Author: Harry

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RSPCA ‘Freedom Food’

I was reading about meat labelling in The River Cottage Meat Book (which I’d recommend, so far, though I haven’t actually tried any of the recipes yet). He mentioned that meat labelled as ‘RSPCA Monitored Freedom Food‘ wasn’t, as you might expect, free range – just produced with slightly more regard for animal welfare than the legal minimum requirements for intensive farming. Which was a bit of a blow since I was just preparing to cook a Freedom chicken, bought in the assumption that it would be, if anything, a step up from ‘free range’.

I can see the argument for the RSPCA giving approval to some intensively farmed chickens. Intensive chickens account for 98% of the birds reared in the UK, and the RSPCA has to engage with the industry somehow; encouraging the producers to treat their birds slightly less badly is a good start.

I just think the choice of branding – ‘Freedom Food’ – is a real misjudgement, because I think most people will see it and assume it means ‘free range’, just as I did when I glanced at the chicken label. The concept of ‘free range’ chicken is devalued enough, without weakening it further. I basically feel I was misled by the packaging, and not in a way which benefits animal welfare. In future, I’m just not buying chicken or pork from the supermarket unless it’s organic. That seems to be the only labelling scheme that means anything.

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Culture Other

Adult film posters (and some other stuff)

Adult movie posters, via we make money not art, who got it from Camp Heatwole.

edit: more linkworthiness. Dazzle painting, via gravestmor. It’s worth looking at the pictures and clicking on the links in the dazzle article.

further edit: Bangladeshi rickshaw art, via Metafilter.

and still more: Crop Art, also via Camp Heatwole.

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Culture

Mask of the Week

Busó costumes:

Busó is apparently a festival to mark the start of spring in Mohács, a town in Hungary.

“According to the oral tradition, the Busó who crossed the river on boats chased the Turkish away from the area of Mohács in 1687. This has never been proven but possible since it is well known that the Turkish are very suspicious and the frightening Busós looked like the devil especially when the Turkish saw an army of them. According to traditions, the Turkish fled in panic when they saw the horrible army.”

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Culture Other

Chihuly at Kew

I went to see the Dale Chihuly glass at Kew Gardens today. Which was pretty fab. This Flickr slideshow gives you some idea. It finishes 15th January, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re in London, go and have a look.

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Culture Other

Duchamp vandalism and BBC fuckwittery

Someone took a hammer to Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Which is the famous sculpture made from a urinal. I just found the BBC’s phrasing annoying:

A 77-year-old Frenchman has spent a night in custody in Paris after attacking a plain porcelain urinal considered to be a major artwork.

‘considered’ to be a major artwork? It’s one of the iconic artworks of the 20th century! I can’t believe that 88 years after the event, the BBC still feels the need to prevaricate about it. Not the Daily Mail or the Sun, but the BBC, a serious news organisation and a major cultural broadcaster to boot. Fuckwits. What kind of philistinic culture do we live in?

I don’t insist people should like Fountain, and if you wanted, you could argue it’s a kind of work which has been a rather uninteresting experiment and should be relegated to a footnote in art history. Or whatever. But the idea that we have to have the same stupid, boring, pointless argument about whether it’s art, over and over again – aargh!

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Culture

po-heritage

One of the things that seems odd to me about Ron Silliman’s legendary (post)Avant/SoQ dichotomy is that trying to claim ownership of a country’s cultural heritage, trying to shape a national canon, feels like an essentially conservative impulse. The idea of a national tradition of radical poetics seems self-contradictory, like the Maoist idea of continuous revolution. I don’t think there’s actually a logical contradiction, but there does seem to be some conceptual tension.

I was going to use this observation as the starting point for a whole post about America’s relationship with its cultural heritage, but on balance I think that’s an exercise best left to the reader.