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I’ve usually missed out on any Joni news in recent years. For example, when they did the boxed set of her first 10 or so albums… I missed it! But then I have all those albums on vinyl already, and on CD, as well.

Still, hearing that Seagull was significantly improved, and all four had been remastered, I thought, yep, let’s get this set. In some ways I love it. I’m such a Joni junkie that if money were not an object I’d simply buy pretty much everything. But funds are, alas, an issue.

Compared with the threadbare Tom Waits remastered re-isssues, which i thus far haven’t even bothered with, these are at least nicely packaged, with the gatefold card covers, lyrics, and even separate inner-sleeves, like ye olde vinyl. But sound wise I haven’t as yet noticed any great improvement. I’ll have to do some proper A/B comparisons.

Joni has said she thought Seagull sounded awful, as if it had been recorded under a jello-bowl, or something like that. Produced by her one time lover, David Crosby, it certainly sounded different from all the later recordings, but not awful. Not to my ears, at any rate. Indeed, it’s differences even give it some charm. And, regarding the ‘improved’ new version, I’ve read some reviewers saying they actually think the new mix is worse, over-compressed and muddy, etc!

All things considered, I do feel that as great as all this Joni stuff is, that’s going on right now – and far and away the best stuff is the previously unreleased material that’s gradually coming out – it could have been even better. Brandi Carlisle’s little written homage is ok-ish. But many fans, like myself, would’ve loved proper essays on each album, as you sometimes get with the rare jazz, funk and souls reissues.

It’s a bit like those Steely Dan remasters that came out some time ago now, whilst Becker was still with us, and that had those rather silly notes, written by Becker and Fagen, as added ‘bonus’ material. Ok, that was at least something new. But hardly something of any great value. Indeed, in some ways it served to tarnish their legacy, seeming a bit sophomoric in tone. It seems odd and rather sad to me that some of the stars of contemporary(-ish) popular music appear to hold such a sway over their legacy that they actually inhibit it’s appreciation.

Anyway, it kind of goes without saying – around here at any rate – that the content of these four discs is some of the twentieth century’s greatest singer songwriter artistry ever committed to wax. I love all four of these albums, and some of those that came soon after this, just about equally. I’m not one of those that holds Blue to be her Holy Grail. Indeed, Blue is the one album of the four presented here that I sometimes can’t listen to all the way though. It’s just sooo intense!

Song to A Seagull has a very special place in my own life, for reasons I dursn’t enter into online, to be honest. Just as Kris Kristofferson said ‘Christ, Joni, keep some for yourself!’ I shall do likewise in this instance. Suffice to say that I went through a very intense time with this album as my chief accompaniment. It is true that this is her most naïve and dated sounding album, in some respects. But that suited the naïve young me to a tee! And to counter-balance that, there is poetry in the lyrics and magic in the music that I believe is the equal of anything in her long and prolific career. My pick for this disc, Sisotowbell Lane. Sublime!

Clouds is another solid gold slice of musical brilliance, with no bad songs at all. Just like Seagull, in that respect. The production aesthetic is more natural and ‘transparent’, and consequently a tad less dated than her debut. But her music and delivery are very similar. Whereas there are no famous hits on her first record, here we have Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now. But for me the standout track is the hauntingly deep Songs To Ageing Children. Rather like Tom Waits, Joni had a kind of old head on young shoulders.

Ladies of The Canyon also has a few ‘name’ tracks, from the jaunty Big Yellow Taxi – the Chelsea morning of this record – to Woodstock, the ode to the festival she spurned and yet kind of wanted to both be at, and not be at. But once again the real gem is The Circle Game, which, like Songs To Ageing Children cuts much deeper. Again, all killer, no filler. And on this disc Joni starts adding some more diverse sounds. A sign of things to come.

And then, of course, there’s Blue. Inescapable in her canon, and undoubtedly a rare instance of a lionised record that really does live up to (and, in all honesty, transcend/surpass) all the hype. Ironically there’s only the slightly more jovial – tho’ still melancholy – Carey, to follow numbers like Chelsea morning and Big Yellow Taxi. Everything else, like the album’s name and hue, is deeply, darkly blue. And as a result this is the easiest Joni album for me to O.D. on. Standout tracks? Well, it’s hard, they’re all so good. But if pressed I might say Little Green and This Flight Tonight. In the parlance of yore, man, this is one heavy trip!

So, all the music contained herein is top-drawer 24-carat undiluted brilliance, of a rare and unique kind.

But… the thing is, does this latest release really add anything? And, as much as I love having it, and rate it highly for the sublimity of what it contains, the basic answer is… no, not really. The biggest potential benefit is the ‘fixing’ of the mix/production on Seagull. And although I can hear an audible difference in the music, it’s not so big as to be remarkable, either in a good or a bad way. At least not so far. I have only had this a few days, and listened through it all just the once so far.

Some folk would dock something for the fact that this doesn’t really add to or augment the Joni legacy, as such. I can’t do that. The musical genius that is contained herein is off the scale. To knock stars off they’d have to have sabotaged it all in some way. And they haven’t. It may not add anything. But nor does it take away. What you get is four utterly wonderful albums, presented in a rather lovely manner. So, it’s the full five stars.

This was the sole new book purchase, of my recent trip to Topping Books, Ely. I bought two very cheap books that same day, from Oxfam. One on Caravaggio, the other, A Tolkien Bestiary. The Caravaggio one is for cutting up and framing prints. The Bestiary was a book I had as a child. Something for old times sake!

Picasso 1932, was an entirely new thing to me. I hadn’t even been aware of the recent-ish Tate exhibition, of which it is a catalogue/accompanying monograph. I’m a massive Picasso nut. I just love his prodigious output; the rampant fecundity and diversity of it all. The single year theme is great. It really accentuates Picasso’s incredible creative energies. The quantity, variety and quality of his work is, I find, always astonishing. It’s kind of like he’s a conduit for continent-shifting levels of energy, a continually erupting vent of Krakatoan proportions.

Picasso often talked about making art like a child. And here he talks about painting ‘arses’ (got to love his earthiness!) like a blind man; painting it as it feels to the touch. How delicious! The Mirror, pictured below, achieves just this, I reckon. And rather cheekily, I might add. It’s even as if the lady’s ‘pillow of clouds’ type backside is actually a dream object, in a cartoon-style thought bubble. Which of course it is.

The above pictured Reclining Nude has a soft spot (or two, or three…) in my heart, as it’s a painting I bought as a picture postcard on a visit to the Musee Picasso, in Paris, many, many moons ago. And I love how speaking of moons, he uses crescents of white repeatedly. And the use of apple-esque red and green, also, is delicious.

Briefly returning to the theme of arseholes, as well as this cataloguing the Tate Modern exhibition (2018), it also covers and celebrates Picasso’s first career retrospective, of 1932, around the time he was turning 50. I’m 49 now, so this is very resonant for me.

Rather ironically, one of Picasso’s exhibitors, Paul Rosenberg, is quoted in here as saying ‘I refuse to have any arseholes in my gallery’. I love art and artists. But many – and it’s often been said of Picasso – are, frankly, the very epitome of assholes. And gallery owners and art critics? Even worse!

How ironic that Rosenberg would object to hanging arseholes on his walls, but could be very tolerant of the same populating the environment of his gallery!

One of the many, many, many things I love so deeply about Picasso is how varied and prolific his work was. Have I said this before? I’ll say it again; one of the many things I love about Picasso is how much work he did and how diverse that work was.

In this year/book alone, he ranges from monochromatic drawings and paintings to orgies of colour, soft round pillows and hard sharp angles, and then there’s the sculpture. Sometimes the links between periods, styles or themes are clear, whilst at others he jumps around like a grasshopper on PCP.

And very often he works through ideas in series of closely related works. Riffing away (appropriately enough he often riffs on guitars/flutes, etc*), looking for perfection, or that elusive magical alchemical quality great art can have. As he puts it: ‘ I can rarely keep myself from redoing a thing… after all, why work otherwise, if not to better express the same thing? You must always seek perfection.’

Ironically, for one of the greatest artists of all time, he is incredibly unlike most appallingly hip artsy types, whose preciousness often manifests in a combination of spiky arrogant feeling obscurantism, and an almost monomaniac visual aesthetic.

The series of crucifixions above illuminates several of these ideas; his playfulness, the stark stylistic contrast between this stuff and his colourful cream-puff nudes, and how he sought perfect through re-iteration.

That said, Picasso’s own spoken words – at least as communicated in books such as this – range from the refreshingly earthy and unpretentious (I like his statement about not making art ‘serving the interests of the political, religious or military art of any country.’) to the painfully self-consciously intellectual or opaque: ‘I will never fit in with the followers of the prophets of Nietzsche’s superman.’

As well as the series of related artworks, some on themes such as seated ladies, female nudes, bathers, crucifixions, Bacchanalian scenes, etc, there are whole sketchbooks, reproduced here, as well as photo-articles such as Andre Breton’s Brassaï illustrated piece on Picasso’s sculptural work at Boisgeloup.

And, rather nicely, the importance of places, as well as people, is really addressed nicely in this book, via maps, black and white photos, and text.

This review is primarily my initial response to the visual content of this terrific book. Most of my interest in art books lies in simply looking at the artworks, and other images. Art history texts are infamous for all too often being tortuously verbose and pretentious. What little I’ve read here, thus far, seems alright.

But the real treasures here are not the words, obviously, but the artworks. And for these alone, this book is, for me, essential. Love it!

I often feel somewhat peeved at the adulation that Blue is regularly accorded, to my mind very much at the expense of other equally great Joni albums, from her mind-blowing ’68 debut, Song To A Seagull, to one of my personal favourites, For The Roses (1972). As Brandi Carlisle puts it in the liner notes to the recently released The Reprise Albums, 1968-71, whatever else might be right or wrong about the times we live in, we can at least say we lived in the era of Joni Mitchell. Amen to that.

Anyway, having got that out of the way, here are some notes I made whilst listening to the 50th Anniversary re-release of the Joni Mitchell Archives Demos And Outtakes release…

Wow! This is what we want. Or at least it’s what I want. I’ve been a bit of an ornery curmudgeon regarding the recent 50th anniversary celebrations of Blue. Sure, it’s a brilliant album, by the best female singer songwriter that’s ever lived. But it’s also the most talked about and lionised of her albums. And I always have issues with such adulation.

So, rather than joining the (very justified) hallelujah chorus singing the praises of the album itself, I find it far more interesting to discover new sounds from the period. And that’s exactly what these demos and outtakes provide. Okay, there are only five tracks, and of those only one – Hunter – is out and out new to me. And even this track is familiar, parts of the guitar sounding very like another Joni track I can’t quite put my finger on.

The full track listing is Case of You, California, Hunter, River, Urge For Going. What I love is that these recordings are absolutely superb in quality – however they were recorded, they could easily be on any album – and yet they feel to me like they capture that perennial image of Joni as the girl with guitar and portable reel to reel, continually ‘sketching’ (‘I am a lonely painter’).

And, even better, these aren’t just track-x take #whatever, i.e. very like the tracks we know. They all have certain aspects that mark them out as significantly different. This is most obviously so on Case of You, which kicks things off. It’s a more staccato take, instrumentally, with quite a bit of difference in the lyrics. California is perhaps the closest to what you hear on Blue. But it’s still audibly different, if only quite subtly.

Hunter is – to me – completely new. Although, as already noted, it sounds like she may have recycled some of the guitar elsewhere. River is very like the version in Blue, except that at the end there are added horns, riffing on the Christmassy vibe Joni evokes by quoting that familiar seasonal melody I can’t name right now. And then there’s Urge For Going, which wasn’t on Blue, but is widely known, having been released elsewhere on numerous occasions. Again there’s a new element, this time overdubbed strings.

In conclusion, these recent archival releases are absolutely terrific! And these demos and outtakes partake of that grooviness. If you’re a Joni devotee, as I most unashamedly am, then this undeniably essential.

As a work of art, and labour of love, this is a five star affair. So why have I, rather meanly, knocked off a half star? 

Well, the truth is that I really rather dislike – though in truth that’s not a strong enough word, detest is better – the Bible. The over-reverence, or even just plain attention, that it is accorded, even by it’s critics, is energy that could be better spent on other things. [1]

The task of illustrating Genesis took Crumb about five years, according to the artist himself. And it was a challenge in numerous ways; he wanted to draw in a more ‘realistic’ and historically accurate manner than he might sometimes adopt in other works, and this was to be a ‘neutral’ even-handed rendering. Neither the drooling sycophancy of the acolyte, nor the cutting satire of critical disbelief. 

Both of these factors impact on the total work of art. Fans of Crumb’s more celebrated stylised exaggerations might find his style here a bit straight-laced. But, truth be told, I reckon his pure passion for rendering decent art wins out. And enough of his slightly icky primitivism seeps through to keep it well within ‘signature Crumb’ territory (he already has a strong tradition of cartoon as documentary, from his prolific sketching to his histories of early jazz, blues and folk musicians).

And then there’s the actual Biblical content. Some of it, such as the most colourful and celebrated mythical parts, like the Creation, the Flood, Joseph in Egypt, etc, is perfect material for Crumb. But there are other aspects – in particular the lineages – which are a part of the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, that I’ve always loathed. 

So, whilst Crumb’s art itself, and his sheer chutzpah in even attempting such a project, are all five star, the material itself is considerably less. The importance of the Bible in history, as great as it undoubtedly has become, is, nevertheless, continually overstated. It’s position, rather like it’s very genesis (pun intended), is one of those accidents of evolution; it just so happened, rather than the texts winning a place in history by merit, never mind Divine authorship!

Having said all that I have, I’m intending to read Isaac Asimov’s two part Biblical work as soon as time allows. My excuse for this Judaeo-Christian navel-gazing and time wasting is the working out/off of my own very religious childhood. 

As works about the Bible go, this is undoubtedly a very good one. The way Crumb treats it, very literally and completely, is a good antidote to either the fawning reverence of believers, or the sometimes overly gleeful mockery of the disbelievers. 

Believers might, one hopes, start to sense the human historicity of their founding text, and we can all marvel at the sheer nuttiness or banality of certain parts, or even cogitate on the potentially more profound ‘psychological truths’ (should you feel that way inclined) of some of the potential readings of certain foundational myths. 

In addition to an intro or preface (I forget exactly how he titles it!), there are Crumb’s ‘commentary’ notes on the text, at the end. This stuff reveals Crumb’s own take on it all more clearly, as someone with a secular historical interest in his source material. There’s a particularly interesting thread in here regarding how certain textual oddities might result from a later patriarchally slanted redaction of originally more mixed stories, some of which would have (or might have) originally had a decidedly more matriarchal slant. Fascinating!

If you’re a Crumb fan, or interested in the history of religion/myth, and I’m both, I’d say this is well worth having and/or reading. 

——————

NOTES:

[1] It’s a ‘pop culture’ thing; why endless genuflecting before The Beatles, or Dylan, or Miles, or even Bach or Mozart? Hero worship always requires lowering of critical faculties, a kind of group reverential hysteria takes over, and masses of ‘lesser’ stuff gets swept aside and ignored. To the loss of all. 

Fooling Yourself, The Better To Fool Others

I found this pretty compelling at the time of reading, but now I come to review it, I’m surprised at how little of it has stayed with me. Deceit and self-deception are fascinating facets of life, and I share Trivers’ desire to better understand these areas. But at times I found his writing a little opaque, either just being plain confusing, or assuming knowledge I didn’t have. I feel the best authors of such popular science books (as this appears to want to be), have the skill of making themselves understood. So, whilst I certainly admire Trivers intent, I wasn’t entirely bowled over with the execution.

Much of what Trivers discusses here, i.e. the bigger more basic ideas (such as that alluded to in the books subtitle), seemed rather obvious to me. Granted, he does in places go into some depth and detail, compared to which one’s own intuitions perhaps ought to be considered interesting but insubstantial. But I didn’t find the book as robustly scientific as I might’ve have hoped. One aspect I found rather trying being the unsignposted blending of scientific findings, anecdote and opinion. All these things may be welcome components of his thesis, but knowing if and when a statement is supported by scientific research (and the nature of that research, and it’s source) seems vitally important to me. So, for example, his comments on the cognitive dissonance reduction of ‘lifers’ who say they would murder again, whilst plausible (and predictable, really), strikes me as pure speculation, unless he has some kind of evidence for his view, in which case it should be cited.

In contrast with the way in which some of the broader ideas seem obvious, where Trivers cites material that appears to be drawn from research in his own field (biology), he’s not always clear enough, making too many assumptions for the ‘lay reader’ like myself. Perhaps he’s simply assuming a familiarity with evolutionary terminology and science I simply don’t possess? One example might be the use of the term ‘selected’, which in everyday language assumes the conscious selection of a discerning agent, whereas ‘selected’ in the context of natural selection has an entirely different meaning. His use of the term selection, though not clarified, is something I was able to cope with, but the following – “In competition over access to maternal investment, paternal genes in offspring are inevitably less related to siblings than are maternal genes” – is far from obvious (to me), and needs more and better ‘unpacking’ than I feel it got.

When it comes to the impact these ideas have on human life, there’s some pretty harrowing stuff, such as the material relating to aircraft accidents, and Trivers is clearly, as we all ought to be, very concerned about the role of deceit in national and international politics, particularly given the ramifications such deceits have in terms of the destruction of lives and environments, these days, thanks to our industry and technology, on catastrophically large scales. Still, I had hoped that he’d engage my interest more deeply, in the manner of someone like Carl Sagan, whose ruminations on similar (but also very different) themes, in his landmark  Cosmos  series, penetrated my consciousness in a more profoundly resonant manner.

Still, despite the caveats and complaints, this is a very welcome opening up of an area that we seem, on the whole, resolutely determined not to look at, And however unsatisfactory it is in places it also contains a lot worth thinking about. Trivers says himself that he sees the book as the first public word in a debate he hopes will mature into a whole area of research and understanding, and I say ‘amen’ to that. I just hope that later editions might clarify or simplify a few things on the one hand, and present arguments a bit more rigorously on the other.

Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation

Wow! Mark Pagel has written a really fantastic book here. This book has the kind of depth and breadth that is awe-inspiring enough to have an almost visceral impact. In exploring how we have evolved culture, or culture has evolved us, Pagel touches on a dizzying array of themes and concepts, never getting too complex or abstruse to follow, and always remaining both erudite and engaging.

And, in a way that reminded me of Arthur Koestler (in particular his excellent Sleepwalkers book), Pagel manages to make some pretty challenging ideas – challenging more to our sense of self (and other ‘cherished illusions’), rather than ‘difficult to understand’ – seem not just plausible, but likely.

In this respect Pagel shows that such scientific understanding as he is dealing in doesn’t necessarily suggest easy ways forward: how are we to square a growing awareness of the illusory nature of the self, along with ever clearer evidence that our access to truth, and even our ability to be author of our own responses to it, is far from what we’ve commonly assumed, with the tendency of the modern world towards a global culture, when biologically, i.e. genetically, our phenotypes (both physical and cultural) have been predominantly sculpted by the vastly longer timespans we’ve spent in smaller tribal groupings? He has answers, neither glib or simplistic, but you should read the book to find out what they are!

He frequently quotes or refers to authors like Dawkins, Dennett and Trivers (I had hoped Trivers’ recent book Deceit might be as satisfying a read as this has proven to be, and Pagel frequently refers to Trivers’ work on deception and self-deception, but I feel Pagel has brought together a broader, richer synthesis in this book), and like all three of these scientific (some might say ‘scientistic’) writers and thinkers, he uses Darwin’s evolutionary insights, chiefly the concept of natural selection, to address vast areas of great fascination, from how languages evolve (or resist change, for that matter), to such profundities as ‘what exactly is consciousness?’ Like these other writers he also demonstrates how, in Dennett’s terminology, Darwin’s dangerous idea is a seemingly ‘universal acid’, eating its way through all aspects of our understanding.

As well as addressing issues like truth and our relations with it, he looks into the origins and functions of art and religion (“beliefs take hold because they promote survival, not because they are true”), possible genetic as well as cultural roots for conflicted aspects of life in general and our being in particular, whose convoluted tendrils might ultimately manifest both in physical and psychological terms, and even why our societies have evolved to function as they do (with their vast disparities between innovation and copying, wealth and power). This really is an amazing, exciting and excellently written book.

Pagel also illuminates the incredible richness, although never glibly, of both what we’ve become and how, suggesting that, whilst in many ways things may not be as they first appear, nevertheless there’s much to admire, be thankful for, and work towards, not least of which is the understanding of our peculiar position as conscious cultural collaborators. Quite where to go from the point of finishing reading this, I can’t really say, as there’s a lot to absorb and reflect on.

In my view, with this book Pagel has stepped right to the forefront of the first rank of writers of popular science, with a superb account of how evolution creates culture and culture creates humans. The warp and weft of his argument and storytelling is densely and intricately interwoven, beautiful, illuminating and nigh on impossible to unravel.

I can’t wait to read more by this stimulating and engaging author… loved it! I just wish more books were so interesting and well-written. It’s an added bonus that this Allen Lane hardback has also been beautifully designed, typeset and printed.

Helping put anomalous monotheism in its proper historical context.

In Battling The Gods Tim Whitmarsh performs some fascinating cultural archaeology, digging up and reconstructing some of the deep history of naturalist (as opposed to supernaturalist) thinking.

There are two things about the way he deals with this subject that disappoint me a little: first, the acceptance of negative terms – his subtitle, Atheism in the Ancient World, uses the primary one – which have been thrust upon those who question religion and superstition (I nearly said ‘the deep history of disbelief’ above, which sounds snappier perhaps, but is once again a negative); and second, limiting the book to the ‘classical’ world/era.

But to be honest these are, for me, very minor gripes. The first issue arises from the fact that even two or three centuries after the Enlightenment we are still emerging (or so I fervently hope) from the religious hegemony of a Christian past, and simply accepts, more or less, the common parlance of the status quo (although to his credit and my delight Whitmarsh frequently challenges this negative framing and its causal religious bias). And the second limits a potentially massive and difficult subject to a smaller more manageable project, resulting in a wonderfully focussed and readable book.

Ever since my own ditching of religion, I’ve harboured a suspicion that the historical narrative left by a Christian dominion of close to two millennia has hidden a much more complex, diverse reality, in which alternative views, from persisting ‘paganism’ to outright disbelief survived, and were far more prevalent than surviving Christian history would have us believe. Whilst Whitmarsh doesn’t address this within the period of Christian dominance (indeed, he says ‘The arrival of Catholic Christianity – Christianity conjoined with imperial power – meant the end of ancient atheism in the West.’), he does make a very convincing case that ‘viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is [not post-Enlightenment atheism, but] the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.’

This book primarily looks at the Greeks, even when it deals with the Roman era, and we meet some fascinating characters, from the familiar, like Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, the Epicureans and Stoics, etc, to the less well known. One of my favourite discoveries in respect of the latter category was a chap called, rather ironically, Demonax, whose position Whitmarsh describes thus: ‘aggressively satirical, an enemy of dogma rather than a doctrinaire adherent to any particular philosophical code.’ Sounds like a topping kind of chap to me, eh what!?

One of the key points that emerges is that, just as human social and political organisation evolved from small tribal units to city states to empire, so did the roles and functions of religion. The loose, adaptive, and, broadly speaking, more tolerant/pluralist mode of polytheism eventually gave way to the adoption of a monotheistic faith, embraced by Roman imperial power – thanks a bunch, Constantine! – in a marriage of political convenience. Whitmarsh eloquently and succinctly sums this seismic shift as follows: ‘the real ideological revolution engendered by the Christianisation of the empire [was] the alliance between absolute power and religious absolutism.’

I really enjoyed this book. I would love to read more on the same theme, concerning similar naturalist free-thinking in other places and times. Even, dare I suggest, during the heyday of European Christianity, a period when we lived under a new and less tolerant dispensation, and from which we are only now gradually emerging.

PS – This is another archival review; I read and reviewed the book in 2016. I even went to Heffers bookshop on Trinity Street, Cambridge, around the same time, and attended an author’s talk by Whitmarsh, which was great.

Another in my ongoing series of archival reviews.

I really loved this book. Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp, through the huge swathes of material – mostly biblical, but going much wider overall in terms of sources, albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity – much of which is either bizarrely arcane, pure gibberish, or frequently a mixture of both, is both educational and highly enjoyable.

Not a book likely to be admired by the devout. I was in fact first made aware of it, indeed given it, by a believing friend who themselves refused to read it, for fear it would undermine their faith: exactly why they should read it in my view.

Waugh is a little disingenuous in his intro; by the end of the book – well, long, long before then, in truth – one gets a strong sense that Waugh finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of the almighty, as glimpsed through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description, rather than any want thereof), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.

It is nonetheless remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our ‘apostasy’. But personally I think that just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion remains, for both those with and without ‘faith’. And I was brought up ‘in the faith’. Or rather within a number of the myriad bastard offspring cults to have proliferated under the name Christian.

And though I might share the desire of many contemporary ‘naturalists and free-thinkers’ (a phrase I got from A. C. Grayling), in wishing to see humanity’s consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, unlike Dawkins and some others – who at one point seemed to believe such a state was imminent – I think we’re a massively long way from any such state of lucidity or rationality. But then that’s exactly why books like Waugh’s God are so important.

He is at times flippant, and frequently very funny. But underlying it all, and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-gods, is a very serious and in my view laudable desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth the particularly damnable god of Judaeo-Christian tradition is exactly.

Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.

Like Crumb I’m both an artist and musician*, so I find this fascinating and compelling in just about every way one could. His tastes in music are, like all sorts of folk, from Woody Allen to the now deceased Dan Hicks, to some extent, what is sometimes called ‘old timey’.

Whilst my musical tastes overlap with Allen and Crumb et al to some extent, their passion for these older art forms is obsessive – i.e. well beyond my own dilettante interest – which is great, as one can learn a lot from them. Crumb’s distinctive visual style includes not just his talent as an artist, with an emphasis on the cartoonish, but also as both designer and calligrapher.

In addition to his many terrific album covers, for labels like Yazoo, Shanachie, and others, this book also gathers together many music related Crumb works, from his early blues and jazz trading cards, to pin badges, calling cards, posters, and other related ephemera.

The whole lot comes in a slipcase, the shiny black hardback making a square yet ‘record’ like insert, complete with circular cut-outs on the hardback slipcase, like an old paper record-sleeve. As with all Crumb’s stuff, it’s eclectic, individual, beautifully done, and filled with verve and joie de vivre.

Superb, and highly recommended.

* I’m not comparing myself to Crumb in terms of talent or success!

I’ve always had a somewhat confused and mixed relationship with Robert Zimmerman. Like a lot of the most famed folk in popular music, from Elvis to Sinatra, the Beatles to Led Zep, I think he’s been overly reverenced. That’s not to say that these artists haven’t occasionally, or even consistently, been great, or even brilliant. It’s just that the focus on them leaves less time and space for noticing and enjoying other stuff.

That said, I’m currently enjoying revisiting Bob’s oft-maligned Christian phase. I grew up in a Christian household in which this phase of Bob-ness helped confer some much needed hipster cool on our dreadfully dull religion. Well, that’s how I saw it, way back when (I was nine when this came out!). Now I’m no longer religious, let alone Christian. And quite a lot of overtly religious music is anathema to me. Although I must admit I love early Christian choral music, like Tallis or Victoria, etc.

Many professional hipsters slagged Bob’s Christian music off at the time. I may be prejudiced, thanks to my childhood exposure to it. But I think a lot of it is really great. The title track here, and In The Summertime, are terrific. And along with one or two others, are sufficiently vague in their religious overtones. The elegaic paean to Lenny Bruce is beautiful, and whilst the lyrical content of Property of Jesus does make me cringe, the music is great. The musicians involved are top drawer, the ensemble feel live and organic, and the music very rootsy, in an aptly gospel r’n’b vein.

Not perfect, but surprisingly good. And certainly not the fall from grace that hipster journos such as the writers at Rolling Stone pronounced it to be at the time. Definitely worth having and enjoying.