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Lady Fancifull

~ adventures in a mainly literary obsession

Lady Fancifull

Daily Archives: April 9, 2013

Jocelyn Pook – Flood

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Film soundtracks, Listening, World Music

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Africa, Early music, Flood, Jocelyn Pook, Kathleen Ferrier, Music review, sacred music, Soundtrack, World music review

The weird, wonderful, Puckish Ms. Pook

Jocelyn PookJocelyn Pook’s fascination with both the sacred early music traditions of Christianity, and the music of northern Africa, the nomadic tradition and Islamic influence, easily puts a girdle round the earth in 40 minutes.

From the beginning track where ethereal female voices JocelynPook Floodsing a choral Requiescat, she moves into something which opens out the horizons on the second track, with a vista of sandy deserts and nomadic camel riders, except that the strange beat, the synthesised soundscape behind the ululating female voices, suggest an almost other world, futuristic planet.

The fourth track, Oppenheimer, where the narrative voice at the beginning makes reference to Hindu devotional texts, Vishnu the destroyer, is apocalyptic. There is a harsh, windy soundscape which sounds like the end of the world has happened, through which weave and interweave prayerful music from Christianity and equally devotionally intense music of Arabic influence. It is almost like some final, terrible battle between major faiths, and at the end of things is harshness, and the beauty which mankind created (music) left to remind us of the devotion and the savagery of faiths.

Another track starts with the urban voices of children at play, and weaves the rich Pook picvoice of Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Winds Southerly with the small soprano female choir singing a Pie Jesu. Pook clashes worlds together in an utterly new, hypnotic way

Pook shadow

I don’t know who is responsible for the primary female vocals on most of the tracks, the floated voice, but it is sublime!
Jocelyn Pook – Flood Amazon UK
Jocelyn Pook – Flood Amazon USA

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Felicity Lawrence – Not On The Label: What Really Goes Into The Food On Your Plate

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Health and wellbeing, Non-Fiction, Reading, Society; Politics; Economics

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Book Review, Felicity Lawrence, Food Industry, Not on the Label: What Really Goes Into the Food on your Plate, Nutrition

Angering and disturbing

As someone who has always found feeding, eating, preparing and sharing food one of monocroplife’s pleasures, and as a vegetarian, with a keen interest in health and wellbeing, who has read fairly widely about the subject, I thought this passionate and starkly laid out book would have little to teach me about ‘what really goes into the food on your plate’

chorleywood-bread-industrialI’m a keen follower of information about the paucity of nutrition in the average Northern Europe and North American shopping basket. I abjure and loathe junk food, eat far more than my 5-7 portions of fruit and vegetables, avoid trans fats, prefer butter to marge, avoid anything labelled ‘low fat’ (what is put into it, is the question for me, what ghastly made up synthetic chemistry or manipulated molecular structure we are not evolved to process), never knowingly eat anything with artificial sweeteners, read labels to make sure that ingredients are RECOGNISABLE if I do buy anything ready made.

So I thought I was going to be smugly and superiorly nodding at everything I knew, Abattoir06and patting myself approvingly on the back for my nutritional choices. Which, in the main, I was.

However, where Lawrence delivered a huge gut punch to me was in her section on what is staple in my diet – fresh fruit and vegetables. And the punch was not due to nutritional value information – I knew already that monoculture factory agribusiness, intensive crop growing has depleted the soil, is depleting the soil, and that in the main our fruit and vegetables are no where near as nutritious as they used to be, since the trace nutritional minerals have been taken out of the soil plants grow in. Way back, we husbanded, and grew crops in rotation, and were prepared to leave fields fallow, allow weeds to grow and die back in, to remineralise. Different plants have different mineral needs, so rotation growing was a skilful nurturing of the earth, what grew in it, and what we ate.

The big shocker for me was Lawrence’s revelation of the existence of virtual slavery, migrant workersyes, even in this sometimes green and pleasant land. The bullying techniques of supermarkets and just in time delivery has placed all the power in the hands of multinational bullies and their shareholders. Farmers are forced to comply, the independent small holding goes to the wall – this I knew, but what I didn’t realise was how deeply the grower’s margins are squeezed – so that in the end, the only way to make a profit, is to cut what costs you can – wages, of a mainly unskilled, often seasonal, often migrant, ununionised workforce. The production of even our ‘buy British’ fruit and vegetables is often linked with terrorised, exploited workers, living in overcrowded, substandard accommodation, recruited (often by being forced to pay hefty backhanders to gangmasters – some of whom are linked with organised crime and human trafficking). Lawrence shocked me by saying ‘do not think slavery was abolished a couple of hundred years ago – it is still going on, in all but name – and in THIS country’

Felicity LawrenceShe comes from a solid, investigative journalist tradition, What Really Goesand indeed worked undercover to experience what goes on in this country (as well as others) in slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, bakeries, and in the fields.

And, sadly I believe that though this book is quite elderly now, its lessons are still largely unheeded

Other books, by another writer writing equally well and starkly about how far we have departed from any sort of sensible relationship with our daily bread and more, is the excellent Michael Pollan Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual; In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating: An Eater’s Manifesto

Not on the Label Amazon UK
Not on the Label Amazon USA

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