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Current Preoccupations, week 40
Last week, I found myself waiting in a long line of twenty-something-year-olds in fancy dress, Goths in black leather and chains, trans waifs in white pancake makeup and platform wedgies. The line snaked around a block by London’s St. James Palace; the evening was warm, and the mood convivial. It was opening night: we were…
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Current Preoccupations, week 39
Any fool can see that the head of state is naked, that he is a complete phony — except for himself. Such appears to be the premise of The Emperor’s Clothes, a fairy tale I see referred to more and more. Apparently, Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 parable is awfully relevant today. Reading yet another reference…
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Texting with … Lilia Topouzova
I wanted to show that history and memory are inseparable—and that unsilencing is itself a method.
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Current Preoccupations, week 38
Last Saturday I saw a play called « Mother Has Arrived ». It was written and directed by Than Hussein Clark, an American artist based in Glasgow and Genoa. His project was half of a larger installation called « Anal Peace » that is being shown at Corvi-Mora, an art-gallery in South London. Clark’s half…
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Current Preoccupations, week 37
The elderly gentleman seemed at first sight to be having some kind of seizure. He was lying on the ground, his body shaking convulsively. Young men and women in yellow hi-vis jackets, whom I took to be paramedics, were bent over, questioning him. Then they picked him up by his arms and legs and head…
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Of trotting horses & angelic words
I was reminded of Muybridge’s moving pictures while looking at the serial attempts of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348/49) at rendering the invisible visible.
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Madame Blueberry’s insatiable want
Madame Bovary leaps into a modern time, a new medium and another biological kingdom.
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Texting with … Vincenzo Latronico
« Nobody will want to read my book if I come across as a guy who quotes Kant on Whatsapp »
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Texting with … Julius Fintelmann
With Julius Fintelmann the ERB’s Sander Pleij texted about a musical shooting on a rooftop…
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Texting with … Johanna Sinisalo
With Johanna Sinisalo the ERB’s Sander Pleij texts about Finnish Weird…
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Texting with … Kamil Ahsan
With Kamil Ahsan the ERB’s Sander Pleij texted about editing a editing international yet regional magazines…
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Independence and/or Death
Brazilian artist Jaime Lauriano recreated the iconic painting Independence or Death (1822). A scorched earth remains in his own Independence and Death (2022).
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Borrowed time is borrowed money
« We’re borrowing money from Germany, and nothing with ‘borrowed’ in the name sells. »〖 Found in translation 〗
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The Van Leer headquarters is not a fish tank
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Van Leer Headquarters in Aalsmeer.
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Two palindromes
→ Setting of the Sun at West Mountain / Puffing & panting ←→ Worm-eaten Rimbaud / Always knowing whom ←
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Every end has a start
In 2005, Yamandú Roos embarked on the photographic project Europeans: one continent, forty countries, 65.000 kilometers.
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On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino
On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, newly translated: a Q&A with Alexander Chee.
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Read between the stripes
How do Swedes perceived striped shirts? Great question.〖 Found in translation 〗
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Panties of the people
The hall burst into laughter. I was left completely puzzled.〖 Found in translation 〗
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Overalls & eyeglasses
The glasses looked surprisingly like the ones in my Facebook profile.〖 Found in translation 〗
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The Mass of Mies
« Less is more »? The scale and shape of his body gave the architect Mies van der Rohe an unequaled weight and architectural authority.
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Judge a book by its covers
The task is to hold your attention for more than three seconds.〖 Found in translation 〗
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« droid » ➞ « druid »
The translator had probably not been familiar with Star Wars.〖 Found in translation 〗
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« Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
A violent mistranslation I still find amusing was with a poem titled 1965.〖 Found in translation 〗
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No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
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Coagulated soy juice
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Lucia Berlin belonged to a less sanctimonious age than ours.
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Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
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Marx and the art of natural winemaking
The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
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A can-can dancer performs a Christmas tree
〖 A killed darling 〗 Being alone in a new city over the holidays was wonderful and, as it happened, not to be repeated.
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On Kafkaesque pedagogy
Not the nightmare one might instinctively expect. Franz Kafka and Stig Dagerman on parenthood vs. educatorhood: who can educate a child?
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The Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center is a Metabolist pearl
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center in Tokyo.
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The Reliance is a revolutionary pigeon haven
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Reliance building in Chicago.
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Aarhus City Hall is a Gesamtkunstwerk
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: Aarhus City Hall.
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Animal Anti-Cities
« A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm’s width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino’s cat flâneurs.
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On paths not taken
« Genocide Studies » is a house with many rooms. It accommodates and even encourages a broadening of its central concept. And like all academic fields, it presumes its object of study will always be there.
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Place, non-place, place
« What happened was that we were driving on the highway from Izola towards Koper when we saw a drummer on the side of the road. So I immediately drove to the side of the road and reversed my car and asked if I could take some pictures. »
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The void that fills the void
Relics, and the places devoted to their worship, dotted the map of Europe and the Middle East. Saints, like today’s celebrities, were both omnipresent and faraway, once-vulnerable people who became something more than human.
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It wasn’t the beer
How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?
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How to write; or, how to insult
Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after class, a boisterous wrestling over insults exchanged. Nothing to be concerned about. Acquiring knowledge was, after all, a combative affair.
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Who will speak European? A puzzle
Brussels is a concave mirror that returns a concentrated (and somewhat distorted) reflection of the projection of its continent.
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Firsts in space
A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.
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Curtain call
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
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Only stupidity is hereditary
There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a way that we can clearly see the pages. It is a family tree of sorts, with eight rows of seventeen standing donkeys.