And this is a
very instructive art almanac – offering
vignettes of key dates in the lives of artists
2. Photography
is another visual art – practised by such giants as Cartier-Bresson
Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand and John Parr
(who was part of a superb MOMA exhibition on English
photography under Thatcher)
My friend Keith
(before and after his retirement) has been a keen mountain walker and
photographer - and his blog must by now be the richest source of Scottish mountain-scape photography. If
I’m the King of hyperlinks, Keith is the King of Scottish mountain vistas
photography
He has been
blogging as long as I have – more than a decade – and each post records his
every scaling of every Scottish peak over 3000 feet (known as Munros – of which
there are 282) – replete with superb photographs which give an amazing sense of
the wonderful world at that level which most of us simply don’t see and indeed
are not even aware of……And this is a good example of the occasional
political comment his blog makes
3. Talking of
mountains, the Bergahn journal resource which they have just kindly made
available to us all – temporarily of course but in the spirit of “Open Access” - revealed this nice article on the
UK and Carpathians 1862-1914 in their Journal of Travel and
Travel-writing
4. And still on
painting, I began to read a little book about John
Berger by one Andy Merrifield and was sufficiently intrigued by the
author’s writing style to want to see more of it – and duly discovered this little cache
One of the
essays in that little collection is called Searching
for Guy Debord -Debord being the author of the famous The
society of the spectacle (1967) which railed – rather more philosophically
than Jerry Mander and Neil Postman – against the social and political effects
of the entertainment industry…..
The spectacle
has now “spread itself to the point where it permeates all reality. It was easy
to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical
experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was
also the falsification of the globe.”
Merrifield is so
taken with Debord that he seeks out his widow, still living in the house with
the special high wall Debord built to keep the world out. I can’t say I share
Merrifiels’s enthusiasm for the book – with its 221 theses and an equivalent number of explanatory notes
which an editor has subsequently (and necessarily) added….It’s not my sort of
writing
The integrated
spectacle, Debord said, has sinister characteristics: incessant technological
renewal; integration of the state and economy; generalized secrecy;
unanswerable lies; and an eternal present. Gismos proliferate at unprecedented
speeds; commodities outdate themselves almost each week; nobody can step down
the same supermarket aisle twice. The commodity is beyond criticism; useless
junk nobody really needs assumes a vital life force that everybody apparently
wants.
The state and
economy have congealed into an undistinguishable unity, managed by
spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Everyone is at the mercy of the expert
or the specialist, and the most useful expert is he who can best lie. Now, for
the first time ever, “no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend
that they wish to change anything significant.”
For gluttons
for punishment Debord added, 21 years later, Comments
on the society of the Spectacle
5. Visual Capitalist may not be the
best of names but its great use of tables and visual warms my cockles. Here’s a
typical example – 24
Cognitive Biases warping Reality
My readers will
be bored by my emphasis on the importance of text being visually illustrated….
6. Hold
Everything Dear – dispatches on survival and resistance; John Berger (2007)
If you’re
looking for an example of the poetic power of John Berger’s writing, read this!
It’s a series of short essays sparked off by 9/11. The
subtitle brought back memories for me of Albert Camus’ Resistance,
rebellion and Death (1960) whose “Letters
to a German Friend” moved me greatly when I first read them in the early
60s
7. Last
month I posted an updated
list of the English-language journals which I had tested with 5 demanding
criteria - for having (i) depth of treatment; (ii) breadth of coverage (not just
political); (iii) clarity of writing; and being both (iv) cosmopolitan in taste (not
just anglo-saxon); and (v) sceptical in tone.
The post analysed more than 30
journals - regretting the disappearance in 1990 of Encounter.
This morning an
article arrived in my mailbox celebrating
that selfsame journal – what it doesn’t
tell you is that Encounter’s entire
archives can be accessed here – courtesy of the quite amazing UNZ Review – an alternative media selection – “A
Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely
Excluded from the American Mainstream Media”.
And if you
click “pdf archives” you’ll find a quite wonderful collection of journals inc
The New Yorker from the 1930s to 2010!!
Finally, I am no great fan of George Galloway's - but his one saving grace is the clarity of his diction.....and here he is with another great communicator Dr John Campbell
Finally, I am no great fan of George Galloway's - but his one saving grace is the clarity of his diction.....and here he is with another great communicator Dr John Campbell
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