“How do I deal with self-doubt? I go and have a beer. Or preferably a glass of wine. I don’t waste time on self-doubt.” — Wole Soyinka, at the Cape Town Book Fair, July 2010 (via Kimberly Burge)
“Minor music-business functionaries having an opinion about how a singer should sing or how her band should sound — all those people can go fuck themselves.” — Steve Albini - http://www.spin.com/articles/pj-harvey-rid-of-me-oral-history-steve-albini/
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“… faith is not about what we are certain of. Indeed, the corollary of this - that faith means uncertainty - has been one of the tough lessons of the past few years that I have learned, and certainty about God is something I had had to let go. Having come from a place of certainty, or some mirage of it, I am with the agnostics, happy to accept that we will never prove that God exists or does not exist. The scientific method simply cannot help here.” — Kester Brewin, Other - Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures
“James Fowler has written extensively about the maturing that occurs within spirituality in his ‘stages of faith’ model. This consists of six stages, which range from childish ideas of God and faith (like Santa Claus) through the third stage of externalised authority structures (I believe because the Bible/my pastor teaches it) and into the conjunctivity and universality of the latter stages. I strongly believe that if we are ever to see a properly functioning ‘emergent’ church, then it will have to be one fully conscious of these stages, and well set up to allow and encourage people to negotiate the paths between them. These churches will also be labelled ‘dirty’ by those who equate doctrinal purity with closeness to God.” — Kester Brewin, Other - Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures
Not sure whether I am going or coming home - is the future always weird and a bit alien?
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Jesus’ walking into the desert was a deliberate act against settling for safety. He knew, as so many before and after in so many traditions have found, that in order to see more clearly who we are at the core of ourselves, we need to step out of comfort, step out of safety and into the deserts - the fasting places. The prophet who turned water into wine goes there to not drink, the generous provider who shared loaves and fishes to feed thousands goes there to not eat, to not consume, to not buy or sell or text or call or update his profile, in order to allow the waters from which he has just risen, baptised and affirmed by God, to settle, that he may better look, and see clearly just who he is.
In other words, though we shouldn’t attempt to live there, we regularly need to go to the desert to escape the machines; to go to remind ourselves that, despite our now inextricable reliance on digital communications, combustion engines and synthetic chemistry, we are not, at our core, automata. Perhaps this is what our Sabbath should be: a day to turn off.
” — Kester Brewin, Other - Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures“Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving - amateurs - we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers - should we be lucky enough to find any - some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” — Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (via invisibleforeigner)
(via mosteverybody)
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You can make a great record from pretty much any recording and mixing device, if you have four things:
1) a great song
2) a great performance
3) great production
4) a great mix
- in that order. And the last two aren’t even necessary if the first two are incredible.
” — Bob Clearmountain, Tape Op magazine June/July 2012