I am a singer-songwriter from England living and working in Catalonia, Spain.

It’s hard to write about yourself; listen to my songs and you will discover what I am about…

I am nothing to do with the other Guy James who I believe has a radio show in the USA.

Have done with learning,
And you will have no more vexation.
How great is the difference between “eh” and “o”?
What is the distinction between “good” and “evil”?
Must I fear what others fear?
What abysmal nonsense this is!

The people are merry as if at a magnificent party
Or playing in the park at springtime,
But I am tranquil and wandering,
Like a newborn before it learns to smile,
Alone, with no true home.

In the eyes of those
who have more than they need,
I alone appear to possess nothing.

What a fool I am!
Muddled and confused!
When common people scintillate
I alone make shadows.
Vulgar folks are sharp and knowing:
Only I am melancholy.
Restless like the ocean,
Blown about, I cannot stop.
Other men can find employment,
But I am stubborn; I am mean.

All men settle down in their grooves:
I alone am stubborn and remain outside.
But wherein I am most different from others is
In knowing to take sustenance from my Mother!

lao tzu- tao teh ching

compiled by gj from translations by wu, rosenthal and blakney

“That which you do not make conscious, becomes fate.”

Carl Jung

Photo by Katie Dureault

At first people gazed in wonder as the bubble rose into the air, wondering if it was too late to join, and some squeezed in to join the party going on in there. After a while though, those inside realised they could only see each other, and the inner walls of the bubble were mirrored so they couldn’t see out at all. They felt pretty clever that they had left all the ‘ordinary people’ behind on the ground but as the bubble rose, they started to get the nagging feeling that they had left terra firma with no idea of where they were going.

We ordinary people down here can see the bubble for what it is, that is we can see that the politicians and the journalists have got a pretty cosy little arrangement going on, and we can also see that they are almost totally detached from reality. Those few people who take what politicians say seriously (and they seem to be getting fewer) are surely to be pitied, but they are perhaps investing their faith in something obviously flawed for the simple reason that they can’t see anything else to believe in. This tiny amount of remaining faith is the last string connecting the ‘media reality’ to the ‘actual reality’, and when this breaks, and literally no-one believes a word politicians are saying, then their bubble will burst.

The financial markets’ bubble is in the process of bursting for the same reason: it is getting harder and harder to believe in. There are so many layers of belief, with so little underpinning them, that it is soon going to be hard to believe in money at all. It is just created out of nothing as figures on a screen in the first place, and we have to work all our lives to scrape together a minute fraction of what someone else can create with a couple of strokes on a keyboard.

Add to the fundamentally insubstantial nature of money the overwhelming complexity of the money markets, and it becomes clearer why the bubble is bursting: no-one at all has any idea of what is going on, and therefore has no clear idea of how to save matters. This was an advantage for a long time, because it was assumed that underneath the complexity was something very profound and substantial, it was just that I, the individual looking at the situation, was not clever or educated enough to understand it. Now it just becomes clear that the layers of complexity were mainly to hide both deception and the underlying nothingness at the heart of the system; and if the layers could be stripped away somehow, they would reveal precisely nothing beneath.

What we have forgotten, it seems, is that all the clever philosophers who said that truth is just a matter of opinion, and that my truth is as good as your truth, and ultimately there is no such thing as truth, were wrong. What truth actually is may remain a mystery, but the fact is that if you create a bubble, the thing that eventually causes it to pop is going to be truth in some form or other. This is bad news in some ways because it means we can’t live in our bubbles forever, and that all debts must eventually be repaid (and I don’t just mean financial), but as we see various parties float off into the stratosphere, we can take heart that they will be back, possibly with a bump, as reality bursts their bubble.

The really scary thing is that those in the bubble may not know they are in it, and in fact we may find that our entire Western culture is a bubble, just ready to be popped- and the landing may not be a particularly soft one, especially if we land in a shanty town full of people who spent their childhoods making our running shoes.

Have one or two of those moments a day and life seems more worthwhile- make up your own, it doesn’t have to be a blog post- could be that you finally hypnotised a chicken for the first time.

The argument against it would be that just ’settling’ for a nice moment or two a day would take away any ambition for larger achievements, and I would agree, but I find one only gets those moments of satisfaction, of ‘having one’s day made’ if one’s life overall IS reaching for the bigger picture, the larger goal, whatever that may be… possibly hypnotising an ostrich, or a member of the US Congress. Reaching for the ambitious is the background, the soil if you will, in which these day to day satisfactions grow.

Just a thought, now leave me a comment and make my day

After it was over I looked it up on the net and then I remembered: the reason I particularly wanted to see it (apart from the fact that I want to see all of Herzog’s films), and one of the reasons it is very odd, is that all the actors in it are hypnotised, except one, Josef Bierbichler, who plays Hias, the herdsman who can see into the future.

That’s right, Herzog personally hypnotised all the cast before shouting ‘Action’ (or the German equivalent). Now I suppose when someone is hypnotised they are literally ‘under suggestion’ from the hypnotiser so it depends what suggestions he gave to them. In a way it is a director’s dream come true, to give directions to the actors which they carry out precisely; and possibly it could be said that they are not really acting at all as they temporarily believe that what they see before them in the film set is real and that they are their given character.

The overall effect is very strange, in a way disturbingly real, in another way, very detached. It is like watching someone sleepwalking- they appear to be awake but their mind is clearly elsewhere and they don’t inhibit their behaviour like we normally do in the consensual ‘real’ world in order to fit in.

‘Heart of Glass’ reminds me of so many other films, I feel sure that it is one of those works that every director has to see at some stage and I can detect its influence in many other movies, for example David Lynch has created this same odd atmosphere, pushing it over the edge into the realms of nightmare on several occasions, such as ‘Lost Highway’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’… even ‘The Straight Story’ has a slightly dreamlike quality which is akin to ‘Heart of Glass’.

Also Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ has this dreamlike, detached feeling which many people seemed to think was a weakness when it came out, but I feel sure it will be ultimately judged as one of his greatest films. It’s not an accident that it feels detached, Kubrick did not deal in accidents.

‘Mirror’ by Tarkovsky and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ by Bergman must have been influences on Herzog for ‘Heart of Glass’- for me ‘Hour of the Wolf’ is one of the scariest films ever made; I can sit through more or less any horror film and feel nothing but boredom but HoTW is properly chilling, like taking a holiday in a schizophrenic’s mind. ‘Mirror’ has the same poetic quality as ‘Heart of Glass’, it is nothing so prosaic as an allegory or a metaphor, hiding one thing behind another; more like the director’s emotions put straight into your body and mind by means of the medium of film. Yes, I like it…

Older films which may have influenced ‘Heart of Glass’ could be Robert Bresson’s films where he used non-actors and told them not to even try to act, giving a very emotionally flat effect to the performances which is contrasted with occasionally very dramatic subject matter, for example in ‘Mouchette’ where the tension between the performances and what is taking place leads one to doubt what one is actually seeing.

Anyway I was left literally hypnotised by ‘Heart of Glass’ and never cease to wonder why the less a film tries to please the audience, the more I like it (with the exception of ‘Container’ by Lukas Moodysson which I saw recently and was thoroughly bored by, even though I love all his other films). It’s probably simply that I am allergic to cliché in the cinema, and ‘Heart of Glass’ is further proof that Herzog is the right kind of man to be making films, i.e. a complete nutter.

As an example, I was just watching the coverage of Glastonbury Festival on the BBC and I realised that pretty much anything goes now- you just pick any style you like and run with it. I saw Spiritualized, fair enough, they have never followed trends and are all the better for it- but also Hot Chip (nerd-electro or whatever you want to call it), Band of Horses (1976 Neil Young template), Groove Armada (dance), The Imagined Village (folk fusion)…etc etc… my basic point is there is no ’scene’ or movement of bands which could be called a trend.

I think this is down to the fact that before, major labels had a success, then looked for other bands who were more or less part of the same ‘trend’, signed them and made them change to fit in to the trend template, then pushed the whole package as one through the music magazines. Thus it appeared that everyone was making a certain type of music more than any other at any one time, and this inspired other bands to copy that and so perpetuate the ‘trend’. Then everyone got sick of it, especially the knock-off bands who were signed just as a short term attempt to make some money from the trend and were more likely to have been changed and styled to fit into a trend they were perhaps never that into in the first place. For example, Menswear were shoehorned into the ‘Britpop’ package but probably never really shared much with Blur or Oasis or any of the others (of course they were more shit, but that could have been a result of them being forced to follow the trend instead of their own inspiration. Or it could just be that they weren’t any good.) Same thing with Inspiral Carpets and other bands from ‘Madchester’ around the same time, and it’s these ‘lesser’ bands which made everyone sick of ‘the scene’ and eager to find the next ’scene’.

Also I rejoice in the dwindling influence of music magazines, I think they wielded an unhealthy amount of power and were complicit in creating these trends.

The only trend is see now is ‘do what you want how you want’. Or as someone far greater than me once put it, ‘have a good time all the time’.

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Update: It’s been going for about 11 months now and we’ve got 4334 subscribers!! (despite the slack level of posting to the podcast)

enjoy!