tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73616120803427579762024-03-13T04:33:02.946-07:00All Manner of EnquiryBlogging about subjects of interest, whatever they may be.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.comBlogger160125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-92094366599593760942018-03-25T10:47:00.000-07:002018-04-08T13:51:20.655-07:00Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the ICA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 11pt;">Legal cases usually allow both legal teams - prosecution and defence, in criminal cases - to examine and make use of the relevant evidence. But while governments have their own evidence-gathering experts and the money and knowledge to commission additional external expertise if needed, the people and organisations that might find themselves having to defend themselves against or challenge the state generally don't have access to these kinds of resources.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That's where Forensic Architecture comes in. It's an "independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London", according to London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which is showing an <a href="http://https//www.ica.art/whats-on/season/counter-investigations-forensic-architecture" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exhibition of the agency's work</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The ICA's website says: "Forensic Architecture is not only the name of the agency but a form of investigative practice that traverses architectural, journalistic, legal and political fields, and moves from theoretical examination to practical application."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Actually, if the exhibition is a reliable guide, then the agency practices very little architecture as most people would think of it, and really carries out research encompassing interviewing, forensic examination, reconstruction and - the area where architecture is most at play - digital and physical modelling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">They've been commissioned by non-governmental organisations and families to examine evidence relating to potential human rights abuses, crimes and state violence, including police killings, state airstrikes, and the EU's handling of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's a fascinating subject for an exhibition, and the ICA devotes a lot of space to it, including multiple videos and charts and a recreation of the floor-plan of an internet cafe where a murder took place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Eddy Frankel was fairly scathing in his <a href="http://https//www.timeout.com/london/art/counter-investigations-forensic-architecture-review" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">review</a><a href="http://https//www.timeout.com/london/art/counter-investigations-forensic-architecture-review" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> of the </a><a href="http://https//www.timeout.com/london/art/counter-investigations-forensic-architecture-review" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exhibition</a> in Timeout, and he has a point when he says:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"All along the opening walls of this show are long, involved, mega-academic essays on the ‘forensics of aesthetics’ and shit like that. Is it a concession to the usual blah-blah waffle of the art world? Or is it simply an inability to condense down all the inward-looking, shoe-gazing academic theory at the heart of Forensic Architecture into something that can really connect with people? Probably a bit of both."</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The section of the exhibition he highlights is interesting in flagging that aesthetics plays a part in courtroom presentations of forensic evidence even though evidence itself is supposedly straightforwardly factual, but it's a point that has minimal relevance to the case studies presented. There are also far more accessible ways of saying that the human body records evidence of the impacts of some of the things it experiences.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore, it's not always clear what, if anything, resulted from the agency's work. In some cases this is because the work is ongoing, but in others - such as the reconstruction of an airstrike - it seems to have been left out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Likewise I had doubts about some of the findings. An increase in deaths in the Mediterranean is attributed to a specific cause, whereas it looked to me like it could have been due simply to the seasonal increase in attempted migrant crossings during the summer. A video is asserted to show a soldier pretending to discharge a shell from a rifle, when actually something that looks very much like a shell clearly ejects from the chamber.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But Forensic Architecture is, as I said, a fascinating agency that seems to help provide a counterpoint, in situations of a massive power imbalance, to the ability of governments to control the generation of evidence and expert analysis. And this exhibition provides a substantial, if at times somewhat confusing and frustrating, insight into how it does that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's well worth dropping by.</span></div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-55995314904366606412018-03-14T15:57:00.000-07:002018-03-14T15:57:20.976-07:00Review: Andreas Gursky at the Hayward Gallery<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">People at the exhibition</td></tr>
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Art is at least as much about what's left out as what's included. A sketch of someone can be all the more moving for excluding their surroundings; a photograph can highlight neglected details by zooming in on parts of a whole.</div>
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This also mirrors how the human eye and mind work. Our eyes can focus on only one small area at once, while our brain generally limits our attention to what matters most at any given moment, filtering out the rest.</div>
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But this is not how the world really is, and that's part of the point of the Andreas Gursky works currently on display at London's Hayward Gallery.</div>
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Many of Gursky's works are very large, and depict monumental scenes of people interacting with their environment on an epic scale.</div>
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More than that, he uses post-production techniques to splice together multiple images of the same scene, so that he can capture and reproduce more of it - and all with the same sharpness of focus, rather than with any blurring, curving or fading away at the edges.</div>
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This is not how we perceive the world, and yet it represents the world as it really is. Objects we aren't focusing on at any given time don't really become blurry, just as background noise doesn't really reduce in volume as we eavesdrop on a particular conversation - it only seems that way to us. In reality these things carry on as before, just as big or small, just as important or unimportant, regardless of who's looking.</div>
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Similarly, the things that seem monumental to us are actually hardly any more or less so than the things that seem inconsequential. The different threads in a carpet, as depicted abstractly in one Gursky photograph, are barely any different in size to the glacier and mountains depicted in another if considered on the scale of subatomic particles or the distances between galaxies.</div>
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Even when Gursky takes more egregious artistic liberties, such as when he manipulates the capture of two Formula 1 pit crews to make the team members more multitudinous and their exertions seem simultaneous with each other, he gets closer to the real truth by doing so. A single snapshot of a pit stop wouldn't convey the frantic speed of the action or the competitive importance of it as brilliantly as the hyperreal, toyed-with version. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gursky</td></tr>
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In collapsing several moments and perspectives into a single work, like David Hockney did with his Polaroid collages, Gursky gets closer to the reality of multidimensional spacetime.</div>
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Not that Gursky always wants to portray everything as it really exists in the world. His depiction of the Bahrain grand prix circuit chops the track up into multiple kaleidoscopic pieces that lead to nowhere, while the one of the pit crews intensely isolates the cars and people in a sea of black space like a computer game emphasising a highlighted character or object selection from an array of options.</div>
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But even here one could argue that Gursky is getting closer to the truth. Even if, in the real world, photons fall from the sun onto surfaces at the same rate regardless of what those surfaces are made of or how they got there, likewise raindrops and wind, and even if all materials are ultimately made up of the same subatomic stuff, the deeper truth is that some things <i>are </i>different by virtue of their origin or emotional resonances. A Formula 1 car is different to a mountain because of the thousands of hours of human effort and ingenuity that have gone into its design and manufacture, while a tarmac loop in the desert deserves attention for the sheer absurdity of its having been forced into being.</div>
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Gursky somehow captures that. One of the many things he does with his pieces - as well as documenting the interplay and mutual impacts of people and the environment - is make us think differently about the world and our place in it. And that, again, is what art - some great art, if not all - is about.</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-51124291367776365972018-02-25T11:03:00.002-08:002018-02-25T11:03:46.205-08:00Rachel Howard; Study (2005)<div dir="ltr">
Rachel Howard's painting Study, currently on display in London's Newport Street Gallery, is a rendition of the infamous photograph of Ali Shallal al-Quisi being tortured by US military personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.<br />
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It's being exhibited alongside 14 other paintings, each of which was created by pouring paint and varnish down the canvas, to produce an effect similar to that used to reproduce al-Qaisi's robe in Study.<br />
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Those paintings are all mostly abstract, and might not have brought much to my mind. But because Study is figurative, and perhaps because I'd been prompted by <a href="https://www.timeout.com/london/art/rachel-howard-repetition-is-truth-via-dolorosa-review" target="_blank">TimeOut's review of the exhibition</a> - opening sentence: "Humanity is capable of abominable acts of violence and degradation" - I found myself thinking of the runs of paint as representing humanity literally draining out of the world in response to the horror of the situation; colour and richness drawing away in abhorrence or despondence.<br />
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From that point of departure, the other paintings, despite their abstraction, can be seen as extensions of the first, if you choose to view them that way - as showing life in flight.<br />
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Probably that's not what Howard had in mind, but that was my take.<br />
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@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-16993083098418074452018-02-04T11:39:00.002-08:002018-02-04T11:39:34.518-08:00Book review: The Story of The Face, Paul Gorman, 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Face was the coolest British magazine to garner a fairly large mainstream following, a feat that made it enormously influential not only in the publishing industry but also in fashion, design, photography and music. In this book, Gorman traces the history of the magazine from its establishment on a shoestring by founding editor Nick Logan in 1980 through to its peak at the height of Cool Britannia and its subsequent decline, sale and death after the turn of the millennium.<br />
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What comes across most strongly are the low-budget, small-scale, egalitarian, collegiate but perfectionist nature of the editorial office and how The Face changed the game with its insistence on great design alongside editorial standards and capturing the zeitgeist. It feels like Gorman had a good degree of access to the main players and materiel, not least Logan.<br />
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The book itself is high-end, with generous glossy reproductions of the magazine's covers and contents. At £35 it isn't quite as good value as say some Taschen books (it's published by Thames and Hudson), but it is a big, hefty bugger - and that's very much an asset, not a failing.<br />
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If it has slight shortcomings, they're that the focus is perhaps too much on The Face itself, when more attention to some of its competitors and stablemates - particularly in the photographs - would have been useful, and that in the later stages the telling becomes somewhat of a churn of barely identifiable editors and contributors. More photos and telling details of the cast might have helped there.<br />
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But ultimately the book is a treat: a lush, comprehensive encapsulation of what was so great about possibly the greatest British magazine. It feels not merely warranted, but necessary - and it almost lives up to the standards of the publication it eulogises. Almost.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-35614222940426432162018-02-04T10:59:00.000-08:002018-02-04T10:59:58.110-08:00Book review: Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis, 2017<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Adults in the Room, economist-turned-politician Yanis Varoufakis's account of his attempts while Greek finance minister to get the country's creditors to agree to write off some of its debts in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, o</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">pens like a thriller. Although it then goes on to become a slightly overlong blow-by-blow account, it always maintains its grip on your interests, even though you know how things turned out</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">You can understand why Varoufakis would have wanted to set the record straight with a microscopic account of the events given how he was maltreated by the media through the machinations of his political opponents, but the middle part of the book does drag slightly with the succession of meetings and papers.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">On the other hand, how often do you get the chance to take a ringside seat at the eurogroup? Not very.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Among the major players, only Varoufakis and Emmanuel Macron emerge from the book with their reputations essentially intact. The Eurogroup itself, most of its member ministers, the media, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, Sigmar Gabriel, Wolfgang Schauble and even Angela Merkel all display varying degrees of incompetence, ineffectiveness, illogicality, callousness and foolishness, even allowing for some bias on the part of the author. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">This is a sometimes-thrilling, ultimately depressing account of how governments and institutions can allow themselves to become trapped by circumstances, group-think, myopia and stubbornness. There are glimmers of hope for a better future, not least in Macron, but will those glimmers coalesce into a guiding light?</span>@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-15706643332718279342018-01-14T12:45:00.001-08:002018-01-14T12:45:33.752-08:00Ask me, ask me, ask me<div dir="ltr">
The prospect of a second referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, or on the nature of its future relationship with the EU, has been on many a lip and TV show since Nigel Farage suggested he might be open to the idea in order to kill off the question for a generation.<br />
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One pretty common reaction is demonstrated by the guy 40 seconds into the above video - asking how many referendums there might be, or whether there should be a "best of five", etc.<br />
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For many people, the idea is a bit like this scene in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, where our heroes are aggrieved to have to play the Grim Reaper over and over again having already beaten him at Battleships:<br />
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But the EU referendum differs from this in crucial ways, as Farage has recognised. Firstly, the result was ridiculously close. Farage even said before the referendum that if the outcome was split 52%-48% (he was assuming that would be in favour of Remain), there ought to be a second ref.<br />
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Requiring a straightforward majority is standard in referendums internationally. However, "supermajority" requirements of say 60% and double majority requirements (meaning both an overall majority and a majority backing of, say, in the UK's case, all four of its component nations), are far from unknown (<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjmhdf1o9jYAhXsC8AKHUlkBE0QFggwMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fresearchbriefings.files.parliament.uk%2Fdocuments%2FSN02809%2FSN02809.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1P8_Xn5iWULUl5jzMwi03T" target="_blank">PDF</a> and <a href="https://constitution-unit.com/2017/11/28/referendums-in-uk-democracy-how-should-they-work-in-practice/" target="_blank">article</a>).<br />
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Furthermore, in this instance, almost every promise made by the winning Leave campaign has now been reneged upon. There will be no £350m per week for the NHS, economic growth will be lower outside the EU, migration will need to remain high, sovereignty will be relinquished to the US, China and India rather than to an entity over which the British people have a substantial degree of control, etc etc.<br />
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All of which favours a second referendum. Ideally one in which the options are clear and the campaigners are held to account for what they say.<br />
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Personally, I'd be in favour of taking no drastic action - neither leaving the EU nor lending British backing to further EU integration - unless there is at least a 55% majority, and ideally a 60% majority, one way or the other.<br />
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One objection that is often raised is that the British people will feel like they've been betrayed if there's a second ref. This tends to go hand-in-hand with the suggestion that the referendum will be repeated until the "elites" - whoever they are, given that the Leave campaign included the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg - "get the result they want".<br />
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This is ridiculous. People don't collapse when they're asked the same question more than once. Remember Ed Miliband?<br />
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Nor are people like fruit machines that spit out different answers at random. If people feel strongly one way or another, they'll turn out again and vote in accordance with their feelings. If they don't they'll stay home, and will have no right to complain.<br />
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And if the answer isn't clear cut, the political outcome should be one of compromise that pays heed to the closeness of the result.</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-42865805464256140762018-01-07T12:26:00.000-08:002018-01-07T12:26:30.192-08:00Winner takes all, but victory is Pyrrhic<div dir="ltr">
Theresa May's Brexit plan, which entails leaving the EU's Single Market (which the UK itself essentially created) and not being part of a customs union with the EU, is the most extreme form of Brexit shy of a "no deal" situation (which would be utterly disastrous).</div>
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In pursuing this hard Brexit, May is ignoring the views of the 48 per cent of referendum voters who backed Remain. She's also ignoring the narrowness of the result, the vagueness of the referendum question, the many lies told by the Leave campaign, the likely preferences of EU citizens resident in the UK, the Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the preferences of most businesses and, last but not least, the fact that young people, who will have to live with the effects of Brexit the longest, overwhelmingly favoured Remain.</div>
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Why is May doing this? She was herself a remainer, after all, albeit not a very effective one.<br />
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In large part, she's probably doing it because she's wanted to be prime minister all her life, and she knows that she would face a leadership challenge from hard-core eurosceptic Tories if she pursued a softer Brexit. She's putting her career ahead of the country.</div>
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But it seems to me she's also probably been enabled and emboldened by the standard model of British politics, which is the first-past-the-post electoral system.</div>
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Under FPTP, the party that wins an outright majority can implement its manifesto in full - or in practice can do whatever the hell it likes - with no regard to the extent to which any given policy was emphasised in the election, the level of support for it among its own voters, the divergence on that issue in the opposing parties' manifestos, or the level of support for those policies among the opposing parties' voters.</div>
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The public mostly puts up with this, in part probably because people hope that their party will win next time, and in part probably because people are now so weary of politics in general that they can't be bothered to kick up a fuss.</div>
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But Brexit is different, or ought to be. First, the closeness of the result and the preference for Remain among young people make it very likely that there will be an outright majority in favour of Remain in the near future. That's assuming that there isn't already such a majority, which there might well be given the number and importance of the Leave lies that have now been exposed. Is it really wise to go through the horrendously costly and time-consuming process of leaving, only to then attempt to reverse that process in a few years' time?</div>
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Second, while we can probably assume that most Remain voters would favour staying in the Single Market and joining a customs union, while most Leave voters wouldn't, we don't really know. Certainly there are some Leave voters who favour those softer Brexit options.</div>
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So the fairest, least divisive, least disruptive options would be to recognise the closeness of the result and pursue a compromise remain or compromise soft Brexit, or hold a second referendum on the nature of the Brexit. </div>
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Unfortunately, the Labour opposition leader is an undercover leaver, and has done little if anything to oppose May's damaging actions, just as he did so little during the referendum campaign.<br />
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Hence it's fallen to rebels in both parties, like Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna, to provide the checks and balances that have been so sadly lacking.</div>
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Charles Tannock was one of three rebel Tory MEPs among 20 who signed a letter last week calling on May to remain in the Single Market and join a customs union with the EU.</div>
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As the Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/06/brexit-may-urged-to-stay-in-single-market-by-20-british-meps" target="_blank">reported</a>, he "described the 52% victory for leave in the EU referendum as a margin “not convincing for Brexit, let alone the hardest of Brexits” given the scale of constitutional change". </div>
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Or as Andrew Adonis <a href="https://twitter.com/Andrew_Adonis/status/946961360700788741" target="_blank">put it</a> in his letter resigning his position on May's cross-party infrastructure commission:</div>
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“If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children's generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction.”</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-54007545553850849592018-01-01T12:17:00.001-08:002018-01-01T12:17:54.041-08:00Book review: On Europe, Margaret Thatcher, 2017 (2002)This extract, published this year, from a book Thatcher wrote in 2002 is interesting to read today for several reasons, foremost among which is the extent to which the arguments she advanced for reforming or terminating the UK's membership of the EU, and for the likely success of that endeavour, were adopted by the Leave campaigners in the UK's 2016 EU referendum, warts and all - and warts there are in plenty.<br />
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Take for example "The rest of the EU needs us more than we need them" and "EU workers are going to bring pressure on them [EU politicians] to keep our markets open". Both of these were uncritically parroted by the Leave campaign, and both are utter nonsense.<br />
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In support of the former assertion, Thatcher cites the fact that the UK is a "substantial net importer from the rest of the EU". Well, as well as this ignoring that British consumers want to purchase these EU goods, and would be unhappy at not being able to do so, it also ignores that the proportion of UK exports to the EU is much higher than the proportion of EU exports to the UK. Meaning the EU has the UK by the short and curlies. The latter assertion has now been disproved by history, as Germany's car manufacturers have lined up to emphasise the importance of the integrity of the EU's Single Market.<br />
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Indeed, On Europe is full of the kind of subjectivity, hypocrisy, wishful thinking, woolly logic, appeals to authority, and outright falsehoods that characterised the Leave campaign. For example, Thatcher complains that when she became PM, the UK was "on the verge of becoming the EEC's largest net contributor, even though we were then only the seventh richest nation per head". This of course is comparing apples with oranges: the net contribution of the UK, which is a total for the country as a whole, and therefore dependent on population size, and the UK's wealth per head, which is an average. To give just one more of the many examples of unsound argument, Thatcher compares unemployment in the UK, USA, Germany, France and Japan in order to attack Europe's stronger social protections, which she says hinder job creation. But she does so for just a single time point, rather than over a prolonged duration, and she ignores any consideration of whether, for example, France's citizens might <i>prefer</i> early retirement to low national unemployment.<br />
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But the book's biggest problem is its near-complete failure to engage with what ought to be the main question of any debate about the EU, which is: what is the ideal scale at which democracy should take place? Thatcher does make the occasional baseless assertion that, for example, the EU is inherently undemocratic purely because "there exists no pan-European public opinion", or that Europe is inherently divided because "it makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, boiled beef and bouillabaisse". But she makes no attempt to set out why it makes more sense for, say, defence policy or interest rates to be decided at the scale of the UK rather than that of Europe, or why Westminster should have total sovereignty but not Scotland, or why decentralisation is a good thing when it entails more power for nations but a bad thing when it means more power for regions (e.g. through the Committee of the Regions).<br />
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There may well be answers to these questions that make EU membership less attractive - it's a fascinating thought - but Thatcher didn't provide them, and nor has anyone else that I've seen, either prior to or since the referendum. Thatcher's arguments were a thin tissue full of holes that ought to have been shredded in the referendum. That they weren't says more about the nature of human decision-making and the state of British politics and journalism than we have yet dared to admit.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-89128787989790288152017-11-26T10:45:00.005-08:002017-11-26T10:45:56.670-08:00Book review: The end of the liberal order? Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, 2017<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Two intellectual heavyweights debating whether liberal international order is on the wane. Ferguson argues it has been for about a century, whereas Zakaria argues it's still going strong and worth fighting for. At times the question seems academic: while Ferguson argues that globalisation has increased inequality, he doesn't dispute Zakaria's point that it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - which made me think: if </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">something's</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"> working, does it matter what?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But actually, it's important for deciding where we should direct our efforts and resources to further global peace and prosperity: into things like the UN and EU, or into beneficent, cooperative nation states.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It's an interesting debate, but the downside of a debate is that it doesn't come to a tidy conclusion like a typical book, but rather leaves the audience or reader to decide which argument won out. Yet with a typical book you can choose to disagree, whereas here I was left agreeing and disagreeing with both debaters on certain points, and essentially just wanting more.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But still, a decent way to spend two hours.</span>@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-74511470039306578492017-10-20T14:36:00.000-07:002017-10-20T14:36:01.804-07:00If I could code I'd ... #3If I could code I'd...<br />
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Write a script for a way of doing a google search for a term plus a string of dates, that would open the results for each date in a different browser tab. (Thereby helping journalists etc find when something happened / is happening.)<br />
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...but I can't.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-38365346860658959042017-10-11T13:43:00.001-07:002017-10-11T13:54:41.774-07:00On creativityI <a href="http://allmannerofenquiry.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-banality-of-relationships.html" target="_blank">wrote here</a> about how there are thought to be essentially only three ways in which several things can be related or connected: resemblance, contiguity in time or space, and cause or effect.<br />
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Creativity is often talked about as making connections between disparate things. For example, <a href="https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/" target="_blank">Steve Jobs told Wired</a> in 1996 that "Creativity is just connecting things."<br />
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But is making connections the only way we can be creative?<br />
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A <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7674/full/550034a.html?foxtrotcallback=true" target="_blank">recent article by Dan Jones in Nature</a>, reviewing three books on creativity, suggests not - depending on what you define as a "thing".<br />
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In their book The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, Jones says, David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt "trace the roots of creative thinking to three key mental skills: bending, breaking and blending".<br />
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Clearly blending involves connecting two things, but what about bending and breaking? I would say these don't, or at least not if we want to look at things in the most fruitful way.<br />
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As an example of creative bending, Jones cites architect Frank Gehry's warping of the lines and planes of buildings into waves and curves (see also Zaha Hadid). Now, you could frame this as <i>connecting </i>unbent buildings with any of a number of things that cause the building to bend, for example: mechanical stresses; the concept that curves are beautiful; or even, to get meta about things, the suggestion that bending is a key skill at the root of creativity.<br />
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(The bending doesn't have to be physical, btw: Jones also cites Einstein's bending of how we look at the fabric of the universe with his theories of relativity. )<br />
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But this seems silly: to say that something has been connected with the idea that it would be better off bent is an unhelpfully roundabout way of saying it was bent.<br />
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Likewise breaking, which Jones exemplifies with cubist painting, also seems better thought of as a standalone process.<br />
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So it does seem that creativity is not just connecting things, as Jobs asserted: it can also be purposeful, novel changing of a single existing thing.<br />
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Indeed, it seems to me that Eagleman and Brandt have (or perhaps Jones has) overlooked various other kinds of creative changing - for example, of colour, texture, size, proportion, orientation, stiffness and surface contiguity (say, whether or not something is perforated).<br />
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So are these two subsets of creativity (connecting and changing) exhaustive - do we now have a complete taxonomy of creativity?<br />
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Jones goes on to talk about another book, Mario Livio's Why?: What Makes Us Curious. This, according to Jones, says that curiosity, and subsequently creativity, is piqued by novelty, complexity, uncertainty and conflict. So what mechanisms does creativity piqued by these prompts act through?<br />
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It occurs to me that each of these four things can be not only properties inherent to a thing one is presented with, but also properties that one can oneself introduce to a thing. Could this introduction in itself be a creative act?<br />
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Clearly bringing something into conflict entails connecting it to something else, so that's already part of our taxonomy. But what about making something more novel, more/less complex or more/less certain? Can any of these things be done without connecting something to something else, or without changing it in a way that isn't better described as simply twisting, bending, snapping it, etc?<br />
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Is, say, the solving of a complex mental problem best characterised as a creative mechanism in itself or as an abstract form of straightening / unravelling - i.e. changing?<br />
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(Holy shit. I was going to ask whether problem solving might also be better thought of as an abstract form of rearranging multiple tangled strands, and that made me realise that not only can single things be creatively changed but so too - duh - can the connections between connected<i> </i>things. Hence that's a third type of creativity right there, or a combination of the two primary types, if you prefer.)<br />
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Likewise, can something be made more/less certain without adding or removing something else to or from it? (Removing might seem to be another creative category, but following my holy shit moment about changing connections in the above paragraph, I'm going to lump the removal of a connection in with other changes to connections, or bracket disconnecting with connecting.)<br />
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I'm not sure, and this post is getting a bit long, so let's end by summarising:<br />
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Creativity is <i>not </i>just connecting. Creativity includes changing, which is more than just bending, breaking and blending; it includes connecting, which seems to be limited to likening, bringing into proximity, and affecting; it includes changing connections or disconnecting; and it might also include other things.<br />
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To be continued...@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-78244883889809573362017-10-01T08:38:00.002-07:002017-10-01T09:29:13.445-07:00Answering for Verhofstadt The European Parliament's Brexit lead, Guy Verhofstadt, gave a talk at the London School of Economics on 28 September, on the future of Europe after Brexit. In the Q&A afterwards I asked him a question that he said was an "excellent" one he would return to later. He never did.<br />
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The question I asked was whether there was not a contradiction in the talk he'd just given: he'd said that the 48% of people who voted Remain in the Brexit referendum were "too large a minority to ignore", and then set out his vision of a deeper, more united future EU. I asked him how he could back the views of the Remain 48% while his vision seemingly ignores the views of, say, the 46.2% of Austrians who voted for the euro-sceptic Norbert Hofer in that country's 2016 presidential election. I also asked whether a more flexible, multi-speed EU might not be more democratic, given the breadth of opinion, and more robust to the ebb and flow of nationalism.</div>
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I would have been very interested to hear Verhofstadt's thoughts on this. But in lieu of his, here are mine.</div>
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It's not necessarily hypocritical to want to back the views of one minority but not another. Or rather, one could <i>seek </i>to back the views of every minority, but reluctantly decide one can't in a given case if doing so would be more damaging overall.</div>
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In the case of the Remain 48%, there's good reason for thinking that taking their views into account would actually better represent the desires of the biggest chunk of voters. The Brexit referendum was poorly designed, and told us nothing about the type of Brexit that Leave voters wanted. But we have good evidence from surveys to think that a majority of voters would like to remain in the single market, for example - a closer future relationship with the EU than the government is set to deliver.</div>
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I don't know much about the Austrian presidential election, but for argument's sake let's imagine that every one of the pro-Hofer voters would have settled for nothing less than Austria leaving the EU. In that case, backing their views would be less representative overall, since a majority of people voted for the pro-EU van der Bellen.<br />
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The alternative explanation is that Verhofstadt backs the Remain 48% and not the Hofer 46% simply because he thinks he knows what's best for everyone, and that the Remain 48% are right while the Hofer 46% are wrong. That might not be a stance he would be keen to admit to taking. If asked about it, he might dodge the question.<br />
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(It's interesting to contrast that hypothetical with the known stance of Theresa May, who is backing the most extreme interpretation of the narrow Leave victory even though she wanted a Remain outcome. She's neither taking on board the views of the 48% minority nor sticking with the courage of her convictions. Instead, she's hoping that by pandering to the extremists in the 52% even though she expects it to damage the country, she'll see off any challenges from within her own party. Her game is short-term personal and party politics, as opposed to what's best for the long term.)</div>
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That brings us to my second question. Whether a more rigid, united EU would be more or less robust to nationalist challenge depends on whether it would be sufficiently more effective to generate more additional positive feeling than the additional negative feeling that would be generated by ignoring the views of euro-sceptics.<br />
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I don't claim to know the answer to that question (unless you count <a href="http://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1366456" target="_blank">this piece I wrote</a>). Verhofstadt, Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Claude Juncker do. That's why they're politicians. And in fairness to them, they all won elections. But then, voters' views change: time will tell whether Verhofstadt et al are right, and whether those who voted for them last time around will stick with them and their federalist stablemates in future.</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-36707695985523122162017-10-01T08:13:00.003-07:002017-10-01T08:13:30.777-07:00Evolving bucket list, autumn 2017<i>[Numbers 1 to 40 written in Spring 2014. Numbers 41 to 96 and strikethroughs and comments on numbers 1 to 40 added 30 December 2015. First publication 30 December 2015.]</i><br />
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1. See Tool live. - They're touring in 2016, I think?<br />
<strike>2. Visit Barcelona. - I expect it'll happen sooner or later...</strike><br />
3. Visit Iceland. - Do with someone as a couple?<br />
<strike>4. Watch "1984".</strike><br />
5. Read <i>War and Peace</i>. - I read <i>Anna Karenina</i> instead; W&P can wait 20 years...<br />
6. Visit New York City. - AAC?<br />
7. Visit Venice and Rome. - AAC?<br />
<strike>8. Visit Japan. - With whose money?! AAC?</strike><br />
9. Write a book. - But what, FFS!!!<br />
10. Write a screenplay. - BWFFS!!!<br />
11. Ride a motorbike. - Leave London and get a licence?<br />
12. See Henry Rollins live. - He's touring in 2016...<br />
13. Read one of Henry Rollins' books. - Let me save a few quid, then I'll do it.<br />
14. Run my own business. - BWFFS!!!<br />
15. Own a rock bar. - Leave London to do it?<br />
16. Get married. - Ha. You kill me.<br />
17. Have kid(s). - Should probably find a woman first. A keeper, I mean. See 16.<br />
<strike>18. Watch <i>Easy Rider</i>.</strike><br />
<strike>19. Watch <i>Dirty Harry</i>.</strike><br />
20. Read <i>Moby Dick</i>. - Less keen now. I think it'd bore me.<br />
21. Play a venue as a drummer. - Trying to join a band...<br />
22. Shoot a gun. - AAC/Group?<br />
23. Have a go at welly toss. - AAC/G?<br />
24. Go to a football world cup game. - Eh. Whatever.<br />
25. Meet Henry Rollins. - Christ, I need to find additional people to admire...<br />
26. Visit South America. - Quit my job and do it? Wait 6 months? 12?<br />
27. Visit Cuba. - See 26<br />
28. Visit Vietnam. - See 26<br />
29. Try a hallucinogen. - Less keen now. I like my sanity. Sort of.<br />
30. Visit the highlands. - AAC?<br />
31. <strike>Visit Ireland. </strike>Visit the rest of Ireland - AAC?<br />
32. Visit New Orleans. - See 26<br />
33. Be a radio DJ. - How?<br />
34. Make a short film. - BWFFS!!!<br />
35. Curate or programme a show or exhibition. - BWFFS!!!<br />
36. Throw a throwing knife. - Or an axe? AAG?<br />
37. Get over 1000 views for a single blog post. - Trying!<br />
38. Own a car or motorbike. - Leave London?<br />
39. Sail somewhere. - Haha, with whose money?<br />
40. Visit Vegas. - See 26.<br />
41. Play squash. - Unwrap the racket you've had for 18 months and find a friend who plays, you loser!<br />
42. Get a short story published in print. - BWFFS!!!<br />
43. Get a poem published in print. - Ha, you don't even read poetry!<br />
44. Get a book review published in print. - Up your game, son!<br />
45. Get a film review published in print. - Up your game, son!<br />
46. Record an album. See 21.<br />
47. See a million in my bank account (earned). Pounds, euros or dollars. - Erm... come back to me on this one.<br />
48. Give blood. - Just do it, you useless shitsack!<br />
49. Buy someone a present they really like, instead of your usual crap. - Erm... get to know ... people?<br />
50. Design and build some furniture. - Leave London? No, not to build furniture. Give me a break! Take a woodwork class? Three years of them at school didn't achieve much...<br />
51. Climb a mountain. - Any one will do. What's the nearest of the UK's big 3?<br />
52. Climb Kilimanjaro. - See 26. Try not to be too big a tourist twat while you're about it.<br />
53. Be in a good club for New Year's Eve - AAC/G. Not got long to do this one! Cos I'm 30 I mean, not cos it's Dec 30th.<br />
54. Do a standup routine. - Whoa there! The most terrifying thing on two legs? But you aren't funny! Nick someone else's routine...?<br />
55. Do some amateur dramatics. - Google some societies. Stop being a coward. Read a ... play? Read plays!<br />
56. Get better at chess - Google some clubs. Improve online first? Clubs seem pretty unwelcoming!<br />
57. See the northern lights. - Everyone else seems to want to! See 3.<br />
58. Join a cult, just briefly. - Google "London cults?" Does Scientology count??<br />
59. Live on a commune. - Not really compatible with most of the rest of the list, but sure... Does Scientology have any??<br />
60. Go to another festival that involves camping. - Will never ever remember or be sufficiently alert to get Glasto tickets again. Play Glasto?! See 21.<br />
61. Go to a festival in Barcelona. - See 2.<br />
62. Go to Burning Man. - See 40.<br />
63. Meet the President of the USA. - Build a really complicated clock??<br />
64. Go to space. - May as well aim high... See 47.<br />
65. Do something selfless. - Try thinking about someone other than yourself for two minutes??<br />
66. Get an academic paper published. In print or Open Access online. - Get a PhD? Wait, maybe start with a Master's? BWFFS!!! Leave London?!<br />
67. Walk across the roof of the O2. - Find out how much it costs. (£35. Not horrendous.) AAC/G?<br />
68. Run up the stairs of a massive building, for or not for charity. - Start trying doorhandles?<br />
69. Do an oil painting. - Google painting classes? Buy a pipe and slippers, granddad?<br />
70. See a desert. - See 26.<br />
71. See the pyramids. - See 26.<br />
72. Read <i>Homage to Catalonia</i>. - Visit Bookmongers. Get some Amis too.<br />
73. See Underworld live. - Start saving. AAC/G?<br />
74. Do a driving holiday. - Take refresher lessons? Get a bike license? (No, saddle sore!) AAC/G?<br />
75. Go canoeing or kayaking, whichever is easier on the back - AAC/G?<br />
76. Try surfing! - See 26.<br />
77. Live in a foreign country for at least 6 months. - Leave London? (Duh!) - Now?!<br />
78. Collaborate on something. - Get good at something! BWFFS!!!<br />
79. Get a mentor. - Join the ... circus? No. Approach older men in bars and ask them for life advice?<br />
80. Be a mentor. - BofWFFS!!!<br />
81. Run a marathon. - Keep checking websites for signup dates.<br />
82. Try fell running. - Try not to fall on the fell. Find a fell. What's a fell?!<br />
83. Own a nightclub. - See 47. Alternate with 15?<br />
84. Try falconry. - Google it? AAC?<br />
85. Take piano lessons. - See 47. Drumming would come first, FFS.<br />
86. Visit Moscow and St Petersburg and Lake Baikal. - After Russia pulls out of the Crimea, stops killing journalists and dissidents and lets gay people live... Topple Putin?<br />
87. Conduct an interview you're really, really pleased with. - Decide who you'd really, really like to interview. BWhoFFS!!!<br />
88. Get a GOOD feature published in print. BWFFS!!!<br />
89. Try skiing and/or snowboarding. - See 26.<br />
90. Get fluent at German. - Keep hammering DuoLinguo? So dull! Move to Berlin?<br />
91. Read <i>Madame Bovary</i>. - Bookmongers again.<br />
92. Read at least the first volume of <i>A la Recherche de</i> ... - Bookmongers? The library?<br />
93. Read <i>Dubliners</i>. - In German parallel text?<br />
94. Get a dog. - Leave London?<br />
<strike>95. Watch <i>The West Wing</i> and <i>The Wire</i>. - Scope some charity shops?</strike><br />
96. Think of something better than 95...<br />
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<strike>Christ, I'd better get cracking...</strike><br />
Pisspoor progress....@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-92173440587290081752017-09-20T12:39:00.000-07:002017-09-20T12:39:00.214-07:00Suffering for your art"The power to resist makes the hero journey affective. And for the audience to undergo the hero journey, it's essential that the writer undergo the journey. That's why writing never gets any easier [...] you can't sing the blues if you haven't had the blues."<br />
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Kife<br />
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"Each time a painter realised that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art [...] Every exceptional work was the result of a prolonged successful struggle."<br />
John Berger, Ways of Seeing@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-56717638065447794952017-09-17T06:37:00.002-07:002017-09-17T06:37:37.923-07:00What do people do all day? #3"Every day was just an absolute nightmare. I didn't have anything to do. Being an early riser meant my day was done and dusted by nine o'clock in the morning. There's only so much guitar you can play, so much shit TV you can watch. You end up just going to the pub. Boredom will kill you, man."<br />
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Liam Gallagher as interviewed by Cian Traynor for Huck magazine@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-24410290849611105472017-09-03T05:34:00.001-07:002017-09-03T05:34:24.582-07:00Brexit and the need to be dominatedIn <i>Three Uses of the Knife</i>, Pulitzer-winning writer David Mamet's book on the nature and uses of drama in art, politics and life, Mamet makes the claim that people have a "wish to be controlled and to call such desire autonomy".<br />
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Possibly the assertion doesn't originate with Mamet - it sounds fairly Freudian - but that doesn't really matter here: what matters is that this assertion, although contestable, is plausible enough to explore in the context of Brexit, to which it has clear relevance.<br />
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Leave campaigners' highly effective slogan was Take Back Control - i.e. repatriate power to the UK from the EU. What Leavers appeared to be asserting in adopting this slogan was that the EU is insufficiently and too distantly democratic, and that by bringing lawmaking that affects the UK back within the UK, people would have greater say over the policies that affect them.<br />
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However, Mamet's assertion offers another way of looking at this. It suggests that the apparent democratic distance of the EU from citizens was abhorrent to Leavers not because it made the EU too controlling, but because it made the EU not controlling enough.<br />
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There's an argument to be made that the EU is actually more democratic than the UK. For example, the UK has an unelected second parliamentary chamber (the House of Lords), whereas both the legislative bodies of the EU are elected. But it's undeniable that the EU <i>feels </i>democratically distant: a far higher proportion of people can name their local MP than their local MEP, or the previous prime minister as opposed to the previous president of the European Commission.<br />
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So if people do indeed (subconsciously) want to be controlled, perhaps the EU isn't offering sufficiently identifiable control to satiate this need. And if people want to be able to "call such desire autonomy", then couching the Leave vote as a way of restoring independence was the perfect strategy.<br />
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Does this argument imply that Remainers are less subconsciously subservient than Leave voters? Not necessarily. Perhaps Remainers have an equal need for domination, but pinned their hopes on a different master: the EU.<br />
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A constant refrain of the EU institutions is that European nations are too small to compete for power and influence with the vast economies of the USA, China and India, and that only by banding together as the EU can Europe ensure its future seat at the global table. If this is true it almost by definition makes EU leaders more powerful figures than their European national counterparts, thus also making them better sadistic tyrants for our masochistic subconsciences.<br />
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But the Remain campaigners' slogan - Stronger In - as well as being less dynamic than Take Back Control (it lacks a verb), doesn't particularly play to this posited subconscious need. Unite for Strength might have been better, or perhaps Combine and Conquer.<br />
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Of course, EU leaders (unlike, say, Vladimir Putin) don't adopt the "strong man" stance, because they're afraid of provoking a nationalistic backlash. Mamet's theory, if correct, implies that this is a grave strategic error.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-71378546180451159782017-08-30T01:45:00.003-07:002017-08-30T01:47:35.725-07:00Murk outside; murk insideThe plot of the science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly incorporates drugs, undercover policing, surveillance, paranoia and betrayal. But it's the novel's humanity and melancholy that make it the masterpiece it is.<br />
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The novel is based on author Philip K Dick's experiences of the effects that drug use had on his circle of friends in 60's America. A list of the real-life dead and damaged in the novel's epilogue is the final nail in the coffin for drug use as escapism.</div>
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But the novel is also suffused with pessimism about life even for "straights" who haven't suffered the effects of drug misuse. Dick says in the epilogue that drug misuse is "a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence". So the novel also speaks about that ordinary human existence, and what it says isn't pretty.</div>
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Those people burned out by drug misuse in the novel become like "an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction." Burned out "heads" endlessly throw balls up in the air in futile attempts to juggle them, or forever fail to figure out how to wax a floor.</div>
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But how different is this from ordinary human existence? We straights also repeat the same actions over and over in futile hope of miraculously achieving a desired outcome that we never attain. We get shitfaced in the pub on Friday night. We go clothes shopping. We ditch our partner and find someone new. We read the next book. We visit the next country. Does any of it help?</div>
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The novel's main character, undercover cop Bob Arctor, hopes that surveillance equipment installed to monitor the people he's living with will do a better job of understanding them than they themselves can manage:</div>
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<i>What does a scanner see? he asked himself. Into the head? Down into the heart? [...] I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk.</i></div>
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How clearly do any of us see ourselves? Aren't we all always searching for someone to explain us to ourselves, in the form of self-help books and tutorials and TED talks? And novels?</div>
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In this novel, dealers prey on or co-opt users for their own ends, and users similarly prey on each other. But capitalism more broadly is also implicated in the same process: Arctor muses that "Someday it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms."</div>
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How far removed is this from modern capitalism, in which person A convinces person B that they really need the sofa person A is selling, so that person A can afford to buy the new suit they really need that person B is selling? Or person C's cocktail, or person D's holiday.</div>
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The novel isn't proscriptive or prescriptive about any of this. As Dick says in the epilogue: "it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were". Nor does it offer an alternative coping mechanism to drug misuse or consumerism more generally. It doesn't pretend to have better answers. It's too honest for that.</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-79355449441412435742017-08-26T15:04:00.000-07:002017-08-30T01:49:31.701-07:00Deadly urges<div dir="ltr">
I have a thorn in my side. Not metaphorically, you understand: I literally have a thorn lodged in my side. </div>
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It's been there about 14 years. It's in my back really, but just at the point where my back starts to curve around, so I can legitimately call it my side. </div>
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How can it have been sitting there under my skin for all that time? Well, it entered with a lot of force: all the force my body had acquired in falling for about six feet. </div>
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What happened was this: I was exiting the block of flats I lived in in my first year of university, which entailed descending a set of steps. The steps had a wall or barrier at about waist height, and without any consideration, without any thought of how high the steps were or what might lie on the other side, I vaulted the wall - surprising myself as much as my two friends - and a short while later landed feet-, hands-, arse- and back-first in a thorn bush or two, with about a dozen punctures as a consequence. The thorn in my side went unnoticed at first, and then resisted persistent efforts to squeeze it out.</div>
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I wouldn't be writing about this if the incident had been a one-off, a youthful quirk or spasm never repeated. On the contrary, that occasion marked the first instance (as far as I can recall) of something I've since become intimately acquainted with: the near-irresistible compulsion to vault waist-high barriers between myself and a drop or otherwise dangerous location. </div>
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I don't know if there's a name for this specific urge. Google informs me that there is a name - the high place phenomenon - for the urge to jump from high points, but I don't get this feeling with heights in general: drops without barriers or with say 6-foot glass windows cause no such urges. It's only waist-high barriers, on bridges, steep slopes, buildings, metro platforms, etc, that bring it powerfully forth. Maybe I was a hurdler in a former life.</div>
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Hungerford bridge in London, which joins the popular South Bank cultural area with its more hinterlandish partner on the other side of the Thames, is one of my favourite spots because of its views of buildings like the Gherkin in The City, but I often have to avoid the edges or take firm hold of my consciousness when I'm crossing it because of what I might do otherwise.</div>
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The thorn incident is the only occasion I've actually succumbed to this urge, but if I ever do again it'll probably mark the last time I ever feel any urges of any sort, given the likely outcome.</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-85939668993574096522017-08-26T14:38:00.003-07:002017-08-26T14:38:36.087-07:00Fireman, doctor, astronautWhat do you want to be when you grow up?<br />
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Lots of people struggle with this question, and it causes no small amount of anxiety. There's a lot of pressure to settle on an answer - first from our parents, and then from prospective and actual partners, who often want us to know what we want from life.<br />
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And not entirely without good reason: thinking about what you want from life early on is doubtless good for increasing the chances you'll study something relevant to your future career, and thereby not waste money, for example.<br />
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But the amount of pressure on people to answer the question, and the very ubiquity and acceptance of the question itself should be examined, I think.<br />
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It is, like much of what I've written about recently, a product of the West's dominant liberal humanist ideology. Hunter-gatherers didn't ask their children what they wanted to be when they grew up: if they were male they would be hunters; if they would be female they would gather (maybe not strictly true, but you get the point).<br />
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Hell, even in the early days of capitalism the working classes didn't ask their children what they wanted to be: it was accepted that children would follow in the footsteps of their parents.<br />
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Both of which might seem obvious, but why then is it taken for granted these days that we should <i>want </i>to <i>be </i>anything at all, in the sense of assigning ourselves a particular career-as-life-defining-characteristic?<br />
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Do infant chimps ponder how they will spend their time once they become adult chimps? Do the infants of indigenous tribes-people?<br />
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No. So why should we expect five, seven or even thirty year-olds to have the inherent desire to want to be accountants, surveyors or HR managers?<br />
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We want to eat, fuck and sleep. Beyond that it's just how we twiddle our thumbs until we die.@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-36038989427364537452017-06-25T14:58:00.000-07:002017-06-25T15:00:06.262-07:00The banality of relationships <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">
<i>"I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk</i></div>
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<i>Your head rush, fly like Egyptian musk</i></div>
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<i>Aww shit, Wu-Tang Clan spark the wicks, and</i></div>
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<i>However I master the trick just like Nixon</i></div>
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<i>Causin' terror, quick damage your whole era</i></div>
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<i>Hardrocks is locked the fuck up or found shot</i></div>
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<i>P.L.O. style, hazardous 'cause I wreck this</i></div>
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<i>Dangerous, I blow spots like Waco, Texas"</i></div>
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- Ghostface Killah on the Wu-Tang Clan song Bring Da Ruckus</div>
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More than once I've pondered whether noticing (and pointing out) a resemblance between two things is banal.</div>
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Rappers for whom everything is like something else are one example (although don't get me wrong: I think Wu-Tang are great), but there are also critics who attack someone for resembling something:</div>
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<i>"[Michael] Gove sort-of looks like a fucking balloon animal or something doesn't he, he has that kind-of eerie air to him."</i></div>
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- The comedian Frankie Boyle talking about a British politician</div>
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I've also been guilty of it myself, as with <a href="http://allmannerofenquiry.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/juxtapositions-1-tiepolo-and-mondrian.html" target="_blank">this post</a> juxtaposing paintings by Tiepolo and Mondrian. </div>
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But it turns out there are far fewer ways of relating two different concepts than I'd realised. According to the philosopher David Hume, there are just three: resemblance, contiguity in time or space, and cause or effect. </div>
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It's worth reiterating that, I think: <i>there are only three different ways in which any two ideas or thoughts can be connected</i>. </div>
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(Steven Pinker, in whose book <i>The Sense of Style</i> I learned the above, says linguists have identified about a dozen different kinds of connection, but that the extra nine or so are essentially just subdivisions of Hume's trio.)</div>
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So if I'm a rapper trying to inject some colour into my rhymes, I've only got three options. </div>
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Likewise, if I'm a critic examining something, I can only introduce ideas not inherent to the thing itself in one of three ways (unless I want my writing to be disjointed and incomprehensible; not so much of a problem with rap, admittedly). </div>
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Hell, even if I'm just making small talk with someone at work or in a bar, there are only three things I can do to keep my words from drying up, without abruptly changing the subject. </div>
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Suddenly I feel so much better about my shitness at chit chat: it's not only that I lack imagination, it's also that there are so few courses of action <i>anyone</i> can resort to! </div>
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Quite why society hasn't yet invented and embraced a device for generating topics of conversation at random, I don't know. Maybe that can be my gift to the world...</div>
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"I don't really know anything about cactuses ... Or the Spanish flu ... Or temperance ... Ah look, a flamingo! Did you know that science can't yet explain why flamingos stand on one leg? We do however know that <span style="font-size: x-small;">they're pink</span> <span style="font-size: xx-small;">because they eat algae ...</span>"</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-24141267072858861982017-06-17T12:57:00.000-07:002017-06-17T13:10:43.635-07:00Alien sculptures<div dir="ltr">
There's an otherworldliness to the Ron Nagle sculptures currently being exhibited in the <a href="http://www.modernart.net/main/exhibitions/current-exhibition/ron-nagle-br-2-june-1-july-2017" target="_blank">Amended Testimony show</a> at the Modern Art gallery near Old Street in London. </div>
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Each of the twenty or so small works on display comprises at least one pocked, sedimentary, blocky chunk suggesting a segment of rock or slab of construction, and most also have an amorphous, smooth, shiny blob dribbling or oozing somewhere on or near the crusty part. </div>
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Eight-Track Mind, the piece that most captured my attention, also has a shaft a bit like a tree trunk, of a similar or the same texture as the block - blocks, actually, since there are two in this work:</div>
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<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;">
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BUt7wS1AIXX/" style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Ron Nagle, 'Eight-Track Mind', 2016. ‘Amended Testimony’, our first solo show with Ron Nagle opens Thursday 1 June. #ronnagle</a></div>
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A post shared by Modern Art (@stuartshavemodernart) on <time datetime="2017-05-30T13:12:06+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">May 30, 2017 at 6:12am PDT</time></div>
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All of the pieces are otherworldly, but Eight-Track Mind is the apotheosis of otherworldliness, like something seen through a tear in the fabric of the universe. </div>
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The ceramic blob, which swells pregnantly and precipitously on the edge of the uppermost epoxy resin block, seems somehow sentient, as though malevolently purposeful. </div>
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Meanwhile the shaft, which has a hint of having been amputated, damaged but not destroyed, seems - perhaps because of its grey-black colour and the way it's lit in the exhibition from above and behind - strangely incorporeal, like a projection or digital image. It's an other-dimensional presence in this otherworldly tableau, which is monumental despite its small size. </div>
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These two parts of the piece seem to be interacting, or about to interact: the blob radiating a kind of cold menace; the shaft like the embodiment of some mystical force with no say over its own use or abuse. </div>
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I've never felt so transported by a sculpture, or been so transfixed - although not actually <i>fixed</i>, since the piece encourages you to move around and view it from every possible angle, to better appreciate the suggestive bulging tension of the blob, the weird, eye-fooling texture of the shaft, and the changing relation between the two as your vantage alters. </div>
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I didn't want to leave the exhibition, and after I'd left I wanted to return. It's like Eight-Track Mind really is an alien artifact, able to lodge itself in your consciousness. It's invaded mine. </div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-51626280191021325022017-06-11T08:43:00.001-07:002017-06-11T08:43:32.638-07:00Quotes #12 - Virtue"Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing."<br />
GK Chesterton, <i>A Piece of Chalk</i>, as quoted in Janet Malcolm's <i>Forty-One False Starts</i>@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-17775782242070637792017-06-11T08:38:00.002-07:002017-06-11T08:38:49.126-07:00Quotes #11 Life"Too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"<br />
Bladerunner, 1982<br />
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"You only live once,<br />
And that's not guaranteed."<br />
He's Gone, Doris Duke, 1969@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-25115891937328604852017-06-11T08:35:00.000-07:002017-06-11T08:39:12.803-07:00Quotes #10: likes<div dir="ltr">
"You should not feel guilty about coveting your neighbour's wife if she is better looking or more fun. You cannot really change what you like."<br />
James Watson, Nobel-prizewinning biologist, as interviewed by Christopher Swann for the Financial Times (2004)<br />
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"It is in the nature of the mind that the more we cultivate and familiarize ourselves with positive emotions, the more powerful they become." <br />
The Dalai Lama on Twitter, 2017</div>
@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7361612080342757976.post-44875647224178030842017-05-28T09:30:00.001-07:002017-05-28T09:30:34.504-07:00Quotes #9: Art"A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it. I want to have and to give <i>access to feeling</i>. That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world - to make it alive."<br />
David Salle in a letter to Janet Malcolm in her article and book <i>Forty-One False Starts</i><br />
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"I can remember, for instance, waiting for a performance by Toscanini of the Eroica, say, and not being able to stop <i>trembling </i>while waiting for it, I mean trembling with nervous excitement, with <i>pleasure</i>, with what I think can only be described as a kind of sexual pleasure, though it's not directly that. And if you're interested in having experiences which will last you for a lifetime in the arts, you've got to do your damnedest to find your way to that kind of experience. How you do it I do not know."<br />
Marvin Mudrick, <i>Mudrick Transcribed</i>, as quoted in James Wolcott's <i>Critical Mass</i>@CLANicholsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14253406902816172038noreply@blogger.com0