The British Country Look

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fbdcl/British_Style_Genius_By_Royal_Appointment_The_Country_Look/


My next sewing project...tartan trousers!!!


Alex James, rock star turned cheese farmer.


Luella Bartley

Allotment

I recently became a member of a communal allotment. It is currently barren, the fruits of our labour not yet even conceived, but come summer and there I will be able to spend many a pleasant evening with a trowel and some wine, beholding the glory of burgeoning self-sufficiency! As for potential set-backs, at this stage I'd rather not imagine them, for the sake of optimism.

The Atheist Bus

I'm not sure how I feel about this. After all, vehement disbelief takes just as much unfounded supposition as its counterpart view. However, the word 'probably' gives more of an agnostic feel to the campaign.

The Man Who Planted Trees

I remember watching this as a child!

Climate Chaos Café

Tonight was my visit to the Climate Chaos Café and I have come away not only, as my Grandfather used to say, having had equal sufficiency, but feeling incredibly inspired. The facilitator gave a fascinating talk under the title of 'Gardening for the Future', in which he (reminding me of one of a previous post of mine) alluded to the war-time effort to self-produce food, following with advice on how to garden in view of the warming climate. Then I paid two-fifty and was fed a three-course meal. My diary is also burgeoning with notes, dates and numbers. Hoorah.

For anybody with a concern over global warming, this sort of thing is held every Wednesday at 6.45 at The Common Place. It is run by Stop Climate Change at Leeds Tidal.

SDC Breakthrough Project

"The Sustainable Development Commission is launching Breakthroughs for the 21st Century, an exciting new project for 2009 - and we’d like you to be a part of it. We want to bring together some of the best ideas that will truly put the UK on the path to becoming a sustainable society – one which is strong, healthy and just, and lives within environmental limits. We plan to showcase these ideas in a publication and at a high-level event next summer."

There is a questionnaire that can be filled in by those interested, with a space for ideas. I appreciate the chance to add my thoughts, and hope that this isn't just another exercise to create the illusion of power.

The Trauma of Geophysical Dislocation

Jefferson Medical College professor Salman Akhtar discusses "The Trauma of Geophysical Dislocation", proposing that psychoanalysts need to pay special attention to their immigrant patients. Akhtar suggests that the immigration experience creates disruptions to the waking screen that are too often ignored in therapy and that the objects and landscapes that are left behind have a more significant impact on the immigrant's psychological well being than has generally been recognized.

Listen.

Ernesto Neto

One of the leaders of the contemporary Brazilian art scene, Neto "works with abstract installations which often take up the entire exhibition space. His materials are gossamer-thin, light, stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine membranes fixed to the ceiling by long, stretched threads his works hang down into the room and create shapes that are almost organic. sometimes they are filled with scented spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings, sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures which the visitor is allowed to feel through small openings in the surface. He also creates spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter and thereby experience the work and interact with it."





This inspires me to do something artistic with all of those laddered hold ups I have accumulated! Of course, mine would spill.

Global Economic Future

An article in the Economist, intriguingly alluding to W.B.Yeats' famous poem, 'The Second Coming'.

Burn After Reading

I went tonight to watch the latest Coen Brothers' flick, and came out wondering why I did. It's not as though it was a bad film, in fact it has had very favourable reviews. I just don't feel in any way edified by it. Perhaps the utterance of a couple of words I'm trying to include in my working vocabulary were of value, and of course the mere appearance of Clooney & Pitt is always welcome, but I drew no real rumination from the film, nor did it connect with any other issue that currently has a bearing on me. Is this to mean that every film I watch, or every book I read, needs to be contextually relevant, or that I simply wasn't 'into' that particular film? I think the latter to be the truth. After all, I frequently indulge in period dramas without a fig of obvious grander significance. So why this regret? I am most likely just pissed at having spent a fiver on a film I didn't much like; that could have been used more judiciously to buy a bottle of corner-shop-plonk!!

Good Men?

Some words from Kurt Vonnegut's 'Timequake':

"...Dillinger robbed only the rich and the strong...(he) wasn't a simpering, sly swindler. He was an athlete.

In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools which will never stop, the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected. One is the story of Robin Hood. As ill-educated as John Dillinger was, that was surely his inspiration: a reputable blueprint for what a real man might do with life.
...
And another, as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood...is the life of Jesus Christ as describes in the New Testament."

Words of the Revolution

A little Byron, from 'Don Juan': "...revolution alone can save the earth from hell's pollution."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dw3p7/Words_and_Music_The_Ringing_Grooves_of_Change/

Medieval Economic Systems

"Community rather than individuality was at the heart of the medieval approach to things..." article affiliated with The Idler.

In light of this, my Utopia requires usury to be outlawed and guilds to be re-established. The first of which will be the Net Book Agreement. Amazon is cheap but you won't find a charmingly dishevelled bookseller lurking among a pile of mouldy George Elliots. On the plus side, nor will you find a dead badger.

(Sorry to steal your blog posts Christian, but I wouldn't if it were not for their sheer brilliance.)

People who Told the Truth

I watched muddy masterpiece The Libertine the other night, and I have to say that I rather like the 2nd Earl of Rochester. He was debauched, drunk and diseased, but he made no excuses. He was essentially true to himself. In a world where we lie almost continually, whether to protect or to pomp, a completely truthful person is rare. I first thought upon this after reading some Camus; The Outsider sees protagonist Mersault live his life without contrivance, but of course it was to be his downfall.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.



From Rochester's 'A Satire Against Mankind':

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

Charlie Brooker on the Invisible Apocalypse

"Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves..." The man has insight.

Agrofuels

To find out why they are actually incredibly BAD, follow Biowatch Uk. I suppose to the uninformed they would appear as environmentally friendly alternative fuels, but the implications are convoluted. An acquaintance of mine is heading the protest tomorrow, unfortunately I have to be in uni, or else I would go. I think Direct Action is best action of all, especially with the promise of 'guerilla gardening'!!

Leeds Light Night

Despite being decried by my friends, and despite the fact that I could only scoff at the performance art, I think that Light Night is a positive thing. This video I found on the Met's website.

The Great Unfreeze

In association with Climate Chaos Leeds and coinciding with Leeds Light Night, I partook in this demonstration in the centre of Leeds. It is difficult to tell, from my perspective how effective it was, but it did draw attention.

Read the Yorkshire Post article and watch the video.

Oxford Bags

Antiquated men's fashion is so appealing to me.

America: A History and A Taxi Journey

The American Future: A History is a brilliant new series on the Beeb. The first episode covers the USA's impending resource crisis.

More colourfully, but just as interestingly, Stephen Fry takes a look at contemporary America, taking us all with him in his little black cab. Here is the first episode, where Mr Fry charms the East coast.

Apparently, he is also the charmee, of my mate Matt. I have been told by the latter that the former now follows on twitter! What a bugger of a sentence.

98 Months

It seems incongruous to place this entry next to a rather whimsical one about fashion, but then my interests are conflicting.

As of August this year, it was announced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that after a period of one hundred months, the climate will be irreversibly tipped into a state we will not be able to rectify. This Andrew Simms article is a recommended account of the crisis we purportedly face. I find the comparisons between today and war-time recession especially interesting. Margaret Beckett also alluded to this in her discerning 2007 speech Climate Change: The Gathering Storm (watch). Perhaps it is once again time to Dig for Victory.

On a conspiratorial note, one paragraph of Simms reads "It tells us, for example, that only a government that was sleepwalking or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations..." puts me in mind of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Timequake. Are we really all on autopilot? Sitting here now, idly blogging and drinking tea, makes me suspect that at least I am.

Finally a quote, from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who regards climate change as “an act of aggression by the rich against the poor”.

Samantha Pleet

"New York-based designer Samantha Pleet has been charming everyone with her sartorial alchemy since her debut collection in fall 2006..." Visit the Pleet Street Journal.

Ann Demeulemeester

I'm coveting the 08/09 collection from this Belgian fashion designer. I need a pair of boots for the winter, and would love to find some (moderately priced!) flat lace-ups for trudging about in. Ones like those Jane, Elizabeth or Tess might have worn! Everything in the shops is just so impractical and contrived.







Look too at her green upholstered shop! Designed by Korean firm of architects Mass Studies.

Gregory Crewdson

American photographer. Creates and photographs 'meta events'. Reminiscent of David Lynch.

Edmund Dulac

One of the greats of the American Golden Age of Illustration.

Band Tour by Bicycle!

This is their blog.

New Project Blog

Despite my reservations about social networking and blogs, specifically the way my interests are no doubt being collated by marketing giants(!), I accept that they are a very efficient way of presenting on-going projects. To organise myself a little better, I have started a new blog for my current brief. This way I can keep this blog for my own fancy, or just as a space to RANT. The new blog URL is currently http://thebinyard.tumblr.com/, but it is subject to change, especially if I want to obscure myself from certain nosy Parkers.

I just looked 'nosy parker' up in the dictionary..

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from the picture postcard caption, “The adventures of Nosey Parker,” referring to a peeping Tom in Hyde Park, London.

It feels good to know where my words come from!

Self Cultivation

The prospect of identity overwhelms me. I constantly feel under pressure to assert who I am, and what my sodding interests are. Sometimes I just don't care; all I want to do is to quit trying to be ME and just BE. Actually, staring at a blank wall sounds great right now. I don't want to be a given the option to 'personalise' it either.




Does anyone even read this?

Apple Festival in Sweden

Creative author - Helge Lundstrom

Ice Rain in China

I can't seem to find the source of the photograph.

Why We Should Stop Doing Things.

'Cause Charlie Brooker is always right.