This Week Is Flying By

Oh dear, it’s Wednesday already. I feel really busy, but I’m not sure I’m accomplished much so far this week. Sometimes you have just to stop, take a look around and get some perspective.

I’ve been working on the next stage of the old song idea I blogged about here and http:/?p=1442. The song is progressing really well and there are some basic guitar tracks (three for rhythm and one for lead). I’ll band together a blog post later today on that.

I’ve started playing with Audio Boo. It’s an interesting site, with the potential to become a kind of audio Twitter. For musicians it is a great platform for sharing clips. You can find me here and listen to my first test recording (of Hong Kong traffic noises). My plan is to use Audio Boo in two ways. First, to record one minute clips of ambient street sounds from around the world. Second, to record short, clips related to my studio work, finding guitar sounds, tweaking effects, that sort of thing. YOu can see some of the potential of AudioBoo in this explanatory video. You can even subscribe to my Boo’s via this iTunes link!

Today I fixed an old post on extending a compositional idea (the audio links were broken).

Moo are one of my favourite companies and right now I’m working up some stuff to send them, suing their sticker and business card formats. I like that you can now send images direct from your computer.

A few months back I revisited the topic of Theology and Film, by looking at a draft outline for a Master’s module I proposed while at King’s. This week I stumbled upon another draft, which was a suggestion for a longer programme on the subject. I’ve started writing that up and should, hopefully, appear here next week.

Another recent post I’ve been pondering was on different approaches to parenting. I don’t think of myself as much of a role model for good parenting, but it is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot over recent months. There are practical issues about how we manage ourselves as parents, what I think of as “comportment.” There’s also relational issues about trust, love and respect. Moreover, there are conceptual and ideological topics, like authority and power where my thinking has shifted a lot over the last 20 years. I’m not ready to write any more just yet, but this is a subject I want to come back to soon.

Although the June edition of Atlantic has yet to arrive here in Hong Kong (the may edition only made it last week), I’ve been enjoying Joshua Wolf Shenk’s interview on NPR on the subject of Happiness. I’m fascinated by how important some exposure to tension, stress, pressure and loss is to not only finding happiness, but also developing the personal skills required for sustaining happiness. Moreover, that happiness is seldom concomitant with seeking approval. My experience is that the contemporary church does a really poor job of talking about happiness, or modelling it for that matter – maybe this is because there is too much of an obsession of approval and “belonging” and there is little desire to really embrace the darkness and tragedy of life?

Finally, I’m continuing to slowly evolve the new blog design. This is moving slowly, but I have made some changes to colours, added more header images and (slightly) narrowing the page width since the initial upgrade. More to come…