gifted with a “combination of technical mastery and passionate artistry”.
Graffiti, Street Art and Stigmergy
Lachlan MacDowall’s chapter in The Uses of Art in Public Space.
The chapter explores how graffiti and street art function in public space by considering their relationship to the notion of stigmergy, a theory derived from insect behaviour that explains how the actions of individual agents within populations are coordinated without direct communication. The application of stigmergy highlights a number of neglected aspects of street art, namely its spatial clustering, its incitement of interactions, the active audiences it produces and its existence as a ‘cultural scene,’ based not on fixed art objects but on forms which elicit ongoing, collective contributions.
The resurgence of Clarice Lispector
Hayek’s Capital and Interest
The latest volume to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek
20th Century Boy: The Marc Bolan Story
This BBC radio programme is far more informative and insightful than all the videoed stuff put together. Bolan unfortunately labored under the teen idol ascription which made many in the day keep quite about their admiration for him. Glad this has all changed.
36 years after Marc Bolan’s death, Paul Sexton presents an updated repeat of his 2007 profile, with a stellar cast list including David Bowie, Bernie Taupin, Noel Gallagher, David Gilmour, producer Tony Visconti, Bolan’s girlfriend Gloria Jones and their son Rolan. The revised version also features archive from Marc’s friend and earliest media supporter, John Peel.
The programme charts Bolan’s long journey from the streets of Hackney in north London, via early singles in his own name and as a member of John’s Children, to his ultimate glam rock superstardom at the helm of T. Rex.
The Power of Conversation
A Lesson from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien
[w]e moderns are increasingly fleeing from “conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas.”
Also Oakeshott on conversation:
In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
— Oakeshott, Michael. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1962: 197-247.
COSMOS + TAXIS 3:1
Walker Percy Wednesday 57
“Look here. She’s got a strong amplitude and high millivoltage over the temporal lobe, Brodmann 28, which correlates in my experience with singular concrete historical awareness, vivid childhood memories, you know, as well as a sense of the uniqueness of one’s tradition. But see here: an even stronger reading over parietal lobe, Brodmann 18. That’s the site of ahistoric perceptions that are both concrete and abstract. You should be an excellent artist, Ethel.”
“You see there, Ethel! She is, Doc.”
“Tch,” says Ethel sourly. “I’ve got the same thing from fortune cookies.”
“Are you Jewish, Ethel?”
“What? Yes. What do you mean by asking?”
“You exhibit here what I have termed contradictory Judaism.”
“What in hell do you mean?” Ethel swings around on her knees and looks at me squarely for the first time.
“Because you believe at one and the same time that the Jews are unique and that they are not. Thus you would be offended if a Jew told you the Jews were chosen by God, but you would also be offended if a non-Jew told you they were not.”
. . .
How stands it with a forty-five-year-old man who can fall in love on the spot with a twenty-year-old stranger, a clear-eyed vacant simple Massachusetts girl, and desire nothing more in this life than to move into her chickee?
. . .
At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, etcetera.
The poor U.S.A.!
Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn’t work after all. The U.S.A. didn’t work! Is it even possible that from the beginning it never did work? That the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer. Moon Mullins blames it on the niggers. Hm. Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one. One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.
One little test: you flunk!
AI: Its nature and future
Glenfarclas 17
As someone with a preference for Islays, Glenfarclas 17 came over as what I can only describe as “muscular” (others say “robust”) especially so for a Speyside. It did grow on me however. Here are some more articulate reviews.
Jason’s Scotch Whiskey Reviews
Master taster Horst Lüning’s gushing assessment:
manwithoutqualities 