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Happy birthday to the paradoxical Dalai Lama

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Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
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....and talking of national shame

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Quite so , and this also is  a national shame . . ..and this too   ..and this too   ...and there is  much more national shame .
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Not always so

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Celestial Harmonies' 17 CD boxed set Music of Islam ranks alongside Paul Bowles' Music of Morocco as one of the great achievements of cultural documentation. David Parsons was responsible for the project's field recordings, which took ten years to complete. In 1997 he travelled with his family to Karaj in Iran to record volume 12 of the Music of Islam . Here is an extract from the sleeve notes for the 1998 CD release:  Producer David Parsons and his family periodically suffered from stress in accomplishing the recordings for The Music of Series. This was mainly due to the preconceptions (in reality, misconceptions) they held about Islam and the Islamic countries they needed to work in. These fears, they feel, were largely brought about by the negative bias with which the Western news media have portrayed the Islamic countries over recent years....   It was with some trepidation, therefore, that they undertook this Iranian project, particularly because of the very ...
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Have we lost that vital spirit of place?

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The first paragraph John Fowles' 1965 novel The Magus  concludes with the words "...I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be". The Magus is sometimes criticised for being a rites of passage novel; which may or may not be the case. And even if it is there are some other very fine novels in that category: for instance J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye . And other great artworks can also be interpreted as rites of passage: for instance Mahler's Fourth Symphony .   I first read The Magus soon after its 1965 publication, and around the same time as a student I spent two summers on the Adriatic islands of what was then Yugoslavia. Much of the action of The Magus happens in and around the mysterious villa of Bourani on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos. It is known that the villa which is the lair of the magus in the novel was loosely based on the Villa Giacemia on the island of Spetses, which Fowles had visited. ...
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I loathe crooners and swooners

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Reading today's news trivia reminded me of a passage in Arthur Koestler 's 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot . References to the "under-privileged classes with their undeveloped tastes as consumers of mass-culture" may not sound well seven decades later. But Koestler was a brilliant man with important things to say, and he said them well; most notably in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon . This, together with Animal Farm and 1984 , was essential reading for a generation of intellectuals falling out of love with the Soviet Union.    In the following passage from the epilogue of The Lotus and the Robot  Koestler reflects on how the Westernization of Eastern cultures is being superseded by another form of cultural osmosis. Despite being written in 1960, Koestler's thesis is, sadly, so very true in today's digital culture. Because as King Charles' 2025 Birthday Honours remind us, there has never been fewer creative talents facing a vaster audience of consume...
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But I don't want comfort

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Legendary wilderness survival expert and author Tom Brown, Jr wrote that "Safety, security, and comfort are euphemisms for death". It is only too evident that the priceless artform of classical music is struggling to survive fundamental changes in culture and technology, yet it remains puzzlingly wedded to the fatal dogmas of safety, security, and comfort. Just one example is the reactionary brouhaha that greeted the City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's experimental challenges to classical comfort zones. Yes, some of those experiments were obviously misguided and doomed. But the classical nimbies would do well to remember Søren Kierkegaard 's assertion that "Everyone wants progress, no one wants change".  Change in the classical lexicon all too frequently means experiments with lighting, visuals, and social media targeted at young audiences. Or it means emphasising the zones of safety, security, and comfort by programming "classical light...
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Classical music's march to the scaffold

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News that revamped BBC Radio 3  attracted a record audience in Q1 2025 and programme presenter Norman Lebrecht's euphoric support for the network's new regime should be seen in the context of the following extract. This comes from a paper entitled The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror in volume 20 of the academic publication Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal:   'Executions were the most frequent and popular of revolutionary festivals, and the guillotine was at the centre of entertainment celebrating the Republic. A sense of the fairground spectacle and amusing novelty is conveyed in the following passage:  "Around the scaffold people sold mementos and lists of the scheduled executions. There were restaurants and cabarets de la Guillotine, where the latest victims were lists as “catch of the day” and satirical songs and poems were performed. The crowds were especially dense near the Jardin des Tuileries where, it was commonly known, one had...
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