Reinstall

I’ve mentioned already that I work near an art gallery. I noticed a piece of opportunistic recycling as I walked into town today.

Apparently the artist

“creates new relationships, experimenting with unexpected combinations of materials creating objects and environments, which encourage us to see the everyday world with fresh eyes”

and she

“fashions monumental objects from scrapyard materials and throws them away after use”

Though I do wonder if a graffitied garage door is quite what she intended. It pleased me though.

Plunged into Kaos

I’ve just discovered that the Arts Council have decided to stop funding my favourite theatre group.

Kaos Theatre have a reputation for productions that are loud, colourful and bawdy. What the slapstick can hide, though, is the intelligence that goes in to these productions.  They aren’t just great physical theatre, they are witty, subversive, considered, highly-rehearsed and fun. And I’m puerile enough to dearly love hearing the word “cunt” used appropriately on stage.

My earliest memories of Kaos are of their rehearsals for “Caligula” in the Brewery Arts centre in Cirencester in the mid 1990s. I didn’t go to see the production, but anguished screams punctuated the life-drawing classes I was attending. They seemed serious and rather heavy, and I had enough seriousness and heaviness in my life at that time, and I don’t remember going to any of their productions. I was aware of them though, and I took a young Frenchman to see “The Importance of Being Ernest” five years or so ago and fell in love with the company then. I hadn’t seen camp like it. It’s indescribable, because anything I say will give you a watered down impression. Imagine a cross between Liberace and Pantomime played at racing speed, and you’ll get the general idea. It was very very funny, and very very clever. Then I took the one I go to the theatre with to see “Moll Flanders” and was delighted by the complexity and sophistication of thought underneath the rudeness and crudeness of the action. Oh and the cross-dressing was fab. Gender-ambiguity: bring it on.

So it’s no surprise that I’ve been looking forward to their “Midsummer Night’s Dream” ever since they announced it a year ago. The Dream is one of the most under-rated plays. It’s full of darkness and menace, but it’s either played as candy-floss or as commedia dell’arte.  I’d like to see a gothic version please:  I want to see a Tim Burton Dream, with Johnny Depp as Oberon and Helena Bonham-Carter or Christina Ricci as Titania, and Pete Postlethwaite as Bottom.   Kaos is not afraid of darkness, and much of their work has no slapstick to it at all, but explores all sorts of violence.  Their dream promises to be:

… a fantastically lurid vision of Shakespeare’s classic play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The KAOS DREAM plunges this famous story into a contemporary urban cabaret of strip-clubs, pimps and pole-dancers, subverting all convention in true KAOS style.

And now I discover that the Arts Council in it’s infinite wisdom have decided to throw away the decade the company have spent growing as a troupe and building a brand and an audience.  More worryingly still, I hear that many of these decisions were taken based on inaccurate information about audience sizes and so on.  If you are going to have criteria for ripping away someone’s livelihood and for destroying something that took a decade to create, at least apply those criteria fairly.

I have of course written to the appropriate Arts Council officers to register my protest. But this is more so that the Council cannot pretend that no-one minded and no-one objected than because I have any expectation that it’ll make a blind bit of difference.

Hey bloody ho.

Y’know

How do you know you know something?  How do you know you’re learning?

I spent a couple of days last week on the first two teaching days of an academic course.  The topic in question is a fluffy subject for magpie minds - the tutor even used the word “eclectic”.

We spent the tutorial days chatting.   The tutor had a dozen or so slides and if he hadn’t had those then it would have felt like we were just hanging out, sharing tales from our various pasts and blethering.  It was a pleasant way to spend two days, but it didn’t feel structured or disciplined and so I didn’t feel like I was being taught stuff and therefore I didn’t feel that I learning.

I had the same experience years ago when I spent enough to buy a newish small car on NLP training, but couldn’t tell if I’d got anything out of it.  I challenged the tutor then saying “this is interesting and it’s cool, but what exactly are you teaching me and what am I learning?”   He said that different people know they know things in different ways and observed that I need to be able to relay something in a structured way in order to know that I know it.  He also said that they’d taken a decision to teach in a way that suited the majority of people who could learn without the need to evaluate their learning.  Or something.  To this day I don’t know if he was bullshitting on the fly or if I really am that anomalous.

In the old days of surgery the method was watch one, do one, teach one.  Teaching something fulfills my need to be able to relay it in a structured way.  I guess the nearest I’m getting to that in my studies is the discipline of writing an essay on the subject which is transparent enough to explain its own subject-matter to an intelligent lay-person.

I decided to trust the tutor last week.  He’s been teaching his subject at various universities for years, with a lifetime of training before then.  There were only four of us, all with a couple of decades of working life behind us and all well on the way through our studies.    The experience with the NLP training is a reasonably successful precedent.   And most recently I’ve discovered that when I am teaching, I watch people to see if they understand the concepts rather than banging on and on until they and I am bored.  I don’t care whether or not they have an “ah hah” moment of epiphany when they realise they get it, so long as they get it.  I do spell it out when I’m asked to, but that’s because leaving people floundering is cruel.

So I decided that last weekend I’d go with the flow rather than floundering, but I’ll only find out what I learned when it comes to writing the assignment.  It’s flattering to be trusted to pick the bones out of our chattering, but it’s also rather scary if the truth be told.

Across the Universe

Julie’s comment about the Turner Prize on my previous post reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write up for a while.

Wouldn’t it be better if the Turner Prize was just announced the way that the Nobel Prize is? None of this “and the nominees are…” crap.

If they did, then the prize this year should go to NASA. Yep, the eningeering dudes who run the Space Station and put men on the moon.

Yeah, I know that they’re Scientists and Americans, but they came up with the most amazing piece of art last month. They beamed the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” at the Pole Star, Polaris, the most useful and influential of the stars visible from here.

I don’t know what the guys at NASA call it, but in my book it may be cheesy, it’s also brilliant conceptual art. They’ve blurred the boundaries between science and art and done something inspiring and witty, and clever and pointless, a piece of apposite cosmic graffiti, and we should give those geeks a prize.

Failing to plan is much easier in the short term

Longer ago than it’s polite to admit, Bloglily tagged me with the meme to ask how I plan things. I didn’t do it, because I don’t really organise myself, so it never got on a to do list, so I never did it, so it’s all rather embarrassing. However, today I found a sheet of paper I wrote up a year ago when I was working out things that need doing to the house, and it clicked itself in beside the “must do Bloglily’s meme” entry in my brain, and so I offer it here. Pretty, isn’t it?

And confusing. And impractical.

The long and the short is that I don’t have a consistent system. As I’ve said, I tend to carry my to do list around in my head which is a Bad Thing. The diagram above shows an attempt to get the list out of my head and prioritised in some way.

At work where these things matter, I either plonk my way through my email inbox, red flagging things that need dealing with and confirming them as complete when I’ve done them, or else I make a list in my notebook and tick them off when I’ve done them. I’ve taken recently to doing beautiful diagrams in Visio of things that need doing and the order they need doing in, and they look rather like demented seaweed. Oddly, I have a reputation at work for planning and preparation, but that is because I can be heard snarling things like “failing to plan is planning to fail” and “being without a list makes you listless” and “poor preparation makes for p***-poor performance” at myself, and occasionally at others.

Every five years or so I make a Life Plan. I write the things I want to have or do more of in coloured pen on a sheet of flip-chart paper. They tend to be fairly generic things like “laugh” and “do gardening”. I also work through the exercises in “What Color is Your Parachute” which help me think about what I want in my life and what I want out of it. It can take me years to gather my thoughts for the really big changes like buying a house or making a career change or choosing a degree course, but once I’ve gathered them I end up putting my criteria into a checklist of 4 - 8 things. I am then ruthlessly uncompromising about the criteria on the list, but very patient.

Ultimately though, I find that lists of things to do are usually so oppressive and depressing, and full of so much obligation and so little that’s actually worth doing for its own sake, that I tend not to bother. Which is why only half of the things on the picture above have actually been dealt with a year later.

Podcast Reviews - 2 - Podcasting Fun

My week has some aural hot-spots that I thought I’d share with you, here in order of joy are some silly but articulate podcasts.

Answer me This by Helen and Olly - (website - iTunes) - fresh, funny, witty, teasy, fun. They’re not afraid of swearing (hence the “explicit” tag) but, swearing aside, their content is pretty innocent. Helen Zaltzman and Ollie Mann riff off questions that listeners send in, with occasional interjections from Martin the Soundman, and I find them articulate and entertaining.

Friday Night Comedy - (iTunes) - Either The News Quiz or the Now Show - either way, top class topical comedy from the BBC. If your week doesn’t include this already, then you are several endorphin rushes short of a giggle.

The Bugle by John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman - (website - iTunes) - More riffing from the Zaltzman family, this time it’s brother Andy who discusses this week’s news with comedian John Oliver courtesy of Times Online. You’ve got to admire anyone with two Z’s in their surname. What I want to know is how you can make something this well prepared sound this unrehearsed? It’s impressive. Oh, and funny.

Skeptoid - (website - iTunes) - not comedy as such, but a cheerful debunking of the frankly ridiculous, and there is something about Brian Dunning’s approach which is refreshingly un-dogmatic. As far from Dawkins as you can get and still be on the side of the angles.

Alt.text from Wired.Com - (website - iTunes) - five minutes or so of Lore Sjöberg taking a perverse, diverse, subverse and occasionally obverse look at modern pop culture. Ach, let’s not be clever: it’s a bloke taking the piss out of things. Witty though. And don’t be put off by his photo.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast - (website - iTunes) - the boys have been feeling the strain recently, but they’ve been podcasting weekly for over a year. However, their insights into the lows and lows of being a working troupe of actors are still better value than Wogan on the way into work in the morning.

Reducing and Cropping

The earlier mornings and later afternoons are a daily delight, and when you add sunshine it’s bliss.

Here’s today’s photograph, reduced to 25% of it’s original size:

And here is the mid-section of the photograph at full resolution, but cropped.

Should I raise an invoice?

Should I raise an invoice, or do I offer my services?

An organisation called “Madrigal Communications” (which seems to be a bloke and an internet site) has lifted the meat out of one of the posts here in my blog, added one sentence at the top, and three at the bottom which are soliciting business, and put the whole thing up on-line. He did this in November, but the credit’s just turned up here. Oh, and he has miss-spelt “Behn” but there you go. Ironically, he offers proofreading services. At least he doesn’t offer ethical advice.

So, the question is, do I send him an invoice for the time I spent putting the original blog together which was a professional lifetime plus a couple of hours? You could argue “no” because what he has lifted are quotations from Einstein, Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll which are in the public domain. On the other hand, the “Questions” series is the result of a good couple of decades thought, the post he’s lifted them from is about a specific category of questions to be used for a specific kind of analysis, and I make it plain that I ask questions for a living. It seems he doesn’t, though he does write for a living and is trying to get business off the back of my blog post. Or maybe I should be grateful that he credited me at all.

Bugger the internet.

Photo later in the day, I think.

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I just received a very pleasant and honourable email saying that he’s removed the post from his site. I’ve reminded him that he can wrap his own words around the Kipling questions, and pointed him in the direction of my source material for the Carroll and Aristotle questions. To be honest, if he’s soliciting for business for his writing skills, then it would do no harm to cut out my list of questions and use the space for his own words. I do hope he does. I didn’t create the questions, just the thinking about them expressed in my post.

Not in Cuneiform any More

I’d forgotten that I’d photographed a whiteboard at work today until I downloaded my other photos off my phone this evening.

Since this is a record of what I see each day as much as it’s anything, I put it up here as today’s offering.

It’s not inherently interesting, but in the context of this blog I take comfort that so much early cuneiform is the deadly dull record-keeping of Assyrian and Babylonian civil servants.

Incidentally, the optical zoom on the G800 was useful for this because it allowed me to stand at the other end of the table and photograph the board straight on and still get the image to fill the frame.

Tulips up close and personal

The frustrating thing is that the Sony Ericsson has the better software controls (and I’ll miss them) but the Samsung is the better camera. These two photos were taken with everything except the flash and the focus turned to “auto”.

It’s not particularly bright in here (it’s my kitchen, it’s 7.00pm, it’s February) but both phones did pretty well.

Interestingly, the Sony Ericsson (below) is closer to what I see, but the Samsung (above) is the more pleasing image.

Talking of not very bright - why did I commit to a photo every day for four weeks when it’s still dark in the evenings? Oh well.