Plug ugly

(Japan Times)

 

"Created by Paul McCarthy, an American artist, as part of his exhibition Chocolate Factory, the installation is officially described as a Christmas tree. Social media wags, however, have suggested that it looks more like something rude (ask your mother)," says Ellen E Jones in the Independent on Sunday.

 

1. I don't know why it is your mother you'd have to ask. If Ms Jones can't tell the difference between a dildo and a butt plug she may not be as sophisticated as she pretends.

 

2. It's not a commentator's jest: the resemblance to the latter is entirely intended by the artist. Here he is in Le Monde:

 

"As the bright green plastic canvas "tree" is completing its installation beside the Vendôme column (the most phallic monument in Paris), we interviewed the artist, who specialises in disturbing and provocative works, about the nature of his piece.

 

""It all started with a joke: Originally, I thought that an anal plug had a shape similar to the sculptures of Brancusi. Afterwards, I realized that it looked like a Christmas tree. But it is an abstract work. People can be offended if they wish in relating to the plug, but for me it is more of an abstraction.""

 

Not entirely surprising, then that he got punched in the face and that the guy ropes were cut, so that the "artwork" had to be deflated. He had indeed "disturbed and provoked".

 

(Japan Times)

How much longer will we have to endure cheap stunts justified by highfalutin' nonsense and boosted by a louche and jaded commercial commentariat? Is there really no distinction between art and a smoking-room joke?


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Man of Sorrows

According to the Loeb Classical Library translation, the root of the name "Odysseus" is "man of pain". Athene, remonstrating with the chief of the gods, uses a pun on the hero's name to ask why he has been imprisoned on Calypso's island so long:

 τί νύ οἱ τόσον ὠδύσαο, Ζεῦ
Why then did you will him such pain (ὠδύσαο - "odusao"), O Zeus?
(Odyssey, Book I, line 62)

Something I never knew before, and which changes how I see the story: a series not of adventures, but tribulations. So it is about endurance and fidelity - Penelope waiting ten years after the Trojan war has ended for a husband that most would by then have assumed was dead; Odysseus turning down Calypso's offer of immortality so that he may spend his remaining mortal years with Penelope.

The Greeks: grief, grit and pride.

And loyalty and pathos, exemplified by the moment his ancient dog Argos is the first to recognise the much-changed man on on his return to Ithaca.

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A smile



A blood-feud in Iceland, a thousand years ago: Halldor and others have just killed Bolli in his dairy, while his wife Gudrun is out...

(From Laxdaele Saga, tr. Muriel Press)

 

(pic source)

 

I've never forgotten it.

 

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In praise of Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke is the Low Life columnist for the Spectator magazine. He lives in Devon's South Hams and mixes humbly (a word he's fond of) with the ordinary, poor and raffish, reporting on them and himself with lapidary prose and that quality the ancient Chinese prized and called "human-heartedness".

 

A collection - not to be missed, we were re-reading it aloud this morning with our wake-up tea, and laughing - is available here (a gift for yourself, and maybe for some of your friends too):

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Low-Life-Middle-Aged-Search-Point/dp/1907595511/ref=sr_1_1/277-4349049-2951361?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403330788&sr=1-1&keywords=low+life+jeremy+clarke

 

 

Here (16 Aug 2003) he is helping out on the Whack-the-Malteaser stall at his sister's annual charity fete held in the local centre for those with learning difficulties:

 

After Ray, Maurice came over and tried his luck. My sister loves Maurice. He's her pet. She found him a work experience placement recently, at Tesco's, as a bread packer. Every day he packs bread until they tell him to stop, then he goes home. He loves packing bread so much, says my sister, he can't wait to go to work again the next day. Maurice was accurate with the mallet, but his timing was way off.

 

He was far too slow. By the time he'd brought the mallet down, the Malteaser had already crossed the table and been picked up, examined, and eaten by an onlooker. Maurice then walked away with the mallet in his hand, the silly arse. I didn't notice it had gone until the next customers presented themselves, and I had to close the stall temporarily to go and look for it.

 

The terrific heat was a major problem for the stall this year. This year's fun day was the day of the hottest temperature since records began. The Malteasers' chocolate coating began to melt and they stuck to the inside of the tube.

 

Customers were standing at my table, mallet raised, eyes narrowly focused on the pipe's exit, and the Malteasers wouldn't come out. The only way to shift them was to blow down the pipe. This was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, but mainly because it meant putting my head nearly in line with the mallet's descent.

 

I requisitioned Jim, gave him my supply box of Malteasers and asked him to take them inside and shove them in the fridge. 'I can't do it!' said Jim, which is the only thing Jim ever says, and he trotted away with them towards the house. Later, when I popped over to get the Malteasers out of the fridge, they weren't in there. 'Jim,' I said when I found him, 'what did you do with the Malteasers?' I can't do it!' said Jim pointing at his mouth. 'I can't do it!' Jim had only gone and scoffed the lot. I seized his face with both hands and gave him a big kiss.

 

Because with no more Malteasers to Whack, that, thank God, was that for another year.

 

His collection is subtitled "One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point", but like the Chinese sages, in a way he's found it, in seeing and loving.

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"I me mine": gender and the possessive pronoun

Commenting on the latest twist in the Lawson-Saatchi feud, John Ward says:

"For me, Nigella had always represented a figure of fun: the personification of how too much money and bubble-based privilege can lead to idiotic comments such as “The best vinegar to add at this stage in the cooking is cider, but if you’ve run out, Champagne vinegar will do just as well”. But behind all that, I felt a background unease about the sheer size of her ego: how every dish was ‘my’ Christmas Turkey or ‘my’ summer salad."

Actually, this is something many women do, if you take the trouble to listen to them. This is (I venture to suggest) because they are more relationship-focused; they are also (I think) more likely to invest inanimate objects with personalities.

If you watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's cookery programmes (at least the early series) you may note - it stuck me quite forcefully at the time - that he does this "I/my" thing consistently. At first I found it irritating, but then I came to admire him, for I realised that he was mimicking the feminine use of language to appeal more strongly to his audience.

My wife says that in the quoted context, it's also about food as giving something of yourself.

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Weekend Arts: Lowry

Source: Wiki (see terms of use)

You can always get me along to an exhibition of an artist with a clear world-view, even if it's not one I particularly like.  Only just squeaked in to the Tate Lowry, though, which closes this weekend.

No great visual revelations here - you know pretty much what you are going to get, wall after wall of it (none of his strange erotic stuff included in this show).  But there are several really illuminating things to be learned that you won't find in wiki.

• He can properly be placed squarely in the French tradition of Utrillo and Pissarro, having been formally trained at the Manchester School of Art by the less well-known impressionist Valette.  Indeed, he (Lowry) exhibited in Paris more than in England in his early years.  (To judge from the single Valette in the show - a grand urban nocturne - the master was, *ahem* perhaps better than the student ... just a matter of taste, obviously)
• He was a fire-watcher on a high factory roof during WW2, which readily explains the perspectives of many of his post-war paintings.
• He was capable of taking the piss in no uncertain terms.  Two separate paintings are exhibited side-by-side without comment, one entitled 'People arriving at work' and the other 'People going home from work'.  They are essentially identical (not mirror-images), down to the colour of individuals' coats
• He had a short 'welsh' period when he painted some more-studious-than-usual / less generic, and rather magnificent Welsh landscapes  
• Gates and gateways clearly had significance for him (might be a fruitful opening for psychological speculation)

This is all a bit late to count as a recommendation for any except London-area readers - sorry about that - but it's meant that way.  Time well spent.

This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog  


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Weekend Reading (Heavy Division)

This, by Jonathan Franzen in Saturday week's Grauniad review, is the best essay I have read for several months.  Based on his translation and exegesis of the writings of an Austrian I'd never heard of - Karl 'The Great Hater' Kraus (1874-1936), a kind of proto-blogger - the piece is hard to summarise.  (The Graun's sub-editor has failed hopelessly in this task, so don't be offput by the rubric.)

So I've assembled a little set of extracts.  If you like them you'll read it ... 

"... rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren windowframes. Just spare me the pretty ribbons! "

"Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads." You're not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it 2 billion now?) "individualised" Facebook pages may make you want to say them. 

Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. 

For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of "empowerment" and "creativity" and "freedom" and "connection" and "democracy" abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it's far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people's worst impulses, than newspapers ever were. 

"An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn't have it. For fifty years now it's been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living"

Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses 

... the next thing you know, you're translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful. And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. 

Kraus's signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past ... something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity. 

You get the picture ...


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog
 

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A question for Ayn Rand followers

What is the point of "rational self-interest"? Everything you do for yourself is lost when you die.

Perhaps it's an observation rather than a precept.

But it needs unpacking - what's the self? What are the drives that count as "happiness"? Are you exercising your freedom by obeying your impulses?

Reminds me of what little I understand of Sartre. Having proved to his satisfaction that man is a futile passion, he then tries to build on the void - you should be brave, honest. Why? When you're gone, you won't be able to applaud yourself or stick any trophies on your ethereal shelf.

The "selfish gene", that I can understand. But that implies that the organism lives for the next generation and for others that share its genes, not itself alone.

We share about half our genes with bananas, I'm told.

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Haunting

http://xkcd.com/1259/

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Carl Hiaasen's green mischief

http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/arcimboldo_paris/gaml1007_15.htm

If you haven't read Carl Hiaasen (and he's not yet well-known here in the UK) I hope you will. Much of the best and most original postwar writing in English has come from the US - I defy anyone to name a British writer to stand next to Thomas Pynchon, for example. Maybe it's that America is less hung up on its cultural heritage (having so many), maybe it's simply the literary efflorescence that accompanies economic and military expansion as it did in Elizabethan England, I don't know.

But things that grow also decay, and Hiaasen's very funny crime novels are a symbolic organic revenge for property developers' depredations in his beloved Floridian wetlands. He's attacked the Disney Corporation in Team Rodent (1998).

His viscerally-felt objections are partly ecological, partly moral, but also aesthetic. The developers are merely crass, gripped by a nearsighted obsession with money, and as long as they turn over the cash and get out that's all they care about. The retirees who flock South are similarly dumb and disconnected from their environment; for them, a condo close to the Everglades is like one in New York, just warmer in winter. A long-brewed reckoning awaits them all.

In the book I've just (re)read, Double Whammy, the arch-enemy is a ratbag TV preacher who has sunk his profits in a disastrous residential complex pierced by canals ("lakes", he angrily reminds his salesmen) which he hope will be a selling feature for keen bass catchers, but which for historical land-use reasons turn out to be nearly as toxic as Love Canal.

But Nature is fighting back, not least because it has recruited a former State Governor who has despaired of resisting the forces of capitalism and gone wild, living in the forest and only sallying forth to harvest roadkill for his dinners. In this book, he loses an eye in a fight and replaces it with one from a stuffed owl; in another, his long hair becomes braided Indian-style, with eagle claws hanging from the ends.

Even the lesser villains are mutating in the vicinity of nonhuman life, with which (as we now know) we share so many genes. Here, a kidnapper kills a pitbull and unable to remove its death-locked jaws from his arm, simply cuts off the head and carries on. When he and his victim pass through a traffic tollbooth, the changetaker calmly expresses her regret that she hasn't any Milk Bones to offer the creature; for in Florida, anything can happen and Man is beginning to forget his distinctive nature.

Hiaasen has a writer's fascination with language, which like the nearby primeval landscape burgeons beyond our ability to grasp it all. In the midst of his scorn for the daftness of fishing competitions, he gives us this rococo recital of its commercial artefacts:

"As was everything in Dennis Gault's tournament artillery, his bass lures were brand new. For top-water action he had stocked up on Bang-O-Lures, Shad Raps, Slo Dancers, Hula Poppers, and Zara Spooks; for deep dredging he had armed himself with Wee Warts and Whopper Stoppers and the redoubtable Lazy Ike. For brushpiles he had unsheathed the Jig-N-Pig and Double Whammy, the Bayou Boogle and Eerie Dearie, plus a rainbow trove of Mister Twisters. As for that most reliable of bass rigs, the artificial worm, Dennis Gault had amassed three gooey pounds. He had caught fish on every color, so he packed them all: the black-grape crawdad, the smoke-sparkle lizard, the flip-tail purple daddy, the motor-oil moccasin, the blueberry gollywhomper, everything."

Wonderful. And best of all, good triumphs over evil.

It's escapism, naturally. As Oscar Wilde said, "It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all."

But in stimulating our imagination, perhaps Hiaasen's gonzo tales and misshapen brood are preparing us to take the side of the angels, or at least that of the more enigmatic Green Man.

http://www.vosper4coins.co.uk/stone/GreenMan_files/GreenMan.htm

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Chris Ryan's "Killing for the Company"

Until not so many years ago, I naively took the view that fiction was made up and non-fiction was true. I now realize that much fiction is dangerous truth smuggled past the guards.

Chris Ryan's 2011 novel shows the usual expertise gained from his time in the SAS, and his characters shoot and stab (and are killed) with believable detail. I read this type of thing as a vicarious thrill, but perhaps also to inure myself somewhat to the horror of what humans do to each other. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance: imagining the awfulness so that I can be reassured that it won't happen to me and mine in reality.

But Ryan's books, blood-soaked though they are, don't seem to inhabit a completely bleak moral universe. This may be to do with the heart of the man: when Ryan called his wife after his escape from Iraq, almost the first thing he said was "I've done a terrible thing," referring to his having had to kill two people during his solitary flight through the desert. The profession of arms is a tough one, but soldiers can still have a conscience, even if they look at religion sideways. I get the feeling that Andy McNab manages to keep the side doors of his mind shut a little tighter, though his references to the incidence of suicide among some of his fellows, and to the need for the psychological counselling that is more easily available to American Special Forces, suggests that many who do what they have to do find difficulty in preventing emotional leakage from those shut rooms.

It's said that psychopaths do understand how other people think and feel; what makes them so dangerous is that they don't care. There are two such in this book. One is a female Mossad agent who kills man, woman and child without the slightest compunction. The other is a British Prime Minister called Stratton, who holds secret meetings with an American arms manufacturer and undertakes to get his country involved in the Iraq conflict. Years later, we see him as a peace envoy to the Middle East, with more hidden plans and connexions. Throughout the book, he shows a quick perception of others and a superficially charming manner, but has a mood that turns on a sixpence. And he's a first-class God-botherer with a messianic ego and millenarian enthusiasm.

Events come to a head in 2013, in a Middle East becoming unstable and with Western powers preparing for imminent direct military involvement.

I can't say whether Stratton is simply a great fictional villain, playing to the prejudices of many of the readership, or whether the writer has a genuine dislike for those who give the orders but never wield the knife or gun themselves. I felt that the work was climbing over the border fence of fiction.

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Nomad

Richard Dadd: Caravan Halted By The Sea Shore (1843)


Pounding up the packed M5 yesterday, I noticed that caravans are like a red rag to a bull for the rest of us drivers, even if they're doing a good speed. But I also used one or two in the middle lane as markers to see if staying in the outside lane is better than switching to whichever queue seems to be making better progress; it is.

And as I drove, I wondered whether there is a Best Place. Cornwall and Devon are so lovely, so do the people who live there go elsewhere on their holidays, and if so, why and where? You could do an experiment, perhaps using information from travel agents: find out where the majority in one location take their breaks, then go to that place and see where the locals take theirs, and so on. Would you end up somewhere that is perfect, or simply so poor that the natives don't go abroad? Would you end up back where you started? Would the trek never end?

Perhaps it is not so much about venturing into the unknown, as escape from the known. Gertrude Stein: "What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."

Richard Dadd: Artist's Halt In The Desert By Moonlight

Arabs - the Bedouin kind - have long caught the British imagination. Like birds, they seem free. Some of the happiest-looking photographs of the SAS are taken when they're wearing their shemaghs, and the first couple of lines of the following quote from James Elroy Flecker's "Hassan" appear on the memorial Clock Tower at 22 SAS' Stirling Lines base in Hereford:

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

          Always a little further; it may be

        Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

          Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

        White on a throne or guarded in a cave

          There lies a prophet who can understand

        Why men were born: but surely we are brave,

          Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

I suspect that Flecker originally wrote the scene as a stand-alone tribute to the heart's desire for the journey without end or final purpose, like Tennyson's Ulysses, and only afterwards turned it into a drama (all the rest is in prose).

And so, with regret, passing Gormley's awful Willow Man at Bridgwater (now thankfully dwarfed by the massive, gaudy-green decorated shed of the Morrisons depot) we took the Golden Road back to Birmingham, intending to return to the West Country as soon as possible.

CORRECTION: Not Gormley - Serena de la Hey. Apologies to both.

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