Thursday, December 08, 2005

Celeblogging

Living in London for almost one and a half years, I have not yet succumbed to report any celebrity spotting. That does not mean however that I mastered the Londoner's die-hard indifference to famous people (Yes I know it's Kim Catrall, yes, she was in Sex and the City, so what? Will you stop gawking at her for God's sake!!!). Far from it.
So last night I went to the Barbican to see the delectable, the uncomparable, the prima donna of expressivity (if such a word exists) CECILIA BARTOLI perform Scarlatti, Caldara, Corelli and Handel. It was a memorable occasion, not only because seeing Cecilia Bartoli was the very first thing I did when I cam to London in September 2004, but also because I went to queue for return tickets, was the first to get there and get one, and thus had ample time to go and see the Nobuyoshi Araki exhibition at the Barbican art gallery. To my surprise, there was a panel discussion announced with Yoko Ono! Free of charge! One day before the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's murder! Also on the board was Dr. Lucia Dolce, a scholar friend of mine from the SOAS and - incidentally - Steffano Dolce's cousin (of Dolce and Gabbana fame, for those who can't take a subtle hint).
Well, the exhibition was fantastic, endless rows of images of empty Tokyo landscapes juxtaposed with assorted genitalia and bound and gagged girls hanging baroquely from ceilings.... The discussion was about to start, but where was Yoko? Of course she was there and the embarassing thing was I knew her! She is a cruelly misnamed film scholar at Oxford Brookes, but in my self-delusion of the glamour of London (I had preformulated a whole blog entry in my mind about how cosmopolitian this all is - including me of course) I completely blanked out the utter unlikeliness of Yoko Ono commenting on the deeply disturbing colour shades of vulvae....

Monday, November 21, 2005

Unknown Unknowns

The Bush administration has a way with words that borders on the playfully poetic, especially in such suitable contexts as war, massacres and weapons of mass destruction. We all remember when Donald Rumsfeld spontaneously (it seemed) produced the following gem of sophistery:

'...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.'

A few years later we need to consider even more combinations, such as the unknown knowns: things we didn't knew we knew (because we didn't communicate with the numberless agencies whose job it is to be in the know); the known unknowns that we don't know because we suppressed what others know; and most importantly the known knowns that we know because we made them up.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Phantom Projects

One of the most difficult things about being an anthropologist is battling phantom projects. Those always occur at the same crucial moment in time: I think about a topic, develop some ideas on it, read up on the literature, start to write drafts and outlines, sketch a structure and timetables, methodologies and possible outcomes, and when the time comes to finish it up, suddenly a completely different idea grabs my fancy, seems very alluring and for a few days I am leading myself to believe that this is a much more interesting and fascinating project. Of course it isn't, just something entirely different, and after a few days I realize this and abandon it. The phantom projects spring from a fear of closure, of having to stick with and being identified with the final project while being unsure about its outcome. It's an anxiety that is linked with the open nature of anthropological inquiry and the doubt about whether it will generate any kind of interesting data.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Spider Season

There are a few days of summer that never seem to end. The heat seems to permeat everything and people throng the streets at night because it is too hot to sleep. The week I spent in Vienna coincided with this most magical stretch of summer where everybody appears to be happy and contended. But hidden from this general elation, the process of decay has already begun, autumn sharpens his knives to cut the thread that hold this precarious season together. One day you wake up and the sky seems much higher than usual and the rays of light have lost their glare and are golden and soft.

Were I live it is the spiders that are the harbingers of this change. It was quite hot and unpleasantly muggy yesterday, one of these days when the shirt sticks to your skin and the air seems trapped between the hot tarmac and the leaden sky. When I opened the door to my bedroom, dreading another short night with little sleep, there it was, the first spider, sat in the middle of the white wall across from me, without moving, as if someone had put it there as a remainder.
There are numerous spiders in this wooden house and as I am quite arachnophobic I managed to negotiated some sort of ceasefire . The spiders had to understand that they would be killed if entering my territory which I restricted to my bed, giving them free leeway on the rest of my floor. We usually get along fine, expect during spider season, that is, early spring and early autumn, when my bedroom seems to be a station on their migrating patterns from the great outdoors to the hidden bowels of the house. Faced with a month of spider-checking and jumping at the slightest touch at night, I sighed and went to get a towel. When I returned, the spider was gone.