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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.

Doomed

“Why worry so much about the future of a doomed world?”

A delightfully nihilistic quote attributed to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project and of the first atomic weapons, although it’s probably apocryphal. It seems to originate in French from Michel Houllebecq’s book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. The English translation of Houllebecq actually mentions in a footnote that the quote is untraceable.

Houllebecq is, shall we say, a not uncontroversial writer who may conceivably be projecting his own profound misanthropy and negativity onto Oppenheimer; Lovecraft’s, too. Even so, it’s in character for a man who made it possible for the human race to render itself and most other life on the planet totally extinct within a matter of minutes.

It’s also in character for Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ”The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

PS: “Fat Americans”

A footnote to the previous post about Americans being the weirdest people in the world: the image above is the first one thrown up by a Google image search for “fat Americans”. It’s been reposted, Reddited and ripped off so many hundreds of times that I wasn’t able to track down its original photographer or origins. If you know or by some weird quirk of fate you are in fact the photographer himself or herself, leave a comment. It’s also been used by mainstream American magazines and blogs to illustrate articles about American obesity.

I’m not saying that many Americans aren’t obese, because they are and contrary to some particularly shrill and screwed up segments of obese American society it’s not “fat-shaming”, “hate speech” or whatever to tell people that it’s unhealthy, self-destructive and a needless drain on the state’s and the planet’s finite resources to eat so much and so badly that you get this fat. People slowly killing themselves with eating disorders is a major and ever-growing psychological and societal problem in most developed countries, not a personal lifestyle choice that doesn’t really impact anybody else like dyeing your hair or getting a tattoo.

But anyway, what nobody appears to have noticed is that the sign in the window (top left) suggests that this McDonald’s is not in the USA because the sign is in some kind of non-Western script. Cyrillic, maybe? Armenian? Again, please correct my ignorance if it’s immediately obvious to you what language the sign is in. I suppose the children themselves could still be American.

My slightly autistic observational skills noticed this discrepancy immediately, I just thought I’d share it especially for any Americans who might have been feeling a bit fragile after the last thing I posted. Assuming it’s some consolation to you that children in other countries are getting as horrifically, life-threateningly obese as they are in yours.

“Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World”

This is Eden Wood, from Arkansas. She is an “actress, model and singer” who was made to enter beauty pageants when she was 14 months old. She is currently eight years old, having “retired” from pageants at the age of six. QED.

Although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s an example of confirmation bias because I’ve been saying and writing similar things for years, I just read a lengthy but very interesting article about the ways in which social sciences like anthropology, economics and behaviourism may be even more ethnocentric, subjective and ideological than all but the chippiest post-colonial theorists have portrayed them.

In short, social science and its “truths” have been dominated by people from the USA and their culture. And the citizens of the United States are the weirdest and most subjective people in the world. US dominance means that Weird Japan or Weird Asia are internet genres, while Weird USA is just the internet in general. Hollywood films and US TV shows label Paris as “Paris, France”, implying that most people in the world think of the Paris in Texas first of all. They don’t. Studies of sexual mores in the USA somehow get extrapolated to the behaviour of everyone else. And so on. Note that in the quote below even the article’s author apparently unreflectively uses “we” and “our” to mean US citizens:

“In the end they titled their paper ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.”

The firehose

Twitter calls its unmediated stream of all the millions of tweets “the firehose”, and my new page at the stupidly named but engaging and useful RebelMouse fits that description with its dynamic, auto-updating page of interesting stuff culled from posts at my two blogs and on the aforementioned Twitter. It’s still in beta and I don’t even do Instagram or the other networks it can link to but there’s already a veritable torrent of links, images and revivals of old posts there. Stand still and cover your vitals or you might do yourself an injury.

https://www.rebelmouse.com/AlistairGentry

Eric Gill, sans consentement

“‘Bath and slept with Gladys,’ runs one entry in the diary. Such Gill family intimacies seem routine, a habit. A few weeks later there are more surprising entries; ‘Expt. [experiment] with dog in eve’ [the rest has been obliterated]. Then, five days later, ‘Bath. Continued experiment with dog after and discovered that a dog will join with a man’”

Fiona MacCarthy quoting the diaries of Eric Gill from November and December of 1929, in her eponymous biography. Gladys was Eric’s sister.

This post is a companion of sorts to the enduringly popular one I did on Adoxoblog about James Joyce and the extremely explicit letters he wrote to the magnificently monickered Nora Barnacle. There’s something quite joyous, delightful and possibly even endearing in the way Joyce talks very dirty and explains his wild fantasies of giving it to his Mrs up the wrong ‘un, with her full and equally enthusiastic consent.  There’s a good reason why so many people find the letters so arousing, or funny, or both.

The same cannot be said of what the sculptor and typographer Eric Gill (1882-1940) was up to in roughly the same period, as revealed in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of him. It involves incest, paedophilia, bestiality and extremely hypocritical claims to Catholic piety, so if these things are triggering to you and the quote above is already more than enough, then be warned that it only gets worse and don’t click to read the whole post. Strong language, upsetting scenes, etc.

Gill’s design influence can still be felt all over the world, and of course even more so in his native Britain. Gill Sans remains well known in all kinds of applications, including the iconic Penguin books typography, as a standard digital font installed on many computers, and in the modern BBC logo. His carvings also still adorn the Deco parts of the BBC’s headquarters at the end of Regent Street in London; a particular irony given the recent revelations that the BBC in the 1970s was a kind of free-wheeling paedotopia where a clique of light entertainment sexual predators were well-known within the corporation and for the most part tolerated because boys will be boys. The sculpture is undeniably lovely– inspired by The Tempest, the carvings of Ariel in turn inspired the title of the BBC’s in-house newsletter– but herein lies part of the problem, once you know what he got up to and how closely his artwork is tied to the sexual abuse of children and animals. As MacCarthy aptly puts it in a Guardian article about working on the biography:

“Having read Gill’s own account of his experimental sexual connections with his dog in a later craft community at Pigotts near High Wycombe, his woodcut The Hound of St Dominic develops some distinctly disconcerting features.”

The “cut direct”

Etiquette: Rules and Usages of the Best Society was published in Australia in 1885 for the benefit of “the better sort” among our colonial cousins. Not the crims, in other words. Some of the advice is very wise, some of it is surreal, while some of it– such as the recommended homemade treatments for acne or grey hair– is liable to end with a trip to the accident and emergency room.

THE “CUT DIRECT”

The “cut direct,” which is given by a prolonged stare at a person, if justified at all, can only be in case of extraordinary and notoriously bad conduct on the part of the individual “cut,” and is very seldom called for. If any one wishes to avoid a bowing acquaintance with another, it can be done by looking aside or dropping the eyes. It is an invariable rule of good society that a gentleman cannot “cut” a lady under any circumstances, but circumstances may arise when he may be excused for persisting in not meeting her eyes, for if their eyes meet, he must bow.

“A gentleman cannot “cut” a lady under any circumstances, but circumstances may arise when he may be excused for persisting in not meeting her eyes, for if their eyes meet, he must bow.”

VULGARISMS

In conversation, one must scrupulously guard against vulgarisms. Simplicity and terseness of language are the characteristics of a well-educated and highly-cultivated person. It is the uneducated or those who are but half-educated, who use long words and high-sounding phrases. A hyperbolical way of speaking is mere flippancy, and should be avoided. Such phrases as “awfully pretty,” “immensely jolly,” “abominably stupid,” “disgustingly mean,” are of this nature, and should be avoided. Awkwardness of attitude is equally as bad as awkwardness of speech. Lolling, gesticulating, fidgeting, handling an eye-glass or watch-chain and the like give an air of gaucheire, and take off a certain percentage from the respect of others.

“Lolling, gesticulating, fidgeting, handling an eye-glass or watch-chain and the like give an air of gaucheire, and take off a certain percentage from the respect of others.”

Saint George’s Day

Georgios.

The day when England barely celebrates its Greek patron saint and sheepishly denies having any national pride. The day when we remember that Christianity, via the story of George slaying the dragon, tacitly acknowledges the existence of dragons. If they weren’t real, how could George slay one? So not believing in dragons would technically seem to be heretical if you’re a Christian.