Banksy, Parts I and II

After much exhaustion on which I shall elaborate later, we are proud to present: Banksy vs Bristol Museum! More pics to follow when I have a bit more sleep.

As this is a work in progress and I can't yet upload my own pictures (these ones were taken by Daniel and I shall not steal any more of his thunder), I shall describe in words what I cannot yet in pictures.

Part I

It took me five hours to get to Bristol. Usually, it would only be about three, but for no clear reason, thetrainline.com decided that I would much like sitting around in Derby Train Station for an hour, and that Cheltenham Spa Train Station would also be a good place to leave me for about forty minutes. From my very brief stay in both these stations, I can only conclude that these towns are likely to be the most boring places in the world, and that they serve the pre-packaged sandwiches found throughout the UK that are somehow designed so that the "turkey breast and ham" sandwich tastes identical to "tomato and cheese", and not a very good tomato and cheese at that.

But no matter. Three trains, four stations and five hours after I leave from my comfortable abode in Leicester in pursuit of what I hope to be amazing art, I arrive in Bristol. It is 2.30pm. Daniel had gotten to Bristol an hour before me and has warned me that at the time, he had been in the queue for 20 minutes and still was not in.

By the time I reach the Bristol City Museum it is 3pm, and last entry into the museum is 4pm. There are at least 300 people in front of me waiting to see Banksy. The "museum staff", big muscular guys who look like they could pound you into a pulp if they so wished, look more like bouncers. They warn us at 3.15pm that it looks unlikely that many more of us are going to get in, but we in the queue hold on to the precious ground we had gained against the impregnable machine of museum policy. People continue to join the end of the queue, still hoping to get in. I was reminded quite surreally of queueing outside the club on a Friday night, only that it was daytime, there was no loud music, and the drunken students shouting obscenities were replaced by mostly middle-aged men and women, sipping coffee and having genteel conversation.

As you may have guessed, I did get in eventually after 45 more minutes. By the time I arrived at the museum steps, I felt like a king.

Part II

The main hall looked absolutely surreal. Masses of people shuffled about in orderly queues, staring at what appeared to be plain and simple vandalism. Right in the middle was an ice-cream truck with no wheels and smashed windows ("glass" fragments lay on the ground nearby). The body of the truck was covered with poor-quality street graffiti. A shopping cart lay destroyed nearby, and most surreally a full-sized SWAT officer was perched on a tiny carousel pony, riding up and down mechanically. A tag on its chest read "Metropolitan Peace". I left the queue to snap some pictures and realised that the smashed-up ice cream truck doubled as a reception.

Looking more closely, the traditional Greek and Roman statues had been remade into a parody of their modern counterparts.

Venus, Goddess of Beauty, is staring intently at the price tag of a pair of sunglasses in her hand despite already wearing another pair. A fashionable winter scarf is wrapped around her neck, while a revealing toga frames her plastercast assets. She cradles a bundle of shopping bags in her hand, the kind of oversized paper bag with fancy designs that is presented to you by branded companies as a "thank you" note for allowing them to rob you of your money, and their workers of their dignity.

Apollo is wrapping a cloth over his mouth to hide his face. A jacket lined with explosives is strapped to his chest.

Cupid, cigarette and beer can in hand, stands drunkenly over a small pile of junk food and energy drinks, clasping one high-heeled shoe in the other hand.

The Goddess of Victory, Nike, stands proudly with chest straight and wings unfurled, but a paint bucket has been placed rudely over her head. ugly pink splotches have dripped all the way from the bucket to the base of the statue. Further away, Buddha isn't spared either. He sits wisely as he always does, but his left hand is not raised up - instead it rests in a sling across his lap. His neck has been placed in a brace, and one eye appears to be swollen shut.

On the other side of the hall is a cast of a lion with a circus whip in its mouth. It stands fiercely over a hat and jacket that may have belonged to an animal trainer. His fate is hinted at by a small amount of blood-red paint on the lion's mouth and face.

Rejoining the queue, I walked down a corridoor into a side room, filled with Banksy's paintings.

To be continued in Part III.

Ode to the Past

Wow, it's been a while since I last poked my nose into my own blog. The last two months have been hectic, both medically and otherwise. Lab work, exams, post-exam celebrations and a trip to London have taxed me physically and mentally, and underlying these events is a sense that I am missing out on something I know is terribly important, but can't quite put my finger on. But more on that later, for those whom I would trust - this blog has been a place for me to bare my soul, but not right now. Some issues have not yet completely played out, others I would rather discuss with good friends in the privacy of internet chat rather than allow the casual wanderer to see my deepest thoughts. Some of you may be disappointed by the shortness of this post, but then my feelings and thoughts cannot be easily expressed in words.

The blog looks like an old room which I left ages ago in good order, but reenter to discover a fine layer of dust on everything that once was familiar. My every move stirs up faint clouds that add nostalgia to summer sunbeams from the window. Old declarations, bitterly sworn with clenched fist and pounding heart at stormy skies, lie faded on the webpage, the beliefs underlying them built on sand long since disappeared beneath the waves. Some of my crafts remain solid, yet with rough edges that once went unnoticed, but now stick out like a sore thumb. I barely remember the events preserved by the photographs on my facebook wall.

I step forward to identify each memory: Socialism, once a cherished ideal, remains standing, but has been eaten through by my own doubts. Nationalism, the very first concept that was the founding crux of my first blog as well as this one, lies dead, smashed by my own hand when I saw the beast for what it was. Faith in a superior being, that pristine glass carving that I once tried panstakingly to protect, was finally shattered by a careless thought. I may perhaps one day glue the delicate pieces together, but not before I change again. Even my taste in music has been fundamentally altered - when once it was the Backstreet Boys and Linkin Park, Massive Attack and Rob Dougan now dominate.

Taking in the room in its entirety, I can't help but realise how different I have become over the last two years. But though I am different, something within remains the same. All of these creations, splintered or maintained, worn out or pristine, were mine. And they still are.

Light bulbs, bayonets and other such stuff (Watt!)

I am now sitting in my living room in darkness, making a ridiculous number of typos as I can't see the keys on my laptop - I fumble especially with the apostrophe, so apologies if I type "it;s" instead of "it's". Three lights are on - in the kitchen, stairs, and my housemate's room, along with some very faint light from my laptop, and the television. I can also see an even more faint emergency light from my neighbour's kitchen. But the light in the living room, in which I am currently blogging, is not on, which is why all this mucking about is happening in the first place.

The reason the aforementioned light is not on is not because the light bulb had blown, but rather because I thought the light bulb had blown. No, this is a significantly longer and more complicated series of events than I would ever have thought could occur from a mistake about a light bulb, so please bear with me.

It is about 6pm (actually SEVEN, but my finger keeps hitting the 6 key instead so I have given up trying to tell you all that it was instead SEVEN. Anyway who cares, poetic license and all that, all you need to know is that it is getting too dark to read). As I am, incidentally, just about to pick up a book, I turn the light on, upon which I heard a small "pop", and the light stays quite certainly off. I think it must have blown (seriously, who would ever think a fuse would trip because a light was switched on?), and curse my luck as I can't be bothered to go all the way to the superstore that I had just returned from carrying 10kg of groceries. The next logical step is to find a replacement, so I go upstairs to my room where I keep the spare light bulbs (100 watt, which I knew the one in the living room was), and bring one down. Steadying myself on a rickety chair, I hope to God that I hadn't gained as much weight as I know I had, take out the blown light bulb, and put the replacement bulb in.

Unfortunately at this point I realise that the replacement doesn't actually fit the socket. The original one is one of those old, 100-watt, bayonet-capped lights which they really should have stopped producing when they figured out how to manufacture a 100-watt screw-capped light bulb. My replacement, unfortunately, is a 100-watt screw-capped light bulb. No matter. I descend with relief from the rickety wooden chair, put both bulbs on the table, and stomp upstairs to collect another replacement.

After some rummaging around in my plastic bag of extra light bulbs, I am forced to conclude that I do not have a bayonet-capped light after all, and that my 4 to 6 (SEVEN!) spare light bulbs are for all intents and purposes, useless. I have no choice but to go out and buy one. I put my coat on, walk out into the cold with the original bayonet-capped light bulb, and throw it into our bin. It makes a satisfying shattering noise, and I head to the local store where light bulbs are more expensive, but decidedly nearer, than at the superstore, which is at least 20 minutes away.

I spend the next 20 minutes wandering around the local shop trying to find a light bulb before realising that they don't sell them here.

With great consternation, I go to the next shop, and the next, until about half an hour from where I started off, I find a shop that sells 100-watt bayonet-capped light bulbs (I ask the shopkeeper if I could look at them to make sure), and buy three, just in case two of them don;t (apostrophy!) work. Happily, I head back knowing that I am sorted.

Unfortunately, this isn't to be. As I steady myself on the rickety chair for the second time today, I realise that I had bought a 100-watt, bayonet-capped lightbulb that in't the right size for the light. By this time, it is well and truly night. I extricate myself again from atop the rickety chair, and walk into my housemate's room to turn his light on. It doesn't respond either. At this I get very annoyed, because light bulbs, unlike workers, do not tend to strike; and now I am stranded in my house in general darkness.

I stomp off grumpily into the kitchen to make myself some tea, the same way the English do if they don't have a spare light bulb, or if their favourite TV show isn't on, or if Britain is once again invaded by the Nazis or anything else happens to which the English don't really know how to react. I turn the kitchen light on. It doen't turn on. It begins to dawn on me that the fuse must have been tripped. But then, the television is on! So is the laptop, which I had taken the battery out of because it doesn't work.

In great consternation, I make my way gingerly into my housemate's room, trying not to stumble on anything unfamiliar that I cannot see, to the fuse box. Using my phone, I find the fuse-box and four sub-fuses. One (downstairs front) has tripped, leaving me berefit of all downstairs lighting while simultaneously allowing Virgin TV to atack my senses with the worst advertisements known to man.

I fix the fuse and the lights go on - except of course, the light in the living room whose bulb I had thrown into the bin outside our house. I think about going to the shop again and asking the same shopkeeper for more light bulbs because I had bought the wrong size, even after checking that they were the right bulbs. The potential embarrasment is too great for me to bear. I decide to go to the superstore tomorrow, read in my bedroom for the time being, and forever avoid the electrical shop from which I had bought three useless light bulbs.

I hate tripped fuses.

Agnosticism Now

Most of you will know by now, that I’ve left Christianity, quite suddenly to some. The truth is that the cause of my disagreement with God has been there for a long time now. Every time I hear the news that a confused teenager has gone out and shot twenty people, or that every thirty seconds a person is dying of Malaria, I see that reason, and I can’t ignore it – there is so much wrong with this world that either God doesn’t exist, or he doesn’t care.

Now some would like to tell me that by turning my back on God, I am abandoning all that I have ever stood for. This isn’t true. I believe in a world where people should be rewarded for their hard work, and compensated for their misfortunes. I believe that if we put in the effort, and if we are ethical, moral people, we are better people than those who would lie and steal to achieve their aims. I believe that each individual should want to serve society as a whole, but that society should never (and should never have to)tell people to help it in ways they are not willing to. In the end, I believe that one should be able to live, with the greater good of society in mind, and die, content that society in turn has returned what it has received from them. I believe that many religious people here share my view of an ideal world.

Coming back to the reason I have decided to leave the Church. I feel that we, as a people, have betrayed each other. I wonder at the purpose of the Bible, and whether people spend so much time reading it that they forget the reason it was written – I think God, if there is one, gave us the bible as a code of conduct – and that if we stuck to the guidelines that God had set down for us, we would:

1. find inner peace and be one with God, and
2. bring about a utopia for all, where the world is filled with joy and idealism, where peace reigns not only within the soul but everywhere – the land of milk and honey.

(NB: I assume this is true for the major religions besides Christianity.) The first object of the code, people excel at. We are so at peace with ourselves that we ignore the glaring sins we have committed, and either forget or ignore the second, greater objective. This is my first criticism of the vast majority of religious. (My second is that the religious are frequently too busy trying to convert others that they forget the two objectives that the Bible seems to be telling us.) If God exists, then I think he will forgive my frustration with him – he told us that if we conduct our lives well, we would be given utopia. But what he didn’t tell us is that we need to build it on our own. He expected us to work this fact out for ourselves.

This is the third possibility – that God, for whatever reason, has decided that we are to do the work he set for us, and that we have to earn our keep.

My current line is this: I am going to do as much as I can for the downtrodden of the world. God isn’t going to do it directly. Again, the three possibilities are that he doesn’t exist, can't be bothered, or he’s waiting around for me, and people like me, to do something about it.

If it’s the first then I suppose I would have lived up to the objectives I’ve set for myself – that I as one of the more fortunate people should give to society as much as I can give, willingly and with no regrets.

If he really does exist but cannot be bothered, then I suppose I would rather not believe in a God who could stop all this nonsense, yet chooses not to.

If it is the latter, I suppose God would meet me at the end of my life, and tell me how this was all part of his grand plan. And maybe then I would decide whether to believe in a God who would rather people save themselves, even though he himself can.

My path to agnosticism begins here, and I am turning my back on God for the time being, but not on what God says – that the world as it is needs fixing, and that we shouldn’t expect anyone else to do the fixing for us.

[EDIT: I am not turning my back on God, but on our religious teachings on God and the way God operates – things will become clearer to me later, and I would rather be active and practical than ponder over the same thoughts repeatedly. I believe I made that statement with a great deal of frustration, and therefore didn’t quite check what I wrote. Thank you, Mum, for pointing out my typo.]

Muse

Ladies and gentlemen, if you do not like to ponder "Life, The Universe, and Everything!", then this post is not for you.

We know that molecules are governed by formulae. We have used these formulae to build up an understanding of the world on a larger scale – calculating how long a line is, designing a battery, analysing a cell in the human body, breeding the perfect racehorse etc. These formulae have not only allowed us to understand the world, but to rule it.

But once we get to humans, the rules break down – nobody can predict the actions of a single person; no matter how we they know about people they will always continue to surprise. Which is probably a good thing – if we knew how to predict people then life itself would lose all meaning. Would you really want to live if you knew that someone with a calculator knew (not commanded, knew) exactly what you would do?

What really scares me is this: once you zoom out to look at populations rather than individuals, a new set of formulae comes into play – they are different of course from those that govern molecules, but they are formulae nonetheless, and they are frightfully efficient. What would you do if I told you that advertising companies could tailor an advert to increase their sales by a very specific percentage range? Somehow, on a large scale we lose whatever freedom we have created out of exact rules. It is almost as if whatever we do as individuals seems to make no difference to the grand game that governs us as a species.

And that, my friends, is very frightening indeed, because if this is true, then whatever choices we make are not going to make a significant difference to the world. And knowing human nature, someone out there will try to find out this magical set of formulae, to influence entire populations for their own ends. I won't use the words "mind control" because they're too clichéd. This is more subtle, more insiduous. It directs populations, yet abandons the individual to make sense of a world where they seem to have so much choice, but whatever they choose makes no difference to the final outcome. I pray that this will never come true, yet somehow I feel that it already has. I leave you with a movie quote for you to mull over. It may be from an action movie, but it is a powerful one nonetheless.

The truth [is]...that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

And you thought that The Matrix was just another action movie.

Why War still Exists in the 21st Century

Excerpts from films, media, quotes and the like. Again I've not had the time to flesh out my train of thought, so the blanks are yours to fill in. However, I do hope that the journey you take will still be worth it.

Aeschylus
In war, truth is the first casualty.

Thomas Carlyle
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

Jon Stewart
It seems shocking that a product of finite supply gets more expensive the more we use it.... Now the terror alert means higher oil prices, which oddly enough means higher profits for oil companies giving them more money to give to politicians whose policies may favor the oil companies such as raising the terror alert level.

Eleanor Roosevelt
“So much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating effect.”

Banksy, street artist

(TV has made us into monsters)

Hotel Rwanda - Rwandan Genocide 1994
Paul Rusesabagina: I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.
Jack: Yeah and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show?
Paul Rusesabagina: How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?
Jack: I think if people see this footage they'll say, "oh my God that's horrible," and then go on eating their dinners.

Helen Keller
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.

Robert Maynard Hutchins
"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."

1984 by George Orwell
The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou shalt. Our command is Thou art.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Victoria Safford
Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is.

John Dos Passos
The cure for apathy is comprehension.

Unam Sanctam: Girl altar boys - oxymoronic or just plain moronic?

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