Monster Mash

 

      

Furry Sings The Blues

   

Jazz Weekend is my favourite 
time of the whole year :)

     

   
  

About Today

 

    

Splish Splash

       

   

Peace Is Just A Word?

I recently read an interview with one Steven Pinker, whose appealing mixture of optimism and possible delusion sat well with me. Below is a commentary on his latest literary offering.

  

'In The Better Angels of Our Nature, the celebrated evolutionary psychologist, Harvard professor and bestselling author Steven Pinker argues that we – the human race – are becoming progressively less violent. To the consumer of 24-hour news, steeped in images of conflict and war, that may sound plain wrong. But Pinker supports his case with a wealth of data.

Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two world wars and the mass killers Stalin and Hitler, the likelihood of a European or American dying a violent death was less than 1%.

In the book, a series of lists spells out the 'Five Inner Demons' that often cause us to act in evil ways towards each other:

• Predatory or Instrumental Violence
• Dominance
• Revenge
• Sadism
• Ideology

These are countered by the 'Four Better Angels' of human nature:

• Empathy
• Self-Control
• Moral Sense
• Reason

Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans first developed agriculture 10,000 years ago. And it has dropped steeply since the Middle Ages. Oxford in the 1300s, he tells us, was 110 times more murderous than it is today. 

Nowadays, the notion that life is measurably improving – and there can be no more profound improvement than not being killed or tortured – is about as unfashionable in educated circles as the conviction that western culture is in any sense civilising. However, Pinker challenges several enduring 'truths'. It's not true, he says, that man in primitive societies, being at one with his environment, was less inclined towards violent struggle. Nor was the church-focused village a more peaceful environment than the model that replaced it, the impersonalised cities of the Industrial Revolution. In short, the book is a corrective to the widely held belief that humanity is locked into some sort of moral decline.

Born in Montreal in 1954, Pinker grew up in a middle-class, secular, Jewish household. At the age of 13, he declared himself an atheist and an anarchist, but dropped the anarchism a couple of years later after witnessing the effects of a police strike in Montreal. The strife and chaos he saw apparently changed his perception of human nature. "I was a Rousseauian then." he later recalled. "Now I'm a Hobbesian."

Rousseau believed that modern society corrupted human nature, whereas for Hobbes modern society was a necessary protection from human nature. It's Pinker's contention that without the pacifying influence of a commonly recognised state, we are prone to make life the nasty, brutish and short experience that Hobbes described.

This is the problem with defining human nature: it can seem like a post-facto explanation of social phenomena that are essentially historical accidents. At its most crude, it becomes teleological, ascribing a pattern and an ultimate end to random events. Yet it's also fair to say that a reluctance to suffer and die is part of the human condition and it's only natural that we should seek ways of limiting suffering and death. 

It's this vision of our common humanity, what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature", that animates Pinker's latest work.'

Let's hope he's onto something.

  

guardian.co.uk & litkicks.com 

   

Fly Away

   

  

Off to the 'Burgh in a few short hours :)

      

Inside & Out

      

  

Lookin' For My Leopard

 

Sometimes, there's nothing for it but to 

purchase something that brazenly flies in the 

face of good taste ... just for sh*ts & giggles.

  

Purple Leopard Head Purse - River Island

    

   'You're tacky and I hate you'

Fancy Pants, School of Rock, (2003).

              

  

A Forest

     

  

  

 

Sweet & Tender Hooligan

       

The infamous 'Pop' turned 

one, a few weeks back.
  

  
  

Frontier Psychiatrist

      

Oh Deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer.

 

   

   

  

 
'Grab a kazoo - let's have a duel'

     

Say It Right

   

Heh :)

    

Black Swan

    

Last Friday marked Thom's 43rd Birthday

(Not that he looked too pleased about it):

 

 

My favourite track from his

 2006 solo album, The Eraser:

   

     

This Side Of The Blue

     

 

    

   

'And the rest of our lives will the moments accrue,
When the shape of their goneness will flare up anew.

Hen - we do what we have to do re-loo, re-loo

Which is all you can do on this side of the blue.'

 

  

 

        

All The Pretty Horses

    

 

    

Kate Moss looking every inch the winsome snow fairy

complete with white horse carousel, for the Louis Vuitton

Spring/Summer '12 collection at Paris Fashion Week.

 

 

 

More images here

   

Sweet Little Lies

    

     

Every now & then, the other half's incessant 

movie tinkering yields a particularly appealing 

result, in this case in the form of the beautiful 

cover art for Little White Lies - a bi-monthly 

independent film magazine with a difference:

 

  

 

Hard copies of the publication seem to be in 

short supply, but the digital versions are freely 

viewable on the Little White Lies website 

   

Lady D'Arbanville

      

    

   

One of the things I love most about Cat Stevens

is how much he really means it.

   

        

Get Gone

     

    

What's A Girl To Do?

     

     

Considering a Pop Art themed Hallowe'en this year, 

with the help of a Lichtenstein-style makeover:

  

  

  

Introductory faffing aside, this looks pretty good:

 

    

Rebel Rebel

  

 

Where's Me Jumper?

   

Still unsure as to whether I'll succumb to the 

deeply unflattering embrace of oversized, animal 

print knits, but they're nice to look at, all the same.

 

 

 

  

 

 

All by Cooperative @ Urban Outfitters :)

  

Flowers For The Dead

  

 

The above image of the ill-fated Horsley 

warrants a post all of its own.

  

20th Century Boy

            

Owing to having been slightly swamped in 

work, of late, the aforementioned 'Book a Week' 

challenge has become a book a month, at best.

 

       

Continuing in a similar air of debauchery, Dandy in 

the Underworld is the autobiography of the eloquent, 

if completely mental, Sebastian Horsley, perhaps best 

known for his late adventures in voluntary crucifixion.

          

    

        

Named for a Marc Bolan album of the same
title, it has thus far made for charming reading -
unusually so, for a work that concerns itself with
the more idiosyncratic of the human appetites. 

   
As coroner Paul Knapman put it, Horsley was
'the author of his own misfortune'. It would seem
as though this was quite literally the case.