ANIMAL AGRICULTURE1:THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE INDUSTRY FACING THE PLANET TODAY?

ANIMAL AGRICULTURE - the most destructive industry facing the planet today. This is the message of  'Cowspiracy', a hard-hitting indie documentary released in 2014 exclusively on Netflix and now on the web at various sites. YouTube has a (poor audio) video interview with the filmmakers. 

There was a spat with Greenpeace USA who declined to take part and felt that they were misrepresented by implication in the film. See: 'Cows, conspiracies and Greenpeace' blogpost  by Robin Oakley (19th October 2015).

'There’s a population crisis all right. But probably not the one you think'  by Guardian environmental journalist George Monbiot (19th November 2015)  asks the question: 

'So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity?'

Here are some extracts and condensed facts

Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. 

By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals.

 Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. 

A recent paper in the journal 'Science of the Total Environment' suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. 

Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. 

Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres. 

     Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population does. The dairy farms in Tulare County, California, produce five times as much as New York City. In England the system designed to protect us from the tide of slurry has comprehensively broken down. 

Livestock farming creates around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. 

British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: 

If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.

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'It's important to remember that what we put on our plates has political consequences'

Barbara Unmuessig, President of the Heinrich Boell Foundation

This is a yearly publication by the Heinrich Boell Foundation - a German environmental NGO - and Friends of the Earth. The first English version for the international market was published in 2014. 

The aim is to inform consumers about the dangers of increasingly industrialised meat production, says Barbara Unmuessig, the foundation's president, herself a self-confessed enjoyer of the occasional organic steak.

"In the rich North we already have high meat consumption. Now the poor South is catching up," she said. "Catering for this growing demand means industrialised farming methods: animals are pumped full of growth hormones. This has terrible consequences on how animals are treated and on the health of consumers." 

In the United States more than 75kg (165lbs) of meat is consumed per person each year. In Germany that figure is around 60kg. Huge amounts compared to per capita meat consumption rates of 38kg in China, and less than 20kg in Africa. 

But whereas in the developed world meat consumption has stabilised - or in some countries such as Germany, is even falling - in other parts of the world, particularly in India and China, consumers are taking enthusiastically to a meat-heavy Western diet.

As a result increasing amounts of agricultural land are being given over to grow animal feed, such as soya. Globally 70% of arable land is now being used to grow food for animals, rather than food for people, says the Heinrich Boell Foundation. 

This is undermining the fight against starvation and poverty, says Barbara Unmuessig, as individual farmers are pushed off their land by huge competitive corporations. And industrialised methods have led to an overuse of damaging chemicals, she believes.

'Meat Atlas' charts a changing world of meat eaters by Damien McGuinness

BBC News, Berlin (9 January 2014)

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Lucy Siegel in 'The eco guide to eating meat' [The Guardian/14 Feb 2016]

By 2050, experts predict, the demand for meat will have doubled, and meat-related emissions will boom at 12bn tonnes of carbon to feed a population of 9 billion. Our consumption has to tail off if we are to achieve Paris emissions goals.

In 2013 researchers found the carbon footprint of a vegetarian to be half that of a meat eater. Comfortingly, they also found that a flexitarian approach is a close second. By replacing three-quarters of our ruminant budget with other forms of protein, we could reduce livestock emissions to 3.1bn tonnes by 2050. Chicken could play a part, but some non-meat proteins should be included, too.

ANCIENT ART 5: CAVE ART / VIRTUAL LASCAUX/ VIRTUAL CHAUVET / VOLCANIC CHAUVET / ROCK ART

Panel of Lions from the Chauvet cave

Have long been fascinated by  cave and rock paintings and have written two posts, one triggered by Herzog's wonderful 3-D film Ancient Art 4: Cave of Forgotten Dreams of the stunning Chauvet cave art in southern France, discovered in 1994. Several of the early cave paintings were discovered by children and I wrote another post about that, about Abbé Breuil and children's books on the subject, entitled Ancient Art 3: Childhood Discoveries. Am returning to the subject to report on fresh developments and a new exhibition.

THE VIRTUAL LASCAUX

The discovery on September 12th, 1940 of the remarkable Paleolithic paintings in the Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne Region of southwestern France. The paintings, which consist primarily of large animals that were native to the region, have been dated as being up to 20,000 years old. At its height, the cave was visited by some 1,200 visitors a day but it was soon clear that the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans were damaging the paintings. Lichens and crystals began to appear on the walls in the 1950' which led to the closure of he cave to the public in 1963. In 2001 a new air-conditioning system was installed to regulate temperature and humidity but this resulted in an infestation of white mold which spread rapidly across the cave. In 2007, a new fungus which creates grey and black blemishes has also spread in the cave. In 2008, it was closed even to scientists and preservationists and now only one individual is allowed in for 20 minutes once a week to monitor climatic conditions. A huge symposiuim in Paris in 2009 brought together experts from around the world and work continues to try and clean and preserve the Lascaux paintings,

You can take a virtual tour of Lascaux here

In order to meet public demand, in the early 1970s, the owner of the site built a large concrete shell in which an artist and a sculptor reproduced some of the paintings. Work stopped due to money problems but in 1978, the local General Council bought the facsimile and hired more artists to develop the virtual cave. In 1983, the first tourist entered Lascaux 2, which was buried on the same hill as the original cave and contains reproductions of 90 of the original paintings. Since then, it has had 10 million visitors.

Lascaux 3, an international exhibition went on world tour in 2012 and was also a big hit.

But now Lascaux 4 promises to trump them all. Located near the real-life cave, it is installed in the purpose-built International Center of Parietal Art, and is the product of three years work by 25 painters, sculptors, welders and moulders who have created a remarkable and exact full-size facsimile of the entire cave. It will be open in autumn this year and will accommodate a maximum of 30 visitors at a time. Full details of this inspiring project can be found here

THE VIRTUAL CHAUVET

The nearby Chauvet cave, which was discovered by a small group of cavers in 1994, has never been open to the general public to avoid the problems at Lascaux. If anything Chauvet is more spectacular than Lascaux. For a start these Paleolithic cave paintings, which are more or less perfectly preserved,date may be as old as 34,000 to 37,000 years ago, which upset many of the existing theories on prehistoric art. According to an account here: 

'The fact that these cave paintings were executed so skilfully yet so deep within prehistory has forced us to abandon the prevailing view that 'early art was naive art'. Not only is the Ice Age art of the Chauvet Cave extremely old, it is also very extensive and highly varied.

'Hundreds of cave paintings of animals have been recorded, depicting at least 13 different species, including those which have rarely or never been found in other Ice age paintings. Rather than the more usual animals of the hunt that predominate in Palaeolithic cave art, such as horses, cattle and reindeer, the walls of the Chauvet Cave are covered with predatory animals - lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas. As one would expect, there are no human figures, except at the very end of the lowest and farthest gallery in the Chauvet cave system, where there appears to be a female figurine - the legs and genitals of a woman - attracting the attention of the one other human figure - the lower body of a man with the upper body of a bison, now referred to as 'The Sorcerer'.

Work began on creating a $62.5 million facsimile of Chauvet in 2007, which opened to the public in April 2015. The replica cave, located three miles from the real one, is known as the Caverne du Pont d’Arc . It covers an area nearly the size of a football field and is based on 700 hours of laser scanning in the actual cave. After admiring the cavern you can continue to explore the prehistoric world in the Aurignacian Gallery.

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VOLCANIC ERUPTION IMAGE

In January 2016, a scientific paper was published claiming that a  36,000-year-old volcanic eruption is depicted in the Chauvet Cave. The full scientific paper is accessible on the PLOS ONE site

This figure shows: A) Map of the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave; B) General view of the rock painting of a Megaloceros, a prehistoric deer (Photo: D. Genty); C) Details of the spray-shaped signs depicting a volcanic eruption (Photos: V. Feruglio-D. Baffier); D) Petroglyphs depicting the Porak volcano eruption  found in the Syunik region of Armenia and dating from the 5th millennium BC; E)  A mural painting from Çatalhöyük in Turkey) which was considered the oldest depiction of a volcanic eruption, dating from the 8th/7th millennium BC 

In an article by Daryl Worthington 'Cave Art Shows France Ravaged By Prehistoric Volcano' he reports that the research team, led by Sebastien Nomade,,geoscientist at the University of Paris-Saclay in Gif-Sur-Yvette, have documented the occurrence of spectacular volcanic activity just 35km north west of the cave, between 19,000 and 43,000 years ago. 

'Despite being one of the most spectacular geological events visible on the surface of the earth, volcanic eruptions are rarely found in Paleolithic art. Until now, the oldest testimony of a volcano was believed to be the 9,000 year old Çatalhöyük mural in Central Turkey. The next oldest depiction is roughly 2,000 years younger, and found in Armenia: a group of six petroglyphs in the Syunik upland portraying the eruption of the Porak volcano seven millenia ago.These depictions predate by five millenia the observations and records of the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption made by Pliny the Younger.

'To put that into context, around 340 Paleolithic sites containing parietal art have been unearthed around Europe, predominantly in northern Spain and southern France. These sites date back to between 36,000 and 40,000 years ago, a period which coincided with the arrival of the first Homo sapiens to the continent. Iconography from the Upper Paleolithic however, largely features images of animals, or in some cases humans. No images of the natural environment, scenery or geological phenomena have ever been discovered.'

* Parietal art is the archaeological term for artwork done on cave walls or large blocks of stone.

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INDONESIAN CAVE ART

World's oldest art found in Indonesian cave

Delighted to discover this story by David Cyranoski (published in Nature /8th Oct 2014). See full article and video here:

Back in the 1950s, hand prints and paintings of animals which had been discovered on the walls of a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were estimated to be about 10,000 years old. It was believed at the time that anything older would have deteriorated.

Modern researches revisited the caves  and dated 12 stencils of human hands and two images of large animals. The paint itself couldn't be dated but the top layers of calcium carbonate  ('cave popcorn') covering the paintings could, using a uranium-thorium dating system which gave them a minimum age for each sample.

The results were surprising. The oldest hand stencil was at least 39,000 years old - 2,000 years older than its European equivalent. One of the animal images, of a babirusa or 'pig-deer' (which still survive but have endangered status) was estimated to be 35,400 years old — around the same age as the earliest large animal pictures in European caves but painted in a different style, more like brush strokes than finger paint.

These findings, writes Cyranoski, 'undermine a Eurocentric view of the origins of human creativity and could prompt a ‘gold rush’ to find even older art on the route of human migration from Africa to the east.' It raises the question as to whether those migrants already had the capacity to make art or whether it arose independently in Indonesia.

“It allows us to move away from the view that Europe was special,” says Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, who led the team. “There was some idea that early Europeans were more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Now we can say that’s not true.”  

'The analysis hints at “just what a wealth of undiscovered information there is in Asia”, says Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who in 2013 identified what had been considered the world’s oldest cave art, in Europe.

He was the lead author of a paper entitled 'U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain' which was first published in Science in 2012. The abstract reads:

'Paleolithic cave art is an exceptional archive of early human symbolic behavior, but because obtaining reliable dates has been difficult, its chronology is still poorly understood after more than a century of study.

'We present uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying or underlying art found in 11 caves, including the (UNESCO) World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo, Spain. 

'The results demonstrate that the tradition of decorating caves extends back at least to the Early Aurignacian period, with minimum ages of 40.8 thousand years for a red disk, 37.3 thousand years for a hand stencil, and 35.6 thousand years for a claviform-like symbol.

'These minimum ages reveal either that cave art was a part of the cultural repertoire of the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or that perhaps Neandertals also engaged in painting caves.'

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ROCK ART: THE FROBENIUS PAINTINGS

Rock carving known as "Meercatze" (named by archaeologist Leo Frobenius) in Wadi Methkandoush, Mesak Settafet region of Libya. 

Photo: Luca Galuzzi [www.galuzzi.it ]

Another interesting discovery comes from The Art Newspaper which announces that Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau is staging an exhibition entitled 'Art of Prehistoric Times: Rock Paintings from the Frobenius Collection' [open to 16th May).

Leo Frobenius was a German ethnologist who pioneered the process of recording far-flung rock art sites with realistic colour copies. The Institute in Frankfurt set up in his memory contains 8,600 works on paper and canvas of which 130 will be in the exhibition. The work of doing artistic renderings in situ was mainly done by academy-trained painters, who went on expeditions between 1913 and 1939 round Europe and to Africa, Indonesia and Australia. Once colour photography came in, the artistic lost their scientific value but retained what Frobenius' curator calls "the aura of the originals."

Astonishingly and interestingly, they attracted an enthusiastic popular audience. In the '20s and '30s, there were about 40 exhibitions of rock art in Europe and some 30 in the US, including, most prestigously, a three-floor show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York of 150 facsimiles personally chosen by Alfred H. Barr, the Museum's first Director, when he visited Europe. 

There is a chronological list of MOMA's exhibitions on their website, which has photos of the original two-page typewritten press release for the show, which ran  from April 28th to May 30th 1937. It reads in part:  

'On the fourth floor of the Museum modern paintings will be shown

which bear a certain similarity to the pictures painted and engraved

by prehistoric man. Among the modern paintings to be shown are works

by Miro, Arp, Klee, Masson, Lebedev, and Larionov. 

'Also on the fourth floor will be shown reproductions of pictographs painted in polychrome and red monochrome many years ago on California rocks by American Indians. These reproductions made in color by workers on the Federal Art Project are shown, as arc the modern paintings, for the purpose

of comparison with European and African rock pictures.'

"That an institution devoted to the most recent in art should

concern itself with the most ancient may seem something of a

paradox," stated Mr. Barr in commenting on the exhibition,

"but the art of the 50th century has already come under the

influence of the great tradition of prehistoric mural art

which began around the 300th century B.C. 

'The formal elegance of the Altamira bison; the grandeur of outline in the Norwegian rock engravings of bear, elk, and whale; the cornucopian

fecundity of Rhodesian animal landscapes; the kinetic fury of

the East Spanish huntsmen; the spontaneous ease with which the

South African draftsmen mastered the difficult silhouettes of

moving creatures: these are achievements which living artists

and many others who are interested in living art have admired.

 A 1933 watercolour of an Egyptian painting from BC 4400-3500

"Such technical and esthetic qualities are enviable but no
more so than the unquestioned sense of social usefulness which
these prehistoric pictures suggest. Until recently our own
mural art was usually an architect's after-thought, a mere
decorative postscript. The mural art of the Spanish caves and
African cliffs was, on the contrary, an integral and essential
function of life, for these painted animals were almost certainly
magic symbols used to insure the successful hunting of
the real animals. Today walls are painted so that the artist
may eat, but in prehistoric times walls wore painted so that
the community might eat. 

"We can, as modern men, no longer believe in the magic efficacy of these rock paintings; but there is about them a deeper and more general magic quite beyond their beauty as works of art or their value as anthropological documents. Even in facsimile they evoke an atmosphere of antediluvian first things, a strenuous Eden where Adam drew the animals before he named them. It is even possible that among them are man's earliest pictures. In any case, this is the way he drew and painted, apparently following continuous traditions for thousands of years in parts of the earth as remote from each other as the North Cape of Norway and the Cape of Good Hope. " 

'Twelve expeditions headed by Professor Frobenius have been made to the centers of prehistoric art on the Scandinavian coast, to the caves of France and Northern Spain, the Comonica Valley in the Italian Alps, and in Africa to the Libyan Desert, the Sahara-Atlas, the Fezzan, Southern Rhodesia and the Bushman caves and rock shelters of South Africa. Photographs showing the actual rocks on which the prehistoric pictures were found and the surrounding terrain will be hung on the Museum's walls with the facsimiles themselves. The facsimiles reproduce exactly the colors and forms left by prehistoric men some ten or twenty thousand years ago. 

'Most of the facsimiles to be shown in the exhibition are the size of the original rock pictures. Several of them are enormous, the largest 22 feet wide and 14 feet 9 inches high. One facsimile, too high for the Museum's ceiling, extends out on the floor; another hangs two stories down the Museum's stairway'.

'When the exhibition closes in New York May 30 it will go on on extensive tour throughout the country. '

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THE BRADSHAW FOUNDATION

Dabous Giraffe Rock Art Petroglyph: One of the finest examples of ancient rock art in the world - two life-size giraffe carved in stone

Right at the end of this long investigation, I found this remarkable site - without doubt the single most important resource on the web for rock art all over the world, full of fantastic images, information and videos - an abundance of riches which will take some to time to explore in detail.

The Bradshaw Foundation provides an online learning resource. Its main areas of focus are archaeology, anthropology and genetic research, and its primary objective is to discover, document and preserve ancient rock art around the world, and promote the study of early mankind’s artistic achievements. The Foundation funds preservation projects around the world, scientific research and research publication. The Foundation carries out its work in collaboration with UNESCO, the Royal Geographic Society, the National Geographic Society, the Rock Art Research Institute in South Africa and the Trust for African Rock Art to ensure that the programs achieve maximum impact. It is a privately funded, non-profit organisation based in Geneva.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/

THE BEATS: GINSBERG POSTCARDS/ FERLINGHETTI BOOKS

 'Cadets at the Virginia Military Institute read Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg'. Photo by  Gordon Ball (1996).

This image (above) I've had bluetacked to my wall for more than a decade I would reckon, one of a number of cards and images that fringe a large and wonderful mounted poster for a 1985 centennial exhibition of the work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay at the Musée Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It features 'Red Eiffel Tower' (1911-12) which is now in the Guggenheim in New York. Delaunay first painted the tower in celebration of his engagement to fellow artist Sonia Terk in 1909 and made it the subject of at least thirty works over the next few years and again in the 1920s.

Back to the postcard. It was given to me by a friend who had bought it in the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco. I guess I've looked at it every day at some point.  Anywaysup as chance would have it, I've found out the story behind the photo thanks to the London Review of Books  for whom Iain Sinclair reviewed two new books under the heading 'Retro-Selfies': I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 edited by Bill Morgan (City Lights) and Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson (Liveright)

  

As a huge fan of The Beats I was more than a little interested Sinclair writes like a dream and I picked up more info on Ferlinghetti than ever before. The piece really clarifies his  relationship to Ginsberg (who, like most of The Beats was quite critical and patronising about Ferlinghetti's own work). This is where we come to the postcard.

'Thirty-six years later [after first publication of Howl], City Lights Bookstore was selling a postcard by the photographer Gordon Ball showing a line of shaven-headed cadets at the Virginia Military Institute frowning over their copies of Howl, as if challenged to formulate tactics for understanding, and eradicating, the enemy within. The notion that god’s country could contain aliens ‘who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall’ was altogether too much to bear. This slender, black-on-white, slip-in-the-pocket City Lights reprint, gripped in the paws of the future military élite, looks like the all-American equivalent of The Little Red Book for the uniformed warriors of free-market capitalism. Are they being inoculated against the viruses of chemical addiction, homosexuality, madness and elective poverty? ‘Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! … Granite cocks! Monstrous bombs!’ Or are these monkish warriors honouring the native tradition of converting outlaws, rustlers and genocidal maniacs into neutralised and exploitable brands? First you beat them, incarcerate them, execute them, then you produce the box set, sell the jeans and collect all the surviving scraps of paper for a million-dollar pitch to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, or some other well-endowed coldstore vault.'

Interestingly enough Alan Baragoma, the guy who had arranged for Ginsberg to visit the Academy, responded with a letter in the next issue:

'Iain Sinclair is within his rights to scorn the co-opting of Beat Generation rebelliousness as a way to defang it, but he is mistaken in using Allen Ginsberg’s visit to the Virginia Military Institute in 1991 and my friend Gordon Ball’s well-known photograph of cadets reading Howl to make his point.'

Baragoma says that Ginsberg stayed for a whole week, recited Howl publicly for the first time in ten years and conducted a workshop in transcendental meditation. He writes:

' It’s true that some cadets, administrators, alumni and faculty were unhappy about it, though not because of Ginsberg’s homosexuality or drug use so much as for his pacifism during the first Gulf War. But there were also many people in all those categories who were excited by the visit, and the administration supported us, even requiring the entire corps to attend the poetry reading. Ginsberg was aware of this and at the intermission told the cadets that as far as he was concerned they had fulfilled their obligation and were free to leave. Roughly two-thirds of the corps stayed for the second half. Afterwards, cadets crowded around Ginsberg to speak with him and later lined up at the bookstore to get their copies of Howl autographed...

'What you see in Gordon’s photo is not frowning, but concentration, weariness, and some confusion as Ginsberg walked students through this challenging poem. This is a class of freshmen, few if any are English majors. How do you expect them to look?'

One of my most treasured possessions: a postcard from Allen Ginsberg, who I interviewed on April 25th 1985 - four days before my 45th birthday. You can read the text of the piece I wrote in a Previous Post: Meeting Allen Ginsberg



This is the recording of a live internet link-up we did with Lawrence Ferlinghetti - from the City Lights bookstore to the Komedia in Brighton - on the night of 3rd May 2002. It was quite a technological achievement at that time and, I believe, the first ever Internet link-up with a Beat poet.

For all Previous Beat Posts: See Beat News

DAVID BOWIE & THE ARTS LABS MOVEMENT

One of Amazon's biggest sellers following the death of Bowie was (or is) this paperback memoir written by one of his lovers, who lived and worked, with him and others, to inspire, create and launch the Beckenham Arts Lab in 1969 in a local pub. They also organised a free festival in the park, that same summer during which 'Space Oddity' hit the charts and man walked on the moon. 

Mary Finnigan writes in an assured and readable fashion, her skills honed by decades of mainstream journalism and broadcasting, about a tender period which was full of love, poetry, song, reefers and tribal activity. She makes it feel real whereas much writing about this period is cringeworthy.





I and my friends had our own Arts Lab - the Worthing Workshop - and there was a network of others all over the country. Here are some of us are on a Saturday selling underground newspapers and making our presence felt     We were the FREAKS !!

THE GENERALIST archive contains Issue 1 of the Arts Lab Newsletter, produced by BIT Information Service (then resident at 141 Westbourne Park Road) in October 1969 which contains information and listings from each Lab. 

The entry for Beckenham reads: 'contact David Bowie at 460 6489. Mary finnegan (sic), Nick Godwin and others have left the Lab.' The Newsletter begins:

THE ARTS LAB MOVEMENT 1970 Vision: May 150 Labs bloom!

1969 Facts; 54 Labs: just under a dozen fully-fledged ones in Britain - about a dozen and a half Labs without permanent premises but nevertheless active - and well over two dozen Labs at an early stage, sometimes no more than a nucleus of people meeting and planning their first benefit concert.

NOW WHAT IS AN ARTS LAB ANYWAY?

Jim Haynes of the Drury Lane Lab tells it like it is: "I feel that an Arts Lab has the following characteristics:

(a) a Lab is an 'ENERGY CENTRE' where anything can happen depending upon the needs of the people running each individual Lab and the characteristics of the building.

(b) a Lab is a NON-INSTITUTION. We all know what a hospital, theatre, police station and other institutions have in the way of boundaries, but a Lab's boundaries should be limitless.

(c) Within each Lab a space should be used in a loose fluid MULTI-PURPOSE way - ie. a theatre can be a restaurant, a gallery, a bedroom, a studio, etc. etc.

(d) I am interested in creating a fluid COMMUNE situation where a group of people live and work together. At the Covent Garden Lab we have 15 to 20 people who live and work together 7 days a week. No one is paid - "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"- We have space, food, ideas, work, etc.

Now may I say something about politics. People ask me if the Arts Lab is political. Anyone who is interested in changing anyone's attitude to anything is committing a political act. We at the Covent Garden Lab have certain philosophical attitudes to the world, and we hope to show others by word and deed that these political/philosophical attitudes can be transmitted via non-political media. Every person is a medium; use it carefully.

AS FOR ART.. .we are more interested in bringing people together in a real involved way; not very interested in "marketing" art or anything else for that matter".

ARTS LABS SOLIDARITY July 27th, '69; Arts Labs met and divided themselves into 8 regional co-operatives with a co-ordinator for each region. Earlier in the year, Jim had proposed a support system for Labs which he named ‘Arts Labs in Great Britain Trust’. The Trust, launched 5 months ago as a sub-group of a registered charity called Community Development Trust, is administered by a committee of elected Arts Labs representatives and Arts Council observers, and meets every two months in London. Its aim is to help Labs over legal hurdles and in their negotiations with local authorities, and to raise something like £1/2m for Labs from Industry, the Arts Council, Foundations.'

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My mates and I formed the WORTHING WORKSHOP, which was part of the South-East Arts Lab Co-op and I wrote the following report of our activities ( I was 19 at the time) which was published in this Newsletter:

Premises: None permanent at present time. Previous activities held in hired pub room and common room of local college of design (via 'Student's Union') - liason with bureaucratic hierarchy minimal. Also St John's Ambulance HQ at times.

Technical and other facilities: Silk-screen press just started; light show (Crystalline Foetus, presented by Ian) - liquids, film and static slides; electronics expert - designs and builds group and hi-fi maps and speakers, light equipment etc,; Discotheque - equipment and approx. 200 records plus regular DJ, sundry Musicians, artists etc.

About 5,000 people turned up for their free concert with Steamhammer in August and this gave them a great burst of publicity; their name is now down on council list for premises; recently their World's First Bubble-In was on TV.

On Saturday October 19th at 7:30pm at the Norfolk Hotel for only 5/- you would get the Entire Sioux Nation + lightshow and discotheque. Lots of other things happening too.

They are opening a head shop soon, one half newspapers and jewellery, the other half a 24 hour coffee bar, with free music all day. They hope this will provide an outlet for art student's work and people like this. The Council meet to consider the proposal on October 26th and they hope to open in mid-November. [This didn't happen, by the way]'

This was first posted up on The Generalist on 31st August 2006. I ended the piece like this:

ISN'T IT ABOUT TIME WE STARTED 

A NEW ARTS LAB MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN ?

Here in 2016, I'm asking the same question again.

THE ORIGIN OF DOGS

UPDATE: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/ice-age-siberian-hunters-may-have-domesticated-dogs-23000-years-ago

PRIMITIVE DOG BREEDS: Africanis is a landrace of South African dogs. It is believed to be of ancient origin, directly descended from hounds and pariah dogs of ancient Africa, introduced into the Nile Valley from the Levant. The Swahili name for the breed is umbwa wa ki-shenzi meaning common or mongrel or “traditional dog”. Africanis is also an umbrella name for all the aboriginal dogs in southern Africa.

Source:avaxnews.net via Pinterest: https://uk.pinterest.com/thanaki/primitive-dog-breeds/

For some reason I've been curious about the origin dogs (and cats for that matter) and how they became domesticated. I'm not really a dog or cat person but the subject intrigued me. Now in an article called 'The search to find out where dogs came from' by James Gorman in a recent New York Times, it looks like fascinating clues if not definitive answers are emerging.

This is thanks to a worldwide cooperative scientific effort to create a huge database of ancient dog DNA to try and decode when and where they first emerged. At present there are a wide variety of hypotheses. 

There is general agreement that dogs were domesticated 15,000 years ago but some biologists believe that this happened 30,000 years ago. Researchers looking at both dog and wolf DNA, modern and past, have variously come up with evidence that dogs originated in either Africa, Europe, Siberia, Mongolia and East Asia.

In earlier theories it was believed that dogs evolved from ancient wolves.Human hunter-gatherers nabbed wolf cubs and bred the tamer ones to become dogs. However wolves and wolf puppies are hard to tame and the new thinking is that dogs invented themselves. Some wolves hung round hunters and scavenged their kills more than others. They gradually became tamer and had lots of puppies because it was easier to get food that way than hunting elk. So, according to 'Dogs' by professor Raymond Coppinger "the domestic house dog may have evolved into a parasite."

Pet dogs make up only a quarter of the world population of dogs,estimated at one billion. The rest run wild, scavenging where they can and causing tens of thousands of human deaths annually through rabies.

Wolves are different from from dogs but they do interbreed easily and, writes Gorman, 'some scientists are not convinced that the two are even different species, a skepticism that reflects debates in science about how to define species.' In other words, is the concept of species a fact of nature or an arbitrary line drawn by humans.

Genetics could provide the best clues to solving these issues except that dog genetics are in a mess. Professor Greger Larsen a biologist in the archaeology department of Oxford University explains to Gorman 'that most dog breeds were invented in the 19th century during a period of dog obsession that he called "the giant whirlwind blender of the European crazy Victorian dog-breeding frenzy." Brilliant.

Dr Lasen and his team have traveled the world, collecting some 1500 DNA samples and photographs and measurements of several thousand remains, including some complete skulls, from dogs, wolves and canids (somewhere in-between), both old and modern.

Hominid DNA was the key which has enabled us to map the evolution and migrations of humans and Larsen hopes they can do the same for canines. He believes the domestication of dogs may have been a watershed in human history. "Maybe [it] on some level kicks off this whole change  in the way that humans are involved and responding to and interacting with their environment. I don't think that's outlandish."

The Chinese have yet to supply samples from their part of the world for this project but there is another collaborative 'big data' project brewing aimed at sequencing 10,000 dog genomes.


James Gorman wrote a previous story in October 2015

15,000 Years Ago, Probably in Asia, the Dog Was Born

Central Asia is the newest and best candidate, according to a large study of dogs from around the world. Laura M. Shannon and Adam R. Boyko at Cornell University, and an international group of other scientists, studied not only purebred dogs, but also street or village dogs.

Various views of the skull of a 33,000-Year-Old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia

Goyet Cave dog/wolf (?) dated as 32,000 years old

Excellent and lengthy discussion about these two finds and many other aspects of the origins of dogs on the blog Retrieverman.net

Post: 'Remains of a 33,000 year-old-dog found in the Altai Mountains'

See Also

DNA Backs Lore on Pre-Columbian Dogs

Dogs like Peony have pointed lupine faces, markings that look like eyes, and whitefishhook tails. John W. Adkisson for The New York Times

Some Carolina dogs still live in the wild, and local people have long thought they were one of the few breeds that predated the European arrival in the Americas: “Our native dog,” as Michael Ruano, another enthusiast who often works with Mr. Anderson, put it. “America’s natural dog.” Now, a new study of canine DNA backs up the folklore. A team led by Peter Savolainen at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has reported that several dog breeds in the Americas — among them the Peruvian hairless, the Chihuahua and the Carolina dog — are without some genetic markers indicative of European origin, suggesting they arrived in an earlier migration from Asia.

ASCENT OF THE DOG

Rosie Mester

Discover/October 1994

Skeleton of Hesperocyon Gregarius, the Stem Dog that lived in North America's tropical forests 37 million years ago.

CULT BOOKS: NELSON ALGREN / SAMUEL R. DELANY

 This blog is full of Cult Books posts. I read books virtually every day of my life and have done for most of my time on this planet. I like buying books second-hand which introduces an element of rich randomness. I like to turn people on to books that have inspired or captivated me. Here's two new discoveries that I found together. They are both stunning.

Sure I knew who Nelson Algren was - an American writer. When I was in LA in 1979 (another whole story), I went into a bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard and, after much deliberation, bought a hardback copy of 'The Man With The Golden Arm' - the Algren book that most people might have heard of as it was made into a movie with Frank Sinatra. I've never read it...yet. It's sat there for years.

'The Neon Wilderness' is much more approachable. Its an amazing collection of short stories - something I rarely read. Algren is all about the characters on the street. His city is Chicago where he more or less entirely lived and wrote. Hemingway considered him one of the two best writers in America. He had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre translated  his novel 'Never Come Morning' into French. It sold a million copies in the US. This is a cool edition  from Seven Stories Press in New York, which includes part of a Paris Review interview by Terry Southern (you'll find a long post about him on this blog), a great and appreciative essay by his friend, another great Chicago figure, the writer and radio jock Studs Turkel. and an introduction by Tom Carson.

The power of these stories and the quality of the writing. Highly compressed, the people in his tales are totally vivid and are usually suffering. Yet they will not be beaten down. Algren is never patronising; in fact he gives his characters pride and respect no matter how beaten down they are by life. They may have lost their paycheck, drunk themselves blind, lost out on love and are homeless, crazed and alone. Yet Algren lovingly but dispassionately brings us their souls, takes us into their internal thinking, and evokes their landscape of bars in rundown districts, brothels, rooming houses and failed garages. He is particularly good at writing about boxing. Some of these stories are army tales. Algren enlisted in 1942. Three years later he had still not made the grade of Private first class. Did I mention he also wrote a novel called 'A Walk on the Wild Side' (1956) which Lou Reed acknowledges as his inspiration. I'm sure Bukowski and Raymond Carver, Tom Waits and many others lifted their hat and nodded in his direction. These tales will touch you deeply as they have me.

First off, I love the cover of this book which is credited to Chris Moore/Artist Partners. Back in the day, if you were into SF you almost inevitably read loads of the Gollancz science fiction list which had uniform yellow covers (a different shade to National Geographic but equally distinctive). These cool paperback reprints are very collectible.

I knew very little about Samuel R. Delaney so, having read this book cover to cover in two days, I looked him up on Wikipedia. He's mixed race and bisexual. He was the great SF prodigy of the 1960's. This is his sixth novel published in 1966 when he was 23. He's continued to write huge and wonderful books and be a highly respected professor and critic.

Babel-17 if a full-on space adventure whose main character is a brilliant female poet called Rydra Wong, loved and read by people from many civilisations who are at war with each other. Her highly-developed grasp of languages and cryptography leads to her being brought into a highly secret operation to try and decipher Babel-17 which appears to be linked to a series of "accidents" or terrorist incidents.

Within a few pages we are flung out into a massive universe of cultures, spacecraft, mysterious alien characters and incidents that bewilder at first but soon become three-dimensional worlds in your head. Some scenes in David Lynch's version of Dune give some hint as to the imagination and wonderment that pours off the page, so rich and wonderful. Hugely influential, Delany is a colossal talent. Makes you realise what lukewarm gruel we've been served up by modern cinema. There's no cliches in sight here, rather a mind that appears to have no boundaries.