Occasionally an article catches one’s eye that genuinely opens a raft of interesting new thoughts. That happened to the other day when I read this Guardian piece about a new area of Pirate Bay that offers templates for 3D printers to clone figures for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings table-top games.

Up until now, media piracy – as opposed to nautical banditry – has been concerned with freeing up access to information. In the 17th Century, with characters such as Henry Hill the Book Pirate (see this excellent short history of book piracy here), this was about giving the poor equal access to textual information by way of cheap editions of books and illicit pamphlets that were uncensored by the church or crown.

In the digital age this pirate spirit of free access to information was made orders of magnitude more easy as so much – words, music, images, videos, programs – was now no more than a package of 1′s and 0′s. That has wreaked havoc with the industries concerned with protecting their products and trying to make money out of them, but up until now the physical world has remained somewhat immune.

Sure, you could always buy a knock-off Rolex if you wanted to, but that still required some manufacturing work – even if it was substandard. That protection from digitised sharing afforded by the physical is now beginning to crumble. As Pirate Bay spokesman Winston Q2038 put it:

One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour.

This is still some way off, as 3D printers are still prohibitively expensive, but it wasn’t that long ago that the same could be said for DVD burners. What we are looking at in the near future is a world where many physical objects will be able to be pirated and copied right in the home. Like the design of that lampshade? Go to Pirate Bay and download the code for it. Lost a Scrabble tile? Just print one off. Found out where Paris Hilton lives? Print off a key to her house. Everyone will have one.

Of course, there will be symbiotic reaction from the physical world too. We will no long have keys – they’ll just not be safe. And true craftsmen will return to materials that will be more difficult to pirate. But others will embrace this world, and deliver extraordinary things to customers… bespoke will become ordinary; there will be no more original.

This dissolution of the physical into the digital has interesting implications for all art and craft… something I blogged about from a different angle way back in 2005 (ouch!):

“A work of video art is simply a video signal on a tape. Early analog video technology is termed ‘lossy’ – meaning that with every successive copy there is a noticable degradation in quality. Analog technologies still had some claim to the construction of an ‘original’ – the photograph had the negative, and the video has the master copy, from which further copies are struck. The negative and master thus have more value than their offspring.

“Digital video formats released by Sony in the 1990′s changed this condition completely, as they allowed for perfect reproduction. Video is now simply a piece of code – a string of ones and zeros that, unlike its analog parent, is wholly duplicable. Enabling the production of infinite clones with no discernable value hierarchy thus renders ‘original’ a meaningless term.”

That ‘perfect reproduction’ may well be heading out of the hard-drive, and onto the (physical) desktop. And, as ever, pirates will be there to chase down those who want to profiteer. Going to be interesting times.

I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis.

Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ from different religions. As he puts here, ‘even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?’

It seems that there is a twin move here. Atheists like de Botton are moving towards religion, to try to colonise the secular space which still values ritual, and many religious people are moving towards an atheist reading of their faith… both agree that ‘God is dead’… but what to do with the carcass?

It seems to me that de Botton and others want to pick over the beautiful, to grab rituals and art and the ‘awe-some.’ One of de Botton’s earlier books, which I like a lot, is The Consolations of Philosophy, and I wonder now if this is simply an upgrade: religion as no more than consolation. We feel lonely, we suffer, we don’t earn enough…so here’s a smash and grab on some religious ideas that seem to have helped console people in the past.

I don’t think this is enough. I think religion as consolation is little more than religion as emotional crutch. It’s low challenge, middle-class angst with stained glass windows, and intellectually and psychologically impoverished.

The religious who are turning to an atheist reading of their faith are doing something different. God is dead, but that means that we have to take up the challenges of that absence… and that’s perhaps a more demanding road. I can’t speak from anything more than a Christian perspective on this, but it seems to me that this is not so much gaining ‘ahhh’ moments from beautiful buildings, but taking a long hard look at the scorched earth once those buildings have been torched, and wondering what is left.

Because an atheist reading of Christianity is not about polite rituals and ‘big society’ moments of collective goo. It is not about human beings rejecting God and becoming atheists. It is about God rejecting God and becoming an atheist himself. The core of Christianity is as radical as that. Jesus beat de Botton to ‘religion for atheists’ by about 2000 years; the problem is, the path he set out was so challenging that it has been almost totally rejected. Why? Because the move from religion to an atheist reading of religion is not about experiencing the sacred in the remains of religious beauty, but about experiencing the abandonment and desolation, the responsibility to the rest of humanity, when we realise the sacred is not found in the stain glass, but in the slum outside the church.

God’s life created fissures within society between the believers and unbelievers. It seems God’s death will be no less divisive… but this time I wonder if the polite ‘crutch’ accusation will be made the other way.

Good to see the comments on the previous post, in which I was trying to open up a bit about the prevalence of depression among writers.

I’ve been mulling on that a bit, and thinking about why teachers (curses – I’m that too) also rank as professionals with some of the highest rates of depression. I wonder if it has something to do with isolation and futility.

Teaching, ironically, is quite an isolated profession. Although you are surrounded by children the whole time, you are not there as an equal, and contact with colleagues can be very limited, especially if you have a full teaching load. Those of you who are writers will know how isolating that can be too. Obviously when things are going well this is a great thing – you are immersed in your characters / plot / arguments, and don’t want any disturbance. But it can be a bad thing too, and the thoughts come that people aren’t just ‘not disturbing’ you, but actually hate your guts and don’t want to see you anyway.

Secondly, I think teaching and writing can appear, at times, to be both futile and endless. There are always more children to be taught, and so so often you end up teaching the same bloody things over and over and over again because it just will not bloody well stick in their teflon minds that the square of a negative number is positive…  And there are always more words to write too. Once one chapter is done, there’s another. And once one book is done, there’s the next. The giddy high of the polished and sent manuscript is quickly followed by the crashing low of the next empty page…

So what might we do about this?

Firstly, we need to be careful. Some aspects of depression are circumstantial, while other aspects are clinical and need far more careful and expert intervention. But here’s some thoughts about day to day stuff that I think helps get over the isolation and futility.

Meet people. People who don’t care less about books or exam results. I play football each week with a bunch of guys, and the exercise is bloody good, but the meeting over something totally different is important too. If you’re in a solo profession, make damn sure you arrange stuff that involves other people that’s not ‘professional.’

Do something that has an endpoint. It might be gardening, or digging an allotment, or carpentry, or… whatever. But make sure it’s physical rather than intellectual craft. Get your hands dirty, and get involved in something that creates a physical product that doesn’t take too much time. Something where you can say ‘I’ve finished.’

Plus fresh air. Walk. Then walk some more. Along rivers, around streets, up hills. Doesn’t matter. ‘Mentally munching nothingness’ as Will Self puts it. It’s good for you. Oh, and comedy clubs. Live. Nothing like it. Sydney Smith’s witty advice is pretty damn spot on – taking things less seriously is pretty damn good in every situation

Some of these things have worked for me… do share others if you have them.

I’ve been wondering about writing something on this for a while, but haven’t been sure how much to say, or what might be wise. But I thought it might be helpful to others to open the door just a crack and see if there’s some light that could get in on what’s a terrifically difficult and often very dark and complex place.

Perhaps I don’t need to say very much, so I’ll start with just this: I’ve long been aware of the creative relationship I have with depression. Which is to say – it’s a bastard thing to suffer, but I’m not sure I’d want to be without it. Why? Because the time spent walking the black dog – as Churchill put it – appears somehow to bring something to the page.

I’m not going to go into any details – I don’t think there’s much point as I’m pretty sure people who know know anyway, and it’s no badge of honour either (which I know can happen). Plus it’s not something I suffer from very badly, and I’d be happy just to shut up and get on with it, but the reason I wanted to write something is that I see it in other writers, other speakers and public figures, and wonder if it would help to get it out in the open a bit, because, to be honest, there’s still a stigma around the issue, which is surprising, given the prevalence of it. Surveys show that writers (and teachers – great, double whammy) do tend to suffer depression more than others… but feelings are mixed about whether they would would want to be without it.

Anyway, may be I’m dumb to own up, and may be people just don’t want to talk about it… but if you did want to  – anonymously if need be – then feel free to add comments/links etc. I don’t really have any answers, but I think it’s possibly even worse in the ‘Christian’ world because there’s such a pressure to be shiny-happy people who’ve got Jesus to sort it all out. Well…that didn’t work out so well for me, so you’re not the only one /-)

There are so many technology stories every week it can be hard to know what’s significant or not. But this piece on the BBC about a new sort of camera has kept me thinking all day, so I thought I’d blog something about it.

Put simply, the ‘Lytro’ camera – available for pre-order, but not yet out and user-tested – captures the entire ‘light field’ of a scene – all of the light travelling in every direction – meaning that the point of focus and depth of field can be changed any time after the shot has been taken. The video on the BBC site I think is the best explanation of it, but here is a CNET review too:

So why might this be interesting? I’ve lived through an extraordinary period where we’ve moved from totally analogue film to pure digital. You’ll know if you’ve read here at all that I’m keen to explore how our tools reshape us, as well as us shaping them – and the move to digital has had a profound effect. People expect to see images now, rather than waiting for them to be developed. But with this new development, are people going to have an expectation of being able to post-produce photographs too?

I’ll admit to being a little uneasy about aspects of this, or just a little sad. It feels as if the photograph as object is under threat – that photography is becoming entirely subjective – alterable by each viewer as they choose, rather than presented as a final exposed, controlled piece by the artist. Rather than me approaching a photograph – a finalised object, a slice of time frozen and preserved – and responding to it, it’s almost that the lytro-style photograph has to respond to me, which, forgive the pun, is a huge change of focus.

Perhaps there are general themes here beyond photography too. Is objectivity in final retreat? Must everything bow to the subjective? In the world of Facebook and other social media, is it becoming more problematic to make ‘real’ statements, or must we offer everything in a format that can then be manipulated and modified by others.

I’m not against interactivity, and not against it in art in any way. But I would still want to be able to hold on to the ability of an artist or writer to be able to make statements or produce objects that demand that the viewer or reader change in response to them, rather than the object or text having itself to morph to fit those who view them.

As part of the book I’m writing at the moment I’ve been reading and thinking quite a lot about the idea of what ‘property’ is, and how this relates to the arts – and music in particular.

Just the other day a new legal ruling was passed that ensured that ageing crooners like Sir Cliff Richard can still claim royalties for songs they recorded (not actually wrote) for 70 years. Cliff and others have been campaigning for this for some time, though some of their responses ring a little hollow for those of us who’ve done a little more work than Mick Jagger:

“Obviously the record business is not what it was, so people don’t earn as much as they used to. [The royalties] can extend their lives and the lives of their families who inherit their songs.”

Others have been far more skeptical, arguing that the ruling will only benefit the very few – like Jagger and Richards – and could serve to stifle freedom of expression, with older works remaining in copyright for so much longer.

Here’s my question – which I mean very genuinely, and would love to hear opinions from people who know better than I: to what extent should musicians get paid?

The historical stuff I’m reading paints perhaps very different picture of musicianship from that we see in Jagger and Richards. In the pre-recording era, it was impossible to ‘own’ a song in the way it is now. A song was not your property. Indeed, most musicians, from what I can gather, played variations on standards that they had inherited from other musicians – and thus existed by very much drawing on the open pool of song knowledge that existed in communities.

That pool has been enclosed and privatised, and musicians – from what Jagger is saying – should now expect to have their careers in music pay well into old age. Clearly, without investment so much musical innovation would not have been possible. But is it really right for songs to remain ‘owned’ by song-writers in perpetuity?

My hunch is that what the digital music revolution may have precipitated is a partial return towards the historic pattern: musicians making money through performance. I personally think they – and other artists – should have a right to be paid for their work, but that very long copyrights are, in the end, unhelpful. But I’d be really interested to know what others who may be in the business think about it, because I’m really not sure I’m right.

(PS – congrats to Iain Archer for having one of his songs as the opening track on the current UK number 1 album! He should be paid. Forever )

I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV or night in with a video.

The film is set in the mountains round Serra San Bruno in the south of Italy and is basically documentary drama – in other words, this is everyday rural life, but with some elements of staging. It is almost entirely silent (there are far more words in the slightly annoying trailer above than in the whole film), but more than that, it is a quite extraordinary meditation on humanity’s place within the world. Frammartino himself says this:

I want to put mans role into perspective and turn my gaze away from him. I want to know: can cinema free itself from the dogma that says human beings should play the central role?

I don’t want to give too much away – though it would be hard to say anything that was a ‘spoiler’ here – but his vision is enacted here as the film as it begins appears to be about an old goat-herder, but then becomes about the goats themselves, then the trees in which the goats shelter, and then the charcoal that is made from these trees. In other words, the ‘four turns’ of the film are human, animal, vegetable and mineral – a cycle of life and death from ashes to ashes.

None of this is to do justice to the incredible cinematography, which has some stunning shots and elevates the camera to an instrument of deep perception. There is not only fabulous humour, but a very subtle and beautiful theology woven into the film too, and being almost silent and only 88 mins long the piece could literally stand as an act of meditative worship on its own. It carries a gentle critique of the power of the church, the old goat-herd drinking an infusion made from dust sweepings from the church floor, which he seems to believe will cure his respiratory problems… Yet it is outside of the stone walls in the community rituals of Easter and Christmas, the dressing up, the parading, the erecting of a huge tree in the town square, that the most healing moments seem to be found.

But don’t take my word for it. Just do all you can and go and see it. Mark Kermode’s review below:

Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is back in the news again after Christian fundamentalists took a hammer to a print of it in a gallery in France.

If you’ve never seen the photograph ‘up close’ then I’d highly recommend it. It’s far more beautiful than the title suggests, and a subtle piece of trickster-work. It is thus far more orthodox than than the Christian Right have given Serrano credit for. He is not trying to debase God or Christ, but comment on the trivialisation and commodification of the image of Christ – as exemplified in the cheap plastic crucifix.

We have sanitised the crucifixion. One can be quite sure that any Good Friday service you attend this week will not include much blood, and certainly no urine, faeces, sweat, broken bones at stomach-churning angles, ear-splitting screams, whipping, torture, skin piercing or grotesque physical violence.

We weep for the tragedy of Jesus’ death, but are far removed from the pain, anguish and down-right sadistic punishment that went on that day – and every day. Crucifixion was horrible, and common, and when Jesus suffered it none of his followers expected that anything good might follow.

Serrano is working within tradition by forcing us to look again at what has become over-familiar. His filter of blood and urine literally forces us to see afresh. I wrote about the piece and it’s place more in tricksterism more full in The Complex Christ (UK) / Signs of Emergence (US), and quote Serrano there as saying:

Complex and unresolved feelings about my own Catholic upbringing inform this work which helps me to redefine and personalise my relationship with God. For me, art is a moral and spiritual obligation that cuts across all manner of pretence and speaks directly to the soul. Although I am no longer a member of the Catholic Church, I consider myself a Christian and I practice my faith through my work.

Clearly, the Christian Right do not like the introduction of dirt into their sanitised religion. Why? Because it is awkward. Shit always forces us to ask difficult psychological questions, face our fears and doubts, and reassess our classifications of what is ‘in’ or ‘out.’

And there can be no better message as we come to Easter again than that: this is a God who came into a bloody and dirty world, and refused to shy away from our shit.

But there are deeper questions too. What are those who come with hammers to smash a work of art hoping to achieve? Do they believe that God is somehow trapped within the photograph, and needs to be released? Are they hoping that their violence will somehow cause other artists to think twice before attempting similar representations? Or do they want to spoil it so that no one else will be able to see the image? What sort of God do they think they are defending who cannot stand what Serrano has done? Not one that I’m interested in following, that’s for sure.

I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it.

One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and Cleopatra, where the characters perform a ‘deliberate indulgence in a fiction’ – choosing to believe something they know is not true, for the sake progressing the plots they are engaged in.

Greenblatt quotes Coleridge, who says that when watching a play we have a ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’

I’ve been pondering on this, wondering if within the performance of ritual – the church service as theatre – we are required to suspend our disbelief for a while.

But perhaps the opposite is true. Too often I think church services can be museums of fact. We trail round singing one truth, then hearing another before recanting another. We rehearse and recount them over and over to make them more true. There is, in many evangelical services, no suspension of disbelief, because there is no doubt. There is thus no theatre, no drama. It is all sermon: an expounded text to be taken as read.

As we come to key moments like Easter, perhaps what we are required to do is not suspend disbelief, to trot out the facts that we find to be true. Perhaps we are required to suspend our belief for a while.

Why? To enter into the drama. To enter into the uncertain plot, the doubts and troubles that good theatre explores.

Now I’m off to Ypres and The Somme today on a school trip.

Funny old thing, life.