Diver from Porlock

Writers make a lot of excuses for not writing.  The Man from Porlock is only the most famous example, there are many others.  The Spectator would probably have to close down if one day it had to stop running whimsical pieces of the 'Things I do while I should be writing the definitive novel of the early part of the 21st century' variety.

In my own case, given my gnat-like concentration, facebookisation, and fascination for the 1950s yellow tiles that I can see from the kitchen table where I work, I often go to libraries or museum cafes to write. 

manuscript, coffee, pen and specs

One of my favourite places to go is the cafe at the Pompidou Centre, which is generally conducive to writing, as it's airy, relatively quiet and uncrowded, and you can sit in the same place for several hours after buying just one cup of coffee at 2.3€.

It also provided me with a wholly original excuse for not completing the 1000 words I had set myself for yesterday's target.  How often is it that one is distracted by men throwing themselves into the void in front of you?

Man jumps from tower in Pompidou Centre

A crowd of people stood and stared and I just had to look.  The young lady in a miniskirt opposite has a photo of me with a camera to my eye. There was a short burst of applause when the man landed.  I wrote 600 words yesterday.

Thomas Kinkade- The Painter of Light (TM)

Thomas Kinkade died just over a year ago, of a drink-n-drugs overdose, as do so many great artists and drinkers.

He is famous for pictures such as this one

It is not my place to criticise his work.  At the time of his death his website claimed reproductions of his paintings hung in one of every twenty US homes.  He sold a lot of reproductions by mail order and over the internet.  He trademarked 'Painter of Light' (which probably never occured to William Turner) and set up galleries in shopping malls through a franchise operation that is in litigation with a number of disappointed franchisees. 

I'm not going to criticise his business model either.  He piled it high and sold it cheap(ish).  Damien Hirst prefers to trade on the rarity of his pieces and the distasteful nature of many of his raw materials, such as skulls and dead sheep.  And Hirst pretends to be an anarchising socialist, which I do not believe Kinkade ever did.  Either way- Aldi or Harrods Food Hall- it's still grocery. 

There is also a housing estate in California designed to look like the houses he often painted. 

Kinkade had a vision that people wish to live in.  Typically this vision looks back to the past- between about 1880 and 1950 in most of his pictures.  It's probably not a co-incidence that he was authorised to paint Disney characters and often did so, as the Magic Kingdom is another highly processed form of escapism. 

A few years ago I would have made a fairly standard left response to this- alienated workers seek refuge in an idealised past that capitalism promises but will not deliver.  

Unfortunately on the left we are starting to idealise the past too- to look back to a social contract that we believe existed from the end of World War ll until the election of Thatcher and Reagan- the years known in France as les trente glorieuses.  In 2013 we hardly dare hope to make the world better, we just hope to stop it getting any worse.  Virtually all my activity as a trade unionist is an attempt to stop our working conditions deteriorating 'because times are hard now and we have to be realistic.'  Things were better in the old days...

Kinkade has something to say about that.  If we look at his paintings of houses in the past- the ones we would live in, if only we could- we can see that, almost without exception, they are burning hard on the inside.  I do not know if he meant to say it, but the meaning of his pictures is obvious.

If we continue to seek to live in the past we will burn. 

I meme mine...

​Something is changing

I've been lucky enough to walk past the Eiffel Tower every morning and afternoon that I go to work for the last ten years or so.  It's an extremely popular attraction and gets nearly 7 million visitors a year.​

And they've started to jump.  Literally.  Into the air.​

This is new.  During the first eight years, at least, of my two daily walks past La Dame de Fer I must have seen several thousand photos being taken.  Not one of them involved the a tourist jumping in front of the tower.  Now maybe a quarter of the photos taken involve a leap, folded knees and outstretched arms.  

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​Eiffel Tower through mesh

​I can't prove it without more research than I'm prepared to do but I suspect that most of these photos find their way onto Facebook or into Instagram.  The 'leap in front ​​​of a tourist attraction' is endlessly reproduced in what we are encouraged to refer to as a meme, ​which is what happens when millions of us go 'me too, me too, me me me me meme' without thinking.

​And then, as they say, it gets to be in our DNA.

​Now I'm not saying those old photos of the Eiffel Tower, the ones taken with instamatics where the sky is an unnatural yellow-green, were better ​photos.  ​They weren't, even when the whole family except the photographer was posed carefully and everybody smiled at the same time, which was rare.  But their function was different.  They were essentially private objects whereas the photos on your mobile phone are public statements- part of the branding of self ​we are encouraged to do, and which is (let us be honest) one of the main purposes of this blog.

If I were cynical and given to hyperbole I would call this the Facebookisation of the Self.  As I'm polite and deferential I'll merely observe that I don't wish to live all my life on the agora.​

I would continue, but this is already too long for a blog post.  My own facebookisation means I find it hard now even to watch a film on television without an ipad on my lap.  I want to discuss 'curating' as understood by tumblr and pinterest and whether this damages creativity, and I will.  ​I will, sometime soon, ​but right now I have to check my email and update my twitter feed.

​TTFN, LOLs ;-)

J xxx

Julian Pennock does his bit for the World Economy

​There is a remarkable consensus that the way to get the economy moving is to increase employment.  Workers with jobs will spend their wages and this extra consumption will cause employers to hire even more workers to provide the goods and services the workers who already have jobs want or need.  One way to increase employment which has yet to be suggested is the industrial injury.  ​The employer has to keep on paying the injured worker's salary (at any rate in la douce France) and so the injured worker can carry on in his benevolent and productive consumption.  And the employer also has to hire a replacement and thus are created two jobs where there was only one.  Even better, the replacement worker has as precarious a job as any business leader could wish.

There is, of course, one problem.  The plan relies on the injured worker's job being necessary, and the employer replacing him.  This will not be the case if one is, for instance, an EU commissioner or a captain of industry.  But for the rest of us our economic duty is clear- we should get hurt at work.

As the picture above shows I am, as ever, leading by example.​

Red Judge, Juge Rouge

A Red Judge, at any rate for English speakers (rather than speakers of American) is not the same as a Juge Rouge.  To English speakers it means a senior judge who wears scarlet robes.​

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Image lifted from the Daily Mail

In France however the 'rouge' refers to the presumed political affiliation of the lawyer and is generally a term of abuse.

The 'juges rouges' have been much in the news lately.  Judges and proscutors are trained apart from other lawyers in France and have a totally different career path. They are civil servants and are collectively known as magistrats and they have their own trade unions.  ​Pictures of the offices of one of these trade unions, the Syndicat de la Magistrature​, were recently published, and in particular, pictures of the Mur des Cons where the magistrats put up pictures of people (many of them from la sarkozye) whom they find stupid or irritating.  

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Picture lifted from Paris Match

According to certain ill-intentioned people the existence of this display board shows incurable bias on the part of the syndicat ​and it should therefore be dissolved.  This of course begs the question (again in the English, rather than the American usage) of how to counter the incurable bias of the Red Judges who are not unionised, and who are still overwhelmingly male, white, upper middle class products of private school and Oxbridge.  The gentleman in the picture above, for instance, is a product of the Oratory School and Magdalene College, Cambridge.  He is currently head of the judiciary in England and Wales.

It's wrong to judge people by the schools they went to and I have a high opionion of British judges who generally interpret law, insofar as it is possible, according to precedent rather than personal prejudice.  But Lord Chief Justice Judge is wearing a robe so long he needs a servant to carry it, and silver buckles on his shoes.  He is seen here in public with the notorious Jack Straw.  ​​Il serait pas un peu con, ce mec?  Is there room for him on the wall?