Altruism or Self interest

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 20, 2009

Losing the plot. Altruism over self – interest is always a hard battle. I find it hard to stay composed especially with little sleep and a growing hunger. A hunger for new opportunities, new methods, ideas, to create a more sustainable economy, a creative economy – an impossibility. Probably. Oh nothing so grand as a nation state – local will do me fine. But new ideas are often missed, blocked from the light of day by the long black shadow of self – interest; a callous manipulator, a greedy fecker, a mangy cur, or so they say. Yes, they say;

“Stay away you greedy bastard”
” You’re only interested in your end”
“What are you going to get out of it, what’s in it for you”
“You don’t care about me, my feelings”

Boo – fucking – hoo. Don’t you see? Without self interest we’d still be plankton. Or eating dirt. Take your pick. You can’t create without self interest. You can’t imagine, find new worlds, develop ideas, philosophies, concepts, religion without self interest. History has taught us that. Without self interest the big picture is out of focus, mere dots on the retina, vague brushstrokes, a sketch of something, a smudge, maybe, might be, sometime, whenever, manyana.

How can one thing affect the other? How can I affect change? How can one action create change of thought, change of focus, re – direction, re – alignment. You can’t live breathing in the air of altruism alone. Eventually they’ll beat you down. Instead, swap, exchange and trade. Bring them all together, all sorts, types, tribes, peoples, skills, resources. All they want to do is drink out of the same well. Just from a different spot in their own shade. Bring it on – let me be cooled in the hard sun and drink deep.

1025 total views, 2 today

Going upstream

roggernaut | All about mutantspace | October 13, 2009

Things are now unsure. Edgy. Biting fingernails to the quick. What’s to come next besides shoulder pads and ‘the good old days’. People will always try to pull you down, the poppy will always be cut and the curtains will always be twitching for gossip, beady eyes looking to stare you into Balor stone. Petrified. I don’t want to be contrary, difficult. I don’t want to be shouting “the end is nigh” into empty air. Laughed at and derided for rowing upriver. But how else can I do it except by going upstream to start again – to find a new current.

Yes, yes, I know campaigning is a good thing. We’re all in it together, our interests are similar, we all want the same thing yada, yada,yada. But we don’t. There is no ‘we’. There is only ‘I’ in a culture of conspicuous consumption. Don’t you remember? Is your memory that short? We sacrificed the collective in favour of the individual long ago. When the going was good. And we can’t simply change our clothes when the tide turns. The whole edifice must come down before we can reconfigure our artistic constitution.

428 total views, 1 today

Globally Obtrusive Obtuse Wrappings

Ambrasia Kurtz | Culture and politics | October 10, 2009

This month we have Ambrasia Kurtz, a mutantspace arts skills exchange member from South Africa writing an essay on her cultural journey in a strange land called Ireland

Sendings from Acerbica reveal something of what it can be, to see out of the eyes of two people who tumble together through not ordinary lives.

Like when she was sitting on a long drop in a resettlement camp in Africa. A long drop? That’s a very long, narrow hole, dug way down into the ground, colonized at the bottom by a colony of working maggots, working to dispose of what’s deposited into the long drop from the top. And if there are snakes around, they may also be drawn into the dark, dank sanctity of its recesses. Anyway, she’d gone with a group to lend some aid and cheer and comfort and act as an observer in this resettlement camp. A resettlement camp? An encampment, virtually makeshift, generally on a parched stretch of barren, desolate, deserted land, where the elementals often deploy their more malevolent sisters; where communities, by forced removal from areas that their people have always lived in for many generations, are summarily and arbitrarily dumped by remote authorities. So, she recalls, she was in this bleak resettlement camp, perched atop this long drop, attempting to balance her body (and her mind creating unimaginables in the blackness beneath her); whilst additionally unsuccessfully braving icy wind that was taunting the scantiness of the corrugated tin enclosure and, wondering how she could reach in her pocket to see if she fortuitously had some sort of tissue, a blessed, abundant roll of TP suddenly appeared through a crack in the tin on the end of a small, black hand. She, of course, white as the worst of the driven invaders who came off the ships at the Cape of Good Hope and becoming, in that predicament, almost as white as that TP, was deeply moved by the compassionate gesture that had miraculously provided wiping saviour.

She didn’t know, at the time, that that giftly surprise of TP inserted into the corrugated iron was deemed luxury, reserved for use by VIP guests only when they passed through. Dig down further and it’s not the hole but the tale that gets deeper, because she really could NOT handle long drops. NO, no, no, no, no, no, no! One of her companions had fallen into one – rotten planks around the edges – and, to get washed, she had to walk to the closest water supply in a river, a mile away.

It was mostly the concept of snakes in the long drops that got to her. So, her and her partner researched other toilet options and decided to run a dry composting system for their rural sojourn. Do that for twelve years, and comprehensive observation attains corroborated evidence, that the yards upon daily millions of yards of basic wipe, probably top the list of the most un-biodegradable substances in domestic waste. Even government duty, plastic shopping bags disintegrate quicker than TP, especially where there’s sun. The main stuff that TP is primarily thought to deal with is dealt short shrift in rural, outdoor nature – little bugs, and dung beetles in their rivetingly fascinating duty appear instantaneously and, in half an hour or so, the cleaning job is done and the spot is as it was before the deed; except for that lump of white paper that sits there, like ‘X’ marks the spot, for an age. It does not deteriorate, it does not decline, it does not shrink, it does not wilt, it does not deplete, it does not move. It just sits there. She often had to advise guests who didn’t have a clue of how to trail in the wilderness without the white porcelain bowl, “find yourself a secluded spot – choose the best view; but take this plastic bag with you so that you can bring back the TP to throw it in the burn trash”.

Essentially, the dry composting system didn’t ever work properly, because of the TP. What’s left, is an ever increasingly, woven mat, that just continues to get fat.

In her experience of Africa, you can do someone a really good turn with an unsolicited thought that counts as marked contribution to household supplies, if you arrive for a pop in visit at the door of a perpetual friend, with a roll of freshly purchased TP in your hand. One has to stop and picture that:

. . . arriving at a friend’s house and nonchalantly handing them a roll of TP as they open the door and they say “ooh thanks”, gratefully, like it’s the most natural, little, everyday gift in the world . . .

(no flinching, no blinking, no query, no stumped, quizzical look, no balking, no offence) and you’re following them down the passage to a cuppa in the kitchen, while automatically exchanging titbits that commonly comprise regular, customary, greeting chatter.

In the civilized sanitation of urban life, TP is as assumed a proliferation as a TV, but it simply has a habit of running out – unlike the transmitted programmes or anything else in the supply cupboard. Even if this toilette commodity is an unquestioned, forgone inclusion on the standard shopping list, somehow, in the bustle of a preoccupied mind, there’s often a forgetful slip in getting this item to the till along with all the other buys. And the car, bike or foot will be turned around to go and get the TP when the omission is detected – won’t they? The modern mind can no more conceive of life without bountiful TP than imagine the daily practicalities that might have been part of the pre-industrial housewife’s latrine chores: like what were they using in the old days, rags that had to be made and washed? Could the wealthy buy them in stores? What were they called? (This could raise the aside of the origins of the nomenclature for the musical genre “Rag Time”.) More to the point, how would we, in western ways, do without TP now?

There is a situation, a context, a realm, wherein a modern mind may find itself perplexed by the semblance that life is returning to pre-industrialised time; and this is not necessarily only in the instance of distant, starving masses that didn’t make it to the current century in the first place. Since this is not a usual subject of easy confession in open conversation – it’s probably less confronting to discuss sexual fetish – there is real likelihood that TP could regularly be beyond the means of countless, normal, professional lives, but there just wouldn’t be opportunity to getting around to, er, sharing it. ‘The syndrome’, her and her partner named it, did begin to occur, circa 2004. The first dim signs were that even tertiary educated, contemporary people, downline of ‘superior’, colonial stock, academics, serious cultural individuals in apartments on civilized streets, ‘house-next-door’ families, were increasingly living a portion of each month in the ambience of candlestick lighting, not necessarily by aesthetic choice, but via the ES Corp instituting summary power cut-offs in the instance of arrears accounts. It was an emerging lifestyle. And it came around all too soon, when stashes of TP rolls became a luxury of the past or, of a future that might one day again be imbued with sufficiently voluptuous budget to splurge on the additional, convenient comfort.

Comparatively speaking, TP is simply not that cheap. Those who were aware of this and had to steer themselves through, began to share a new pathway. There was a solidarity in the acknowledgment of the governing practicalities and parameters of the escalating situation, ebbs and flows, when the circle regularly didn’t meet at both ends, but where somehow, there could still be found, a bottle of plonk to go around in a gathering by flickering shadows, while the commiseration of a knowing, somewhat cynical laughter, would transmute the onerous burden of cash flow slow-down, into a strange weightlessness that is profound: fantasising about the phases of bounty that would return, when there would be a sense of easy breeze because the kids were licking ice creams and the mobiles would have enough creds for a throw away text or two and there’d be a stash of bulk-pack TP in store that would make one feel like there was endowment enough if it were eternity one had to live through. Then, in a blend of tipsied mirth, one would negotiate one’s way down an unlit corridor to the solace of discovery that one was truly not alone, because there too, in the light of the candle next to the loo, balanced on the specifically designed TP roll holder, there would be a humble, hand assemblage of some arbitrary paper. When there’s a mutually unspoken cognizance that a roll of TP will fulfil the need for an urgent godsend; when the practicalities of a friend’s life mean that milk or eggs are more of a priority choice in the disposable actuality of their budget, and one arrives at the door in that empathetic knowledge, with a roll of TP in one’s hand, there’s an ironic transcendence in the communication of a relationship.

Scares about the coming of food shortages might have buzzed the ears of even the most financially clockworked, sceptical of lives. So. We learn to save seeds, we try to sew, we try to grow. But, should we have to, how do we prepare to replicate this other base commodity that we have all come to love, know and take for granted. There was a time when the substitute substance for TP could be newspaper, but those items become scarcer and increasingly a thing for the few. Old Golden Pages? Somehow there are those members of the unnamed masses who manage to pick up a supply of newspaper to roll their zolls. (Smokes) Rizla papers in their situation would be like a fully convertible 09 Mercedes Benz to a cashier check-out worker. In the smoking application though, the paper quantity required is small consideration. But most people would surely acknowledge, that their use of TP increases exponentially beyond the obvious, into all manner of other things. Handkerchiefs are mostly outmoded aren’t they, so, besides TP, just what else does one do for the nose? Tissues and kitchen towel classify one as elite, don’t they? The rural African mass might seem eminently civilized within an extreme eco consciousness, that their existence causes them automatically to rely on grass and leaves for all purpose wipes, instead of the modern convenience of these white, chlorine infested, bacteria prevented metres of meticulously measured, tear off blocks, pristinely, precisely, coiled over the completely and utterly useless cardboard roll – as anyone who has ever tried recycled crafts will know. Effort as you might, disguise it as you will, the utmost inventive, creative, intelligent genius bold, cannot do anything with a spent toilet roll that will successfully dissociate the combined shape, texture and dimension of the item from its original identity and intended function: to slip neatly around that little lugged, cob-like cone, that clicks at both ends into the bevelled indents of wall, ceramic, metal, plastic, cemented, nailed, siliconed onto or propped upon some surface near the porcelain bowl and chain. Neat, nifty, sophisticated gadgets, often in awkward, after-thought places, gotta reach too far forward or too far behind, crick the neck or back, while the expedient spinning, spinning of these dispensing devices, too easy, too much, turns consumptive unconsciousness into a total wrapping of the whole planet, minute over minute, every day and every night. One might begin to use this precious commodity much more wisely if one began to realise how precious it really is and, if it came to light that the dear citizens of Earth are smothering her and themselves with TP.

There’s a book, a MUST read, “Rubbish” by Richard Girling. He asserts that daily consumption of this wiping paper, in the ‘UK’ alone, unrolled to its extended metreage, constitutes enough to wrap around the whole globe ten times! To see how the treatment plants have to dredge it all out of the sludge – one must read on, if one dares.

. . . arriving at a friend’s house and nonchalantly handing them a roll of TP as they open the door?It might be a kindly act that synchronously prevents an inconvenience, since procurement of the roll was omitted at the store. It might be the start of a new rage of TP gifters, building a compendium of stories to swap and compare, about the most basic consumptive grace of our race. No joke. The implications of the subject of Toilet Paper carry enough severity to warrant the attention of such honest levity.

Ambrasia Kurtz

456 total views, 0 today

Gone fishing

roggernaut | Culture and politics | October 9, 2009

Waiting on the boat in the sun. The boat hardly moves in the calm water. The sun hits every smooth, polished surface and is blinding. All the boats are peeling out one after another. The forecast is good and though heading out to work there is an expectation like holidays. People look on from the pier.
Ten days holed up in the town, no money, worry of changing fortunes, only drink…no money. Get the food on board, the ice, the diesel.
The little punts tinker around the rocks for late summer lobsters. Maybe they feel a little jealous as they wave at the trawlers passing. Their time has come and gone and our wake passes under them.

When the sea opens up the boat seems small where not so long ago it was impressive and strong. The swell forces it right and left, slapping the water. Standing on deck making last calls, last contacts. The land goes away slowly; the boat moves slowly. The sun is high and the land and sea under a haze. Rank of diesel. A puddle is still fresh on deck.

To be out here is to be patient. Hour after hour the sea is the same. It could be different if you wanted: the infinite ways it strikes the boat; the swells catching up and slowing down with the changing tides; the colour changes from green to blue to grey at different times of day; the disappearing and re-appearing horizon behind rough white peaks rode up by the wind. But it gets tiring and what comes instead is a pleasant and safe numbness: the sounds of the engine, creaks of the timber, sounds borne of the rolling water. When the hull rolls over the body strains and you can imagine it is your bones that creak. The constant rise and fall of the sonar song- a sound connected to an unseen movement turning on top of the wheelhouse.
Watching the radar for another boat. When it comes within miles and isn’t a mirage it is hard to believe they are the same: the blot on the screen and the blot against the sky. Below deck the smell of oft- used oilskins and boots, salty and not unpleasant. On the walls the only picture is the framed drawing of the boat before it was made.

Sleep when you can even if the sun is high. Eat when you can even if you aren’t hungry. All of this time is waiting and preparing for the fishing grounds that creep up, nautical mile by nautical mile. 100 miles, 200 miles, 300 miles. Every view is the same, every sleep, every smell, every sound. This is the numbness, the inaction, the peace. There is very little talking.
Within hours the fishing grounds will arrive. A straight line from land to sea to find the tuna fish who swim here every year when they come to their fishing ground to find the garfish who come to find their fishing ground to find the clouds of plankton that have no ground but the wandering ambition for sunlight.

Wake up. The bunk is always dark but there was never the need for action- fumbling for clothes.
Up the stairs to deck there is, before sight, an insight that things are different: the proximity of others. In that black night the sea is not all ours anymore. Lights light up the world, dozens of lights, in seamless blackness of sea and sky, floating in vast empty space. But it is not empty: the swell and the spray and the creak are still there; the sea is always present without being visible. Boats on a black sea-field.

‘Mid-water trawling requires the two vessels to meet in open water, connect the header and footer of the net to one another and then separate again.’

Her net hangs like long, fair hair. Illumination floods the green mesh. Water banks on either side. A vapour of mist spun from the fray. Light only to catch edges and fringes, occasional expressions under yellow hoods, white shocks of water. Before our boats are joined with ropes there is time for the sea to seethe between us. The waves refract and fight. Just once we collide and hold our breath. The boats are only small and made of timber.

Seventy boats, they say, after all that fish. Up and down tracing their lines, nets stretched taut. All through the night the boats haul up and men peer from binoculars to see what they’re competing against, what they can hope for. Estimates of how much fish, last night, the night before; everything important here is in tonnes.
Across the water, under grey glimmers of dawn rising, is a bright square of light below the deck where a man in overalls stands- though it is only because you can imagine his legs- waist deep in tuna.
The skipper moves his mouth without making a sound. He is scans for signs. Everyone waits for accidents or fish.
The net comes in the same as it went out excepting the occasional tuna caught by the awkwardness of his great pectoral fins, like fairy wings. Those trapped in the folds are shaken free, go sliding down to the others fuming at the cod end. Without a light in the sky the fish are seen pulsating under water, darker than the sea itself. Life is mostly extinguished from four hours trawling. Occasional flashes of silver.
The first clutch thump the timber planks, slither out across the space. Thump then slither. Some have eyes ripped out, others stomachs (big frills and blooms). They all have wide lesions from the nets. Some are just abrasions, the silver skin flaked off to reveal faint pink flesh, others cut deep into their dense bodies, rips and cavities. Lower jaws are snapped, some clamp onto one another biting- like one would bite a rope- some still flinch or even flap. Amazing considering: they should all be drowned, dragged backwards in the water so their gills are flooded.

The smell I couldn’t define- the bloody wreck of fish: briny, sweet, fresh, rotten. There is no break- the violence all happens before sunrise, the bodies can’t be left till daytime. In the ice-hold the fish are delivered by a winch then thrown onto their bellies in the tight honeycomb shelves. The pick axe swings against the blocks of ice. Lifting them by their arrow head tail fins, like pendulums swinging. The tuna are bedded down in their frozen shelves. The cold is sharp. One says ‘I thought hell was hot’. A whole bin is kept aside, full of fish that bear no resemblance to what we’d know, or buy- all features erased, no precious silver skin remains.
The clear prints of bloodied hands are wiped off the walls and pipes where someone found support during the night. A hose pumps water into the hold. Fragments of bone and fin are gathered by hand so as not to block the drains. The rest is scrubbed away. Only the smell left.
At some point the engines are killed for everyone to sleep. The only time the only sound is water sloshing outside and in, the inescapable creak and maybe, if the swell is high, the shake of the cutlery in the drawers.

Twelve hours work shelved underneath our feet when we meet together in the galley for tea. Tuna steaks fry in the pan for breakfast. When the day comes the boats have gone.

355 total views, 0 today

The arts of silence

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 9, 2009

October. And by the time you’ve read this article the Lisbon vote will have been counted and NAMA and the upcoming budget will be firmly back on the table – who knows, a general election might be in the offing. We live in interesting times. But what pray tell is this to do with ‘culture and the arts’?

Well, everything.

All these issues have a fundamental impact on the future of our society and our culture. A culture in which I am a part of, am an active participant in. In short, a citizen who cares. And although only individuals, you and I have invested time, ideas, labour and love into the fabric of our country. It is only right that we are cognisant of the facts. It’s only right that we take an active role in deciding our future, extricating ourselves from the mess of the present with lessons learnt from our recent past in the hope of building a better future.

357 total views, 1 today

Put the silence in

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 7, 2009

Slow down. Slow down.

Stop the blood coursing at an amphetamine speed. Crashing is inevitable it’s just a question of when and how long it can be held off, at bay. I need other elements to engulf and dissuade me from emptying myself all over the place, through a bottle and down the gutter. Maybe television and ice – cream, perhaps a long walk, a cleansing, a rub, a pont on the river?

Travelling through another space – above the hullabaloo – in blue skies; cold, hard, bright, silent, clear, clean. Devoid of chatter, incessant gobbling, gibbling, dribbling. Take the noise out and put the silence in. Please.

361 total views, 1 today

Death of the Avant – garde

roggernaut | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 6, 2009

What are the odds of you saying something entirely new and original?

Fairly slim, I would imagine. Instant answers are now available to the most trivial of questions. Charlie Finch opines in his artnet.com column that we will never see any more truly avant-garde artwork again because ‘the odds of an artist discovering something new are nil’. Finch maintains that every thing which has or had been considered avant-garde has either failed in its mission or has simply proved to be a fraud.

Neverthless, the term has become an everyday utterance, bandied about by those wishing to describe anything which they feel to be even mildly provocative or challenging. I even started a band using the name albeit in a questionably humourous fashion. But does this signal the death knell for the avant-garde? And what did it all mean anyway? Where did it all come from?

443 total views, 0 today

What’s Pushing Your Angry Button?

hilary williams | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 5, 2009

As you may know by know I use this column as a sort of sounding board for my various sorties into the areas of Performance Art.
Sometimes one avenue leads up one way and then you meet someone and it takes you down an other.
I met Dominic Campbell www.homeofthebewildered.com writer, director, artist, and producer.
First at the Fluxes Concert and later at The Black Swans Project (see previous reports.) He invited me to the challenge of being in his Ultra Fringe production “Angry School” September 5th at 11 Aran Street, Smithfield, Dublin.
This production ticked all the boxes of being a really interesting mix of pseudo reality, bordering on a performance/theatre mix.

417 total views, 1 today

The Generals view of paradise

Ronan Goggin | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 5, 2009

Without even feigning to make eye contact, he just came right out with it. “I love you,” he said. “I love you.” Quite frankly, I could have done without the sarcasm.

Normally there was no getting round General’s aloofness, or his brazenness. He had come to regard this corner of the property as his own turf, where he could do what he pleased, in his own good time, without being disturbed by the other lodgers, who if they encroached would be received by a short, sharp snap of the jaws.

Perhaps the indifference in his swagger, from one corner of the balcony to the other, could be explained by his being, admittedly, different to the rest of us. But a more likely hypothesis was that from that perch he could survey the magnificence of everything until the river with the sense that it was his own personal kingdom – a treasure he wanted to keep all to himself.

367 total views, 1 today

The UHC Collective

roggernaut | Art and design | October 5, 2009

Ultimate Holding Company (UHC) was founded in 2002 and in the same year gained nationwide critical attention when it opened a working replica of the US internment facility ‘Camp X-Ray’ on land earmarked for regeneration in Inner city Manchester. ‘This Is Camp X Ray’ has set the tone for the Collective’s subsequent projects in its ambition, radical approach and choice of challenging contemporaneous subject matter.

In 2007 UHC were awarded the Art Gene Open Prize for their projects; People’s Tower for Manchester and The Thin Veneer of Democracy. Both are representative of UHC’s ongoing interest in making work which interrupts neo-liberal control of city space, specifically seeking to challenge acceptance of the private enclosure of ‘public’ space, through temporary acts of disclosure. These works employ a mixture of architecture, performance, and sculptural intervention, in search of a new urban environmentalism

383 total views, 1 today

Bertie to leave politics to focus on MeHole

mire man | Life in a cultural petri dish | October 5, 2009

The Mire has learned that former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is to retire from politics before the next general election to focus on MeHole, an internet site which he believes will rival the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Mr Ahern says he has spotted a gap in the market for an “anti-social networking site” and has secured considerable funding for the project. “After I resigned as Taoiseach I got a lot of invitations to join these sites from the likes of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and, of course, Nelson, and I did but me heart wasn’t in it,” Mr Ahern told The Mire. “They were all too bloody cheerful.”

Continue reading »

382 total views, 1 today

Balloon Soul

roggernaut | Short fiction and poetry | October 5, 2009

Balloon Soul

We are the replication young men,
who used to chase the many pavements, dead in heat
who knew the lines that knew our face, long before its very cracks healed our wounds

We are the old young men,
who launched our boundless bones over broken walls into the sea, carelessly
who knew the waves upon which we’d crash, long before the sound did come

We are the bitter-heart young men,
attached to ruin, though it blights our landscapes, covered in solitary vine
whose dream-scenarios stir in quiet minds, an age before the first flame did ignite

We are the fractured-smiled young men,
who ran from door to door with pride, howling to the hanging moon
before skipping lightly over streets so wild, long before they had a name

We are the dislocated young men,
stuck to seats in cheap bars at night, arguing over song
manipulating the time that comes, long before we realise our home

We are the tired young men,
a thousand lifeless wishes weighing us down, wriggling on our broken knees
traipsing to and fro behind lazy eyes, long before they open up

For you

Dad said he saw your car when out cycling in the rain earlier today, being driven by its current owner
I tried to make a joke, but it didn’t work, and never will
I imagined it was actually you behind the wheel, crawling at snail’s pace, cursing and waving, making sure that we were alright
I do that sometimes; make different realities, make everything alright just like it used to be
I still remember that June day when we laughed for the last time together in real time, I try to forget the following September
My last year of school was upon me, and everything started to crawl up into a messy hole of panic and confusion
You weren’t that man we dressed in a fine suit, and kissed and carried as a light rain fell down upon the shoulder we’d exposed
Nor were you the man who woke to find his son burst through a windshield, and his grandson a stranger at his door
You were the man who laughed when I broke his window with a golf-ball, and cried when he argued with his wife
You were all the seasons rolled into one, you were Monday to Sunday, morning to night, best friend as well as grandfather
You said to me I was the young man, heck – even child, who saved his life, though we both knew it only prolonged it just for a little while
Even now, I still hear you tell the same stories, sound the same sighs, swear at the same faces on TV
Do you remember how you’d stop me on the street and get me to fix the watches of old-men? I miss changing the hours, I miss not having the old times
And do you remember I stayed off school, and you brought me for a meal and drink before taking me on a journey through your childhood, through little country-roads, byways and deserted lanes?
Now I only see you in brief outbursts of memories, reminded to me by old, sad songs, and I’m not afraid to cry
Remember that day in June, my young heart became that of an older man, and as they were about to close the doors of the ambulance, you gave me a thumbs-up with that wicked smile of yours.
When they were shut, I smiled too, but in that sad way one does when crying is not enough.
I hope I’ve been everything you thought I could have been, I hope you remember those days together when you were just as young as me

333 total views, 0 today

Books of the month for October

roggernaut | Book reviews and writers | October 4, 2009

The Futurist Cookbook by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The Italian Futurist poet, dramatist and publicist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) compiled La Cucina futurista in 1932, some twenty years after he burst on to the European art scene with ‘The Futurist Manifesto’. A man who cultivated a public image as a deliberate troublemaker, Marinetti and his friends espoused speed and transience as the essence of modern art and life.

Their Futurism dynamised and individualised Italian painting, while their cult of ‘the-word-in-liberty’, which pursued free associative expression without syntax, gave the world its first taste in literature of a Dadaism to come. Marinetti was way ahead of his time applying Futurist ideas to food, which meant treating ingredients primarily as a means of artistic expression and only incidentally as a source of nourishment. His revolutionary recipes include suggestions for themed restaurants, food performances and ‘staged’ meals. The twenty-first century is still catching up with his ideas.

“There is a faint twinge of alarm in recalling that Futurism was to become the house style of Italian Fascism. Mussolini never followed Marinetti’s plans to the letter, although one can well imagine him setting up crack squads of ravioli hitmen and a League for the Liquidation of Noodles. Mostly, however, this book gurgles to the innocent sounds of excess pleasure”

Anthony Lane, The Times

The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton – Smith

Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate,deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity?

Brian Sutton-Smith, a proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology. Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct rhetorics; the ancient discourses of fate, power, communal identity, and frivolity and the modern discourses of progress, the imaginary, and the self. In an analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse’s objective theory.

This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for natural selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences, might offer the components for a new social science of play.

“Brian Sutton-Smith presents a lively, contemplative and challenging theoretical discussion of the ‘category of diverse learnings’…that make up play… leaving the reader alive and alert to the possibilities of play that transcend generations and cultures”

Jill Williams, British Journal of Educational Studies”

[According to Sutton-Smith] although we have a sense of what constitutes play, when asked to define it, explain its function, or even identify players, its paradoxical nature becomes apparent – it is and is not what it appears to be. Does and does not have a function, is and is not the purview of children”

Child Development Abstracts & Bibliography

Brian Sutton-Smith is Professor of Education, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania

Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn

This interdisciplinary history of the theory of sound in the arts reads the 20th century by listening to it – to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, threatre and film.

Placing aurality at the centre of the history of arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include: Atnonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eistenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo and Dziga Vertov.

“Kahn’s research is impressive, and his presentation is thorough and precise”

Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal

“…a unique and important contribution to this emerging, exciting field. It is overflowing with ideas, references, and conjecture”

John Levack Drever, The Art Book

1350 total views, 0 today

Delicious recipes with apples

Giles Clark | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | October 3, 2009

This month we have three classic recipes using apples.

Treasured fruit around the world say the sales and the rich history. On these shores especially – it is the last of our fruit we’ll see until spring’s rhubarb. So time then to turn a blind eye to the shelves of Golden Delicious sent over by the French and to search out and taste our own apples – less uniform in size, shape and flavour. There seems to be a good scattering of trees in country and city alike standing awkwardly, in isolation and beginning to brim. Perhaps there’s a stranger’s door to knock on and offer a hand with harvesting, or else in the markets and small greengrocers. Don’t insist on organic – it’s not so easy at all to grow a good amount of apples organically in this climate. Rather avoid the super shiny and go by taste. For the recipes below tart eating apples, such as the Kerry Pippin will work best

343 total views, 0 today

Comfort food

Joseph x | Recipes from a mutant kitchen | October 3, 2009

This month our skills exchange foodies gives us the ultimate comfort food recipe, bacon and cheese pie.

Comfort food is a term much bandied about these days. Indeed, I have seen it used in so many different contexts that I am no longer certain I understand what it means. To add to the confusion, what constitutes comfort food is, clearly, a matter of subjective judgement. What may bring “comfort” to me might have no such affect on you. For me, comfort food must be part of winter. It must usually be hot and come from the past, or have associations or links with food eaten in childhood. It smacks of solid fare and of a simple, no nonsense approach to eating.

367 total views, 2 today

Page 1 of 212

search our blog

check out our skills bank

Check out our bank where we pool all our skills for the benefit of our mutantspace members. It's free to join and registration only takes a minute

submissions to our blog

we're always delighted to publish your work in our blog. So If you want your art seen by thousands of people then go to our submissions page to get more info