Tadao Cern’s photographs of people being blown by a whole heap of wind. 

Further to this and this, what men really, really want to talk about.

Aesthetes that my readers are, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the name of Jan Fabre, a Belgian performance artist and “theatre-maker” who, we’re informed, “expands the horizons of every genre to which he applies his artistic vision.” Mr Fabre’s acclaimed efforts at horizon-expanding include Preparatio Mortis, a piece unveiled at the Vienna International Dance Festival and which entertained us no end with its combination of moths, underwear and staggering pretension.

While writhing in her bra and panties, the dancer, Annabelle Chambon, was tasked with nothing less than “an attempt to reconcile life and death.” Or as one commenter suggested, to reconcile boredom with public subsidy.

You will, therefore, be thrilled to the tips of your nipples by Mr Fabre’s recent curatorial triumph. Sweat is a performance piece by fellow Belgian Peter De Cupere, choreographed by Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat.

If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

Oh, there’s more to it than that of course.

Peter De Cupere is creating his smell. Not just a smell, but a composition of the smells of his body, skin of different parts, breath, sweat, sperm, spittle, nose drops, blood and many more smells you can imagine with a person. The smells are and will be subtracted on different times, after different moments, after special dinners made for himself by himself. A research that will go on his whole life. His first edition of his perfume will be soon available… The perfume is called ‘Peter’.

Now, who’s up for fourteen minutes of excruciating toss?

Don’t think of running. I’ve locked the doors.

This is all for your benefit.

Hold still, goddammit. I’m nailing some culture into you.

Update:

According to ArtNews, De Cupere is “incorporating scent into the aesthetic experience.” Thing is, the performance above isn’t an aesthetic experience. It isn’t by definition. (By all means feel free to point out the beauty. There’s cake to be won.) Described more honestly, it’s a hackneyed, rather desperate, attempt to transgress. (“Sweat, sperm, spittle, nose drops, blood…”) Now imagine if arts writers were fined £5 every time they lied. Destitution would ensue in a matter of days.

And from the same article, this:

New York activist-artist Lisa Kirk was seeking to evoke a social experience when she developed a perfume called Revolution for her 2008 exhibition at Participant Inc. on the Lower East Side. Kirk contacted witnesses to political upheavals, including Central American revolutionaries and ex-Black Panthers, and asked them, “What does revolution smell like?” The answer: dried blood, smoke, burning tires, gasoline, and urine. Kirk relied on perfumer Patricia Choux to create the scent and jeweller Jelena Berhrend to design containers that looked like pipe bombs, fabricated in silver, gold, and platinum, and priced from $3,750 to $47,750 per bottle. “If we can’t start a revolution, at least we can create a fragrance that symbolises rebellion,” says Kirk.

Yes, rebellion. She’s an “activist-artist,” see.

Hey, it could happen. // Hands up if your garage contains a Boeing 737 nose cone and flight simulator. // Bees that drink human tears. // Harvesting bees in the Himalayas. // Elephant chair. // Elephants have big innards. // Tiny tarantula. // Cocktail shaker of note. // Coffee maker of note. // Now this is a shopping trolley. // How a Bicycle is Made, 1945. // Watch lithium burn. // Skydiving in a kayak. // The radio time machine. // Retro synth sofa. (h/t, Robert) // The power of wearing spectacles. // The physics of a jumping Hulk. // Can your pet mouse do this? // And finally, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf narrated by Boris Karloff. 

I was doing some research on Detroit and its decline. They kept raising income tax and every time they raised the tax rate, the tax revenues went down. In 2008, Charles Gibson put this to Obama when he was a candidate. He said, “Why are you for raising the tax rate on the rich? Because you often get more revenue at lower tax rates than at the higher tax rates.” And Obama said, “Well, it’s a question of social justice.” In other words, he doesn’t really care about whether the government raises more revenue. If he can get people mad at the rich and they vote for him, then it’s a success.

Further to this, Thomas Sowell discusses the second, expanded edition of his book Intellectuals and Society. Subjects touched on include solutions versus trade-offs, Marxism versus reality, Obama’s hubris, and how to deal with mountain lions lurking near school gates.

And remember, the “anointed” vision Sowell is talking about is embraced by people like this. And by these “enlightened leaders.”  

Daniel Hannan on a bloated state and the legacy of Gordon Brown: 

The lugubrious Fifer inherited a Chancellor’s dream scenario: falling expenditure, rising revenues, strong growth and low inflation. For two years, as promised in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, he stuck to Conservative spending plans, and debt was paid off. Then, purposefully and methodically, he started blowing everything away… All subsequent politics have been dominated by that central, dismal fact. […] The national debt now stands at £1,023 billion (66 per cent of GDP), up from £905 billion (60 per cent) twelve months ago. Total public spending, contrary to almost universal belief, has risen over the past year from £605 billion to £617 billion. […] It cannot be repeated too often that ‘the cuts’ are a figment of the BBC’s imagination. Net public expenditure is higher today than it was under the Broon. The government is spending nearly half our GDP. Whatever is causing the downturn, it plainly isn’t some imaginary shrinkage of the state.

Zombie on the Cloward-Piven strategy:

Voters in both France and Greece, two countries ruinously addicted to government entitlements, rejected the “austerity” model of debt-reduction and instead doubled down on unsustainable spending sprees. France elected Socialist François Hollande as president, and in his acceptance speech he promised to increase government benefits and amp up “stimulus” spending programs – the exact things that got France into a metaphorical debtors’ prison in the first place. But exactly as Cloward and Piven surmised, once you get 50+% of the population hooked on “free” government money, there’s no turning back – they will vote for socialists every time.

And – as Sam notes in the comments – then the money runs out.

Roger Kimball on France’s descent into socialism: *

Here’s a question I would like to ask François Hollande: just where does he think money comes from? […] Socialists tend to believe that money comes from “the rich.” Need some dough for your social program? Simple, take it from “the rich” (however you define that elastic category) and give it to someone else via a government bureaucracy you have set up. But what happens when the rich cease to be rich? What then? […] For the capitalist, the purpose of economic activity is the production of wealth; for the socialist, the purpose of economic activity is the redistribution of wealth: how the wealth gets generated is for the socialist a secondary question, a detail.

Heather Mac Donald on race, riots and Rodney King:  

Unlike most of the public, the jury that decided the excessive-force charges against the officers saw the full video. They acquitted the officers. By then, the media had disseminated the relentless message that the biggest threat facing blacks in L.A. was the cops, not the hundreds of gangs that murdered blacks every week with zero protest from racial advocates.

And David Boaz on the best way to be a socialist. 

Feel free to add your own. [*Added, via Anna.] 

Further to this, Zombie again, this time on Occupy Oakland’s general disarray – sorry, “General Strike”:

There was no purpose or goal to any of these confrontations; in fact, the act of confrontation was the goal. Everyone would mill around waiting for something to happen, and then some cops would show up and the crowd would go into a frenzy for no apparent reason. The mere presence of a policeman is all that it takes to send an Oakland Occupier into either blind rage or a life-affirming adrenaline rush.

Ah, but the poseurs and would-be warriors gotta have thrills, baby. Psychodrama’s where it’s at. And look at the effort they’ve gone to. The nose-ring and pocket knife combo is this season’s Occupy Look. 

So, what was the purpose of all of this? Nothing. Excitement for the teenage rioters. Moral outrage for the Occupy organisers. Overtime for the cops. Boarded-up windows for the businesses. And higher bills for the taxpayers.

The important thing is, those bourgeois suckers have to pick up the tab.

And remember, kids. Marxism will make you happy. Because this, according to Occupy, is what democracy looks like. 

Zombie ventures into the moral wilderness of Occupy’s latest project: 

The farm they seized was not a working farm per se, but rather a “research farm” for the University of California, near its Berkeley campus. The only difference between the way the farm used to be (prior to a week ago) and the way it is now is that the Occupiers have transformed what was essentially a well-maintained and important open-air laboratory into a dishevelled and ultimately purposeless pretend-farm for trustafarian dropouts… The scientists themselves are for the most part royally pissed off at the Occupiers and some may have years of work ruined by the Occupiers’ juvenile prank. 

Ah, but pissing off random people is how a leftist radical gauges just how radical he is. See, for example, this. And this. And this. It’s the Occupy way. 

This being Berkeley, several faculty members felt a need to display their own mighty radicalism: 

Some leftist U.C. professors are lecturing today at the farm to show their solidarity with the Occupiers, including Laura Nader (famous for helping to lead the field of anthropology toward self-critical Political Correctness); Gill Hart, a Gramscian anti-capitalist; and Paul Rabinow, a deconstructionist anthropologist. What do any of these professors know about farming, or plant biology? Nothing. But hey, they know about the significance of what it means to spout off a bunch of revolutionary socialist verbiage while absconding with stuff that isn’t yours.

Property is theft, man. Well, your property is, anyway. Theirs, not so much. 

As these are ersatz radicals with ersatz principles, the “farming” they do is also of the pretend variety.

Breaking into gated property and “liberating” land is exciting; the tedium of then spending endless hours over the next year in the blistering heat, in order to legitimise your actions and prove you’re not just jacking everyone around — not so fun. […] Only a handful of rows, right near the entrance, were planted all along their length, from end to end. Soon enough, those rows gave way to other rows with just a few plants near the walkway, seemingly just for show. Many rows’ plantings were pretty pitiful, or perhaps just symbolic; in this case, for instance, a single full-grown leek was stuck in the ground at the start of one row, to simulate the concept of “farming leeks.” […] Prediction: Very few, if any, of these “crops” will ever be harvested, or even grow to maturity.

Why, it’s almost as if the Occupiers’ “farming” were just a pretext for fatuous grandstanding and self-admiration. Say it isn’t so. 

As the camp’s official volunteer sign-up sheet reveals, nearly 80% of the activities at the “farm” have nothing whatsoever to do with farming. 

But on the upside, they are offering workshops in yoga and poetry. Oh, and group hypnosis sessions. 

Update:

Meanwhile, in entirely unrelated news…  

The FBI arrested five men Monday evening, saying they had planted what were believed to be explosive devices under the Ohio 82 bridge over Cuyahoga Valley National Park as part of a May Day protest… One of the leaders of the Occupy Cleveland movement, Brandon Baxter, is one of those arrested.

Via Daniel in the comments, Jim Treacher has more background here, along with the obligatory disclaimer: “Remember, everybody: Whenever an Occupier commits a crime, he’s not really an Occupier. All Occupier crimes are completely unrelated incidents, because shut up.” Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Mr Baxter – aka Skabby, the would-be ninja of social justice - is seen tapping bongos in front of a banner that reads “greed kills.” Unlike exploding highway bridges, of course, which have no physical consequences whatsoever. 

Update 2: 

Or, further to this, more damning evidence of a misspent childhood. From Avengers #2, November 1963. 

Ah, back when the Hulk used furniture and rumbled in his underpants. And Janet van Dyne was permanently in heat.

Seriously. Even supervillains were ogled. 

Oh, and yes. The film is great fun.  

Caught with the cameras of Voyager and Cassini. // Czech citizens, as seen by the secret police. // Painting with light in 3D bullet time. // Bubbles inside bubbles inside bubbles (in space). // “Zambia’s forgotten Cold War space programme.” // Childhood time-lapsed. // Cardboard sculptures. // Bear meets teddy. // Alan Whicker meets San Francisco’s hippies, 1967. // Little hippo. // House malfunction. More. // Helium-filled object with inversion drive. // Sea monkeys and x-ray specs. I used to own a pair of those. // Assorted mountaintop monasteries. // Fishy swan. // Door knocker of note. // And remember, ladies. Cooking is fun.