Chasing Trane

Yesterday, I prepared and uploaded my Maundy Thursday Morning Prayer, and then continued working with the components of the Good Friday service video. It turned out to be more complex and difficult to realise, as YouTube flagged up digital rights management issues on a couple of the music tracks I'd used. To be honest, I couldn't make sense of it, whether it was possible to use the pieces in the way I'd intended. 

It took me a couple of hours to change the selection and upload a revised version to YouTube, but the next time other DRM issues were flagged up, and I think incorrectly, but how to dispute this was beyond my ability to understand. And a waste of even more time. At fifty minutes this was the longest video edit I'd ever attempted and the software didn't fail on me. The video rendering and uploading to YouTube took up hours of time machine minding.

Clare is still in a lot of pain and incapacitated with her back injury. She went for an osteopath treatment yesterday and is in  even worse pain today. Between looking after her needs and working on the video, my day was entirely consumed. It was nearly ten in the evening before I went out for a walk, needing to clear my head before going to bed without finishing the job, having decided to edit out the music altogether and just present a voice audio version of the service. Not what I wanted, but it will have to do.

Thankfully, I slept well, and uploaded the Good Friday video without issue this time. Then, a couple of grocery shopping trips, another to the surgery to collect a pain killing prescription for Clare and another for my blood pressure medication. Then, after supper I went to the Eucharist at St Catherine's. There were twenty one of us present, eight in the choir. Mother Frances talked about a Picasso Blue Period painting, which I recognised, signifying estrangement and failure in relationships, and jumping from this to Judas at the Last Supper. I go the point, but it didn't quite work for me. I think I work by visualising the story and conjuring with it dramatically. That's certainly how I got the thread of ideas for my Good Friday text.

Before bed, I watched a remarkable documentary about the life of John Coltrane, one of the 20th century's musical geniuses. It had interviews with many of the jazz greats, now at advanced ages, but full of energy, still inspired by their memories of the man who died aged 40, fifty five years ago, What was important in this biography was the exploration of Coltrane's spirituality, his creativity and mystical relationship with God. It was so good, I'd love to watch it again. It was so absorbing that I was surprised to find that it had run for two hours, when I thought it was only an hour long. It also made me wonder why I have none of his albums in my music collection. Somehow, after his time with Miles Davies, his contribution to music passed me by.