This may be quite silly of me, indeed it almost certainly is, but I’m considering another reading plan I’ve come across… booktuber Criminolly talks about it here:
So, the rules:
The task: read a novel from every year of your life in chronological order with no author represented more than once. The rules: No novel that you have read before. No non-fiction. No story collections. If you DNF a novel, you must replace it with another from the same year. You can stretch out the challenge for as long as you like and read whatever you want between novels that you tag as challenge entries.
And this looks… doable, which is what I said about the other one I started in January then crapped out on, but there’s no time constraint, i.e. I don’t have to read x amount per week or month or whatever… potentially, therefore, this could last me quite a number of years at my going rate… but yeah, I think I might just try it anyway. I suppose we can only see what happens, eh…
A Sydney council has removed a “playful” artwork of Jesus Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters after a torrent of online abuse.
Sydney artist Philjames’ work, Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem, was removed from the Blake Art Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre after fierce criticism was directed at the artist and gallery on Friday, just two days before the eight-week exhibition ended.
The biennial prize at the Liverpool city council gallery recognises contemporary artwork that explore spirituality and religion and draws artists from all beliefs and cultural backgrounds.
But a last-minute online protest claimed the 2023 oil-on-lithograph work mocked the Christian religion, with some protesters threatening the museum and its staff – many of whom are volunteers – with violence.
Philjames said he received about 200 “vile” social media messages on Friday and Saturday, with the gallery receiving over 60 phone calls from protesters on Friday alone.
“I do like stirring a bit of a reaction with my work, but the novelty very quickly wore off on Friday. The level of vitriol and the sheer volume of it was actually frightening,” the 48-year-old said.
“I’ve been doing these sorts of works for around 15 years and I’ve had one or two people upset but nothing like this. It was vile and not at all Christian.”
Actually there’s nothing more Christian than getting worked up about this sort of thing, they’ve had centuries of practice at it. And having got worked up about it, it’s a short step to threatening (or just taking) action against whatever they’re worked up about; recent American history should show us how increasingly short that step is becoming.
Now this thing has been on the artist’s Instagram since last year and it’s been exhibited too; apparently entering it into an art competition I wouldn’t have thought was that popular made all the difference eventually, cos it was on show from May and yet it’s evidently only just been whined about. So ‘twould appear there’s been a concerted effort by someone, I wonder who…
Charlie Bakhos, the founder of conservative Catholic group, Christian Lives Matter, told supporters on social media that the “shocking disrespectful art” had been removed.
“This is another attack on Christianity we have managed to put a stop to thanks to everyone’s support. Let’s keep defending our faith respectfully and we will get results as Jesus is on our side.”
Oh, THOSE cunts. How surprising to find them apparently involved.
Anyway, as I often say in these instances, if you find your faith under attack from bullshit like this thing, your faith isn’t worth piss. Cos, frankly, neither is this art; it’s just a co-opting of some other religious painting and slapping a few cartoon faces on it (are they even “Looney Tunes” characters as such?) and… to no point that I can see. James has another picture of Jesus leading some children but he’s added the “born to kill” helmet from Full Metal Jacket and stuck it on Jesus’ head. THAT actually makes some kind of point which this thing doesn’t, it’s just vacuous. And James actually says as much himself, he reckons it was just a bit of absurd fun. So probably as little point in me getting worked up about it as Charlie Bakhos and Ned Mannoun? I don’t know. But I think I find this picture I found on Tumblr of the Last Supper painted on a saltine cracker more valuable as art:
Never heard of this guy before, but apparently his monstrous bodily waste hangs out with famous people. (Yes, the hideous grammar of that headline really was the thing that grabbed me about this ludicrous story.) It’s a crappy way to become notable—apparently this guy has spent a long time just rocking up to industry events where no one knows who he is but they just accept him as this sort of constant background presence—and I fear his famous friends will now dump him. Still, that’s what you get for taking a drug diabetics actually need more than you; karma will sometimes feed you that sort of shit sandwich…
Podcast time again. Hitting the post-punk switch again this time, cos last week’s venture into 60s/70s psych and so forth was SUCH a hit… not like most of my mixes so far have had huge listenerships but at least the first three in the current series (I took down the previous editions I did from years ago) made it into double figures… anyway, enough of me complaining, go and listen to it, and here’s what’s in it:
Observe also Count Binface and the ventriloquist’s dummy.
To be honest, I’m struggling to get too excited by the UK election results, which were broadly as expected, i.e. Labour romped home while the Tories were routed. The latter, however, still have about 120 seats, and Reform got four [correction: it actually wound up being five] including one for Nigel Farage. That’s four five more than should’ve been acceptable to anyone, but the UK never was immune to fascism, crypto- or otherwise, was it… of course, some wits have said that Farage winning his seat was actually the worst thing for him cos now he’ll have to actually do something to keep his constituency happy rather than just lurk in the background… but I fear he’ll be fine with that; he’s finally got an actual place in government, however small, which I don’t think he’ll give up easily, and he’ll be perfectly happy to do things as long as he can make things worse for the people he hates.
And frankly Labour under Keir Starmer inspires me about as much the Democrats under Biden and the ALP under Albo. As I saw someone say on Mastodon, the Conservatives may have lost but the conservatives won:
A song that, alas, will almost certainly never not be relevant. On the plus side, though, most of the worst examples of the Tories lost their seats, so we can bid not especially fond farewells to Liz Truss (who blamed the party’s loss on having to obey laws that stopped them from booting out them damned furriners; I expect to see her in Farage’s gang sooner rather than later), Michael Fabricant’s lunatic hair and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s general 19th century undertaker’s demeanour… and speaking of whom:
Much like the giant fellow in the top picture, it feels like Baked Bean Man here entered the electoral race purely to force Mogg to appear in a photo like this with him. It would, frankly, be worth having to stand right next to the cunt like that.
Meanwhile, my favourite non-winner of the day:
Well done, that bin. And let’s not forget:
Less than 200 votes for Pissy Parker! That was worth the effort, wasn’t it, K-J Kunt? Slightly bothersome that she got even that many people on her side who couldn’t see through her, but at least several thousand more people did. All told, not entirely satisfying but at least it’s also not exactly the far right surge we saw in France recently… not yet, anyway.
With some books at least, sufficient heat is evidently enough to wreck them without them having to actually catch on fire. Apparently this particular manuscript actually did get transcribed before the war, so it’s not like anything in it is irretrievably lost, but it’s still a kind of distressing sight somehow… I wonder where it came from (Kassel University, where it apparently resides, was only founded in 1971 so it obviously came from somewhere else) and how many of its fellow manuscripts ended up in the same state but their contents weren’t saved…
As is custom, every tenth Important Images post contains 50 images rather than the usual 20, and so it is with this one. Which means there’s a bit more room than usual for nudity, of which you will find some particularly good examples herein. Not including Terry Gilliam and his strategically placed hat.
Astonishingly, this is not actually a joke. The younger Bobby K. was responding on Fox’s News Nation to a Vanity Fair profile of him including a… charming photo of him chowing down on a whole barbecued animal which the article speculated was a dog; Junior harrumphed that it was actually a goat, and for some reason felt the need to clarify that he would eat anything except dog, monkey, or human. And the above picture is how another Fox show, The Five, reported the conversation… the above way. I mean, I suppose it’s nice to know RFK Jr wouldn’t eat another human being, it’s just that no one was accusing him of cannibalism in the first place… still, now I feel the need to know where Biden and Trump stand on eating humans, and whether or not the phrase “I wouldn’t eat a human” actually means Kennedy would eat more than one…
Ben Fordham at 2GB got the vapours earlier about someone in Wagga calling Bibi a cunt. Which… he kind of is? I mean, he’s got tens of thousands of dead Palestinians to his credit, I think it’s not unfair to call him one. I’d call Hamas cunts too, of course, for what they did on October 7th last year. I’d call quite a lot of people cunts for various reasons. I’d call Ben Fordham a cunt for being part of 2GB, a pack of cunts who are stooges for the Liberals, another pack of cunts. Australians tend to use the word quite a lot. And I’m sure Ben Fordham has used the word himself as a slur against politicians and indeed anyone else he doesn’t like. He wouldn’t call Anthony Albanese (who, frankly, I could be tempted to call a cunt for his betrayal of Labor voters’ hopes that he would actually be a good PM—what happened to fighting Tories, Albo?) a cunt on air, of course, there’s rules about that, but I’ve no doubt he’s called him one away from the microphone. And Fordham would be the sort of cunt to deny he ever called someone a cunt, too. What a cunt.
We live in an increasingly fucking stupid world, and damn me if I didn’t just find one of the most fucking stupid things I’ve ever seen on the Internet. While searching for something else entirely, I lucked upon this replica props & costumes forum and a thread thereon. I actually looked at the video featured in the screenshot, which highlights a number of shots in 2001 that look a bit like some in the trilogy, but none of which can them can be described as more than superficially similar at best… and when you consider 2001 and SW generally, there is absolutely piss all real similarity of any sort. But the question about the latter being a “carbon copy” of the former seems to have been posed seriously. I somehow don’t feel like it was meant ironically or as a troll. Maybe it was and I’m missing the joke, though if I am missing somethng then everyone else in the thread who told OP not to be a dickhead missed it too… I don’t know, I’m angrier at this than I probably should be. But, like I said, the world is increasingly fucking stupid, and bullshit like this just makes it worse.
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