All Photos by Woulfie
Ruth's Christmas present for me (thanks darling). My present came in a card Ruth had designed with a drawing of Nils Frahm saying: can't wait to see you Glenn. Ruth got to share the present as well but not sure if Nils was particularly pleased on the night to see anyone as he was more engaged with flipping between his stage full of equipment and complaining about the noisy air conditioning. He compared it to playing in a construction site at one point. I have to say that when I saw Dinosaur Jr play at the Albert Hall last year and they were blasting a hole through my ear drums I failed to notice the air conditioning: different vibe tonight though.
I aim too make the challenge as diverse as possible so including a German artist who combines classical and electronic music should help. The audience feels too cool for school and there are flat caps aplenty and enough facial hair to give the CEO of Gillette PTSD. Nils is an incredibly talented musician and some of the piano pieces are so delicate and beautiful and incredibly quiet. Every time someone opens the door to go to the toilet it's cringeworthy as the door banging shut is louder than the music. Not sure that Neneh Cherry was too worried about doors shutting last Wednesday when she was belting out Buffalo Stance with the help of the whole audience. Some of the more delicate pieces drag on a bit, but the electronic pieces are pulsating and would sound amazing headlining an outdoor festival on a balmy Sunday night. Ruth looks on another plane and it does have a mindfulness vibe to it at times. Another good night and tickets are booked for the Blue Dot festival in July with Kraftwerk and New Order headlining: beat that!!
Tried to work out why the festival at Jodrell Bank is called Blue Dot and think I have found out:
“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there — on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . .
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994 (Pale Blue Dot)
No comments:
Post a Comment