The transient and the ancient.

 

So much art

is now self-advertisement.

How many delegates to COP-27

in sun-baked Southern Egypt
are reducing
their personal use of water ?

On the 100th anniversary of his death,

I still find him unreadable
in either French or English.

He showed, at mind-numbing length
how odious are they who live in luxury.

He was pretty odious himself.

The Dead Proust, by Man Ray.

Some of the 40,000 Russian refugees

(including colonels and counts)
who fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution
drove taxis, just as Putin had to do to keep alive
seventy years later
when the Turbo-capitalist invasion
hung his country out to dry.

(The fabulously rich Russians were already there.)

Oscar Wilde did not remark

that the trouble with civilisation
is its brain-washing vulgarity.

This quiet medieval village

is a good place to be.
I never lock my house,
nor my car, which I park
on a very quiet street
100 metres from my house
along with a trailer
currently half-full of firewood.
Yesterday I left 60 euros
on the front passenger seat
where I discovered them this afternoon.

'Even the dead can't escape climate change.'

 

Ericky Boniphace’s photographic project –
Even The Dead Can’t Escape Climate Change
– followed labourers disinterring the remains of those buried
in a cemetery near Dar-Es-Salaam’s Msimbazi River.
For several years in a row
rising water levels have eroded the land the cemetery sits on
and swept graves away.

An admonishment

to humans and literate pets.

'New Liberal Economics' ensure

that the inevitable poor pay
proportionally more in taxes than anyone else,
because most tax-revenue comes
from 'goods and services', alcohol and energy.

In Ukraine,

CT215, a French street-artist,
is Doing His Bit for Democracy
with stencils.

"The Western News Media" are not mentioning
the inevitable (if small) Ukrainian atrocities...

"History shows"

that language
creates more conflict
than co-operation.

Evolution is not the same
as progress.

Today's Interesting Fact.

Rigor Mortis
usually begins with the eyelids.

We all go through

The Almost-Universal Brainwash:

that we should Like Other Sheople
(except those whom we are taught
to dislike or to hate).

Light-show,

Salisbury cathedral
(twelfth century).

Ah, the music to accompany it!

One can drive oneself to distraction

trying to keep sane.

Hot news from Italy.

One of the Etruscan bronzes
preserved in the mud of the hot baths
at San Casciano dei Bagni,
between Viterbo and Montalcino.

It is probably too much to expect

that people should consider
thoughtfulness
before 'mindfulness'.

 

Today is the centenary of the birth

of one of the USA's greatest writers,
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

A little bit of slightly-good news.

 Health

Australian researchers trial

temporary sperm blocker

in ‘gamechanger’
for men’s contraception.

Although human language is a disaster

for the planet, at least
it is possible to say so.
But numbers cannot ever indicate
the catastrophe of numbers.

A famous war-correspondent,

Independent Member of Parliament
and UNICEF Special Representative
for Humanitarian Emergencies,
wrote of the United States:

Of all the 90 countries that I worked in
[as foreign correspondent for the BBC]
it seemed to me. with the possible exception
of Equatorial Guinea, to be the most alien.

– Martin Bell, Through Gates of Fire, 2003, p.149.

It is hard to be kind

and honest and transparent
because transparency is thought to be unkind.

"What a misshapen and ridiculous

thing the penis was!  Half of them didn't even
work properly, and all of them looked pathetic
and detachable, like some wrinkled sea-creature
– like something you'd find goggling at you
and swaying in an aquarium." 

– Paul Theroux: Doctor Slaughter, 1984.

Winter's coming in Ukraine.

A man in Kyiv
shows how, in the event of no electricity or gas,
he would erect a tent in his flat
and pass the nights in a sleeping-bag inside it.

Breathing inside a small tent, he said,
will keep me warm.

On either side of a road in Tibet,

gullies formed by rainwater erosion.

Li Ping/TNC Photo Contest 2022

Twins ?

 

Gay Pride, Buenos Aires.

So...why not cannibalism ?

Anthropologists don't talk about sins,
but they do make value-judgements
which are largely Abrahamic
(or should I say Abrahamist ?). 

If I were to consider flaws as sins
I'd say that the first sin was
to regard sex as other than fun;

and the second was
to view animals as other.

As for the third
and maybe subsequent sins
I'll need to ponder further.

The two ugliest mammals

are, surely, the tiny, harmless
naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber)

and the paler forms of naked human ape
(Homo sapiens amens var. pallidus). 

It seems obvious,

after you reflect a little:

To know too much is not
to know everything.

Flesh of their flesh.

Only the very corrupt
(and politicians)
can even imagine the corruption
of the very rich. 

'Drop-box Babies'.

'Until women's constitutional right to abortion in the USA was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2922, no one gave much thought to Safe Haven laws. 

These allow a mother to give up her new-born baby for adoption, at a designated site, anonymously and without risk of prosecution. 'Safe Haven' legislation first appeared in the US in 1999 in Texas, in response to a rise in the number of abandoned babies. Now it exists in every state. These laws were never intended as an alternative to abortion. But as the options for unhappily-pregnant women diminish, some are anticipating an increase in the number of babies left by desperate mothers in hospitals and specially designed Baby Boxes at local fire stations.'

(report from The BBC)

In earlier times, such drop-boxes, baby-hatches or niches were organised informally (if not always anonymously) by the Catholic Church.  Here is one (no longer used) in my village of Caylus in SW France.

Hypocrisy

is just cultural schizophrenia.

 

Family Portrait, 1997.

 

Rimaldas Vikšraitis

If Russia

'is where idealists are sent to die',

America is where they are genetically modified.

 

Collins Dictionary 'Word of the Year' –

Permacrisis.

It should have been
the first word ever,
maybe even
the First Word of God.

The Social Circus.

First conform

Then perform.

Nice to see you.

 

photo by Tanya Griffin Houpermans

Tell a man

that something – anything –
is a machine, 

whether a house,
a hospital, an army,
an assembly, a relationship,
a person, a deity,
a brain, an atom or a galaxy,

and he'll love it.

The clocks go back (in Europe).

The older I get
the less I like myself
and others.

The Next British Prime Minister ?

photo by Kin Cheung

 

One of the great truths,

written by a great writer
in the persona of Bernie Gunther :

Being wrong is an important part of being right
and only time* can tell which it turns out to be.

– Philip Kerr in Prague Fatale.

*Actually, only the end of time.

"Mondriaan painting

 

has been hanging upside down for 75 years."
What a tragedy!

Automatic Editing.

Who needs bad memories
when the good ones make you weep ?

A abbreviated taxonomy of human types.

Socio- and psycho-paths, Very Nasties,
Moderate Nasties, Shits, Creeps, Bleeders,
Proselytisers, Yes-men (and -women),
Sycophants, Followers, Fence-sitters,
Side-changers, Leaders

Scapegoats, Sheep, Compromisers,
Well-intentioned, Vacillators, The Unreliable,
The Decisive, the Thrusting, The Modest

Heroes at the right place and time,
The Saintly, Hermits in the Forest

Narva.

On the left is the Danish-built castle
in Estonia (which the conquering Danes called Estland)
...EU...NATO.
On the right is the Russian castle of Ivangorod
in the Russian Federation.
Russian is the language spoken
on both sides of the river.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct4c5r

My African friend asks me

why white people seem to smile only for show,
and say Thank-you and Sorry so very much.
I reflect on this. 
I wonder if it is because an emotional insecurity
(born of Christianity)
that has also led them to conquer and ransack the world,

has suppressed their playfulness in the interests of competitiveness,
and engendered a fear of spontaneity
in the pursuit of a grim hedonism which
has turned them into leering puppets ?

Beauty before mere cleanliness !

An Iranian hermit, Amou Hajji, dubbed
“the world’s dirtiest man”
(for not taking a shower for more than half a century)
has died at the healthy old age of 94. 

Another Corrupt Oligarchy.

The prime minister and finance minister of the UK
(England and its subject nationettes)
are both multi-millionaires. In fact, I think
that the prime minister is a billionaire.

From Azerbaijan,

"Adaptive Fashion"

not for the predatory male
nor the submissive female gaze,

and not made by glamour-obsessed queer men
for the rich and young and disquietingly thin,

but for the comfort of the wearers.