suits vs. hoodies

If we're going to ban items of clothing, shouldn't we start with the business suit?

While we don't condone shoplifting, terrorising old ladies or generally making other people's lives a misery, the tabloids seem to be picking on the wrong people. Casual research suggests serious fraud, insider trading or acts of corporate manslaughter are unlikely to be carried out by people wearing hooded sweatshirts. Photographs of senior executives of British manufacturers of land mines, anti-personnel grenades and cluster bombs have shown no evidence of hoodie-wearers. Businessmen offering large amounts of cash in return for peerages, and the politicians who accept the cash, tend towards less casual items of clothing. When the decision was made to invade Iraq, no-one wore a hoodie. And the men who think Guantanamo Bay is still a good idea do not wear hoods themselves, though they have been known to offer them to guests. Sure, there's the odd villain who wants to conceal his face. But there's bigger villains around who have no such shame.

Jon Matthews

(entire article written by Matthews, and taken from www.howies.co.uk)

Scribe on 'the one and the other'

One common defence for the 'Goodness of God' in the face of worldly evils is that is takes pain and evil to give sense to happiness and goodness. It takes one thing to understand its opposite. Arguably, some things can not be understood without knowing their opposite, or at least contrasts. Whether you subscribe to this or not, it makes good sense, in theory at least.

Jason Mraz, singer-songwriter, sums it up adeptly for the less philosophically-inclined;

It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction

…

It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to make you yawn, brother
And it takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other


In fact, in one sense, the relationship between two extremes is in fact a close one. To draw a clumsy comparison by way of example, in one sense Nazism and Stalinism are poles apart on the ‘political line’, yet very much neighbours in another.

Personally, I enjoy cold weather. Yet this is, for the most part, only because it enables me to enjoy it by looking out from the window of a warm lounge, sipping a cup of tea. Similarly, people say they appreciate home more when returning from a holiday. We usually only want iced drinks when enjoying the heat; thus contrasts are inescapable yet often overlooked.

WARNING; pointless philosophical/pretentious bit:

Night time follows day; it’s an inescapable cycle. Indeed, regular cycles bring organization and routine to all forms of life. We can’t appreciate the night if we don’t understand that apart from having its own nature (say, the property of n), it is also intrinsically lacking the nature of day (-d). Are the two mutually defining? I’d go so far as to say yes, but theoretically I could be wrong. For all practical purposes (n) always = (-d) and vice versa. Yet I suppose this is a matter of opinion; a sort of optimism and pessimism, but to do with how one sees contrasts. That is to say, one person may be more mentally aware of night (they may, for example, exclusively work night-shifts), thus their default awareness is of (n) and (n=-d). Likewise, another person may base their entire work and personal life around day-time, and seeing as the night time (in their mind, the absence of day) provides them with the contrast to the default, they think in terms of (d) and (n=-d). The first person to mention dusk and dawn gets a slap.

These differences may seem trivial, but we some things can only be understood in terms of contrast or comparison. If we didn’t have an awareness of contrast and comparison, many properties/attributes (and adjectives, linguistically speaking) would be meaningless; ‘big’, ‘tall’, ‘old’, ‘beautiful’, ‘rich’, ‘cold’ and ‘heavy’ for example.



Aside from these theoretical distinctions, there are many examples in mundane life. As per the above lyrics, the satisfaction of finding something can only come if that thing has been lost. Pleasure can only be appreciated by contrast to a lack of it, although in this case, the latter state doesn’t necessarily mean discomfort.

These observations are, however, not very practical. Informing the mother of a dying child in Africa that her infant’s death is helping some people to understand the dichotomy of good and evil, or slyly pointing out to the winners of a football match that all they are doing is providing a context for the other side to be losers is of no practical value, no matter how theoretically correct.

Sometimes we feel so relieved to sit down in a comfy chair and have five minutes peace, because we’ve been busy, feeling down, or out of our comfort zone. But it takes the bad to know the good, the dark to know the light. Not that that’s much consolation, at times. But it’s nice to know.

something I said...

A "hey" met with a very wary or suspicious "hi?" (read "do I know you? What the hell do you want?")

That's the limit of our conversations really.

So maybe a simple greeting isn't the best place to start. Now this wouldn't be a problem if it were some stranger or someone I was hitting on. But it's the person I'm supposed to be living with, for fuck's sake.

Can I get anything right?

Scribe on Art

SEEKING FAME through art is, to paraphrase the infamous and elusive graffiti artist Banksy, like going to a restaurant and ordering a meal because you want to have a shit. Instead, he argues fame is only deserved when one has made ‘something that means something’. Fame, then, is a by-product - the shit after the meal, if you will; something maybe predictable but not the initial intention. Whether one agrees with this (as I do) or not, this begs the question ‘what is it that is valuable about art?’. For some it is the effort and thus proportionate end result that makes art worthwhile. For others it is the fact that the art exists at all.

It has become fashionable of late to bludgeon the question ‘what is art, anyway?’ over the heads of art critics; amateur and professional alike. This form of nihilism and readiness to embrace relativism both alarms and annoys me. Whilst staying in Edinburgh with a friend I found myself embroiled in a heated and admittedly alcohol-fuelled debate on the definition and value of art. The young lady I was speaking to informed me she was studying art at College (giving her, in her mind no doubt, the trump card when it came to quality of opinion). Predictably we arrived at one controversial area; ‘what IS art?’.

It insults my intelligence to be told that something that the ‘artist’ spent little time and thought on actually has a deep meaning which goes part way to exploring the soul and nature of man. Or some such pretentious bollocks. In fact, I can’t decide which is worse; those appalling messes which take little time to produce, or those which have tens of thousands of pounds spent on them in research, ‘prototypes’ and sourcing. At least Artist A had the decency to only spend a few hours knocking together Untitled Waste of Space I and is now contentedly applying meaning to it, whereas Artist B spent nine months debating how to go about his work. In the end, of course, only to product Unoriginal Shite-Pile II. Artist A, after all, had the manners to get his artistic spewing over with quickly. On the other hand though, at least Artist B is tied up in his work for a fair while, and not free to run amok concocting other monstrosities within hours’ notice like his less-forward planning associate.

To be fair, the term ‘monstrosity’ is the wrong one to be using. Whilst I can fully understand and appreciate works of art which I find aesthetically distasteful, what is more distressing is viewing something—be it a sculpture, painting or amorphous mass of mouldy socks—which is actually pleasurable to behold yet means nothing. No matter how much the artist maintains it represents an ironic take on anti-capitalist post-war Scarbourgh. For me, the quality of art is usually, but not always, is in proportion to the time, effort and genuine skill that has gone into its production. Some modern works of art require little or no skill, yet critics of this ambiguous genre are made to feel intellectually lacking; as though they are somehow missing a deep point, and don't have to deepness of thought to appreciate a tent with names painted on, or, say, a bird on a stick (yes, Emin, this means you).

It would be fair, I think, for one to feel rather cheated if upon going to an art museum the art on show is so 'open to interpretation' that the onus is decidedly on the beholder to fill in the gaps, give meaning, and make entertainment. Theatre producers hardly develop a production which requires the audience to attend and provide sound effects, the odd line, decide upon the stage directions and maybe decide on just what the outcome is.

Oh dear... I fear may just have just given someone, somewhere, an embryonic-stage Turner Prize...