12:04 pm - Footnotes to Jan's room A trip to a friend's flat is a chance to absorb and exchange information -- what they're into, where they've been, where they're going. You get onto the same page with someone by entering their space. You synchronize watches, you do "signature specification". It's field work in a flat.
At the weekend my friend Jan Lindenberg -- an art student when I met him, Jan now works in sustainability design research for a telecoms company -- invited about four of us to his place (he just lives round the corner in Neukolln) so that we could tell him about stuff he could do on his upcoming trip to Japan. Jeweller Naoko Ogawa also wanted me to advise her on places to go in Vienna during her upcoming trip there. And Hisae needed her clunky, broken printer tested.
As usual -- and with Jan's permission -- I snapped the stuff on his tables and shelves, if only so I could google it later. Someone's room is like an appendix of footnotes. Or do I mean that a blog entry about someone's room is like a footnoted appendix to the room? In the photo above, for instance, there's an URL: CAC Bretigny turns out to be a contemporary art space in Brétigny, France, currently showing two artists exhibited in this year's Berlin Biennial, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer. Their 2006 work Flash in the Metropolitan saw them lighting various ethnographic pieces in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art with strobe lights, highlighting a question I raised in my Museums are better than clubs piece: "What if Dionysus lived in a museum?"
Jan's flat is chilly compared with ours, but the lack of heat just shows his commitment to sustainability, and -- being as big a Japan fan as I am -- he supplies Japanese-style blankets (recycled ones!) that you can either fold on the floor and sit on or drape around yourself. I'm very jealous of his Technics SL1200 turntable, which on Saturday was playing New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies -- a record I bought when it first came out in 1983, and which produced all sorts of weird juxtapositions in my head (when I was listening to it I was working a data entry job at Lloyds Bowmaker in Edinburgh, living in a mezzanine room overlooking the Firth of Forth). The CD is Kalk Seeds, a Karaoke Kalk compilation which includes a Toog track.
Flexibility -- Design in a fast-changing society is an exhibition Jan recently saw in Turin (currently Design World Capital for 2008). It's held in an old prison (the Designboom coverage is excellent, and the location looks amazing), and continues for another week. The exhibition "explores the diverse ways of designing the world and society starting from a concept of adaptability, from the perspective of transforming town and city environments into more elastic places, durable but also welcoming and changeable spaces". Fernando Brizio's Renewable Clothing (in which ink seeps out of open felt pens speared into a white dress) is strangely sexy:
I also liked New York design duo Antenna's pretty sandbag installation, an aestheticization of a flexible element associated with emergencies, wars, disasters. There's nothing like a crisis to make you focus on flexibility, impermanence and improvisation.
Jan has a framed picture on his wall of Yama-Sama from Tokyo Bopper, who's a bit of an icon at our house too. Above the record player is a poster for a Berlin photography show (now over) called PUNKTUM. You can see a Flickr slideshow of images from it here.
Designers, Visionaries and other Stories is a collection of essays on sustainable design. This is very much the theme of my Post-Materialist column: John Wood’s essay, Relative Abundance: Fuller’s Discovery that the Glass is Always Half Full, for instance, is about the "hedonic treadmill", and calls for a new dream to replace the never-satisfied dream of American consumerism. In the new dream -- the replacement -- we'd learn to “accept rewards that place less emphasis on income, and more on an enhanced quality of life”.
I turned immediately to the essay entitled "Why design anything at all?" which says: "Asking people to stop consuming is a pointless endeavour, when what we should be pursuing is redirective behaviour which steers consumers towards greener and more sustainable alternatives". By the way, Naoko is playing a new iPod app in the picture above which turns the screen into a tactile, playable guitar keyboard surprisingly like a real guitar. Does this make us consume fewer guitars (saving wood, nylon and metal) or more iPods?
The flyer is for a show (now ended) called Sex Brennt, about how the Nazis in 1933 burned the books in the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering sexual research institute, the Institute for Sexual Science. Freud's books were also burned. "Down with the destruction of souls through the overvaluation of sexual drive!" the Nazis shouted.
Suicidal Textiles is a piece shown at Nobel Textiles, a show at the ICA which showcased a collaboration between art students from St Martins and Nobel-winning scientists. The Suicidal Textiles project saw designer Carole Collet paired with biologist Sir John Sulston. The idea is that decay -- in the form of programmed cell death and bacterial breakdown -- becomes included in the design process:
"The design concept is inspired by the process of programmed cell death; deliberate cell suicide, which enables organs and limbs to develop. This process is crucial to the shape and function of every organism. Carole chose to echo this principle in her collection of garden furniture and textiles that will evolve with time; the final forms only to be revealed at the end of the ‘apoptosis’ process. Using biodegradable (natural) and durable (synthetic) materials. Portions of the furniture and textiles will slowly biodegrade to reveal different final forms. The process of biodegradation will also support C. elegans, which feeds on the bacteria that live in soil and compost."
Hisae is always telling me to throw out the old copies of Relax magazine we have lying around the house -- the magazine ceased publication in 2006 -- but Jan has them too, probably for the same reason I do: ProQM had a fire-sale on all its unsold copies when they moved. The battleship-like forms are actually the silhouettes of buildings, from some exhibition or other, but I'm not sure where or what. Jan, care to give us a footnote?
Superlegitimacy is one of Click Opera's more significant posts, one I've rewritten and published. It appeared in a catalogue about the artist Matt Stokes and will pop up in The Book of Scotlands, transmuted for comic effect to a Scottish setting: "Yesterday I took one of Edinburgh's beautiful new trams, from Pilton to Restalrig. I was standing in the first car, right behind the driver."
Shortly after I rewrote the Superlegitimacy piece with a Scottish setting, an American train driver calling himself "Delta" started adding comments to the original thread.
"While I understand -- at least superficially -- the notion of superlegitimacy in Japanese living culture, in sharp contrast to western individualism mistaken as legitimacy, I have to wonder whether the train driver's actions really betray superlegitimacy," he wrote.
"I am a train driver myself, in the US (train engineer is the term we use here) and I see the difference daily: train drivers is what we do for a living, not who we are, and we would rather be scientists, movie stars or politicians to earn legitimacy. I personally disagree with this notion and tend to see my profession as a deeper calling, which, in a sense, guarantees its legitimacy for me.
"I have no doubt that the Japanese train driver in the video wears his uniform on off days and may even be addressed as Mr. Train Driver by his wife -- this is who he is and without his role, Japan could not survive.
"Still, his actions betray something quite different: ritual habits. In our profession, many actions must be ritualistic, even in western societies. The complexity of the job requires that the driver practice good habits -- really, rituals -- or run the danger of forgetting something critical. The job requires persistent focus, continual analysis of conditions ahead and constant multitasking. In an environment such as this, practicing rituals helps simplify what is already too complicated.
"This may indeed be little more than "mirror, signal, manoeuvre."
"Still, fascinating for western eyes to see. Do you have a longer video of that fellow you could post?
I responded enthusiastically: "Wow, great to hear from a real train driver on this thread! And I take your point about ritual existing even in the West, and being a necessary part of the job. The film I posted is all the video I have, alas, but there may be other video of Japanese train drivers on YouTube."
"Very good point," said Delta, and then went off and found the videos I've embedded on this page, "in which it is explained why these engineers make certain pointing motions".
After watching these videos, Delta noted one where drivers (or possibly conductors) are changing shifts. "They seem to compare watches (having standard time on railroads is critical), exchange words and salute. Another ritual."
Ritual becomes Delta's explanation for the strange movements I'd noticed in my Tokyo train driver: "Looking at the last engineer, it seems to me that what he is doing is "going through the motions." Before taking any action, such as throttle out, he checks conditions outside (e.g., the signal governing his movement), and inside his cab (indicators, doors-closed lights, etc.). ALL engineers must go through these checks before moving. It seems that Japanese engineers are required to actually point physically to items being checked. This will reinforce completeness for the checklist and assure that no brain lapses happen."
Delta concludes: "Ours is an extremely high responsibility. I like the Japanese approach.
"Again, however, this does not mean that your original point is invalid."
06:44 pm - Man the controls! I think I just unlocked a cheat code for the shower.
Hold temperature gauge at 8, point showerhead at 35°, turn pressure gauge to the left continually until the boiler makes a groaning noise. You now have unlimited pressure. Current Mood: Refreshed
02:37 pm - Babylon a fall! One thing the current financial crisis ought to be making us say (though I haven't seen anyone saying it yet) is "Shit, the Rastafarians were right -- Babylon a fall!". These past couple of weeks have seen the Rastafarian concept of Babylon looking stronger and smarter, and our own concepts about the efficiency and intelligence of the market system looking ever weaker and more stupid. If Bush and Blair and Brown thought that Babylon would save us, it's now becoming clear that it won't. Instead, Babylon is more likely to do what the Rastafarians have been telling us all along it will: Babylon is likely "a fall".
The Rastafarian concept of Babylon is one we all understand in its broad outline. Babylon is the white man's world, the oppressor's world, the world of the slave-taker and slave-trader, the world in which precious spiritual things are reduced to mere commodities. It's a world characterized by greed and dishonesty, a corrupt and decadent world, a world with no respect for nature and no respect for humanity. One should have as little to do with it as possible -- one shouldn't deal with Babylon. For, because of its endemic vices and iniquities, Babylon shall fade and Babylon shall fall, just like the reggae songs tell us.
Babylon in reggae and in Rastafarianism is a catch-all phrase, a metaphor. The real, historical Babylon, Wikipedia tells us, "was a city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which can be found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers (55 mi) south of Baghdad." Interestingly, the current-day location of Babylon is occupied by the Americans, who are without a doubt the current-day metaphorical Babylonians too. Ominously, though, "all that remains today of the ancient famed city of Babylon is a mound, or tell, of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in Iraq." Babylon was a holy city by 2300 BC and the seat of an empire by 612 BC. It boasted a globalization-friendly skyscraper in the form of the Tower of Babel and a world-standard tourist attraction in the form of the Hanging Gardens. And yet, by 141BC, Babylon was to be found "in complete desolation and obscurity". Babylon a fall.
We could call Babylon, the Rastafarian concept, a "cautionary metaphor". By tunnelling far back into the past, the Rastafarians point to the fall of one empire, map it to the current empire, and preview, by extension and with relish, its fall too.
As David Bardfield explains in The Roots of Babylon (The Dread Library), the concept as it appears in Rastafarianism comes from Marcus Garvey's teachings, which map the exile of African slaves in the Caribbean to the exile of Jews into Babylon, as described in The Bible. It's a word which is shorthand for a whole political program: "Instead of saying "Injustice must fall", "Poverty must be alleviated", or "Jamaican legislation must represent its people", a Rasta need only say "Babylon must fall".
Babylon represents a range of corrupt and unjust institutions: politics, police, laws, even cities are "Babylon".
What's really remarkable is that the speeches from both sides of the current US presidential debates could very easily be reframed (I'm sure there's a text engine out there that could do it with cut and paste) in Rastafarian terms. When McCain and Obama agree that "Washington is broken, and Wall Street is broken", or when they talk about greed and corruption being endemic, they're basically recognizing that they live in Babylon. Even Bush, admitting that the $700 billion bailout may not solve the financial crisis, is warning us that Babylon may not be easily fixable. It may, indeed, fall. In fact, in a long enough perspective, it's absolutely sure to.
Babylon has been a theme in my own music -- I even put an image of Haile Selassie on the inside of my 2006 album Ocky Milk. Here's a clip from a track on my forthcoming Joemus album which pits "the Babylon King" against his nemesis, a "Jahwise Hammer":
11:33 am - SuperCollider! Right, I only heard about this yesterday, even though the software was first released in March 1996 (although it's enjoyed quite a few improvements since then). SuperCollider is, according to its sourceforge site, "an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server."
According to Wikipedia, it's used by a fair number of notable artists including Aphex Twin, Autechre and Peter Gabriel. Wikipedia makes no mention, however, of its use by iPhone-wielding Japanese female Kraftwerk homage, Craftwife.
I tried to install it last night, but the code was recently changed to refactor some things into a separate library and the SConstruct file hadn't been updated to reflect that. It was, however, updated this morning, so I've finally got it working.
Unlike the $200 Vocaloid I bought earlier this year, SuperCollider, previously commercial, is now Free Open-Source Software. It works on Mac OSX, and to an extent on Linux (the difference is that, apparently, Linux doesn't (yet?) get all the fancy graphical stuff OSX gets). There's also a Windows port, known as PsyCollider.
I don't have time to play with it right now since I have to do mundane things like pay my rent and sleep through a lecture on Formal Models of Computation, but I'll get on it this afternoon.
2/Today, however, I would like to classify the English singer Simon Bookish, who has a new album out next week, his third, "Everything/Everything" (Tomlab), "a big band song cycle about science and information".
4/Before Bookish released Everything/Everything he released Unfair/Funfair (2006) and Trainwreck/Raincheck (2007). Generic titles containing consistently quirky punctuation are good.
5/Simon Bookish is the stage name of Leo Chadburn. Leo/Simon (as I expect he would enjoy being called) is very tall and always looks more interesting than anyone else in the room.
6/Pitchfork called him "the long-lost son of Jarvis Cocker".
7/Other people (I still love you, powpowpow!) have said "he thinks he's Momus" and "but Simon Bookish is quite a bit better than anything he's done in years". Grrr!
8/Tracks on the Simon Bookish Myspace page make it seem as if this new album -- played by a fifteen piece band rather than Bookish's usual digital synths -- is a great leap forward, a coming-of-age.
9/It is therefore time to say some things about Simon Bookish.
10/But first, let's watch him performing a song called Interview, from his previous album.
11/ I like the way the backing track is almost Brian Eno's Golden Hours, which is probably my favourite Brian Eno song ever.
12/ The repeated refrain "Queen Victoria", and Bookish's outlandish garb, make me think of him as a futuristic "New Victorian Dandy" type.
13/A typical Bookish lyric: "the royal meteorologist's expression is pained". This is refreshing as a break from "let's hump and grind one more time", but not refreshing if you set your watch by Divine Comedy lyrics.
14/Reviewing Ocky Milk, Simon Bookish SLASH Leo Chadburn kindly called me "one of the most ingenious, pranksterishly self-aware musicians around". He criticized my Jamaican accent (correctly), though, and thought some of my friendly songs were mawkish.
15/If I might be allowed to criticize back, I would say that I find something emotionally attenuated (not mawkish enough) in Simon Bookish songs. Where, gentlemen, is the soul?
16/If Interview has the sound of Golden Hours, it certainly doesn't have the soulfulness of the Eno song.
17/People Simon Bookish has been compared to in reviews: Pulp, The Divine Comedy, Momus, Steve Reich, Marc Almond, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson.
18/People I would compare him to: David Cunningham, Wire, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, The Books, Dickon Edwards, Idle Tigers.
19/Artists I would not compare him to, but might compare to each other (because they're all out of control, dark, subconscious, soulful and fascinating to me): PiL, Tricky, No Bra.
20/No Bra's Susanne Oberbeck might be the only person in the room more extraordinary-looking than Simon Bookish, if a room were to exist where they both were.
21/I don't know why, but No Bra songs like She Was A Butcher and Doherfuckher touch me in a way Simon Bookish songs don't. Perhaps because, as Susanne says, "for me music is about relating emotion". There's something vulnerable and dangerous there. No Bra songs are "bad", but in a good way.
22/Boomkat classifies the new Simon Bookish album as "laptop folk / americana", which is completely weird, especially since the American empire has this week officially fallen. Laptop folk / Americana is the category my Folktronic belongs in, but not his Everything/Everything.
23/Simon Bookish asked John Talaga -- Fashion Flesh -- to do a remix for him for a single called Leo Being Simon Bookish.
24/Simon attended the Guildhall School of Drama and Music in the Barbican.
25/In 2004 Simon presented Fear of Music, a deconstruction of the work of Talking Heads at Limehouse Town Hall.
26/David Byrne played a track from Everything/Everything on his podcast recently.
27/Not Wanting To Say Anything About John Cage is an art piece Simon Bookish has presented.
28/He has also made a new score for Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk CIrcle at the National Theatre, and appeared in the production as The Singer.
29/I would like to inform you that I approve of Simon Bookish's new Tomlab release wholemindedly.
["He tries to make a connection between religion and all the wars and violence in the world..."]
Facepalm...
I'm so sick of this argument. Big name atheists of today pretend to ride in valiantly on their white steeds to rescue us from the horrible fantasy of religion for the betterment of mankind. They need to read a history book.
I say bring back the Friedrich Nietzsche style atheists, at least he was honest about the unavoidable bloodshed in which atheistic philosophy results.
Admittedly, I don't know Nietzche too well, but I'm fairly sure he didn't say that a lack of belief in God would lead to bloodshed. It's my understanding that Nietzche realised that belief in God would have to be replaced by something, and that that 'something' would be either perspectivism or nihilism. Neither perspectivism nor nihilism seem particularly martial to me. In fact, I would go as far as to say that perspectivism would probably decrease wars by naturally leading to an increased respect for competing ideologies, and that nihilism would decrease wars because nothing is important enough to fight for (or over). This is probably a grossly oversimplified view, and perhaps it doesn't work that way, but I'm all but certain Nietzche never said that an atheistic philosophy (which begets the question: "Which one?") inevitably leads to bloodshed.
12:41 pm - new job role So... Yeah.... new job role is ...... intresting to say the least! With a combination of outdated training databases to practice on and going through everything pretty much blind, I'm pretty much blagging it! It's been a long time since I've been in this postion and to be honest I am so out of my comfort zone :/ It's only the third day so far, so not getting too stressed out about it......yet. In other news, all is well in Andyland. Parents are doing well with nothing major to report. Elizium was ace, and seriously long over due! Never did go to Obedience School this time round due to having to be at the doctors in New Deer at 8.30 in the morning for a stock up on Champix to aid the stopping smoking. And I think that's about it for now. Current Mood: confused
12:00 am - How fortunate the man with none "There is no money in this town! The whole economy has broken down! Oh, where is the telephone, is here no telephone, oh sir, goddamit, no!" What a great time this is to buy, listen to, and sing along with Robyn Archer's fantastic albums of Bertolt Brecht's theatre songs! These were a huge influence on early Momus; hard, unsentimental, witty, wise, Marxist takes on a 1920s economic collapse everyone's suddenly invoking again.
One of my favourite Archer-Brecht songs is The Solomon Song. The translation sung by Marianne Faithfull misses the point of Brecht's original, which is that assets (the wisdom of Solomon, the beauty of Cleopatra, the courage of Caesar) can suddenly turn into liabilities. The John Willett translation sung by Robyn Archer is much better, ending each verse, and each virtue, with the thought "how fortunate the man with none"! (Lotte Lenya's version is more concise: "Now I thought that brains were good -- guess not!")
Like Oscar Wilde before him, Bertolt Brecht had a way of turning simple inversions of received ideas into satirical wit. For Wilde it becomes superficial not to judge by appearances and "evil" becomes a way to explain the curious attractiveness of others. This effect works because the binary divisions of semantics are arbitrary and exaggerated. The more these divisions are repeated, the more a kind of counter-sense builds up, the sense that the opposite is also true and ought to be expressed from time to time. A Wilde or Brecht witticism allows that expression, usually followed by a releasing rush of laughter. Yes, raping a child-bride in her nightie just makes Mack the Knife more roguishly attractive! Liabilities are secretly assets, and assets liabilities.
If these reversals (and the arbitrary, repeated exaggerations of semantic binaries they depend on) thrive in comedy and wit, they also thrive in times of crisis. In a crisis, the received wisdom and habits which once kept everything going have collapsed. Suddenly their opposites rush into the vacuum with the force of suppressed truths. Wow, what we thought were assets were really liabilities! And what we thought were liabilities were really assets!
Recently we've seen that happening to any state unfortunate enough to strike oil, and therefore to be invaded for its oil, or to have no weapons of mass destruction and consequently be invaded for having weapons of mass destruction, while those with them are tiptoed around. Or you could see it in the financial meltdown, where people with money in the bank are now faced with the prospect that it might not always be there (and not because they take it out, either). Robert Peston, blogging for the BBC News website, says: "There is a widespread perception that the £35,000 limit to deposit protection in the UK is inadequate - and that it makes our banks more at risk of a run on retail deposits."
They're talking about a run on retail deposits -- normal, everyday bank accounts -- on the BBC website! We really are entering a looking glass world, one where even the firmest certainties of former times are reversed. If having money in the bank is no longer a sure thing, neither is owning property, currently losing its value faster than you can keep up your ludicrously over-inflated mortgage payments.
Those of us who've owned nothing for years are, at this point, feeling slightly vindicated. Especially those of us who moved to Berlin, attracted precisely by the city's appalling problems -- the fact that it's as broke and as out-of-work as we are. Berlin isn't just the city at the heart of the Weimar Republic our own civilisation is starting to resemble (celebrated by Brecht as The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), it's also a city whose liabilities -- in the form of poverty, unemployment, empty buildings -- are, from a certain point of view, its greatest assets.
Here's comic novelist Julian Gough -- a Berlin acquaintance, and one of the sharpest, quickest-minded people I've ever met -- being interviewed last year on an Irish TV show. Julian talks in this clip about why Berlin's liabilities are assets for artists, why it's good for artists to have no money, and how he saw all along that Irish property was absurdly overvalued (he compares the collective delusions of the popped property bubble to Scientology):
Like Wilde before him, Julian Gough is unrelentingly paradoxical throughout his Late Show interview. He says he's more qualified to write about Ireland because he doesn't live there (exactly the reason I'm currently writing about Scotland, by the way), he says being poor and unemployed is better than being rich, he says the unemployed man's time -- properly calculated -- is worth more than an employer could afford, he says houses aren't worth the prices paid for them, and he imagines priests being seduced by children rather than vice versa (an inversion first seen in Freud's Seduction Theory). Gough also wears a long scarf that not only trails the ground, but breaks all the rules for ground-trailing garments by being show-up-the-dirt-white.
These inversions aren't just the prerogatives of the wit and the provocateur. They're also the essence of the license accorded the Shakespearean fool, the one allowed to be mad and, in so being, to be sane; to tell lies and, in so doing, to tell the truth. The fool above is from Peter Brook's film of King Lear. Normally the fool is just background noise, a song and dance man. But in times of crisis he changes places with the king, and his madness becomes the new sanity; in King Lear, the crisis sees the king becoming the mad one and, in becoming mad, sane. We may be in such a time now; a time in which paradoxical fools are suddenly right, and former kings and bankers wander the wilderness, mumbling to themselves.
I hope that whoever wrote this sign doesn't study Formal Logic.
Anyway, I have everything at uni sorted now. Managed to speak to my advisor and because I managed to complete two 30 credit classes last year (The Philosophy of Sex and Hume) I'm only doing three 15 credit classes per half-session rather than four and a fuck-off 5000 word project. Nervous breakdowns should be kept to a minimum. The amount the bloody queueing I've done just to get stuff done is rediculous. My classes this half session are The Philosophy of Film (lol yeah, it'll be second year film studies ALL OVER AGAIN!), Exploring the Emotions (Which sounds namby-pamby but is more focused on Mind-Body problems) and Berkeley (Who famously stopped existing because his girlfriend stopped seeing him)
In other news, I can't see headlines like Space Freighter is Destroyed without thinking of Earthshock. Current Mood: okay
My favourite piece in the show was a video by photographer Hermann Huber of the Tiring building, a big shabby commercial centre in the centre of Cairo. With the eye of a still photographer, Huber leaves his camera set up to watch, in real time, casual moments of "street life" unfold in this warren of corridors, more like a covered city than a building. Gradually, you begin to understand how the dreamlike space fits together; Huber's static framings swivel, overlapping scenes you've seen minutes before. The time element is used mostly to communicate the acoustics of each environment, and also to show a certain existential quality: there's boredom and loneliness in the men caught staring -- both menacingly and pleadingly -- into the camera for minutes on end, and relief when they're joined by a friend for a smoke.
My second-favourite piece in the Cairoscape show was another video, "Chinese Sweet, Chinese Pretty" by Doa Aly. It's a reportage about Chinese peasant farmer women who've relocated to Egypt and make a living by selling lingerie and nightwear to the Egyptians from door to door, fishing them out of black garbage bags and modelling them for prospective customers. Watching the video, I had the following sequence of impressions:
1. After the scowls and machismo of the Egyptian men in Huber's video, sheer relief to be in the company of chatty, friendly Chinese women. I personally experience the Middle East -- and men -- as somewhat threatening and alien, and the Far East -- and women -- as reassuring and familiar.
2. A fascination with the "double foreignness" of the scenario, from my point of view. This wasn't just a video about Asian people, or a video about Cairo, but a video about Asian people in Cairo, made by an Egyptian artist. It therefore appeals to my Romantic sense of the exotic, and to my orientalism. (I'm trying to be honest here!)
3. The thought that -- given the current financial crisis -- we might all learn something from people who work without bank loans and without shop premises, in selling mode but not in a particularly capitalist-as-we-know-it mode.
Googling the piece when I got home, I found that the video has been quite widely exhibited since it was made in 2006. It's been in biennials, at Tate Modern, at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Something about it appeals to curators putting together shows which -- in the critical clichés -- "interrogate" globalization and migration by means of "dialogue" and "gaze".
In Focus tells us that "Aly is mainly interested in ideas relating to performance, growth, and identity; the constant struggle to Become which gives way to a hybrid form forever suspended between different sets of connotations". The blurb for the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial showing calls the video "an interrogation of the dynamics of cross cultural integration in Egypt", and adds: "Issues of displacement, belonging and memory are re-occurring themes that speak to the particular dynamics of globalization and migration and their effects on individual lives in and beyond Africa".
For Brian Holmes in Transform it's an Egyptian "gaze on immigration to their own country, and a look at the city from the radically different perspective of Chinese peasant farmers who find a way to improve their life back home by means of a temporary stay in Egypt". And for Nerve it gives "the sense of the individual as part of the vast and complex process of global migration".
Tate Modern, meanwhile, uses the video to remind us that "movements across international boundaries can lead one to encounter a storm of political and historical meaning... the pressures and fantasies of a better life which prompt the desire for migration must negotiate the limits of walls, barriers and occupations, as well as economy and status".
Now, all this curatorial langue de bois is perfectly true and perfectly reasonable and admirably progressive, even if it quickly becomes a boring cliché to those of us who encounter it too often. It seems to see the world through a rather 90s, Andreas Gursky-ish lens; globalization is occurring, it tells us, but not without problems and human consequences. It presents an "Egyptian gaze" on these problems and consequences, but fits it into a Western curatorial framework. What's more, when you look at the biography of the Egyptian artist in question, you find that she's working as a design intern in Milan and New York. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but this is not "the deep other"; there is nothing deeply resistant to Western framings here. This video is made by someone much closer to "our" perspective than the average Cairo resident.
I wonder, most of all, what it means that the curatorial stuff leaves out the things I mentioned in the numbered list of my own personal responses. All this talk of globalization pointedly ignores the Romantic, escapist and exoticist angle which I responded to -- foreignness for the sake of foreignness, doubly strange because it's doubly foreign. This, not economic and social ruminations on the process of globalization, is what made me sit fascinated in front of the video.
But to frame it this way sets me up for inevitable disappointment. I'm disappointed -- as an unrepentant orientalist, interested in net difference -- both by a curatorial tone which basically seems to come straight out of The Economist, and by discovering that the Egyptian artist is in fact a design intern in New York. The curators seem to usher you towards one kind of personal pleasure (the pleasure of knowing you're a good person, concerned with human geography and the consequences of globalization) but to block the way to another (the pleasure of escaping, for twenty minutes or so, your own life and your own culture, and perhaps of learning something by an encounter with true and utter difference, and perhaps even the pleasure finding foreigners -- or just their fabrics -- sexy).
Or is this just a question of curatorial texts (the kind nobody reads, to be honest) being a sort of Freudian super-ego, and orientalist pleasure being a sort of id, unspeakable but powerful, a kind of buzzing hub of pleasure supplying the real power of the aesthetic experience? And mightn't the cultural-historical equivalent of this personal id be empire, the thing the curatorial texts don't mention, perhaps because to mention it might be to propose globalization as its contemporary face?
Do you see what I'm getting at here? If we have empire (disguised as "globalization"), why can't we have its cultural corollary, orientalism? Maybe we do. Maybe that's what this art is, secretly. Then again, given the current meltdown, I think our empire just went. And what may replace globalization (the globe as we'd like to see it, all roped together in our perspective -- globalization in Fareed Zakaria's odd phrase as "America's great mission") is globe: the world as it is, unphased by (and uninterested in) what we see as its foreignness.
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Refreshed
Babylon in reggae and in Rastafarianism is a catch-all phrase, a metaphor. The real, historical Babylon, 
As David Bardfield explains in 
Babylon has been a theme in my own music -- I even put an image of Haile Selassie on the inside of my 2006 album Ocky Milk. Here's a clip from a track on my forthcoming Joemus album which pits "the Babylon King" against his nemesis, a "Jahwise Hammer":
1/The Dewey Decimal System is a system for classifying books. 
19/Artists I would not compare him to, but might compare to each other (because they're all out of control, dark, subconscious, soulful and fascinating to me): PiL, Tricky, No Bra.
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confused
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okay
