Admin Stuff.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Much like Valleray, pictured above, I too am desirous of a long, long sleep. So, I’ll probably be around sometime Monday, but I don’t know when. Things will start eventually, and there’s plenty to peruse from this weekend, because I suspect most people had the sense to be out and about enjoying themselves rather than sitting in front of a computer. I will definitely be gone on Tuesday, because I need to get away from this house, this computer, this everything. We’re going to go travel gravel for a while.

Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem. [NSFW]

Yesterday evening found me distracted again, chasing one tangent after another until I landed on Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638), a most talented painter. He was a Northern Mannerist, and given all the foibles of that particular style, he made his characters luminous and achingly beautiful, even when they were misbehaving. Click all images for full size. The first painting which caught my eye was A Monk With A Beguine, painted in 1591:

Een monnik en een begijn, A monk with a beguine, by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

Een monnik en een begijn, A monk with a beguine, by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

The detail and light are wonderful, it’s all so…lustrous. And reluctantly lusty. You can almost feel their consciences attempting to get the better of them, and failing. The story of the Beguines is an interesting one.  I think there’s a lot to be said for such structures as the beguines, just sans religion. At the time, this was a good option for a lot of women, when they had few choices in life.

What grabbed my attention next was Venus and Adonis:

Venus and Adonis, by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

Venus and Adonis, by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

You can see in Adonis’s face there’s some problem, one which has him quite emotional, while Venus has the solid air of confidence and casual comfort. Again, the details are astonishing in their beauty and light; the pearls are translucent.

I’ll add just one more here, The Fall of the Titans, which leads me to the conclusion that all men should have a dragonfly for their dick. Yep. Here’s a detail first, then the full painting:

Detail from The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

Detail from The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

 

The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem.

Look at the faces, those expressions. Incredibly poignant, once you can stop looking at the dragonflied and butterflied* genitals. Also, dragonfly dick and the character at the bottom right are same person.

*Not meant in that way!

Tools.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved. Bad flash, sorry. Click for full size.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved. Bad flash, sorry. Click for full size.

Good tools are important. Having the right tools is very important too. I can highly recommend the Staedtler sharpener (mine is in obvious need of a clean). It works beautifully and renders a very sharp tip. Speaking of sharp tips, everyone who has worked with pencil, colour or not, is familiar with point breakage during drawing. This sends tiny bits of core all over the place. If you’re working in ordinary pencil, it’s not a major deal if it smears, as it’s easily erased. That is so not the case with colour pencils, Prismacolor in particular. Normally, I use a fox tail brush to clean, but these can cause problems with colour pencils, in that no matter how lightly you wield one, it’s still heavy enough to cause many a smear. The solution? Feathers. I use 3 types of feather. Not only can you pick up minuscule bits of pencil with them, they are very good to brush an area of your work without smearing.  The turkey feather is the lightest, and excellent at picking up bits; the other two are stiffer, with more weight, and good for an overall sweep. If you have a bunch of bits and dust, gently press the feather down on them, and it will pick them up. Don’t forget to clean your feather after. Just using your fingers on the feathers works fine.

Living rural, I don’t have to go far to find feathers, but if you’re deep in an urbanscape, feathers of all types are easily found in craft stores. The benefit there is that you can buy feathers by the bag, so you’ll have more than enough for your needs.

ETA:

22 seconds in the microwave, kept all the info. Just sharpened it, seems to have worked. This was also a sharp reminder of a major failing on my part – not paying attention. I’m so colour focused, I completely ignore observing the condition of the pencil. Now that I had a very good look at this one, there are a number of gouges and scores, particularly on the ‘back’ of it, and there was a suspicious piece transparent tape, too. So, while it’s good to know you can fix your pencil up, it pays to be very observant of the pencil itself before you bring it home.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 10 – Sex Ed

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

This is another one of the issues where the current US divide between left and right amuses me greatly. If you ever saw the movie “Red Heat” you will probably remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as a Soviet agent turning on TV in a cheap American hotel and upon seeing porn uttering the word “Capitalism!” with utmost sneer in his voice. That scene rings so true to me.

The regime’s attitude to sex and sex education was abysmal. You see, sex is pleasurable to the individual, and as such informing the populace about how it is supposed to work could not be easily spun into a way to advance the greater good. Pornography was illegal and erotica very strictly regulated. And sex education almost non-existent.

Well, that is not entirely true. Sex ed was compulsory. But non-existent at the same time.

In the seventh class of elementary school, the biology classes were focused on human anatomy. Towards the end of the year part of the curriculum was about sexual and reproductive organs and some sex education thrown in.

The sex education part was gender segregated. Girls were shown some educational video whose details I do not know. Some boys tried to listen at the windows and from them I know that it probably consisted mostly of information about expected changes in body chemistry and shape during puberty, and nothing more.

Boys had even less informative session, which I missed completely due to illness. All I know from highly bemused accounts from my schoolmates is that instead of the rather good diagrams in books the whole issue was explained on a picture of a tulip. Really. Bees and flowers. At school. In 1980s.

At no point whatsoever were the “technicalities” of sex mentioned. No mention of consent and how it is supposed to work, no mention about how condoms are used and what other options of contraception there are, no mention of how the body parts actually fit into each other. So all of this info had to be learned from surroundings, either from family members or from peers. Which has of course led to great variation between individuals.

Info about consent came mostly from media and from peers, with all the masculine garbage that is the stupid “yes means yes, no means try harder”.
Use of condoms had everybody to gleam from rare articles that might be written in some magazine for adults or to figure out for themselves. Oh, and the stupid “it’s woman’s responsibility to not get pregnant” was part of the package too.

How the sex itself is supposed to work everybody learned from pornographic magazines smuggled in from west. People who did not get lucky to see porn or grow up in the country  might end up completely unable to actually perform sexual act properly, as was attested in the book Lidská sexualita (Human sexuality) by sexuologist Ivo Pondělíček and his wife Jaroslava Pondělíčková-Mašlová, who bemoaned that in the 1970’s multiple adult pairs came through his office who were unable to conceive child and during the courses he learned that they did not even know that for a woman to conceive the penis must enter the vagina. At least one such pair were people with university diplomas.

All in all it is no wonder that in my relatively small social circle I knew two girls who became pregnant shortly after the age of consent (15 years) and that it was all too common that girls got pregnant and married quite young. There are no precise statistics, because the regime did not keep tabs on things that reflected on it unfavourably, but I would not be suprised if today’s Texas came out better in this regard.