Michael Leal - Home Made Cakes and Bicycles Repaired

Ovangkol

2011-01-03T02:27:00.001-08:00

Entirely disconnected.

Continuous Ionic Volute

2010-12-28T15:34:00.001-08:00

In case anyone was feeling a lack.

Edit: Should include +(3,3.5) to match traditional construction.

Second edit: Theta from 0 to 2.pi.

Unfolding piece

2010-05-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

English oak. This and the previous piece are substantially inspired by the work of Alan Capern (who is unfortunately not on the internet). Includes two hinges and one distorted ball and socket joint.

Spinner from engine block

2010-04-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

My first completed piece with a moving part. The wood is a fifty year old oak engine block, courtesy of the Greenwich Yacht Club. The dark staining in decades of engine oil.

Creepy Walnut and better pictures of boxwood.

2010-03-06T03:34:00.000-08:00

Yves Tanguy pastiche

2010-01-28T07:54:00.001-08:00

Having mentioned Tunguy in the previous post I had a sudden desire to produce a pastiche. Which I did .

Attitude to surrealism

2010-01-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

Many of my carvings on the surface appear to fall quite squarely into the category of Surrealist. From my perspective this is partially true, and partially not.

I very definitely like a lot of surrealist art, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti particularly. There is also some surrealist art I dislike; completely automatic poetry I gave up on very quickly, and some surrealist painting and sculpture I find formulaic and dull (this includes most of the modern pastiches of surrealism visible in hotel lobbies everywhere; as this could happen to any art movement once it has ceased to be new and dangerous I don’t hold this against surrealism itself).

Deciding whether I like surrealist art, and whether my own art looks surrealist, misses out the central aspect of surrealism which is an approach rather than a set of characteristics. This is an approach which, from my understanding of it, I may not use nearly as much as might appear, and which I suspect may be somewhat divorced from what attracts me to the surrealist work I do like.

At this point trying to describe what I think surrealism actually is can be put off no longer.

A problem with having an opinion on what defines surrealism is that the movement’s founder, Andre Breton, appears to have been rather fussy as to who was allowed to self define as belonging to his movement. When I started reading the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, I assumed that the people he was ejecting from his circle with impressive vitriol had committed some major political sin or personal betrayal. As it turned out, their crime had been to experiment with approaches that were not entirely surrealism as Breton defined it. From his perspective, one could only be entirely and exclusively surrealist or not at all. Treating this as silly, I view surrealism, on the basis of the much more interesting first manifesto, and the works of the other surrealists (whether they were in favour with Breton at that particular moment or not), as follows.

Surrealism is an approach to art that puts at the centre the images, impressions, half formed thoughts and urges that pass through the mind when the subconscious is exerting a strong influence. This can be through the use of automatic methods – writing or drawing with the minimum of conscious control (carving like this is a bit of a problem, although not impossible as I will describe shortly), by producing more traditionally planned works designed to represent subconscious experiences, by producing works which are ambiguous, but stimulate subconscious interpretations whether the recipient wants them or not, or any other method where the subconscious experience of either the artist or the recipient is treated as central.
All three of the methods specified above I have at some point used, or attempted to use. The second and third methods I am quite confident work in the way they claim to, and I fully intend to continue using them. The first method I have some issues with. A lot of neuroscience has happened since the 1920s, and whilst the surrealists where generally anti-mysticism and identified with Marxism, reading them now there is an element of romanticism to their picture of the subconscious which feels uncomfortable (I am fairly ignorant of neuroscience beyond a random collection of lectures by a linguist several years ago, so I make no claim of definitely refuting any specific statements made by surrealists). My other issue is the idea that the produce of automatic methods is qualitatively different from straightforward inspiration. For the use of automatic methods to be worth while there doesn’t need to be, anything which makes inspiration flow easily is good. My problem is that when I use them, by making large decisions about a carving very quickly, even if the hacking away itself is a very long and consciously controlled process, I have the feeling that this is somehow better that trying to make a slower, more considered decision. This, to me, sounds like mysticism and I don’t like it.

My other reason for not wanting to consider my work entirely surrealist is a positive sense in which I use various other methods that just happen to produce things that look surreal. One of these methods is simply going for technical challenges of a certain type, which tends to result in spindly, strange, overly delicate structures reminiscent of Yves Tanguy paintings. Going for technical challenges like this I would like to claim is not entirely a question of showing. It is partially, but there is also an aspect of the excitement involved in working in with something that might break at any moment, the excess of effort involved, and the emotional investment that produces. Whether this is in any way communicated in the finished product I can’t say.

Another non-surrealist technique I use is a general interest in structures themselves. This relates to the technical challenges mentioned above, and also to my own variant on the third surrealist technique I mentioned, described here, but it also serves a more straightforward desire to pay tribute to physical processes in thier own right.

I still prefer surrealism to conceptualism.

Boxwood

2010-01-16T10:38:00.001-08:00

With added anti-fascist iconography. Will write more in relation to these pieces in a while.

New Website

2010-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

My website has been Alistair Cambell'd.

Laburnum and an awkward peice of oak

2009-10-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

All this and Bevin too

2009-10-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

A poem by Quentin Crisp, part of which was read out at my Grandpa's funeral seven years ago. As far as I can tell there are no copyright issues with me posting it. If you are the holder of the copyright please say so and it will be taken down immediately.

All this and Bevin too

There’s a place at the edge of the town
where a Kangaroo walks with a frown
in the loneliest street
on the weariest feet
and, wherever he can, he looks down,

though they say that the street simply shone
with his smiles in the days that are gone.
He played hop-scotch, had fun
with the kids and would run
with one foot off the curb and one on.

But all that was before he had heeded
the wireless announcements that pleaded,
or read in the press
the distressed S.O.S.
saying ‘KANGAROOS URGENTLY NEEDED.’

For, as soon as the meaning was plain
(and it was when he’d read it again),
having hopped from his chair,
he had slid down the stair
and had boarded a Bakerloo train.

It was clear to him what he must do.
He must offer himself at the Zoo.
But th moment he tried
the committee replied,
“We’ve already got plenty of you”.

“If you like you may leave us your name
so that we can go into your claim
and then doubtless, you’ll hear
in the course of a year
an evasive reply to the same.

“And perhaps in the interim, you
would take home these forms to read through,
paying special attention,
perhaps I should mention,
to paragraph four-seven-two”

So our hero returned to his room.
(O Bloomsbury, where is thy bloom?)
and he lit in the attic
to make it dramatic
a candle to lighten the gloom

And he sat there and tried not to snivel
while wading through pages of drivel
compiled in verbose
and ambiguous prose
by the servants that some have called civil,

for most of their questions were rude.
They asked what he weighed in the nude
and, as well as his size
and the shade of his eyes,
if he’d ever been formally ‘zooed.’

And the sky became black that was blue
before all of his reading was through
and he still couldn’t see
what the meaning could be
of that paragraph four-seven-two

It said “Kindly state how and when
in the future the past or since then
either you or your mother
or father or brother
has ever? And will the again?”

So he called in the cat who was good
at what cannot be quite understood,
and by dawn, weary-eyed,
they had somehow replied
to the questions as well as they could.

About paragraph four-seven-two,
with the craftiest possible mew,
said the cat, looking wise
and half closing his eyes,
“I should say ‘Yes and No.’ People do”

But day after day after day
drifted by, either sunny or grey,
and, when finally came
a reply to his claim
it was not what he’d hoped they would say.

Though they didn’t say, “No,” I confess,
yet they certainly didn’t say, “Yes.”
They said, “Not in as much,
heretofore, such and such,
notwithstanding” and “nevertheless.”

And affixed to this note with a pin,
which the Kangaroo saw with a grin
that was more of a grimace
or twitch of the face,
was a dozen more forms to fill in.

They would know of his favourite books
and his friends – were they English or crooks?
And you may think it wrong
but they questioned him long
and unkindly concerning his looks.

But the cat only murmured, “I knew
that your paragraph four-seven-two,
though we all tried so long
not to answer it wrong,
was the first of not even a few.”

But, courageously setting aside
his impatience and animal pride,
with the help of his fiends
in a dozen week-ends
he could say he had duly replied.

And the Kangaroo thought that at least,
since his chances were greatly increased
of achieving his ends
by the help of his friends
he must offer to make them a feast.

Now he hadn’t the butter for toast
and not rations enough for a roast
but each guest brought some beer
and his egg for the year
and they drank to the health of their host.

They had bread, which they cut very thick,
and a cake that was hard as a brick.
It was mostly wood-pulp
but they all gave a gulp
and thirteen of them only were sick.

They had coffe but drank it, perforce,
with no milk and no sugar of course.
But the dreariest flop
was a tiny lamb chop
which all of them knew to be horse.

But week after week after week
drifted by either sunny or bleak,
before, less out of pity
than pique, the committee
could deign or be bothered to speak.

When it did, it was hardly to state
but more nearly to hint at a sate
when an interview might,
if the weather was bright,
be arranged for deciding his fate.

And the skies on that day were as blue
as if nothing momentous were due,
as he stood until four
in a queue by the dorr
with “ENQUIRIES” on it and “ZOO.”

To create an effect he had sat
on the previous night with the cat
who had washed from his nose
to the claws on his toes,
and a monkey had lent him a hat.

But all that didn’t get him much forwarder,
he struck for an hour in a corridor,
then in a room
that was cold as a tomb
and, because of the people, was horrider.

They asked his birth place and who
where his parents and what did they do;
and they asked him what wage
and how tiny a cage
they could get him to take in the Zoo.

And they told him his chances were small,
if indeed they existed at all,
and they yarned and inquired,
looking angry and tired;
if he’d been to the local town hall.

After that he saw girls of fifteen
who were gushingly willing but green
and others of fifty
whose answers were shifty,
but no one an age in between.

And they said, without shame or remorse,
that they’d given his cage to a horse,
but that still, if he chose,
and could alter his nose,
he could put his name down for a course.

So they gave him a pen that was squiggly
and, feling half sad and half giggly,
he managed to sign
on the dottiest line,
though his signature went a bit wiggly.

they would train him, they said, in the art
that’s performed by a horse with a cart,
and would teach him to neigh
in the very best way.
In September his classes would start.

And so, once having signed , willy-nilly,
he went, feeling wretchedly silly,
to a school with a foal
being trained as a mole
and a finch being trained as a filly.

And, after a term and a half,
with a jaguar and a giraffe,
he went for a test
to see which was best,
and they all of them tried not to laugh.

And the Kangaroo, out of the three,
was successful alone in that he
didn’t swallow his bit,
and they had to admit
he was due for an equine degree.

But the final results of his test,
which were posted to them on request,
had got nothing to do
with a cage in the Zoo
as the cat, in his wisdom, had guessed,

for, suppressing a querulous mew,
he said, “All of our failure is due
to our answer, I fear,
being rather too clear
about paragraph four-seven-two,

because year after year after year
will go by, either cloudy or clear,
without ever a word
being spoken or heard
that concerns your intended career.”

What the Kangaroo wandered was, “Why?”
but he feared that to speak was to cry,
so he lolloped away.
There was nothing to say
but to bid all the neighbours good-bye.

On the monkey who’d lent him a hat
he bestowed a benevolent pat
on the top of his head,
with no word being said.
Then he went for a walk with the cat.

And to him, who was nearest his heart,
he announced he was willing to part
with his radio set,
with the bitter regret
that he’d listened to it at the start.

After which he turned homeward in tears
where he settled his rental arrears.
Then he packed both his bags
and took down all his rags
that he’d used as a black-out for years.

“Of all joy and all happiness robbed,
We live,” the poor Kangaroo sobbed,
“(and I hope there’s no harm
in misquoting a psalm)
our life as a tale that is bobbed.”

He lives now on the edge of the town
where at dusk he will walk with a frown
in the loneliest street
on the weariest feet
and, whenever he can, he looks down.

And he said to me, “Though I’ve succeeded
in finding out how we’re impeded,
it does puzzle me
that the posters I see
still say, ‘KANGAROOS URGENTLY NEEDED.’”

Maze

2009-10-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

No real reason.

And again.

2009-09-26T07:05:00.001-07:00

Learning to draw

2009-09-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

Re-learning really, I recall I could draw quite well before around the age of fifteen. Picking up again now as an auxiliary to carving.

From a photo.

Another lump of leylandii

2009-08-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

Will possibly undergo further finishing. The first piece I've finished for ages.

Flexible New Deal

2009-06-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

I was informed of this today by my new deal adviser. Under the old new deal, one would be guaranteed, and obliged to take, a 13 week work placement, at the end of which it was assumed a job would be likely. Unsurprisingly, there are not two million and rising thirteen week placements available at the moment, and so the New Deal is to become more "flexible". Full description here. Parliamentary questions here.

I haven't read all of it yet, but note from the opening paragraphs the bit about a "possibility of a further "Work for Your Benefit" stage". Presumably the materialization of this stage will depend in part on the governments assumption that eight out of ten JSA claimants will get a job within six months. Given current unemployment and job availability figures, this seems optimistic.

Possibly more when I've read the whole thing, particularly parts threatening further privatization (paragraph 14, not sure what the private sector actually does at the moment).

Also, they need someone else to do their graphics, the graph is miles away from the figures along the bottom, and the "specialist providers" line isn't even vertical.

Herring Brothers spoon bent gouge

2009-06-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

One of four 19th century chisels I got from my Granddad. Clearly, I will not be able to sharpen it too many times before it wears down, but for the moment it is extremely effective. Part of the reason for this is the thinness of the spoon compared to modern equivalents, enabling a far shallower angle along the blade. This has to be traded against the better quality steel in modern chisels (and the feeling of grinding away an antique when sharpening).

Road

2009-05-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

Leylandii, partially seasoned. Surprisingly interesting grain for a softwood. Could be an interesting Mario Kart track.

As it can be carved quickly and is extremely cheap in large quantities, I am thinking of experimenting with automatic carving, similar to the surrealist technique of automatic writing. Obviously, doing this directly into the wood would present problems, not least safety, so I have ordered some play dough to do the automatic part with, any interesting results of which I will try to reproduce as accurately as possible in the wood.

Relief carving that really doesn't photograph very well.

2009-05-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

Mainly due to the curvature of the surface; to see the entire design requires a moving viewpoint. Finish also looks a bit dodgy (also true in reality to an extent). Very well seasoned elm.

Frame

2009-05-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Possible the start of a series. Very green English oak. May undergo further finishing when fully seasoned.

I now officially dislike Markus Brigstock

2009-04-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

I am also forced to admit that he is genuinely funny and at times good politically. I am also aware that he plays up his snobbish middle classness deliberately for comic effect, and that anything he appears to say and mean must be moderated through this.

The conclusion of my dislike came a few minutes ago listening to The Now Show. There has been a tendency over the past few years for The Now Show, The News Quiz, Mock the Week, and various other satire shows, to include genuinely good political analysis amongst their sillier aspects (of which I am also a fan). Indeed, they are frequently the only place coherent left wing politics is allowed onto air. Markus Brigstock's slot on TNS has generally followed this trend, which is why I am pissed off enough by his latest outbreak of patronizing snobbery, and take it seriously enough, to be bothered to write about it.

His basic theme was that protests are being devalued by the presence of uneducated yobs. I paraphrase only slightly. He then went on to do impressions of the kind of people he thinks are spoiling demonstrations.

Thankfully, we still have Jeremy Hardy and Frankie Boyle.

Relief Carving

2009-04-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

American Cherry.

Mumps

2009-04-03T02:40:00.000-07:00

I have mumps (or "mump" as it says on my doctors note). Anti-vaccine campaign, you are on my hitlist.

In other, unrelated news:

G20
Obviously I have missed the G20 protests myself, and so cannot claim direct observation of the extent of the intervention from my own party (The SWP) and other socialist groups or trade unions. However, I was starting to feel, watching the television reports, like we were the elephant on the protest.

At the height of the anti-war movement, when the demonstrations gained reasonable coverage, the people interviewed at them would be a mixture of random people, big name speakers and the organizers behind various groups, so that you would get both a "flavour of the demonstration" and some reasonably sharp analysis as well. In the case of the G20 protests, and thinking back, other anti-capitalist protests, it seems absolutely forbidden to report on anyone producing anything more detailed than a brief slogan. I understand that this is in part due to the lack of a unifying cause for these protests relative to the antiwar marches, but I cannot help attribute it more to a desire to portray the protests as depoliticized as possible.

Even if coherent revolutionary politics were unlikely to be sought out by the BBC, they could at least have found someone coherently expressing the kind of (perfectly reasonable) views expressed by George Monbiot.

Google Street View
In my view, is probably not a government conspiracy. This is not because it is implausible, I just can't see what they would use it for that they can't do already.

Westerns
"Fistfull of dollars", "Gunfight at the O.K.Corall" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" are all reasonably good films, listed above in descending order of preference. Fistfull of dollars wins on style. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a bit silly, and tries to disguise its misogynystic elemnts through romanticism, whereas Gunfight at the O.K.Corall is completely unapolagetic about them.

Zebrawood
I am carving a piece of zebrawood at the moment, purchased last year at the Westonbirt festival. I can strongly recommend not trying to carve in zebrawood. It is splintery, weak against the grain, and also endangered. The piece I have was purchased from a stall, and for all I know may have been sourced sustainably or from a fallen tree, however; I have failed to find any suppliers online even claiming sustainability, so I am regarding it as off limits in future. Its saving grace is a very nice appearance when finished.

Flemish Boxwood and Chinese Bamboo Root

2009-03-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

I came across this in the British Museum. It is a sixteenth century boxwood rosary bead, produced by an unknown Flemish craftsman. As far as I could see the back was solid, so all the carving must have been done from the front. To give scale and proportions, the bead is about 40mm high, and the scene goes back more or less the full depth.

Quite how something like this is done is a mystery to me. There are certain aspects that I can see a method for with very eccentric chisels or through very patient scraping. Other aspects appear completely intractable.

On the same day I also came across these. The middle one is particularly impressive (although hard to see from this photo) for the people standing in and amongst the trees just to the left of the group holding the scroll.

Harp Shape

2009-03-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

English oak, finished with beeswax. Will try to sell this, along with Cthulhu (right at the bottom), in a few days time.

Twenty Tons of TNT

2009-02-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

One of the lesser know Flanders and Swann songs. Due to increase in the worlds population, the figure has probably gone down since then. A quick calculation from Wikipedia gives around 1.4 Tons per American, 427000 KT in total. Figures for the rest of the world are harder due to uncertainty over the total stockpiles of China, Russia, Israel etc.

Coriolis Machine Rant

2009-02-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

I had this idea when I was about 16. Studying non-inertial frames in my second year at uni, I realized it was several orders of magnitude away from being remotely plausible after a few minutes calculation. This should be fairly obvious, as a modle of this machine thousands of miles across (otherwise known as the weather) is still substantially short of providing for our energy needs. If the world were such that this machine could work we would have our fingers broken every time we pulled the plug out of the bath (although at the earths current speed of rotation, it is unlikely that the Coriolis force has much effect on plughole sized whirpools at all, excepting possibly if initial conditions are very finely balanced).

Pipe

2009-02-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

As with the game, this is at the "Does it work?" Stage. The tube is made from coiled copper with a small amount of glue to seal gaps.

If it does work without excessive smoke loss or burning of throat (the latter being the main problem with my previous attempt at pipe making, probably down to the tube being too wide), then a larger, prettier version will follow.

A pretentious but possibly interesting alternative.

2009-02-09T06:20:00.000-08:00

Upon experimenting with two balls of wool, I quickly realized that the original set of rules I had in mind would be almost certainly unworkable. After a period of confused pondering I have hit on a slightly odd, possibly rather silly, set of rules:

Player I starts at one corner.
Player II starts at another corner.
Play proceeds by turns.
When desired, either player can exit the board via the other pole in the opposing players corner, at which point the opposing player must then do the same.
An adjudicator, known to either both players or neither, who has not observed the game and does not know whose colour is whose decides upon the winner.
No two strands may touch excepting at holes.
No pole may be moved once threaded.

The difference between the above set of rules being interesting or not depends chiefly on the nature of the adjudication. One possibility would be for the adjudicator to make a decision in a split second, another would be for them to give advanced notice of the aesthetic criteria they would be using.

In reality I suspect that this set of rules would not produce an interesting game. I am mainly just throwing it out there / here in lieu of something more like a normal game.

Hlalf Finished Carving.

2009-01-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

Self explanatory really, posted mainly because I tend to find the process of carving at least as interesting as the finished product (anyone observing me in the vicinity of someone else's carvings will see a curious series of hand gestures as I try to determine how it was done).

Rules will follow shortly

2009-01-30T06:31:00.001-08:00

The game will probably be played with wto colours of wool, the second currently being used to attach a Free Palestine banner to the law faculty. The vague idea is that each player will have to reach a certain point on the board with various ways of the other player blocking them.

The motivation behind this project is to create a game that is playable, but with a game tree so large and unpredictable that at no point can anyone play the McNulty-Delgado opening thereby determining the next 20 moves unless one player hasn't heard of the McNulty-Delgado opening in which case they have lost instantly (I never got on with chess).

If a workable set of rules is arrived at, I may produce a second, better crafted board with a higher coefficient of steam-punk.

"No such thing as society"

2009-01-28T02:13:00.000-08:00

I have spent the passed four days in the Cambridge University Law Faculty in a sit in protest in support of the people of Gaza (I would still be there now, but can't, as will be explained in a minute). The demands of Cambridge Gaza Solidarity relate mainly to the university providing humanitarian aid, along with some form of condemnation of the actions of the Israeli government.

The reaction of the Law faculty and the proctors was initially reasonably tolerant within the limits of having to enforce the statutes of the university; for example, we were forbidden from bringing in food and blankets, but no one stopped us when we did.

From the start the occupation did not consist of only university students, there were alumni (like myself), members of local political groups, and guest speakers. At first the university did not seem to have a problem with this. On the fourth day of the occupation, however, a policy was enacted that only card carrying members of the university were to be admitted to the building. Under this policy the following people have been refused entry to address the protest:
A local councilor (escorted of the premises by security)
A senior member of Trinity College and founder of a well known neo-con think tank.
Craig Murray, former UK ambassador and Rector of the university of Dundee
Professor Tony Booth, a Cambridge alumnus and member of Canterbury Christ Church University.
Many younger alumni and students without university cards (but often with other identification as a university member), hence my inability to remain in the protest having left to take delivery of a bookcase.

The reaction the above policy when it was announced was initially one of annoyance, turning to dismay when the full extent of its application became clear. I now come to the actual point of this posting, that the dismay of the members of the protest, almost exclusively people below the age of 25 (with some notable and excellent exceptions), was as nothing to the reaction of those old enough to remember the time when this would have been completely, utterly unthinkable.

I am currently sober and therefore unable to properly describe the surrealist theater produced when Craig Murray decided to give his speech half way through the door of the faculty, surrounded by security guards and students on all sides. Aside from his main speech he, and all the other speakers turned away, made in strong terms the point that "you just don't do this sort of thing" (collectively paraphrasing).

The curious thing for me is that the chair of the Law Faculty, directly producing this policy, and most of the senior members of the university presumably also influencing it are no where near as conservative as senior academics at Cambridge and many other universities would have likely been in the 60s and 70s when our older guest speakers observed the unwritten rule that, whatever efforts the university might make to evict an illegal protest, the idea of preventing a well known academic from addressing such a protest would be an inconceivable attack on the principles by which any university should run. (Long sentence, consider revising).

If my picture of 60s and 70s student politics is correct, the actual political opinions of students and academics were far more polarized than they are now, with a majority being fairly conservative, and a minority coming from one radical tradition or another, and a universal consensus on the unwritten rule described above.

This situation has now reversed. Aside from the hard line Zionist organizations, there are probably very few members of the university, staff or students, who do not broadly agree with some points of our condemnation of Israels actions. Even Times reading conservatives would probably agree that the IDF's actions have been disproportionate and unnecessarily produced a humanitarian crisis. The polarization now seems to centre round the very idea of student activism, the idea that a conscience driven protest should be accommodated as far as is possible, and fundamentally respected as part of academic integrity.

I am of the opinion that this legacy of Thatcherism, that the right to be implausibly anal is reserved by anyone with the resources to hire a security guard, is just as politically significant as the legitimacy of imperialism, unregulated currency markets, or any other political issue the would come up if you asked someone direct political questions. More than that, it is an issue that reflects the direction our society is going in with more immediacy than any more circumstantial one, and needs to be fought on as such.

Cider induced utopian ramble.

2009-01-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

I am an occasional consumer of fantasy fiction. A common, possibly ubiquitous feature of the fantasy genre is intelligence / consciousness residing in something other that an evolved, material, human mind. I don't know exactly what this does for everyone else, but for me the attraction of this situation lies mainly in the increased possibility for interaction with the rest of the world. An obvious interpretation of this (for an unreconstructed Marxist) is the desire for a society free from the effects of alienation, as well as the escapism often given as the primary explanation for the popularity of fantasy. Not actually believing in any form of the supernatural, what I really want is fiction that has the above mentioned property of fantasy, without the inconvenience of magic. There are two places I have found this provided so far: The film Easy Rider, and various parts of the works of Herman Hess. My search for more examples continues, but for the moment these two sources give me the best glance at what the utopia means.

It should be noted that neither Easy Rider, nor any of Hess' novels that I have read so far, actually present a utopia. In Easy Rider, the temporary freedom obtained by Pete Fonda and Dennis Hopper arises through there profits from dealing cocaine. From Herman Hess, Pablo (in Steppenwolf) and Goldmund (in Narcissus and Goldmund), in my view his most utopian characters, are flawed figures living in quite dystopian societies. They do, however, give the most poignant glimpses I have yet encountered as to what utopia means. Specifically, it means picking up hitch-hikers.

Believe it or not, the above two examples came into my head before I remembered thier musical connection.

Silly Voices Pt 2

2009-01-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

I listened to a recording of myself a couple of days ago, singing Casper's verse of We Three Kings at Epiphany. I do it as well. When speaking I have a mildly middle class south east London accent as befits my middle class south east London upbringing, when singing I sound like I have come fresh out of Eton. There is no good justification for this, it is an arbitrary convention arising from the Victorian high church movement. Plus, I sound silly.

Website

2009-01-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

I now have a proper website as well as this blog, at http://www.michael-leal-carvings.co.uk/. From now on, photos of carvings will more likely go to the website unless I can be bothered to upload them onto both.

Silly Voices

2009-01-05T08:49:00.001-08:00

I was recently listening to a recording of the Vivaldi Gloria by a well known choir. Whilst it was an excellent recording in most ways, I could not prevent my reaction of bursting into giggles at the Woosterish pronunciation of the first word: GLO-ri-AAR. In the case of 19th century English church music it is historically appropriate to adopt such an accent, and I do so myself through gritted marxist teeth. In the case of Vivaldi there is no reason to suppose that such a pronounciation is in any way appropriate. When I was at school I recall my choirmaster complaining that we were sounding too south east London during rehearsals, however, he always corrected us to a pronounciation appropriate for the peice. I appreciate the certain bear-making-nasty-comments-about-gays nature of complaining about snobbery in the English musical establishment, and in general I might not bother. It's just that it sounds so silly.

Narrative

2008-11-03T07:28:00.001-08:00

The following second person narrative is inspired by the computer game “Submachine”.

You wake up on a plane, flat and white as far as the eye can see, as if from a mathematical text book.

You are dressed as you were before, with the addition of a diamond ring on your index finger.

The spot you stand on is indistinguishable from any other, but you are afraid to leave.
You bend down and try to scratch the ground to mark your spot. Columbus would be proud.

Your ring makes no mark. Columbus looks disappointed. Either chemistry does not apply here, or the ring isn’t diamond. Somehow, the former seems more likely.

With a curious trepidation you take a step forward, and then a step back. Out of the corner of your eye the horizon draws your attention, but for no obvious reason.

You count two thousand heart beats, then decide that this is pointless. You attempt to wake up for a while, then realise that no dream is this realistic, or this unrealistic.

You start to run. Not out of panic, just because there’s no reason not to. After ten minutes you realise you are not tired or sore. You speed up to a sprint, then a desperate sprint. Still you feel like your started ten seconds ago.

You look up and see the horizon curling above you. You change direction (by this point, panic is starting to become an issue. On the other hand, if oxygen can be added to your bloodstream at an arbitrary rate, why pay any attention to hormones) and the horizon meets.

You change direction again, trip, tumble, and bang your head, but not too hard. The fall has given you a nose bleed. Drops of blood now lie on the ground. You have a fixed position. Columbus nods in approval.

You look up again. Now that you’re stationary, the horizon wants to flatten, but the link has been made, and will not be broken. The link is stretched to a thread, and is pulled flat.

You position yourself under the thread as it comes down, and catch it in your arms. It, that is, everything other than you, tries to become one unbroken mass again, but you won’t let it. The thread gets finer until you have no way to tell whether it is there or not.

Eventually you give up holding on to nothing.

Let us (my identity need not concern you) assume that something desires you to live. If not then why the air?
How can one commit suicide on a flat plain? Technically an impact to the head from falling, but reflexes won’t permit it. Also, pain can exist here, and the prospect of unending pain without death suddenly seems plausible and highly undesirable.

Sitting down, more out of habit than fatigue, you notice that an almost imperceptible layer of dust now coats the ground, leaving speckles on your drops of blood.

From within the reach of your arms you scoop all the dust into a hill, around a millimetre high.

You keep going until the hill reaches just above your head.

Hunger and thirst are still alien, but fatigue now overcomes you and you lie down in the pile of dust to sleep.

What you dream of your own accord, I cannot know; however, I remember the valley in as much detail as you.

From the start you knew you were dreaming. I would say this didn’t matter, but it clearly did. At the back of your mind was the knowledge that anything comforting was only a dream, and anything unpleasant you would remember and could not escape, and so might as well be real.

The valley appeared normal. From the top downwards: rock outcrops, a steep slope with patches of gorse, a gentler, grassy hillside, a meadow, and a slowly winding river. A flood plain was visible out of the end of the valley.

Noticeable by their absence were houses, farms, roads, dry stone walls, signposts from the Welsh tourist board or any other signs of human activity.

Your perception of sensory perceptions had initially led you to assume corporeality. Upon strong evidence contradicting this assumption obtained by looking down, your perspective changed.

With the ability to travel anywhere, the uninhabited world became suddenly less interesting. Having found no sign of human existence in all the gorges of north Africa, Journeyed to the centre of the sun, developed an intuitive understanding of general relativity, sat at the bottom of the Atlantic watching giant squid and listening to whale song for a year and concluded (erroneously) that this was all a figment of your imagination, the marvels of human intellect became, for you, the most pointless creation imaginable. In the space of a few minutes, “your” dream world became infinitely more restricting than the flat plane you left.

In desperation to awake, you returned to the valley, to the exact spot you remember the dream commencing. For hours you stayed there with no result, until, moving an almost imperceptible distance, you felt a slight resistance. Moving an even smaller distance, the resistance increased, seeming to indicate a peak at a certain point. Gradually, you moved closer and closer to the peak, becoming more and more exited with every moment.

The following is a coordinate geometry reference. If coordinate geometry is not your thang, please feel free to replace the next four paragraphs with ones of your own.

A black cat walked up to your side, saw you, and curled up into a furry ball. You needed the other end.

At this point you tried and think logically, but with no pattern to go on. You needed the other side of a single point.

Your desperation took you through every mathematical viewpoint, all either failed or unusable, to aesthetics and finally to outright mysticism. All to no avail.

There is a solution. Switch off, go down hill, and wait.

The last two you achieved with as little effort as they required.

To switch off entirely is impossible, all you could do is retreat, find an alternative.

She looses the appeal. Fifteen years, one visit a month.

You slid down, you tried to break. You succeeded. You’ve broken out? You weren’t supposed to break, you only just succeeded. Perhaps you’ve slipped through the gaps.

You have, but now I’ve found you. Technically, we shouldn’t be meeting at all. Down you go.

The hill has changed. Still the same size, shape and colour, but warm now. There’s also a smell. You trace it to a single hole. The rest of the hill is still powder, but the hole is hard, harder than.....?Yep.

You scoop away the dust. Inside the hill is a structure, around your height, shaped like a gourd with a bent neck. You tap the side and the smell changes. You shout down the neck and the smell changes again. None of the smells are quite right. A second hole opens before your eyes, followed by a multitude of smaller holes. A new smell, this one unmistakable. The gourd shakes, and gets warmer. You feel sick.

One hole closes. You are sick.

Oxygen wasn’t conserved here, neither is bile. Worst, you know you’re better off than they are.

A mercy killing? Suddenly SETI seems unwise. You need to leave. So do I.

We leave the station, walk past the cross, and turn right down to Trafalgar square.

What? Oh, ok, give me a minute.

2008-11-02T04:08:00.000-08:00

More cheap pine, super-glue, and the occasional varnished broccoli.

Aesthetics and conservative traditions.

2008-11-02T03:47:00.000-08:00

It has recently started to bother me that much of my approach to aesthetics is unavoidably tied to the traditions of the societies of the art I most admire, and therefore try to emulate. There seem to be three ways in which this is characterised, which I will represent by examples. These examples, being for illustration purposes, are treated in a far briefer manner than they deserve.

1. Renaissance Counterpoint

The beauty of western harmony arose in part from the dogmatic following of the rules of counterpoint. Such dogmatism is not entirely anathema to me, as in one way it is simply a mathematical system, in the context o which strict rules are entirely natural. My problem is that the evolution of western harmony seems to have depended on devotion to rules beyond experimenting with a particular system and firmly inside religious dogmatism. A good illustration of this can be found in Fux’s “The study of counterpoint”, in the introduction of which the author decries the experimentation of modern composers in a manner which I cannot condone. The essential dilemma is that without people like Fux, classical harmony might never have evolved, but without the experimenters he decried, Romantic harmony might never have emerged. For someone who envisages a world without conservatives, an artistic dependence on the tension between conservatives and revolutionaries is deeply problematic. One possible way forward is to treat conservatism as an experimental technique to try and develop new styles, without requiring an uncomfortable principled commitment. An example of this is given at the end.

2. The Danish crown jewels

This problem is more directly social. I recently visited the Danish crown jewels and was stunned by the craftsmanship displayed. The most striking examples were the pieces of carved ivory of delicacy I found almost completely incomprehensible. These pieces were not merely technical wonders; there was a high level of artistry and imagination displayed. My problem is that I cannot imagine any system other than a monarchy producing the dedication of resources necessary to train craftsmen to a sufficient level and in sufficient numbers to produce the artefacts collected by the various Fredericks and Christians. There are two mitigations to the problem that I can see. The first is that an individual artist or craftsman can push themselves to whatever technical level they desire and are capable of. In our current society there is the limiting factor of diminishing financial returns for time committed to an individual piece, however, as I have already started worrying about a world without conservatives, full adherence to the labour theory of value does not seem too far removed. The second factor is that, whilst I believe that much of the artistry displayed in the Danish crown jewels was dependent on the technical wizardry of the artists, I do not necessarily place such a high value on the volume in which it was produced. It could in fact be argued that mass repetition, however skilful, weakened the effects of the individual pieces. One last factor is that many of the pieces on display were showing off technical ability and effort for its own sake. I am as guilty sometimes of being seduced by this as anyone else, and I cannot definitely declare technical ability and effort to be false gods. In context; however, what was being displayed in Köbenhaven was a straightforward boast as to how many highly trained man hours the royal family could employ.

3. Lord of the Rings / Star Wars / Lancaster Bombers

This third problem is the vaguest, but also possibly the most serious. In a nutshell I, along with many others, have a strong aesthetic appreciation of hierarchy, dynasty, and the trappings and instruments of war. This problem does not really require a further explanation, so I will give a single example: Given any abstract sculpture, my own or someone else’s, my first instinct is to visualize it as a military space station or fortress, usually in a mixture of star wars / gothic castle style. My problem is whether these instincts, undoubtedly a result of social conditioning in part, in fact contain something more innate that might not change in a different society. Military technology from any period, real of fictional, combines functionality under high pressure of performance with drama and romanticisation in a way that nothing else does (with the possible exception of musical instruments). Whilst the romanticisation is clearly cultural, this does not mean that a different, less violent culture would automatically produce a substitute.

My final problem is essentially how much these tendencies should bother me, especially given that I normally keep them internal in specific instances.

Appendix: A dogmatic set of rules of my own

In order to test my first problem, I am starting to develop a set of rules relating to my own style of sculpture. By the nature of the disciplines, a set of rules for sculpture will not be as precise as for music. As formed so far my rules consist of a list of motifs and rules for how to combine them. The list of motifs is not exhaustive, however, rules are forming in my mind as I type for the inclusion of abnormal elements. The rules I am producing are arising from work I have already done, adding some elements and some false strictness, in line with my intentions. As they relate to complicated three dimensional objects I will not even attempt to describe the rules in detail until I can do so with references in every instance.

2008-11-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

This carving is in apple wood. Not much more to say really.

2008-11-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

2008-11-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

This piece is made from cheap pine and super-glue. Whilst not particularly elegant, this technique allows for easy experimentation with unusual structures. Several more pieces using this technique are shown below.