Blogging Volumes

The Fountain, Marcel Duchamp On the 9th of April, 1917, a urinal presented itself to the Society of Independent Artists. It was not warmly received - in fact, when the Society came to display all their artwork, they hid this piece behind a partition. And yet, almost a hundred years later, 500 artists would vote this boisterous urinal the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. Most people know this work, for better or for worse, as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain . Yes, I said the urinal ‘presented itself.’ It did. Marcel Duchamp may have carried it, or had someone carry it, but the urinal entered the Society of Independent Artists entirely of its own volition. It possessed Duchamp; much like the hairworm insect, that uses mind-control chemicals to direct crickets towards light, the urinal’s chemicals compelled Marcel, and through him the world, towards modernist artistic enlightenment. So the urinal would have placed itself on a pedestal in a gallery whether Duchamp put it there ...

Belgium Yesterday, I broke down. It seemed to come from nowhere - I was just sitting with friends, half-concentrating on my computer, half-concentrating on whatever was on TV, just generally relaxing after a nice day out. And then, oh . Open on my laptop was the homepage of The Guardian . I like that paper for its climate coverage, and that day was a particularly busy day for climate reporting. At least six headlines confronted me with dire news of flooding: China, India, Belgium, Germany, The Philippines and London had all been submerged under unexpected levels of water. Hundreds had died, more were missing. Alongside these headlines were analysis columns; titles like “Extreme weather ‘will be the norm and UK is not prepared’”. That one got to me. Before I really knew what was happening, I had stood up and left the room. My eyes were blurring, my knees were wobbling. My feet took me to my bedroom, where I curled up on the floor. The dam burst. The floodwaters rushed out. The ground sh...

Welcome to Another Day Losing Paradise. This post was initially written as three separate posts without images. The original blogs are still available on this site, but I'd recommend reading this version. Since I wrote and published those first blogs, at least 10,000 more square miles of rainforest have burned in a single region of the Amazon, and as I write this new introduction, Californian wildfires are once again raging just ten miles from the town of Paradise. Paradise Lost (The Cycle Begins) “The beginning is the end.” That phrase, along with many other vague wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey lines, is eternally recurring in Netflix’s German sci-fi show Dark . The show takes place in three different time periods, 33 years apart from one another, in the small town of Winden, whose distinguishing feature is a giant nuclear power plant.  Oh, and it also has a cave that transports people back and forth through time. At the end of the first season, someone from 2019 crawls through that ca...