David Bennett

The Tate Modern is the natural gallery in London to show ground-breaking, avant garde artworks. The kind that as often as not might make you shrug, dismiss, and despair of.

I am talking about bricks laid out on the floor so that their only distinctive feature is the ease with which one can trip over them. Or rubber tyres in the shaped of a half-submerged submarine.

On the plus side, I remember some years ago liking a grand piano that was suspended from the ceiling and which repeatedly dropped ten feet while spilling its innards before winding itself up to the ceiling again.

These are personal opinions of course, and you may feel differently. And if not you, then someone else may love the bricks or the tyres. The only constants are that to each his own, and that there is no accounting for taste.

So when I read about Ai Weiwei’s exhibition, Sunflower Seeds, I was spectacularly unimpressed and uninterested.

I had read that Ai Weiwei was considered to be a dissident in China, but beyond that I knew very little about him.

Why We Went To The Tate Modern
The Sunflower Seeds mass sculpture was an afterthought. We drifted towards it after seeing the Gauguin exhibition.

We went to the Tate Modern specifically to see the Gauguin exhibition. It was a major exhibition with paintings from all period’s of the artist’s life. It was a huge and spectacular exhibition and we saw many paintings from all periods of his life. We also learned a lot about Gauguin’s perspective on life and the troubled times to which that led him.

The Sunflower Seeds Exhibition
But of course, this article is not about Gauguin but about Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibition.

As I said, we drifted towards it at the end of a long afternoon, out of curiosity over the sheer size of it.

The mass sculpture that comprises the exhibition is laid out on the floor of the Turbine Hall and covers about one half of the hall.

The one hundred million sunflower seeds that comprise the exhibition trail off into the distance.

To give you a sense of the huge size of the Turbine Hall, take a look at the photograph at the head of this article. Can you see the doorway in the left corner down at the far end?

They dwarf the attendants walking along the narrow walkway that leads to the administrative offices at the far end of the Turbine Hall.

Dust and Health & Safety
I had read that the curators at the Tate Modern had had to fence off the seeds to prevent people walking across them.

The original idea was that visitors would crunch their way through the seeds, but the dust they were throwing up was considered dangerous to health.

The reason for that is that the seeds are not real sunflower seeds.

They are individually crafted, life-sized porcelain sunflower seed husks.

Each of the 100 million seeds that make up the exhibition were made by hand in Jingdezhen in China- a city that has long been associated with pottery production. The video that accompanies the exhibition shows dozens and dozens of people in the city employed in making the seeds – a laudable undertaking.

The seeds were mass-produced in the sense that little balls of clay were individually put into tray moulds and fired in a hug kiln. Then each seed was cleaned and hand-painted, stripe by stripe.

The Idea Behind the Sculpture
So what is the idea behind this mass sculpture? According to Ai WeiWei it is about several things. It is about ‘made in China’ and the politics of a culture that turns individuals into mass producers.

Ai Weiwei comes across as a very sympathetic person in the video, and as we stood in the huge Turbine hall looking at the sea of seeds, we started to be drawn into what we were seeing.

So in contrast to the pile of bricks of earlier exhibitions, we liked this one.

Each seed is attractive; each is different. But from a distance they are very nearly the same.

It left us feeling part of the caring family of man.

Ai Weiwei
By chance after I had written this article, but before publishing it, I saw a programme on TV where Alan Yantob interviewed Ai Weiwei.

Alan Yentob had been refused a visa to enter China, so the interview was conducted by video from their respective computers half a world apart.

I came in partway through the programme at the point at which Ai Weiwei was describing how the Chinese authorities had placed a security camera across the street from his house in Beijing so that they could monitor his comings and goings.

In response, Ai Weiwei had sculpted a number of marble security cameras, and it was particularly amusing to see them lined up on a bench – iconic and unseeing.

These snowdrops came out a few days ago. I saw them one day and intended to go out to photograph them the following day. However, the best-laid plans can go awry, and the next day it snowed.

The snow was swept away by the rain the next day and so I went to visit the spot again.

I didn’t worry that the snow would freeze and kill them, because snowdrops are hardy enough to withstand freezing. On the way I wondered though whether the snow would have flattened the little flowers.

They were fine, however, and I was able to photograph them.

William Wordsworth described snowdrops in his 1820 poem of that name:

“…I see thee bend thy forehead, as if fearful to offend.”

And Mary Robinson described them in similar terms in her 1791 poem,

“…why droops so cold and wan thy fragrant head?”

Peter Pan and Tinkerbell
I don’t see them that way though. I don’t see them hanging their heads, but rather they remind me of the costume that Peter Pan wears or the dress that Tinkerbell wears in the novel Peter Pan – or at least in the Disney film version.

The hems of their costumes seem to have been cut in a zig-zag with an exaggerated pair of pinking shears.

In chapter three of the novel, J.M Barrie describes Tinkerbell as a fairy who mends pots and kettles.

Tinker
The derivation is from tinker – someone who works with tin. And of course, the word tinker is used to describe those wandering people of Irish origin living mostly in Ireland and Great Britain and who traditionally made their living from mending pots and pans.

It makes me think of the ‘You little tinker’ as a way to tell off a child who misbehaves.

Children’s Rhymes
Then there is the counting rhyme: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

We used that rhyme and also one that involved holding out a fist with the thumb uppermost while someone went around the group counting One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four. Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes, more.

Either rhyme ended with ‘You’re it.’

Pinked
When I was making the caption for this last image, I wondered whether pinked was perhaps a word that described the kind of edge made with pinking shears. And indeed it is.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes pink as meaning ‘with a saw-tooth edge’ and mentions that it comes from a Middle English word meaning to thrust, as in he pinked his opponent’s shoulder with his sword.

All good useful stuff to help ward off the still dark February evenings.

To send the snowdrop image as an ecard, click the image at the top of this article.

I have just been watching one of Don McAllister’s screencasts from his series of very useful tutorials at ScreenCastsOnline on how to get the best out of your Mac.

This week’s show is about John Gruber’s Markdown and about various text editors that can use it.

What Is Markdown?
Markdown is both ‘plain text markup syntax’ and a software tool that converts plain text markup to HTML.

In plain English, it is a simple way of writing an article that contains the code to make text that displays with formatting and that can also be displayed as a web page.

For example, it can make bold text and italic text, as well as headings and links.

MarkDown is built as a plug-in for the Moveable Type blogging platform and as a script that is built into various text editors.

About Text Editors
Text editors are small programs that run on your computer.

That means that you can use them to write an article for the Web and save the article as a draft on your machine. Then you can come back to it later, work on it some more, and then publish it online.

And all the HTML formatting needed to enable the article to be read by web browsers is already built in.

I could write HTML coding in a text editor, but – and this is a crucial ‘but’ – Markdown text is easy to read, whereas HTML code is not. This is a major attraction of Markdown.

But Why Do I Need Markdown?
Many blogging platforms enable you to write articles with a Visual Editor. This blog uses the WordPress platform, and it is very easy to write and edit posts directly in this blog using the built-in Visual Editor.

That means that I can write text and format it to make headings, bold, and other kinds of text formatting – and I can see all the formatting without having to see the HTML, which is tucked in the background.

So When Is MarkDown Useful?
Well, until I saw Don McAllister’s screencast I didn’t think I had much use for MarkDown.

Therefore, I had never really looked at the code syntax.

However, when I saw the MarkDown code today, I recognised it as the code that MadMimi uses to make its email newsletters.

This is relevant to us because use MadMimi for our email newsletters.

Until today, I thought the markup language in MadMimi was its own proprietary language.

Working Offline
Being able to work on email newsletters offline is very useful to us because it opens up a whole new dimension for composing newsletters with MadMimi.

And using easy-to-read Markdown, makes it even more attractive to use.

Now we can write drafts in a text editor on the computer without having to work directly on the Web in MadMimi.

Text Editors
As I said, there are a number of text editors that can use Mardown syntax.

One free one is Notational Velocity and I am experimenting with using that at the moment.

I am also trying an alternative fork development of this program, called Notational Velocity Alt which has a separate preview window that I like. That means that I can see the markup in one pane and the formatted text in another pane.

MarsEdit
However, my preferred editor is MarsEdit.

In fairness, it is much more than just a text editor. MarsEdit also can send articles directly to a number of Web platforms, including WordPress.

Madmimi (like Notational Velocity Alt) has a preview pane in which the formatted text can be viewed when the Preview pane is set to Markdown.

This makes it very easy to see and check formatted text ready to paste into Madmimi.

Here in this screen grab you can see an earlier draft of this article written in Markdown and shown in formatted text in the Preview pane.

You can see that the formatted text at the bottom is easy to read, but so is the Markdown text at the top.

Conclusion
It is much more relaxing to work in a text editor because we can just turn on the editor, type something, save the draft and put the article on one side.

Then when we are satisfied with our draft, we can paste the Markdown-formatted text into MadMimi.

Then all we have to do is check that everything looks OK and then send out the newsletter!

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