flambingo

lords debate on civil partnerships

hansard record of the second reading

working at home

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

meanwhile in gilead

"Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.
The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds."

355gay.com

civil partnerships uk

this really has suprised me, given the lords historic love of a hysterical discussion of sodomy whenever given the chance. support from the tories and the bishops is welcome and overdue.

"The Civil Partnership bill received an unopposed second reading today, with broad support from the majority of the House of Lords.

The bill, which will give same-sex couples access to similar rights and responsibilities as marriage, was due to be discussed in the House of Lords this morning. Its success there means the ball will now start rolling towards full legislation, with some suggesting it could receive royal assent as early as January next year, providing there are no delays."

from uk.gay.com

Evelyn Waugh’s Diary July 11, 1924

Chris [Hollis] turned up in the morning and told me a good story.

Mr. Justice Phillimore was trying a sodomy case and brooded greatly whether his judgment had been right.

He went to consult [former Lord Chancellor] Bikenhead. “Excuse me, my lord, but could you tell me—What do your think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?”

“Oh, 30s or £2—anything you happen to have on you.”

my cat treat invention will make me rich

"christian shaped cat treats to feed the lion in your circus!"

dada's spam demons speak to me in my sleep and whisper

tristan tzara's ghost in the machine

patriarchal cemetery semitic georgia produce regular heterostructure rote impiety pineapple constraint healey clot hoot nbs bliss andromeda polyhedron inquire humphrey coastline atmospheric dyad grilled circa defunct gamesman rho promiscuity brim finale advert fetter bolshoi modus atkins bandstand bewitch rickettsia henceforth meant tachinid confess stratospheric elm plastisol century edmondson cuttlebone planetesimal suction oilseed suzerainty mimic sideman trill comptroller ah motion brisbane glorious midst mutatis veal insistent jawbreak e foam folly vacillate adversary rebuttal embrace vigilant radiate digestible numerable confuse michelin hurdle octile quadrillion coulomb atheist animosity.

If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right

Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images

above the rules of the
and its control

i've been to hull and back

mummified mermaid from hull maritime museum

easter weekend

happy easter.
(egg from the delightful paul young, choclate maker to the stars)

brighton beach

domestic taxonomies

at long last I am tackling the bookshelves. i need more room and i can't find anything, books have just been shoved into and space and nothing makes sense. but how to organise them?

its a nightmare, not least that the cat is markedly unkeen on any kind of change, particularly anything that smacks of moving house, so has been pushing over my carefully made piles before retreating to her den in the airing cupboard.

i'm reduced to sorting like an overcrowded dinner party. who would gore vidal like to sit next to (he gets edmund white), why have flan O’Brien, Borges and Ian Sinclair ended up together? does classical writing mean that plays poetry and criticism all go together but philosophy has to go hang out on a different shelf eyeing Foucault with distain? or would it all be much more comfortable next to ancient history? which leaves Melville the choice of 'star of the sea' (whaling / cannibalism), 'master and commander' (boys own seafaring) or palhunick (americana) for neighbours. or some strange cannibal-americana-whaling-seafaring category all of their own?

I end up with the basic point of bookshelves, storing and retrieving books. books most frequently read on the most accessible shelves. but 'did I see that recently' as the main referent has been the cause of the current chaos. well actually the immediate chaos - several hundred books in precarious towers or mudslides across the whole of the sitting room is the attempt to solve the most recent chaos. And it would probably help if I didn’t keep finding things I had been looking for and having a quick read.

I knew someone who organised their books by spine colour, not a bad system, normally while searching for a book start with 'did I read it recently' before moving on to 'what colour is it'. another who organised by size. I tried this but having 'bread and jam for frances' mixed up with an 'for an anti-authoritarian insurrectionist international' helps no-one.

so so far i have: ancient, medieval and classical lit (subsuming poetry, plays and critical theory), pre-19th british, pre-19th european, 19th cent british, 19th cent american, 19th cent european. 20th cent european and international, americana, contemporary british and commonwealth, poetry (excluding classical and medieval), travel (20th cent - excepting travel properly belonging to politics or history). and that’s before the real test of will non-fiction.

I feel like peter kien. Its not a good feeling.

philip guston

i went to see the philip guston, not an artist i'm especially familiar with so i went out of curiosity more than anything. what i didn't expect was to find his work so extraordinarily naked and moving.

there’s a clear division between the pre and post war work, not uncommon in american painters of the time and not surprising given the newly problematic nature of depicting the human body after the war. some of the early drawings reminded me of henry moores drawings of the blitz. there’s some marvellous ones of basic navy training where he’s managed to both show real events and imbue them with a sense of mystery, there’s one of naval recruits doing a clothes inflation drill where they both look like young bemused soldiers but have something of boticelli's illustrations of the damned in the inferno. but innocent with their very young faces turned skywards as they float in some strange confusing hell. the study of european art is very evident. there’s a largish canvas of children on a raft-like structure amidst a city. its simultaneously like bosch's ship of fools and the raft of the medusa, their medieval masks slip slightly and there’s the same confused innocence on their faces. they look cast adrift in a city, but not floating, not able to actual cast their moorings.

his figures aren’t allegorical but rather capable of holding some kind of bodily meaning, its a very european type of art, elements of dix and grosch but without the disgust. and it all changes, there’s a break and then there’s post war. and then there’s no bodies at all, or rather no painting of bodies - perhaps because of a surfeit of seeing them.

i've long thought that abstract expressionism is not just a reaction (or a development as teleological art history would have us think) to european art, with its socially conscious figuration of toiling workers and cities of suffering people, but also to do with the sheer horror of the second world war for soldiers, and most artists of the age were soldiers too. there’s also a reaction, perhaps unknowingly, against national socialist art - its heroic figures of soi disant heroes from an invented nordic past. but when guston does abstract expressionism it looks like their were some figures there and they have been painted out, scrubbed, it somehow looks like the fact of the body is too painful for him.

its here i think that the cartoonishness makes sense. for an artist who owed so much to european high art - acknowledged in the final piece of the exhibition called pantheon (where he paints his easel and light surrounded by the names de chirico, giotto, tiepolo, piero, massacio - an excellent pantheon), and for whom the body is in the classical sense a source of meaning there’s an americana in cartoon. its anti 'Art'. its colloquial and without a readable history. it doesn't reference just says.

its almost like he’s unlearning the drawing tradition, the lines are as loose as the covers on his strangely not-sinister clansmen. the bodies hidden, its not the muscular greek based model of fascist or socialist art, there’s no heroism there. a heroism that as a jewish artist who had fought in the war must have been hard to see as some terrible sick joke. there’s also this terrible reinvention of his own body, pretty soon in his renewed figuration its his and almost only his body that becomes represented. first he’s covered like the klansmen - is this some implicit acknowledgement of that capacity inside all of us? himself? and then increasingly as a mass of externalised entrails and organs. often he is only an eye and a hand (what more of the body would a painter need?). he's a giant head with one horrific eye, he’s a foetal sleeper clutching a corn cob-like wife and his paint brushes in equal measure. it should be ghastly, this palate of unmixed red paints, but it isn't.

there’s forays out of this self depiction. a series on nixon has him as a giant cock-nosed cripple wearing an american flag and looming over a landscape like goya's colossus, there seems to be a return to the european academy in the later smaller paintings; a bowl of cherries like chardins pomegranates. but more than that there’s the repetition of shapes and forms. a light bulb looking like a noose appears everywhere. an easel with a blank canvas. shoes. piles of shoes like a holocaust museum. seas of heads, forms stacked like bodies or like the entrails on monsters, a personal vocabulary of shapes formed out of some sleep of reason.

and its this i find so touching, so extraordinary about the work, someone who's tried so hard to find a personal vocabulary that’s actually comprehensible to the viewer while offering no compromise or accommodation. its so of the self and courageous and unusual.

which dog?

which dog should you get? i should have a whippet. i had hoped for a Chihuahua.

what constitutes an attack in foil?

fencing is a complicated and technical sport. its come a long way since the practice weapons of its origins and has been effected by technology more than most sports. there’s a long running debate, generating rule changes and equipment changes about what constitutes an attack. basically it works like this:

foil (like saber but unlike epee) has a right of way, in order to score you need to possess the right to do so and this is gained either by starting at an attack first or by parrying an attack and hence gaining right of way. if two people both land points on the others target then only the one with right of way will score, if two people attack and one has right of way but lands the point off target the point is played again and no score recorded. straightforward non?

well no. electric scoring and blade technology have given rise to 'flicks'. that is using the momentum of the tip of the blade (previously a sharp pointy thing made blunt but now carrying a heavier 'button' that registers pressure and relays that to the electric scoring box) to bend around a blade or body and 'cast' the point. it can look rather like fly fishing.

the problems lies in refereeing it. the electrics can only tell you if a point lands, NOT if the attack itself is capable of scoring. and all too often preparing for a flick attack involves bending the arm and taking the point off line with the target, the basic qualification for an attack being the point threatens the target, the arm is straight and there is a continuous attack (allowing for compound attacks). its this break in time of the attack which is the source of contention; to some the attack is continuous because the preparation for a flicking attack is a signal of threat onto the target. for others only a threat to the body held constantly can be a threat so the break in time to remove the point on preparing a flicking attack cedes right of way. it makes judging a nightmare and makes the interpretation of attacks by judges arbitrary to say the least.

to try and bring some sense to this the FIE is proposing changes to the weight of the tip of a foil and the duration that the tip needs to be depressed to register a point, this will disable 'glancing' flick hits. much debate and confusion has ensued.

Bill Oliver of the US Fencing Officials Commission (FOC) provides an analysis of the rules surrounding the attack and interpretation on how the attack is defined. and then discussed further on the fencing forum. fencing 101 also has a thread on experience of the new rule changes.

me? i'm just waiting for the rule and tech changes to filter down to club level to try out, and hoping that this will bring some consistency to competition judging which at the moment seems to have a such a wide range of interpretation as to be almost impossible to second guess.

as an aside, materials science developments effects on fencing.

an apology from american clothing manufacturers

"We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

strange technical documentation

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, seemingly including diagrams for masturbating robots.

a serious work of singificant genuis

http://www.jesus-action-figure.com/, from malbec king of live journals.