Uses for the Financial Times

It's good for checking I'm in focus. Hmn. More drawings and observations on the other side:
http://boulevardisme.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tongue-tied-japanese-rope-bondage-at.html

Supreme Court art: love, music and copyright

'Can a cached copy be used to make a hard copy?' a judge asks a QC.

There is a pause. I nod vigorously, and pointlessly, from the public seats.

Public Relations Consultants Association Limited v the Newspaper Licensing Agency and others (aka Meltwater) is being watched like a hawk by press cuttings agencies who feel that copyright laws are limping after new technology. So, are copies created when accessing a web page exempt from copyright protection by virtue of the temporary copies exception under s28A of the Copyright and Data Protection Act ?

I wonder what the average teen hacker would make of all this.

In the legal seats today there are massed ranks of alert brains. I'm finger-painting with charcoal.



From the public seats, you are conscious of two tectonic plates pushing against each other. The legal teams are turned away from you; as they shift in their seats they conceal and expose the more distant judges and court staff facing you.

Talking of digital technology, I have a skill which Lord Neuberger doesn't: the dying art of touch-typing which allows your speed to emulate Concorde (which has gone the way of touch-typing). There's nothing perverse about a blank keyboard as far as I'm concerned. But Lord Neuberger's left index finger is elegantly raised, kept out of use, rather than lightly resting on its home key of F from which R, T, G, B and V are within easy reach.


Henry Carr QC

Henry Carr QC is extraordinarily animated on his feet. A shape-shifter. I can't pin him down on paper. Afterwards, in the canteen, I draw Edward VII, whose flattering marble bust turns its back on the refrigerated cabinets.

It's a slushy time of year. The flowers on the Court 2 curtains offer themselves to view. I buy and then liberate the Supreme Court teddy bear, who in gratitude performs some putto moves around the back view of Robert Howe QC, defending. The bear is heavily influenced by the putti action in Watteau's Le pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère (see further down).

Oh, but are the lovers arriving at or retreating from the island of romantic escape? And here I really want to quote W. H. Auden's poem Law Like Love in its entirety. But it's protected by copyright. The first copy of it you find on the internet may well be pirated. What to do?

Drifting to another fraught copyright area, my weekly YouTube recommendations come in via email. Top of the list this week is Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Judgment 7 February 2013.

Then I'm offered:

The Drifters - Stand By Me
Eric Whiteacre's Virtual Choir - Lux Aurumque
Petula Clark - I Couldn't Live Without Your Love
The Girl Effect - The Clock is Ticking 
Edita Gruberova - The Art of Bel Canto

Le Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère by Watteau

Putti in close-up



Edward VII in the canteen



Detail from the Court 2 curtains,
loosely interpreted

Catullus textual criticism class, Wadham College, Oxford

By accident, I find a class on textual criticism of Catullus. Top poet, could do The Lot. Anguish, filth, everything in between.

I email Professor Stephen Harrison. May I come to the class, as a long-ago graduate of this establishment?

‘It’s rather austere,’ he warns.

A stream of scholars from the Middle Ages to today (ooh look, there’s A. E. Housman) have been wrestling with a variety of transcribers and opinionated editors on the quest for a true text.

One.

The works of Catullus survived through one incomplete manuscript, shot with mistakes (not his), now lost.

This class is wonderful. Two top geezers conduct it in stereo: Stephen Harrison - I haven’t captured his exquisite gestures here but he subtly hand-jives fragments of the poems - and Stephen Heyworth.

I don’t believe in translation. I don’t even believe in synonym. That’s tough.

Today, Tristan Franklinos contributes a scholarly canter through the variants in 69.

Something cataclysmic has happened since I was last in these parts: Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Would Catullus have used this word? Word search. Click. It’s there. Hang on a second - Plautus used it twice. 

It feels like cheating. 

When I arrived at university as an ineducable teenager my motto was from Richard II: ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me.’ In my adult years it’s ‘Otium Catulle’ from a section of poem 51 which he may or may not have written. And what is otium? Time on your hands, freedom, leisure, idling, slacking, messing around, not having to fight a war (and was that considered a good or a bad thing?), Catullus… It’s bad for you… Destructive…



I got Argos to make the necklace. 

'It's snowing in Paris'

used to mean that your petticoat was showing. We didn't think then that petticoats were supposed to show.

I've blogged my recent Paris trip over here:

http://boulevardisme.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/nicolas-yorois-stage-de-kinbaku-in-paris.html

Degrees of stalking at the Supreme Court

From the public seats it's about the backs of chairs. Their curves contain Hogarth's line of grace and beauty (on the palette in his self-portrait below). In his book Analysis of Beauty, he argues that sinuosity is more dynamic and gratifying than a straight line.

Hayes v Willoughby concerns harassment and examines stalkerish behaviour. Howlett v Holding, for instance, involves the overkill of leaflet drops and derogatory remarks trailed behind a light aircraft.

In today's case, a man tried to persuade law enforcement agencies to investigate his former employer. His allegations had no substance. Is the ex-employee shielded because his aim was to prevent or detect crime?

Lord Sumption

Clive Wolman is congratulated more than once on his performance. But when Robin Allen QC stands up to defend with silky elegance, Wolman's left arm's default position is gripping the chair.

Is there a danger that Robin Allen will exceed his time limit? No fear: 'My lord, I have applied a guillotine to myself.'

I try to examine the optical illusion that creates two desk microphones in the foreground when I look at Lord Neuberger in the background.





Lord Neuberger and an optical illusion

Oops. Fleeting eye contact with a law lord. That makes me feel stalkerish. I wish I were invisible. Can they hear the accidental snap of my charcoal, like an interloper stepping on a twig?

And do they get their own back? I'm told that at least one of the justices sketches during hearings. Which brings me to a fascinating book, The Art of Justice: The Judge's Perspective by Ruth Herz, herself a former judge in Cologne.


Pierre Cavellat, a judge in Brittany from 1929 to 1969, drew from the bench with the ruthless eye of a gagged social commentator (albeit with a weakness for a pretty face). The book painstakingly examines the emotional, cultural, forensic and aesthetic context of his work. He sees more than he says. I feel it's time for a Wim Wenders remake: The Judge's Fear of the Penalty. Which, for Cavellat, included capital punishment.

What would Cavellat make of today? I will have to try a Cavellat pastiche next time. Although French and Algerian criminals and Nazi overlords offer a more colourful cast than the Supreme Court on an average day.

The two illustrations here appear courtesy of All Souls College, Oxford.






Then with a sly, barely audible mechanical sound in my left ear, a tourist behind me photographs my half-done drawing. Twice. I stifle my instinct to bawl her out. And no, photography isn't allowed.

Afterwards in the cafeteria I buy a Supreme Court biro and pencil and, sitting by the merchandise showcase, use them to draw a Supreme Court teddy bear. 'Do you work here?' asks a tourist while I'm sketching.
'No.' Although my coat does match the curtains. It's camouflage.

We can all be stalkers now that Supreme Court judgments are on YouTube. But the 'Comments' section has been disabled. That's not cricket.

The Art of Justice by Ruth Herz is published by Hart Publishing (ISBN 9781849461276; Sept 2012; £35) http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?isbn=9781849461276

Crisis. Christmas.

Faery (with wings) bingo-calling, helped by Diego

'What are you doing for Christmas?'
'Going to Crisis.'

She thought I meant a nightclub. But it is a club of sorts. It has people who are guests year after year. Mostly single and homeless.

Volunteering for Crisis gives you a rare example - not found in corporate life - of people working together with a default position of kindness, because that's all we have. The centres are teeming with volunteers wresting happiness for themselves and others from the nation's distress/disgrace.

For years I heard the siren song of Crisis but thought no, I can't cope with all those scary people. But in 2011 I started to draw the scary people attracted to the Occupy protest camps. It was a doddle. This is my second year at Crisis.



Barbara, volunteer hairdresser
(in mirror, left)

The scariest person I meet is a Green Badge (Crisis High Command).

'Who are you and what are you doing here?' she barks, existentially.

A drawing is an experiment, a what-if. Most drawings should be thrown away. But when you're drawing the face of a guest at Crisis you have to do the best you can, every time, and you sweat on the result, because it matters to someone who has never been drawn, who is faceless, who sees the drawing which you will give them as validation.

Cate (top) and Faery

There are extraordinary volunteers. Inspirational Faery, aka Charlotte, makes up her own agenda - pop-up salsa, anyone?

Cate (of cyoga.co.uk) teaches yoga. A couple of men challenge her strength. She idly supports herself on her arms for a while, levering herself up and down.

Men gaze and sigh at women, with courtesy. I sketch a shaggy ex-punk/glam-rocker in a buttercup yellow suit.

'Do you believe in free speech?' he asks.
'Yes.'
'Give me your phone. Why do moths fly with their legs open?'

Two beautiful young couples in love ask me to draw their double portraits. I can't show you these, or any other pictures of guests, as their identities are shielded.

Cate

Boxing Day: Transport for London tweets that traffic is sluggish or stationary around shopping centres in east and west London.

At the Crisis day centre, the idea of using a holiday to drive to a traffic jam to buy stuff is...

Volunteer barber

I go home via Sainsbury's for a small bottle of wine and a large bar of chocolate. Serving at the tills are young men, strong and handsome like many of the guests at Crisis. Lucky bastards to have jobs, I think.



Cate teaching yoga

 

The Graham Fitkin Band and a sugar rush

I'm drawing the composer/pianist Graham Fitkin rehearsing his band at Kings Place in London. I try not to trip over anything and end up being the thing that can be tripped over.

There are musical fragments, moments of dynamism, longueurs during sound checks.

Last time Graham gave a concert here he finished his piano solo with apparent poise then left the stage to succumb to norovirus. There is no such problem today.

Graham never wrote anything for harp until he met his partner Ruth Wall, the harpist. Now there are two amplified harps centre-stage.

I don't know how to describe his music, which includes a string of prestigious commissions. Phase-minimal-troubadour-jazz-electric-acoustic-bouncy-mellow gives you completely the wrong impression.

New, that's what. New.

It's a last-minute concert with a full house. Graham has made meringues with Cornish cream which band members distribute to the audience after the interval.

Then Graham hands out party poppers which we're allowed to let off ad lib and on the beat. It's celebratory and we're sent home happy. Scroll down for more pictures.

 

Meringue in the hand of another gifted pianist,
Justin Snyder