We need to talk about Kelvin

A handy temperature conversion chart:

Cute cats and repressive regimes

The Irish Times of 16 May carried a report on the Media Future conference held in Dún Laoghaire. Much of it was about digital in the newsroom, but not all. Some was about unintended consequences:

Bilal Randeree, social media and web editor for Al Jazeera English, told the conference that attempts by regimes in some parts of the world to close off access to social media are usually counter-productive because of “the cute cat theory”, he explained.

“People like to share pictures of cute cats on social media. When you block Facebook for 10 days, you’re basically pissing these people off. They get upset because they can’t share pictures of cute cats any more, and they get politicised,” he said.

More here and here.

  

Monitor: Private Eye

Bastille Day is Serge Gainsbourg day

Here is the great man in 1979 with his version of “La Marseillaise”, recorded in Jamaica with Sly and Robbie as rhythm section and the I-Threes (Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths) who were maybe the Jamaican equivalent of the Sweet Inspirations:

And here is the dub version.

Advertising on Stuff

Fairfax has given up on quality editorial content, hasn’t it. This vid of Miranda Kerr making an ad for Victoria’s Secret is not a news story in any way, it is an advertisement. So is this piece about an art auction later this month in which the dealer explains that buying paintings, specifically these paintings right here, is a really good investment. In the accompanying video – I wonder who paid for it – the dealer says, “There’s huge opportunities there for buyers.” Well, he would, wouldn’t he. 

The “story” on Stuff is illustrated with the opening still from the video, an arresting image of a woman whose head but not face is covered with bees. Neither painting nor artist is identified. (I can do that: Bee Lady by Joanna Braithwaite was first exhibited in 2002 at Milford Galleries.) I wonder why no one at Fairfax thought that might be useful information for readers. 

Advertorial and product placement is to be expected in suburban giveaways and James Bond films, but it’s not what one expects from one of our major media companies. Oh, wait…

What I’m reading #70

Speed is bad. Especially for journalists.

Industrial music from North Korea: an excellent horse-like lady.

The future of non-fiction, possibly. One lives in hope.

English language:

Now that the Tour authorities are finally getting on top of the doping problem, we British are sensing a genuine sporting challenge at last, and showing how it should be done....with grit, determination, and a shitload of expletives.

Mick Hartley has the full story. See you next Tuesday.

Australian language:

When I told a former coworker of mine that I was leaving New York City to spend three months in Australia and asked whether he knew what to expect of its inhabitants, he told the story of the first Australians he’d ever met, fellow attendees at an event in Manhattan. This man is a professional writer and his stockpile of adjectives is not small, but he strained to find one that would convey not only the volume but the unblushing boldness of their conversation, much of which was unrepeatable to a young lady like myself. I asked him whether it was fair to base his impression of Australia on a group of individuals who, from his description, could have been backpackers just escaped from their hostel. He said it was the UN delegation.

The writer is Helen Rittelmeyer whom this guy regards as “the most disturbing human being I have ever encountered” and who must be quoting Kevin Bloody Wilson’s cousin Kevin Fucking Rudd.

Even if the midget is willing

Dizzee Rascal, born Dylan Kwabena Mills in East London in 1984 and now a big hip-hop star and co-owner of his own label Dirtee Stank, tells the Guardian about his new life in Miami: 

I’m not going to lie, it can be fun throwing money over a naked midget in one of the most famous gangster strip clubs in America. But after a while, throwing money around is not sensible, even if the midget is willing.

 So here, after you skip the terrible ad, is Dizzee Rascal with “Bonkers”:

Paragraph of the week

Aidan Hartley, a farmer in Tanzania, explains in the 30 June issue of the Spectator why he bought a pedigree Boran bull despite knowing that he was paying too much: he wanted “some pizzazz” in his herd:

After all, few are the joys left to a man of 47. I haven’t got a mistress. I do not feel the need to ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I like wine too much and while dodging bombs and rockets in Sudan the other day I thought it might be a good idea to retire from covering African wars. But what comes after the adrenalin of being shot at? I rise early, I work hard, I love my family, but I just seem to spend my life paying utility bills or talking about petty-cash vouchers.

The bull, we learn, is named Ollie and has a “lustful look in his eye. He’s heavy but not coarse-boned, not too loose, with length and a great top line.” Sounds like a bull, and sounds like a couple of Ollies I know. Later in the column Hartley says:

To launch the herd, my wife Claire bought me three heifers for my birthday.

I have a birthday coming up. I wonder…

What I’m reading #69

A drive-by art preview in Christchurch.

The last Word.

Your e-book reader is watching you.

The spreading tyranny of bike paths.

How to avoid discussing the Scott Guy verdict.

Via TVHE, Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research answers the question, “Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?” (The PDF of his paper is here: it’s a fascinating and entertaining read). It’s blindingly obvious once he points it out. Money quote:

By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favour.

Keith Stewart on Gordon Walters, part 2

The 54th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the December 1995 issue. A sequel to this article from the December 1994 issue, it was based on conversations Keith Stewart had with Gordon Walters from November 1994 to October 1995. The intro read:

The artist Gordon Walters died last month. In conversations throughout the preceding year, Keith Stewart talked to him about the freedom he found in tight limits, and the balance between control and feeling in his paintings.

 FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE

Gordon Walters has always made his art under his own jurisdiction, uncluttered by the influence of any criticism but his own, yet his paintings are a powerful response to fundamental elements of New Zealand, unmatched by few, if any, other 20th-century artists. His lucid simplicity, proportion and clarity have given art here a special vitality that seems to suit us, but in spite of his years of neglect by the wider community – even by most of the art world – he does not see his art as isolated.

“Art doesn’t come of out nothing,” he says. “And everything that I have done has come from people who have gone before. Not that I copy what they have done. It’s not that, because I transform things into my own sort of image. But to say that these things are completely original is not right.”

Indeed, there have been accusations of appropriation of Maori forms from academics who argue for an institutional form of isolation for culture. Walters, however, does not accept that responding to influences as he has done is anything other than the normal process of making art. He doesn’t deny the immense influence Maori culture has had on his own work, in particular the traditional forms of Maori art, or that he went looking for it – not that it was hard to find.

“Driving around the country I got to know, to almost sense, the Maori environment, and knew when I saw these places that there would be a meeting house around, and there was,” he says of his many journeys through rural New Zealand. “There is a peculiar quality those places have got, and this was very much the case in South Canterbury, which is all farming country, but where you get those limestone outcrops, cabbage trees, and a really unique little micro-atmosphere – you knew it was a Maori place. I love that feeling, that quality. It brings home to you strongly what the country used to be like.”

However, the process of turning those experiences and his strong feeling for the Maori presence in the land into an equally powerful element in his art was not instant. In spite of Walters’ awareness of the influence of African, Central American and Pacific art on European artists, he could not make the visual contact himself.

His awareness was no glib response in search of novelty. “At first Maori stuff seemed remote to me, very opaque, and I couldn’t get into it, couldn’t see how you could use it. But that was my limitation at that particular time. I tried to make use of Maori design, tried to take elements from it, but I couldn’t do anything with it. I couldn’t see properly at the time, and couldn’t see how I could ever use it.

“In the end one of the things that led me to use the Maori stuff was that I deconstructed things. I would take a particular Maori arrangement, say just a small koru thing, a bulb like that, and another piece coming back on the same thing, and I would keep the movement, take the bulbs, the circles off, so the thing would be deconstructed,” he explains, pointing to one of his now famous paintings. “I found that opened up possibilities.”

Possibilities that introduced a particular New Zealand feeling into paintings that were already heavily influenced by his voracious appetite for contemporary European art. His discovery of the kowhaiwhai pattern’s potential coincided perfectly with his awareness of the modem Europeans.

“The two areas came together. The modem European art that I was fascinated with, that I had travelled away to see, and the Maori stuff that had been there for all of my life and that I was working with regularly, came together. The timing was crucial. It is with those sorts of things. They just sort of worked themselves together and then there it was. I knew I had it immediately.

“When I went into work I would often sit down at my desk and just start drawing, just doodling around on a notebook or a piece of paper. And I was just drawing these kowhaiwhai patterns, trying them out in different ways, and there it was. The positive and the negative in one thing and at that point I knew I had something good, and at that point I started to go all out to develop it. But it took me a long time, a bloody long time.”

And it didn’t result in a rush of images. Gordon Walters’ career has been a steady, meticulously worked and crafted flow of paintings, rather than a gushing frenzy of paint and canvas.

“I didn’t develop that as far as I could,” he points out. “Because I already had enough. The thing is to know when you have enough, and I like those limitations because it enables me to go deeply into a thing. It is the struggle to get that thing working that somehow causes something to flow from you into the work. It’s an intangible sort of thing but it keeps on working.

“You can’t really plan that consciously, it has to be felt. It may only be a simple thing, but that is what is nice about it. I love those restrictions.”

And he continues to love them, worrying away at the “one picture” he says he is painting all the time, expanding our horizons, our view, by limiting his own material. It is a process that has produced some of the purest art possible, and he speaks of it with a candour and refreshing simplicity that almost matches the clarity of his paintings.

“I control things with my feeling, only my feeling,” he says, introducing the artist’s own view of making works that have been called excessively cerebral. “I move those things around, working with small studies. I have an idea. I put it down very roughly. If it doesn’t look right, I cut it up. I stop working with my mind and freely move things around until something stops me, and I feel that there is something there, so I work with that. I keep moving it around.

“There is this point where I stop working with my mind, where I am very relaxed, where something else takes over. But you have to be very alert or you miss something.

“I feel that my works are static, basically. The movement in the thing is resolved, is brought into a kind of tension, a balanced tension. Your eye has got to move around them. There are lots of things I could do with them that I haven’t done, but that’s from choice.”

But not too much choice. Walters returns to the theme of restriction, reducing options. “The forms in the thing are limited, and my use of the forms is limited. You have to put limits on what you do to operate freely. This is the contradiction. The works are very strict – you’ve got those horizontal bars, those circles. That is very limited, and you think how the hell can you make art out of that? But out of that incredible strictness you get tremendous freedom at the same time.”

So how does he feel about his enormous contribution, a career that has flourished in recent years as the price of his paintings spirals upward and critics refer to his greatness. A legend in his own lifetime?

“At the time you are doing it, you don’t think about the relationship of what you are doing to the community or anything like that. You are too involved in what you are doing, in making the actual work,” he declares matter-of-factly. A lifetime of making art in a country where artists are well down the status chart has ensured no glittering prizes, and more than his share of smacks in the face. The respect may be nice, but it doesn’t change the art. Or the approach.

“When I look back, my life looks like a whole lot of incidents which have jogged me on a step further. My earliest attempt quickly reached an impasse because I didn’t have the skill I wanted, and it was a terribly slow and lonely business to slowly make concrete what I felt, and to respond to what I had seen,” he says.

But he has done it, no compromise. To paint or not to paint is the only decision. From there on the choices are limited and are not reliant for success on anything as transient as popular acclaim. “I don’t know what makes me paint. I think it’s a very selfish thing in a way,” he reflects. “The reason I did so many of those koru paintings is that it took me a long time to get it to my satisfaction. It looks so easy now, so simple. It looks as if I have taken something and just put it down, but I haven’t.

“I am very aware of the business of making art just because it sells, but I don’t do that. You can’t do that. You have to have your sights set on things, and that’s right and proper. It’s not like being careerist, it’s just that you have to cut out anything in your life that is going to in any way delay your real aim.

“Art takes the whole man, it takes everything. You can’t fudge it.”

Amelia Earhart, first lady of the air

Home Paddock reminds us that on this day in 1937 Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were last heard from while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight. Conspiracy theories abound. Were they spies? Did they run out of fuel and crash into the ocean or were they captured by the Japanese? Was Noonan beheaded on Saipan?

We will never know but at least the English band Plainsong got a concept album out of it, In Search of Amelia Earhart, in 1972 when bands made concept albums. This was one of the better ones. So here they are with “True Story of Amelia Earhart”. Four musicians, four-part blissful harmonies. Lead vocalist is Iain Matthews who was between  Fairport Convention and a successful solo career in America: