small ritual

moscow again [and again and again]

i've been to moscow three times in the last month or so working on a new project, and when i'm here i've been working late night after night, so i've had no energy for blogging. there were no photographs because the work laptop i was carrying, being windows :P was very heavy and i didn't have strength or space to lug my big SLR around as well. so this trip i bought a nikon coolpix s700 to stick in my pocket. it doesn't do a bad job, although i miss the wider angle on my SLR lens - struggling to get the whole church in across the street when i could have easily made it with the SLR - also a factor when shooting video out the taxi window, although the quality is much higher than my phone - something which isn't apparent in the compressed versions on youtube. [the other challenge of shooting video in moscow is that one is either bouncing along at 50mph or at a complete standstill for ten minutes at a time in a traffic jam between trucks.]

when in moscow one always has to work at a thousand miles an hour, because of the limited trip duration, so i tend to crash mentally and physically when i get home. but it's not all slog though - here's a glamorous moment in the city space bar [stills here]

the view wasn't as good as it could have been, because it was snowing. bar manager bek narzibekov, seen putting the finishing touches to a cocktail and explaining it to the customers, is now recovering after being poisoned, probably by a business rival. the young guy who grins at the camera is my work colleague dimitry, who knew bek when he was one of london's top bartenders/managers.

communist postcards

in the 70s and 80s one of my uncles used to travel behind the iron curtain on business. he sent us postcards, as much for us to see the stamps as anything. i found a few of them over easter - here on flickr. there may be more to follow if i can remember where they are. on one such trip he brought back the tu-144 brochure.

the postcard from north korea strikes me as especially remarkable now - it can't be a common thing to have. my brother noticed that the description is in spanish - why would a north korean postcard have a spanish caption? we presume it's because the only visitors were likely to be from cuba. it's also unusual for stamps to feature aggressively brandished machine guns.

more greenbelt photos

in putting those greenbelt 98 photos on flickr, i found that i had a whole lot of other greenbelt photos that i hadn't done anything with. so i've made a greenbelt collection. some of the sets are the alt worship stuff that's already up there, but the greenbelt 2003, 2006 and 2007 sets haven't been seen before. neither have the l'arche and labyrinth photos in greenbelt 2001.

interior design

the relative lack of blogging or any other creative activity lately is because most of my spare-time energies have been going into sorting out my flat. my delicious links tell the story [of inspiration more than purchase, i should say!]. hopefully the wall panels will go up this weekend. then it will be finished enough to take some photographs.

in the meantime take a look at this marvellous 60s home. the stuff's mostly mass-market kitsch, but put together so well it's a design triumph. in this country one would call the national trust and ask them to preserve it for ever. the house is in los angeles, but almost every aspect of the interior is familiar to me from my childhood in england - clearly this idiom was universal. it brings back nagging non-specific memories - that wood wallpaper behind the dining table - who in my childhood had just that, and similar dining chairs too? my mum would know.

greenbelt 25 1998 [ten years late]

now for some emerging church history.

when greenbelt festival hit 25 in 1998, it planned to reinvent itself [split into two festivals, change sites and intentions]. so i decided to use my new camera to record the festival, in case it was the last of its kind. indeed, the grace service on the monday night was called 'the last supper', in case it was the last alt worship service at greenbelt. and had the festival ended there yours truly might have been the last 'act' ever at greenbelt, leading a meditation at 1.30-2am tuesday morning [the john 21 meditation in 'alternative worship', written for the slot - the last line was originally 'the world after greenbelt']

of course it didn't end there, but i've never photographed the festival in general since, feeling that i'd done it. but i discovered, late last year, that i'd never actually scanned more than a handful of the photos - just a few of the epicentre ones for small fire. so here, ten years late, is greenbelt 25 at deene park, featuring the legendary epicentre arts cafe.

a note on the venue: deene park was a country house estate, with a natural bowl in the land. the main stage and backstage were in the bottom of the bowl, with everything else arranged along a circular path around the edge of the bowl. this meant that whichever way you went you would always come back to where you started, having met along the way all the people you knew who weren't in the outfield at their tents. finding people was so much easier. everything was under canvas - so there was nowhere warm when it was cold or cool when it was hot, and the noise from the dance tent wrecked all attempts at quiet ambience, silent prayer, meditation. and marquees can get pretty muddy inside, which isn't good for electrics either. after the torrential rain and mudbath of 1997, and the not much better weather of 1998 [see photos], the move to cheltenham racecourse was partly about making sure that at least some of the main site and venues were on concrete or indoors. it took greenbelt 7 or 8 years to recover from the financial damage of the bad weather in 97/98.

grace as a perfume

only £44 in john lewis. more on flickr.

urban church set

this is a expanded version of the 'urban church' drawings on smallritual.org, based on the talks i did in melbourne and adelaide last year. the idea was to draw together a whole range of things that i've done into an overall picture of what 'church' might mean, from small things to big, from your pocket to the city. it's best as a slideshow so things are in order, but i'm beginning to wonder if linear order matters. there are some more slides to come, especially in the 'objects' section, but i haven't been getting round to it and i'm tired of these just sitting on my hard drive.

mushy peas

i find myself explaining mushy peas as a result of this photograph

i have to record this

i didn't see or think about mushy peas for many years [even in northern chip shops you were more likely to get frozen peas in the 80s and 90s]. and now they're resurrected, courtesy of trendy pie shops and the fashion for traditional english food. the restaurant at tate modern serves fish, chips and mushy peas - we took our russian clients there and persuaded them to have it - it's strange having to explain how to eat something you've grown up with. how to eat fish in batter without eating the skin or any bones, for instance [don't just cut slices like a sausage!].

when i was small we lived next door to a chip shop in cleethorpes. i remember sometimes getting threepenceworth of chips [old money not decimal] for supper, as a treat. makes me sound victorian ;)

norway photos

healthy drink in post below is because i'm having a couple of days off work ill, or exhausted - not sure which. this gives me the chance to finish uploading the norway photos from 2004. on the hard drive it doesn't look like too many, but in my photostream it's pages and pages. but some of these are among the best photos i've ever taken. i can start making a 'best shots' collection now.

bling and bikes

in selfridges, the aptly-named ego laptop:

which comes in a variety of couture finishes - this one has a diamond logo:

looks a bit like the grace logo doesn't it? who'll be the first at grace to buy one? how about our logo in diamonds? would certainly look good running worship off it at greenbelt. maybe we could hire one for the night...

also a couple of fixed wheel track bikes with paul smith colour schemes:

[as a teenager smith was aiming for a professional cycling career until a serious accident ended his hopes. while convalescing he made friends with art students, ended up running a boutique with his fashion-designer girlfriend, who encouraged him to train as a tailor, and the rest is history]