And then you notice the pigtails. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // Sexed-up grand piano. // At last, stain-repelling shirts. “Discover what living stain-free feels like.” // Eruption. // The Samsung safety truck. It seems obvious now. // Man with some old vinyl and an electron microscope. // Free Hayek. // Customer feedback of note. (h/t, PootBlog) // Arrive refreshed with this in-flight posture apparatus. Works on any desk top surface. // Assorted gifs and photos from an organic chemistry lab. // He brings greetings from his home world. // Owl café, Ikebukuro, Japan. // Wooden keyboard of note. // Test your colour vision. // All six Star Wars films superimposed. // Four-year-old girl copes quite well with dad’s stunt flying. // And finally, office chair plus leaf blower equals good times.  

Meanwhile, in the Guardian:

[Arts Council] grants aren’t won down the pub by a dart competition where the bullseye’s a picture of the taxpayer’s face. Of course, I wish they were, because that would save the hours of work it takes to write a grant application. And I’m pretty good at darts.

So writes Zoë Coombs Marr, a writer, comedian and “theatre maker,” and a woman of profound humility, in a piece complaining about the “devastating effects” of modest alterations in taxpayer subsidy for Australia’s commercially unviable artists. Artists who, while unloved by the general public, are nonetheless deserving of money they haven’t earned. “I’m here to bust a few myths,” says Ms Marr. And so begins a sorrowful tale of how bloody hard it is to be an artist whose work is of little interest to the public, and how hard it is to screw other people’s earnings out of other people:

Grant applications are comprehensive proposals that take multiple people and sometimes months to complete. They’re assessed by a panel of professionals (not your mates) employed to pick your application apart, assess it for financial viability and community relevance.

At this point, rather bafflingly, Ms Marr links to an article – this one here, by Tim Blair – which is part of a series of pieces by Blair and Andrew Bolt on arts funding cronyism and the ludicrous misspending of public money. A series that actually reveals her claim of funding integrity and aesthetic high-mindedness as – how shall I put this? – less than convincing. Not your mates, indeed. 

Undaunted, or perhaps oblivious, our unhappy artist continues,

Grant money is pumped back into the economy and employs numerous people. 

How much and how many is, sadly, left unspecified. But apparently Australia’s economy will be rendered turgid and engorged by throwing $21,000 that someone else had to earn at “rainforest basketry training programmes,” and another $20,000 at “dance theatre work devised by participants who identify as fat/large/bigger-bodied.” And by surrendering a further $12,000 of taxpayers’ money to “enrich the sensory theatre practice” of one person “with master classes and mentoring in Body Mind Centring praxis.” Yes, you can hear that economy boom from half a world away. These examples, by the way, are among the many cited in the article by Tim Blair, and to which Ms Marr links as somehow helping her case.

Readers unswayed by Ms Marr’s article - in which she says, “I could try to explain to you why we should fund the arts” but doesn’t bother doing so - should note that she is the winner of Australia’s taxpayer-subsidised 2006 National Poetry Slam Championships. So there’s that. A more recent poetic work by Ms Marr can be savoured here. [ Added: ] And thanks to Nikw211 in the comments, Ms Marr’s comedic stylings – the fruits of her “training, skill and hard work” – can be experienced at length here. I should point out it’s quite a slog and you may want a stiff drink to hand. Or a canister of nitrous oxide.

Eugene Volokh on the now-official “microaggression” of criticising leftist assumptions:  

I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing. I like to think that I’m generally polite, so I won’t express these views rudely. And I try not to inject my own irrelevant opinions into classes I teach, so there are many situations in which I won’t bring up these views simply because it’s not my job to express my views in those contexts. But the document that I quote isn’t about keeping classes on-topic or preventing personal insults — it’s about suppressing particular viewpoints. And what’s tenure for, if not to resist these attempts to stop the expression of unpopular views?

If, for example, you don’t regard a person’s melanin level as both a fascinating detail of their being and an inexhaustible license to invoke victimhood and deference, then you’re probably committing a microaggression. And the publicly-funded University of California thinks you may be “sending denigrating messages” and “creating a hostile learning environment” because you aren’t awed and enthralled by how brown a person is.

Charles C W Cooke finds a modern echo of an old George Orwell quote: 

“We don’t want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare,” says [Californian school teacher, Dana] Disbiber. “Worry not, teaching him helps the progressive cause,” replies [New Republic columnist, Elizabeth Stoker] Bruenig… When politics is everything and everything is politics, nothing escapes the commissar’s judgment. It is one thing to analyse art for its political content — critically necessary even – but it is quite another to subjugate one’s view of that art to one’s politics.

Of course Orwell, like Shakespeare, is – to use Disbiber’s parlance – a dead white male, and worse, a critic of piously narrow attitudes like those of Dana Disbiber. We must therefore regard both authors as insufficiently progressive and entirely devoid of relevance.  

And in other thrilling academic news: 

Utah Valley University, with an enrolment of about 34,000 students, is trying out a staircase with lanes. Lane one is for walkers, two for runners and three for texters.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets below. It’s what these posts are for. 

I know, I know. I’ve been starving you of updates from the world of performance art. By way of apology, here’s a short yet challenging piece by a gentleman named Reed Altemus, captured for posterity at the Mobius art collective’s Something Else Fest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earlier this month. Mr Altemus, who “lives with his cat, Clyde, in Portland Maine,” describes himself as a “polyartist working in visual poetry, performance art, noise music and small press publishing.” Quizzed on the importance of his radical craft, he explains:

Traditional forms have failed us: they produce the same kinds of social situations as have ever been: we have poverty, wars, corporate imperialism, neocolonialism, racism, religious clashes of all kinds, homophobia, etc… Beethovan [sic] and Mahler have not solved the problem of violence in society; Tennyson and Poe have not given us answers to the problem of fascist dictatorships in the world. It is obvious to me that to change the world as a poet one must subvert entrenched assumptions which underlie oppressive or coercive discourses.

Yes, Mr Altemus is putting an end to war, dictatorship, violence and poverty by subverting our entrenched assumptions and oppressive discourses. See, for instance, here. He’s literally saving the world with his art. For reasons that will doubtless become clear, the following life-transforming, poverty-solving, dictator-toppling piece is called Amplifying My Clothes:

An earlier, no less dazzling performance, in which Mr Altemus spends 16 minutes wrapping an eggplant in string, can be seen – nay, beheld – here.

Kevin Williamson on cultural critic Lee Siegel and other student loan deadbeats: 

The justifications are piled high: [Siegel] comes from a modest background and finds it unfair that other people have had advantages denied him. He declares it “absurd” — making no case, only the declaration — that he could “amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college.” Never mind that his borrowing and spending was, in fact, reckless, and that an Ivy League degree or three is every bit an item of conspicuous consumption and a status symbol as a Lamborghini.

To default on a loan because you do not wish to pay it back is theft, in this case theft from all of us, since the federal government is on the hook for the loans in question… We hear variations on Siegel’s argument that education is a social good, that we should be glad to have spent whatever sum we spent in order to avail ourselves of his “particular usefulness to society.” This is an example of the special-snowflake philosophy of social organisation: Yes, your feminist slam-poetry collective is very, very impressive — but even T. S. Eliot went to the office six days a week when literary life wasn’t paying the bills.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone – a grown man in his fifties, writing in the New York Times – who believes that paying his debts as agreed, as millions of others do, would entail wasting his life, due to his enormously artistic “usefulness to society,” i.e., his self-imagined talent as a profound and insightful writer. A claim somewhat undermined by his own self-flattering article and its thin rationalisations. The short version of Mr Siegel’s article would be, “Fuck you, taxpayers. I’m an artist and intellectual.” But that wouldn’t present him in the all-important and very much expected Heroic Victim Light.

On the subject of student loans and baffling choices, see also this and this. 

Ed Driscoll probes the mental fever swamp of Ms Naomi Wolf. Including her theory that American troops building field hospitals in Liberia were actually there to secretly take Ebola back to the U.S., and thereby justify “emergency measures” and “quarantining Americans.”

Theodore Dalrymple shares a tale of underclass moral squalor and the role played by the state: 

Never in the book is there any recognition that a mother whose children meant “the world” to her should not leave them in the care of an obvious psychopath or go to bed so drunk that she does not even realise that she has vomited in her sleep.

Needless to say, it’s not a happy tale and not for the squeamish.

A mirror made of penguins. // PlayScanner, a toy CT scanner for children. Easy to clean, ideal for waiting rooms. // Gadgets from a parallel world. // Rotary hydroponic herb garden. // Vietnamese cave panoramas. // Caves of ice and snow. (h/t, Dr W) // Tunnelling under London. // Deep Blue is a big chap. // At last, your own 3D-printed exoskeleton hand. // 3D-print a section, any section, of New York City. // Drawing Manhattan. Keep the coffee coming. // “Man washing monster truck mistaken for plane crash.” It is a big truck. // It’s a truck, it’s a dog, it’s a truck. // In sporting news. // A map of UFO sightings, 1925-2014. Now we have smartphones they don’t seem to visit. // Office furniture of note. // Your children are filthy. // And finally, a photographer and his dog.

The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett – she of the ill-fitting hair – asks,

Are we too selfish to live like hippies?

Herself a child of what she generously terms “communal living” – specifically, an “Islington house furnished from skips” – Ms Cosslett allows her mind to drift back, way back, to the heady days of the late Twentieth Century:

My memories are faded but what remains is a picture of a happy, lively household whose ethos was not so far removed from times when children were raised by communities, not individuals.

A faded memory from childhood, when people are generally much less discerning, is perhaps not the soundest footing for an approach to housing policy. And hey, what parent wouldn’t want their child raised collectively by a shifting pile of misfits, losers and unemployable hippies? Or as Ms Cosslett puts it, rather romantically, “art students from Berlin, Portuguese musicians” and, naturally, “miners during the strike.” Yes, all this, and in an environment where six layers of wallpaper – a historical record of sorts – gradually detached themselves from damp plaster walls:

Though the conditions weren’t great, they paid £11 a week rent… Low rents (or if you were squatting, no rents) enabled people to work in the arts, to create music (I was sampled on a Madchester dance record, aged three), write literature and paint.

And working in the arts – I suspect the term “working” is used here loosely – is more than reason enough to squat and not bother with humdrum details like permission or paying rent. That such freewheeling sentiment is less fashionable than it was saddens Ms Cosslett. And so boilerplate ensues:

Our political apathy, our materialistic obsession with property ownership, our disinclination to pursue alternative lifestyles all explain why communes and squats are in decline… Walking through Park Crescent the other day, past impossibly grand houses with their dark interiors… I felt an incredible sadness. It is the disappointment at the abandonment of an experiment… Imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar, a few sacks of lentils…

And someone else’s property.

Michael J Totten relays the splendour of a notable megalomaniac:  

Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedov just erected a 69-foot statue of himself in the centre of Ashgabat, the capital [of Turkmenistan]. He’s up there on a golden horse atop an enormous slab of marble that looks like an iceberg. He’s compensating. Two years ago he fell off a horse at an official race. The only reason we even know this is because a brave person in the audience captured it on amateur video and uploaded it to the internet. All the other riders rode past him as he lay flat on his back in the dirt, but he was declared the winner regardless and awarded an 11 million dollar prize for his “performance.” This clown follows President Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006 of heart failure. He renamed months of the year after himself and his family. He built a 60-foot statue of himself that slowly rotated so that his face was always in sunlight.

The first in a possible series.  

But really, Berdimuhamedov’s statue. You should see the thing.

Heather Mac Donald on post-Ferguson policing: 

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr Dotson reported. Arrests in St Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

See also Thomas Sowell on the same. And the last item here now seems somewhat prophetic. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on social work and deservedness: 

I called a social worker and made a disastrous mistake in my first sentence. “I have a particularly deserving case,” I said, thinking to arouse her interest and forgetting for a moment that desert in any traditional sense was a concept that had long been banned from the lexicon of social work. Far from arousing her interest, let alone compassion, it aroused her hostility. If I thought a case was particularly deserving, it followed that I must have thought that some cases were relatively or even absolutely undeserving. In short, I was judgmental, that is to say censorious, cruel and Victorian.

The abandonment of distinctions between the unfortunate and the merely verminous is a phenomenon we’ve seen before. As when the Guardian’s Zoe Williams wanted us to believe that the problem with ‘problem families’ is simply that they’re poor, and nothing whatsoever to do with how they choose to abuse their equally poor neighbours. And so attempts to deal with people who repeatedly play loud music at 3am or throw pets from top floor windows are framed as a “demonization of the poor” and “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.” According to Zoe, we should be “unstigmatising,” which is to say, non-judgmental. A result of which is that empathy, or feigned empathy, is shifted from the working class victim of crime and antisocial behaviour to the working class perpetrator of crime and antisocial behaviour, on grounds that the thug or criminal is in some way being oppressed and, unlike their neighbours, being made to misbehave.

Presumably Ms Williams’ own neighbours have little in common with, say, the delightful Stuart Murgatroyd, a father of twelve who has never worked and boasts an extensive criminal record, not least for robbing the elderly in graveyards, and whose attempt to challenge an antisocial behaviour order was cut short at the very last minute due to him being arrested for assaulting the mother of his children, herself a convicted getaway driver, on the steps of the courthouse. And I suspect our infinitely compassionate Guardianista has yet to experience an all-night eleven-hour rave being hosted next door, which would doubtless give her an opportunity to practise that non-judgmental piety.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Tiny origami robot folds itself, performs tasks, dissolves into nothing. // The road to success. // Days of future past. (h/t, Pootblog) // Eco-pod. You want one and you know it. // Plants and mirrors. // Cloudreporter. // Here’s some weather in a box. // Balloon creatures. // Hot dog style guide. // I think we need more logos. // A map of horror movie locations. // Odorous alarm clock. If you’re going to wake up to a smell, why not make it one of these? // Octopus lugs coconut shells. // It’s probably best not to try this at home. // Avengers interface porn. // At last, a 10-storey urban playground. // Smart device gesture sensing. // Done with magnets, marbles and sand. // Oh dear, something is sucking the eggs. (h/t, Julia) // And finally, I’m having second thoughts about this cunning plan.