Lost in Thanet a Friday ramble about art and stuff.

My day off yesterday and I popped into Margate to view The Turner Contemporary’s latest commission, with the TSE label on the tin I was expecting a bit more than baked beans inside, perhaps, the intersection of the timeless moment would be Margate and nowhere. Never and always?

As it was the moment which is not of action or inaction, turned out to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. I did pop into the gallery and have another look at the works of Emin, Turner and Rodin and speculated as to why our Tracey had left out one of the most controversial of turners erotic sketches.

It’s far too rude to put here, so here is the link to some of his more controversial pictures http://margateturner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/test-post.html the top one is on display in the gallery, and looking at it I thought there was something artistically not quite right about it. It’s the bloke’s hand don’t you know, positioned further away from the end of his arm, than what it ought “a bee” which made me wonder if some of Turner’s erotica wasn’t drawn from life, but was more in the nature of a record of Turner’s activities. After all to put this sort of thing in words requires a specialist skill, which could even have left old TS wanting.

This rather left me wondering if the next sketch down was something in the nature of a self portrait, to use the local parlance here abouts, was JWM Turner a bit of a shirt lifter. Looking at the shape of the nose and comparing contemporary portraits it does seem I could be on the right track here.

Perhaps this is something that Stephen Fry ought to have asked Tracey Emin about, not did she think JWMT was bisexual, but why did she leave this picture out of her selection.

The Olympic madness seems to be setting in, I tried phoning the council to see if they were aware of their confusion about the Olympic torch route through Ramsgate, the councils operator put me through to an answerphone so I rang the council again and was but through to a different answerphone. At the moment which way the torch will go through Ramsgate is anyone’s guess. Looking on FaceBook one of my friends has posted that McDonalds have managed to ban chips at the Olympics, see http://food.uk.msn.com/socialvoices/blogpost.aspx?post=5712d7fe-c952-426b-a338-5b8f64dadc4b&_nwpt=1&lc=1033

I have also noted back on the art theme that there is a new art exhibition starting at The Belgian Café in Ramsgate tonight, the Broadstairs and St Peter’s Arts Group, I will try and wander down there this evening and report back on what it’s like.

Still on the arts front, the boat project is due to arrive at Margate harbour Arm this evening, Friday 13^th intervention by wind (we tried sailing yesterday and there wasn’t any)  means the boat will travel from Ramsgate to Margate by road, see http://www.theboatproject.com/

I did just check the council’s tourist website http://www.visitthanet.co.uk to see if there are any other arts events on today, this is what it says,

Commercial Break, Lone Broadcast and Numbers at Broadstairs

Fri 13 - Wed 18 Jul 2012

·                                

Magz Hall at The Old Look Out Gallery at Broadstairs

Fri 13 - Wed 18 Jul 2012

·                                

what with the council being lost in Thanet I wasn’t surprised that there didn’t seem to be any mention of the Belgian Café or the boat.

Quite strange really the council’s bizarre web presence, both of the entries above are copied directly from the council’s leisure website, the only two listed for today’s date, when you click on them they both seem to be entries for the same event.

I don’t recommend further clicking, this will take you to places like the wrong place on Google maps, and as for the other events that are also held in this venue “The Old Lookout” obviously whoever wrote this has either never been there or thinks it is The Tardis.     

 I have bunged up my watercolour of Turner here, I know the eyes are a bit odd but I think the nose is ok.

I will ramble on here.

Rambling on post Belgian Café, the art exhibition there is pretty good, lots of mostly fairly small pictures and well worth going in for a viewing.

I figured that as the exhibition started today a lot of the people in there were probably artists so I found a fairly dark corner to sketch from, the snag here being that I couldn’t really see what I was drawing or what colour the paint was, the results below are, as you see, a bit on the odd side.

Some photos round the harbour this evening, there must be a lot of potential in terms of commercial opportunities from all of the windfarm boats there now. Sorry if some of the photos are a bit blurry the light wasn’t that good http://michaelsbookshop.com/laptop712/id4.htm

The ones with the lines of coloured lights on them are achieved by changing the focal length of the lens (turning the zoom ring) while the shutter is open. 

Council misplace Olympic Torch Route

Thanet district council have produced this leaflet

 Inside is this map, I copied the detail from Simon Moores’s blog and the quality isn’t that good. the pink line is the torch route.

Here is the actual route from the official torch route map on The Olympic Games website, the yellowy brown line is the torch route.

So if you follow the map on the council’s leaflet and line Madeira Walk, Wellington Crescent and The Plains of Waterloo, you won’t actually see the torch.

I wonder what the leaflet cost to produce and how it could have been produced by a council officer who didn’t actually know where King Street and Harbour Street in Ramsgate actually are.    

Councillor Ian Driver and Johnny Rotten disagree on taxing drugs videos.

Thanet Watch have just released a video of Ian driver explaining his plans if he gets elected as police commissioner, here it is.   

Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten also appeared recently in an interview on the main subject here, the legalisation or decriminalisation of drugs, here it is.


Obviously a major factor here is if Mr Driver has his way and more drugs are legalised and taxed them Mr Rotten will be displeased.  

Personally I don’t really have the answers to this one, I have doubts about overall decriminalisation, certainly the classification of drugs in this country is wrong and sends out completely the wrong message to people.

I guess the situation is that most adults now have some experience of drugs even people as old as I am do, unless of course they slept though the 1960s.

In terms of impact on my day to day life goes, the drug that has the most significant impact is alcohol, and I would like to see more of the massive amount of taxation generated by its sale spent on dealing with drunks, but then I live in the town centre and I would say that. When society reaches the point that people are reluctant to venture into their town centres in the evening because of this problem, then it needs solving for social and economic reasons.   

Obviously the problems I am talking about in terms of classification and harm need justifying, this chart is from the Home Office website. 

Penalties for possession and dealing

		Possession:	Dealing:
Class A	Ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, crack, magic mushrooms, amphetamines (if prepared for injection).	Up to seven years in prison or an unlimited fine or both.	Up to life in prison or an unlimited fine or both.
Class B	Amphetamines, Cannabis, Methylphenidate (Ritalin), Pholcodine.	Up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine or both.	Up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine or both.
Class C	Tranquilisers, some painkillers, Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), Ketamine.	Up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine or both.	Up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine or both.

And this one from the Wikipidia article on recreational drugs.

I am not saying that the Wikipedia chart is exactly right, but I don’t think it is that far off.  


I think one of the main web resources is the American National Association on Drug abuse, see http://www.drugabuse.gov/ as 29 million Americans over 12 had a spliff last year and more American students use cannabis than smoke tobacco it is an interesting site. 

The UK figures taken from The National Health website are difficult to decipher, here is an example.

Smoking, drinking and drug use

Pupils aged 11 to 15 were more likely to have ever drunk alcohol (45%), than to have smoked (27%) or tried drugs (18%). By the age of 15, 83% of pupils had done at least one of these.

One in five pupils who had ever smoked or drunk alcohol or taken drugs had done so recently; 13% of pupils had drunk alcohol in the last week, 7% had smoked in the last week and 7% had taken drugs in the last month. 

This from The Guardian.

“It is estimated that the number of young adults in Britain who had tried an illegal drug in the 1960s was fewer than 5%. This reached roughly 10% in the 1970s, and 15-20% in the 1980s. By 1995, nearly half of all young people said they had taken drugs. If you ever wondered how successful the Grange Hill kids' Just Say No campaign of 1986 turned out to be, then you have just read the answer.”

Here is the link to one of the main recent surveys http://www.mixmag.net/drugssurvey

I guess when one reaches a point where about half the population including the prime minister admit to having done something that carries a 5 year prison sentence the law needs modifying in some way.

I will ramble on here if I get time during cooking.

Here is a list of people who have confirmed an interest in running, sorry about the formatting
 

Ian Learmonth

Craig Mackinlay @cmackinlay

Conservative

‘Craig Mackinlay has been selected to be the Conservative candidate for the upcoming police and Crime Commissioner election’

Yes – has secured the Conservative nomination

Mentioned 18/06/12 Website

Harriet Yeo @KentPCC or @shookyshiner

Labour

‘I won’t stand by and let Tories become cheerleaders for police cuts in Kent…[I will do what I] can to support the police in the fight against crime’

Yes – has secured the Labour nomination

Quoted 18/06/12

Fran Croucher @francescroucher

Independent

‘Through me I will deliver your concerns and priorities to the Chief Constable’

Yes

Quoted 02/07/12 Website

Ian Driver

Independent

‘[I] want Kent Police to take a much tougher stance on domestic abuse, hate crime and dangerous driving’

Yes

Quoted 02/07/12

Ken Little

‘The public must be heard and, more importantly, listened to’

Yes

Quoted 23/02/12

Dai Liyanage @DaiLiyanage

Independent

‘We need an independent, experienced and cool look at what’s best for the police and the community.’

Yes

Quoted 13/06/12

Fergus Wilson

‘I think I can make a difference’

Yes

Quoted 11/02/12

Steve Bates

Labour

‘Steve Bates, who was a special advisor to former Home Secretary John Reid [is seeking candidacy]’

Yes – reportedly on the Labour shortlist but not selected

Mentioned 25/05/12

Jan Berry @JSB54

Conservative

‘Want to use my unique experience to support the people of Kent’

Yes – reportedly on the Conservative shortlist but not selected

On Twitter 27/05/12

Francois Gordon

Conservative

One of the three who made the shortlist is ‘Foreign Office man, Fancois Gordon…’European Strategy Adviser’ to Kent Police’

Yes – reportedly on the Conservative shortlist but not selected

Mentioned 27/05/12

Jacques Arnold

Conservative

‘I am very keen on the concept that the priorities of the police match the priorities the public have’

Yes – but reportedly not on the Conservative shortlist

Quoted 21/05/12

Jo Gideon

Conservative

‘If done right, this could deliver really great opportunities for local communities’

Yes – but reportedly not on the Conservative shortlist

Quoted 25/05/12

Mike O’Brien @CllrMikeOBrien

Conservative

‘Cllr O’Brien confirmed… he had put his name forward ‘

Yes – but reportedly not on the Conservative shortlist

Mentioned 23/04/12

Brian Sweetland

Conservative

‘Cutting out red tape… will be a key priority’

Yes – but reportedly not on the Conservative shortlist

Quoted 03/05/12

Col Tim Collins

Conservative

‘This is a job for someone energetic and who is willing to work with the chief constable’

Reportedly not running

Quoted 01/10/11

The Turner Contemporary Margate, lies damned lies and statistics

I haven’t visited the Turner Contemporary for about three weeks so the sketch of Rodin’s The Kiss from my last visit will have to do to illustrate this post, hopefully I will get back there soon and hopefully get the hand into a more apposite position to complement the rest of the exhibition. I am no Marcel Duchamp so I may fail in this endeavour.

Feedback about the current exhibition from customers in my bookshop is not entirely positive, however there is a new commission that opened last week on the promenade outside the gallery, not protestors this time.

What we have this time is; Sinema Amnesia, Mark Wallinger, as I am sure everyone won’t remember this I thought I ought to mention it. Here is the link http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/new-commissions-mark-wallinger-and-lindsay-seers as you see this will allow you to admire yesterday’s view.

Now on the one hand I have reservations about the popularity of contemporary art while on the other there are the gallery’s statistics, which suggest that the interest is considerable.

We have had four main exhibitions at the gallery so far, the first one (Conrad Shawcross, Daniel Buren, Ellen Harvey, James Webb, Russell Crotty and JWM Turner) I wasn’t that keen on. The next one the youf one with artists too numerous to mention that I enjoyed very much. The next one Turner and the Elements, that I wasn’t that keen on, too much of a jumble of his works for me, this is always a bit of a difficult one as saying anything negative about JWMT tends to be frowned upon. Then the current exhibition which is not really my bag baby, but then I’ve only visited it twice so it may grow on me and there is something about it that is inspirational that I haven’t really nailed down yet, perhaps something to do with the tentativeness of Emin’s work. Whatever it is I felt like painting after the two occasions that I visited it so it may be that I just don’t understand it.

Anyway this leads me on to the business over the statistics, taking an interest in the “Summer commissions at Turner Contemporary - Mark Wallinger / Lindsay Seers” video embedded in the page on their site, link above, I watched it as I assume most people with an interest in what the art the gallery has commissioned (and we have paid for) following the video through to its statistics though I was surprised how few people had watched it.

I am not sure what this is significant of but will probably ramble on a bit when I have looked at some other stuff, I do for instance subscribe to the Tate videos and will need to check the statistics there.
I guess we all want and need the gallery to continue successfully and part of this is that there is a continued interest in what the gallery are doing, I am a bit concerned that there is a disconnection between what the gallery does and any views the public may have.

Still on the local art gallery theme the Monkey Cage gallery at the Westciff boating pool in Ramsgate is moving off to Whitstable, which isn’t good news for Ramsgate

The Belgian Café has an exhibition of paintings by the modern impressionist Anthony Giles, click on the link for his website http://anthonygiles.vpweb.co.uk/ he also has two pictures on The Great Wall of Ramsgate.

I do wonder how many people come to Thanet to view The Turner Contemporary and wind up actually enjoying The Great Wall of Ramsgate much more.

All I can do really is look though my sketch book and give you one of the sketches I did when I was in there last Thursday.    

When it comes to The Turner Contemporary, I think I will say “Give me Tomorrow” well September really, I am quite looking forward to Alex Katz, but then I suppose I would be.  

Frigging in the Rigging, around Thanet with a Dingy.

To be honest I am really too old now for dingy sailing, you really need to be young and bendy to do this sort of thing, however I promised to teach the youf of today how to sail a dingy and so today I am recovering from bending in ways I no longer bend.

A fairly large problem when teaching someone to sail a dingy in Thanet is the lack of non tidal water, there are no inland lakes and a technical error could involve being swept away by the tide.

A bit of a discovery here is Walpole Bay boating pool, as you can see from the picture it is big enough. The top of the pool appears about 2 hours after high tide at Margate which means that the pool is usable from about two and a half hours after high tide to about two and a half hours before.   

At the other end of the car park is Jetski World, café toilet and jetskies at about £50 per half hour, there website is http://www.jetskiworld.co.uk/ pleasant people, didn’t get a chance to try the café but will do. I managed to buy a wetsuit there that fitted my frame short and fat, euphemistically labelled large short.

Rules and regulations are fairly limited for unpowered watercraft, I got third party insurance at http://www.newtoncrum.com/ £19 and joined Thanet council’s water users group http://www.thanet.gov.uk/environment__planning/water_users_group.aspx £30, neither of these things is compulsory, but at the very least I would recommend the insurance.  

If you have limited time slots the water users group means you get a key to the slipway barriers, which seem to be locked or unlocked in a fairly arbitrary fashion.

 Dingy sailing is a bit like riding a bicycle, you can only really learn to do it by being pushed off and messing things up until you get the knack and I would say a great many of the accidents and boat wreckings that happen to larger boats are caused by people operating them not acquiring this basic skill.

The basic imperatives of keeping away from a lee shore and if you can’t change directions by turning to the wind do it by turning away from it soon become apparent. 

Westgate Election results, a glaring message to councillors of both major parties.

My best guess, and I have been saying this since the last year when the district elections returned the no overall majority result, is that we are likely to get this situation of Labour control at Thanet for the next nine years.

Historically the election results at Thanet District Council tend to reflect the situation within the national government rather that the situation within the council.

If there is any lesson for the Conservative group in this result, it is to wake up to life in opposition and start to become an effective opposition.

I very much avoided posts about this during the run up to the election, I didn’t want to be seen as influencing the result in any way and as the readers of this blog are measured in thousands this seemed a possibility. 

As a commentator on local issues I had got used to dealing with the pre-election situation with Conservative control and a Labour opposition and during that time I found the Labour group to be on the whole responsive to local issues and of course being opposition much more open and much less guarded in their responses.

Now at the moment my main concern locally, Pleasurama is up for decision and under normal circumstances I would expect some interested and informed responses from the Conservative group, especially from shadow cabinet members who would normally be both better informed about the issue than most councillors, but have less in the way of restrictions than the cabinet members, when it comes to talking to a member of the public.

The responses I have had so far have been very derisory and seem to be based on the assumption that the shadow cabinet are suffering a minor blip in a period of continuous Conservative rule, in what after all should be a safe Conservative run council.   

Back in April I offered to add the Conservative shadow cabinet member to my email list (cabinet members, senior council officers and MP) relating to The Royal Sands and he declined, this is an example of the sort of problems that members of the public face when trying to find an effective political opposition in Thanet.   

Trying to work out how the Conservative group view Ramsgate and major council related issues in Ramsgate, which for the most part relate to the council owned property in the town, I slowly came to the conclusion that there was an element of spite towards the town from the Conservative group.

Oddly enough this spite was sometimes directed at the wealthy, who one assumes would under normal circumstances be Conservative voters. The best example of this was the eviction of the historic vessels from the historic vessel pontoon with the benefit to the council being progress from reduced mooring fees to no mooring fees.

It is as well to appreciate that most historic vessels are considered to holes in the water into which one pours money, not a choice for those without it. 

I would guess that use of the internet is an area where councillors and the council could do with considerable improvements, the last experience here being the Mayor Margate FaceBook fiasco which revolved around a group of Conservative supporters trying to say that the Mayor of Margate had used FaceBook improperly during this by-election.

Slowly and to my mind rather sadly it became apparent that none of these people understood FaceBook sufficiently to even be able to recognise what was a publicly viewable page and what was a private page normally only viewable to the account holder.

The other side of this coin is that an increasingly important part of becoming and remaining elected as a politician is that politicians internet presence. A great part of this is some sort of social media site where electors feel confident that they can comment reasonably and the politician will respond reasonably and in a public forum. 

I would say that here, by that I mean blogger one is looking at older politicians and voters, with FaceBook the people tend to be younger. In Thanet I would say that that for the most part councillors and officers are terrified of social media sites, especially blogger and with very few exceptions don’t understand FaceBook, which is potentially less controllable and more dangerous.

Thanet District Council opened a FaceBook account in 2009, see http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thanet-District-Council/83700846372 ran it in the most muddled and confused manner until March 24^th of this year when they stopped posting to it.

Most of the younger people I know have a FaceBook account, assume it is a sign of being alive and I guess it is the first place they would look when trying to work out who was who, when determining not just who to vote for in an election, but whether to bother to vote at all.

Even to a much older person like me, one aspect of deciding who to vote for, would be to see if a candidate had some sort of live internet presence, where they were prepared to communicate openly with people who voted for them.

For both parties there is an important lesson to be learnt here from the results, the two candidates that got the most votes were young, under 25 I think and the winner was female. This isn’t reflected in cabinet posts or committee chairpeople, most particularly within the cabinet and shadow cabinet where the intention is to form a governing group.

The formation of effective groups is a science in itself and all of this, something that all of the scientists involved agree about is groups made up of the same type of person are ineffective. A group made up of men over 50 is unlikely to be able to achieve anything much at all apart from an ever increasing level of animosity between members.    

Rambling on here since Labour took control I have managed a few small achievements with the council that I never managed for years of asking when the conservatives were in control. The most recent of these is to get access to the new licensing applications which I now publish on the press release blog, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Thanet%20District%20Council%20licensing%20applications perhaps some tiny sign of more open government at TDC.

Staying on the subject of press releases, which I publish in the format they are sent to me, compare say a Turner Contemporary press release http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Turner%20Contemporary%20Press%20Release where the images appear because they have computer code in them that cause images published on their website to appear in the press release with one published by the council today that has computer code pointing at an image in my password protected email account (the TDC logo) so it doesn’t appear at all, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/westgate-on-sea-by-election-result.html.

Or ones published by the Conservative group, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Conservative%20Group%20Press%20Release which mostly look as though they were formatted on a 1960s computer.

Or ones by the Labour group that look as though they were formatted on Windows 95, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Thanet%20Labour%20Group%20Press%20release

Incidentally the pictures illustrating this post are on Jodie’s FaceBook, I don’t mean that I have copied them from there, just inserted the coding so that you see them here although they are only published there. I guess this would raise some interesting copyright issues.

A few pictures around Ramsgate Harbour this evening, they should have all published by about tenish, I don’t know what they will be like as I took them with my mobile phone, haven’t looked at them yet, just ftpd them to my website and I wouldn’t expect it to be much good in the fairly low light conditions, here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop712/id3.htm an added factor here is that needing reading glasses and the phone not having an optical viewfinder I can’t really see what I am taking.      

I will ramble on here if I feel like it. 

Greyfriars Canterbury

Not really that much to say today, we went to Canterbury where I bought a few books and a tube of paint.

I did get half an hour to sit in Greyfriars and do the pen and watercolour sketch above, photo below for aspiring art critics.

A Stamp on the Toe for Being so Slow and a Ramble

For those interested here is my Thanet blog chart for last month, i.e. the traffic sources statistics for this blog http://michaelsbookshop.com/laptop712/

This brings me to the vexed question of what to blog about and I guess this rather depends on what you readers are interested in.

Here in Ramsgate one of the largest dental practices has lost its national health status, which means lots of people have lost their dentist, I gather this was done because of some government competition rules, but the problem is the government having done this haven’t provided any alternative dentists.

Also Ramsgate has been named as one of the top ten uk beach resort destinations, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/9282875/Jersey-most-popular-for-summer-staycation.html

There is the Royal Sands Development on the Pleasurama site in Ramsgate, this was the subject of the lead article in The Isle of Thanet Gazette last week see http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Ramsgate-Pleasurama-site-set-redeveloped-3-3m/story-16469934-detail/story.html

Their reporter phoned me on Tuesday just after I had finished the blog post about it, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/he-royal-sands-development-on.html so guessed that there would be another newspaper article.

There are a few disparities in the article the most interesting one being; “So far about 30 per cent of the luxury apartments, priced from £185,000 to £435,000, have been reserved.”

The amount of reserved apartments fluctuates a bit, at the moment it’s fourteen out of 107, which I make about a sixth, rather than about a third. For clarity these are apartments Nos. 2, 5, 6, 12, 19, 33, 41, 63, 64, 67, 91,91, 96 all the rest are available on the internet.

Very hard to tell where the council think they are going with The Royal Sands, or what the developer is trying to achieve.

The closest guess on my part is the council would like to avoid expensive litigation and the developer would like to make a large profit. 

Over in Margate the football club is back with an amended planning application F/TH/12/0433

For those interested here is my Thanet blog chart for last month, i.e. the traffic sources statistics for this blog watching the southeast BBC news today and noting Tunbridge Wells borough council insisting that a proportion of employees on a new development there should be recruited from people living in the area, it occurred to me that if one of the criteria for being a senior council officer at TDC was living in Thanet, it would ensure that the people making the decisions had to live with the results of those decisions. I guess this could be further extended to ward councillors having to be residents in the wards the represented.

Back onto The Royal Sands, this time the cliff wall, over the time I have taken an interest in this structure the council’s engineer and engineering advisors have repeatedly told me that the cliff wall was built to help stop weathering on the chalk.

I have now found out that it was build as a result of a series of huge cliff collapses in 1935 and 1936. These collapses were though to be the result of a prolonged period of wet weather, so evidently weathering comes into it somewhere.  

Bit of an amusing photo going around the book trade at the moment which may appeal to some of you

I will ramble on.