The street-art is listening to you!

A very nice mural reported this morning by Street Art News, who ascribe it to English artist Banksy. Click through for a higher-quality image, and more photographs, but in short this piece incorporates a classic British telephone box (vandalized, graffiti-daubed and piss-stained, but unusually not festooned with postcards advertising prostitutes and escorts) and externalizes the lack of privacy in Western telecommunications. Surrounding the box are three men dressed as stereotypical 1950s spies, complete with trench coats, hats and dark glasses, using various archaic technologies to eavesdrop on the conversation in the booth and transmit them to GCHQ in Gloucestershire. I don't expect many people use phone boxes in England these days, which is in one sense a shame, because this artwork would look even better captured with various people making calls from inside the box over the course of the day. The workmanlike expressions on the faces of the spies would then be especially apt: they're doing their jobs, without shame or regret, but also without prurient interest or enthusiasm; they are technicians. The upper figure on the right shows a small amount of discomfort, but that's more due to his position, reaching up with a small satellite transceiver, shoulders hunched, fedora dislodged by large headphones and resting awkwardly on his glasses. The lower right-hand figure, crouching like a plumber or electrician working in your house, looks especially bored with his work, recording telephone conversations onto an old-fashioned tape deck, and does his job uncomplainingly only out of thorough professionalism. Even the spies hacking into our telephones and email accounts, blackmailing our Web service providers, sabotaging Internet security and watching us masturbate on Yahoo webcams, don't give a shit about us.

Silver reviewed in CROSS

By chance I learned yesterday that my book of butchered poetry published last year was reviewed in the "literature" section of the Cultural Review Of the Society for the Sanctity of the family, a flimsy journal with the somewhat creative acronym CROSS, published somewhere in the darks of fuckin' Newfoundland.

The idiocy starts in line 1 of the review:

We were, perhaps inadvertently, sent this galley volume of animal-slaughter themed poetry by the publicity department of a deservedly obscure and ill-organized press called Fallen Albatross Books.

(I count seven errors in that sentence alone.) We can only imagine our erstwhile reviewer Reginald May's growing confusion as he passed the first 55 pages of the collection without coming across a single reference to animals, abattoirs, or the sale or consumption of meat. Assuming he read the book any more than skimming the back cover and two or three randomly selected pages. Assuming he can read at all, or understands that poetry is not just prose with a ragged right margin, or knows that the garlicky piss spewing from his mouth is not the same as the considered opinion of a trained literary critic.

He misunderstands the very concept of a poetry collection:

The selection of poems in this volume, all by a single author of clear counter-cultural proclivities but with no unity of purpose, plot, theme or style, defeats all comprehension.

Even the closing words of the review fail to engage in any way with the literary merit, cultural context, generic conceits or thematic content of my book, the words and poems therein, or even any recognition of the talent and history of the author. His criticisms, while I really do take them as a compliment, are so banal and inept as to beggar belief:

To be perfectly frank, the work lacks dignity, gravitas and taste, not to mention the kind of social responsibility that we at CROSS like to endorse.

To be perfectly frank, Mr May, I wouldn't shit in your mouth unless it were from a great height and I had some assurance of protection against splash-back.