Peril in Venice

Screaming pope in Cannaregio

Venice. Don't ask me. Read up on it. Look at the things to look at.‎ And tell them where to shove their selfie sticks. 

Venice is sinking along with its property prices but I'm a lightweight. I don't make a difference.  

Top online tip for tourists: 'The floating landing stage is not the vaporetto.‎'  

The Italian Renaissance all-comers free-style match at the Accademia is won by the Bellini family.  

The Madonna con il Bambino (workshop of Piero della Francesca) at the Palazzo Cini, with its translucent cool poise, reminds me of the polished, pallid cross-section of a fossilised waterborne thing floating through eternity which I've just seen in the Museo di Storia Naturale - a tendrilly blob which might have had a single impulse, genesis. Wish I'd taken a photo.

The talented blogger KnitOxford‎.wordpress.com sends me someone else's clever post about designing a jumper based on the Doge's palace. 

Why not knit the Grand Canal with intarsia gondole and crocheted palazzo edges? It would make a nice scarf.

Members of a watercolour class

I get lost and end up stuck in the appalling Rialto crowds and tat. I become one of the people who annoy me by clogging the arteries of my Portobello home ground. 

I'm not here to draw but on the last night I sit by the Grand Canal as the damp chill rises, eat a zabaglione-stuffed choux bun and have a pen malfunction. 

Free the caged songbirds, you bastards!

Time for Italian Hours by Henry James:

Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves....

...It is a fact that almost every one interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice by a happy instinct, settling in it and treating it, cherishing it, as a sort of repository of consolations; all of which to-day, for the conscious mind, is mixed with its air and constitutes its unwritten history. The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give. But such people came for themselves, as we seem to see them—only with the egotism of their grievances and the vanity of their hopes...

Left: La Meditazione or La Malinconia, Domenico Fetti (or followers), c.1618, Accademia. Is the version in the Louvre the first or second?


...the very vulgarest rubbish in all the modern market...

...It is possible to dislike Venice, and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent manner. There are travellers who think the place odious, and those who are not of this opinion often find themselves wishing that the others were only more numerous. 

Incoronazione della virgine, Andrea di Bartolo, Ca' d'Oro

In court with the Naked Rambler

[Note: you’ll see that I’m not drawing the characters, just casting them from Spotlight.]

Someone has left a startling amount of male and female imagery lying around outside Winchester Crown Court. 

It's a bracing reminder that we're here because of the Naked Rambler's genitalia and buttocks, frequent sightings of which have excited magistrates' opprobrium to such a degree that he now has his own special ASBO which leads with lumpen logic to a potential infinity of jury trials - this is his fourth - and custodial sentences.

'Prometheus', Gustave Moreau, 1868

He’s a huge burden on the taxpayer: a one-man Trident but with arguably less deterrent effect.

Before the jury are admitted, The Naked Rambler aka Steve (Jim Dale) is summoned from the deep. 

I hear shackles rattling à la Marley’s ghost - surely he isn’t chained? The usher assures me that it's the jangle of the accompanying official’s keys to the cells. But later I’m told that, when out of sight, he’s in handcuffs.

Steve must have been wearing clothes occasionally - his forearms and neck are darker than his bony chest and shoulders. He is thinner and rangier than the last time I saw him, in August; his beard is on the march again. 

From my viewpoint, only his top half is visible. In the dock he is shielded by a wooden screen below, glass above. He gazes up to heaven like a grizzled terrier or leans forward, straining to hear, his nose against the glass. 

He rubs off the condensation from his breath and a fragment of Yeats, writing about Keats, comes to mind:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied

Hmn, a bit dark for Steve, but it’s there.

To my mind, the only person truly naked in this court is barrister Matthew Scott (Tim Piggott-Smith), who has been Steve’s loyal brief in the past.

Inaccurately billed as 'leading QC' on the front page of the latest Sunday Times, Scott is nevertheless top man - nobly standing on the sidelines as an unofficial amicus curiae without brief, wig, robe or ability to raise an invoice, because Steve wishes to represent himself. But that’s impossible if you aren't allowed in court at the same time as the jury. Steve won’t promise to remain seated - with his genitals out of the jury’s sight - so he is sent back to the cells.

Prosecuting counsel: ‘Mr Gough does have a wish often to stand up.’

Judge: ‘We can’t ask a prison officer to chain his legs to the floor.’

A Police Community Support Officer (Billie Piper) is looking after cellophane packets containing a pale grey marl top and tracksuit bottoms, ready for Steve to pop on if he relents.

Steve when at liberty

During one of the longueurs triggered by attempts to fit Steve’s caprice into court procedure, Scott asks his pupil (whose duties may not have been explained adequately at interview) to stand fully clothed in the witness box, then in the dock, ‎and scrutinises him to assess whether the offending genitalia really could be seen by the jury. Then Steve himself is summoned back to the dock for the same exercise. When Steve stands up, ‘The top of the pubic hair is visible, my lord.’

Judge love

The judge (Timothy West elided with Ronnie Barker) is humane and authoritative. He is particularly considerate towards Scott and expresses profuse gratitude: to represent this, in my notebook, I sketch a heart and a flower, then realise with horror that I have drawn in the court, my biggest fear as it’s illegal to do so.

It’s tempting to glamorise Steve as Joan of Arc or Peter Grimes or Job (‘Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither’) but that would be false.

I won’t regale you with Steve’s Fotherington-Thomas comments about the human body because I think they are irrelevant. I spend a lot of time drawing people who are naked as models or performers. Whether professional or enthusiastic amateurs, they embrace discipline and stick up notices on doors to the outside world saying NO NUDITY BEYOND THIS DOOR.

Steve hasn’t found the door. He isn’t even looking for it. His struggle is not concerned with some right to be naked in Asda, but with an eccentric compulsion to challenge authority.

He is using nudity as a figleaf.‎

‘The arguments against me have no foundation,’ he says.

The judge questions his intransigence: ‘Do you think something is going to change in your lifetime?’

‘Probably not.’

‘You’ll just get older and colder?’

In the court cafeteria, the clock has stopped. 

   
Steve is remanded in custody awaiting a psychiatric report and sentencing.



 

Supreme Court: legal high

Donald Trump, who breeze-proofs his hair with a baseball cap, is taking on a proposed wind farm near his golf club in Scotland. But banish thoughts of Quixotic flailing at windmills: today's hearing is sharply focused on i) the correct construction of the Electricity Act 1989, ss36, 38 and Schedule 9 (3) (1); ii) whether condition 14 attached to the consent for the wind farm was so imprecise, void for uncertainty and unenforceable that it vitiated the s36 consent.

Void for uncertainty. Yup, that's me.

A friend who happens to be passing drops in. A top pensions lawyer, recently retired, he is fascinated. 'Maybe I should have done planning law,' he muses afterwards. 'All those appeals...' It's his first time in the Supreme Court. For solicitors, keeping their clients out of here is a badge of success.

He helpfully points out the socks of the solicitor in front of us. They say THURSDAY.

A journalist says that watching me draw is more interesting than the case. I don't agree. Too much dithering and blank staring going on. Which reminds me...

Last July, a judge in Northern Ireland ordered a teenager who'd been bailed on charges relating to public order offences to draw him in court. Apparently the youth liked art.

This order was later withdrawn (possibly because drawing in that court is illegal), but what disturbed me most was the judge's rider about behaviour while sketching: 'If you look stoned, you will be arrested and remanded in immediate custody.'

When I am drawing, I must look stoned out of my mind. This is due to varifocals, concentration, lack of inspiration, the voices in my head, fear of committing a public order offence, and fantasies about cake. Certain learned counsel have a mild hallucinatory effect as well.

Have you noticed how the flowers on the carpet keep moving around? It was designed by the pop artist Sir Peter Blake, who also designed the Sgt Pepper album cover. I mean, asking for trouble.

And did you know that if you stare long enough at the Supreme Court carpet it spells out 'Paul McCartney is dead'? That will be understood by my older reader.

Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited and another v The Scottish Ministers (Scotland)

St Mary's University, Twickenham: Centre for Law and Culture conference

The theme is change. There's a rip in the red and gold wallpaper which needs restoration. Not too much change, please.

We're attached to the fantasy building which gave its name to Strawberry Hill Gothic for this year's conference at the Centre for Law and Culture.

I missed day one; this is day two.

Dr Kim Barker, Wolverhampton University: 'Changing legal #culture one tweet at a time.'

Claudia Carr, Hertfordshire University: 'Organ donation and presumed consent in Wales.'

Dr Dawn Moore, Carleton University, Canada: 'What the police saw: images changing the prosecution of domestic violence.'

Kelly Ann Cannon, Derby University: 'The condition of change' (about graffiti).


Finola Farrant, Roehampton University: 'Shapeshifting: the demand for "change" in ex-prisoners' identities.'




Professor Chris Harding, Aberystwyth University: 'Cartooning cartels: changing modes of attacking business cartels in early 20th century political cartoons and early 21st century cinema.'

Professor Fiona Macmillan, Birkbeck, mops up the proceedings after a sandwich lunch: 'Locating the cultural turn in law.' What is law in the context of culture? Or vice versa?

This perplexing cultural turn defies location. I think the most satisfactory answer lies with W. H. Auden:

Law, Like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

Notting Hill Carnival 2015

'Is there a toilet on this bus?'

Nadine Read, founder of The Makeup Hut

'Not yet.'
 
I'm ambivalent about the carnival but you've got to hand it to Elimu Mas Resurrection and Paddington Arts. They've teamed up to focus on the carnival as a serious business and this year their professionalism delivers stunning costumes, a flood of beautiful people of all ages, and Trinidad's Carnival Queen who can walk on stilts in the rain.

Exquisite, wistful, remote, she floats like a poem on trails of blue-green fabric, a golden ship on her head. She is the ocean. Beside her is the designer, a cadaver wearing fruit.

'We wanted to improve the carnival experience,' says the director, and they certainly deserve that massive ad from British Airways on the side of their lorry, plus their tours of China.

Rain-spattered picture

Outside is a centrifuge of noise.

'I just turn off my hearing aid,' says the costume director Annie, who's wearing a gold sunray-pleated cloak.

I keep pace along Westbourne Grove with the St Michael and All Angels Steel Orchestra playing a clever arrangement of For Once in My Life: like all competent steel bands it makes me cry.

'I was pissin an she drew me. Sick man. Can I buy it? Are you police? D'you want my name? She's in the zone man. She's English. Look, I was pissin an she drew me. Sick.'

If you're the person doomed to live in the absurd Havona House, with its pool, ballroom and ludicrous bas-reliefs (as yet untagged by our local artists, but just be patient), being built smack bang on the zebra crossing at the end of Portobello Road, here's what it looks like during the carnival - I've left out the tide of people so as not to put you off because we could all do with a laugh and at the moment, here in London W11, you're it. Can't wait to see the reaction when you visit The Sun In Splendour.








Here's a secret. If you want people to come up to you and be nice, go out and draw. 'I just want to say that I like that you are drawing when most people say art is shit.'



My friend says that his front basement area is a sea of excrement and condoms. The council will clean up for free in the first week after the carnival. As I said, I'm ambivalent.

More pictures if you scroll down.