I am preparing for a new term and this one is long and busy and a change is needed.

I am aware this year of a change due to the things that I have done, I am looking closely at what I am currently doing and that maybe I need to change that as well.
I have been troubled by the way education funnels the mind of children into smaller and smaller focus which may have been good for sending them to the office or the factory but in today’s society we need flexibility and creative thinking with the ability to learn new things and new skills and that is not being addressed by schools in my humble opinion.
I heard an interesting talk on the radio by science fantasy writer Jasper Fforde saying that schools need to promote imaginative thinking and not focus on science because what we need are new ideas not a reworking of old thoughts .He raised the interesting point that on a mobile phone the only new idea was the liquid crystal display everything else was reworking of old technology.
Old paradigms that drive political and economic thinking have taken us to a number of dangerous places which is evident in the non-ecological aspect of most government thinking. For example instead of creating more energy we should just use less, we are using three and a half times what this planet can sustain in the West and that cannot continue whatever we think, this is a bit like death, you might be able to delay it but it is coming for you.
What matters in our thinking should be what world are we leaving for our children? At this rate we are destroying our grandchildren because we are destroying the ecosystem that they require; don’t get me wrong here the planet does not need saving that will adjust but it will be without us. We are at the top of the food chain we are the most vulnerable and the change that we need comes from all of us not from politicians and we can start by changing how we teach our children.
Vic

Unknowable......

I am running a school where you are not obliged to know stuff or be an expert. It is more about being able to wonder and to learn a little, and that is all that a life needs. - Steven Jenkinson.


Ah if only this was the attitude that people had when they stared to learn music, finding themselves through exploring sound and playing and the joy of working with others understanding that mind reading is not as science would say nonsense but something that musicians do all of the time.
Art comes from the dreamlike world of the unconscious which does not require paper qualifications and recommendations of the halls of academe but the attention of the ordinary people that you have something to say or something to teach.
Music is the expression of life and its weirdness and its love and its pain, nothing to do with measurement or repeatable scientific research; that is for the people in white coats.
I have often pondered that if J K Rowling had written about a young scientist who had gone to a special school to fulfil his destiny whether she would have had such a success in her writing? I would say not.
So let us embrace the people that make us feel good whether they have qualifications or not and here is to sticking a finger or two up to the accountants who want to measure and the scientists who want to dissect everything and then wonder why it is dead.

Vic



Bluescampuk three days of rocking out. ... www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Getting uncomfortable

I spend a lot of time looking and attending courses and festivals to give me ideas for Bluescampuk and seeing if there are new ways of making the experience exciting.
I have just returned from something which was more ceremonial in the hills of Wales and this experience was interesting for me because I felt totally out of my depth. I was in a group that seemed to have done it before so that feeling of uncertainty and the feeling of ‘why am I here’ which I know many people experience when doing something new really hit me.
I have always felt that the feeling of uncertainty for me always precedes a learning moment I have even got the point as looking for this as the marker that confirms that something needs to be looked at.
I have reached the point in my life that things that are comfortable are not really transformational events and that feeling of fear and uncertainty is what I need marking it as being out of my comfort zone.
I know that a lot of people experience this feeling when doing music examinations and it may be a good way of explaining why a challenge like this is good for them.
Vic

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk

In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless. -Aleister Crowley

A quote from one of the most famous or should I say infamous magicians of all time is so true of music as it is of magic or as Mr Crowley would have said magick.

Any art form from dance and poetry to music and sculpture is about expression of you the artist and one would use the tools of the trade – your talents and virtues as the building blocks to express this however without willpower you have no way of dealing with the blows that land on you from people who critique you and who are just downright jealous of you.

You need to develop a thick skin to deal with this and that is something that most artists do not have and it needs to be acquired.

A little bit like the skin on the ends of your fingers that start being very painful and then they toughen up and then one never feels that level of discomfort again.

 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

Right under your nose.

Sometimes we look for something and it is hiding in plain sight, right under our noses but because we do not expect the answer to be that easy we miss it.
Many of the answers in my own life I have found to be like this, something that I ‘stepped over’ in the course of every day and it often took something to change my paradigm to make me notice.
I was thinking about this with regard to music, some musicians get this instinctively and they know that the answers to their musical questions are already with them, they just need to ‘see’ them. Maybe the use of different ways of thinking through use of drugs or just dropping out help them to find what is right there.
I have explored the way that music changes consciousness and the way that consciousness changes music and some of the answers are so simple that you are amazed that they were staring you in the face all of the time.
This situation does not just apply to music, for an example I worked for a while in a bank as a cashier and balancing a till often led to a till difference where the figures did not tally. Once you had looked a few times then you would not see your mistake but someone else could spot it straight away. It was almost that you were hypnotised to what you could not see because you did not see it before.
So look with new eyes into things as if you did not know yourself…………..

Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk


Let us show you how to rock............

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors. Jim Morrison

The silence in between the place of naturalness these are powerful places; the between yes and no what Edward De Bono calls Po.
The Taoists call it ‘suspending your disbelief’ this is a creative place that things start from almost a trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost or Sun, Moon and Earth or Above Below and Middle Earth all of these trinities are hinting at the same thing.
The Doors were one of the most creative bands of the period and they were greatly influenced by one of the great British writers Aldous Huxley taking their name from his work the Doors of Perception.
Morrison certainly put himself ‘in between’ but we can do this just by thinking ‘outside’ even dreaming something different will do it.
Try this today let go of what you think is possible and what you think impossible and make it plausible and then act towards it.
Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Ghandi

What a great motto for those who teach from one of the great people of the 20^th century.

Learning is such an important thing that is why it is not done in schools. Learning which is free and unfettered is the thing that brings down governments and creates freedom for ordinary people that is why Ghandi was shot.

I am not suggesting that we bring down the government but I am suggesting that the type of learning that people can do through learning an instrument is very different than the type of learning that happens in schools and this is the opening for you as a musician.

Also good learning is fun and effortless it is what the human mind does best, but when you are being forced to acquire information that is what is difficult because there is no joy in it.

Vic

  www.bluescampuk.co.uk