Breaking the sock rule

It's usually best to match your socks to your pants rather than to your shoes, but there's one exception: With cream pants and black shoes, black socks look better.

Debate.

Bananas

Together with some 2500 other people, I attended a lecture at the Christchurch Town Hall on Thursday evening by the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins. His reception, which was described in the local newspaper as a "rock-star welcome," reminded me of that extended to another great iconoclast, Noam Chomsky, when he gave a talk here back in 1998. The difference was that while Chomsky spoke in front of an invited audience at Canterbury University, Dawkins lectured in front of a paying crowd, most of whom had bought tickets for $15 (although someone reportedly paid $132 for a ticket to the sold-out event on Trade Me).

People attending Thursday's lecture were greeted at the entrance to the Town Hall by a small group of Christians who were handing out free copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species. The catch was that this edition, published by Christian minister and evangelist Ray Comfort in 2009 after he discovered that the text was in the public domain and distributed at universities in the U.S., includes a "special introduction" penned by Comfort (although a section of it was alleged plagiarized from a text by Dr Stan Guffey, a biologist at the University of Tennessee) in which he seeks to discredit Darwin's work.

I haven't read the special introduction yet, but if Comfort's antics in this YouTube video are anything to go by, it's sure to be quite amusing. In the video, Comfort argues that the fact that bananas fit comfortably into our hands and mouths is proof that god designed them to be eaten by humans. There's so much wrong with this argument that it's hard to know where to begin in refuting it. But how about the fact that the modern banana depicted in the video is the result of years of human cultivation and propagation, one of the effects of which has been to remove the large seeds that once made the eating experience less enjoyable.

Incidentally, although he now lives in the U.S., Comfort was born in New Zealand, and began his preaching career in Christchurch.

The Fighting Fool

One of the advantages of growing up in an academic household was that the family home was always full of interesting books. This was especially true in my late teens after my mother went back to university to study and later teach Eastern religions and after my parents came back from a year teaching English in China, when the family library took on a real exotic flavour.

One day while perusing the bookshelf in the living room I came across a Tai Chi manual complete with photos and English instructions. I'd been interested in the martial arts for years (this was back in the days of Bruce Lee, whose movies I enjoyed) but I'd been too timid to actually go to classes and learn. With this book, I thought, I could study on my own at home. And so it was that I took my first tentative steps towards learning a martial art.

Many years later, while living in Japan, I took up Shorinji Kempo, which I stuck at long enough to gain a first-degree black belt. Sounds impressive, but a first-degree black belt is really just a learner's license. It means you've learned the basics and are ready to begin mastering the art. I have many pleasant memories of those years learning Shorinji Kempo, of my kind and generous teacher and his wife, also proficient in Shorinji Kempo, and of my fellow adult students, some of whom were learning with their sons and daughters. But by this time Mrs Fool and I had decided to return to New Zealand, and although I could have continued with Shorinji Kempo here, my enthusiasm had waned to the point where I was no longer willing to put up with the niggling injuries that are part and parcel of martial arts training like blisters and calluses on the soles of the feet, twisted ankles, and stubbed toes, and the inevitable not so niggling injuries, which in my case included a cracked wrist, sustained in a competition when I tried to block a kick with my lower arm. I lost that bout but was awarded a cup at the end of the day for my efforts. I had to pose with the cup for a photo, which I'm pretty sure aggravated my injury.

Walking Fool with cup (c. 1993)*

Which is all by way of introduction to the announcement that, something like thirty years after my first attempt, I've started learning Tai Chi again, this time properly with a teacher. I'm taking a course called Tai Chi for Health at the WEA. It's based on a variation of Sun style Tai Chi devised by Dr Paul Lam, a physician and arthritis sufferer who took up Tai Chi to help his own arthritis and has since established what seems to be a mini-empire with DVDs and books on everything from Tai Chi for Diabetes and Tai Chi for Back Pain to Tai Chi for Kidz (there's no Tai Chi for Cats yet, but I'm sure it's not far away).

The course I'm taking is aimed at older folks (I'm pretty sure I'm the youngest student), so it's very easy on the body. I've been to five classes so far and have been practicing a bit at home using one of the DVDs. Although I'm skeptical about the whole concept of chi (or ki as it's called in Japanese), I'm already noticing some benefits in that I feel really relaxed and in a heightened state of awareness after a Tai Chi session. I think this is due to the slowness of the movements, which as well as strengthening the joints and muscles seems to have an almost meditative effect.

*Both left-facing and right-facing swastikas have been associated with Buddhism for many centuries. Shorinji Kempo has links to a type of Buddhism called Kongo Zen, and the left-facing swastika (omote-manji in Japanese), which symbolizes compassion, was attached to Shorinji Kempo uniforms in Japan and was part of the Shorinji Kempo logo until 2005, when it was abandoned on the grounds that it was hindering the growth of Shorinji Kempo overseas.

Privilege

When I checked Tomasz Stanko's official website the other day and saw that he was due to play in San Francisco and New York next month as part of a U.S. tour to promote his new CD, Dark Eyes, I recalled a comment I made back in November last year about timing my proposed epic rail journey across North America to coincide with a concert by either the Polish trumpeter or my other musical hero, pianist Keith Jarrett, and ever so briefly considered flying over to see Stanko in San Francisco and then traveling by rail to New York to see him again at Birdland (and to eat grilled stuff with Erik).

I then remembered that I'm visiting Tokyo later this month and couldn't possibly afford to make another overseas trip so soon after that one. Also, the Keith Jarrett Trio is performing in Tokyo in September-October, and I've promised to take Mrs Fool to see them to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And while I'd dearly love to see Stanko perform live again, the prospect of seeing him with his new quintet doesn't excite me as much as that of seeing him with his old quartet (with Marcin Wasilewski on piano), which I had the pleasure of doing back in March 2009. It seems that that quartet is a thing of the past. It produced just three CDs, including the sublime Lontano, which took me a while to get into but is now one of my all time favourite albums. I consider it a privilege to have seen that quartet perform live.

As Jarrett himself confirmed to an Italian audience in 2007 during one of his infamous outbursts, seeing Keith Jarret perform is also a privilege. Unlike Stanko, however, Jarrett doesn't believe in changing the personnel in his groups much. In fact his current trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums) has been playing together for more than 25 years. And while I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the trio in Japan, if I had a time machine one of the first things I'd do, probably even before going back to Wellington on the night of 7 March 2009, would be to go back to the Village Vanguard in New York on the night in May 1979 when Jarrett's "European Quartet" (with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, Palle Danielsson on Bass, and Jon Christenson on drums) recorded the album Nude Ants. According to Ian Carr's Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, Garbarek was having an "off-night," but even that couldn't spoil the magic.