Today I went to the V&A, one of those obvious London tourist attractions that, living here, I’ve never before got round to visiting. Their current exhibition on British design is pleasant enough, if a bit too broadly themed to be really captivating.

All is forgiven, though, because it contained this wonderful chair:

It’s hand-made by Stephen Richards. He calls it the ‘Storm Chair’, for obvious reason. It feels like some scrapyard miracle, as though wooden offcuts of wood have somehow found coherent form.

It’s a shame, though, for this to be a one-off. This should be the product of a genetic algorithm crossed with a CAD program. Tell it to evolve a chair, made from notched sticks of varying lengths, with the requirement to avoid regularity and parallel lines. You’d get not one chair but thousands, evolving towards the chaotic perfection of the storm chair. Tool up a workshop to turn the designs into reality. The carpenter arrives one morning to find a pile of numbered, notched, pieces of wood, and beside it a printout with instructions. She finishes it, only to find the process repeated with a slightly different chair. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I’ve not been paying enough attention to the student protests in Quebec. There’s an overview at The Disorder of Things. It’s about tuition fees, the right to protest and an attempt to bring down the traditionally-strong student unions:

downtown Montreal has been plunged into an actual state of exception, warranting the full force of the law (send the tape to Agamben). Very worryingly, the authorities had recourse to anti-terror legislation to prosecute four students who detonated smoke bombs in the Montreal Subway a few weeks ago and the police used their newly-found discretionary power in the application of an ancient municipal rule last night, which resulted in the arrest of over 500 people, who were fined 600 bucks each (somebody’s got to pay for all that overtime).

The author insists that most of the politics here is specific to Quebec, though some of his commentary is much more generally applicable:

The strike has also sparked a wave of left romanticism, which, for someone steeped in the tradition of radical doubt, sits somewhere in between the comical and the genuinely inspirational. I admit I’ve been forced to reconsider the power of an ironic moustache versus good old street protest. I think that the current generation of students, equipped as it is with a more sophisticated understanding of power, will nonetheless try and reclaim the terms of political discourse instead of spending its time deconstructing them. Words like democracy, equality, rights and freedom seem to have a less hollow ring than before in various parts of the world. Amongst the Quebecois urban youth, there is a genuine sense that signifiers like “democracy” and “fairness” have been totality baffled by the current elite and by several decades of persistent neoliberal admonishing.

One fairly certain prediction for the future, is that in the next couple of decades we’ll see many more stories of princelings behaving badly.

China’s elite have money, and a reasonable number are sending their sons and daughters abroad. Even at home, the puritan work ethic of the parents must produce a rebellion of some kind. Whether that emerges as culture, gambling or boozing depends on the child.

B&T picks out a mid-level case of this from a report in Le Monde Diplomatique. Children of Chinese officials go on gambling jaunts to Kaichin, a breakaway province of Burma making a bid for independence. Apparently Laiza, its main town, is filled with casinos targetting Chinese:

“Children of Chinese officials became a problem,” said a [Kachin Independence Organization] official. “They borrow money from the [casino] owner to gamble, pay after a phone call to their parents. When parents stop sending money, we keep them in the hotel until parents pay up.” Keeping them is not kidnapping: “They get food and housing, they just can’t leave. We make a lot of money.”

The full story is interesting, showing China’s policy of non-interference being put to the test:

Chinese infrastructure projects in Burma — pipeline, railway line and dam construction projects — depend on peace in Kachin State. Two pipelines are expected to transport 12bn cubic metres of gas and 22m tons of oil a year from two Chinese-built ports near Kyaupkyu in the Bay of Bengal to China’s energy-hungry central provinces.

Who can see your Facebook content, if you keep to the default privacy settings? In 2010, visualization expert Matt McKeon tried to display this, showing how the privacy settings had loosened over time, and exposed your life to ever-wider groups of people.

He plotted groups of people as concentric circles, from the most intimate (you) in the centre, out to the whole world at the end. Spokes represented types of content (name, photos…), and a segment was colored blue when a group of people could see that content by default.

Thus as Facebook loosens its privacy settings, the circle turns blue and your life becomes open to the world.

All this is now two years out of date. I hate to think how much bluer the circle has become in the intervening time.

From Sheila O’Malley, a depressing picture of Marilyn Monroe — or rather, of her position in the world:

Many of these movies were interested in demeaning or humiliating her, punishing her for the fact that she elicited desirous feelings in men. The Seven Year Itch, while mostly famous today for the skirt-blowing-up scene, is a nasty piece of work which puts Monroe in the unenviable position of being portrayed as a circus freak of sex appeal. Tom Ewell plays her ogling downstairs neighbor, and the way he views her shows the attempt to turn her sexiness into something dirty and lewd. She is so “hot” that she has to keep her underwear in the freezer.

O’Malley, though, has her usual admiration for actors who bury their problems under fanatically workaholic commitment to getting the job done:

It is commonly known that Monroe was victimized and abandoned as a child, leaving her with an abyss of need inside of her, but she took that victimization and turned it into a weapon and a strength. As an actress, she did not hide her need for love; instead she willingly let it flood out of her eyes into the camera and into the eyes of her co-stars in a way that is still startling to witness today

I always enjoy seeing specialist, professional media outflank the mainstream, and agree with the angry ranters. Much of my joy in reading the Financial Times, for example, comes from seeing them offer critiques of markets and capitalism which the Guardian would flinch from publishing.

Case in point: Australian marketing magainz B&T rips into the Olympics. They describe a photoshoot with Sally Gunnell, interrupted by fanatical brand policing by the Olympic organizing committee:

Raising the national flag over her shoulders was deemed to be too reminiscent of Gunnell’s triumphant gesture after winning the 1992 400m Hurdles Olympic Gold for Great Britain in Barcelona. The photoshoot was halted, the Union Jack removed and Gunnell forced to change from her white tracksuit deemed too reminiscent of the British national strip and into a more acceptable orange T-shirt.

The New Statesman profiles Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Among other things, it paints him as embodiment of the shift away from economic politics, towards London-centric cultural and arts:

“what happened in the late 1980s was a changing of the guard from people interested in politics to people interested in culture. Rusbridger’s not politically engaged, but nobody else is, since it doesn’t make any difference who’s running the country. He has been very successful at retaining a Guardian persona that keeps in touch with the zeitgeist”

It’s true, and it’s possibly what has kept the Guardian doing so well. I just wish it didn’t have to be that way.

Shiv Malik in the Guardian:

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

A particularly horrendous case, this, but not an aberration. It’s mindblowing how much of the grunt-work of running big occasions is now turfed over to the exploited unemployed. The government and private sector have figured out how to get work at only the cost of unemployment benefits. And however much they are described as ‘volunteers’, there’s a strong element of coercion:

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

That promised paid work is hardly utopian, by the way:

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The Moscow gay pride parade happened a week ago, as usual. Or rather, didn’t happen as usual. LGBT demonstrations, Described as ‘satanic’ by one former mayor, have never been allowed in Moscow.

Drugoi (Rustem Adagamov), one of Russia’s most popular bloggers, was there this time, and reports that everything followed the pattern established over the past 7 years of abortive parades. The organizers apply for a permit. They are denied, on dubious grounds (“a provocation, causing moral harm”). A few of the brave and foolhardy turn up anyway, ready to be either arrested or attacked by counter-demonstrators.

A few dozen journalists waited at the city council building and opposite the mayor’s office on Tverskaya Square, waiting for the appearance of LGBT activists…What happened today couldn’t be called a parade nor even an action — a dozen people with assorted rainbow logos, or without them, turned up to the city council. One one ground or another they were all arrested and taken away by the police.

And if you think wearing the rainbow flag is shaky grounds for arrest, you should look at St. Petersburg. There, “homosexual propaganda” has been banned since March, by a law which forbids “

propagandising sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderism among minors

“. There are moves in progress introduce a similar law on a national level. So all in all, gay rights in Russia are growing weaker, rather than stronger.

ETA

: after writing it I discovered that, wonder of wonders, an LGBT demonstration has been allowed in Moscow. Maybe my pessimism was unjustified — or perhaps this is a one-off, because assorted EU politicians are in town

What’s strange about guitarist Erik Mongrain isn’t his skill or the beauty of his music. It’s the novelty of his style — something I thought would be impossible by now. The guitar is the most ubiquitous of instruments — how could there exist a technique which hasn’t been explored a thousand times before?

Mongrain calls it ‘lap tapping’, reasonably enough. A few other people play percussive guitar — Dominic Frasca, Andy McKee — but with a far more traditional guitar sound. And there doesn’t seem to be any tradition of this, though presumably history has some lone virtuosos. So Mongrain is all alone in innovation.