Art or porn in Paris exhibition

"Ma Pensée Sérielle" by Miriam Cahn (17/02/2023 to 14/05/2023 at palaisdetokyo in Paris) has been criticised for appearing to depict an act fellatio on children. But it’s intended by the artist as a critique of rape as a war crime.

LGB vs TQ+

 

I posted this on my Fakebook this week and one of my FB friends asked me to explain what it was about. Some artists eschew queries about their work but they're the pretentious ones and I'm not one of them.

Moonage Daydream of gender-bending David Bowie

Moonage Daydream is a brilliant audio-visual collage of David Bowie’s life and art, mainly his life as a performer from Ziggy Stardust to Let's Dance: the 1970s to 1980s, that is. Directed by Brett Morgen, it showcases Bowie's many talents besides being a singer-songwriter with mercurial and chameleon-like charisma: his dancing and mime and painting skills and all-round creativity.

I should declare that my sister’s best school-friend’s mum was good friends with David Bowie’s mum in Boring Beckenham where we grew up together - not Cool Brixton, as Bowie claims (yet again) in this film - so I practically knew the guy!

The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge

The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great read. My favourite scene is on p321, where Mel advises Ginny how to write up the story so as to avoid the risk of her wealthy adversaries taking her down with questionable libel claims: "Fictionalise it. Dress it up as something else ... Find some other subject where a bunch of fanatics take incontrovertible truths and rip them up for some crazy ideology." Mel's suggestion is to have the fanatics "argue that biological sex is a false concept imposed on the world by racist imperialists. Or is that too far-fetched?"
I wasn't expecting it to be such a romping adventure with twists and turns of character. I found many characters credible and believable.
(Slight spoiler alert: stop reading here if you haven't read TEOTWIF yet). Shane was an exception, maybe, due to the way he turned into more and more of a callous, unprincipled villain. But still, he was the Love-To-Hate character and deserved what he got!

View all my reviews

Blessing poem by John O'Donohue

To create a space for all our words, 

Drawing us to listen inward and outward. 

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place 

Where the Eucharist of the ordinary happens, 

Transforming our broken fragments 

Into an eternal continuity that keeps us. 

Rabbits as symbol of rebirth at Christmas

Here is one of Oxfam's Christmas cards this year. It depicts rabbits in moonlight.

art from plastic in the sea

Making art from plastic debris in our seas and oceans is a common theme among various artists today. There is plenty of source material to work with, after all. Two such artists are Fran Crowe and Hannah Scott -

Carmageddon hubcap sculpture

Carmageddon – the hubcap sculpture. Is there anyone with artistic inclination among my friends who would like to collaborate with me on making a sculpture? I call it Carmageddon and it is basically a large sphere covered in hubcaps. Thinks of it as a rollerball coming down the road to crush cyclists, pedestrians and any other kind of non-motorised traffic. The sculpture is a protest against car culture, obviously.

urban myth of devils interval banned by church

Is it an urban myth that the so-called 'devil's interval' was banned by the Catholic church in the middle ages? (It is also called the diminished fifth tritone and it's the distinctive interval in Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.)

reflections on Experiment with Light

My reflections on Experiment with Light, the one-day Quaker retreat on Saturday 9 April at Colchester Meeting House,