Sunshine and Shade in the Weald of Kent.

A lovely walk today with the Dog Jed, in the rolling Weald of Kent, with its twelve feet of topsoil.

Across the fields

And into the woods ....

Jed is far, far ahead

But there is plenty to catch the eye

The red, white and blue, original form.

And so, back to the garden gate ...

What could be better?  Not much.

The Bluebells this year are lovelier, by far, than I have ever seen them.

When Spring comes around again, one of its greatest pleasures in southern England is to go and see the bluebells that carpet the woodlands with a hazy blue.

They are prolific in hazel woods, which in turn are prolific around here, and usually have been coppiced for centuries, providing a perfect bluebell environment.

Coppicing is an ancient method of woodland management that involves cutting the trees back almost to the ground every few years, so that they re-grow with thin straight branches.  This gives a nearly everlasting supply of wood for building, fencing and tool-making.

Another advantage of coppicing is that it ensures the  light canopy and dappled sunlight that bluebells prefer, so they become really well established: sometimes the colonies have been growing for hundreds of years, and cover many acres.

And I have never seen them lovelier than they were today on the Downs of West Sussex.

Take a look:

See what I mean?

And here are the Downs, that I love so much, probably because I was born among them.

A Down is a rounded, chalky, and largely treeless hill in southern England, with the same Old English root as "dune", as in sand dune.

I wrote about my favourite Down, and my Dad, here:  A Magic Summer Evening Long Ago.

More on Bluebells, which, as you might expect, are under threat from invasive species.

Remix: The Dialectic of Altered Books.

Brian Dettmar's intricate and skillful sculptures explore the meaning of knowledge and our relationship with it.  He insists on the obligation to challenge orthodoxy, and the right of the individual to do so.  This makes me very happy.

Dettmer:  Perpetuity to Rymer

(Thomas Rymer (1643-1713) English Historiographer Royal)

Dettmer's work is completely different to that of German sculptor Johannes Pfeiffer, which I wrote about recently (Weighing Words: Sculpture With Books).  Pfeiffer also articulates books as repositories of knowledge, and in his case the purpose is to critique censorship and rigidities of thinking. 

I liked the small exhibition that I saw in Turin. It conveyed, in a horribly static way, the deadness of thought control.  There is something deeply creepy about books entombed in concrete.

The Bible by Johannes Pfeiffer

Dettmer, by contrast, focuses on the other side of the intellectual coin: the dynamic potential of ideas; the opening up of thought; the importance of re-interpretation and re-integration; the development of knowledge through interaction with the material world; the evolution of meaning.

Take a look at this famous, lovely, brain-like creature:  or is it a magical helmet of knowledge? or a nifty mohican of dreams?  Anyway, it is made of a full set of encyclopedias (encycoplediae?).

The New World of Books
 All downloaded from Brian Dettmer's photostream on Flikr, under creative commons licence

How incredible is that?  Entrancing even?

Dettmer works by sealing the book or books with some kind of resin, and carefully cutting away one layer at a time, revealing images and text that are already there, putting them in new relationship to each other.  He never inserts, or moves the book's contents. What emerges is a new, or alternative, set of meanings, of knowledge.

Here is his Flickr slideshow, which is just astonishing.

And below is a video of Brian himself, setting out his ideas, and how he sees his work in relation to modern media.  He seems quite young to have achieved so much - each of his dozens (scores? hundreds?) of works must take ages to complete.

Perhaps he now has a studio of assistants, like the Dutch and Florentine humanists.

But he is a modern-day humanist.  As he says himself, his work is remix.

I will deffo be going to his New York exhibition 19 May-11 June 2011 at Kinz and Tillou, 525 W. 26th St.  It's in my calendar.  When will he next exhibit in London, I wonder?

Wedding Flowers

There was a wedding at St. Andrew's, Farnham on Saturday, and these were left behind, for the rest of us to enjoy.

You might also like A Churchyard in Surrey.

Weighing Words: sculpture with books

Spotted on the tables and windows of Unicredit's Leadership Learning Centre in Turin this week, some interesting work by German sculpture Johannes Pfeiffer.

Not sure I really understand, but interesting nevertheless; I liked it.

Most of the books seemed to be about philosophy, the arts and religion, so perhaps that is where the meaning lies.......

These works were recently shown at Pfeiffer's exhibition "Pesare les Parole", at the Turin City Multimedia Library (Biblioteca Archimede Settimo Torinese).

Bruce Springteen - No Surrender

Never beaten.  Still relevant.





We busted out of class had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school
Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say you're tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

We made a promise we swore we'd always remember
No retreat no surrender
Like soldiers in the winter's night with a vow to defend
No retreat no surrender

Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold
We swore blood brothers against the wind
I'm ready to grow young again
And hear your sister's voice calling us home across the open yards
Well maybe we could cut someplace of our own
With these drums and these guitars

Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend
No retreat no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There's a war outside still raging
you say it ain't ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed
with a wide open country in my eyes
and these romantic dreams in my head




With thanks to John J. Kelly of This Hard Land 2010 for reminding me.

Libya, the Security Council and our Responsibility.

Following today's mild remarks from the UN Security Council on Libya, after more than a week of slaughter there, I am reminded of this photo, which I took by chance a couple of weeks ago.

It shows the UN Secretariat Building, hidden to the left of the picture, reflected pinkishly at sunset in the Trump Tower, the dark building on the right.

Now, I don't believe there is any direct connection between Trump himself and either Libya or the UN, and as far as I know he does not deal in arms. But the webs of relationship between government, cruel exploitation and fabulous wealth have been so sharply clarified by the current uprisings, that it seems at least moderately symbolic, especially perhaps as that thin white building in the centre is the newly renovated US mission to the UN (and when I say renovated I mean, of course, "renovated").

The photo suggests perhaps the smoke and mirrors that obscure these shadowy relationships of neo-imperialism.

The reality, we have to remind ourselves, is far harsher than this somewhat dreamy crepuscular snap implies.

A particularly disgusting element of the current moment is the complicity of western governments in the poverty, terror and desperation of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.  The hypocrisy of the mumblings coming out of Washington, and the more robust denunciations emerging from Downing Street (even while blatantly dealing in arms and other acoutrements of repression) is hardly out of character, but gobsmacking nevertheless. 

Our government, and the business people they represent, are equally culpable with those they now denounce, who up till now have been doing the wet work for them.

Why on earth would they break the pattern and act against their own interest on the Security Council?  And their best interest is that Gaddafi should stay for the time being, provided he does not become a total embarrassment. That is why they have been stalling, in the hope that perchance he might weather this storm.  And Plan B, if the Libyan people force them to ditch him, will be to shepherd as far as possible the installation of a new puppet: more liberal, more democratic, more credible, but a puppet nevertheless, if they can.......

The point is not that they should now "do something" about Libya - its way too late for that. We didn't stop them when they were setting it all up (which is our culpability), and now we have all been overtaken by the people of Libya and the whole region.

Our job, our historical responsibility, is to limit the options of our respective governments to perpetuate this kind of oppression, in the present and for the future, and we have a huge opportunity right now.

The contradictions, the corruptions, the lies are so clear.  The best thing we in UK can do in support of the people in the Arab world in overthrowing their governments, and to advance the struggle for greater equality world wide and within our own countries, is to clarify the puppetry and linkages among all the actions that oppress and weaken us collectively - attacks on unions in the US, austerity in Europe and dictators supported by the west, to name but three, organize in our groups, and get out in the streets in vast collaborative numbers to stop them.

And, as they appear to have forgotten, a copy of Picasso's Guernica hangs, or used to hang, outside the Security Council Chamber.

The ambassadors and delegates used to walk past it each time they entered and left the chamber. Often it has been the backdrop to press conferences, and indeed the United States insisted that it be covered while they were bombing Iraq. I believe it was then moved a bit down the corridor, out of camera range.

I don't know what has happened to this remarkable, and always timely, image now that the Secretariat itself is under renovation (and no doubt a little "renovation"), and its various chambers are in temporary accommodation next door.

I wonder if the Ambassadors had it in mind as they juggled popular pressure and international law with their own national self-interest and the urgent pressure from regional tyrants to hold the line, as they prepared their expression of grave concern and deep regret about the excesses, but not the rule, of Gaddafi.


______________________

Just for the record, the current members of the Security Council are, in addition to the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States), Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, Germany, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa.

MagNews  has a great post that gives all their human rights records.  Prepare to be re-gobsmacked. @magsnews

And check out @itsmotherswork's post on the links between all of our struggles: Solidarity, multiculturalism and public service values.

And A regime in mortal freefall over at Lenin's Tomb, has more on the crocodile tears of western governments.  And Simon Jenkins: Britain Can Push Democracy or Weapons - not both.

And photoshopped or not, I like this pic.  It is by Muhammad Saladin Nusair, and has been placed in Mother Jones and Lenin's Tomb, among many, many others, I am sure.