Journal BlackHat's Journal: Hypocrites and parasites/ Will come up and take a bite 2
[Game show set, long view]
BlackHat: As mentioned last, Mr Karl Marx is here with us today. Hello Karl.
Karl Marx: Hello.
[Move camera up on stage center]
BH: To recap. Brownson stated that-- Error is never harmless, and only truth can give a solid foundation on which to build. [Thus] Individualism and [S]ocialism are each opposed to the other, and each has only a partial truth. The state founded on either cannot stand, and society will only alternate between the two extremes. Your view Karl?
KM: Ahhhh... The workers... shit. Hang on! You used baseball metaphors did you not, sir?
BH: Yeees...
KM: Hah! So then, I want a Designated Hitter.
BH: Fair enough. Got someone in mind?
KM: Hit it Matt!
[Swing camera to a spot-lit English Don]
Quote:
Between the great house and the vernacular landscape beyond was the garden. At all periods gardens have been more than simply lawns and beds of flowers; gardens are about power as well as plants. Around the great house the gardens were planned as a mediation between the elite and the ordinary, as well as between Nature and Culture. The seventeenth-century antiquarian and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in his essay on the quincunx turned a garden motif into a meditation upon the classical Ancients, and into a complex metaphor for life and death through the classification of plants and animals. For other early modern writers gardens had Utopian and Edenic associations. Evelyn's proposal for a Utopian college community was framed around a garden. Gardens could also constitute political agendas. Designs ranging from grandness and formality to simpler but more expansive designs had explicit connotations in the alternately absolutist and republican world of the seventeenth century (Parry 1992; Chambers 1992).
Medieval gardens were generally enclosed and inward-looking; they were used for both function and pleasure. The enclosure of large areas of space was not a specifically early modern phenomenon. Royalty and feudal lords enclosed large areas for use as deerparks, bounded by a park pale or wall or earthwork enclosure. The creation of such parks often swept away earlier settlement, with whole villages being cleared away as at the sixteenth-century royal palace at Nonsuch (James 1990: 16). Complaints against the iniquity of deerparks were as routine among sixteenth-century rebels as those about enclosure were (Thirsk 1967).
Some writers have commented that medieval gardens were largely functional rather than for 'pleasure' before the sixteenth century (Platt 1994: 54); this view conflicts with the archaeological evidence. Chris Taylor for example has surveyed Nettleham, Linclonshire, and has suggested that 'the whole site may be interpreted as an elaborate formal walled garden with terraces, paths and flower beds set into the sloping ground and with a separate compartment at the north-eastern end' (Taylor 1983: 38). Whatever the case, the development of large-scale formal parks and gardens as a matter of routine around the great house goes along with the development of the gaze in early modern elite landscapes. This can be seen most markedly in the dissolution of medieval and sixteenth-century enclosed gardens in favour of more extensive views and perspectives in the seventeenth century. Kenilworth Castle in the early seventeenth century was one of the first gardens to use large-scale terraces in the systematic deployment of views (to north of the keep in figure 6.2; see also figure 6.11).
Systematic development can also be seen in the form of symbolism deployed within the gardens. Strong has termed the earlier sixteenth century the age of the 'heraldic garden'. Heraldic emblems were displayed within the enclosed courts, often as at Hampton Court on wooden posts. Knots, emblems and 'devices' of various kinds continued to be deployed in the time of Elizabeth with puzzle or riddle elements being especially popular (figure 6.12).
The garden transformed the treatment of Nature. Trees and plants of all kinds were brought under strict discipline before the eighteenth century: they were clipped, shorn, 'tortured' into as unnatural a shape as possible, while at the same time the yeoman farmers labouring in the fields of the vernacular landscape disciplined Nature at an everday level. At the same time knowledge of the world beyond grew; where the Tudor garden included largely domestic species, later gardens became a melange of strange and exotic plants from all corners of the colonial world. An increasing number of alien species were imported from Europe, the Mediterranean and North America. Jarvis counts a rise from 36 hardy woody alien species before 1600 to 239 by 1700 (1979: 148 and 153).
The garden transformed the view of the house. Gardens had always been part of the architecture of the house, the enclosed courts around the late medieval house merging into surrounding parks; but now this relationship was a mathematically proportioned one, the different elements being in clear and explicit relationship with each other, in which geometry was manipulated, explicitly sanctioned by invariant rules of proportion. House and landscape were most explicitly united in the ferme ornee (ornamental or villa farm), seen from the 1720s onwards in south-eastern England; this was imported from France where it had developed in response to Classical texts (Brandon 1979: 176).
At the very height of the most elaborate, extensive formal gardens, a new style emerged in earlier eighteenth-century England: of the Palladian house combined with the 'English landscape garden'. Where gardens had been formal, aligned along straight lines, now they were to be irregular; where Nature had been clipped and shorn, now she was to be given free rein.
There is much debate over the specific historical origins of the 'English landscape garden'. Contemporaries and many subsequent commentators saw it as a distinctive statement of national identity (Lange 1992). Earlier styles of garden had often been imitative of Continental models. Hunt (1986: 180) argues that in fact the new style derived much from Italian models, but it is certainly true that within a few decades the style had become to be seen as distinctively English.
If landscape gardens were a statement of 'Englishness', they were a statement on the part of a specific group: the great paternal landlords who quite explicitly linked their claim to political power through their use and deployment of the 'correct' view of landscape (Cosgrove 1984: 189). John Barrell has argued that by the later eighteenth century polite culture asserted that correct 'taste' in architecture and landscape was intimately associated with political authority; the latter 'is rightly exercised by those capable of thinking in general terms'. This ability to think in the general and abstract was produced by the correct education and an ability to spend one's time free of mechanical labour. It thus inevitably excluded women and the vulgar. Landscape appreciation was one test of taste, turning on the 'function of the panoramic, and ideal, landscapes on the one hand, and, on the other, actual portraits of views, and representation of enclosed, occluded landscapes, with no depth of view' (Barrell 1990: 20).
Eighteenth-century landscape parks can thus be viewed as a piece of ideology, of mystification of what was 'really going on' in the countryside. Such a view is reinforced by considering the relationship of the landscape style to contemporary vernacular landscapes and enclosure. At the very time when enclosed agrarian landscapes were getting straighter, writers on parks and gardens were advocating the abandonment of straight lines (Franklin 1989: 145). Whereas boundaries within the park were transformed by the ha-ha (a wall set at the bottom of a small ditch to allow the illusion of an unbounded landscape), the boundary between the estate itself and the world beyond was reinforced with walls and the planting of groves of trees. The wall at Blenheim for example, built from 1727-9, was seven feet high and nine miles long (Green 1951: 314).
Addison, in articles in his magazine The Tatler, wrote of the landscape garden as being free from unnecessary constraints: his garden, envisioned in a dream, had the Goddess of Liberty and attendant statues representing the Arts and Sciences in her train; nearby the goddesses Plenty and Commerce were seated. Commerce 'was seated in a little island, that was covered with Groves of Soices, Olives, and Orange-trees; and in a Word, with the Product of every Foreign Clime'. Addison enjoyed his dream garden all the more 'because it was not encumbered with Fences and Enclosures' (Hunt and Willis 1975: 140).
The landscape garden in fact concealed its restraints rather than having none. Spence recommended the manipulation of perspective: how to 'unite the different parts of your garden gently together' by drawing distant objects close and close objects further away through the judicious use of narrowing and widening plantations of trees. Spence cited Pope who claimed that 'He gains all Ends, who pleasingly confounds, / Surprises, varies and conceals the bounds' (Hunt and Willis 1975: 270-1). It was also full of allusion and complexity of meaning: again, principally to Classical sources, but also with follies of Druidic temples alluding to Britain's prehistoric glories. In the view of some great patrons the irregular wooded clumps and groves alternating with stretches of pasture were a return to Britain's 'natural' state before cultivation (Smiles 1994).
Along with the creation of the landscape garden went another discursive form: the emergence of landscape art. There is a profound silence of art on enclosed agrarian landscapes before the mid-eighteenth century. In contrast with the landscapes of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Italians, English artists rarely portrayed everyday agrarian scenes (Fussell 1984: 4). Prince calls early eighteenth-century paintings 'escapist fantasies'. Thus for example the Duke of Bedford showed his interest in the agrarian landscape through his experimentation with new farming techniques, but he commissioned landscape paintings that are 'idyllic' and depict an ideal landscape without any such improvements (Prince 1988).
When Thomas Gainsborough portrayed Mr and Mrs Andrews in his 1748-9 painting, however, he showed them in the middle of an agrarian scene, as a newly married couple with a well-managed estate in the background. The position of the local church has been moved to be within the estate and the estate itself has been enclosed with improved methods. 'The wheat has been drilled, hawthorn hedges . . . are neatly cut and laid, a new-style five-barred gate gives entry to the field . . . and the sheep themselves are of the size and shape of breeds selected for feeding on turnips and artificial grasses' (Prince 1988: 103). Woodland also came to carry both authoritarian and radical meanings in such art (Daniels 1988). By the nineteenth century, landscape art had become a key idiom for representing national identity (Daniels 1993). --Matthew Johnson
[Exterior shot of a loading ramp. An open truck receives a chair being loaded by two brown coated men. Karl stands at the edge looking on. Beside him a man in a black hat with a microphone. The cord leads into the open bay door.]
BH:This will be the pattern book for the period that follows. The Europeans begin to look at the world as a...
KM: Their! Careful with that couch lads.
BH:
[Text after sequence of Moc-credits]
More quotes on this period 1799-1899 (yes, this is before, but keep with me here Bart) and this 'Notions about Nations' theme. Until then.
News fused into a solid lump:
Kryptonite time for Pinochet.
Gray Lady Boy down? Yet he has since accumulated a fortune of around £60m with no one being very sure where any of it comes from. Perhaps he just cuts a lot of money-off coupons out of Take-a-Break magazine. Heaven forbid that he might have ever used his family connections to secure any dodgy business deals. The allegation that he was in Oman in 1981 to act as an intermediary for a £300m deal secured by his mother is completely without foundation. No, he just happened to be in the Middle East because he took another wrong turning in the Sahara desert. Neither is there any truth in the allegations that he made £12m in commissions on the al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, signed by his mother. No, he was on a CND demo at the time. Of course, by the time Mrs T was thrown out of office, America also had a leader with a stupid son who seemed to make a curiously large amount of money out of some rather shady deals, so I suppose we should just be grateful that Thatcher Jnr hasn't followed his mother into No 10. But to Texas
Now we checked out this duck quack/ Who laid a big egg oh so black it shone just like gold.
Pardon? The president of Panama has pardoned four men accused of attempting to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. Cuba had warned it would cut diplomatic ties with Panama if President Mireya Moscoso pardoned the men. While in the USA they went and gave Fidel Castro a talking point for one of his 38 hour rants.
49.30 and back down to 43/40. Still looks like swingtimes to me. Perception is still adding +/-5 bucks to any call that you see from the usual flakes [MSNBC,CNNB, FT etc].
Pakistan's playing the same old games. Fiction follows form. Appearances are not everything but the only thing.
The Vicar faces the music. Cherie Booth's chambers, Matrix, are to draw up the document to impeach her husband, Tony Blair, for "high crimes and misdemeanours" in the run up to the war against Iraq, it was disclosed yesterday. The 12 MPs planning to revive the ancient parliamentary procedure - last used 156 years ago against Lord Palmerston - have engaged his wife's chambers to frame the motion because of their record in taking up human rights issues. Two of Ms Booth's colleagues will be working on the motion. One, Rabinder Singh, is of equal status to the PM's wife, being a QC and a deputy high court judge. He recently brought a case arguing that the Iraq war breached international law. Early days yet. And Tony has a large pool of spite to draw from. More, and as single subject, on Jeremiah Cornelius's JE.
Moor trouble for Spain.
'naivety'!!! Free and not dead press. Militants in Iraq have killed abducted Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, an Arabic TV channel said after obtaining video apparently showing the victim. A group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq said it had killed Mr Baldoni after Italy refused to withdraw troops from Iraq, al-Jazeera TV said.
OYAITJ:
43798 : "Is IP a pre-capitalist concept?", Word 5 works just fine in Classic Mode. Repeat anything for long enough in the echo chamber, and people start to believe it. A fortnight after Sun published a community roadmap for OpenOffice it has been widely reported that the Mac version will be delayed, even though the 'delay' no longer than it is for version 1.x., and a few small bits.
Texttoon:
Fumetti : Stock photo of John Kerry speaking to a crowd. Overlayed speech bubble has him saying; "I'm of two minds. And one of them is made up... by my opposition."
TEXAS! His SPIRITUAL HOME! (Score:2)
NUKE TEXAS!
Re:TEXAS! His SPIRITUAL HOME! (Score:2)