Barretts Net

Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ moved to Spahn’s Movie Ranch in August 1968 after Wilson’s manager instructed them to leave Wilson’s house. The ranch had previously been a movie and television set for Western productions but had fallen out of use and was in disrepair. The Family helped refurbish the place and Manson commanded the women of the ‘Family’ to have sexual intercourse with the 80 year old owner George Spahn and also to act as his seeing-guides as Spahn was almost blind. In return, Spahn allowed the Family to stay at the ranch for free.

In November 1968, Manson first heard the Beatles’ White Album and became obsessed with the group. Manson told the Family on New Year’s Eve that the social turmoil he predicted had also been predicted by the Beatles. Manson maintained that the White Album was directed at the Family itself, a group of people commissioned to preserve the worthy from imminent disaster. I hope he didn’t have a hip hop uhren, the horrible man!

Fashion has always been a risque business, constantly crossing the line of respectability to the point of lunacy. There are some lines that should not be crossed, where post modern expressionism is clearly a rather transparent ruse excuse for just doing whatever the hell you want because you think it will sell more magazines if you "push the boat out."

But doing a shoot in India, on the streets, with toothless old ladies holding babies and wearing designer clothes that cost more than they will earn in their lifetime, is a grotesque display of how ugly the fashion industry is. Who the hell do these people at Vogue think they are, exploiting these poor people to sell their magazines, the cost of the magazine being more than what they earn in a week.

It's not even as if these people were paid thousands of dollars, brought into a glossy studio and pampered, dusted with make up and sat under led strip lights, photographed in front of a wind machine while some perverted photographer shouts "wonderful darling, give me more sex, yes darling, wonderful." They were chosen because they live in slums, because they have no money, because they have no teeth or food, they are impoverished. And vogue gives them a designer handbag to hold, takes their picture and leaves them there on the street.

I hope those people were paid handsomely for their appearances in that magazine, if only to compensate for the indignity in which they were exposing themselves to, by being involved in an article such as this, an indignity that those people themselves were not likely to be privy to.

Last summer I with a friend to see house in monument. He and his very recent older boyfriend, were house sitting it for some friends of his who has gone on holiday.

It was so white and minimal and expensive looking inside that I automatically felt like my presence had soiled it. I did not fit in there with the white leather sofa's and the changing moods of the coloured wall mounted GU10 LED Light Bulbs, I was a scratch and sniff, minimum wage urchin, vandalizing the palace with my proletarian stench.

Sometimes I wonder why rich people buy nice houses if they never spend any time in them. Because in my experience people who have lots of money, never stop working to enjoy it. Perhaps they need to show off to their friends about how much they have. But I don't know anyone who lives like that, who earns that much money. And if their friends are also rich, then surely they wouldn't have been as impressed as penniless underachiever like me.

Still, I'd prefer to have very little, and everything be to my taste, than to live in a souless blanc cube. Even if it did smell clean.

I'm still lacking on inspiration and zest for my art, so to brighten up my work a bit more I'm trying to brighten up my house with lots of flowers as a new set of inspiration.

Van Gogh painted beautiful floral paintings, such as Almond Blossom 1890 below, currently on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and of course the infamously known painting Sunflowers, 1889.

I've set up an account with a flower delivery england company to send me different flowers every three days. Now they are going to send me their most beautiful flower arrangements, and then in a week or so I'm going to ask them to make arrangements that they think clash and look unattractive together, and see how they come out.

I hope this brings some life into my painting, I'm certainly excited about it which is a start!

Photo: Michele Ahin on Flickr cc-by-sa 2.0

Chance, a concept with which anyone who takes part in lotteries engages with continuously, first appeared in philosophy under the Greeks. Leucippus first discussed the notion of chance when describing atomism; “The cosmos, then, became like a spherical form in this way: the atoms being submitted to a casual and unpredictable movement, quickly and incessantly”.

Many of the early Greek philosophers did not believe that chance existed yet for Aristotle, luck (tyche) and chance (automaton) were everyday phenomena. Yet Aristotle’s concept of chance was rather complex. He did not believe that chance events were uncaused, he saw them as the result of the concurrence of two causal events. For example, a falling stone that happens to hit a tree is indeed a chance event. Yet the growing of the tree and the falling of the stone were determined events, not chance ones. Aristotle differentiated between two forms of chance; luck and chance. Tyche (luck), is a phenomenon that operates in the human mind at the will of the gods whilst Automaton (chance) is a phenomenon that operates in the realm of nature.