I’ve never been a great fan of the Olympics but this year I’ve found myself already caught up in it’s wake. So despite my disapproval of Union Carbide’s sponsorship (the people behind the Bhopal disasters for which I shaved my head) I already have tickets for several paralympic swimming events to cheer on my superhuman cousin Ellie Simmonds. Furthermore I was recently asked by my old friend and house-mate Louise Giblin to compose a short piece of music to accompany her exhibition of body cast sculptures of Olympians. Louise has made body casts of various olympic athletes including Kriss Akabusi, Beth Tweddle, Dame Kelly Homes and Sally Gunnell onto which she adds motifs and designs reflecting the model’s career/life/achievements, they are then cast in bronze, brass or aluminium. I spent a day with her and blind paralympic swimmer Darren Leach as we watched him train and then go through the process of being cast as you can see here. By chance and synchronicity the 2012 Olympic slogan is a quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses :“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, so I was able to tie this into my last album ‘Tennyson’. I produced a short film to explain the process, and here is the final piece: To strive
1 Response to My Bit For The Olympics
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Hey Paul,
hadn’t seen your blog before now and, er, it looks like you haven’t ‘seen’ it recently either!
Thanks for mentioning the Dow/Union Carbide sponsorship issue and, although everybody would agree that the Olympics were generally a huge success, Dow’s sponsorship remains as the only real stain on their reputation.
Most people are a little uncomfortable with the choice of some of the main Olympic sponsors and it’s easy to see the conflict between McDonald’s, or Coke, and sport eh?!
But, even if you believe that their products are ‘poison’ you can still accept that most people consuming them are choosing to poison themselves!
Nobody in Bhopal chose to be poisoned by Union Carbide’s gas and Dow, the proud Olympic sponsor, still refuses to present its wholly-owned subsidiary, Union Carbide, to face the criminal charges against it pertaining to the Bhopal Disaster. These are charges of ‘culpable homicide’.
To date around 30,000 people have died in Bhopal as a result of the 1984 Gas Disaster.
Tens of thousands of poor families are still being poisoned by the toxic waste that was never cleared up.
Dow Chemical are the ‘Official Chemistry Partner’ of the International Olympic Committee.
“Trebles all round”