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Career Suicide: Ten Years as a Free Range Artist

Uncanny Valley: Collected short stories

Normal nonsense will be resumed shortly, and if you’re on the front page you can scroll down to see the newest posts as normal. In common with most bloggers I do this in my free time with no great expectations because I enjoy it and because I relish the knowledge that thousands of people share my interest in the things that I post, and probably also because I’m a bit of an attention whore. As many of you probably do, I use an ad blocker and I tend to switch right off when people try to sell me stuff or talk to me about my responsibilities, so I understand that some of you might not want to hear this little lecture from me.

Also in common with most bloggers I have to make a living and I rarely make any money from blogging, although in my case one of my day jobs is also writing so sometimes I do get paid tiny amounts for blogging elsewhere. But the fact remains that there’s no such thing as free; everything you get on the internet cost somebody something, at some time. I know very well from the last hellish eighteen months I’ve just battled through that times are hard, but hard times for most of us make it more important– not less– that we should all try to support people whose work we like, whether it’s paying for a download or CD of a band we like, donating to the programmer of the app we use all the time, helping out with somebody’s Kickstarter project, or– yes– by purchasing a book by a writer whose work we appreciate.

Know what I mean?

Career Suicide is my memoir of working as an artist and film maker for most of my adult life, while experiencing almost every misfortune except popularity. I’ve been told it’s funny, a good read and it contains valuable insights on the art world’s foibles and failings. And slightly less valuable insights into my own. My adventures in gonzo art criticism continue at my other blog, of the same name.

Uncanny Valley collects my published short stories from various anthologies and magazines circa 1996-2006: among other things, a magic talking dog castrates the Estuary Gaffer Tape Rapist with his teeth, a robot maid trades housework for sabotage, and the last living intellectual escapes from his cage at the zoo and goes on a rampage of contemplation…

They’re not expensive, they’re professionally designed and copy edited so they look a hundred times better than your average self published bunch of shit, and they’re available in various print and electronic formats. Even the Apple Store, although they had a bit of a wobble at first because they interpreted mention of a rapist getting his nuts bitten off as “erotica.” Really, Apple? Really? This blog isn’t stopping, I’m not on strike, the books sell OK already and I’ll still love you even if you don’t buy something after I’ve blatantly whored myself out like this.

But please do buy something, if you can afford it, and do the same for other people whose work you regularly enjoy and follow. Me love you long time if you do.

Buy Career Suicide or Uncanny Valley here.

A lament for lost sartorial options

The Emir of Bukhara, 1911.

Some striking colour portrait photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. In some ways they look like they could have been taken last week, but they were actually all made between 1907 and 1915, just before WWI and the Russian Revolution. The splendid example above is of Alim Khan (1880-1944) the Emir of Bukhara, in 1911. Bukhara was a vassal state of the Russian Empire, though the Emir had absolute authority within its borders. It was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1920, and Alim Khan fled to Afghanistan.

There’s just something about seeing these long-dead people in colour that connects us to them, and to history in general, in way that hardly any monochrome image can achieve. To make them, Prokudin-Gorskii developed a system of exposing three glass plate negatives rapidly in succession, with a red filter, a green, and finally a blue. These three monochrome negatives could then be projected through a lantern similarly equipped with matching coloured filters to create a full colour image. The photos shown here have been reconstructed digitally by the US Library of Congress using the same principles, which will be familiar to anybody who uses Photoshop or any similar image editing software. Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) left Russia in 1918 after the Imperial family was murdered, settling in France via Norway and England. The Library of Congress bought the negatives from P-G’s heirs in 1948. Read more about Prokudin-Gorskii and see more images on the LOC site.

I’ve said it before, but it’s also a crime that modern day globalised clothing is rarely half as interesting, individual and vibrant as some of the amazing getups and colour schemes recorded in images that are only about a century old and yet depict a world that’s now almost completely lost to us. I don’t think anybody should romanticise what poor people and dissidents endured in Tsarist Russia, or mourn the demise of colonialism, nationalism or imperialism, but some very valuable things were also lost along with them.

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Gay Pride March of the Penguins

The final post inspired by Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Penguins and their gayness hardly need an introduction given the ubiquity of “on the lighter side” news reports about male Penguin couples in zoos. Wild Humboldt Penguins live in groups of 10-60 individuals, but King Penguin communities can consist of up to 300,000 pairs. Lifelong homosexual pair bonds develop between male Humboldts. They usually live together in a nest they’ve built. They also both take part in the magnificently named “ecstatic display” in which the male stretches out his head and neck, flapping his flippers and emitting a loud braying sound.

Males in heterosexual pairs also sometimes court and copulate with other heterosexually paired males and with females other than their own mate. In zoo populations of Humboldts, at least 5% of all pairs are exclusively homosexual. Other males are bisexual, pairing with males after losing a female partner.

Homosexual relationships between King Penguins are less durable, often ending in divorce after about a year. Like Humboldts, some King Penguins never show any interest in heterosexual relationships.

There are other variations on the monogamous pair and the nuclear family. About a quarter of heterosexual pairings end in divorce, often with the female leaving the male. About 6% of chicks are raised by single parents. Like the Hooded Warblers mentioned last time, Penguins occasionally (about 5% of the time) form trios. Non breeding females may join a breeding pair as a kind of nanny. Kidnap of eggs or chicks by chickless penguins occurs sometimes. It’s like a Penguin soap opera. 

Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Courtship, Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding, Parenting Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time… something not about gay animals!

Original Penguin image from Wikipedia Commons.

Edward Snowden, in the palace of phoenixes

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden answering* some of the “unmerrrrkan, traytor!” accusations that have been flying around in the usual reckless, unsupported, contra-factual and rabble-rousing way in the US media:

“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

What a conspiracy revelation. The US military-industrial-entertainment complex knows phoenixes are real and there’s a massive Sino-American phoenix-petting race that they don’t want the public to know about.

But seriously, if you’ve been obtaining any of your knowledge about Snowden and the US government appointing itself Big Brother from some American Ken and Barbie puppet show “news” programme, get some real and unbiased information about the subject from the horse’s (or phoenix’s) mouth because the situation is several different varieties of fucked up and Snowden has done the whole world a huge service by bringing it all out. He also created another great aphorism when he noted that suspicionless and universal surveillance taking place outside of the USA (as per the US government’s assurances) is still about 95% of the world and applies to any US citizen who ever sets foot outside the country, even if it seems at all sensible for anybody to believe that US citizens aren’t all under Big Brother’s all-seeing algorithmic eye as well.

* (during his live Q&A with The Guardian this afternoon)

Re: the image below, if you wish you may take it as indicative of the fact that I had far too much time on my hands this afternoon.

Snow Den and the Phoenix.

Songbird divorces

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Hooded Warblers are small yellow, green and black songbirds who spend the summer in North America and winters in Mexico and Central America.

These birds take part in all manner of homosexual and alternate-heterosexual family arrangements. Heterosexual pairs rarely build nests, but when two males get together they build one together. Sometimes they raise eggs that have been parasitically laid in their nest by a Cowbird. Male pairs also adopt eggs that have been abandoned by a female Warbler, or they shack up with another male after the female leaves; up to 50% of heterosexual pairings lead to this kind of “divorce”. There are also three-way partnerships in addition to pairs, but despite this superficial monogamy (or binogamy) over a third of Hooded Warbler young were fathered by males playing away from their partners. Single parenting is also common.

Plumage transvestism (i.e. females having some degree of male plumage and therefore a transgendered appearance) is also very frequent. This ranges from having a few black feathers on the head like a male to being visually indistinguishable from a male. In this species males are mostly the only ones who sing, but some of the transvestite females are able to sing as well.

Hooded Warbler (Wilsonia citrina)

Homosexuality: Male Transgender: Transvestism Behaviours: Pair-bonding, Parenting Ranking: Moderate Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… gay pride march of the Penguins

Original Hooded Warbler image from Wikipedia Commons.

You catch more Flycatchers with honey…

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. Ocher-Bellied Flycatchers are small, long-tailed, olive green birds who live in lowland forests between Mexico and the Amazon.

These Flycatchers have a complex social organisation and three distinct types of male. About 42% are territorial, defending “courts” in the foliage within which they perform courtship displays. Sometimes groups of these territorials form an area of several nearby display courts, also known as a lek. 10% of males are satellites who associate with territorials but do not display. This could be regarded as a form of apprenticeship, since they often inherit the territory when the owner retires. 48% of males are itinerant and have no territory either of their own or in waiting.

The aim of the male leks is to attract a female mate, but territorial males will also court other males who visit. These visiting males will adopt the behaviour of females in every detail and be courted as if they really were female. Most interestingly of all, it appears that the courting males only realise that their mate is male when they reach the point of mating with them. At this point they will usually chase away the behaviourally “transvestite” male. The itinerant males, conversely, must be well aware that they are being courted by another male. There have been observations of apparently bisexual territorial males who court females in their own territory, but then go as a visitor in search of same-sex action in the territories of other males.

Ocher-Bellied Flycatcher (Mionectes oleagineus dyscola)

Homosexuality: Male Transgender: Transvestism Behaviours: Courtship Ranking: Incidental Observed: Wild

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… more tiny avian transvestites!

Say yes I will yes to Bloomsday

Even his lapels are filthy.

Today, the 16th of June, is Bloomsday: the annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce in general, and of his landmark Modernist novel Ulysses in particular. It’s a landmark in the literary sense and also in the geographical sense, a dauntingly huge and dense wodge of cellulose. If ever a book was better read weightlessly as an e-book, Ulysses is it. June 16th 1904 is the Dublin day described in hyperreal detail by the book’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, and re-enacted by Joyce fanatics every year since 1954.

The 16th of June was also significant as the date of Joyce’s first outing with the woman who would become his beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. So why don’t you celebrate Bloomsday by starting on Ulysses if you haven’t already? To be honest you might regret it and give up in frustration as many have done before, but you definitely won’t regret trying. But first, how about this:

IT’S ONLY THE BEST COMPLETEST MOST BROWNSEXFUL PAGE OF SHEER FILTH WRITTEN BY JAMES JOYCE TO HIS WIFE ON THE WHOLE BLOODY INTERNET.

http://adoxoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/fμckbird-and-jim-james-joyces-letters-to-nora-barnacle

It’s been linked from Tumblr, Reddit and even by those depraved little naughty farties at The Telegraph. The readership counts for the page are already predictably massive, as they are every year on this day.

And of course there’s also Kate Bush’s magnificent and typically loopy-sexy tribute to Ulysses: The Sensual World. A few years ago she finally released the song as originally intended, with quotes from Joyce. These had been forbidden by the Joyce estate in the late 80s. But I still prefer this version, if only because I don’t think there are enough pastiches of Joycean prose in the world. I think it’s more fun and more in the spirit of Joyce to make it up– as Bush was forced to– than to just quote it.

Look! Kate’s raided the costume box at the local amateur dramatic society again, now she’s sashaying through a forest fire and hopping around like a scary crow and being all sexy and whatnot. Not pictured: police search team and duty psychiatrist.

Happy Bloomsday my hot little boys and girls, you brownarsed blackguards, you whores of the hedge.

No sex please, we’re Proboscis Monkeys

More from Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl. The Proboscis Monkey and its extraordinary nose lives in Borneo. The species is regarded as vulnerable, one stage away from being endangered.

Proboscis groups are centred around a polygamous male with several adult female mates, although males have little say in the group’s social life or decision making. Female relationships hold the group together and most friendly or aggressive interactions take place between females. You could possibly conceptualise it from a less patriarchal and heteronormative viewpoint as a group of females who maintain a single male partner that they agree to share. Sometimes the “excess” males band together in all-male troops.

Both males and females take part in homosexual activity, although neither heterosexual and homosexual advances are always welcomed and the aggressor will try to force them. But sexual activity of any orientation is fairly rare. In one study, there were only 12 mountings in a whole year, two of which (17%) were same-sex. 28% of all adult males never have heterosexual relations because they live in all-male groups. Proboscis Monkeys will even try to stop others having sex. Attempted heterosexual copulations gather audiences who try to disrupt the mating pair by climbing on them, pulling the male’s nose, making noises, or making distracting movements. It’s like a mashup of monkey porn and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Proboscis Monkey (Nasalis larvatus)

Homosexuality: Female & Male Behaviours: Affectionate, Sexual, Pair-bonding Ranking: Incidental Observed: Wild, Captivity

(See It’s Gay Animal Fortnight for an explanation of this box.)

Next time on Gay Animal Fortnight… Boy Flycatchers who like Boy Flycatchers who act like Girl Flycatchers.

Original Proboscis Monkey image from Wikipedia Commons.