"A Little Less Conversation" encapsulates everything I hate about British "culture" in 2002

The last part of your argument doesn't quite hold as the Nike ad is shown all over Europe (all over the world as far as I know), it is not country-specific. And FWIW, I think the original Presley recording is musically pretty good, if lyrically suspect. The remix is dire, though. As for TOTP, well at least they had the decency to put the Elvis impersonator behing a screen.

I think it's a great song. The Colonel rubbed the writer's head as a 'Colonel's Blessing' for writing such a good song. I think it's by the same person who wrote 'In the Ghetto'.

I don't like the remix, but Elvis moves in mysterious ways.

Only Dave Q so far (a Journey and Rush fan! Now I see!) has even attempted to address what I am trying to talk about, i.e. this decrepit country and the way it recycles and pummels every manifestation of life into a standardised, nullifying nucleus of nothingness.

Sure I know where you're coming from, I happily abandoned the UK years ago, but have since come to conclusion that the capacity for despair, fatalism, apathy, and only identifying the worst aspects of everything are just as British, just as debilitating, and just as shitty, as the beer'n'lads'n'tits''n'football tabloid culture you articulately identify and loathe.

At the moment I'm not sure there is any "best" in Britain. It all seems to be going down the plebeian dumper. And maybe saying that makes me a snob, but so what? Things have to improve, and I'm not talking about Daily Mail idealised middle class blandness, either, which is just the engine which keeps the oppressive motor ticking along. If that's Lytton Strachey-type "selective socialism" then so be it.

Blind subscription to assumed shibboleths of male bonding without adequate social justification are beyond my personal remit but not beyond my condemnation.

Scooter - sweet Jesus of Arimathea, that's number two now. Another vodka and tomato juice, then, Sharon.

you come across like a whiny, self-righteous, pseudo-intellectual teenager. What does your great insight amount to exactly?: lazy gender and class generalisations, partisan politics, and the patronising/paranoid conviction that every facet of group behaviour is the result of people being manipulated by vested interests - a sham which YOU are among the select few to see through - everyone else being an easily-led conformist FOOL

makes you despair doesn't it, you obnoxious condescending cunt.

But your shit is typical of the malaise I have identified. Question the validity of football, the validity of the sheeplike British proletariat - question ANYTHING, in fact, which borders upon your smug little world - and this is what I get; abuse and namecalling.

If this is the typical attitude which posters on these boards take towards newbies, then you can shove IL Whatever up your arse. You think you're so fucking clued in but you understand NOTHING, are INCAPABLE of engaging in any argument, are ARROGANT without any achievements in your lives to be arrogant about, are so far up your own arses that you'd need a catheter to play prop forward next season (I don't know about sporting analogies, you think of some better ones).

OK I'll leave you kiddies alone now to carry on with your Dungeons and Dragons. The bad old woman's gone away. Hip hip hooray.

Twats.

As I have already said, I think you do make an interesting a valid point about the lyrics to the song in your opening post, which are well-worth having a debate about, including the football aspects. But your other point that the success of the single represents (a) some sort of industrial-poltical conspiracy to create a society based on "a standardised, nullifying nucleus of nothingness", and (b) that this is specifically a UK phenomenon, is reaching IMO (i.e. YOU HAVE NOT MADE THE CASE - it might be there to be made, but nothing you have written supports the thesis). Moreover, the subtext of your subsequent posts seems to be - this record is popular because the kids are sheep, not because they like it. This is the sort of simplistic anti-pop crap that cannot go unanswered.

By the way, I liked that Babylon Zoo record that got to No.1 on the back of a jeans commercial. I liked the ad too. I didn't buy either product, though.

Dealing with trolls is always tricky on the net, nobody wants to look a mug, but I think there is an element of trust that needs to be assumed. My method is always to pretend even the most obvious troll is serious and continue the dialog. At least once. But all trolls get wearysome, even ones as well done as this.

I especially liked the 'I didn't ask to be born' theme in the original question but like too many trolls / parodies, it tries a little too hard and reveals itself as slips into farce.

btw Did this rant feel slightly old fashioned to anyone else? I may be wrong but surely teenagers aren't still listening to the Manic's 'Holy Bible' and complaining about how their younger sibling is totaly fake and plastic because they are socially well adjusted and quite like Kylie?

See, I told you all early 90s MM wasn't a healthy phenomenon.

I love football, and it is a Beautiful Game, but I agree that all the bullshit that comes with it can be a little tiresome. The compulsory patriotism, the laddishness, and if I didn't like football, I'm sure I would be infuriated by the notion that everyone SHOULD and DOES like football. Still, writers like Brian Glanville and (particularly) Nick Hornby, have opened people up to the fact that you can take a more considered, thoughtful approach to looking at football. Hornby's book "Fever Pitch" particularly, made football fans who aren't Union- Jack brandishing, police-beating, racist thugs feel welcome at football again. And everyone should be welcome to either like or dislike football. A more thoughtful approach INSIDE football, will help make it less of a crushing, boorish presence for non-football lovers ( and has succeeded somewhat already - in the 1980's fotball hooliganism was a much more terrifying presence than today.)

And Alison, insulting everyone for not addressing your question is not going to serve your desire for reasoned debate on the issue. Sometimes threads meander. Were not trying to sabotage you.

And, as I repeat, the rest of you with the sole exception of Dave Q have NOT read the original post properly, so I am unprepared to defend accusations which I have not made.

Yet you go ballistic when someone else tries to express THEIR opinion in the same empassioned and opinionated manner as yourself. It's funny how many people in cyberspace never learned the basic rules of human interaction in nursery school.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying "pastimes like this". Theres nothing wrong with football. It's a beautiful game, like I said.

Let me put it like this - football and football fandom is rife with racism and laddishness, so much so that football fans who take a more considered approach felt dispirited and unwelcome - the likes of Hornby and Glanville set out to bring this element back into the game, to make football a less boorish presence for all. It's a good thing. Makes football matches a more pleasant place to be (for those who do like football), and decreases the whole "everyone must like football or we'll beat them for being a fag" for those who don't.

(yes, largely because it looks good on page 5 of the Daily Mail; rather like selling arms to Iraq and then bombing them anyway)

And this is MY opinion and you don't fucking know that either.

So where does that leave you?

Eh?

Britain is a fucking pit. Why should I have any reason to be "patriotic" about it, or about 12 blokes kicking a ball around not very efficiently, or tolerate dreg culture spoonfed by those who wish to keep us "downstairs"; eternal serfs, servicing the unjustifiably rich?

Getting a bit Dave Spart down here, so I'll leave it there.

Want to come with us Alison - meet you at Gatwick on Friday afternoon?

ah. (i might have spotted that if it hadn't been 1:30 in the morning - and if i hadn't been pissed.)

so something good might come out of this very ENTERTAINING thread yet!

But mark's article about noise was not about volume but (crudely) about the (perceived) boundary between music and non-music.

he needed to pay more attention to its economic base.

'Marx'-ists can be so fucking dull.

Noise organised for extraction of surplus value isn’t noise, but silence at high volume: rock as spectacle blocks its liberating essence, its democratic release and insurrectionary energy

ie noise = liberation; rock = constraint. Mark's point was that (again, I put it crudely) this contrast is flawed. In doing so he shows up liberation at work within constraint; but also supposed liberation turning again and again into constraint. Or something like that. This seems to me a far more successfully dialectical point, and potentially takes us somewhere beyond dialectic.

Tom- Ban mark from ILM so that he can finish his re-write.

Ha Ha Ha Resistance is futile. You will be deterritorialized.

worth isn't dependent on meaning - meaning is dependent on worth. and the failure to understand this is the reason why all post- structuralist theory is a crock of shit.

Purpose is how we act because we have a future and intentions. A purpose is something in the future that we intend to realise. We intend to realise it because it is a good, but goods can be both instrumental and intrinsic. Most goods are instrumental. Money is nearly worthless as an end in itself, for most people, but is extremely valuable as a good-for something else, an instrumental good. We get so used to instrumental goods that our habit is true treat all goods as instrumental, as good-for-something - a common reproach of disappointed parents used to be "you're good for nothing!" - but this would produce an infinite regress. Any instrumental good is really worthless without the ultimate justification of an intrinsic good.

So what are the intrinsic goods in life? Well, there is pleasure, which we would hope to have with any worthy activity; but the true worth of any activity consists of its being right and good, and the true worth of any end consists of its being good and beautiful. Although it is not always obvious what is right and what is good, and "there is no disputing taste" when it comes to beauty, these are the kinds of things that we "need to know" in order to live, indeed, the "good life." These categories of value are descibed in The Polynomic Theory of Value" and "Six Domains of the Polynomic System of Value." It is difficult enough in life to deal with the uncertainties in our knowledge about the right and the good, and with the dilemmas that arise from the independence of these categories of value from each other. We do not always know what we need to know to deal with life, though the basics of morality are, as it happens, simple enough to be understood by most competent adults, and even by most children. This is curious enough in itself, but is not my main concern here: For even when we know the right, the good, and the beautiful, this still does not answer the really ultimate questions about the meaning of life, where we do have this urge to ask the purposive question, "What is it all for?"

The category of value that is listed on the linked pages but that has not yet been mentioned here, of course, is the sacred or holy. In the Bible, God demands that the Jews be a holy people by obeying his Law. Jesus requires that his disciples follow his moral instruction, but the purpose or meaning of it all follows simply from believing in him - though the impression from this is that the purpose of that belief is to achieve eternal life. The purpose of the Buddha's teaching, on the other hand, is not eternal life, but clearly the end of suffering, or, as the Buddha says:

...aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana. [Buddhism in Translations, Henry Clarke Warren, Atheneum, 1987, p. 122] Unlike Western religions, Buddhism does not necessarily envision salvation or liberation as a recognizeable continuation of life. Nirvana is incomprehensible and inexpressible. Exactly what purposes are fulfilled, or even exist, in Nirvana is thus an open, or unaskable, question.

If we rule out using purposes to explain the ultimate meaning of life or existence, then we are restricted to intrinsic goods. Plato, after all, made "The Good" the ultimate reality. But it is not clear how the bare "Good" is more satisfying than pleasure, since we want to ask, "What Good?" We do not find "good" just floating off in insolation, but some thing, some meaning, which is good. It is not clear how upgrading the "Good" to the holy or the sacred is any more satisfying. We still want the reference or the conceptual content. Supreme conceptions of the experience of the ultimately holy object don't seem to help. The essence of the delights of Heaven in Christianity, or of union with Brahman in Hinduism, can be expressed in one word: Bliss - the "beatific vision" of God, or the Bliss (ânanda) which is the essence of Brahman. "Bliss," however, just sounds like an extreme enraptured state of happiness ("blissed out"), and so of a kind of pleasure, afterall. Perhaps a kind of eternal, cosmic orgasm sounds nice, but intellectually it seems rather deficient. We want to know what the deal is. That is going to be the only satisfying answer to the meaning of life.

This makes it sound like neither purposes nor intrinsic goods are going to quite do the job. As with purposes themselves, the nature of our understanding itself seems to preclude the sort of answer that would actually satisfy our understanding. What would help, then, would be at least to understand how our understanding defeats itself. The infinite regress that explanations of purpose lead to is one problem. The disappointment of intrisic goods of the presumably most satisfying character, like pleasure or beauty or the sacred, is their lack of intellectual content: We don't have to understand anything about what things cause the most intense physical pleasures to have them, and the causes are pretty mundane anyway; beauty is not wholly comprehensible and tends to be denatured with analysis; and the sacred depends on paradoxical religious doctrines or mysteries that are explicitly posited beyond human understanding.

One thing that the sacred does, in its obscurity or mystery as an intrinsic good, is stand as a placeholder for the understanding that we would like to have of ultimate things. We might even say that our inability to have that understanding is displayed in the very plurality and incoherence of the world's religions. If there were one true religion, then clearly we would know what the deal is in terms of the doctrine of that religion. As it is, not all religions even agree on whether there is a personal God, or an individual afterlife, at all. Religions don't even agree on whether the practice of religion aims only at this life or beyond it. Thus, while Christianity and Islâm clearly aim at the afterlife, Judaism, although always containing popular beliefs about the hereafter, makes no explicit promises of eternal life as the fruit of religious practice. Most curiously, Buddhism, which begins with monastic practices of renunciation and the clear project of avoiding rebirth, gives rises to permutations, at least in East Asia, where liberation valorizes life itself and even Nirvana does not preclude rebirith and continued individual existence.

This paradoxical situation is explicitly addressed, in the first instance by Buddhism itself, and, more recently in Western philosophy, by Immanuel Kant, for whom speculation about "things-in- themselves" produces "dialectical illusion" and the system of contradictions he calls the "Antinomies of Reason." Kant does think that some questions about transcendent objects can be settled on the basis of morality, that "God, freedom, and immorality" are required as postulates of the Moral Law, but his arguments for all of these (except freedom, perhaps) seem to require assumptions whose own credibility is suspect. What would be more striking, and perhaps revealing, is if morality required that we don't know the answers to questions about ultimate purposes and transcendent objects. This, I suspect, is actually the case. For our task in life, our "need to know," as in any military or intelligence operation, may involve things that we need to not know.

What is the reward of virtue? This has always been one of the fundamental questions of philosophy and religion. Is there divine retribution and justice? That the wicked often prosper and the good suffer is what has persuaded many that the universe is actually random, pointless, and meaningless. But the very essence of morality may depend on not knowing whether there is a reward for virtue or divine retribution and justice. This is because of the fundamental difference between morality and prudence. Morality, as understood from Confucius to Kant, is to do what is right, regardless of consequences or return. Prudence, on the other hand, is simply to govern one's affairs so as to satisfy an interest. This may be merely self-interest, or the interest of something of which one has charge (a family, company, state, etc.), but it is still an intention to obtain some particular goods. Morality may require the denial of an interest, for the sake of justice and righteousness.

Now, if one is good and righteous and holy in life merely because of the promise of divine reward or the threat of divine retribution, this simply converts morality into prudence. Our interest is to obtain salvation and bliss and to avoid damnation and punishment, so we use the means to that end. Interestingly, this approach is harshly condemned in the Bhagavad Gita, and its futility asserted:

[2:43] Their soul is warped with selfish desires, and their heaven is a selfish desire. They have prayers for pleasures and power, the reward of which is earthly rebirth. Thus, when it comes to salvation, that is an end that prudence, by its nature, cannot attain. The very pursuit of self-interest effects rebirth.

Even Plato's great examination of the benefit of virtue and justice in the Republic merely concluded, like the Stoics later, that the just person is happier. Justice, therefore, is merely recommended to the prudent, who aim at happiness. Plato's uneasiness with this perhaps led to the inclusion of the "Myth of Er" at the end of the Republic, where the promise of divine reward and the threat of divine punishment is introduced - adding another layer of the appeal to self- interest. The most dignity that can be attrituted to this approach is that it is one of "enlightened" self-interest.

If the divine reward of virtue and the punishment of vice were certain, then, just as in human affairs, it would merely be foolish, not wicked, to behave improperly. When, however, divine justice is problematic, and human justice limited and imperfect, the merely calculating person may find evil and injustice to offer the promise of greater rewards. The moral person, however, abstains from wrong merely because it is wrong, and shameful. As Confucius says, "The superior man understands right (yì), the mean man understands profit (lì)" [Analects IV:16]. Our lack of knoweldge of the ultimate purpose, meaning, or justice of life therefore separates the proper motive of moral action, as Kant says, the consciousness of duty, from the motive of prudent action, which is to find the means sufficient to satisfy our interests. As noted in the Gita, the latter may earn karmic reward, but not salvation. Christianity, on the other hand, appears to allow salvation by belief and repentance, even if merely prudent, with the qualification, as we see in Dante's Divine Comedy, that some, the truly moral and saintly, end up closer to God in Heaven than those whose belief was less pure. In other words, those who believe and act because of their desire for Heaven and their fear of damnation will attain Heaven, but will have a rather poor seat, the equivalent of the bleachers, in the cosmic ball park, with the Elect seated around God behind home plate.

If the human condition is one where we do not know the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, or whether there is divine justice, reward, and retribution, then the temptation or tendency is to say that there is no meaning and no justice, divine or otherwise. If all is but atoms and the void, and pleasure, in fact my pleasure, is all that really counts in life, since it feels good, then there is no barrier to agreeing with Thrasymachus or Nietzsche that self-interest and power are all that count. The person who restrains their self- interest out of just consideration of others is merely a fool, following a non-existent standard to no real purpose. There are always, of course, people who are virtuous and just, despite believing in no substantial existence for these things, or any non- immediate benefit for practicing them, simply out of self-respect. This is a precarious position, however, for being good merely to respect oneself requires that the good, rather than self-interest, is what is truly worthy of respect, and this is what their scepticism or unbelief has fundamentally unsettled. These are people who, in Plato's terms, are good merely out of habit. One need merely draw the obvious conclusion to adopt the position that the only self- respecting person abandons worry about goodness or justice and simple seizes as much power and pleasure as possible.

What we truly need to know, then, is not the ultimate meaning or purpose of life, but just that there is meaning and purpose, as found in the reality of the right, the good, and the beautiful. Any good person, in a sense, knows this implicitly. The philosopher, sceptic, or too clever sophisticate, however, requires more. Hence, we should hope to have a demonstrable metaphysical theory of value. As I have argued elsewhere, we can construct such a theory and have some confidence that matters of value are as real as matters of empirical fact, because value is merely an artifact of our existence as conscious beings, which severs the connection, let alone the identity, between our existence and existence as such. While we exist in a way that does not seem to benefit from the principle ex nihilo nihil fit ("out of nothing comes nothing"), or, as it appeas in physics, the conservation of mass-energy, i.e. we appear to become unconscious, and die, value is what remains within consciousness as the ghost or after-image of existence as such, which does benefit from the principle. It is what our existence is like apart from consciousness, which means apart from subject and object, that defeats the understanding, which can only grasp things in terms of representation and intention. But the substitute that we possess for such an understanding is indeed the end-in-itself of the good and the beautiful, however differentiated and specifically they appear in life.

As Plato thought that the love of wisdom began with the love of the kind of value we can see, beauty, now we can say that beauty most concretely contains the promise of what is not merely of this life and this, phenomenal, world. This is ironic, since mere beauty can be regarded as one of the most superficial and trival things in life, with no necessary connection to virtue or morality. Indeed, beauty sometimes seem positively adverse to virtue and morality. When the Greeks, of course, said "good and beautiful," they meant nobility as well as good looks, or even, as with Socrates, nobility without good looks. At best, beauty often seems inert and dormant. On the other hand, beauty has other permutations. The sublimely beautiful displays active and even fearful power. While one tends to think of wind and lightning in this respect, erotic beauty is just as much an expression of it, with a fearful power that disturbs and unsettles, even frightens, many, even as it drives a great deal of fashion, entertainment, and daily life, often threatening loss of control, both personal and public. The sublime and the erotic bespeak hidden power that is only latent in the merely beautiful.

While the numinosity of the sacred and holy is sometimes said to merely be a form of the sublime, there is considerably more to it than that. Where the sublime is powerful and even fearful, the numimous is positively uncanny and Other - supernatural rather than natural. No longer an inert and dormant beauty, numinosity seems to have broken free from objects altogether, feeling like an intrusion from reality beyond phenomena, whether of divinities, spirits, or any other kinds of paranormal powers. This can still have its erotic aspect, as we see in the divine sexuality of Babylonian temple prostitution, or the pornographic sculptures on Indian temples. This certainly gives us another case of the difficulty of pinning down a construction of transcendent objects, since a religion like Christianity seems to construe the hereafter as devoid of sexuality. It is India that ironically combines the most austere ascesticism with the most explicit eroticism.

Of all the forms of value, then, the holy is at once the most promising, for the meaning it bespeaks, and the most frustrating, for the lack of postive information and understanding that we derive from its manifestations. Given the limitations of the human condition, or of human understanding, however, this is rather what we should expect. The ultimate meanings, understandings, values, and conditions are closed to us. The immediate meanings, understandings, values, and conditions are available, but as something over and above the mundane factual phenomena which the too clever sophisticate takes to be all that there is. That it is not all that there is at once gives us the reality of meaning and value, but only in relation to the phenomenal world. The form of value that contains no relation to the world, and so is in itself devoid of coherent conceptual content, is the holy. Trying to identify the holy with a form of value with positive content led Kant himself to construe the holy as the faultlessly moral (the angelic "holy will"). However, although we would like, in some ultimate construction of things, for the moral and the holy to be identical, as we find them they are not, and we even see them diverge in the moral ambivalence, not only of the pagan gods, who are positively human in their immorality, but even of the Biblical God, whose moral difficulties Jung explored in his Answer to Job.

It appears, then, that what we need to know are the values of the phenomenal world. Since we are not now living or operating beyond that, our doctrines and speculations about it end up being paradoxical and self-contradictory. Yet the values of the phenomenal world are themselves not truly of it, and present us a clue that there is more to things than what we see. The ultimate clue, though also the most tantalising, is the sense of the numinous, in which we seem to glimpse an unaccountable majestas in the transcendent, whether we think that this is the God of Abraham and Isaac, the Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss of Brahman, the overrated, cosmic Buddha-dharma, or even the Form of the Good. Whether we credit that or not may not make that much difference in our mundane tasks or enjoyment of life. As Confucius said, "I have long been offering my prayers" [Analects VII:35], just by being good. It is only a matter of concern when we want more, when the undeniable randomness, senselessness, and unfairness of events moves us to yearn for some way in which it will all make sense - when the shortness and imperfection of life means that we want reunion with our loved ones, to enjoy moments that in fact were all too brief or that in our folly we did not appreciate enough at the time. We cannot know if this will ever be explained or made good. All we have is what Kant said, the sublime beauty of the starry heavens above and the sublime nobility and justice of the Moral Law within, and the question "What can we hope?" These are the meaning of life, and all that we need to know, even as they represent a flame of hope for more.

Confucianism: Confucius say, "Crap happens."

Buddhism: If crap happens, it is really not crap.

Zen Buddhism: What is the sound of crap happening?

Hinduism: This crap happened before.

Islam: If crap happens, it is the will of Allah.

Protestantism: Let crap happen to someone else.

Catholicism: If crap happens, then you deserve it.

Judaism: Why does crap always happen to us?

New Age: Affirm crap does not happen to me.

Atheist: I don't believe this crap.

Rastafarian: Let's roll that crap up and smoke it.

What I would ask you, Nathalie, is how have you dealt with the conflict at times when you felt requiring of comfort and solace? Will talk more about this with you privately if you prefer.

From a personal point of view, I certainly count myself still on Spinoza's side, probably magnified rather than diminished by events over the last 12 months. Nothing did more to arrest my "progress" from initial grieving than well-meaning people saying, "God meant it to be; He didn't want her to suffer; she's in Paradise now" blah blah it was GENETIC you fools it does NOT help.

The evolution of this thread seems to me to represent a splendid exemplar of Wilson's law.

And how does religion overlap (if it does) with the concept of "caring"? Is the latter naturally possible or can a context only be provided for it by the pre-existing one of religion/faith?

Finally, of course, art isn't a parallel strand to religion; it arose directly from it, so of course without religion there would be no music, thus no ILM.

And who needs art or music? I think we all do. Is that our "religion"? Again, on a personal basis, I feel that for someone unsettled (geographically and emotionally), having books, CDs, pictures, etc. gives you something concrete to hang on to; a sense of place, and a sense of being. If you forsook all that and continued to live a necessarily unsettled life, I think life would be very difficult to cope with (monkhood notwithstanding).

Because without any of these, and without other direct, regular human interaction, one is forced back on one's own meagre resources - and the emptiness becomes even more apparent.

Not all of us do or need it. By telling us what is 'good' you're becoming as bad as a bloody priest.

And I hate most 'art'. I can't fucking stand what comes with it as well. the 'best' music is the one that makes you forget that it is 'art'.

Is that our "religion"? Again, on a personal basis, I feel that for someone unsettled (geographically and emotionally), having books, CDs, pictures, etc.''

books, CDs can be of comfort. But that person would need help and support from family/friends as well. Listening to books and Cds is a lonely thing.

And then you've got ask, which CDs? It could the 'art' music you so truly love but in most cases it would prob. be 'definetely maybe' by the wonderful (back in the day) Oasis.

Me? I listen to whatever music makes me feel better at any given time. Could be "Definitely Maybe," could be Derek Bailey - depends on the time, mood and circumstances. I like it all.

Lonely activity? Support of family/friends? Well, if you've worked out who I really am, Julio (I would say everyone else has by now!), then there's a whole story into which I've gone countless times on these boards and which everyone else here is pretty sick of hearing, I would have thought.

So that's enough for now, I think. That's pretty much as far as I can go with this thread. If anyone wants to continue taking it somewhere else/developing other trains of thought, then please feel free to do so.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, especially Nathalie, but also Julio, Dave Q, Mr Swygart, Gareth, Kilian Murphy, Mark S, Alex B, Alex T, Dan P, Dr C, and anyone else I may have forgotten.

MC still does not feel psychologically able to come back on here as "himself" but may do so in the future. He is trying his best.

Aren't there books on CD?

I hope you get ''psychologically able'' to come up with a that guide to Radu mafalti that you promised?

If art raises questions, why don't we just stick to the answers?

Oh there she is...