New Yorkers have been saying good riddance to bad memories of 2009 with a symbolic shredding of items in New York’s Times Square. A $250 prize was awarded for the most creative entry though there is currently conflicting information as to who the winner was as an entrant who submitted all his odd socks and a 12 year old shredding the memory of a school counsellor who had appeared on America’s most wanted listed as winners.
It strikes me this is a better use of symbolism than any doomed-to-fail style new year resolutions. As the good riddance day website tag-line says (warning psycho-babble alert): because sometimes you just need to let go.
“The poor have been subsidising the rich. And now the rich are shouting because they are losing their subsidy – because they are paying £3,000 to go to Oxford and they should be paying £30,000.”
Contemplating charging the market rate for a good university education
In 1971 Gavin Bryars and Alan Power were working together on a film about people living rough in the Elephant and Castle area of London and around the Waterloo Station area.
The film ultimately did not see the light of day however Gavin Bryars was taken by a section of a homeless man singing a section of a religious song.
The full (and for me moving) back story to how this piece of audio came to be used is more fully explained here.
In 1993 the price was given an extended reworking when Bryars was prompted by composer Philip Glass to revisit the work for the age of the CD which saw the slightly puzzling (for me anyway) addition of Tom Waits voice to a section of the re-recording of the orchestral accompaniment.
The piece to this day divides opinion. I’ll admit it’s a piece that often moves me to tears. Not for any supposed religious or even spiritual aspects (I’m not personally a believer) but just on some kind of tragic human level that I still find hard to adquately explain. It just moves me.
I know I’m not alone in feeling this but equally know that many don’t agree, aren’t moved in any way and just ‘don’t get it’.You only have to read the comments on Amazon to see how much this piece still divides opinion but then that’s music. It would be a curious world if we all liked and were moved by the same the same things.
Over the years the piece has crept into the radio playlist for this time of year. Hard to truly explain why.
I caught it on WNYC radio only last week and had to turn the radio off before it grabbed hold on me again even if it was the easy to digest four or 4.25 minute version rather than the original 26 minute or 56 minute arrangement.
Back in the day when I did my psychology education it soon became apparent that the young parent contingent would happily shout down any research that would point to any probable detrimental effect that parents could have on their offspring but who would alternatively shout from the rafters when other research appeared to show the gloriously positive effects parenting can affect.
So too with the possible link between parental drinking and binge drinking in the young.
The middle class parents for whom a couple of glasses of wine to ‘de-stress’ of an evening naturally dismiss such findings whilst scape-goating the under-classes instead and telling those pointing the nanny-state finger to linger a while and instead point accusingly at the supposedly ‘feckless’ to see the real effects of poor parental role models. Another great ‘no thugs in our house‘ moment.
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