Without the state

And so it drags on...

If the sort of chaos we've seen in the Commons and in Government over the past months had been reported as happening anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage would have wasted no time in sneering, if not in so many words, about incompetent foreigners. Yet, after almost three years of needless confusion and division we still don't know what will happen come April.

That's bad enough but we see fabricated stories everywhere accusing Corbyn personally of being anti-semitic as well as the wider party, despite the damaging claims from Baroness Warsi about anti-Islamic behaviour in the Tory party, the latest singling out Gove again as someone we should all be concerned about if he became Tory leader.

Calls for a third (yes third!) referendum are dismissed as undemocratic despite the fact that there have been three votes on the Withdrawal Agreement - without any part of it having been discussed at the time of the referendum - and despite the fact that some of the most ardent Brexiteers have been campaigning against our membership from day 1 of joining without drawing breath.  Almost 6m people have signed the petition to revoke Article 50, 16m voted to Remain, but these are dismissed as irrelevant compared to a fraudulent vote on an incompetently designed Referendum, called by an equally incompetent politician trying to defend his position as leader and his party's control of the country. But no - asking to confirm the outcome of hree years of further incompetence is undemocratic and only an attempt to reverse the outcome of the referendum.

Well in part yes, of course it is an attempt to reverse the outcome.That's how democracies work. Discussion and debate leading to a decision. It doesn't stop. If arguing against something already enacted is undemocratic then no laws would ever change.

Having another referendum is supposed also to lead to division on the country. Have you looked away from your office in No 10 lately Prime Minister? Have you seen the mess you and your predecessor have landed us in? Have you seen the violent language and violent behaviour directed at foreigners every day. Of course that probably doesn't bother you does it. One of your own party members - OK former party members - says you have a problem with immigrants and you did nothing when Home Secretary to make me doubt that. I've already mentioned the rampant anti-Islamic behaviour that appears commonplace but anti-semitism seems to be a problem too.

What's the prospect for the future? Nothing good.

Coping with climate change

Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.

Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458/video/1

As Bill McKibben, puts it in the New Yorker

The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.

 

 

 

A vision for social housing

The graph above is taken from the recently published report by Shelter. It shows the parlous state of social house building since 1923. I've written quite a lot about housing on this blog but this report makes it clear that things are as bad as ever.

From the Second World War up to 1980, we were building an average of around 126,000 social homes every year. Last year, there were only 6,463 new social homes.

...

If we continue as we are, only half of today’s young people are likely to ever own their own home – and a generation of younger people and many who are retired will spend their lives struggling with insecure, expensive renting. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands more people will be forced into homelessness by insecure tenancies and sky-high housing costs.

We can't afford to continue as we are. The collapse of social housing began with the Right to Buy enshrined in the 1980 Housing Act but has continued through successive governments of both main parties and during the coalition period. The ballooning welfare bill is not down to the recipients of housing benefit, Universal Credit or any of the other myriad forms of support available, in theory anyway, to those who can navigate the bureaucracy. It is because those successive governments have simply ignored the problem, the Tories giving way to nimbyism while Labour targeted Tory voters by shifting right and embracing Thatcherism.

According to the background research for the report (pdf):

• We estimate that public expenditure on housing in England was £26.8 billion pounds in 2016-17.
• Public spending on housing has lagged behind expenditure on other public services over the past twenty years and the focus of spending has increasingly been on housing benefits rather than investment in new social or affordable housing.
• Real terms housing benefits payments in England have been on a long-term upwards trend, more than doubling since the start of the 1990s. The increase is mainly due to rising housing benefit payments per caseload as real terms rents for all tenures have increased. However, an increased reliance on private rented sector tenures has also raised the housing benefit bill and the cost in rents to tenants.
• Reduced investment has lowered the number of additional social rent homes being delivered each year. Social rent housing additions have fallen by 79 per cent since the first half of the 1990s.
• Grant funding for social housing has been limited since 2011. Instead, the focus has predominantly been on making funds available for affordable rent homes or the Help to Buy equity loan scheme.

In another background paper, Shelter provides estimates of existing unmet need for housing:

Homeless in temporary accommodation	79,900
Rough sleeping and hidden homelessness	128,000
Overcrowded	240,000
Living with poor conditions in the PRS	631,000
Ill health/disability	194,000
TOTAL	1,272,900

On top of that they estimate a need for a further 1.2 million homes to address the anticipated increase in existing and newly forming lower income young households who are not expected to be able to afford home ownership in their lifetimes and some 690,000 homes for older (aged 55 and over) households on lower incomes currently in the private rented sector (PRS).

According to Shelter, this 20-year programme will provide a return on investment in 39 years, and would cost £10.7bn a year on average. However by reducing the demand for housing and other benefits by reducing housing costs this would be reduced to £3.8bn a year. It isn't a part of the Shelter proposals but these savings would be significantly enhanced if these new homes were built to the zero energy standard described in this earlier post

We are now ten years on from the financial crisis, and a worsening housing crisis is affecting more and more people. Adding this to the social polarisation triggered by Brexit it is clear that we need a new political consensus. Building such a consensus around an ambitious commitment to improve social housing offers a way out of that divide.

The art of pulp magazines

I've been reading science fiction since I was about 11. When I was about 13 or 14, a cousin gave me a pile of what I now know were Pulp magazines (sometimes just "pulps"). These were inexpensive fiction magazines published in a wide variety of genre from the beginnings of the 20th Century through the 1950s. The ones I had were probably Amazing or Astounding from the early '50s. I don't have them now, but I can still recall the gaudy covers.

The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers began their careers writing for pulps, they are best remembered these days for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art.

Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. The cover art played a major part in the marketing of these magazines. On many occasions the relationship between the cover illustration and the magazine content was pretty tenuous. Sometimes the cover would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.

Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism, and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually the art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas.Most of what I have in my Etsy shop are from Science Fiction and Horror magazines. I'm looking out for examples of other genre, but individual magazines are expensive and hard to come by.

Despite my mother's acquiescence when my cousin gave me those magazines so long ago, the science fiction pulps were however as likely to fall into the same stereotypes as the others. This cover for example, from Startling Stories of December 1945, is by Earle K. Bergey, well known for illustrations of scantily-clad women in space helmets which featured heavily in the cover art for Startling Stories. These served incidentally as an inspiration for Princess Leia's slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi and for Madonna's brass brassiere. Bergey's science fiction covers usually featured a woman being menaced by a Bug-Eyed Monster, alien, or robot, with an heroic male astronaut coming to her assistance. The bikini-tops worn by the girls often resembled coppery metal, giving rise to the phrase "brass bra," sometimes used in reference to this sort of art.

This trope was sometimes reflected back in later stories, perhaps most effectively in The Moon Goddess and the Son, by Donald Kingsbury. This novel was expanded from a novella originally published, appropriately, in Analog Magazine in 1979. Analog is the successor to Astounding and is the longest running continuously published SF magazine u-in the world.

 

I've experimented with some covers by removing the text then editing and enlarging the image. The image above is a case in point but  I've added other examples below. I can now print these up to 30" on a side without loss of quality. They are all available from my Etsy shop by following the links beneath, although largest sizes are only available to special order.

It's turning out to be one of those days...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The moon landings were never like this

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just for a change, its the woman to the rescue!

Protective clothing must be worn at all times...

Interested in finding out more about pulps?

The Pulp Magazine Project

Galactic Central

[Adapted from Pulp Magazine on Wikipedia]

This article is purely about Pulp magazine art. I was never a great fan of comics, although I loved the likes of Desperate Dan and the Bash Street Kids as a younger child. I’ve got lots of comic art in the shop though, which will be the subject of a later post.

Ocean Park - paintings by Richard Diebenkorn

I've been looking at the Ocean Park series of paintings and prints by Richard Diebenkorn (via this book, but also here.) There is something about them that keeps drawing me back. They are deceptively simple with subdued colours, apparently just variations on geometric subdivisions of a rectangle. This makes them seem akin to Mondrian, but they have much more depth to them. They clearly owe much to Klee, but also to de Kooning, at least in terms of colour values. In the end though they are themselves and stand on their own merits.

When I was at school, studying maths we were always told to 'show your workings' and in many ways that's what is going on with the Ocean Park paintings. Variations, second thoughts have been painted over, but their ghosts remain.

I think this is part of their appeal to me, since I've always been intrigued by the idea of palimpsest, even before I became an artist. Both the urban and rural landscapes of Britain can be viewed as archaeological palimpsests. Take the time to look around any British town or city you will find signs of previous activities. The street pattern in many Northern industrial towns can often be mapped against ancient field boundaries, while alignments going back into pre-history may still be seen. (http://locateit.leeds.gov.uk/CharacterOfLeeds/UrbanHistory.aspx?p=3) Beneath the streets archaeological investigation and civil engineering projects alike reveal layer after layer of activity. (http://www.crossrail.co.uk/sustainability/archaeology). The same applies in the wider landscape. Anyone familiar with Britain, will read into these paintings the pattern of fields, woods and lakes which almost define the English landscape. That landscape is almost entirely man made, even in the supposed wild areas like Dartmoor or the Scottish Highlands and has developed out of complex and cumulative processes of human intervention.

So just as imperfections and variations disturb the surface of the modern world, revealing its past to those who look, so the Ocean Park paintings reflect the process of their creation, revealing the changes made and to my mind, humanising their geometrical abstraction.

I'll come back to this another time with images from prints inspired to a degree by Klee and Diebenkorn, and also to some new work I'm planning which will attempt to marry the geometry of this work to another interest of mine, the rock carvings and standing stones of the Neolithic era. Here's some tasters with a couple of trail proofs.