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At Ease.

I listened to a tribute on Pierre Bourdieu. On the BBC Thinking Allowed podcast. According to the podcast, one of his ideas was that the French system of egalitè to some extent does not work because working class people do not feel at ease with middle/upper class people, even though the working class people are as intelligent as the others. That ill at ease is a barrier which few can overcome, (though Bourdieu did). Which reminded me of two meetings I had in the same week some time ago and how I felt ill at ease in one of them (in an art gallery) and totally at ease in another (in a technical design office). Two art professionals (not artists) had finished organising the details of my exhibition and so passed onto a more interesting subject. They tested each other out about the living and relatively famous artists they knew and could count as friends. It was a gentle battle of name dropping. I remember feeling uncomfortable and wandering away to look at the art in the

"Science is Limited" said Dorothy Cross.

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I nearly fell out of my bed as I listened to a podcast of this idiot as she described her latest artwork. Bath tubs with gold at the scum line being watched by a shark's eye which the viewer of the exhibition cannot see but must be told exists. Sorry, she may not be an idiot, maybe she's just in bad faith, or maybe just deluded. And then she said "Science is limited." It's a bit of a cliché but what has science (and technology) ever given us? Everything this imposter has ever used. The building she exhibits in. The cell phone she uses. The lighting in the gallery. The bed where she sleeps. Her credit card. Asprin. Surgery. Brain surgery. Ideas beyond her paltry imagination certainly. Relativity. Knowledge of genes. Super-computers. Shrek. Images from a space beyond imagination, beyond even an artist's imagination. Presumably also the embalming used on the shark's eye.  Maybe she's not be a detail person. Let the mere technician

Like Jewels

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It had been raining all night and when I got up in the morning the plants on the balcony had drops of rain on them like jewels hanging down. First I saw them then the phrase "like jewels" jumped into my mind. Which was a pity because "like jewels" is almost a clichè and took away from the sight the actual beauty of it. Almost as if once described with a poetic clichè … what? I've said in an other blog post that saying that a cloud looks like a dog with a ball or a laughing head destroys and distracts from the real beauty of the cloud. And so does the phrase "like jewels" when talking of drops of water, backlit, hanging from the green leaves. After that five second slip I managed to get back to the joy of the vision, without thinking of anything else. The photo does not convey the reality of what I saw, maybe 5% of it. Real life dynamic human binocular vision is still better than photos.

"There's a bishop at the door." Is that a Euphemism?

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You'll have to listen to " Fags Mags and Bags " to find out... ...it takes some time to get into the series, but is well worth the effort.

Neural Fusion

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"Hells bells!" I thought to myself. "It's Valentine's Day!" And though it is very commercial, you can't ignore it. Not if you're married to an Italian. Not if you don't want to wake up dead on the 15 th . So, just in time, I went to the florists and bought seven red roses. I was lucky, there were no other customers, plenty of roses left. (Seven. That's right isn't it? I mean. Twelve seems such an unromantic number. 12 inches to the foot. And twenty-four! That is even more unromantic. Twenty four hours in a day – boring. But seven is a magic lucky number.) As I handed the florist the money I thought: "It seems only yesterday that I was doing this very same thing, and yet it was a year ago." And when my wife came in that night she was very pleased to see the vase with the seven roses in the center of the table. "They're lovely! But why?" It struck me then that it

Before they started making things, did primitive humans...

I wonder, before they started making things, did primitive humans have an idea of a Maker with a capital M?

Violence. Boring. Tension. Boring.

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On Saturday morning I reviewed "The Glorious Heresies", a novel by Lisa McInerney, on Amazon. Saturday night I went to see "The Revenant". Both struck me as having the same structure. Violence and boredom, tension and boredom. After 50 pages of "The Glorious Heresies" I got the feeling that the rest of the book would be the same. Portraits of the violence and desperation of the poor in Cork, Ireland. Page after page would be the same. I stopped reading because of the tedium of it. After the first 30 minutes of "The Revenant" I began to think that the rest of the film would be more of the same. I was right. Violence, tension, boredom, wishing the film would end. As I sat there I wondered if it was so hard to make an artwork of some kind which is not so... so... violent. It seems to me that it mocks the real stuff happening to real people. Another thing the book and the film had in common was that they were both very wel