Dog Couture in Roppongi Hills at 8 pm

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.

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.

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.

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.

Avantgarde Performance at Kichijoji with the 'Shibusa Shirazu' orchestra

New Home

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

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.

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....

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.