Ramble, my fear of data, bbc dumbing down …

Twice recently i’ve heard material / programmes on bbc r4 that are utter garbage, misleading and vacuous. You can spot them from a mile away, bought-in i guess and often about tech, data, AI and delivered in a breathy ‘we are travelling so far ahead’ BS mode that its all utterly unbelievable and always with a Stateside voice-over. delivered as if all is unavoidable, we will / are being overwhelmed by data, analytics etc. Please back up your fantasy projections; I mostly believe what i hear but journalism of rigour needs proof. I am being expected to believe candyfloss ….

You are talking to a man that does not buy in to modern crap, my idea of fun is to chop the sticks, wash by hand, use a pen, doodle, learn things each day, memorise verse and text, look at books which allows me access to brighter and clever people than myself, to enjoy and learn from mans art and handicraft of decades and centuries gone past.

We can expect worse, The Times newspaper Tuesday March 26th (p.20) voiced concern at the dumbing down of bbc r3 and 4 … Michael Buerk worries over the predominace of public school educations, but personally I am less concerned on this point, as surely its never been much different? All i want is quality. I do not want to hear a dumbed down repetitive output that is blinkered to better things. I put my faith in the privately educated! However the new Director of Radio James Purnell is very youth orientated and is actively reducing bbc r3 & 4 but is ring fencing younger targeted material on radio 1 and 6 music as sacrosanct (ehm … anybody listen to these at all) ? Tish pooey … the young couldn’t care less abt radio as a medium and radio 1 is nothing of its former self, it cannot be, times have changed no longer is it universally what we could hear playing in households up and down the land (as a kid we mostly tuned in to the Dutch pirates, not understanding was a bonus). Programmes such as bbc r4 Womans Hour have been badly served, re-scheduled at a most unsuitable loony time on weekday mornings when mothers and housewives etc have to get busy !

A bit like Brexit, the increasing love affair with data and AI is quite puerile, sickening and needless. But like zombies etc we rush to embrace this crap!

I quite happily have no washing machine and each day wear clean shirt, boxers and t-shirt (its called a washing line) … likewise no mobile phone. I do not need such things and i save energy and minimise my electrical consumption and data footprint. BUT BUT BUT in our desperation to embrace technology theres an unfathomable appetite to harvest data, endless data .. what fckng time I open my curtains or what i have in my fridge should matter to no-one. This is data gone beserk and human values need to prevail, not the values of some faceless twit in a corporation i care nothing for.

For instance ‘bit coin mining’ we read consumes the electricity of a small country! If ever a bubble was promoted it is bitcoin. Perhaps it will be tulips next ….

So lets connect again as how we are hellbent of racing to the abyss, below in the Grauniad we read of the electrical power required to run banks of servers and data collection of which so much is pointless and trivial in the extreme … https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025

I cannot believe I heard this !

Kelsey Grammer just destroyed his bookings for the forthcoming ‘Man of la Mancha’ bbc r4 0830 and tells us he likes what he hears from donald j trump, had voted for him and the full two years later is still okay with what he hears.

This is utterly baffling. We have a screaming outright idiot/ dictator in the White House and the bbc r4 are able to pull off this stunt! I have always maintained there is bbc bias, an agenda, a viewpoint but this goes against all common sense and decency.

Another instance how ‘the world out there’ is increasingly distorted, the break-away seven from the Labour Party are in my opinon to be applauded, to have had the nerve to dump an unusable system called the Labour Party under Corbyn. Clever fella Corbyn, good on camera, loves his little loudspeaker van, always able to deride the party in power yet generally has no policy of his own, would be disastrous in power; one gets the feeling too much time spent watching, ruminating, but reacting (albeit often v slowly) … but no forward energy. Without T May as a punchbag its hard to know what he thinks.

We are in a strange place, the disastrous Brexit will destroy any UK car manufacturing and the supply chain, we were sold a simplified idea of the future. With what we know now Brexit would never happen, yet T May steam rollers on regardless. Those responsible for this simplified over-sell have a great deal to answer for. Perhaps the over-simplified ‘sell’ was an indication of their own limited abilities?

How we think, reach a viewpoint is quite odd nowadays, information is not necessarilly enlightenment. trump rides on this, tv show experience he knows fine well is all he need know.

Theres a common thread in all this, Brexit and trump … its the destruction of present evolved systems and trading partnerships. I shudder as perishable goods / agriculture will fare in the present situation. With trump I’d say he’s knocking down the little men, the smaller producers to allow his bigtime new friends to hoover up any opportunity at knock down prices.

Lets look at how being connected, the digital superfluity of so-called connectedness is diminishing the human experience … https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/84273524/posts/2177568231

f … for Fake ?

I started a facebook account a few days ago (which I have mothballed) and already knew it was a jumble of nonsense as any form of blogging platform; the local tie-in unwanted was an irritation as were ads which screamed ‘fake’.

An hour or more of my life wasted. Compounded by several logins foiled and insisting on a pic of myself log in after log in. Needless to say it was a random piece of junk submitted.

But ….WTF !

facebook is a crappy cluttered trivial to extreme piece of junk. Yet think of all the lovely analytics it provides. Quite obscene. Life was never meant for such up the arse triviality called facebook. Or surveillence called facebook.

My reason for this post is the irony of trump endlessly hurling the insult FAKE to the Free Press ie journalists of acumen and hard effort yet when it comes to the fakery and nonsense of facebook – his little helper to election – he is silent. We can now see the extent of Russian manipulation via facebook. I’m sorry to say that I don’t hold Zuckerberg in any positive esteem.

Screentime its downside ….

Yup, its what I thought all along ….

Creative play, larking about, playing tiggy, I-spy, rhymes, songs, dancing, singing …. are all abandoned to the analogous nipple of screentime. If I were in charge first thing I’d do is render into black n white. Note how the less advantaged get even increasingly less advantaged, a plague upon us.

We need Art …

Not as some clever trick to deceive but as works of artistic creation of what we ourselves possibly could never devise, visit or speculate upon; the work of talented and clever people than ourselves, of adepts. To provide a reprise from the idiocy of a nasty windbag known as donald; as with an irritating teenager he wastes the time of the grown ups.

Art and books associated thereof, I mean to be able to see back into times past, spanning generations and witness ideas developed from cleverer people than we ourselves, to see how they created and recorded beauty. Blimey, that IS INDEED a staggering statement, creating beauty …. something few individuals are capable of particularly nowadays; kids finish school and many are clueless with their hands, their minds or mouths. Rhetoric one of the most valuable subjects to command as a citizen is reserved for the privately educated.

Art can be a snapshot, a time capsule, can contain great beauty, warmth, human love and virtue, or alert us to problems and why should it be crowded out because of tv, texts and twitter and other such junk?

So where does Art count in our so-called ‘modern’ lives?

Why is it so few people use Art Books to connect with a wider world and pantheon of human endeavour they are ignorant of ? We must include books on archaeological finds, of ancient artefacts, for a hundred thousand years all that remain are tools of flint to tell us how we occupied ourselves, of more recently in a mere tenth of that timespan the hidden ancient hearth, the buried cremation urn. I often wonder at how we interacted, the bonds, the human feeling empathy and communication in those distant days. Useful idea for some role play. To perhaps assume the role of the out of family visitor, stumbling upon an established camp.

In many ways and sadly now due to our sucking upon the papp of the much lauded information superhighway we have denuded ourselves of so much of human accomplishment; as if becoming the donald j trumps of culture ie seeing and knowing so little, existing merely in the here and now and kidding ourselves we know it all. The web should (and can) allow us access to an array of clever and talented minds.

So lets go get it.

https://www.leonardodavinci.net/benois-madonna.jsp

That is a most ravishing image. If it does not sing to your mind and your heart then indeed you are dull.

Below reminds me so much of a favourite place, a now deserted coaching stop from 150 years ago.

David Cox watercolour sketch burdock and drainage tunnel.

In a mad fancy of accomplishment I would think that in my last twenty years were I to capture such beauty and interest with ‘simple’ brushstrokes then it would be time well spent and probably best spent. I have my work which is ongoing but also need recreation less energetic than walking miles with my dog. Years ago I would often visualise and work out how to capture cloudscape, distant horizons, thinking of toned grounds, overlays, colour or warmth. My problem is that I can only paint when I’ve had a drink, or maybe need convincing something worthwhile will result from sober effort. Perhaps if I paint with the intention of conciously keeping it all private it will free me up to make me ‘go for it’. In all my travels in all the pastoral settings I can honestly say I have never once encountered an artist or enthusiast of merit wanting to lay down on paper the form, tones, beauty displayed to them, not one person out of doors enthusing of their activity. Maybe I should? I dunno. Realise too that Lowrys work often mostly is a low-cost set of negatives from Boots; look closely. That explains it all, my own insight.

If we are on David Cox then we have to see the famous one…..

whoops to follow as somehow unfindable ….

My idiocy, i had forgotten its Cotman I need to ask for!

http://www.leedsartgallery.co.uk/gallery/listings/l0042.php

or ….

john sell cotman ploughed field and scarecrow — John Sell Cotman

I think I need to go looking for specific books for them both!

Its a bit like the contracted term ‘poetry’ or ‘books’, what we really mean is all that is contained therein ie viewpoint, experience, memory, mindset, knowledge, a way of seeing; so thank goodness for Art, the nourishing kind. I wonder of todays activities of installation, performance and often are grant aided events and as how they will be regarded as of any merit (whatsoever) in one hundred years from now (when possibly we have ceased to exist as a species anyway).

For instance free your eye up … http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2007/british-continental-paintings-w07701.html