Peckham in furs

Its not fair

2012-03-05T13:39:00.004-08:00

What a joke to have a national minimum wage if you are then allowed to pay your employees nothing at all. “Stacking supermarket shelves is better than dreaming of stardom via TV’s the X Factor”, smarms Iain Duncan Smith. For a quiete man he doesn’t half come out with a lot of shit. What of young persons more pragmatic dreams, to gain paid employment after education? “The idea that we should allow a bunch of extremists to get in the way of providing genuine, voluntary help for young people is just crazy” says the indignant Chris Grayling referring to the successes of left groups including Boycott Workfare and Right To Work in either getting firms to withdraw from or postpone their involvement with the government’s workfare programmes which include Mandatory Work Activity whereby claimants can have their benefits withdrawn for thirteen weeks for not working for zero wages  for eight weeks. “Genuine, voluntary help for young people”, who are the volunteers in this scenario, the gross profiting companies who would so generously get people to do jobs for no remuneration or the claimants who are threatened with the withdrawal of their benefits?

The right wing press are, of course, making desperate attempts to smooth the way for the government’s slave labour details. The Mail waxes that out of 1,400 people who did work experience in Tescos, 300 gained permanent jobs. Lo, a mere 1,100 then, worked at the supermarket chain either at stacking shelves or other glamorous tasks for nothing. Moreover, as Britain’s biggest private employer Tesco would have offered those 300 jobs up anyway, so those who did gain employment permanently were also done up like a kipper. The term “job snobs” is bandied. You are a total snob apparently for coveting a week’s wages for a week’s work. And actually is it so bad a thing if you do not want to work in retail, does that make you so deeply ungrateful? Cait Reilly who wasted two weeks of her life stacking shelves and mopping floors in poundland is setting about taking legal action against the government. Cait who has a degree in geology had already found herself voluntary work in a museum, work she had to give up when told by jobcentre staff that she would have her benefits stopped if she did not comply. Article 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which was incorporated into the Human Rights Act in 1998 states, “1. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. 2. No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.” Excluded from the term “forced or compulsory labour” is, “any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations”. I think we might be able to rule out burger frying and mopping floors for extremely profitable corporations as part of our civic duty. And on that, isn’t it a perfect insult to injury that many of these are the same duplicitous companies immersed in scheming to avoid paying billions in taxes?

Tory governments have a record of picking on the unemployed and particularly singling out the young. In the 1980s there was the dastardly Youth Unemployment Scheme where youngsters were forced into full time work for £29.00 a week. And this was for 2 years! When they left the schemes they found themselves still untrained and uneducated and still unable to find employment; so much for training. That same Thatcher government had destroyed real training opportunities, 2 million manufacturing jobs lost between the years 1979 and 1981. It was estimated that 5 million ended unemployed under that government, though they had various methods of fiddling the figures then to suggest it was less. There are other echoes of those times under our coalition rulers. It was after the riots of 1981 that Norman Tebbit, the then employment secretary, made plans for the Youth Training Scheme. Tebbit and Duncan Smith, what a shower.

Being a skivvy on a shop floor isn’t the sole type of unpaid work for the young. Last year the Conservative Party banned the press from their fund-raising ball to no avail. We found out anyway that they were making money by companies such as banks and hedge funds auctioning internships. This is a completely different kettle of fish. A foot in one of these doors and you can expect to rip off millions in a few years, no doubt. Meanwhile attacks are made on the ordinary working person. From the 6th of April 2012 the government has increased the qualifying period for bringing a case of unfair dismissal from one year to two. There are new threats being made on the right to strike and plans to charge workers for using tribunals, £250 to lodge the initial complaint and £1,250 if the case goes to a tribunal hearing, while the employer can write off the costs via compensation awarded against their tax.

There is something seriously wrong with a world in which the biggest employer is the US Department of Defense at 3.2 million, The next being the Chinese army at 2.3 million. After that it is Walmart and McDonalds, 2.1 million and 1.7 million respectively. Couldn’t one be a conscientious objector under these hideous circumstances.

adapted postcards

2012-02-13T03:39:00.000-08:00

when one finds a piece of wood in the street with a hole in it one must paint on it ensuring special note is taken of the fact that there is a hole

2012-02-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

2012-01-24T18:06:00.000-08:00

greetings

2011-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

m1

2011-12-19T17:24:00.000-08:00

they may be an enviromental disaster, but the cooling towers are beautiful

2011-12-12T11:38:00.000-08:00

digging southwark

2011-12-12T04:34:00.001-08:00

extraordinary photos

2011-12-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/50-unexplainable-black-white-photos

geraldine & jim & hose unmistakable trousers, hose unmistakable socks

2011-12-02T08:38:00.001-08:00

horse hospital prisoners

2011-11-24T03:10:00.001-08:00

strays: found painting, wire, sharp wall, bent chimney, sprouts of pollarded tree & aeroplane path in sky

2011-11-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

night condensation on the 21

2011-11-22T04:30:00.001-08:00

Iancu dumitrescu & ana-maria avram @ jerwood hall

2011-11-21T11:44:00.001-08:00

gerhard richter, things that he's said

2011-11-20T05:49:00.000-08:00

"Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view." 1962

"Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself." 1964

On 'Capitalist Realism' "I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form – the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store."

What does the word 'Informel' mean to you today?
As I see it, all of them – Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists, and the rest – are only part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there's an Informel element in Beuys, as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists. The Informel is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, or clearly formed hierarchies.

So in this context you still see yourself as an Informel artist?
Yes, in principle. The age of the Informel has hardly begun yet.

On American pop art and German response: "It was not possible for us to produce the same optimism and the same kind of humour or irony. Actually, it was not irony. Lichtenstein is not ironic but he does have a special kind of humour. That's how I could describe it: humour and optimism. For Polke and me, everything was more fragmented. But how it was broken up is hard to describe."

"I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information."

"I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)" 1964

And much more here: http://www.gerhard-richter.com/quotes/mediums-3/photography-16

gerhard richter, from the exhibition

2011-11-20T05:32:00.001-08:00

experiment in blur & brutalism, blur & trees et cetera after gerhard richter

2011-11-20T05:01:00.001-08:00

blackfriars bridge: love of cranes & polythene

2011-11-19T18:52:00.001-08:00

ana-maria avram's scattered notes

2011-11-17T11:39:00.001-08:00

autumn night

2011-11-06T02:40:00.000-08:00

autumn at bunhill cemetery

2011-11-05T14:39:00.001-07:00

cityscape

2011-11-05T13:54:00.001-07:00

occupy st paul's

2011-11-05T13:10:00.001-07:00

occupy finsbury square

2011-11-05T12:23:00.001-07:00

the art of jennifer pike cobbing

2011-10-29T02:28:00.001-07:00

dangerous glitter on the wainscot

2011-10-25T08:39:00.001-07:00

found on a list of organ recitals at the city church of st. lawrence jewry, tuesdays 1.00pm to 1.45pm

2011-10-12T02:48:00.001-07:00

concrete poetry at the Hayward (just small, a few poems in the bar)

2011-10-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

who philosophize disgrace

2011-09-27T14:19:00.001-07:00

At the South Carolina State Penitentiary on the 16th, June, 1944, 14 year old, George Junius Stinney, was strapped to the electric chair. Securing him to the frame holding the electrodes proved difficult as the child was so slightly built and merely 5’1”, a reason to suspect it was not he who had wielded the huge railroad spike, the weapon used in the killing of two white girls. In a locked room with only white officers bearing witness, Stinney confessed within an hour of his arrest. The court appointed lawyer, did not call any witnesses and as the Stinney family were moneyless, an appeal could not be raised. Another harrowing and messy murder took place towards the end of WW2, when 24 year old, Eddie Slovik was strapped to a post and shot by firing squad, eleven bullets entering his body, but not immediately killing him. The appointed executioners were reloading their weapons when Slovik finally died: "They're not shooting me for deserting the United States Army, thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody and I'm it because I'm an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that's what they are shooting me for, they're shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old", Slovik had told them. Stinney was black and Slovik white. They had in common their poverty and thus their utter powerlessness, as simultaneously, the allies allegedly fought for freedom. 

We no longer believe the WW2 myth that America fights other nations for liberty’s sake, but how can we believe that US citizens are free, when with 5% of the world’s population they have almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. With the “3 strikes law”, people have been sentenced to 25 years porridge for shoplifting. US citizens are the most incarcerated in the world, their prisons stretched to bursting with a population of 2.3 million. China with 4 times the population has 1.6 million prisoners. Little wonder the People’s Republic of China likes to confront the US with its annual, ‘Human Rights Record of the United State’s’ as a retort to the US practice of issuing its own, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices’, never addressing their own egregious methods.

“Capital Punishment is the most premeditated of murders” said Albert Camus and Troy Davis had many premeditating accomplices take a hand in his death, from Obama, who it seems has pleaded the 5th, to the police who intimidated “witnesses”; from the medics of the sinisterly named companies, Correct Health and Rainbow Medical Associates, who for money injected a healthy, man with the lethal cocktail which ceased his heart and respiration; from the careless court-appointed lawyers, to Nathan Deal, Georgia’s Republican Governor, responsible for the 70% cut in the federal funding of the Georgia Resource Centre (Georgia’s legal aid) and from the section of the public who whoop and applaud the statistics on prisoners put to death in the state of Texas, State governor’s, Rick Perry and previously George W Bush, literally killing for votes.

Troy also had against him the endemic racism of his Southern state home of Georgia, where as in other southern states, black people joke bitterly of being arrested for DWB, (Driving While Black). Blacks, representing 10% of the American population as a whole are 40% of the population on death row. Though victims of murder are roughly 50% white and 50% black, those murdered  by the state, have in 80% of cases,since the DP’s reinstatement in 1976, been where the victim was white. In Mobile, Alabama, 1981, Michael Donald was the last known person lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. The police initially lied that he was the victim of a drug deal gone wrong, though Donald had never taken drugs. It took the efforts of Jesse Jackson to get a rightful conviction. It was 1997 when Henry Hayes was executed for the that heinous act by electric chair. Prior to that State-ordered death, the last time somebody was executed for a white on black crime in the state of Alabama was in 1913. Now they use legalised murder in place of lynching. 

weekend of south london gallery cornelius cardew & paul Etienne lincoln

2011-09-17T10:59:00.001-07:00

The South London Gallery in collaboration with the Wesleyan University, USA, interpret Cornelius Cardew's Treatise (1963-67). The vocal Constructivists, 17 strong, use body alone for instruments, but for once, when giant dice were tumbled cross the wooden floor. Superb performance, the constructivists including well trained voices, sounds produced included laughter, multiple voices chatting, latin mass & scat. And featuring Charles Hutchins.

Toulouse Lautrec at Somerset House, they let you take photos there.

2011-09-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Peckham Riots

2011-08-28T06:12:00.001-07:00

On Harriet Harman.org (12 August, 2011) the Mp for Camberwell and Peckham slaps herself heartily on the back for thanking clerks who worked overtime at Camberwell Magistrate’s Court to process locals who’d been involved in the recent riots, “tough action in the courts is going to be very important”. Well she’s got her way and the way of the vast majority of her MP clan, the general media and most sadly a great number of the poplulace. We’ve seen the insanely disproportionate sentences, the constant tellings off, the BBC inviting Kelvin Mackenzie! on Newsnight to tell young people how to behave, their journalists not at all adhering to some forgotten code of impartiality, Kirsty walk, constantly using the word disgusting for the behaviour of the rioters. Michael Gove’s hideous, smug, mug looking oh so affronted. The same man who paid back a tiny proportion of his mortgage payments and ludicrous furniture he’d ripped from the public purse is shocked, affronted. Suddenly England’s a land of the least imaginative of headteachers. What a boring response, if only the clerks of the magistrates courts had chucked in the overtime and headed for the streets. “"The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry." (Raoul Vaneigem). 

In ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, Zizek notes the similarity of Bush’s language as he addresses the American people over the financial meltdown of 2008 and the attacks of 9/11, 2001 referring to them both as attacks on the American way of life while simultaneously calling a halt to freedoms expected thereof. This government is of the same mind, Theresa May now seeking to ban all marches in 5 London boroughs. It is us that should be seeking zero tolerance and riots are exactly of that mindset, a mass cry of, we’ve had enough! When I went into Peckham in the aftermath of the riots, the first damage I sighted on coming out of Meeting House Lane onto the High Street, was the boarded up windows of the police station. Kieran Yates (The Independent, 10th August), braver than me, had ventured into Peckham during the riots. She interviewed girls that were on the scene, not as evident as the many boys. She noted how they fell into two camps, some shouting encouragement, “Get me Jeans!” as boys charged through the broken windows of the Blue Ink clothes shop, while others were more concerned about their eventual arrest, “Get out of here you dickheads, what are you trying to prove?” (a tactic that proved quite successful apparently). Kieran asked some of them, “have you seen your boys being stopped and searched?” for which she invited expressions of disbelief that she would even bother to ask, one saying how the boys had a right to their anger describing how her brother had been shoved up against walls and bars, “and he’s never had anything on him”. Another saying, “You just have to stand back and watch. Not saying this is the answer.” 

“It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.” These are the words of Camila Batmanghelidjh whose charity, Kids Company, works with deprived children in the boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth and Camden. Camila doesn’t condone the actions of the rioters where people were really frightened, but seeks an answer through compassion and equality.

Of course, we are repeating history all over again, as tragedy, as farce, and always will be till the very death of Capitalism. Under Thatcher in the 1980s, £7,9000 million of treasury support was lost to London Boroughs, The Inner London Education Authority and the GLC. Hospital wards closed, 148 schools, homelessness was rife, “the government penalising councils for possessing severe social problems within their boundaries and for having the temerity to propose spending money to tackle them.” (Roy Porter, London a Social History)

Thatcher also introduced the filthy manoeuvre, “right to buy”, a policy still being implemented, losing London loads of affordable housing. Southwark, along with other London boroughs, is now threatening to evict families from their homes, if a family member has been involved in the riots. The desperate impotence felt by Britain’s poor is being met with crackdowns, zero tolerance, tough action, further containment, fewer opportunities in jobs and education, less facilities, while the ruling class cream off millions to further impoverish their lives, Atos, A4E, slave labour, chucking people off benefits and from their homes. And so the poorer boroughs of London and other British cities erupted. There was at least a carnival spirit in those few days. In Peckham the Clayton Arms was broken into for booze supplies, pinching senseless knickknacks from the pound shop, Clarke’s shoes, ripping off clothes from Primark and boutiques, electricals from Curries, cosmetics from the ABC Chemists, chucking missiles at the police and their station, burning cars, a bus, a building. Their streets were transformed. The city, site of alienated labour and passive consumption was made the site of active consumption, an outsider art visited upon the site of their bondage, whether chained to boring, ill-paid jobs or trudges to the jobcentre or A4E schemes to insult them, the riot days they threw off feelings of impotence and said, fuck you. And it was communal too, friends together (or gangs as the press prefer) either rifling shops or standing around to watch the spectacle. We can only hope that in the return of the boring reign of the everyday, the loud roar, No! will not be plastered over through jail and daily humiliations. The broken, boarded-over window of the Pound shop on Rye Lane has become a site where the community has come together again in a calmer, less spectacular refrain. A chorus of post it notes, claiming love of Peckham: “Peace”, “God is love”, “stop police violence”. It’s a pretty patchwork quilt that is going to be preserved for memory at the Peckham shed. But the fury must not be forgotten.

deptford market

2011-08-19T10:33:00.001-07:00

minutely local images, front garden and barely beyond. featuring: summer litter, council's new planting with extremely red wood + my side of the fence, burnt out car since removed.

2011-08-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

Peckham, free silent films come September

2011-08-11T07:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.freefilmfestivals.org/whats-on/free-films-in-peckham.html

2011-08-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

Peckham

2011-08-11T06:13:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5sqf10GSls

vorticists|/|>

2011-08-02T11:59:00.001-07:00

Making most of appointment at Guys I photo the shard and about buildings, thence to the Vorticist exhibition at Tate Britain! What a plan. I congratulate myself and wish I had a vortograph. /|<

animals who are dead

2011-08-02T02:13:00.001-07:00

finished on Tim atkin's horace, i am afraid i killed you, i didn't like you in my house crawling cross my poetry

finished on used gum a bluebottle in your hole

everyday seeing

2011-07-31T01:26:00.001-07:00

the old operating theatre, london bridge

2011-07-29T06:36:00.001-07:00

Finger saw. Wince.

"The presence or absence of 10 predetermined veins or vein groupings belonging to the galenic venous system were prospectively analyzed in 10 cadaver dissections and imaging findings of 10 age matched human subjects. The studied vessels were the vein of galen, the internal cerebral veins, both basal vein of Rosenthals, internal occipital vein, occipitotemporal veins, precentral cerebellar veins, tectal veins, pineal veins, superior vermian veins (including superior cerebellar veins (SCVs)) and posterior pericallosal veins. Each of the subjects had both digital subtraction angiography and magnetic resonance venography studies performed. Diagnostic digital subtraction angiography was performed using the transfemoral route and the venous phase was used for the study. Magnetic resonance venography was performed in 1.5 T MRI equipment using the 2D-TOF sequence. All studies were reported to be normal."(
The presence or absence of 10 predetermined veins or vein groupings belonging to the galenic venous system were prospectively analyzed in 10 cadaver dissections and imaging findings of 10 age matched human subjects. The studied vessels were the vein of galen, the internal cerebral veins, both basal vein of Rosenthals, internal occipital vein, occipitotemporal veins, precentral cerebellar veins, tectal veins, pineal veins, superior vermian veins (including superior cerebellar veins (SCVs)) and posterior pericallosal veins. Each of the subjects had both digital subtraction angiography and magnetic resonance venography studies performed. Diagnostic digital subtraction angiography was performed using the transfemoral route and the venous phase was used for the study. Magnetic resonance venography was performed in 1.5 T MRI equipment using the 2D-TOF sequence. All studies were reported to be normal. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0720048X05001865)

Results:

things what i grew and a squirrel, but how do i reach my plums?

2011-07-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

urban physic garden, union street

2011-07-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

Check out Judith Goldman, she damn good

2011-07-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239146

Watch out for July dates

2011-07-08T10:46:00.001-07:00

http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

gustav klutsis

2011-06-28T17:46:00.001-07:00

karel teige

2011-06-28T14:07:00.001-07:00

snails 'pon flowerpot face

2011-06-27T01:40:00.001-07:00

the horse hospital

2011-06-25T05:31:00.001-07:00

Phwoaarrh Soviet Architecture

2011-06-22T09:14:00.001-07:00

d'agoty & anatomy model

2011-06-05T09:49:00.001-07:00

fast collage

2011-06-05T09:46:00.001-07:00

the cholmondely ladies circa 1600

2011-06-02T03:48:00.000-07:00

cabinet of fake limbs, cock rings & chastity belt & surgical instruments @ the wellcome collection

2011-05-28T02:54:00.000-07:00

frances & bok @ polyply

2011-05-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

tube tunnel

2011-05-13T10:05:00.001-07:00

xing the line at the apple tree

2011-05-13T09:57:00.001-07:00

2011-04-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

harlequin identified and squashed on the strawberry plant

2011-04-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

spring sprung in a peckham garden

2011-04-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

plum tree, marigolds, bluebells, lavender, rosemary, seedlings will be salads

europe house

2011-04-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

8th April 2011: reading at the former Tory headquarters in a terribly posh building off Smith Square featuring bomb proof windows were, Tim Atkins & Jeff Hilson, Tomas S Butkus, Amy De’Ath, Gabriele Lebanauskaite, Agnes Lehoczky, Kate Kililea, Donatas Petrosius, Jon Shaw and Holly Pester. The Tories have since moved to Millbank where the windows have proven non student proof, the evening was an interesting mix of British & Lithuanian poets & there was pink champagne, thence on to the nearby Marquis of Granby, a sleepy bus journey, kebabs on the Old Kent Road; a satisfying Friday.

for tickly coughs

2011-04-05T04:29:00.001-07:00

The British chemist C R Wright discovered diacetylmorphine or heroin, in 1874. But it was the German, Heinrich Dresser who tried to find its uses, first testing it on sticklebacks, frogs and rabbits and then on some of the workers at the Bayer plant, a company that first made its fortune in the artificial dye industry (see Esther Leslie's, Synthetic Worlds). The workers loved it, some describing how they felt heroisch (heroic), hence its marketing name, launched alongside aspirin between the years 1897 & 1914, and indeed it was very beneficial to those sick and in pain, being not of itself harmful to the body and aiding a good night's kip. Course, it is addictive though, hence a problem for those short of dosh, some selling junk metal to support the higher quantities they needed on gaining a tolerance, so the term junkies. But it was the act of criminalising the drug from 1914 that brought the misery so well now associated. In the US, first Jewish gangsters, then Italians took on the industry, murder on the streets, deaths from not being able to judge the purity, injecting other rubbish alongside, through the greed of the greedy bastards at the top of the chain,the farmers of countries like Afghanistan denied fair profits from their natural resources, people in pain denied a satisfactory pain-killing drug, fobbed off with fuckin paracetamol (does fuck all), that's your fucking law for you. And the banks get a piece of the action http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

Patrick Caulfield

2011-04-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

how green things look strange in black & white, mysterious nut-curtained shop front on the old kent rd, some shadows and a dandelion

2011-04-02T09:49:00.001-07:00

action god

2011-03-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

old kent road by the bins where they piss & litter, so on to newcross

2011-03-23T16:35:00.001-07:00

they are trees, one is with a tower block after peeps

2011-03-23T16:25:00.001-07:00

The reactionary, Dauban, describes the women of the Paris commune

2011-03-19T06:04:00.001-07:00

He cannot help but admire

"The women were like the men: ardent, implacable, frenzied. Never had they turned out in such great number, braving peril and defying death. They dressed the horrible wounds made by case-shot, shells, and cylindrical bullets; they ran to the side of those who, under the pressure of unheard-of tortures, were howling, sobbing, and bellowing with pain and rage; then, their eyes filled with blood, their ears full of those cries torn from the last living shreds of flesh, they resolutely took up the chassepot [a kind of gun] and ran toward the same wounds and the same agony. And what dauntlessness at the barricades, what ferocity in combat, what presence of mind, against the wall, before the firing squad ..."

140th anniversary of the Paris Commune

2011-03-18T09:15:00.001-07:00

Destruction of the Vendome Column under the Paris Commune, 1871

but shame, triumphal folly, it was re-erected.

we'll huff & we'll puff & we'll blow up your tall dicks, Nelson, Napoleon

sean bonney & mike weller at the blue bus

2011-03-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

deptford social centre plus, formerly the job centre

2011-03-17T05:50:00.001-07:00

howl event at poetry cafe, poets read alan ginsberg and their words inspired by alan ginsberg

2011-03-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

she's trouble

2011-02-23T07:20:00.001-08:00

bat guano

2011-02-23T06:49:00.000-08:00

disintegrating words

2011-02-23T06:43:00.001-08:00

From the train, pylon, gasometer

2011-02-23T06:28:00.001-08:00

Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner (September 18, 1786 – February 21, 1862)

2011-02-07T07:48:00.001-08:00

Kleksographien - inkblots and interpreting them/helping shape them along. Later Rorschach adpated the idea for testing sanity. What! you see two nuns cutting each others legs off while doing the Can-can, well the sane saw only butterflies, butterflies.

Alexander Ney

2011-02-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

Odd his perforated visions

Soviet Bookcovers

2011-02-07T06:41:00.001-08:00

For more, including children's bookcovers http://kuriosas.blogspot.com/2011/01/polish-soviet-illustrated-childrens.html

I have made some rubbery nipples to hang things on

2011-01-10T09:44:00.001-08:00

more trees in the nude

2010-12-10T14:47:00.001-08:00

art works of poland's orange alternative movement

2010-12-08T10:05:00.000-08:00

1893 from st. nicholas magazine. masked women are in a play about maths but can't find more information than that

2010-12-07T09:04:00.001-08:00

russian art theatre 1900's featuring maria germanova in fantastical costume

2010-12-07T07:49:00.000-08:00

vavara stepanova, clothes designs and fabric prints. first by liubov popova and photo of them together

2010-12-06T06:04:00.003-08:00

wintree

2010-12-06T03:23:00.001-08:00

like fabric print

like pollack

like veins & arteries

very great coollages by louis armstrong

2010-12-04T05:07:00.001-08:00

lovely use of masking tape

collage

2010-12-03T09:19:00.001-08:00

Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière: Clinique des Maladies du Systeme Nerveux

2010-12-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Martian Embassy

2010-12-02T05:18:00.001-08:00

After Gamma's funeral we retired to the Martian Embassy where the surround is wall to wall collage, poodles, Frank Zappa and science fiction. Such happy memories of Gamma, like the time he waltzed with Harry Gilonis - a very beautiful partnership.

cloud fence roost lamp post arrows

2010-11-25T02:48:00.001-08:00

after assarts for wondering

2010-11-22T05:48:00.001-08:00

situation

2010-11-21T12:59:00.001-08:00

2010-11-16T11:20:00.001-08:00

b & w

2010-11-16T08:37:00.001-08:00

love of cones

2010-11-16T08:33:00.001-08:00

crane

2010-11-16T04:16:00.001-08:00

london in the rain

2010-11-16T04:03:00.001-08:00

guy's hospital

2010-11-16T03:54:00.001-08:00

Ha! Daily Mail publishes my comment

2010-11-12T02:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1328635/TUITION-FEES-PROTEST-Standing-firm-face-student-riots.html

Its the last one listed.