very small things

(...)
                                 In a folded
spear of the Bird of Paradise lily,
two snails are mating. They began
yesterday and after twenty hours’
foreplay are still at it, inserting mutual
penises into mutual vaginas. ‘In times
dedicated to universality and excess’,
I have ‘never been so interested
in very small things – twinkling tadpoles
in a barrel of water, the germination
of a fungus, ants nibbling at the leaves
of a lemon tree and leaving it like lace.
(...)

- Landeg White, in Letters from Portugal (to appear)

Julia

I always thought Julia was the really smart one, in Orwell's 1984:


" I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there -- small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.' 

'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in us.' 

'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her. 

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight. 

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

What a beautiful new world to look up to

For chinese men, no house mean no luv

The takeover goes on

In financial crisis, no prosecutions of top figures (NYT)

Would we allow goldman sachs to fail now? (baselinescenario) (spoiler: the answer is no (of course))

I love to say I told you so, F., so here it is: "I told you so". I told you we should have let them all fall and you said I was irresponsible. I said at least we had to punish them right there and then and you said there was no time, we'd to it later; you said after this it would never be the same; it would have to change; they would have to accept changes. Well, here we are.

Years later, no punishment, no regulation,  failed banks and failed rating agencies preaching over the states who bailed them, and all of us on the road to servitude under the new corporate feudalism. And still the sheep bleat and flog both each other and their own backs and join in the cries of the austerics, like in some catholic orgy of self-flagelation.  Is it some judeo-cretin fetish again, maybe that's why I don't get it? Why aren't you shouting "off with their heads?" Why aren't they cowering in fear? Why aren't you singing "you got the guns but we've got the numbers?". Instead you cower in fear. Are you now discovering what being poor is? It is not about having no money. You still have money, but already you are poor. It is about living in fear. Every single day. It is about going to sleep hoping you won't get sick, because if everything goes right you might just make it, but if you wake up sick, expensively sick, then you are ruined forever - there in the gutter, but for the sake of luck, you go.

Why aren't you at least politely correcting them when they say "the state failed"? The state failed? Yes, it failed, when it bailed them out. But they who speak of the markets, the markets have spoken and they all failed, from the dirtiest Madoff right up to sage Warren Buffet, they all failed. They are broke. They are only standing up, the financially undead, because they bought the politicians and stole our money and our futures. And we let them. Because we won't go out on the streets and bring the whole fucking thing down. Because we won't burn their golf courses and serve them molotov cocktails. Because we have grown too polite. We have been bred to cower in front of the new aristocracy, to feed on their narrative, to think in their terms. And to admire their ugly mugs in the covers of magazines. The pigs have taken over the farm.

Large corporations are in effect states, and by their nature the worst kind of states: private realms and absolute tyrannies. The employer's rule is arbitrary, he controls what you dress, he controls every waking hour, and what the waking hours are, he controls your speech. Oh, you can leave. Leave and beg your meal from another just as bad, or perish, since the the social state is about to be eliminated. Your tax money is not there for you, you parasite! It is there to bail  out your betters when they fuck up again.

Communism fails because it degenerates into an opressive bureaucracy. Capitalism fails because it degenerates into corporate feudalism. Both are unstable systems, vigilance is necessary, and a periodical reboot must be executed, at great human expense. Jefferson was wise, or at least, right.

It is a brilliant takeover. We have freedom of speech - in the public sphere. We have the right to vote - in the public sphere. We have lots of rights - in the public sphere. Nobody would dare take those rights away openly. But the public sphere is reduced to a mere pebble, and in the private sphere - that occupies the whole world where you can dwell, feed, survive - it is back to middle age autocracy. Welcome back to the age of the robber barons. Welcome back to the age where I wonder if I should say such things in the future, without wearing a mask.

As I was writing this the sheep were shouting over some idiotic football match. The whole street trembled in joy because some obscenely overpayed athlete stuck a ball into a goal. If only these people could be made to shout half as hard over the fact they and their children are being gutted, the day could still be won.

Plus ça change...

"(...) when war comes they [The Government] are both unwilling and unable to increase their revenue in proportion to the increase of their expence. They are unwilling for fear of offending the people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war; and they are unable from not well knowing what taxes would be sufficient to produce the revenue wanted. The facility of borrowing delivers them from the embarrassment which this fear and inability would otherwise occasion. By means of borrowing they are enabled, with a very moderate increase of taxes, to raise, from year to year, money sufficient for carrying on the war, and by the practice of perpetually funding they are enabled, with the smallest possible increase of taxes, to raise annually the largest possible sum of money. In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war."

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Noblesse Oblige

Of course we had to go into Lybia, young man! Have you no human compassion? What choice did we have, with civilian lives at stake? Mere consistency demanded so! Did we not rush headlong into Tian'anmen square? Did we not rescue Tibet? Did we not sanction and isolate China? Consistency, boy, and compassion, and Democracy, and, why, civilization! It is the white man's burden, after all!
Conditions apply: recipient of military help must have oil or other strategic interest; balance of forces must be extremely favorable, conflict must lead to inventory cycling and profits increase for miltary industrial complex.

Euro Doublespeak

"(...)In essence (...) it is the taxpayers of Greece, Ireland and Portugal who are bailing out German, French and British taxpayers and depositors — not the other way around. The indebted countries are not really getting bailouts, he said, “but loans at high interest rates.” For there to be a real bailout, he said, there would have to be a default.(...)"
-New York Times link

This (...) is the price populations are now being asked to pay for the EU's refusal to heap any economic pain onto the banks that lent these countries money. The alternative to shutting down schools, emergency wards, slashing pension rights etc would be to impose a penalty on those who lent the money in the form of a so-called "haircut".

Paradoxically this is exactly what the EU's proposed future grand bargain involves:(...) any banks that lend to countries that show themselves in danger of going bust would be deemed "irresponsible lenders" and penalized by not getting all their money back. (...)

So why don't they simply apply this market logic in retrospect and impose losses on the banks now?

Here we come to the naked struggle between countries and between interest groups. The banks that irresponsibly lent so much money to peripheral Europe are mainly in, er, northern Europe. France, Germany and Britain would be hammered if their banks were forced to take losses now on the stricken sovereign debts of the periphery.

So the essential deal involved in the new "stability and growth" (don't you just love Euro doublespeak?) arrangements would be: poor countries must pay through austerity so that rich countries do not go through a banking crisis.

-Paul Mason, BBC link

Mértola

Last year, me and a few friends went south to Mértola (Amendoeira da serra, to be more precise) and had some adventures, rummaging for sheep skulls, chasing black pigs (embarrasingly mistaken for boars) and generally sketching till we dropped.

Good times.

Nursery Rhyme Redux: Evolution made us all

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.


A great nursery rhyme to teach your brats: Evolution made us all ( from mother Theresa to the lamprey eel). Bin Laden and Che Guevara make guest appearences.

Urban Sketchers - exposição / Urban Sketchers collective exhibition

Em Setembro os urban sketchers foram em peso desenhar a Rua Augusta. Agora, de 2 a 18 de Fevereiro, os desenhos estão em exposição na Fac. de Belas Artes. Eu tenho lá um dos meus, também: este.

Last September the urban sketchers went out en masse to draw Rua (street) Augusta. A sample of our drawings will be on display at the Faculdade de Belas Artes in Lisbon, from February 2nd to February 18th.
I have one drawing there, namely this one.

Visual Illusion - "Silencing"

From Harvard Vision Lab, a new type of visual illusion that shows we are apparently very bad at noticing changes in a moving object. If, like me, you are too busy to read the paper just check out the amazing videos at the vision labs page and prepare never to trust your two lying eyes again (in the example below, the colors are still changing at the same rate when the object moves - but you can't see it, can you?).


Motion silences awareness of color changes from Jordan Suchow on Vimeo.

Back to plundering as usual?

From the NYT:

"This week, figures from a private research group, Income Data Services, showed that while pay raises for ordinary workers in 2010 had been about 2 percent — much less than the rate of inflation — average remuneration for chief executives at the country’s top 100 companies soared a staggering 55 percent. Many Britons are expecting the country’s bankers to award themselves billion of pounds in bonuses.

And while the squeezed middle is squeezed further, the columnist Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian, “the bankers have walked from the debacle scot free, with almost a trillion pounds of public money in their pockets.”

“As long as the government continues to tolerate this gross imbalance of pain,” Mr. Jenkins wrote, “people will howl, and they will be right.”"

And in the report issued by the IDS:

"IDS warn that and “the business as usual” approach of FTSE remuneration committees after 

such a short period of restraint risks upsetting shareholders.

Steve Tatton, editor of the IDS Directors Pay Report comments: “It seems the days of earnings 

restraint by FTSE-350 directors were short-lived. It is as though the recession never happened.”

“It stands in stark contrast to the coalition Government’s concerns about pay fairness and calls 

for senior executives in the public sector to accept pay cuts.”

IDS says that while some chief executives may argue that their pay was a result of rising share 

prices and improved company performance, shareholders are likely to ask whether the business 

improvement over the period warrants the scale of the increases.

While the FTSE-100 rose 14.5% on the year, bonuses were up by over a third, share option gains 

by over 90% and LTIPs by over 70%.

Despite the increasing scrutiny of shareholders, FTSE-100 chief executives received bonus 

payments averaging £701,512, up 34% from last year (based on a matched sample).

Steve Tatton comments: “The size of the rebound in incentives for top company bosses poses 

some questions for remuneration committees about the design of their incentives.”

“This time last year a number of companies actually reduced their bonus ceilings. Twelve months 

later it appears as if these measures have been reversed, with around 40 companies reporting 

higher bonus scheme maxima.”"

Merry XXX-mas

In today's highly commercialized festivities it is easy to forget about the true meaning of Christmas: pretty girls in kinky red outfits. :) There's a XXX-mas that even an atheist like me can warmly relate to. :)

Sunshine at IMF

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-and-demography/sunshine-at-the-imf-of-all-places/

Empty (Space!) Suits

To take your mind of the depressing news, here is an article on a wonderful coming exhibition of lovingly crafted space suits, some of which have been to the moon. I wish I could go and visit this. When I was a kid I dreamt of being an astronaut for a while...original it certainly was not, but that is a dream no longer common among kids, it's sad that nobody seems to have grand dreams of that sort anymore, they all want to be pop stars, and everyone yawns about a shuttle launch while drooling about a stupid Ipad. Hey, why should we go to mars while there is hunger in the world? - they say - but what they mean is "why should we go to mars if we can build some new sports stadiums instead?"

Charcoal and Chalk on blue paper

What really bugs me?

They took all that tedious left-wing pinko nonsense about class warfare...

....and made it real.

Someone stole my favorite punching bag. Now heads must roll.

Tragedy at the Waldorf-Astoria

Tragedy! Rich people get mistreated by rich(er) people.

The Red Queen is all hot and ready to go

Right on queue with my previous post, "off with their heads" is chanted on the streets of London. For the record, when I mentioned the guillotine I wasn't thinking of the fossilized remnants of the old feudal lords (good for tourism and tabloids), I had in mind the new ones, who truly are begging for it.

Though it is a thing of beauty to see how the charming prince initially had his window half open, perhaps to show how confident he was of the love of the proles? Did he expect them to erupt in applause? Yes, great show of judgement, in older days the Royal family showed support for the people by staying in London during the bombings, now it does so by driving by in a Rolls Royce on the way to the Palladium to get their asses kissed and entertained by giddy "artists", escorted by state funded police, right in the face of protesters who just got their futures ruined by the supposed need to save money at all costs. Yeah, that had to work. No need to guillotine these idiots, they have no heads on their shoulders anyway.

Someone will have to make the guillotines

It is very sad to see capitalism die. It is even sadder to see it replaced by something odious that walks and talks in its name.

There is no capitalism if some actors are not allowed to fail. There is no capitalism if gains are private and losses are public.

There is no Democracy if elected officials of all colors reverse their pledges once in power. There is no Democracy if irreversible measures are passed shamelessly against the clear will of the people.

There is nothing worse than taking the same position whatever the state of reality. The current situation should not be fought by communists who think -wrongly- that what they are fighting is capitalism. It should be fought by capitalists and democrats of all sorts who realize that capitalism and democracy have been murdered and replaced by a cleptocracy, run by feudal lords, where all but the few at the top are to be medieval serfs.

As things are, there is no shame in fighting alongside the communists, socialists, anarchists (or for that matter their equivalents in the right) even if they are fighting for the wrong reasons - there will be time to reform our lines later on. It is far more shameful to fight, by mere habit, by the side of those who happen to carry the flags we once stood by. A political party is not a football club. There is no lifetime allegiance to a flag or a denomination, but to a principle. People in all these camps can certainly agree that we do not deem acceptable to spend the rest of our lifes in medieval serfdom for the benefit of a few rich criminals - those of us with libertarian inclinations should agree with that most of all.

It is not capitalism if winners are fixed; it is not capitalism without social mobility; it is not capitalism without meritocracy; it is not capitalism if the tough rules of the market are not obeyed by all equally.

It is not capitalism at all. It is just a few rich people who got to the top, who then failed miserably, and rather than accept the market's verdict, bought the politicians and got the state to bear their losses. Not content with that, they get even richer, ruin the rest of us, and dare to call for cuts in the very social programs that are more than ever needed to help the people they have ruined. That these very same criminals should dare speak of "fiscal responsibility", while again indulging in their bonuses, is a cruel joke. That politicians should claim that they cannot interfere with the free market - when they interfered beyond all reason to preserve these people, and in doing so ruined their nations! - is all the proof that is needed that they are in their pockets. It is not capitalism, and it is not democracy. It is a bunch of rich people who took over the system for themselves. It is nothing less than a coup.

I predict that if this isn't stopped soon, at least some new manufacturing jobs will arise. Someone will have to make the guillotines.

going down

In these most interesting days we now live in, we find ourselves questioning the very basis for our way of life. Oh, not whether our present life and our future plans were really ever worthwile, but simply whether or not they are tenable. Some find their great master plans unravelling, some others find that even the simple plans, the mere enjoyment of an ordinary human life - or what in the West we came to call normal, in our once privileged cocoon - become suddenly tenuous at best. A friend tells me that the future will be a time for re-embracing mysticism - I shudder at the thought. I agree however that the future may be a time to retreat within - but not to Religion, to astrology, to witch doctors, to "belief", that most primitive human pharmacology, but to those things that we can really rely on and don't require too much of a financial burden: rational thought, philosophy, the pleasures of the flesh, and, last but never least, the box of crayons.

Silly dancers

Process

1- mechanical pencil 0.5mm 2B on 15x19cm paper.

2-Sakura brush + sakura 0.05 + white gel pen

3-Watercolor+lousy scan+photoshop

Watercolor portrait 16/10/10

Lately I've been taking my watercolors with me everywhere. With a pentel brushpen for black ink and another one filled with water I can get a quick impression that looks much better than my usual graphite studies. I find, however, that a graphite study teaches me more; it is a colder, more disciplined approach. But it looks poorer, and now that the world is getting poorer all around, I guess I need to contribute some richesses to the pages of my notebook. Of such careful balance is a good mood made. On that note, it is ironic perhaps that this sketch was made on a page that I was beggining to fill with calculations on Bayesian probability.

Rua Augusta

Uma vista da Rua Augusta, feita neste Sábado durante o X encontro dos urban sketchers.

Even more Bouncies up to their tricks

More Bouncies frolicking around

Bouncies

I've been drawing these bouncy guys for some time now. They just pop up on the borders of my notebooks, usually doing Aikido or gymnastics of some sort. I find the forms really appealing; sometimes they are rounder, sometimes they spread those sleeves and hover around like bats. For some reason I find it relaxing to draw their antics.

Colored Pencil - copy of Carl Brenders

Making copies is a great way to learn. This is a very small copy (about 10x10 cm) done in colored pencil of a Carl Brenders (gouache?) original. It was pretty fast, maybe around three or four very relaxed hours over two sessions. Most of the trouble it gave me was self-inflicted. I wanted to do the whole thing just with four pencils (caran-d'ache orange, yellow, light blue (though I forgot and used a bit of darker blue on the nose, I think, quite without need), and red, and black for darkening and gray for desaturating. I wanted to prove to a couple of friends that you don't need the convenience colors, as the name implies, you can mix them as long as you have saturated colors, it's the opposite you cannot do - those glowing "neon" colors just can't be made from your payne's gray, burnt umber, sienna, or sap greens, I'm afraid, but the opposite is quite doable, though it will tax your patience (and therefore teach you a lot about your colors).

Oh, and the hairs were done with a blade.

...and yet another (watercolor) frog

Done a while ago, but lately I've been too busy to post, much less paint any new stuff.