Saturday, 15 May 2010
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Why Lib-Lab or Lib-Con Could be Equally Undemocratic
Edinburgh South!
I voted Green (the weather was too good not to!), then nipped over to Armstrong’s to spend some coupons. Pottered about by the Castle, observing the midgies (research for my upcoming Transgressions conference!). On the way back I found poor Fred Mackintosh (Lib Dem!) standing at the crossroads at the top of the Meadows in his little suit, and they’d drawn a giant chalk flower around him. Instantly I knew I had committed a deep and unforgiveable betrayal. I went home and put his head up in the loo (see Note 1). Spent the night with David Dimbleby, and it was as turbulent as I have always imagined.
I am sure I was the most agonised voter in Britain! Fred narrowly missed out on Edinburgh South, so of course it went to Labour.
Finally the results are in:
Oh dear, I'm having technical difficulties. You know what I mean though.
A mixed parliament means a mixed mandate. No party can fairly enact the bulk of its programme. We deserve an all-party policy agenda. Specifically, we deserve an agenda which mixes its alignment with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem principles roughly in proportion with each party’s popular support.
Thus 36%, 29%, 23% respectively, by the popular vote; or 47%, 40%, 9%, if you go by seats. You could say these numbers give you upper and lower limits determining how much conservativism, how much social democracy, and how much liberal democracy can legitimately emanate from Westminister (see Note 2).
There are plenty of policy mixtures which could comply with those limits. However, each party’s election manifesto is made up of interdependent policies. You can’t simply mix-and-match. A mixture must be found whose individual components complement each other, and don’t pull in different directions. We deserve an agenda that delivers technocratic efficiency as well as ideological proportionality. If it can also reflect geographical voting patterns, all the better.
That much is obvious and indisputable. The next bit is more speculative.
In considering how to weigh a particular point of policy, it’s not enough to ask how important it is to the party who put it forward. The negotiators must try to assess how popular, and how decisive, it has been with the electorate. Of course it’s difficult and involves guess-work, but polls and common sense offer some guidance.
I think that plenty of the electorate are quite shallow in our priorities. The Conservatives are probably correct when they emphasise that Gordon Brown has been dismissed as a personality. Nick Clegg and, above all, David Cameron, have both been endorsed. My hunch is that the Prime Ministership for Cameron, a high-profile ministerial role for Clegg, and obscurity for Brown, would conform with the electoral will (see Note 3). I think a lot of us are sick of the sight of Brown and have literally used our vote to keep him out of the newspapers and off the telly.
My other hunches are, first, our country is a little bit racist and xenophobic. That is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative policies on immigration (they are sort of policies) and on Europe. Second, our country is somewhat contaminated with a kind of nasty, vindictive class intolerance. This is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative’s policies on policing and on jobseeker’s benefits (see Note 4).
I don’t think, therefore, the Conservatives can be expected to compromise very much in these areas. It requires a different kind of democracy to defeat that immorality, discursive democracy rather than representative democracy. It requires grassroots movements, coordinated through networks and organisations like Hope Not Hate, the NoBorders Network and Unlock Democracy.
I think the Conservative mandate is far weaker on tax (especially inheritance tax), on efficiency savings in the current financial year, on only minimal electoral reform, on incentivizing the voluntary sector, and on plans for the NHS, education, housing, social security, and pensions. In these areas, Labour and Lib Dem can’t be expected to compromise very much with the Conservatives – only with each other.
I really have no idea about environment or defence! Probably rapeseed mecha?
If the bit I described as “obvious and indisputable” doesn’t, after all, go that way – if some lop-sided set of policies, plainly disfiguring our will, is imposed by a Lib-Lab coalition or by a Conservative government with Liberal support – if we don’t get what we deserve – then we have mandate, mandate to rise up.
Melody and I wandered out on Friday morning looking for riots and we didn’t come across any but we did find absolute armfuls of wild garlic and thistles. Bliss!
The sky looked almost too blue.
Note 1: For middle class English girls like me (originally from Newcastle!), the loo is a very important place for strong but mixed feelings. We often put up certificates and things in there, to show we’re quite proud of ourselves but not, you know, tacky. For a long time I even had a picture of me shaking hands with a man I thought was Kofi Anan! Fred went up next to my other darling, a particularly dashing axolotl whom I have also dubbed Kofi. But he will have to come down soon.
Here he is:
Note 2: (I’m leaving out the little parties because it’s just too confusing! Maybe just bung in UKIP and BNP’s 5% with the Conservatives, the SNP’s 2% with Labour and the Green’s 1% with the Lib Dems???) Imagining this spectrum with the popular vote on one end and the number of seats held on the other may look a little arbitrary; indeed it is but the arbitrariness derives from the FPP system. A kind of democratically optimum agenda configured at 36%/29%/23% Con/Lab/Lib would face a certain amount of arithmetical resistance from a house divvied up 47%/40%/9%, especially as MPs who themselves sui generis connosieurs of their constituency’s interest could do just about anything and still sleep at night.
Note 3: What mix of personalities should govern is to some extent independent of the democratic constraints described with respect to a policy agenda. In simple terms, it’s okay for a cabinet to be dominated by Conservatives, with one or two Lib Dems, or dominated by Labour, with one or two Lib Dems, provided that whoever it is superintends the kind of mixed policy agenda I describe above. (That is the sort of thing a representative is supposed to be able do. Representatives are delegates, not just trustees). But allowance must be made for the fact that many people have overridden their views on policy and specifically voted for or against Brown or Cameron.
Note 4: Thirdly (and a little less stridently) we have a knee-jerk dislike of officialdom, and prefer to judge any bureaucratic system by its failures, not by a score-sheet of successes vs. failures. I’m not exactly sure where on the Conservative programme this translates to mandate: presumably (1) wherever decisions can be decentralised with confidence that this will not lead to equally or more complex administration in the local context; (2) wherever the life of a public servant (especially a civil servant) can be made a bit more Spartan.
Note 5: This is a post about representative democracy, and what it means to live in a representative democracy. It's my stab at being non-partisan, but I am still a massive associative democrat! And my friends are all still Markists! I do worry about myself. I mean, the Conservatives abhor poofs too, but I don’t seem to have said that’s the will of the people. To defend the Conservatives in any way, however ingenious and convoluted and reluctant, on the “issue” of immigration, means I’m probably a bit a racist! I will be re-forged in the fires of deliberation like the rest of them.
I voted Green (the weather was too good not to!), then nipped over to Armstrong’s to spend some coupons. Pottered about by the Castle, observing the midgies (research for my upcoming Transgressions conference!). On the way back I found poor Fred Mackintosh (Lib Dem!) standing at the crossroads at the top of the Meadows in his little suit, and they’d drawn a giant chalk flower around him. Instantly I knew I had committed a deep and unforgiveable betrayal. I went home and put his head up in the loo (see Note 1). Spent the night with David Dimbleby, and it was as turbulent as I have always imagined.
I am sure I was the most agonised voter in Britain! Fred narrowly missed out on Edinburgh South, so of course it went to Labour.
Finally the results are in:
Oh dear, I'm having technical difficulties. You know what I mean though.
A mixed parliament means a mixed mandate. No party can fairly enact the bulk of its programme. We deserve an all-party policy agenda. Specifically, we deserve an agenda which mixes its alignment with Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem principles roughly in proportion with each party’s popular support.
Thus 36%, 29%, 23% respectively, by the popular vote; or 47%, 40%, 9%, if you go by seats. You could say these numbers give you upper and lower limits determining how much conservativism, how much social democracy, and how much liberal democracy can legitimately emanate from Westminister (see Note 2).
There are plenty of policy mixtures which could comply with those limits. However, each party’s election manifesto is made up of interdependent policies. You can’t simply mix-and-match. A mixture must be found whose individual components complement each other, and don’t pull in different directions. We deserve an agenda that delivers technocratic efficiency as well as ideological proportionality. If it can also reflect geographical voting patterns, all the better.
That much is obvious and indisputable. The next bit is more speculative.
In considering how to weigh a particular point of policy, it’s not enough to ask how important it is to the party who put it forward. The negotiators must try to assess how popular, and how decisive, it has been with the electorate. Of course it’s difficult and involves guess-work, but polls and common sense offer some guidance.
I think that plenty of the electorate are quite shallow in our priorities. The Conservatives are probably correct when they emphasise that Gordon Brown has been dismissed as a personality. Nick Clegg and, above all, David Cameron, have both been endorsed. My hunch is that the Prime Ministership for Cameron, a high-profile ministerial role for Clegg, and obscurity for Brown, would conform with the electoral will (see Note 3). I think a lot of us are sick of the sight of Brown and have literally used our vote to keep him out of the newspapers and off the telly.
My other hunches are, first, our country is a little bit racist and xenophobic. That is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative policies on immigration (they are sort of policies) and on Europe. Second, our country is somewhat contaminated with a kind of nasty, vindictive class intolerance. This is reflected in the popularity of the Conservative’s policies on policing and on jobseeker’s benefits (see Note 4).
I don’t think, therefore, the Conservatives can be expected to compromise very much in these areas. It requires a different kind of democracy to defeat that immorality, discursive democracy rather than representative democracy. It requires grassroots movements, coordinated through networks and organisations like Hope Not Hate, the NoBorders Network and Unlock Democracy.
I think the Conservative mandate is far weaker on tax (especially inheritance tax), on efficiency savings in the current financial year, on only minimal electoral reform, on incentivizing the voluntary sector, and on plans for the NHS, education, housing, social security, and pensions. In these areas, Labour and Lib Dem can’t be expected to compromise very much with the Conservatives – only with each other.
I really have no idea about environment or defence! Probably rapeseed mecha?
If the bit I described as “obvious and indisputable” doesn’t, after all, go that way – if some lop-sided set of policies, plainly disfiguring our will, is imposed by a Lib-Lab coalition or by a Conservative government with Liberal support – if we don’t get what we deserve – then we have mandate, mandate to rise up.
Melody and I wandered out on Friday morning looking for riots and we didn’t come across any but we did find absolute armfuls of wild garlic and thistles. Bliss!
The sky looked almost too blue.
Note 1: For middle class English girls like me (originally from Newcastle!), the loo is a very important place for strong but mixed feelings. We often put up certificates and things in there, to show we’re quite proud of ourselves but not, you know, tacky. For a long time I even had a picture of me shaking hands with a man I thought was Kofi Anan! Fred went up next to my other darling, a particularly dashing axolotl whom I have also dubbed Kofi. But he will have to come down soon.
Here he is:
Note 2: (I’m leaving out the little parties because it’s just too confusing! Maybe just bung in UKIP and BNP’s 5% with the Conservatives, the SNP’s 2% with Labour and the Green’s 1% with the Lib Dems???) Imagining this spectrum with the popular vote on one end and the number of seats held on the other may look a little arbitrary; indeed it is but the arbitrariness derives from the FPP system. A kind of democratically optimum agenda configured at 36%/29%/23% Con/Lab/Lib would face a certain amount of arithmetical resistance from a house divvied up 47%/40%/9%, especially as MPs who themselves sui generis connosieurs of their constituency’s interest could do just about anything and still sleep at night.
Note 3: What mix of personalities should govern is to some extent independent of the democratic constraints described with respect to a policy agenda. In simple terms, it’s okay for a cabinet to be dominated by Conservatives, with one or two Lib Dems, or dominated by Labour, with one or two Lib Dems, provided that whoever it is superintends the kind of mixed policy agenda I describe above. (That is the sort of thing a representative is supposed to be able do. Representatives are delegates, not just trustees). But allowance must be made for the fact that many people have overridden their views on policy and specifically voted for or against Brown or Cameron.
Note 4: Thirdly (and a little less stridently) we have a knee-jerk dislike of officialdom, and prefer to judge any bureaucratic system by its failures, not by a score-sheet of successes vs. failures. I’m not exactly sure where on the Conservative programme this translates to mandate: presumably (1) wherever decisions can be decentralised with confidence that this will not lead to equally or more complex administration in the local context; (2) wherever the life of a public servant (especially a civil servant) can be made a bit more Spartan.
Note 5: This is a post about representative democracy, and what it means to live in a representative democracy. It's my stab at being non-partisan, but I am still a massive associative democrat! And my friends are all still Markists! I do worry about myself. I mean, the Conservatives abhor poofs too, but I don’t seem to have said that’s the will of the people. To defend the Conservatives in any way, however ingenious and convoluted and reluctant, on the “issue” of immigration, means I’m probably a bit a racist! I will be re-forged in the fires of deliberation like the rest of them.
Monday, 19 April 2010
Lara Buckerton's Political Broadcast
Roger E-art's rather trolling post about computer games and aesthetics has attracted some (mostly) dated interest (here's a similar page, aggregated nine years ago).
Instead you may prefer to play:
Samorost / Samorost II (puzzles)
Triggerhappy (a bit like Space Invaders)
September 12 (realism!)
3rd World Farmer (turn-based strategy)
The Intruder (just Borges + Pong)
Ergon / Logos (praxis Mario!)
File Prix Lux (loads of futuristic art)
Hmm, looks like you can't play Afternoon for free any more! Never mind, play Urban Dead! Come eat me, I'm in the zoo! Yum!
My ballot is sort of hovering to & fro in two beams, BTW, between a Green Witch & a Lib Demonologist. Always the way! Apparently one of the prospective Tory MPs is called "Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax"!
xx
Instead you may prefer to play:
Samorost / Samorost II (puzzles)
Triggerhappy (a bit like Space Invaders)
September 12 (realism!)
3rd World Farmer (turn-based strategy)
The Intruder (just Borges + Pong)
Ergon / Logos (praxis Mario!)
File Prix Lux (loads of futuristic art)
Hmm, looks like you can't play Afternoon for free any more! Never mind, play Urban Dead! Come eat me, I'm in the zoo! Yum!
My ballot is sort of hovering to & fro in two beams, BTW, between a Green Witch & a Lib Demonologist. Always the way! Apparently one of the prospective Tory MPs is called "Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax"!
xx
Friday, 26 February 2010
Three Artists
This week I’d like to draw attention to some of the activities of my artistically-inclined sisters.
A reader recently asked if the gynocratic utopian community where I live in Marchmont has division of labour. Well I can tell you that we do! But it is more “Tiering of Being” than “division of labour.” (Tiering is less squeezy-cutty than division, and Being is more inclusive and holistic and heroic and psytrance than labour).
For example, I tend to handle matters connected with reason, instrumentality, the coordination of means and ends, NPower, etc. That’s not to say I don’t have my artistic side. My Associative Democratic verse (q.v.) is the chosen brand of culture for 8 out of 10 paradises in potentia. Like a little post-Futurist, I base my work on sound scientific principles (incorporating, of course, a sound degree of Feminist Perspectivism about scientific objectivity. It really isn't that hard!).
I did also attempt some conceptual art in the late 90s. Using a sort of pleasantly room-temperature seaweed emulsion thingy, I started making casts of vaginas, which I was going to put in a wall. “This Is What A Vagina Looks Like” or something – it may have been Posie’s idea – anyway after going through what seemed to me like quite a lot of vaginas I arranged them in a delightful 4x4 grid, and was just browsing for an opportunity to uncurtain (un-"squirt"-en?!) my vaginas when I caught wind of an artist who had embarked on exactly the same project, beginning around the same time as me only with a bit more fervour and/or proficiency who already had 5x5 vaginas.
What was I to do? The more I researched my rival, the more our concepts seemed in harmony. There was really nothing in it except the extra nine vaginas. We had hit upon the concept independently, and I struggled in vain to differentiate our motives, methods, aesthetics. The other artist was a man, did my vaginas wear more soothed expressions? They did not. They were comparably troubled.
We even had one vag in common, my friend Posie's as it happens! 2:2 on mine & 2:1 on his, so if you flip from mine to his it looks like Posie is rising into the air! It also raises an interesting question about the necessity of material realisation of conceptual art. Surely it’s enough to hear about the vagina wall, to have the concept of the vagina wall?
Of course, each individual vagina cast is sensuously, subtly unique – very much a rationale, a critique of homogenous porn “pussy” – but the conceptual variation of my vaginas was homogenous with the conceptual variation of Ted I think it was’s vaginas, if that makes sense. Moreover he had, and as far as I know, still has his heart set on 20x25, too – that’s five hundred vaginas! – so in the end I was a sport.
I know, I know, we should combine vagina collection grids. But I am still enough of an artiste to stamp my boot at that suggestion and, if not quite take a razor to my work (because, damn) then at least get my neighbour to help me move them into the garage behind the kayaks. Like weird Battleships. Repress repress!
So anyway this week I’d like to draw attention to some of the activities of my artistically-inclined sisters.
First up is Blood Diaper, a.k.a. Haley Dolan, a.k.a. Bread of Many, a 3’4” Yankee-Doodle polymath for whom the Major-Domo has stretched the guidelines on conjugal visits on a pretty much permanent basis, and I think it shows in her stationery:
What you should really do is buy some of B.D.’s stationery and then write her hundreds of thank you notes and odes on it. There isn't the slightest chance any of us in the utopos would be alive without it. The presence of the hot air balloon has proved invaluable in constitutional-interpretative controversies. Bread of Many is Blood Diaper's dedicated 'tionery blog, & in the rare minutes where she's not striking at the heart of Hallmark with one of her Praxis Giveaways, you can buy her stuff in her Etsy shop. She doesn’t only make stationery. She is an unremitting and compulsive mixed-media improviser and collaborator; anyone and anything entering her sphere of influence is liable to be shlurgled in and spat out as music, text, comics, video, disjecta membra, prosthetic rejectamenta placentas, Dungeon Masters momenta, grassroots proposals to protect local communities from skeletons falling out of pterodactyls, et cetera. More funding for special broad belts on the pterodactyls I guess. Here: Art Blab on Youtube, with Bucket. Fruit and meat, likewise, & Haley & Bucket on MySpace. Some more music from her Praxis Dude show (giant file, hopefully it will stream or something). Look closely: you can make out a youthful Keston Sutherland on steak & cheese panino!
Chloe Mona Ivy Head paints drunk women.
Hmm, she also needs to update her web site. Of course the pics don't do the work justice anyway: some of her canvases are huuge, with molten lava Googly Eyes the size of your toes, & some of them (the icons) disquietingly tiny, almost missable, yet totally potent, like veiled revenant .tar files. A set of three of them are in the Norma Rae Common Room and I just can't go in there.
The kinda Art World / Aesthetics yaddayadda on Chloe's stuff would be something like: Ivy Head explores the relationship between Happiness and Terror, & especially how the two emotions can strobe or combine in religious / booze & drug-induced ecstatic states. Her research is conspicuously gendered, perhaps because the less deeply-written dimensions of identity simply melt in the emblematic Chloe moment.
Felicity, awe, love/fear, the sensuous theological . . . how happy is it actually possible to be, metaphysically speaking? Is the limit condition defined as the sum of every particular individual happiness, of every particular individual being -- harvested, without compunction, from the little lads on the green and the psychopathic paedophiles frolicking at its rim? Even ladies & gays? Or is it less, or more, or . . . ? I don't fucking know! This is secular work -- Chloe doesn't literally believe Jesus is magic, etc. -- but the theological aspect makes the case that delirium cannot be reduced to a pathology of reason. Delirium has its own shit going on!
The Thomist idea of beatitudo, the exercise of the noblest mortal faculty (not boozing, but Reason), on the object of infinite value (guess Who?), & beatitudo's complicated but probably-very-boy-clever antecedant in Kant's idea of the sublime, seem to cast supreme happiness as a kind of error of reason (at least, in this world), whereas Chloe's work performs the inverse: reason as an error of happiness.
Now if that's an ambiguous but fertile-seeming Art World yaddayadda with which to approach Chloe's paintings . . . just forget it! This is work that puts experience first. A better critical gloss would be that "Chloe is this troll lady painter who goes goop de goop de goop goop goop."
Finally, and very quickly, because she's gone to Texas now which to be honest is a bit of a stab in the nuts for the gals -- the extremely wonderful Jenny Nuttall a.k.a. Violet Nut. She writes to us from Texas and none of us know what she means! This is some sort of print:
So: three artists who deserve the levels of exposure associated with a Tube flasher with 20x25 vaginas under her mac. Now revel!
UPDATE: Jamie McCartney, that man is called!
A reader recently asked if the gynocratic utopian community where I live in Marchmont has division of labour. Well I can tell you that we do! But it is more “Tiering of Being” than “division of labour.” (Tiering is less squeezy-cutty than division, and Being is more inclusive and holistic and heroic and psytrance than labour).
For example, I tend to handle matters connected with reason, instrumentality, the coordination of means and ends, NPower, etc. That’s not to say I don’t have my artistic side. My Associative Democratic verse (q.v.) is the chosen brand of culture for 8 out of 10 paradises in potentia. Like a little post-Futurist, I base my work on sound scientific principles (incorporating, of course, a sound degree of Feminist Perspectivism about scientific objectivity. It really isn't that hard!).
I did also attempt some conceptual art in the late 90s. Using a sort of pleasantly room-temperature seaweed emulsion thingy, I started making casts of vaginas, which I was going to put in a wall. “This Is What A Vagina Looks Like” or something – it may have been Posie’s idea – anyway after going through what seemed to me like quite a lot of vaginas I arranged them in a delightful 4x4 grid, and was just browsing for an opportunity to uncurtain (un-"squirt"-en?!) my vaginas when I caught wind of an artist who had embarked on exactly the same project, beginning around the same time as me only with a bit more fervour and/or proficiency who already had 5x5 vaginas.
What was I to do? The more I researched my rival, the more our concepts seemed in harmony. There was really nothing in it except the extra nine vaginas. We had hit upon the concept independently, and I struggled in vain to differentiate our motives, methods, aesthetics. The other artist was a man, did my vaginas wear more soothed expressions? They did not. They were comparably troubled.
We even had one vag in common, my friend Posie's as it happens! 2:2 on mine & 2:1 on his, so if you flip from mine to his it looks like Posie is rising into the air! It also raises an interesting question about the necessity of material realisation of conceptual art. Surely it’s enough to hear about the vagina wall, to have the concept of the vagina wall?
Of course, each individual vagina cast is sensuously, subtly unique – very much a rationale, a critique of homogenous porn “pussy” – but the conceptual variation of my vaginas was homogenous with the conceptual variation of Ted I think it was’s vaginas, if that makes sense. Moreover he had, and as far as I know, still has his heart set on 20x25, too – that’s five hundred vaginas! – so in the end I was a sport.
I know, I know, we should combine vagina collection grids. But I am still enough of an artiste to stamp my boot at that suggestion and, if not quite take a razor to my work (because, damn) then at least get my neighbour to help me move them into the garage behind the kayaks. Like weird Battleships. Repress repress!
So anyway this week I’d like to draw attention to some of the activities of my artistically-inclined sisters.
First up is Blood Diaper, a.k.a. Haley Dolan, a.k.a. Bread of Many, a 3’4” Yankee-Doodle polymath for whom the Major-Domo has stretched the guidelines on conjugal visits on a pretty much permanent basis, and I think it shows in her stationery:
What you should really do is buy some of B.D.’s stationery and then write her hundreds of thank you notes and odes on it. There isn't the slightest chance any of us in the utopos would be alive without it. The presence of the hot air balloon has proved invaluable in constitutional-interpretative controversies. Bread of Many is Blood Diaper's dedicated 'tionery blog, & in the rare minutes where she's not striking at the heart of Hallmark with one of her Praxis Giveaways, you can buy her stuff in her Etsy shop. She doesn’t only make stationery. She is an unremitting and compulsive mixed-media improviser and collaborator; anyone and anything entering her sphere of influence is liable to be shlurgled in and spat out as music, text, comics, video, disjecta membra, prosthetic rejectamenta placentas, Dungeon Masters momenta, grassroots proposals to protect local communities from skeletons falling out of pterodactyls, et cetera. More funding for special broad belts on the pterodactyls I guess. Here: Art Blab on Youtube, with Bucket. Fruit and meat, likewise, & Haley & Bucket on MySpace. Some more music from her Praxis Dude show (giant file, hopefully it will stream or something). Look closely: you can make out a youthful Keston Sutherland on steak & cheese panino!
Chloe Mona Ivy Head paints drunk women.
Hmm, she also needs to update her web site. Of course the pics don't do the work justice anyway: some of her canvases are huuge, with molten lava Googly Eyes the size of your toes, & some of them (the icons) disquietingly tiny, almost missable, yet totally potent, like veiled revenant .tar files. A set of three of them are in the Norma Rae Common Room and I just can't go in there.
The kinda Art World / Aesthetics yaddayadda on Chloe's stuff would be something like: Ivy Head explores the relationship between Happiness and Terror, & especially how the two emotions can strobe or combine in religious / booze & drug-induced ecstatic states. Her research is conspicuously gendered, perhaps because the less deeply-written dimensions of identity simply melt in the emblematic Chloe moment.
Felicity, awe, love/fear, the sensuous theological . . . how happy is it actually possible to be, metaphysically speaking? Is the limit condition defined as the sum of every particular individual happiness, of every particular individual being -- harvested, without compunction, from the little lads on the green and the psychopathic paedophiles frolicking at its rim? Even ladies & gays? Or is it less, or more, or . . . ? I don't fucking know! This is secular work -- Chloe doesn't literally believe Jesus is magic, etc. -- but the theological aspect makes the case that delirium cannot be reduced to a pathology of reason. Delirium has its own shit going on!
The Thomist idea of beatitudo, the exercise of the noblest mortal faculty (not boozing, but Reason), on the object of infinite value (guess Who?), & beatitudo's complicated but probably-very-boy-clever antecedant in Kant's idea of the sublime, seem to cast supreme happiness as a kind of error of reason (at least, in this world), whereas Chloe's work performs the inverse: reason as an error of happiness.
Now if that's an ambiguous but fertile-seeming Art World yaddayadda with which to approach Chloe's paintings . . . just forget it! This is work that puts experience first. A better critical gloss would be that "Chloe is this troll lady painter who goes goop de goop de goop goop goop."
Finally, and very quickly, because she's gone to Texas now which to be honest is a bit of a stab in the nuts for the gals -- the extremely wonderful Jenny Nuttall a.k.a. Violet Nut. She writes to us from Texas and none of us know what she means! This is some sort of print:
So: three artists who deserve the levels of exposure associated with a Tube flasher with 20x25 vaginas under her mac. Now revel!
UPDATE: Jamie McCartney, that man is called!
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Some Aylett tidbits
1. Revised edition of THE INFLATABLE VOLUNTEER is out now from Raw Dog Screaming - and the first publication of the book in the US (see Amazon.com).
"In the constant apocalypse nobody cares if your skull is made of wood or your friends are flying ants. Corrosive phantoms are two-a-penny in such a high-res environment. Minotaur Babs improves the shining hour by snogging horses and has a style pedal attached to his arm so he can punch people in the manner of various celebrities. A basement of whispering apes is the source of all wisdom. Bob is propelled through a hull door with only a parachute between him and the slamming palm of god. Placid vampires suggest shapeless and impractical management policies. But how much of the narrator's vortical tale is designed to annoy Eddie and waste his time? A volley of poetic stand-up, this intense splurge contains some of the most unnerving excuses in print, all a-scramble with phosphene electricity and casual resentment. You will emerge from this revised edition glowing like a dashboard saint."
The Inflateable Volunteer is kind of refined Aylettium, trace geniality and accommodation sucked out. The revised edition eradicates the reactionary efforts of the Republican Guard of Sub-Editor Compromise.
2. Aylett comic strip 'Johnny Viable' is in issue 2 of Dodgem Logic, along with a good Alan Moore comic about a heroic penis in space, some post-civilizationist manifesto, etc. I gotta warn you that 'Johnny Viable' feels a little bit like Aylett coasting on auto-pilot. That's still better than most contemporary creatives at the top of their meticulously-cognitive game.
3. Aylett's REBEL AT THE END OF TIME (set in Michael Moorcock's "End of Time" world) will be published by PS (UK) later in 2010. W10t!
"In the constant apocalypse nobody cares if your skull is made of wood or your friends are flying ants. Corrosive phantoms are two-a-penny in such a high-res environment. Minotaur Babs improves the shining hour by snogging horses and has a style pedal attached to his arm so he can punch people in the manner of various celebrities. A basement of whispering apes is the source of all wisdom. Bob is propelled through a hull door with only a parachute between him and the slamming palm of god. Placid vampires suggest shapeless and impractical management policies. But how much of the narrator's vortical tale is designed to annoy Eddie and waste his time? A volley of poetic stand-up, this intense splurge contains some of the most unnerving excuses in print, all a-scramble with phosphene electricity and casual resentment. You will emerge from this revised edition glowing like a dashboard saint."
The Inflateable Volunteer is kind of refined Aylettium, trace geniality and accommodation sucked out. The revised edition eradicates the reactionary efforts of the Republican Guard of Sub-Editor Compromise.
2. Aylett comic strip 'Johnny Viable' is in issue 2 of Dodgem Logic, along with a good Alan Moore comic about a heroic penis in space, some post-civilizationist manifesto, etc. I gotta warn you that 'Johnny Viable' feels a little bit like Aylett coasting on auto-pilot. That's still better than most contemporary creatives at the top of their meticulously-cognitive game.
3. Aylett's REBEL AT THE END OF TIME (set in Michael Moorcock's "End of Time" world) will be published by PS (UK) later in 2010. W10t!
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Ream Peehole &c.
The Dream People issue 32 is online! Including, you know, "An evening of video and readings from the work of this important minimalist hermit poet who was a close friend of Thomas Merton. With Alan Spence and Julie Johnstone," that sort of thing. Mykle Hansen’s Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere sounds good -- "will change everything you thought you knew about the subject." My stupidly long remix of the Blankety Blank review is here. I particularly enjoyed Rob Parker's "Goatse Agape!" -- a consummate Thing By A Boy.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Blog post
Hello! Three things.
1) Power 2010 / Unlock Democracy is featuring some interesting ideas for democratic reform from the many little larabuckertons of "Blogland."
2) Meanwhile, I visited London this weekend to look for survivors and found nothing but bookshops. The bookartbookshop near Old Street tube station is a sweet little diving bell, stacked with pretty little hand-mades and a few poetic bots and bibs. Definitely worth a lick of its icing, but it has funny opening times so make sure you have a giggle at them before you go.
While you're securing the area, there's a little bookshop in Old Street station itself. Full prices, but "stacky" like a second hand bookshop, so I didn't feel afraid, and for its size it's a good selection of genre and cult stuff.
Altogether grittier is the Barnardo's charity shop near Brixton Tube, where Bon Jovi side-projects and suspect baby slippers mingle with rare and sacred texts of the contemporary avant garde -- you know, Articulate How, Eckhart Cars, that sort of thing. It probably won't be long before they clear either the poetry or the slippers out to make room for the other, so hurry girls!
I'd also recommend, back in Edinburgh, Armchair Books, which is along from Grassmarket. It has a nice large jumble of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a large antiquarian collection whose books I can't afford, but whose titles made me titter melodiously. Two notices, "This bookshop may revert to a private residence at any moment," and "Please don't piss against the door -- it runs into the shop" also trickled under my fancy.
I haven't visited Peter Bell Books next door, but doesn't it sound trustworthy? Like a Praxis MP!
3) I'm guest-editing the "Scotland" bit of an online poetry journal, Sleeves run I think by Marcus Sleeves? I met him at a sort of poetry rodeo thing in London, he has very pure skin like a baby and carries a moustache comb. So do send me your poems, if you live in Scotland (larabuckerton at "gee, male!" dot com), or let's say down to Newcastle, by the end of November.
4) There are now four bald men and one with a ponytail opposite me clustered around a Toshiba laptop watching something that goes "Aaargh! Eugh! Aaaargh! Bchkew!! Bchkew!! Aaaaargh!!"
Looters xxx
1) Power 2010 / Unlock Democracy is featuring some interesting ideas for democratic reform from the many little larabuckertons of "Blogland."
2) Meanwhile, I visited London this weekend to look for survivors and found nothing but bookshops. The bookartbookshop near Old Street tube station is a sweet little diving bell, stacked with pretty little hand-mades and a few poetic bots and bibs. Definitely worth a lick of its icing, but it has funny opening times so make sure you have a giggle at them before you go.
While you're securing the area, there's a little bookshop in Old Street station itself. Full prices, but "stacky" like a second hand bookshop, so I didn't feel afraid, and for its size it's a good selection of genre and cult stuff.
Altogether grittier is the Barnardo's charity shop near Brixton Tube, where Bon Jovi side-projects and suspect baby slippers mingle with rare and sacred texts of the contemporary avant garde -- you know, Articulate How, Eckhart Cars, that sort of thing. It probably won't be long before they clear either the poetry or the slippers out to make room for the other, so hurry girls!
I'd also recommend, back in Edinburgh, Armchair Books, which is along from Grassmarket. It has a nice large jumble of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a large antiquarian collection whose books I can't afford, but whose titles made me titter melodiously. Two notices, "This bookshop may revert to a private residence at any moment," and "Please don't piss against the door -- it runs into the shop" also trickled under my fancy.
I haven't visited Peter Bell Books next door, but doesn't it sound trustworthy? Like a Praxis MP!
3) I'm guest-editing the "Scotland" bit of an online poetry journal, Sleeves run I think by Marcus Sleeves? I met him at a sort of poetry rodeo thing in London, he has very pure skin like a baby and carries a moustache comb. So do send me your poems, if you live in Scotland (larabuckerton at "gee, male!" dot com), or let's say down to Newcastle, by the end of November.
4) There are now four bald men and one with a ponytail opposite me clustered around a Toshiba laptop watching something that goes "Aaargh! Eugh! Aaaargh! Bchkew!! Bchkew!! Aaaaargh!!"
Looters xxx
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