This is a great book if you’re vegetarian, but I’m vegan and too many of the recipes rely on milk/cheese and yoghurt for my liking. The same author is writing a vegan cookbook and I have enjoyed many meals at Govinda’s in London so was disappointed that the recipes weren’t as good as the one’s I’d had in town. I’m “not worth consuming” this for that reason (ie the recipes aren’t vegan). Otherwise it’s an excellent cookbook; it’s just not right for me.

This is a much better book than Plant-Spirit Shamanism although I couldn’t say why. I think it may be because Ross Heaven writes with such passion about Voudou, and in particular his initiation into Haitian Voudou, that you are just carried along. I knew nothing about Voudou before reading this book and now want to find out more. I think that the author certainly honours the spirits he works with and also does a great service to a much maligned and misunderstood tradition. Definitely one I’ll be reading again – there are also some excellent rituals/exercises contained in its pages that I look forward to trying.

This is a straightforward introduction to earth based, feminist spirituality. It’s a beautiful read especially the final chapter about the connections between politics and magick; a subject that isn’t given enough attention in my opinion.

There are some fantastically creative rituals contained in its pages, plus guides to everything you wanted to know about doing a ritual but were afraid to ask!

Reading The Spiral Dance as a man is an interesting experience in itself because the book requires you to shift into a matrilineal way of thinking and feeling about the world, which isn’t something men are often required to do. For me, it reminded me about the unspoken privileges men enjoy even when we think we’re “right on”!

The best thing about Starhawk’s writing though is that it’s grounded in activism and practicality – it’s an honest account of how to practice witchcraft and how to juggle all of the conflicts that this can throw your way. Yet it also insists on the poetic qualities of social action and the inherent beauty of the earth and our need to protect her.

I loved this book and am so glad I read it.

This is a car crash of a film: an elaborately staged, super-hoofer knees up of a thing that makes no sense at all and ends in a rather abrupt fashion. However, what makes it worth consuming is Lena Horne’s demented performance of “Believe in Yourself” which is belted out at Gas mark 10 on the emote-ometer over a night sky backdrop of little babies suspended in mid air as stars. Ms Horne is dressed up as the Good Witch Glinda and is frankly, scary. The whole thing is a Social Services raid waiting to happen.

The Wiz is an all-Black remake of the Wizard of Oz and it’s as late 70s early 80s as they come. Think of the Wizard of Oz we all know and love; now transplant that story to inner city New York and instead of the plains of Kansas substitute multi-storey car parks and concrete playgrounds. The munchkins are wise cracking, body popping graffitti glyphs brought to life, Micheal Jackson is the scarecrow and the poppy field becomes a street filled with coke sniffing disco street ladies wobbling around in hot pants and high heels. Oh, and a rather ill looking Diana Ross is Dorothy. Clunkliy directed, oddly lit and so full of song and dance set pieces that the actual plot gets shoe-horned into whatever brief time is left over, this is a film that makes an impression for all the wrong reasons…

I enjoyed reading this book which is an introduction to plant shamanism, but I found its rather sweeping generalisations about “science” and “Western Rationality” rather problematic. The authors seem to see science as a monolithic form of knowledge rather than a competing and conflicting set of theories in flux. This undermined some of the claims in the book and also allowed wooly notions of “faith” and “creation” to seep into the text. The idea argued by the authors that string theory suggests the universe is an instrument and therefore “someone or something” must be playing it, really got my goat especially as some of the interesting work in physics and biology looking at theories of emergence can explain how and why complex systems maintain and power themselves without the need for an external creator. I wish the authors had read “A Thousand Plateaus” by Deleuze and Guattari as their elegant philosophical arguments allow for the wonders of the universe to coexist with scientific endeavour.

Having said that though, the book itself is fascinating and puts forward some engaging ideas about our relationship with plants, the universe and how to co-work with them to heal ourselves and make the world a better place. Worth a read even if you don’t necessarily buy all the associated conclusions…

From the Zubbles website: http://www.zubbles.com/index.asp

“Bubbles have long been a source of delight and fascination for children the world over.

Now, after ten years of experiments and discoveries, we have done what scientists claimed was impossible… we’ve combined the simple joy of bubbles with the beauty and magic of color, inventing the world’s first real colored bubbles.

We call them Zubbles®.”

This is one of the strangest yet most compelling books I’ve ever read. It’s the story of Simon Buxton’s initiation into the Path of Pollen, a Keltic (his term)Shamanic tradition based around the honeybee. And what a story it is! Without giving it away, all I will say is that Simon Buxton has to go through a number of initiatory tests in order to receive the wisdom of his Bee Master and these tests also include becoming part of the swarms hive-mind, shapeshifting to another species, trips into the forest and to spooky island caves and encounters with the enigmatic and powerful female lineage known as the Melissae. It’s an hallucinatory, bonkers read which plunges you into someone elses dreamscape but it’s so well written and tantalising that you just keep reading on….well worth your time if you can handle shamanic strangeness and someone messing with time, space and your head!

WoW! This is great: acoustic melancholy in a bottle, great to listen to while the rain pours down.

http://www.baader-meinhof.com/index.html

This is such a great film. Imagine a Fassbinder story fed through a technicolor Japanese pop-cultural filter and then turned into a musical. Ostensibly it’s the story of a woman called Matsuko found murdered in a park, whose filthy apartment is cleaned out by her slacker nephew. This sets the scene for a number of episodic moments in both characters’ lives. Matsuko’s life had been branded “meaningless” by her family but it turns out the life contained Yakuza gangsters, murder, prison, mental illness, porn stars, high school teachers, petty larceny, teen boyband pop idols and a whole heap of cartoony loveliness. However, despite the director’s dazzling technical flashes of primary colours and sparkling, filter drenched scenery, this is a work of sadness and seriousness that ponders the pointlessness of life and our capacity to keep going despite this, and the possible existence of God as a clumsy, inelegant bag lady. It’s also very funny in places. This is well worth a couple of hours of your time – if you saw Nakashima’s last film “Kamikaze Girls” and loved it, as I did, you are gonna flip for this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Matsuko