Month: March 2015

AJ

The Longform Wrap #3

A few of the more interesting pieces I stumbled on on the web during March… Enjoy

1. On Spock – Gukira: Leonard Nimoy died, and amidst the outpouring of grief and the eulogies, I found I related most with this piece by Gukira who said it better than I ever could

I do not have a single Spock moment—an image or narrative that stays with me. Unlike those who know how to write about TV and movies, I cannot recall a single episode, at least not by name. When I was younger, when I first encountered Spock in Nairobi, in reruns from the 80s, I encountered him as gesture: as the arched eyebrow, as the grip that caused others to faint, as the Vulcan mind meld.

2. Marissa Mayer has completed Step One – Stephen Levy (Medium): On the Marissa Mayer effect at Yahoo;

She found Yahoo, despite its persistently huge audience, a sclerotic artifact of the desktop era, overly dependent on fading display ads, short of engineering talent and absolutely nowhere in mobile. And now the company is back on track. There are hundreds of new engineers, and an energized culture. Last year it reaped over a billion dollars of revenue in mobile ads — a business that didn’t exist at Yahoo when Mayer arrived. It bought Tumblr, which has 460 million users and is growing faster than Instagram. Yahoo has also built a system that allows app developers — the royalty of the new mobile age — to popularize and monetize their products. Meanwhile, Yahoo apps have won Apple Design Awards for two years running, and the company boasts over 500 million mobile users.

3.Valentine (Why There Would Be No Quiet Revolution Without My Husband) – Susan Cain (LinkedIn): From the Author of Quiet, a moving tribute in our post modern world of how much difference a supportive partner can still make.

I, in contrast, had written a poem. OK, a few poems. They were mostly about my love life, and they were clearly insignificant compared to Ken’s work in the world. Still, one evening I gathered my courage and handed him a sheaf of them, biting my nails as I anticipated his response. It came the next day, in an e-mail with big, 48 point letters: “Holy Shit. Keep writing. Drop Everything. Write. WRITE WOMAN, WRITE.” He wasn’t kidding about the “drop everything” part. This was not the bland encouragement of the experienced guy with a big book being kind to the young girlfriend and her poems. He wanted me to sacrifice for the craft of writing – and he, as my supportive partner, was prepared to do the same. He meant every word of that e-mail. I would find out just how deeply he meant it in the years to come.

4. As migrants we leave home in search of a future, but we lose the past – Gary Younge (The Guardian): Another emotive piece on the immigrant life (other pertinent reads – Finding a home in the apocalypse; Always Returning).

Migration involves loss. Even when you’re privileged, as I am, and move of your own free will, as I did, you feel it. Migrants, almost by definition, move with the future in mind. But their journeys inevitably involve excising part of their past. It’s not workers who emigrate but people. And whenever they move they leave part of themselves behind. Efforts to reclaim that which has been lost result in something more than nostalgia but, if you’re lucky, less than exile. And the losses keep coming. Funerals, christenings, graduations and weddings missed – milestones you couldn’t make because your life is elsewhere.

5: DC Talk and the influence of faith fortifying songs – Trevin Wax (The Gospel Coalition): Fascinating trip down memory lane to growing up in CCM in the 90’s and the pervasive influence of DC Talk which continues to this day in the solo career of TobyMac and the ‘takeovers’; Kevin Max as frontman for Audio Adrenaline and Michael Tait for the Newsboys, other iconic CCM players from that time.

1990’s CCM, for all the faults of its corny creativity (many of which are even more glaring and obvious as time goes by), was successful in one key sense. It gave me and my generation a different narrative. It was a sub-culture, yes, but no matter much some may sneer, it was a culture, and cultures are formative. Twenty years later, it’s the element of “fortifying faith” in so many dcTalk songs that has stuck with me. And for that, I’m grateful.

AJ

On Life, and a Song

The end of the day
Remember the days
When we were close to the edge
And we’ll wonder
How we made it through the night
The end of the day
Remember the way
We stayed so close till the end
We’ll remember it was me and you

I have been listening a lot to the Lighthouse Family again, not for any particular reason beyond the fact that scrolling through my music collection a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on ‘High’ their song from 1998 and got sucked down the proverbial rabbit hole that is YouTube. A few hours later, I was left with a slew of memories from two seasons of my life, and memory lanes I hadn’t been down in a while.

I first ‘met’ High in the days before I went away to University, when mindless TV was anathema, and TV watching – if huddled around our old Black & White National Panasonic TV with my parents and siblings could be termed ‘watching’ – was restricted to the news; Sunday evenings and Frank Olize’s Newsline being the most memorable of those times. Two adverts from that season of life seem engrained in my memory – the St Moritz one with High as the sound track and that seminal Joy soap one where blokes spilled papers from their briefcases, tripped themselves up and swooned under the influence of the inner beauty unleashed by that soap (didn’t work for me by the way, thanks false advertising!).

Given my restricted TV time, my contact with High was limited to the snippets I picked up from that commercial. It would be a few years later, that I would ‘meet’ the rest of the song. One infernal Benin afternoon, whilst hitching a ride from the University gate to our Faculty in a friend’s beat up Corolla and sandwiched between four other people in the back seat, High came up on his cassette player. My initial reaction was one of disbelief then elation, as though I’d just met a long lost relative. I ended up borrowing the tape that evening, and after I had held on to it for over a month, my friend offered to ‘dub’ a copy for me – that was the only way he was going to get the tape off me in a usable state. Something about the lyrics of the song succinctly captured the season of life I was in – Engineering Maths, over crowded drawing rooms and lecture theatres and the Thursday bête noire that was Engineering Drawing sure felt like a dark December I needed rescuing from.

Much later I would learn about the duo and their Newcastle connections and then go on to ingest all their material I could lay hands on – even Tunde Baiyewu‘s solo material after the split from Paul Tucker. The key ingredients which got me hooked on to their music remain things which I look out for – easy listening, engaging lyrics and the silky smooth vocals. I suspect they’re one of the duos I’d think seriously about buying tickets to go see live, if they ever got back together or went on tour.

Someday, it’ll all be over…

That’s a sentiment I could use remembering in my current season of life…

 

AJ

Of trains… And being curious

[Source]

They clamber aboard at Upminster – they being man, boy and girl – eventually ending up on the seat opposite us. We are on the C2C service from Ockendon towards London Fenchurch Street, the first leg of what we hope will be an uneventful train ride into town; towards Tottenham Court Road for a pitstop at Dominion Theatre for Hillsong. Of the trio who disrupt what peace we’ve had so far, the girl ends up by the window, the man by the aisle and the boy – who can’t have been more than 2 or 3 – in between them. The most noticeable thing about the man is his rather tight shirt, one which his stomach strains at ever so slightly and his flip flops. If I were a betting man, I’d place him as some sort of  suburb dwelling city slicker, kicking about with the family on a weekend, slightly overdoing casual in the process, perhaps as his way to compensate for being cooped up in a suit and tie all week.

In the little maelstrom generated by their arrival, I decide to move one seat over, upon which the girl gestures to someone behind me, just outside my line of sight, someone she calls mum. From this I surmise that they are man, wife, very young son and teenage daughter. The buggy ‘Mum’ has beside her strengthens my belief that the boy can’t be more than two or three; that and the excited curiosity with which he engages his father, firing off question after question at him with no respite. The green arrows above the door (magic door his father says), the yellow lights which flash around the main door controls at each train stop and the picture of the dog on the wall (an ad for the RSPCA) are all my memory picked up from the litany of questions asked.

She  – the sister that is – for her part, once all are settled in, and the train is off again, picks up some notes and begins to pore over them. In the twenty or so minutes we share space as our train chugs into town it turns out she is studying for an exam, one she can ill afford to not pass, if her studious, furrowed brow of concentration, is anything to go by. The contrast between her and her brother can’t have been starker – he infinitely curious, free and inquisitive, she intensely focused on not making another misstep on the exam that looms for her.

—

Life shit happens they say; and between keeping up with the roles and duties we assume by nature of our place in family and society at large, and the expectations that come with them, curiosity and inquisitiveness can take a back seat to all the serious, mature things life demands of us. Watching the little boy and his indulging father left me with the thought that maybe sometimes the journey itself is as important as the destination. Quite rightly perhaps, one does have to focus on the wheres,  the end goals of life and its constituent phases. The journey though will throw up interesting and sometimes difficult sections which we will have to work around, with wide eyed enthusiasm and curiosity. Or maybe not?

AJ

Freedom Is…

.. A deep work (what happens in you is greater than what happens to you, and is deeper than the workings of the circumstances and situations that frame our daily life), a quick work (God takes a long time to do something quick  – as long as it takes for us to turn away from what ever else we look to for help on to Him) and a lasting work (what happens through you is meant to outlast you, and true success is measured by how much it empowers the next generation to extend the work that we do). Or so says the phenomenal Joel A’Bell whom I stumbled on in today’s Hillsong London pitstop..

Was also great to hear the worship team reprise This is Living from the Young & Free Album. Sadly they didn’t get to do the Lecrae rap bit.. 😦

New month, new focus, new energy, given how much February sucked on so many levels…