The GardenDespatches from The Satyrs’ Forest

Page 8

A despatch from Ashington

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I’ve been hammering away at a big ol’ 2022 recap post, trying to get it ready before it’s irrelevant. It seemed cruel to leave you all with nowt over the new year, though, so i thought i might send you some photos from a recent evening walk.

A quixotic signpost for the National Cycle network, done up in rainbow colours and pointing towards destinations in elaborately decorated lettering

Ashington1 is a poor erstwhile mining town at the very tip-top of the local conurbation, Newcastle’s last gasp before coal and collieries give way to princes and pastures. It takes pride in two things: one, its mining history, and two, the fact that two Ashingtonians delivered England the world cup in a final remembered by ever fewer people.

The moon glistens over a large pond in the evening sky; to the right, there's a lifebelt in the foreground and a strange purplish pinprick of light in the background

This is the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park — not to be confused with the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park down in that London — a marvellous regeneration project which has turned a spoil heap into a lovely lake complete with a Premier Inn. That purple light off in the distance is the Woodhorn Colliery Museum, a whistle-stop tour of Northumberland’s mining history which apparently fancies itself the Blackpool of the North.2

A closer look at the museum reveals that a cutter-like building is lit up in purple, while two old mining rigs have their spokes illuminated as if they were neon

And that’s all i wrote. Tune in next time for either another bashed-together filler postcard (by Gods, am i going to have to make Blyth sound appealing next?), or the first annual Horny Awards™. We’ll see how far the Procrastination Monster lets me progress. :‌-)

And this is where i’d switch to a Marshallese web host, If I Had One

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Rage comic with a kid riding away on a trike overlaid with the words "Goodbye Mom!" and the Marshallese flag

Today i learned that the Marshall Islands have almost no copyright laws. Since the U.S. handles most of their foreign affairs for them, they’ve slipped through the cracks of international treaties: per Wikimedia Commons, the only restriction is that you can’t directly copy/rip/transfer/sell/publicly perform another citizen’s work and try to make money off of it. (Which i think is quite sensible — even as someone who opposes the whole idea of copyright as a nasty intrusion of people’s freedom of speech — so long as we live in a capitalist society.)

Good on you, Ṃajeḷ. Now if only they had decent internet…

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume X(mas)VIII

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A dirt path by a farm lightly covered in snow

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and good tidings to everyone else — my gift to you is one last sack full of links to send off the year. Mx Tynehorne’s Link Roundup®™ will return in 2023.

Lords of Misrule 2022: Waves, by RĂŚl H. Bishop

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Our final submission of the season comes from one Ræl H. Bishop, a dear friend of mine. Thank you so much for all the entries this year — it’s a lovely thing to have a tradition continue, especially when i’d worried you’d all forgotten i existed. And as always, please leave all your comments on the main site.

This past summer, I lived in a big coastal city. After two months, things took a turn for the worse and I had to move out. I found the city plastic and frustrating anyways. During my time there, I would go to the beach quite often. But not to swim or make sand castles. In the mornings, I’d walk with a book and a bottle of water and watch the sun dance over the horizon. In the evening, I’d find a vacant spot and watch the cargo ships sail over an increasingly indigo skyscape. It was very cathartic. I feel it’s the same feeling all cathedrals, mosques, and mandirs try to cultivate: a sense of awe and serenity that lets our minds meld and our troubles wash away.

I have a very beach-y metaphor for your consideration. The emotions we experience in our lives are like waves lapping onto a shoreline. All emotions are found in these waves. We get caught up in waves of anger, of depression, of pride and lust, of sorrow and shame, greed and jealousy, euphoria and ecstasy. They are strong, powerful waves. We all stand on these shores, but most folks spend their lives getting tossed and turned by these waves, smashed into the undercurrent and washed up to repeat the process the next day. What we need to do in the face of these waves is not to get knocked over by them, but to hold steadfast and let the waves pass. We observe the waves as they emerge, not “pushing back” and not “falling in”, but noting as they come and noting as they pass. The waves leave, and more take their place, but they’re all transient nonetheless.

I’ve tried taking this notion to heart since I realized it. I hope you can find use of this. The next time you’re caught in a slump, or a fit of rage, or in some all-consuming obsession, just remember that it’s another wave approaching from the distance. You have the power, the strength, the will to keep standing in its wake.

You are not these waves, these fleeting emotions. You are yourself. γνῶθι σεαυτόν. तत्त्वमसि.

Lords of Misrule 2022: Three poems

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Today’s post(s) come to us, in no particular order, from three different people, because like buses, good things come in threes. As always, please leave your comments on the main site.

child meets Cernunnos
B.

i met Him in the woods and He told me to hold my chin up His

skin black as ash shining

hunt-drunk

blood in the snow, He gave me a bow fitted for me and said to shoot

i said what for, to shoot what, i don’t want to hurt a creature

and He said the cycle of life requires death, if you reap then you will sow, to kill a crĂŚture is

to give it back.

i said alright but i was scared and He said what if the other hunters come not my Hunters the other ones

man-shaped and hunting crĂŚtures like you

and i shot

the arrow fell through the shadow, spilling, and i said to protect i would do anything

and He said now you understand what this is for. and He said daughter, your destructive anger

can construct mountains and miracles. don’t listen to those as say death and life and rot and growth are anything different from each other. look at the berries grow through the snow. it kills the snow, the snow feeds them, they are not beautiful in this way without the snow.

i said, i understand i am an arrow and a Hunter and i am not yours i am my own and i protect

and like this is how my i became an I

two months later i called for Him

with my head in a bush

because the other ones had taken away my I again

and he said take it back and this time He gave me a knife

and I stole nothing

but I held the knife and sat with Him and remembered that i am I.

Listen to Hanif Aburraqib who says

“I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.”

and go lightly but know yourself Leave a comment

sinxelo, lost
Sent in by an anonymous reader from Santiago

know true, feel feind

creer, pensar
concocer,
enamorar;

se

estou na miĂąa lengua perdide
non coa morriĂąa, ni pobo.
pobre.

lellos turn, so they wanted

perdĂŠronmenĂłs
beg, simple:
Âż Leave a comment

Untitled
Fidomanin

I’m a poet of the future
poet by mission
With pen in hand
I let any dick hard

Strong Viagra is my verse
Fills souls with lust
blowjob by passion
To all subverse morals

I open the gates of hell
Like a lady’s legs
For I am invited to both

May this verse last forever:
I feel sorry for those who love
destined for sadness.

Lords of Misrule 2022: Art, by Ariel

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Today’s post comes to us from one Ariel, of the Library Phantasmagoria. I highly recommend looking at the version on the main site, because it’s done up with its own custom styling, per request of the author — and that you direct any comments there for the sake of consistency. Anyway. The post.

I’ve been slowly taking up drawing as a hobby. I wouldn’t consider myself a very artistic person. In school, I was more math and science oriented. Now I work in computer security. But I want to share some of what I’ve learned.

One of the first things I learned when I started is that using a pencil is hard. When you write, you can have some variation in the angles and curves of your letters while still maintaining “good form”. An “E” still looks like an “E” whether you write it with curves or corners or one stroke or three or squared-off or angled. Contrast this with something like drawing a circle or a 3D box. Even a small variance in curve or angle will turn your perfect drawing into something that looks wrong.

There are tricks you can learn to making more accurate circles or boxes. For example, the lines going out from the corner closest to the viewer on a box need to have obtuse angles between them. If an angle is perfectly 90°, then the viewer will have to be looking at a side straight-on. If the angles are acute, then the box will look skewed. Drawing boxes doesn’t get easier just by knowing the rules, though.

Even though I’ve come up with how every angle and line relates to every other angle and line, I still draw skewed boxes. My hand just doesn’t know how to control the pencil properly. The solution is simple: the knowledge must be applied - a lot. That’s the idea behind Draw a Box’s lessons. (No, this is not an advertisement for DaB.) I think that’s the idea behind a lot of art lessons. Hell, it’s probably the idea behind most things you can learn.

A long time ago, I was browsing a forum thread on a fairly unpleasant website. The forum thread had something to do with programming, and someone was asking about learning programming. I don’t remember the programming language in question, the person in question, or anything else. But I do mostly remember the response.

It was a well-formatted, but very sarcastic paragraph about the “greatest developers”. These “greatest developers” would spend years studying the fundamentals of the language. They learn the nuances of the compiler. They learn the most efficient algorithms for every problem. They read books and watch tutorials and browse forums until they understand the language better than the people that created it. And so on and so fourth. But one line from the paragraph summarizes the idea and stands out most in my mind: "The greatest developers go years without writing a single line of code." (And in case it wasn’t clear, the post was satire.)

I don’t think I appreciated that line at the time, but I find myself thinking about it more and more lately.

I’m one of those people with a tendency to “learn” more than I practice something. I’ll watch hours-long YouTube videos on obscure topics, and my favourite podcast(s) came from the How Stuff Works group: Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, etc. I’ve read books on the history of tea, the book index, and capital punishment in France. It’s knowledge that can’t really be applied in my life, or is only applicable to hyper-specific niches. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this - it’s a form of entertainment for me.

Yet, learning as enjoyment and learning to apply are two different things. Returning to the art topic: I’ve spent more time watching the Draftsman Podcast, browsing r/artistlounge, and similar activities than putting pencil to paper. I - like many in my position - justify it as time spent learning, and there is value in learning from others. (“Don’t reinvent the wheel,” as they say.) But that time is really more entertainment-learning than applied-learning. It’d be better spent putting pencil to paper and improving. Using the pencil is hard, though, because it means having to face failure when the boxes don’t look right despite my best effort.

I don’t have any good words on failure or dealing with it. That’s another thing I’m still learning. But I don’t want to end on a sour note, so I want to highlight another thing I’ve learned through art: how to see it.

I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but hear me out.

I’m going to be using a digital painting by the artist “WLOP” as an example. It’s titled “Civilization3” and you can find it on his DeviantArt. (I’m avoiding posting it here directly because I’m unsure of his re-upload policy.) The art is of a girl playing a magical steampunk-esque violin with lots of floating gears. I think it’s a really pretty piece, and I’d probably be able to know it was one of WLOP’s at a glance (even if it didn’t have a big watermark saying so).

There’s a few things about the painting that I wouldn’t have noticed before I started learning art. For example, look at the part of the violin furthest from the girl. It’s only a few simple strokes and even has some bits randomly floating off to the side. The more you look, the more you notice things like that. The gear under her chin has misshapen teeth. The leaf pattern on her dress is just bean-shapes and circles with a few thin lines running through it.

I don’t say this to make fun of or insult the piece. It’s actually an amazing trick that I hope to be able to emulate one day! But it’s something that I wouldn’t have noticed before I started learning to make art instead of just looking at it. (I also apologize to the artists to whom I’m probably stating the obvious.) WLOP focused on the areas that most people would unconsciously notice the most flaws with (the face and hands) and let the viewer’s mind fill in the detail for the less important parts (the pattern on the dress).

Here’s another one to look at: Breathe by Yuumei. It’s another portrait. This time it’s a girl wearing a respirator of sorts with roses where the filters should be. One of the first things you’ll notice is the clear brushwork-iness of it and the lines again. But this one I point out for the colour. At first glance, she’s wearing a tan coat, but notice the left side: it’s blue. So is part of her hair and face. (Also, if you go back to WLOP’s image, you’ll notice the character’s hair is actually a bit green. Especially in the back.) Before learning a bit about colour, I’d probably have defaulted to a black or grey for shading.

I’m happy that I’ve learned to see things this way. It’s like I’ve learned a secret to unlocking a hidden part of the world.

Lords of Misrule 2022: The Gift of the Influencers, by Baki

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Iō Saturnalia! Just as last year, a month ago, i flipped the tables and invited you all to send me whatever you wanted and i would put it up on the site. I’m pleased to say that even more took up my offer than last year, and over the next five days, you’ll be seeing a variety of their works. Our first submission for 2022 comes from a reader by the nom de plume of Baki. Enjoy.

One thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars. That was all. She had put it aside, one dollar and then another and then another, in her careful posting of selfies and other online activity. Della counted it three times. One thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was nothing to do but post an Instagram Story and cry. So Della did it.

While the lady of the home is slowly growing quieter, we can look at the home. A VW van. There is little more to say about it.

The engine had decided to finally stop working completely and needed replacement. In the back there was an area too small to hold a toilet. There was a bed, but it was not long enough. Also there was a barely functional kitchen with the names of the owners above the tiny window surrounded by little hearts, Della and James Young.

When the names were placed there, Mr. James Dillingham Young was being paid $300 a week via PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon from people supporting their #vanlife social media lifestyle. Now, when he was being paid only $200 a week, the name seemed too long and important. It should have been “Jamie Young.” But when Mr. James Dillingham Young entered the van, his name became very short indeed. Mrs. James Dillingham Young put her arms warmly around him and called him “Jim.” You have already met her. She is Della.

Della finished her Instagram Story and wiped the tears from her face. She sat by the window and looked out with no interest. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only one thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars with which to buy Jim a gift. She had put aside as much as she could for months, with this result. Two hundred dollars a week is not much. Everything had cost more than she expected. It always happened like that.

Only $1,870 to buy a gift for Jim. She had had many happy hours planning something nice for him. Something nearly good enough. Something almost worth the honor of belonging to Jim.

There was the interior of the van. Perhaps you have seen the kind of interior of a van that is created by two people living #vanlife on social media. There was wood. There were lots of fairy lights. There was a colorful blanket to tie it all together. It was very narrow and hard to photograph properly with an iPhone that was two generations out-of-date. However, if she were very patient and used a cheap five dollar fish eye lens attachment, she might be able to get a good pic of the interior. Della, being quite patient, had mastered this art.

Suddenly she stopped trying to film the interior of the van and stared at her phone. Her eyes were shining brightly, but her face had lost its color. Quickly she turned off her phone and set it down on the colorful blanket.

The James Dillingham Youngs were very proud of two things which they owned. One thing was Jim’s VW van. It had been their reason for quitting their boring forty hour a week jobs so they could live their #bestlife. The other was Della’s iPhone, the only camera they owned which allowed them to document their #vanlife on social media so they could be influencers.

If a queen had lived in the campsite next to them, Della would have taken pics of her with the two generation old iPhone and posted them so the queen could see. Della knew that her pics were more beautiful than any a queen could have taken with much more modern equipment.

If a king had lived in the campsite next to them, with his fancy $200,000 RV with pop outs and self-leveling, Jim would have invited him over for a ramen dinner. Jim knew that no king had anything as wonderful as his VW van.

So Della stared down at her iPhone then picked it up again. She stopped for a moment and stood still while a tear or two ran down her face.

With the bright light still in her eyes, she created an eBay auction for her phone then announced it on social media.

“Will you buy my phone? Only two hours to bid!” Della Instagramed.

“Wonderful iPhone for sale. Only two hours to bid!” Della Facebooked.

“Get it while you can! #carpediem #2hourauction” Della Tweeted.

Two hours later, PayPal announced a four hundred dollar increase in their account.

Oh, and the next thirty minutes seemed to fly. She was going from online store to online store, to find a gift for Jim.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the online stores, and it was from a shop very close to them.

It was an original replacement engine for the VW van.

As soon as she saw it, she knew that Jim must have it. She paid the two thousand two hundred and seventy dollars for it. The owner of the shop was a fan, a subscriber to their YouTube channel, and promised it would be delivered within the hour.

What luck! To find the engine so close to their location and so close to Christmas!

Humming Christmas carols under her breath, Della quickly posted that “big things were afoot” and that she “might be off social media for a while” to her social media accounts then packed up her iPhone to be shipped to the winner of the eBay auction.

When Della had done this, her mind quieted a little. She began to think more reasonably. She started to try and cover the sad marks of what she had done. Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks. It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends – never easy.

Within forty minutes her head looked a little better and the engine had been delivered. “If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “after he realizes we can’t post to social media any longer. But what could I do – oh! What could I do with one thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars!”

At seven, Jim’s dinner was ready for him.

Jim was never late when he was out scouting new locations worthy of being photographed. Della held the colorful blanket that the engine lay on and sat cross-legged on the bed. Then she heard his step outside and her face lost color for a moment. She often said little prayers quietly, about simple everyday things. And now she said: “Please God, make him think the engine is nice.”

The van door opened and Jim crawled in. He looked very fit and he was not smiling. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-eight – and with only a couple hundred followers on Twitter!

Jim stopped inside the door. He was quiet as a hunting dog when it is near a bird. His eyes looked strangely at Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not understand. It filled her with fear. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor anything she had been ready for. He simply looked at her with that strange expression on his face.

“You’ve bought me an engine?” asked Jim slowly. He seemed to labor to understand what had happened. He seemed not to feel sure he knew.

Jim put his arms around Della. For ten seconds let us look in another direction. Two hundred dollars a week or a million dollars a month – how different are they? Someone may give you an answer, but it will be wrong. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. My meaning will be explained soon.

From inside the coat, Jim took something tied in paper. He threw it upon the blanket. “I sold the van to get the money to buy you the new iPhone.”

For there lay The Latest iPhone – the iPhone that Della had been reading reviews about for months. A beautiful iPhone with improved lenses and increased memory, perfect for taking selfies and pics of their van. She had known it cost too much for her to buy. She had looked at it without the least hope of owning it. And now it was hers, but the van was sold.

And then she cried, “Oh, oh!”

The magi as you know, were wise men – wonderfully wise men – who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I have told you the story of two influencers who were not wise. Each sold the most precious thing they owned in order to buy a gift for the other.

But let me speak one last word to the wise these days. Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise. For when Della popped back onto social media that night using her new iPhone to tell their followers this story, Della and Jim went viral. Money and offers of sponsorship poured in. The lady who bought Jim’s van gave it back to him for nothing. The shop who sold Della the engine installed it for free. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the influencers.

#blessed #bestlife #vanlife

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XVII

· Tagged as links, Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup · 1 comment
A grainy picture of the Pleiades
It turns out astrophotography is not very convenient or good-looking on a smartphone. Who knew?

P.S. Lords of Misrule starts tomorrow. Hope you enjoy everyone’s submissions — i know i did! :-)

I like a lot of SCP stuff, but man, they really shot themselves in the foot by giving them all numbers and never using the “official” article titles. It makes it impossible to tell what people are talking about unless they’re talking about a really famous one like 173 or 3008: how am i meant to tell the difference between SCP-5031 the one where they realise torture is bad, SCP-3930 the one that doesn’t exist, and SCP-4999 the one who offers you one last smoke for the road, all great in their own right, when they all have iPhone passwords instead of names?

Dear Tate Modern, i have a very cool idea for an art exhibit that i think you would really like. P.S. I am not a crackpot.

¡ Tagged as art, machine learning ¡ Leave a comment
A man looking at two versions of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” — the original, and a noticeably less good AI version

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle in the art world as of late about the ethics and capabilities of AI art (previously), and as Britain’s leading institution for contemporary art, you seem like just the right people to bring it to the public. My proposal is simple, but effective — let man and machine compete on equal footing.

Eight or so talented human artists will be given a prompt to work from. At the same time, the same prompt will be given to a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm, like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. In the gallery, the two works — one made by metal, one made by flesh — will be hung side by side, and the audience will not be told which is which.

Next to each diptych will sit two bins where visitors can dispense plastic tokens (like the ones they have at Asda) to vote on which painting is their favourite. At the end of the exhibition’s run (or perhaps updating live; your call), the votes will be tallied up, and we’ll finally find out whether us or our creations are the better artists.

If you really wanted to provoke, you could ask the humans to provide you with a list of every painting they’ve ever seen, every photo they’ve ever taken, every film they’ve ever watched, and every song they’ve ever heard. Then you put that big list up on the wall, tell the visitors that Advanced Biological Neural Learning Algorithms have taken quote-unquote “inspiration” from all of these copyrighted works, and put to vote whether you should contact the rightsholders and ask them to sue. It would be only fair.

Chære and regards, Xanthe. P.S. — I am not a crackpot.

The Satyrs’ Forest’s 2022 word of the year

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Every December, every dictionary in the English language comes crawling out of the woodwork to reveal their “word of the year”: a single word or phrase that they deem to sum up the past twelve months. And every December, every dictionary in the English language cocks it up. I plan to fix that.

There are a few principles that a good “word of the year” pick should follow. For one, the word of the year should be a word, or at the very least, a phrase with a distinct meaning. You’d think this would be easy, but one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s nominees for 2022 was #IStandWith — a hashtag that only means, well, “i stand with”. See me after class, Oxford.

The word of the year should be from this year. It doesn’t have to have been coined this year, but it should, at the very least, have seen a spike in popularity: another nominee from Oxford was metaverse, invented by Neal Stephenson in 1992 but buoyed by Facebook’s trendy rebrand. Merriam-Webster1 are consistent failures in this regard, and this year’s pick was particularly egregious. Not only has gaslight been in use for years, but it was even the American Dialect Society’s pick for “most useful word of the year” all the way back in 2016!

People should have heard of the word of the year. I’m sorry to keep picking on Oxford here, but i highly doubt your average man on the street is familiar with the concept of going goblin mode.

Finally, the word of the year should last beyond this year; ideally, people will still be talking about it in a decade’s time. This is, to some extent, unknowable, but we in the present can take a good stab at it. We can surmise that 2007’s carbon footprint was a sturdier choice than 2006’s bovvered, and that 2014’s vape was a better selection than, say, loom band.

So then. What does that make The Satyrs’ Forest’s word of the year? It might not be a word, but as a phrase, it certainly has a meaning beyond the sum of its parts. It entered the public consciousness this year, and anyone in Europe who’s been paying any attention knows what it means. It is destined to enter the history books: though they might not use it in conversation, every time someone in 2122 looks up the history of the twenty-first century, our word of the year will be there, staring them in the face. It is:

special military operation

noun. (euphemistic) A war which cannot be referred to as such, particularly the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Infamously coined by Vladimir Putin in his euphemistic February address, no single utterance has had as much impact on the year that was. I could have chosen Kyiv or slava Ukraini — but the word of the year is not an award for positive impact, and without special military operation, those two would be unlikely to have entered the popular lexicon. I could have gone with metaverse, but it’s an ugly word, and one on which i am personally bearish. Lettuce would have amused, but if i wanted to declare a British Word of the Year, i would have called it that in the first place.

So — “congratulations” to special military operation on its victory, which is probably the only such victory Mr Putin’s side will ever have. Let us hope that 2023’s defining phrase will strike a more optimistic note.

Back to the Future (2024)

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POV: Robert Zemeckis just died and you are a cynical Universal exec with dollar signs in your eyes.

Back to the Future
A poster showing a DeLorean with the tagline “You're gonna see some serious stuff”.
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Screenplay by
Based on
Starring1
Music by
Production
companies
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release dates
  • June 7, 2022 (2022-05-27) (United States)
Running time
152 minutes[1]
Country United States
Language English
Budget $200 million[2]
Box office $985 million[3][4]
Sequels

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XVI

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jm6vL729GY
I heard this lovely song on Radio 6 and was shocked to discover it only had about two thousand views on Youtube. Go get it up to three thousand, will you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCp_3zw-CxA
Bonus music, because i love you. (Platonically. As much as an author can love a hypothetical reader whose life she knows no deta— you know what i mean.)

Arts and crafts: tidbits from Manchester

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In a gallery hangs a large landscape painting depicting the Gods and Goddesses of the classical world
I included this photo to show that the gallery still makes plenty of room for the “old masters” — but, to be honest with you, it sums up everything i dislike about some renaissance and baroque art. Just a huddled mass of mythological figures, with no life, no colour, no attention paid to the greater picture. Sad!

Manchester is not particularly renowned as a home for the aristocracy or patrons of the high arts, so i was pleased to discover upon a visit that the Manchester Art Gallery is one of the finest of its kind.

The Mag (as nobody calls it)’s success lies not in the size of its collection — it’s no larger than my local, the Laing — but in its presentation. Like many museums, its curators have lately been making efforts to diversify their collections and make them more relatable to the average yoof of today. It’s a process that can often come off as haphazard and rushed1, but the team at the Mag have pulled it off with care and respect.

A painting of a black woman covered in coal laying on a cloth-covered black table, as if deceased
Berni Searle, In Wake Of, 2014.

Newer works are dotted in each gallery in such a way that they complement, rather than denigrate, the greats of old. A visa rejection letter from a group of Pakistani artists hangs alongside Victorian paintings of eastern caravans; where a gallery about protest and revolution could have added some shrewd, vapid letterpress and called it a day, the museum’s curators have instead chosen to incorporate a thoughtful self-portrait by a South African painter, made in the wake of the Marikana massacre.2

A portrait of a dashingly handsome Shakespearean actor

The captions accompanying each artwork face a similarly complicated task. Be too conservative and you’ll disappear up your own arse into a world of romanticist masturbation; be too reactionary and you’ll come off as cloyingly didactic, engaging in pseudohistoric iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake. The Mag hit a stroke of genius here: after a brief description in the typical style, the captions adorning prominent works also include conversations and thoughts from a variety of perspectives, be it historians, curators, or the artists themselves. It’s a brilliant way to further inform the visitor without beating them over the head with one opinion, alienating them with arcane academese, or leaving out unsavoury histories.

A lit up colourful glass tapestry marked with traditional Ghanaian patterns
Someone, please, tell me what this painting is called. I have to know.

Other highlights on the lower floors include a portrait of the early black tragedian Ira Aldridge (the very first work in the museum’s collection, which rather surprised me coming from the people of 1858), a Ghanaian tapestry that i was surprised to learn was actually made of glass, and a lovely painting of an industrial scene lit by hazy fog whose name — to current me’s infuriation — i neglected to include in the photo, taken from an angle so inconvenient that reverse image search returns nothing of relevance. Past me is a bastard and i’m killing him when i get the chance.

Upstairs sit the gallery’s temporary exhibitions. The most prominently advertised was on the topic of the history of men’s fashion, something i regrettably could not get myself to muster up any interest in. I’m sure it’s quite interesting if that’s your sort of thing. The other (smaller) exhibition sits in a surprisingly grand hall which, from what i can tell, normally houses the museum’s pottery galleries, and it’s about tea. No wait come back i sw—

An all-black, marbled tea set

I jest, but there really is some fascinating stuff in there. The room’s cabinets are packed with advertisements, old jugs, and all sorts of other things detailing how hot drinks have shaped Britain and the world over the years — from sparking conversation to funding colonisation. But there was one thing that stuck out to me the most. A newly-created work of art, perhaps meant to inspire some thought or another in the viewer, but that our whole group agreed could only be described as one thing:

A collection of tea stoppers, hung on ropes in such a way that they really quite resemble a dreamcatcher made of buttplugs
Buttplug dreamcatcher.

PS: I had to ask what the abbreviation “dbl” (“double”) on the signs for upcoming trams meant. My poor exurban soul simply could not comprehend the idea of a transit system that consistently ran so punctually — i had been thinking it stood for something like “delayed by late”.

PPS: This was meant to be the last post in the series, but my rambling about the gallery got so out of hand that i thought i’d spin off its intended complement into its own part. Tune in next week3 for one last dispatch from Affleck’s Palace.