If you’ve not yet come across them, the drawings of Kelvin Okafor are something else. They are pencil illusions, stunning graphite recreations by eye from photographs, each taking between 80 and 100 hours to complete.
The talent of some people is simply extraordinary.
I have recently rediscovered the joy of Monopoly.
In the days before HMV broke, I spotted a very attractive retro edition, in a wooden box, and I decided that as I couldn’t find my childhood box that I would buy it (my old version was a deluxe edition in a black box that included a locomotive token). After all, what better way could there be to pass the long winter evenings than to accrue a personal property fortune?
I was quickly and rudely reminded that there are no ideological bars to winning. My opponent, no, my enemy, a self-styled ex-Socialist Worker who is more than a little sceptical of my own liberal political values, proved to be the most ruthless and cunning capitalist I have ever come across. There was no mercy shown – she led from the beginning and destroyed me five times. Once or twice and I would put it down to a roll of the die. Five times and I was definitely the victim of the socialist incarnation of Donald Trump. (Personally, I think Monopoly provides a safe environment in which socialists can surrender to base instincts and act like the rest of us. That sound you can hear is the sound of me running for cover.)
Still licking my wounds, you could imagine my shock when Hasbro offered a world wide vote to replace a historic playing piece with a diamond ring, a guitar, a toy robot, a helicopter and a cat. The result of that vote? The iron bought it, securing just 8 percent of the vote, and was replaced with… a cat.
Now, I am a cat fan. I admire their cunning, their cold, calculating capacity for dissembling, their ruthless survival instincts and the juxtaposition between the lean, mean killing machine that most of them think they are and the fact that they are often the animal kingdom equivalent of Norman Wisdom, exhibiting a tremendous propensity for slapstick. I would say I own one, but I am pretty sure he owns me.
What a cat isn’t – or what it shouldn’t be – is a Monopoly playing token. To my mind, the iron was one of the more elegantly designed pieces. The cat that replaces it is pug ugly.
I indicated earlier that I can understand the general sentiment towards cats. We also live in a world in which we take refuge in cute things and fluffiness, and perhaps moreso amongst the social demographic that is likely to be taking part in online votes on game tokens. However, applying the same logic to the piece that was rejected, what does it say about the younger generation’s relationship with the iron? Judging from the crumpled trousers I see hanging off the backsides of “cool” types, it says pretty much everything. I wonder if irons are going to go the same way as the cassette tape? In ten years’ time, I can imagine a wide-eyed child pointing at an iron and murmuring incredulously: “Mummy, what is that?”
As it happens, it’s not the first time that pieces have been retired or changed. My retro edition partially recreates the 1935 edition and doesn’t include the wheelbarrow, introduced in 1937. However, it also doesn’t include three other tokens that were retired in the 1950s: the purse, the rocking horse and the lantern (the wheelbarrow already introduced, the 1950s saw the introduction of the man on horse and the dog). Other retired tokens include the sack of money (which existed in the 1999-2007 editions, having won a contest over a piggy bank and a bi-plane), a man on horseback and a Howitzer (!).
In the end it is probably that I am just not good at change. So I’ll just hanker after this classic set, knowing that if only I could have the lantern I’d win every time…
Street artists have a unique eye for taking things that most of us walk past, or regard as ugly or broken, and making them into something very different. Funny, surreal, thought-provoking and sometimes just beautiful, there is a tremendous variety of street art out there around the world.
It can provoke passionate discussion, with some dismissing it as merely an excuse for graffiti. Somehow, though, I think it is more than that, saying something about the urban areas in which we live, and giving value back to things that have lost their value and (sometimes purpose) through decay, damage and vandalism.
One of my favourites is OakoAk, described on his own website as a “French artist who likes to play with urban elements”. His work is simpler than some, often eschewing perspective illusions and instead going for the comic, occasionally tugging a heart-string.
Here’s a selection of some of his most recent, courtesy of Bored Panda:
“Electronic junk narrows our life space…”
Maxim Kamanin
Sometimes it feels like Hollywood is running to catch up with real life. And sometimes, real life seems even less believable than Hollywood’s penchant for technological exaggeration.
From the middle of nowhere comes an invention that might just revolutionise the way we interact with technology – in pretty much every way. Maxim Kamanin, a youngster from a remote village in southern Russia, is the inventor of a new form of display that may eliminate the need for computer screens entirely, freeing us up to work far more creatively with technology.
Displair literally puts digital images into the air, creating fully penetrable 3D images which can be viewed and manipulated. It is completely astonishing – like something out of Star Trek. It uses a cloud-inspired technology (and not cloud as it is usually thought of in computer tech terms) which somehow remains remarkably stable across varying temperatures. The Displair wiki entry goes into more detail.
From artists, architects and designers, to teachers, surgeons and inventors, the creative ways in which it could be used are immense.
The web-film site Focus Forward Films has a video of this astonishing invention in operation:
According to the last census (2011), there were still 176, 632 Jedi Knights in the United Kingdom. As the Guardian reported, that represented a significant decline on 2001 when around 300,000 Jedi Knights were keeping us safe from The Empire (coincidentally, George Bush was US President from 2001 to 2009), but they are still a force to be reckoned with. And thankfully, we are not in Star Wars: Episode IV “A New Hope” territory yet.
Hopefully, the ranks of aspiring Luke Skywalkers will be emboldened by the latest announcement from the White House. In responding officially to a petition on the White House website calling for America to build a Death Star, Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, offered this formal response:
“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:
- The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
- The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
- Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?”
The geopolitical ramifications of building a Death Star aside, Shawcross is quite right to remind folks that actually it wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of robust design. Perhaps a little more worryingly it shows just how deeply imprinted Star Wars is on the American psyche. But let’s not go there!
Anyone wanting a little light relief and some reassurance that, just occasionally, government officials do have a sense of humour, should read his full response.
Noise.
It fills our lives. It is something that is so constant that I doubt any of us really experience true silence except perhaps on a few occasions in our lives. There is the daily burr that forms a soundtrack to our lives that we barely pay attention to any more. There are the phones chirruping away, cars passing, doors closing, papers shuffling, colleagues talking at the water cooler, footsteps in the corridor. The list is endless.
In more peaceful places there is still noise: the wind in the trees, birds singing, the sea on the shore, the rustle of grass as we walk. Even now, in this house, with no music playing, the windows double-glazed and with the heating currently off, I can hear the whirr of the computer’s fan and my fingers clicking on the keyboard (and what a joy it is to be typing on a real keyboard, not a laptop or a Blackberry). At other times there might be the creak of pipes or the sound of the house settling after the day or a distant siren howling through the town.
Interestingly, pretty much the world’s quietest place isn’t in the middle of nowhere at all. It is at Orfield Laboratories, in their anechoic chamber:
Anechoic means echo free and this chamber is designed to completely absorb sound waves and create an experimental space in which there can be absolute silence. Somehow or other I suspect that I would end up being driven mad by the sound of the blood rushing in my ears!
Anyway, browsing Facebook, the feed of an old friend with whom I wish I kept in better touch flashed up a link to a blog: Noise – A human history. Starting Monday 18 March, this 30-part series will explore the role of sound in the past 100,000 years of human history As it says on the blog:
“Recorded on location around the world, it will take us from the shamanistic trance-music of our cave-dwelling ancestors, the babel of ancient Rome, the massacre of noisy cats in pre-revolutionary Paris, and the sonic assaults of trench warfare, right through to our struggle to find calm in the cacophony of a modern metropolis. This is not about sound in the abstract: it is about sound as a matter of life and death, pain and pleasure, feeling and intellect. People, and their past behaviours, are at the heart of it.”
Sound has always fascinated me – how we become attuned to some sounds and not to others, how music can bend our emotions, how people communicate, how we hear the world when we actually stop to listen. Something tells me that this series will be quite special.
Check it out – and those of you who enjoy quality radio, listen out for it.
Some people are just amazingly talented. Here are examples of the work of three artists that took my breath away. They each use our environment in very different ways.
Jessica Drenk was born and grew up in Montana, developing a tremendous affinity for the natural world around her, background that has had a very deep influence on her art. As reported by arts blog This Is Colossal:
Drenk’s most recent sculptures are a series called Implements, each of which begins with a mass of standard No. 2 pencils that have been tightly glued together. Using an electric sander she then molds the piece into a form that seems more likely to have originated in a dark cave or deep within the ocean than from a school desk. Of her work she says:
“By transforming familiar objects into nature-inspired forms and patterns, I examine how we classify the world around us. Manufactured goods appear as natural objects, something functional becomes something decorative, a simple material is made complex, and the commonplace becomes unique. In changing books into fossilized remnants of our culture, or in arranging elegantly sliced PVC pipes to suggest ripple and wave patterns, I create a connection between the man-made and the natural.”
Haroshi is a self-taught artist from Japan. This skull, made from recycled skateboard decks, is just awesome.
Finally, Vadim Zaritsky is a former army office turned artist and entymologist – and uses the wings of dead butterflies, found either beside the road or thrown out from collections. In his own words on Oddity Central:
“Butterfly collectors know that some wings are considered – collectors call it trash,” Zaritsky says. “If the wings are damaged, if they have partially faded, specialists would usually put them aside. It’s a shame to throw them away but you cannot use them either. In time, the bits may become infested with pests and you have to throw everything away anyway.”
According to figures released by the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics, more and more incidents of women being raped in England and Wales are being recorded:
|
2009/10 |
2010/11 |
2011/12 |
|
| Rape of a female |
13,902 |
14,589 |
14,767 |
| Rape of a male |
1,172 |
1,303 |
1,274 |
That is a total of 47,007 incidents of recorded rape over a three year period.
And the number of convictions for rape in that same period (and yes, I know there is no absolute read-across between the offences and convictions)?
1,372.
Yet these figures don’t reveal the horrific extent of rape and serious sexual offences in England and Wales: the report also shows that 57% of women told someone but not the police of a rape or serious sexual assault. 28% told no-one.
And then the questions…
There were “only” 40 non-custodial sentences for rape in 2011. Excuse me? Why were there any?
Apparently “Since 2005, there have been fewer than seven Suspended Sentences Orders (SSOs) given each year for rape of a female and none have been given for rape of a male.” What does the fact that any SSOs have been given say about differences in perceptions between rape of a female and rape of a male?
Another shocking statistic is that, on average, it is 722 days from the moment someone is raped until the completion of the case. That is almost two years of reliving the hell of what happened in order to secure justice. Why should someone have to wait so long?
There are so many important questions that arise from this report it is difficult to know where to start.
The figures should hit home like an iron bar hammered in your face.
They should be screamed across the front page of every newspaper. They are utterly appalling – and reveal a shocking affront to justice that reminds us we are light years from ensuring that rape victims receive the support they need to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice.
And now, in the wake of Leveson, is the ideal time for the press to demonstrate their worth. After all, we’ve had plenty of self-indulgent hand-wringing in recent months, most notably about the important role played by our newspapers in our public life and democracy. In his evidence to Leveson, The Sun’s editor, Dominic Mohan, extolled his paper’s virtues (Para. 60):
“It distils complex important issues of the day, including politics, finance and law into concise readable copy which educates and entertains.”
So, on a day when official statistics reveal such a shocking failure of our investigative and legal processes, on an issue that clearly straddles law and politics, what was this bastion of our free press’s front page?
Perhaps we would expect such crassness and double-standards from The Sun. But what were the front pages of most the other main UK papers today?
Only two national newspapers ran the story on their front pages: The Independent and i – the quality tabloid off-shoot of The Independent:
Metro, the newspaper given out free in major cities, also had it on its front page.
Where were all the others?
Where was The Guardian, never usually bashful in its self-promotion as the left-wing champion of women’s rights and awareness of issues that particularly affect women? Who knows. It certainly doesn’t consider this report front page news. Even after the Savile report was released, The Independent still had this story as a second headline on its website. By contrast, it was the 17th headline on The Guardian Online – appalling.
What does this lack of interest say about a media more concerned with itself than getting to the core of issues that affect hundreds of thousands of people in the most horrendous ways?
It is a corroboration of the silence and inaction that characterises our society’s approach to rape – an approach that continues to allow rapists to escape justice. With Savile, with the horrors of Steubenville and Delhi, perhaps this might just change. Perhaps. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that any of these are, in and of themselves, the answer.
As Deborah McIlveen, policy and services manager at Women’s Aid, told the Independent:
“Despite all that is known about rape and sexual violence, the justice system still fails to hold most rapists to account and so fails to deliver victim safety, public protection and management of perpetrator risk. These men are free to continue to rape and this is unacceptable, harmful and illegal.
“Most rape victims can identify their abuser, and many of these will be their partners or ex-partners. This ongoing failure to secure convictions will continue to leave women and young people vulnerable and in potentially risky situations.”
And as spokeswoman for Rape Crisis England and Wales told the Independent:
“The figures are shocking but sadly not that surprising. There has been lots of publicity and measures put in place to try and increase the conviction rate around rape and sexual abuse. But it looks like it is not having as much effect as we would like.
“It is a chicken and egg situation: women do not report offences because they know they are very unlikely to get a conviction. They know they would have to put themselves through a system which is very traumatic and are likely to come out at the other end with no justice.”
If it matters to you, read the report for yourself. Ask questions.
And don’t be silent.
I’m a Facebook follower of Upworthy, the social media site that sets out its mission: “To make meaningful stories go viral.” A particular story arrived today, clipping an interview on Monday night between Piers Morgan and Alex Jones, a pro-gun campaigner and radio host who co-organised a petition to deport Morgan from the USA (where he has a regular presenter’s slot on CNN) for offering supportive gun-control comments in the wake of Sandy Hook.
I’m not a fan of Morgan – but he exemplifies everything that is right in a calm and measured presenter. By contrast, Jones is frankly terrifying.
I hope Upworthy don’t mind – I am going to reproduce their commentary in full.
Piers Morgan decided to advocate gun control after Sandy Hook. That caused this radio host, Alex Jones, who has millions of listeners (listeners I’d prefer to never meet), to create a petition to have Piers deported.
Being the reasonable bloke he is, Piers invited Alex on his show to have a civil debate about guns. What follows is the most jaw-droppingly incoherent interview I have ever seen, in two deranged parts. The fact that this interview actually made Piers Morgan the most tolerable person on TV for 14 minutes isn’t even the craziest thing about it.
If this is what we’re up against in the reasonable gun law debate, no wonder nothing gets done. Piers should get the Medal of Honor for not requesting a medical team to come tranquilize Alex and have him committed.
Upworthy – Act I: The Dumbening
- At :30, in a hint at what’s about to happen, Jones gets things started by changing the subject completely, and then crafting a disconnected slew of sentence fragments.
- At 2:10-2:36, Alex threatens to burn America to the ground if he doesn’t get his way.
- At 2:50, Alex reminds Piers (for the first of many times) that Americans once fought a war against the British. Piers responds with the kind of scathing, passive-aggressive restraint that the British have spent centuries mastering.
- At 3:48, Alex talks about marine biology.
- At 4:25, Alex talks about his favorite part of “Mad Max.”
- At 6:40, Piers gives up on getting anything coherent out of him.
Act II: All Aboard The Conspiracy Train
- From 0-0:18, Piers suggests calming things down and actually having something resembling a coherent conversation. And then Alex starts speaking again, thus anything resembling healthy discourse ceases to exist.
- At 1:33, Alex thinks an AR-15 will protect him from the largest military in the world and accuses all American soldiers of being potential traitors. Also, HITLER.
- At 2:35, no judgment here, I just want to transcribe what Jones just managed to say, “A study out of Hawaii killed 292 million people.” He also requests that you google “Democide”, so for balance sake, click here.
- At 4:22, Alex quotes his favorite part of “Soylent Green” or “Dawn of the Dead.”
- From 4:51-5:40, Piers decides to let America in on the inner workings of Alex’s brain.
- At 5:40 … 5:40. Don’t cheat and skip ahead to this. Just be ready for it. Trust me on this one. It’s like “Masterpiece Theatre.”
- Aaaaand at 6:27, Piers finally says what the rest of us are thinking.
I admit to finding much of today’s children’s telly incomprehensible. My brother and sister-in-law, who have four scarily bright and funny kids, assure me that it is so much better than when we were younger.
For someone who holds a certain nostalgia for Mr Benn, Trumpton and Finger Mouse, I confess I find In The Night Garden beyond my ken, though The Gruffalo and Room On The Broom have an understated, calm charm.
However, one series that excels at sharing knowledge in a fun and mischievous way is CBBC’s Horrible Histories. It has a wickedly entertaining way of making history fun and accessible, often accompanied by tunes better than those pumped out by better-known acts.
Now, I absolutely know I am not the only one who has found myself in front of a laptop at 3am, having imbibed far too much wine and whisky, playing clips of favourite rock and metal. There is a standard format for such occasions. Both participants (there are usually two, occasionally three) open with a standard metal classic (Nightwish’s Storytime here or AC/DC’s Shoot To Thrill), before choosing more and more classic rock numbers until all semblance of sobriety is conquered by peace songs and revolutionary anthems (from the Dropkick Murphys etc).
To this exemplary canon has been added another clip which forms a part of the “must see, must hear” experience: the Horrible Histories team’s Viking song.
There are rock groups around the world that couldn’t do this – and its pastiche of Queen, symphonic metal and rock ballads is a gem.
Enjoy.
And more from the Horrible Histories crew in due course.
Fragments and Reflections 