déjeuner sur l’herbe (minus naked woman)

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Louisa and Robin and I went to a concert in the Parc Floral, next to Chateau de Vincennes on the edge of Paris They have trees that aren’t planted in straight lines – in fact they aren’t planted at all, they just grow!

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The open-air concert space was right by the lake:

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This was part of the Paris Jazz Festival. It cost €5 to get into the park, but after that the concert was free. The first band was made up of a guy with a giant tambourine, accompanied by a piano and a saxophone:

The second band was a 17-piece horn ensemble, who seemed to inspire this juggler – you can hear them in the background:

Louisa and Robin say hello:

I love the French sense of civic humour: is this a lemon-squeezer, or what?

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louvre

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

well this is what everybody comes to see:

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If that was Venus de Milo (and the Winged victory of Samothrace, if wildly impressive, was pretty much the same), I didn’t even try the Mona Lisa. Instead, I got easily more than my full €10 worth by tracing the ancient world from Greece and Etruria through the Roman Empire. It’s true what they say, that the Greeks did people as people better, the human feeling and the homely touch:

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Meanwhile on the other side of the Adriatic, the Etruscans, though far from joyless, were possessed of an almost Tang-like stylization and impassivity:

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Not suggesting that they had any connection with the Chinese (and certainly not the Chinese of over a thousand years later!) – but where did the idea for this Roman beast come from? Just as at the Son of Heaven’s palace gates, the imperial lion paws the globe…

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The Romans could do the emotional stuff too, if somehow in a more stilted and less intimate way than the Greeks:

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and certainly there was space for navel-gazing:

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but mostly they were about bulk and power: look at the massiveness of our achievement!

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At the zenith of their confidence and authority, Caesar Augustus in unbending triplicate:

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His enforcer, Agrippa:

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By the time of Trajan, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent, there is almost a hint of foppishness creeping in:

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Three emperors later, with Marcus Aurelius, a certain weariness:

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And by the time of Theodosius II in the mid-fifth century, when everything was falling apart, the emperor looks positively freaked out:

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As if that tour through the classical world wasn’t edifying enough, then I walked into the Assyrian galleries – the thunderous mythical world of Sargon II in northern Iraq in the eighth century before Christ, when Rome was a village, if it existed at all:

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These things are as big as houses:

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And so, with a civilization so distant that it seems almost like space travel, I start this summer’s adventure…

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north

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

a low European sunrise under a band of grey sky; greenery spontaneously growing; changing patterns in the clouds; open faces in the streets; still light at 9.30 p.m.: home! Of course the machines don’t work…

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the sound of (distant) music…

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

hard to believe, amid all the madness of work, that a week from now I will be right through Paris and on to Salzburg…

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catbrain

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Jeoffrey Boycat, our boy cat (his name a combination of a Yorkshire joke and the Christopher Smart poem) spends a fair amount of time out at night catting about. One of my morning duties, along with putting on the kettle for myself and the toast for the kids, is letting him in at the kitchen window. On Sunday morning Kyria noticed that he had a large circular wound in the fur right in front of his tail, as large as a Victorian penny and blood red with the exposed flesh. Allison took him to the vet, who stapled the wound closed and put a translucent conical plastic collar on his neck, to prevent him getting at the staples while the wound heals. So, Jeoffrey before:

and Jeoffrey after:

He really doesn’t like it at all. A lot of the time he spends doing a most un-boycat like jig: a couple of dance steps backwards, then a push forward off the back foot designed to smack the unwanted collar against the corner of a hard object like a chest or a door, in the hope that this will prize it off his neck. The rest he sits and mews repeatedly, plaintively, at his trusted human companions, lamenting his new state, or lies forlornly accommodating the intrusion to the cushions around him. Of course he’s not let out of doors where he could do boycat damage to the protective headgear, or his wound, or his reputation with the local cat community, and this doesn’t help his mood either.

This has raised the question in our family: do catbrains understand the notion of temporary? For him, surely, there must be the memory trace of a time when there was no headgear, and the sense of sad contrast that accompanies that; and of course there is his present experience of obstruction and frustration; but could he conceptualize or entertain the question of whether this is a new, permanent state, or a merely temporary inconvenience – even when, pityingly, we tell him? Do his mental categories include hope, or fantasies of freedom, or even the possibility of future change? Or is he stuck purely in the present moment that theologians consider so liberating, but in which Jeoffrey is currently suffocating?

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more bad news to ignore

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Stories yesterday in the Guardian and the Independent about how carbon emissions are rising quickly again after the Great Recession, and how they will flip us into feedback loops in the Arctic within 20 years. These stories hunt in packs, and then it all goes quiet for a while. That makes it easy to forget about what is happening, but of course doesn’t make it stop happening. And what is happening now seems to be that as oil is getting more difficult we are burning the dirtier fuels faster to keep everything going, so that even as energy production drops in years to come the pollution will go on intensifying; and that the feedback loops, added to this, will take the planet into unthinkable levels of atmospheric CO2 later this century.

At the same time there are stories in the press like this one reviewing Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next, which speculates that cities of the future will be integrated breathlessly around airports. People blithely, as if it could go on for ever, write whole “non-fiction” books about things that will crumble before they are real, because before long there won’t be enough fuel for this to work – and these books are reviewed credulously in the most reputable media organs. Such unawareness among such educated people about the basics of the forthcoming energy predicament (or is it already happening? – the Archdruid insists we’re double-counting) continues to astound me – but I guess they’re only having fun. And who knows, maybe they will be right about what happens for a rich elite, while everybody else starves at the gates…

Sometimes I wonder what I was doing having children – I would never wish not to have done so, but when I think what they will see by the time they are my age, at mid-century, I flinch.

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pony convention on the landing

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

I knew that playing with ponies was an important part of princess training, and I knew we had picked up a few along the way. Just exactly how many had slipped by me unawares, though, until they all got together:

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everybody’s doing it

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Talking about the death of Osama bin Laden, that is. There have been so many opinions flying around that it’s not a case of saying anything new, just picking what to agree with. Which, for me is:

  • if you live by the sword (especially when you had the privileges to have chosen not to)  you ought to expect to die by the sword, perfunctorily, without much mercy or sympathy, when your enemies catch up with you
  •  yes, it would be nice if due process had been followed and he had been brought to trial (no doubt to expose himself at length as a hate-filled fanatic), but you can’t expect the high priest of the suicide bomb to be treated as though he wasn’t likely to blow himself and his adversaries to bits, so it’s not surprising that his adversaries shot him rather than taking any chances
  • yes, he was telegenic and charismatic, but that shouldn’t disguise the fact that if he had ever come to power anywhere he would have made life nasty and miserable not just for infidels like me and my family and friends, but for most Muslims with normal human aspirations too
  • death is never good to rejoice at, but certainly in this case nothing to mourn.

When it comes down to it, he was a death-worshipper and a nihilist (and, it turns out, vain with it); and zero minus zero is still zero.

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princessing: a serious business

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Last weekend: Kyria kept pestering me all Friday morning to switch on the TV so she could watch the royal wedding. Eventually, a couple of hours before it was due to start, I did; she and Natasha sat rapt in front of the screen.

Come 2.00, I decided to watch too. It’s a mystery to me why the Windsors have such a grip on at least certain sectors of Britain, but it was clearly a big national event, and thirty years since the last one. That time I had just spent 96 hours straight awake in New York City, except for a four-hour nap on the floor of some loft in the Bowery; then I had flown back from JFK to Heathrow, with a short nap on the plane, arriving after dark and hitch-hiking through the night to Yorkshire; stayed awake the whole of the wedding eve, and gone to a bonfire party on Otley Chevin in the evening; then crashed out seriously, and slept through the whole thing. It could easily be another thirty till the next, and I might not even be around then! So this time, I figured the experience of watching a royal wedding, for whatever reason, was probably worth an hour out of a life.

Ian, who had been up since the middle of the night with his computer games, fell asleep. Allison and I sat wisecracking, which vexed Kyria a great deal; she kept telling us in an irate tone to be quiet. I guess we were breaking her spell. When you are a princess-in-training, these things are terribly serious…

So, it was a curiosity: the spectacle of two young people grimacing nervously through an intimate ritual played out on TV for 2 billion people. In the face of that, such details as whether they love each other etc. seemed totally irrelevant; it’s crowd satisfaction that counts. I should think they scored pretty highly on that – it was a well-put together circus – but I have to say I preferred this version, which was apparently an ad for some mobile phone company:

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the lights are going out (but not here, yet)

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

A story by Tom Whipple in Energy Bulletin yesterday, about how South Asia is running out of power (I noticed this in Nepal when I was there in January, in Bhaktapur – the power was off for at least half the time and I only got one hot shower in the four days I was there). He makes the point that this will particularly affect urban areas – in many rural areas (or even older cities like Bhaktapur) they barely had power at all in the first place, and if you want water you go to the well (though of course that has its own problems) – but if you are in the middle of a modern city and your water stops because your electric pump has gone out, and you’re on the however-many-th floor up, how are you going to deal with that?

So this is how the retreat begins – a nibbling away in the poorer parts of the world of what we, in the rich world, have taken for granted. When and in what form will it reach our shores? And what happens then? I don’t worry too much about Texas – though no doubt it will get plenty hotter – but what about places where power is essential pretty much full time? What happens when the heating goes out in Toronto or Minneapolis in winter? Or Los Angeles or Phoenix loses air conditioning? How are the Americans going to take that?

On a related note, this nice graphic from the World Resources Institute was linked to from a story in the Guardian about which industries emit most CO2:

Air travel just 1.7%, driving around 10%, livestock 5.4%. So travel on the surface by public transport, source your food locally where you can – and don’t eat meat (drops in the ocean, but then drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place….) But what else are you going to do? How, as an individual  to make a start on cement production? Iron and steel? Energy use in commercial buildings, when your employer (as mine does) keeps the air-conditioning on so low – 16°C – that my nose chills and my hands start to seize up? I have to step out into the desert heat once in a while to get warm and functional again. And next week they are having a conference on sustainability…

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