Enter at Your Own Risk

A couple of my real-life friends decided to go ex-pat last year; they're now in London, doing what ex-pats do. In this case, getting sucked into a Movieum of London short film contest, where entrants had 48 hours to produce a slasher horror film for screening on Halloween. You can read a bit about the making of here, or you can just take a look at the finished entry. An extended version with more slashing is in the works.

Botticelli's Dismembered Zephyr

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli c 1482 - 1486

Despite months of practice, I still have moments when I think I'll never be able to draw good. The other day, while I was copying the figure of Venus from that famous Botticelli painting - with a view to producing a piss-take of the image - I made a heartening discovery. Sandro Botticelli wasn't all that good at it either.

When you look at Botticelli's painting, your eye is drawn first to the central figure of Venus, then to the woman on the right (a Horae, according to Wikipedia), holding the robe. Then maybe you glance to the left, at the two winged Zephyrs. Give them more than a glance, and you'll find there's something very dodgy about the figure of the female Zephyr, tucked into the male Zephyr's armpit.

It's easier to see if you trace the main visible outlines and contours of the two figures separately, to disentangle those legs. Here's the male:

He's facing the right of the picture, with his right hand side is turned towards us. Now here's the female:

I've labeled her feet, as indicated by the position of the big toe on each. It's the first hint that there's something distinctly wrong with her anatomy. Just how wrong becomes clear if you try to fill in the gaps, by extending the line of the right thigh and the torso, which we're seeing from her left side. Her left arm is in the forground, with her right hand held over it; the right arm passes behind the male figure.

To start with, we'll need some guidelines:

The red lines indicate the major anatomical constraints on drawing her torso - the line of the shoulders, the spine and, in the 'arrowhead' to the left, key points of the pelvis - the juncture of the spine and sacrum, the left and right iliac crests and the pubic symphisis. The blue lines follow the major bones of the leg - the tibia from ankle to knee and the femur from the knee upwards. Neither of these lines hits the pelvis where it ought to. They could be made to hit the pelvis by shortening the length of the femur but that would still leave problems with the head and neck of the femur and the insertion of the femur into the hip socket.

To finish, here's a reconstruction of the torso and legs, using those red and blue lines as guides to the placement of the outlines.

Disturbing at so many levels.

Scenes from iCadia

Echo & Narcissus

Hedunits

I used to be a big fan of Wire in the Blood, that TV crime drama that regularly turns up on the ABC. Now I'm not so sure.

Yesterday, I got lucky when I was leafing through the old magazines in the waiting room of my personal head care specialist - there were three old New Yorkers in the stack. One of them was the November 12, 2007 edition, which included "Dangerous Minds - Criminal profiling made easy." by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell totally demolishes the "Hedunit" genre of crime fiction and the real-world profilers don't come out looking too flash either.

Wire in the Blood is a good example of the "Hedunit":

We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nephew, the shadowy European. That’s a Whodunit. In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn’t initiate our search for the killer. It defines the killer for us. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows ... Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits.

In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions... (my emphasis)

Hence in Wire in the Blood we get all those scenes where Tony Hill stands in front of a visual aid with high production value - in the last series that I saw, a large computer touch screen which allowed him to open up crime scene photographs and drag them around the screen with the touch of a finger - saying in an agitated voice: "it doesn't make sense: this is all carefully planned and organised, this is chaotic, impulsive."

Very quickly Tony realises that the crimes are being committed by not one, but two killers. Then the writers add a final plot twist - it's actually one killer with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Of course Wire in the Blood is fiction. But it's a very persuasive form of fiction - a lot of work is put into the production to give it realism. The effect of the Hedunit genre on our understanding of crime and policing is similar to the CSI Effect. We see Tony Hill, brilliant clinical psychologist, reading a crime scene for insights into the personality of a killer and we are gulled into thinking that things actually work that way - after all, modern writers of crime fiction do a lot of research to make their stories plausible, don't they*?

The problem isn't restricted to fiction where background research is distorted for literary or dramatic effect. Hedunits are also presented as non-fiction, in the memoirs of profilers themselves. It's one such memoir that inspires Gladwell's coverage of the history of profiling and his assault on profiling's inflated reputation:

There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

For more on what those psychologists at the University of Liverpool found, you'll have to Gladwell's original article. Just be warned - if you're a fan of Hedunits, it's the biggest spoiler of all. You might even find yourself erupting into uncontrollable laughter next time you see Tony Hill do his shtick with the crime scene photos.

* - That is we assume that screen writers in the US and the UK do. Give Australian TV producers a million dollar budget for a series and they'll want every possible cent of that million up on screen, with Georgie Parker in the lead female role. The writers can produce any old tosh they like , as long as it's at least up to the standard of Neighbours and Home and Away.

PC Santa No 1 - Santa Clara the Wimmin's Santa

I put this image together for my own "art" challenge at Larvatus Prodeo. So far, it's looking like an easy winner - it's the only entry.

But that might change, thanks to this fulminating post at Slattsnews. It seems Port Phillip Council tried, and failed to put the kibosh on this years Santa Pub Crawl. Just as every Australian kid has a right to Santa, every red-blooded Australian male has the right to put on a Santa suit, go out with a few mates and get blind drunk - so long as it raises money for charity. And if a left-leaning city council tries to get it called off, with a lot of cant about public safety, it becomes an act of civic protest into the bargain.

Only a few days into this year's season, and we're already seeing some top quality Santa-bothering. Makes you proud to be an Aussie, doesn't it?

Pre-Christmas Vinyl Chuck-Out

I've just finished sorting my collection of old vinyl recordings into two classes - those I definitely want to keep, and those I can live without.

If there are any Melbourne readers out there who might be interested in acquiring some old 70s and 80s pop, one hit wonders and other stuff I've come to regard as so much musical dross, just drop me a line (gummo dot trotsky at gmail full-stop com).

Not Suitable For Royalists

AN American photographer famed for showing celebrities naked or bathing in asses' milk chose a more traditional pose for Britain's Queen Elizabeth, but Annie Leibovitz's new work sharply divided critics today...

Washington Post culture critic Henry Allen was not amused, complaining that the portrait of the monarch sitting in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace had "all the personality of a marble bust of George Washington." (News Limited)

Others were quite happy with the portrait's traditionalism. Not me - I agree with Henry Allen - we're entitled to expect something a little more exciting from Leibovitz. Something like this, maybe:

The Highlights and Other Psychological Horrors

Today hasn't start too well - thanks to an accidental viewing of the synchronised swimming on Saturday night I woke up with an attack of the highlights. Bloody Russians!

OK, so it's partly my fault - I didn't have to stick around and actually watch the Russian team swancing - or is it dwimming - around to the strains of Rimsky-Korsakov's Psychosis Scheherezade - I could have moved to another room and found something else to do. And at least the musical interludes in my head weren't accompanied by visions of legs scissoring above the blue surface of a swimming pool, or a team of eight swimmers making a star figure with their bums up at the center and their splayed legs forming the outline. Well, not until I started writing, anyway.

Right now, all the orchestral bombast of that over-orchestrated little air with variations is blasting out of the stereo speakers - it's into the second part, where you get all those totally unnecessary grace notes from the harp at the beginning. All I have to do is get through the next twenty minutes without thinking too much about Tchaikovsky's Cappriccio Italien, or worse yet, the 1812 overture. They're both on the CD with the Rimsky-Korsakov - as filler essentially. Bloody Deutsche Grammophon!

Postscript: now that I've listened to the whole cloying piece I have to admit that, like Ketelbey and the Mighty Wurlitzer, Rimsky-Korsakov and synchronised swimming were made for each other.

Lit-Crit Gems

(All from the latest Saturday Age)

... the book doesn't only chart the emergence of a department, but of a discipline. Clark, Blainey, Serle & Co didn't just teach Australian history - in many respects they invented it.

Her novel is exceptionally readable, stylish and well-paced. It's not without its moments of wry humour and the plot unravels with rare confidence.

Ramsey and Lawrence do not prove sexually fungible (interchageable). Shriver has perhaps stacked the odds here by making the snooker player an intense and experimental lover, and giving him love scenes that will make the book clubs swoon. They may even develop an interest in snooker, although a glance at the real-life characters on the circuit should douse those dreams.

There has been the usual hype about Davis being a writer we should all be watching. But I'm afraid that deep down her work is shallow.

Suffice it to say that [this book] rekindled the fires that burned all those years ago when a just-pubescent youngster discovered that not only was cricket the greatest game of all, it was - in the right hands - written about in a way far superior to any other sport.