Story of My Life

Life at the moment, anyway. From the excellent Oglaf.

Self-Improvement, meet Torpor and The Great Inane.

Positive Twitter Day

Friday 31st August.

                       Problem?

Not sure what the problem is. The nasty woman is still complaining interminably about 'immigration' at Mr Patel in the corner shop; the troupes of suburban malcontents are still trooping to Trafalgar Square with their timed-out placards and some new ones; the grouchy old loser has not left off grouching in the snug: Ingrowing Stupidity is not a new condition.

Not an absolutely positive view but this is not Friday or Twitter.

What Price a T-34?

₽433,000 to you, sir...

...all right guv, ₽170,000 to get it off the forecourt and I'm robbing m'self.

The production cost of the T-34 tank 1940-45 listed here.

The Russians continually cut cost out of production, assessing for instance the life expectancy of tanks in service to plan the durability of new units. An apocryphal story has German factory inspectors sending a new Tiger back to the workshop to get a blemish in the paint job fixed.




from the Tiger Manual: expensive, very.

Art For The Sake Of... What

To ordinary workaday folk the average Guardian article may seem remote from their concerns; tosh even (picture: Evgeni Zubko)

Helen Gørrill in the Guardian, on women artists not getting snarfed up wholesale by the Tate:

Today, when men’s artwork is signed, it goes up in value; conversely when work by women is signed, it goes down in value, and the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned.

Does anyone buy unsigned work, at all? And how would a suitably artsy signature give away the artist's sex? Intriguing.

Hysteria, the female-specific Victorian malady, has returned to the UK, with women accused of being mad and out of control if they don’t conform to gallerists’ often unreasonable demands.

Will she go on to give examples of the alleged "often unreasonable demands"? Nope, just have to take that as given.

We cringe at the voices of famous male artists and critics declaring their disdain for artists who happen to have been born female: women can’t paint! There’s no such thing as a great woman artist!

In the relentlessly PC world of the Arts, such a declaration would surely be instant professional death. Who then is doing the disdainful chorusing?

And Tate appears to align with these views by collecting only a token proportion of work by women, who form the 74% majority of our fine art graduates... its allocation of annual budget is even worse, with as little as 13% spent on works by female artists.

Oh my! How can that be?

Tate fails to mention gender or equality in its collection policy, seeking only to collect works of art of outstanding quality as well as works of distinctive aesthetic character or importance.

Aha. So what should an art gallery be about?

Tate should make urgent efforts to reflect the diversity of the population in its collections and allow female graduates the same life chances as men.

Never mind the quality, feel the quotas, o Welfare Galleries!

Tate’s support of the activist art collective Guerrilla Girls is a clever tactic that gives the illusion of equality, yet politically correct press releases from the likes of Tate championing female artists could actually be doing more harm than good.

b b b b but

It could be argued that museums raise the question of whether female artists are worthy of collection at all, because no similar promotional material or articles discuss the worthiness of male artists.

Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Can't win any ways no how no sir.

74% of fine art graduates are women?

End of Empire

Yuri Maltsev, at the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade in the mid 80s:

I had a secretary, Lena, a very nice young woman, an ex-student at Moscow University, and I saw her picking up paperclips putting into her purse. And I said, "Lena, why do you steal State property in such a strange form, paperclips?" And she went ballistic on me, she said, "Yuri! What else can I take from this" - she used a very bad word - "office? Well, show me, I'll take that. Nothing, nothing! Paperclips, nails picture, nothing!" And I was walking back home thinking, if the youngest and the brightest are going to work only to steal something there, that's the end of this economy and this experiment [30:32].

Maltsev is very funny and very scathing about the Soviet 'experiment' and on the world since and now.

Alas, watching his lectures has triggered me to buy three books so far from Amazon clicketty click click. I am arsing around on sabbatical studying at the mo, and the faster the money flows out the sooner I will have to go back to seeking an honest day's work for an honest crust, paperclips not included.

Internet Satire

It's easier than you think.

Try Reading The Book

From the comments on a Guardian article by Kathryn Hughes about Wuthering Heights:

Strange how Heart of Darkness and Conrad doesn't get the same verbal contempt and disdain from humanists as Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte.
It might be because that Conrad darkness was over there - in Africa.

That the heart of darkness is over here, in London or Brussels, not in the Belgian Congo, is clearly one of the points of the story. Clearly, that is, if you read it.

But then, to judge from the article, Kathryn Hughes has not read Wuthering Heights: as in actually turned the pages, conned the words and so forth.

Would suggesting that Guardianistas try reading a book or two, just so's they know what it's like to and all, be..?

Guardianistas: That's nazi TRUMPY talk, now you're barred from Twitter la la la la la not listening la la la la la.