Existential Investigations

2007-12-10T05:46:00.000Z

Quote of the Day XI

Viel Arges gibt es heute zu fürchten. Doch das besondere Grauen, das ein Spuk auslöst, ist selten geworden. Nur wenige können sich einer unheimlichen Erfahrung rühmen, so beliebt sie auch als erzählte ist. Das Leben verläuft dieser Art geheuer, Ausnahmen lösen sich meist in Schein oder Betrug auf. Auch der Rest ist häufiger trüb als schaurig.(...)
Wie anders brachten die alten Dinge aufs Fürchten, wie zogen sie es an. Das winklige Haus, das kleine Öllicht, die vielen Schatten: der Spuk liegt nahe. Niemand weiß heute mehr, wie dunkel die Nacht ist, außer im Wald, und auch da fehlt die meilenweite Einsamkeit früherer Zeiten. Wo bleibt ein Irrlicht neben dem Scheinwerfer des Autos, das auf der Landstraße jagt; was ist die Totenuhr im Gebälk sobald der Bauer sein Radio auf London eingestellt hat. Der Klabautermann ist obdachlos, seit das Segelschiff verschwunden ist, ein Kobold gar hinterm Gasherd oder der Zentralheizung ist nicht unheimlich, sondern lächerlich und geschmacklos. Kauzgeschrei, Türknarren und Knirschen von Sargdeckelschrauben hat sich mit recht auf den schlecht beleuchteten Horrorfilm zurückgezogen. (...)
Gewiß, auch die neue Technik hat das 'neue Mittelalter' nicht verhindert, worin wir stehen (und das erst jetzt das finstere genannt werden kann): ein SA-Überfall zur Nacht nimmt es mit dem besten Grauen auf, und der Judenwahn oder Bolschewikenwahn, der die Nazis wiederum beunruhigt, ist vom alten Hexen- oder Teufelschreck nur stofflich verschieden. (...)
Es gibt heute bedeutend echtere, nähere Grauenwelt als diejenige des Schauerromans, der unter der elektrischen Standlampe gelesen wird. Und dieser Graus geht nicht weniger ins Mark, weil er diesseits statt jenseitig ist, weil er an Teuflisches glauben läßt, ohne im mindesten noch Glauben an den Teufel nötig zu haben. Das ist der Spuk, der trotz elektrischer Stromflut übrig geblieben ist, ja sich ihrer bis zum Jupiterlicht über Fratzen bedient, die auch am Tage nicht verschwinden, bis zu geladenen Stacheldraht um sehr irdische Höllen. Also schafft die Technik doch nur den illusionären, nicht den einwandfreien Spuk bis jetzt fort, nämlich das Infernalische aus dem menschlichen Abgrund selber und in einer Welt, deren Technik das Urböse geradezu ungeahnt elektrifiziert hat. Es gibt auch eine Nacht und eine Fülle neuer Schauergeschichten in ihr, die erst recht Nacht bleibt, weil zu sehr bloß Glühbirne, zu wenig anders glühendes Licht darin funkt, nachdenkliches.

Ernst Bloch: Technik und Geistererscheinungen (1935)

2007-11-30T08:56:00.000Z

Technoanimism

My iPod is depressed. There is no other reasonable explanation for spells of utter darkness in his shuffle mode. I got on the train yesterday minding my own business, feeling pleasantly neutral towards the world, when the iPod started playing Leonard Cohen's 'Anthem' followed by Tom Waits' 'Dead and Lovely' and 'Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis'. This was odd as normally some classical piece would interrupt any such assemblage of blue songs. Anthony and the Johnsons came on next with 'My Lady Story' and I was suddenly anxious to hear where this was going, when the iPod launched into a tearful homage to Diamanda Galas, starting with 'My world is empty without you' and 'Let my people go'.
Needless to say that when I got off the train in Ochanomizu thirty minutes later, I felt somewhat suicidal. So drained of energy in fact that I could not even face wresting control back form the evil shuffle mode. Be warned!

2007-11-15T08:16:00.000Z

Quote of the Day VII

Tous les imbéciles de la Bourgeoisie qui prononcent sans cesse les mots 'immoral, immoralité, moralité dans l'art' et autres bêtises, me font penser a Louise Villedieu, putain à cinq francs, qui m'accompagnant au Louvre, où elle n'était jamais allée, se mit à rougir, à se couvrir le visage, et me tirant à chaque instant par la manche, me demandait, devant les statues et les tableaux immortels, comment on pouvait étaler publiquement de pareilles indécences.

Baudelaire: Mon coeur mis à nu

2007-03-23T14:48:00.000Z

Being an Anthropologist

Ethnography always starts with an act of humility. They know something that you would like to know. You want them to tell you for free. They often don’t understand what you want to know, or your concerns seem utterly alien to them. Being an anthropologist must be one of the most awkward jobs in the world. You are superfluous, a supplement if you are lucky. I f you are not, your presence is obnoxious, getting in the way of things, disturbing. In

Japan

, the socially necessary politeness alleviates direct allusions to your status of incompetence, but however long you stay here, you will always be a marginal figure. A supplement. Sometimes vexing, sometimes interesting, sometimes even funny, but never essential to anything.That is probably why living here makes one so prone to depression. You are a foreigner and people will treat you as a guest. You’ll be kept at a distance and no matter how hard you try, you will always be marginal. You just don’t matter in the big schemes of their things. That is why it’s so easy just to stay in bed. You’ll be excused. After all, you are foreign.

2007-03-06T12:36:00.000Z

Quote of the Day III

He 'd told his parents he'd quit teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressed him for details, he'd mention the Warren Street Journal (a Monthly of the Transgressive Arts), the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls had had many opportunities to disabuse her he'd instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn't write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like 'Creative Adultery' and 'Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels' was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding.

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections

2007-03-01T14:19:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape VIII

Its entrance examination time at the Tôdai and everybody is nervous and offices close at odd hours and library opening hours are arbitrary, so I took refuge in the Maison Franco-Japonais in Ebisu, just one station from Shibuya. It has a very calm and spacious library with a high ceiling and a huge panorama window on Roppongi Hills (you can see it in the back on the pics).

2007-02-27T07:20:00.000Z

At the Doctor's

We are often told that 60% of our body is made up of nothing more than water. Over the last two weeks I came to the painful conclusion that my body is made up of 60% mucus. The condition responsible for this is called acute sinusitis and involves all sort of cavities in one's head no one ever understood the use of. Apparently they are simply made to hold mucus and to inflict pain through pressure on the brain, the eyes, the nose and the teeth, which, summed up, is a striking argument against 'intelligent design'. But I digress. After secreting enough slime in various shades of green and brown to supply a whole zombie film shoot single-handedly, I decided to see a ear/nose/throat specialist. Now I am not fond of doctors at all and the total loss of control that a visit to the doctor implies here in Japan made me very reluctant. My fears were soon to be substantiated.
I was waiting for about an hour in a line mostly made up from Japanese mothers with their small children. The line lead up to a bench already inside the doctor's room. There was just a milk glass screen separating the patients being treated and the patients waiting. Milk glass generally makes me nervous because the intention to hide something while being bright and seemingly friendly is so obviously inscribed into it. Nor was I put at ease by the fact that all the children that had been calmly playing or reading started screaming as soon as they disappeared behind the milk glass screen. The doctor's voice kept repeating 'Oh it's nothing', 'I'll be over in a minute' or 'What's for dinner tonight?', words that to every child in the world immediately conveys the message that there will be inevitable pain to be suffered. Then it was my turn. Beyond the screen was a sort of a dentist's chair surrounded by large machines and instruments that were state of the art perhaps in 1956. The doctor, a friendly looking elderly gentleman with glasses greeted me in a mix of Japanese and English and upon hearing that I was from Switzerland assaulted me with the inevitable German phrases that all doctors of his generations had had to learn ('Ich bin Alleinherrscher'). I never know what to say on these occasions. Before I even considered an answer I was propped into the much too small chair and the still smiling doctor started thrusting a succession of frankly intimidating things up my nose, down my throat and into every other hole in my head. This is the worst thing about Japanese doctors: You are expected to absolutely let him do whatever he pleases. There is no explanation whatsoever and when my hand in a reflex grabs his arm to prevent him from making me sick all over him, he exchanges a startled look with the attendant nurse. The other unfortunate tendency of Japanese is to believe that the more painful a course of treatment is, the more effective it will heal their illness. Not exactly much encouragement for doctors to be gentle, I always found, and when he says 'this will hurt a bit' I literally jump out of the chair under the profusest apologies and make a quick getaway. Not without a recipe for antibiotics, of course.

Bjork - Pj Harvey - Satisfaction (Full Song)

2007-01-29T10:30:00.001Z

Some art is epiphany. In a first youtube post here on existential investigations, see two of my favourite artists, Björk and PJ Harvey. I don't know where this is from, but circumstantial evidence points to the BRIT awards in 1995.

2007-01-22T08:31:00.000Z

The Day I beheld the Emperor of Japan

I was invited to watch the hatsubasho (the first Sumo tournament of the New Year) with my former host family. As we arrived in Ryôgoku, there was a huge commotion, snipers on roofs, helicopters circling, the whole place swarming with security personel (recognizable by the vacant look on their faces as they listen to commands uttered into their ears from some hidden headquarter). We expected either the Prime Minister or a member of the Imperial household, but when the limousine pulled up accompanied by two police details, behold! it was nobody else but the Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. There was a contagious burst of cheers and the obligatory waving. I was surprised at how tiny and frail they both seemed.
The Japanese national anthem 'Kimi ga yo' was played when they entered the hall and took their seats. Then the rikishi (the sumo wrestlers) entered the ring and were introduced one by one by country/prefecture of origin, stable and then name.
Funnily enough, of our party I was perhaps most excited about seeing them. My mother took a polite interest into the affairs of the Imperial family mostly based on compassion for the difficult lifes they are forced to lead. My host sister caught a few glances I can only describe as of the sort with which one merely registers some abstract unconnected fact . My host brother who seems to spend most of his days sleeping or staring into empty space, remained utterly indifferent.

2007-01-17T09:32:00.000Z

Insomnia

Not being able to sleep: time seems to slow down, then to peter out slowly, eternity takes its place. All the other nights of insomnia come back to haunt me and the sheer load of those empty waking hours that parade in front of my inner eye sometimes seem enough to tip the careful balance of the mind towards insanity.
The house I used to live in in London was built almost entirely of wood and glass. I lived on the top floor in the triangular roof under a skylight and could see the trees in the garden swaying in the wind. On stormy nights the whole house would shake, the wind howling around the corners of my room, weather straight out of 'Wuthering Heights'. But I felt warm and comfortable curled up in my futon while outside the storm would lash the trees and the walls of my little hut.
Those were the romantic stormy nights I loved. But there were others too. The uncanny siblings of the stormy nights were the eerily quiet nights. Prolonged silence is very unusual in London, especially as we were living between Holloway Road and Liverpool Street and there was always a police siren or an ambulance in evidence somewhere. But some nights were different. The silence would slowly trickle into your brain and accumulated there at the threshold of sleep, becoming more ominous as it became longer. Eventually I would open my eyes, not tired and exhausted, but instantly fully awake, ears palpating the surroundings for noise, the senses sharpend and vivified. But none came. And sometimes a single leave would slide down the slating and create a disturbing, unearthly sound, as if somebody would scratch a single nail over the roof. The silence would thicken and become almost liquid. In such nights it was impossible to sleep.
The nights here in residential Western Tokyo are quiet to, but in a rather hushed and considerate way. There is nothing ominous about them. When unable to sleep I can hear the other tenants of the building move around or quietly talk to each other. The couple next door occasionally has sex, always between four and five in the morning. This starts with strange, high-pitched wimpering noises that last for a few minutes and then stop, only to start again a few minutes later, a slow crescendo towards the inevitable peak, at which the bed starts banging against the wall and it generally sounds as if some maniac was tourturing a cat by trying to squeeze it between the bed and the wall.

2007-01-13T13:02:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape VII

Altre Shinagawa, the new development around Shinagawa station at sunset. Was on my way back from the notorious Immigration office where my visa was extended till March. And it only took three hours!

2007-01-08T13:57:00.000Z

Quote of the Day I

'Truth seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome.'

John Locke

2007-01-08T12:31:00.000Z

All the Best in the New Year to You All

We are already one week into the new year and it is freeeeeezing here in Tokyo. I am not quite sure where I am going with this blog. First the idea of just posting completely anonymous random thoughts appealed to me, but now my fieldwork does not allow for too much pointless rambling. Also, to maintain a readership one needs to post regularily and for a certain audience. So I thought this would be a good tool to keep in touch with friends in Germany, England, Switzerland and America. But so far, only my parents are reading it and thus I am strangely self-conscious about blogging.
Anyway, I decided to open two new categories in order to post more frequently. One being the obvious random photo shots; the other, somewhat more pretentious, is 'Quote of the Day'. These are as random as the rest, just thoughts that I thought were worth disseminating (like the stuck-up English snob that people sometimes take me to be, talking about 'sharing these meaningful thoughts with the blogging community' just feels as if a fishbone was stuck in my throat).
And now to something completely different: For those interested in my research, I just published a short account/memo/text on the New York University blog Material World. CHeck it out at http://www.materialworldblog.com/

2007-01-06T14:06:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape VI

Shinjuku Station Higashiguchi on a Winter Night

2007-01-04T13:50:00.000Z

New Year's Impressions III

For this particuliar impression I have to rely completely on the artificial memory of my camera, as I have no bloody idea when or where I took it.

2007-01-03T13:42:00.000Z

New Year's Impressions II

I spent last hour of the old year and the first of the new one practising Aikidô at the Hombu-Dôjô, the world headquarter of the Aikikai. The grandson of the founder directed the traditional Toshikoshi-Geiko.

2007-01-02T13:23:00.000Z

New Year's Impressions I

This is how we spent the First Day of the Year. After a huge feast of New Year's dishes, copious amounts of Sake, Beer and Shochû and watching the Vienna Philharmonics perform the traditional New Year's concert the Majong board comes out . My little brother usually drinks a few glasses of beer in quick succession and then falls asleep. In the second picture you can see that my grandmother has joined him and they both have a good snooze.

2006-12-18T15:20:00.000Z

Seasonal Dilemmas

It is the middle of December, but in Japan the weather was so mild this autumn that the foliage of the trees did no reach their peak until now. Viewing autumn colors is almost as important as viewing cherry blossoms in spring and inextricably linked to the Japanese feeling for the seasons as extolled in numberless Nihonron, which basically are theories about the Japanese written by Japanese to be read by Japanese in order to find out what is Japanese about the Japanese. The unseasonable warmth however has led to a terrible mix up of autumn colors and Christmas ornaments, not to mention Christmas carols that are inflicted upon everyone daring to step into any sort of public location.

2006-12-18T14:46:00.000Z

Local Elections

It is quite interesting to compare the different expressions politicians or/and their consultants think will endear them to the general public. Some smiles are friendly and warm, some are inane and irritating, some border on the lunatic fringe. It also seems to be quite important to have proper Japanese black hair, preferably a lot of it.
Hair in politics might be an interesting topic. I remember the female Thai candidate who ran for local office in Ayuthaya and whose campaign seemed to rely entirely on a huge majestic hairdo that was prominently displayed even in local tuk-tuks. As if Margret Thatcher and her hairstyle, described by Alan Hollinghurst as 'a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque' (in 'The Line of Beauty'), were the embodiment of some mythical 'hair of power'. It is true that the Prime Minister's hairdo grew over the years out of all proportions and rumour has it that the Baroness was determined to outdo the Queen, in the absence of a crown with pure hair, it seems. The rivalry between the two female heads of state in the 80's is often remarked upon: Apparently the Queen wouldn't let the PM sit during the weekly audiences. There was a brief but telling newsclip on telly when Baroness Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday two years ago. When her car drove up to the Mandarin Oriental, she had to use a walking stick and was supported on one side. The Queen, sitting in her Bentley behind her obviously saw this display of frailty and as if to make a point of it, she burst out of her car, literally 'jumped' out of it with a victorious smile.....

2006-12-14T15:16:00.000Z

Backstage

As I am currently re-reading Goffman's brilliant 'Presentation of Self in Everyday Life', I thought this picture might be appropriate. It is a view of the stage of the National Theatre in Hanzômon, seen from backstage. While many houses in Europe and America are designed to be representative of the inhabitant's taste and sophistication (and often horribly fail in doing so), Japanese interiors are to a much larger degree 'backstage' to their presentation of self. It is not very common to entertain guests at one's house and if one does so, the guest only enters the small part of the house that is made representative through preparation. Interestingly, that space for formal visits is usually not used by the rest of the family at all. It always struck me as slightly odd that my hostfamily and me would sit in the crammed kitchen while there was a large empty tatami room just on the other side of the corridor. Over time I realised that it is precisely this backstage setting that made me part of the family and that I sometimes disrupted by being to formal and polite.

2006-12-12T15:44:00.000Z

Treacherous Objects

How we are depending on objects to convey the 'right' message to those who see them as belonging to us! I remember a birthday party of a friend in his new, self-remade flat in Stuttgart. As an architect and 'Bildungsbürger', he paid utmost attention to all details, from the lavish art tomes on the bookshelves to the miniature reproductions of antique statues. There was, however, on the central shelf of a glass cabinet, a small Egyptian obelisk complete with hieroglyphs in rather too colourful shades. It stood out like a sore thumb among all the rest and I was drawn to it almost magically. I felt a peculiar thrill at immediately finding the object that by not belonging there exposed some of the pretence and at the same time was shocked by being such an interior Nazi. As the evening progressed and everybody got blissfully drunk, I asked the host about this 'éclipse du goût' and he confessed that the obelisk was one of the few concessions he had to make for his much younger boyfriend whose possessions and 'youthful taste' were apparently underrepresented. When I later met the boyfriend himself, I couldn't help but feel that he shared the obelisk's lot in this artsy, 30-something crowd.

2006-12-12T14:57:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape V

This is the view from the top floor of the Tokyo University Library in Komaba where I sometimes ponder the more irritating problems of rubbish fieldword. You can see the Park Hyatt's triple towers followed on the far left by the Tokyo Opera City in Hatsudai.

2006-12-10T14:05:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape IV

It is still unseasonally warm and pleasant. This is Ochanomizu at 8 o'clock in the morning. Looks almost picturesque for Tokyo.

2006-12-03T15:30:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape III

Early winter sunset over the Park Hyatt, Shinjuku's recent new landmark building. The hype created by Sophie Coppola's film 'Lost in Translation' disguises that fact that it is done in a rather bland corporate style. Rumor has it that there is a huge pool under one of the glas pyramids...

2006-11-25T15:13:00.000Z

For Those in Need of Cheering Up

DO you sometimes feel you are the most overeducated, useless person on the planet? Do you fear you are too intellectual to sustain an everyday conversation without drifting off to the problem of transubstantiation or Foucauldian anecdotes? Do you suffer from 'the lonesome Oxbridge blues'? Then I suggest you go and read the personal ads in 'The London Review of Books'. You’ll feel redeemed and charmingly reassured of your own averageness.

A little sample:

'The song that most puts me in the mood for love is Rick Dee’s Disco Duck. Woman, 54, clinging desperately to the erotic undertones of a 1976 historical society Christmas party chance dancefloor encounter.'

'Previoulsy affable, now largely intolerant and recently divorced woman (34) WLTM a bloke my age who doesn’t spend 15 hours a day pretending he’s a heroic blacksmith killing stuff in some other-dimensional village resembling Cottingley circa 1902. Talk to me, not Olaf the Destroyer.'

And my personal favourite:

'I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats.'

2006-11-24T14:53:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape II

This is the NOA building in Azabudai, shot through a cab window. With its red brick base and lip stick shape it is a peculiar appearance in the jumbled faceless cityscape of Tokyo. It was designed by Shirai Seiichi in1974 and has in my opinion grown old rather more gracefully than many a postmodern concoction.

2006-11-23T23:25:00.000Z

Tokyo Landscape I

This is one of the buildings next to Shinjuku station no one ever notices. But on second glance it is actually quite interesting in a 60's sort of way. Could be a villain's headquarter in an early James Bond film.

2006-09-26T09:49:00.000Z

Dog Couture in Roppongi Hills at 8 pm

2006-08-05T03:43:00.000Z

Summer Heat

You might be under the impression that this is lovely August weather over the Tôdai Komaba Campus main entrance. You cannot feel the heat that strikes you like a wall when you leave your air-conditioned shelter. You cannot feel the way the air seems to thicken into liquid form over asphalt. Summer is the time of the year when you realise that sunlight is the enemy.

2006-07-25T15:11:00.000Z

London-Blackpool

For reasons too complicated to describe I find myself in Blackpool early one Sunday morning, with Toby and a rented car. The waterfront is very attractive in a crumbling, almost Eastern European sort of way. As an archetypical working-class resort, Blackpool is overrun by hen parties in improbable outfits on their way to drunken oblivion at 10.30 in the morning. It is also quite rough and full of topless, manky, pale, tattooed, swaggering chavs who slap their bling-wearing, peroxyd-blond, betablocked screaming girlfriends in front of their hyperactive, raging, clueless kids.

2006-07-25T15:08:00.000Z

Berne-London

Ah, the glory of London. One nip down Old Compton Street and you can return to wherever you are from reassured that they are still there: the bald butch, the old queers, the emaciated Prada Nazis, the punks, hipsters, Goths and flyer waifs mixed with a liberal sprinkling of lesbians of every creed and the odd tourist marveling at the complexity of it all.

2006-07-05T15:06:00.000Z

Tokyo-Berne

There is no greater relief than to be off the packed plane and into a warm, balmy, summer day at the main station in Zürich. As the train pulls out of the station, I listen to Beethoven’s Rasumovsky quartet and everything seems just right, as if the twisted wheels of a complex mechanism had suddenly sprung into place and clicked. Even the war-related newspaper headlines in front of one’s very eyes seem very far away and a quick glance out of the window over the summery landscape of golden corn fields will reassure you that this is what’s real and what matters and that everything unpleasant is remotely removed. As if under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar were a place where you actually could breathe.

2006-06-14T16:22:00.000Z

Avantgarde Performance at Kichijoji with the 'Shibusa Shirazu' orchestra

2006-05-20T09:31:00.000Z

New Home

This is where I live. Follow the pictures to my house...

2006-02-25T08:50:00.000Z

In the Empire of the Cute

The Inokashirasen must be paying Sanrio a massive amount of royalties for the use of Hello Kitty on its trains. The mouthless, featureless, expressionless kitten warns children to stand away from the doors and not to get their fingers jammed.

2006-01-16T04:58:00.000Z

Tokyo Tochaku

After a depressing last week in London and a tearful goodbye with Toby things finally started to clear up after a) was upgraded to "executive class"at Heathrow and spent night in seat/bed convertible thingy chatting to rather attractive stewards and having four course menus at 10`000 feet, b) bumped into Mikawa Kenji at the foreign exchange in Narita airport (he is a very well knowndrag perfomer/celebrity TV person) and he gave me adirty look before sashaying past in a billowing coat, and c) I spent my first night in Tokyo getting utterly sloshed in Shinjuku nichome which happens to be just across the street from my hotel (I say incidentially because you never can tell as addresses are completely random. nichome literallymeans second block of Shinjuku, but the hotel is in the fifth block...whatever) and talked to random people(drinking does help the Japanese to loosen up a great deal, almost to a fault I must say though).So after affirming myself that there is enough fun to be had for at least a year I set out to start looking for flats....

2005-12-08T09:53:00.000Z

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....

2005-11-21T14:24:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-21T19:26:00.000Z

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.

2005-09-09T06:24:00.000Z

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.

2004-11-22T12:18:00.000Z

Pain

Pain is a strange thing, isn't it? It is indescribable, but you immediately know what it is if you feel it. Mental pain is a whole different issue of course. It's more elusive, fickle, hard to track down, even hard to feel.We use bodily pain as a metaphor but that does not necessarily mean that the two are in any way connected. The connection arises when we induce bodily pain to represent it. I do now understand girls who carve their arms and legs with knives. If you can create a representation of what you feel inside on your bodily surface, the pain becomes embodied in your scars, more concrete but also localized and less ambiguous. As in Kafkas "Strafkolonie" the law is written into you, into your body, because one cannot reach out and touch the mind in the same way.
I feel like being consumed by a fever. The heat rises inside, but my body is contained, disconnected from the outside world. I don't sweat, I feel swelled, filled with rising heat impossible to cool. But the point where the body reconnects to the world and you break out into sweat and feel it on your surface (how soothing it is!) and you can let it all out, this point I can't seem to reach. As if my tears were running down my face on the inside.