Rush Auer

          There is one thing less appealing than Russian avant garde art, and that is being bombarded with spam about Russian avant garde art. There's something very retro, about bombarding people with notices, it's a bit like the way TV shows used to have really long intros, with a theme song and all the credits. But time and the transmission of information is on a different footing now. People have quicker sensibilities. Less  has become more, and screaming for the attention of the masses will get you just, and only, that.

          No time for that now. If you have been paying attention to what's going on in Flickr you  will know that Lollito Larkham has been working a great deal in Blender and related programs making interesting looking creatures and household goods and other stuff.

          After seeing all his excellent photos, his event at  TKF  on sim Solaris promised well. The main attraction is certainly his Little Gray, a three dimensional morality tale which deplores prejudice.

       

Mind the Gap

In 975, the mind of many a Wessex nobleman was exercised by the increasing wealth and influence of the Benedictine monasteries and a quarrel between the great lords Aelfthere and Aethelwine. Civil War was in the air. St Dunstan, who had been himself a monk and later Abbot of Glastonbury and was now Archbishop of Canterbury, had allied himself closely with Edgar of Wessex and indeed it was Dunstan who devised the coronation ceremony (still essentially used to this day) full of mystical imperialism, which moved other monarchs of Britain to pledge allegiance to Edgar, King of the West Saxons. The achievement was short-lived. After only two years Edgar died, leaving his teenage son Edward (born, some say, of an illicit relationship with Aethelflaed, the 'White Duck', cloistered away in the nunnery at nearby Shaftesbury) to take the throne. 

The succession was anathema to Edward's stepmother Aelfthrith who naturally favored her own boy, Ethelred, later to prove himself 'Unready' (meaning 'without good advice'). For the next three years Aelfthrith plotted Edward's downfall. And so it was that in 975 AD after a reign of little more than a thousand days, King Edward, not yet seventeen, was lured under mysterious circumstances to the castle at Corfe, a Saxon word meaning 'gap', and there met his death.

It is a place of ghosts.