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Je me souviens…

Jean-Luc Nancy, 05.04.2017

Je me souviens de l’étymologie du mot « souvenir ». En latin impérial subvenit mihi ­signifiait : « il me vient à l’esprit ». Le verbe avait eu les sens de survenir et de soutenir, de venir en aide. Le français en a fait « souvenir », terme qu’emploient parfois l’italien, l’espagnol, le roumain ou l’anglais, même l’allemand, le russe, le hongrois. Le tourisme a favorisé une spécialisation du mot en « objet typique r­apporté d’un pays visité ».
J’aimais bien que le souvenir survienne ou se glisse dessous. Comme un magnet retrouvé au fond d’une valise. On en est un peu honteux : pourquoi a-t-on cédé à ce fétichisme ? Pourquoi ce désir de garder un morceau du lieu, du pays, de la ville. Ou une image, une icône à défaut d’un morceau véritable.
Mon grand-père maternel gardait un gant qu’un incendie à bord d’un bateau avait rétréci, sans le brûler, à la taille d’un gant de poupée. Ce gant me fascinait : j’y voyais l’incendie, le paquebot, la main et tout le bras de la personne.

Shut your eyes and see!

Every world view is linked to aesthetic decisions, every thought to its form, every judgment to perception and affect. The fact that this ­always requires an intermediary, a conveyor, is—given the omni­presence of multi- and mass media—both a trivial and a profound insight, the finest shoots of which range from Aristotle’s “the diaphanous” through Joyce to the present, in which one thing is blatant: what is made visible, and how, shouldn’t be left to either the techno- or ­other ideologies.

 

For what seems far too present today, not least in the form of conflicts about images and territories, and as opaque and diffuse as the present, reality, future, has the appearance … has a powerful appearance, which needs critical interpretation and intellectual sleight of hand alongside linguistic sensibility and aesthetic irascibility if it is to be countered. So here and subsequently we present a small section of the world as an interplay of hard and soft, sounding and iridescing differences and interferences; art and thought, critique and production interrelated and juxtaposed, playfully, seriously, and passionately, for a yet to be conceived “divergent thinking.”       

 

So it’s about ART in plural, that makes us see, animates the senses, that is physically compelling. About fiction, if this can be mentioned separately at all, about writing and transcendence: literature, invention, poetics, and poetry. And about DISCOURSE: lecture, talk, discussion, which all in all means a variety of imaginative and expressive forms in a space that is as subjective as it is plural: ­DIAPHANES as MAGAZINE.

 

With this first edition one thing about has been made, a beginning. A beginning that would not have been possible without the great commitment and still greater trust of all the contributors. From now on ­DIAPHANES will appear quarterly as a magazine to buy or subscribe to, continually supplemented online with further articles and translations, and placed within the resonances of a still unfolding book program. The project is accompanied by exhibitions, readings, and discussions in our old, new Berlin project space: espace ­DIAPHANES.

Corona Park, Hub of theWorld

Barbara Basting, 28.08.2021

I’ve always been fascinated by globes, which is why I photographed this very special example in 2011, and the FB algorithm recently presented it to me again. It’s said to be the largest model of the world in the world. I discovered it in Corona Park in the New York district of Queens, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. I went to the Queens Museum, whose creeper-covered wall is on the photograph’s right, mainly to see its model of New York. This impressive piece was commissioned by Robert Moses, director of the World’s Fair, in 1964. New York was supposed to look like an urbanist miracle, the most grandiose of 20th-century cities, the hub of the world.
Facebook fished the picture from the depths of its archives while I was thinking about the estate of an artist whose studio I had cleared out. It included a battered globe. Hm, I thought, can the FB algorithm read minds now? Is this going to make a nightmare out of a long-held human and above all dictators’ dream? It then struck me that I had mentioned “Corona Park” in the caption of the photograph. Here you can see the human side of the algorithm: it responds, as we all do, to emotive words.

 

 


Compared to the one in Corona Park, the globe from the artist’s studio was a modest example. But it did come from a good home. Columbus Globes—formerly Berlin, today Krauchenwies—must have sold it in the early 1920s, for it illustrates the complete colonial landscape of the nineteenth century. As an economic globe it showed all the countries’ raw materials and products, which seemed to be just waiting to be collected: cotton, coffee, pineapples, diamonds, camels, or even sponges (these from Libya). Knowledge as power, passed on to the bourgeois study. Although only partially: neither migration nor capital flows are shown, and oil, which was to write twentieth-century history, obviously didn’t figure yet.
Globes have been a symbol of power since the ancient Farnese Atlas sculpture showed the Titan with one in his hand. From the Renaissance, like maps, they became prestige objects for rulers. Whoever had the best maps and globes could navigate, rule, and—yes—exploit better. At some point the globe became merely a decoration for expos and living rooms, hotel and company lobbies, a signet for shippers and travel agents. As an instrument of power it was superseded by the increasingly well-filled data banks, ceaselessly trawled by search engines and processing programs. In this respect the data kraken Facebook is distantly related to the economic globe.
The photograph reawakened memories of a trip to New York that now seems like a fairytale from a far-off time. An acquaintance from there recently said that soon you could forget the city as we knew it—a battery farm with leisure facilities attached for nine million service commuters every day. So Robert Moses’ boastful model city will soon be part of a future archaeology.
The Queens Museum is currently closed. You name it: coronavirus. The globe, expensively restored a few years ago along with the model, is still standing. For a moment I imagine everything overgrown by the creepers on the museum wall. Corona Park, by the way, is part of former Algonquin territory. Swampland that served New York for many years as a garbage dump.

 

PS: Big corporations have recently begun to withdraw their advertising from Facebook, because they disapprove of its lack of precautions against hate speech.
In 2017 the algorithm began to support groups and protect their discussion space. This has...

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I remember

Johanna Went, 08.06.2021

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and determined still to explore that city to his last living instant. Walking across the Shinjuku plaza, after taking the subway from Ueno district, I watched the livid ­multi-coloured projections from the digital image screens on the surrounding towers incise and deepen the already-entrenched furrows of his aged, disintegrating face, casting animated sequences across it—in Tokyo's illuminated plazas, memory corrosively infiltrates the body itself, abrades it, honing-in especially on the face, eyes and mouth—as his lips vocally conjured memories of his friendships of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s: Kawabata, Hijikata, ­Mishima… After passing the derelict structure of the immense Koma cinema that he loved and would be demolished soon after, we entered the near-darkened dense alleyways of the Golden Gai area, almost untouched for fifty years, and arrived at the discretely signposted bar, La Jetée, owned by Richie's friend, another obsessive agent of memory, the French film-maker Chris Marker, possessed by his own memories of the future, which Tokyo above all other cities disgorges, annulling or reversing linear time, oscillating between future-directed political contestations and now-lost corporeal gestures, transforming the megalopolis's malfunctioned facades and the imprinted bodies they momentarily contain…

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Artificial and Other Intelligences

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great Firewall. Its peepholes, so-called VPNs (virtual private networks), are officially forbidden even for foreigners, but woe if you don’t install these little assistants on your gadgets before crossing the border—your trip will be demanding without a solid knowledge of Chinese. For Google and its Maps are also blocked, along with the Facebook-Twitter-Wiki world and other sources of the bacteria of freely formed opinion. The Chinese are tied to the Alibaba-Baidu universe. Sure, the smarter ones all have VPNs. But communication mainly takes place via WeChat, the (enlarged) Chinese version of WhatsApp. WeChat is only used in the West by people who want to stay in touch with mainland Chinese. The censor’s arm is long.

 

 


Google is a hot potato since it was banned in China in 2014. So I was amazed to encounter its logo in Shanghai, with crowds of Chinese youth taking selfies in front of it. It was standing in front of a new, mostly privately funded museum of contemporary art, the Long Museum Westbund. Westbund is a somewhat sterile showpiece district with hermetically sealed luxury high-rise buildings, new empty boulevards, a river promenade for jogging, and a big Audi dealer. It smells of boomtown.
The line of Chinese selfie-youth was standing in front of the Long Museum because the World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC was taking place there. Unfortunately the museum had been cleared out for it. My long journey was all for nothing. Though not quite, for I learnt a thing or two: in China an art museum can be cleared out for an event in no time; in China young people think Google’s cool, banned or not. What’s more, in China a World Artificial Intelligence Conference apparently doesn’t need Westerners. I puzzled over what “world” stood for. Perhaps for “world domination” through AI surveillance? My Chinese friends, enlightened as they pretend to be, don’t like to hear such things. How arrogant of Westerners to think of the Chinese as digital prisoners! A gross insult! Colonial trauma sits deep—and is propped up, so it seemed to me. In the end I learnt the official linguistic convention. “Surveillance”? No, this is just “progressive Chinese technology.” It’s superficially similar to the algorithms of Google and Facebook, themselves by no means harmless. But in the end what counts is who has a hold on the instruments, and with what authority—and whether there are ways to resist them effectively.

 

PS: There is a continually updated list of websites blocked in China at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China
Despite vehement criticism of his data kraken, Mark Zuckerberg thinks that FB is the lesser of the two evils compared with what’s on offer in China: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-17/zuckerberg-warns-china-s-censored-internet-could-still-win-out. The FB share is plodding along with a downward tendency.

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Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline.
For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago at a late hour, when crossing the Île de la Cité in Paris, while he was riding westward from Notre-Dame. His creator, Louis Rochat, followed the recipe book of historical stage design from which historical heroes were cobbled together in the 19th century—and cathedrals too, as all the world knows since the blaze of Notre-Dame. You take, for example, a scepter, as stocked in the Louvre for just such reenactments. No matter that it belonged to Charles V, who was born 700 years later. You add in extras called Oliver and Roland. Who still knows that Roland was long dead by Charlemagne’s coronation? You ask Viollet-le-Duc, who’s puttering around Notre-Dame anyway, for a pedestal. Et vive Charlemagne!

 


Even contemporaries had their difficulties with the colossus. Conceived while Napoléon III still ruled, modeled in plaster for the World’s Fair of 1867, controversial after 1870 because of the war with Germany, cast in bronze in 1878, it was only purchased by the city of Paris in 1895 and placed in 1908: the year that Picasso and Braque rang in modernity with Cubism and heralded the deconstruction of the operatic realism so loved by the nineteenth century.
The church square was deserted when I photographed Charlemagne. No one on patrol, as it was before the major terrorist attacks. While busy with my smartphone, I heard something rustling, and in the flower beds I saw big fat rats eating leftovers from discarded packaging. I stamped my foot hard. They went on eating, unmoved.
I took a photograph of them as well, not without thinking with a shudder about Camus’s Plague. The eye of one particularly large creature glowed red in the flash. Later I posted the pictures of the monument and the rat side by side on Facebook, after Jean-Luc Godard’s adage that 1 + 1 picture equals a third. My diffusely imagined third picture had something to do with the eerie heroic pose of civilization and the no less eerie power of unmoved rodents.
But then Facebook suppressed the rat. Only the hero remained. Okay, Facebook doesn’t like the third picture. Either this is censorship, or the algorithm is overwhelmed by pairs of photos and the imagination located in their intervening spaces. This is cause for hope.

 


PS: For information on the monument I thank: https://lindependantdu4e.typepad.fr/arrondissement_de_paris/2009/06/la-statue-de-charlemagne-et-ses-leudes-une-statue-qui-a-eu-du-mal-%C3%A0-trouver-une-place-.html — Oh yes, ­Facebook’s share price has very much recovered despite the scandals around “fake news.” Here is the result of an inquiry by the British House of Commons: “Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report”: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/ cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf

 

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Behind the Great Firewall

Barbara Basting, 26.10.2018

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow Sea on the horizon. The region is considered to be the Chinese Riviera, and borders on the city of Qingdao. Under Emperor Wilhelm II it was briefly a German colony. Today the city is booming, and not just because of the German-founded brewery.
The lobby contains a children’s slot machine. You can fish for Walt Disney plush toys. Images of exploited workers in Chinese factories come quicker to mind here than elsewhere. When I access my Facebook page, I think I’m hallucinating, for the Facebook algorithm presents me with a souvenir picture of stuffed animals. Does their app now contain proximity readers?
I took the photograph on September 10, 2013, on Taksim Square in Istanbul. I was there for the Biennial. The Gezi Park protests had been violently put down in May. The atmosphere was palpably tense. The simit sellers were standing on the square with their old-fashioned trolleys as usual, as if nothing had happened, and as in previous years I bought one of the dirt-cheap sesame rings from a seller who told me he was a refugee engineer from Syria. Suddenly there was an alarming police presence by the numerous crowd barriers. The hitherto numerous passers-by dispersed with lightening speed.
One of the hawkers was making plush toys dance. I remember taking a photograph of them, because they seemed to me to be symbolic: distraction and placation in an uncomfortable situation.

 

 


I walked swiftly back to the Istiklal pedestrian zone. Groups of demonstrators approached me. Heavily armored vehicles with water cannons waited in the side streets. Busses released nervous young policemen in combat gear, wet behind the ears, prayer beads in one hand, gun in the other. Teargas stung my eyes at the English-language bookstore in Galatasaray, where I stopped briefly. I almost ran to where I was staying nearby. Heavy iron grating rattled down in front of the shops as I passed. Later I heard gunshots, shouts, and clattering. Next day I read that there had been no fatalities.
The picture of the Taksim animals awakens these memories, and superimposes them onto the sight of the animals in the Chinese slot machine while I am simultaneously trying to sort through my impressions of just a few days in China. Aren’t there certain similarities with Turkey, which I first got to know after 2000? A futuristic country, entirely devoted to progress. A proud society, whose winners demonstratively enjoy their privileges, as if in this way they could serve as models for all those who haven’t yet made it. Artistic and intellectual elites cautiously trying to create room to manoeuver. In Turkey it was a time when much seemed possible. Over and gone. No one can tell how a prospering consumer society will effect the centrally controlled Chinese state. Some wags say it all depends on whether the slot machine has enough plushies for everyone.


PS: the FB share is no longer doing very well, since the crash in summer. New problems are continually turning up, most recently a hacker attack on 50 million profiles: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-security-breach-50-million-­accounts/
Sign of an FB twilight? The Chinese have other worries. For them Facebook & co.
lie beyond the Great Firewall.

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Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

Barbara Basting, 10.04.2018

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west England. Nail studios had begun to interest me because I supposed them to be something like sociological indicator plants. How dumb or despairing must a women be to want to have Christmas trees applied to her nails at the height of summer?
Meanwhile I have turned my attention more to the parallel of the nail-bar boom with that of social media. The connection is militated by a look at the hashtag #nailart on Instagram (which belongs to Facebook). There are 35 million contributions here (as of September 2017).
You go all melancholy at the creativity that fizzles out in the digital nirvana. If I were a curator, I would conceptualize a nail-art exhibition. Subsections like Decor between Ornament and Crime, or Past its Prime. Miniatures Yesterday and Today. Materialities of Nail-Design Communication, including a chapter on the names of nail varnishes. One very expensive company calls a sludge-like color “particulière,” a dark brown-violet “androgyn,” a vague gray “horizon.”
I consulted an art historian regarding miniaturization. He advised me to take up a different trail: I should think about the aesthetic emphasis of the nails as claws. Animal portrayals, particularly those of ­heraldic beasts like lions, eagles, and bears, suggested themselves for comparison. Gender reflections also appropriate, found the cultural-studies-infected researcher. The Social Implications of Nail Design as an Indicator of Female Self-Assurance and Self-Stylization. Or something like that.

 

 

An exhibition on the subject of surfaces, which I saw on one of my travels at the Rotterdam De Nieuwe Institute, was a further source of thematic impulses. This exhibition actually included a nail studio. Curious, I approached. Before I had selected color and decoration, the nail varnisher introduced herself as a museum employee and made it clear that for reasons of cost and time she could only do one nail. Yet the museum was empty. In return I was supposed to answer a questionnaire on the exhibition. My color addiction was probably the reason why I left the institute with a strident blue index fingernail.

Shortly afterwards I saw the postcard of a work by an artist unknown to me, named Silvia B., showing a stuffed albino monkey. All its nails had been varnished red. It pretentiously drooped one of its paws like a little lady, while simultaneously observing the outstretched fingers, sorry, paws, of its other hand. The monkey’s face wore a self-satisfied, even narcissistic, somewhat spaced-out smile. I bought the postcard, and wondered for a long time if this was good or bad art.

PS: The Swiss weekly WOZ has published a brochure on “digital self-defence.” Against data collectors and aspirators like Facebook, available online at
www.woz.ch/verteidigung
In September 2017 Facebook revealed that it had circulated personally addressed advertisements against Hilary Clinton via fake Russian accounts during the 2016 American election. Under the heading of “Facebook versus democracy,” media professor Siva Vaidhayanathan anxiously comments in the New York Times of September 12, 2017: “We are in the midst of a worldwide, internet-based assault on democracy.” The Facebook share has recently been dodging around the 180-dollar mark.

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Boutiques on the Bosporus

Barbara Basting, 10.04.2018

I’m no longer very happy with Facebook. Recently the algorithm seems to be taking the platform into total despotism. And on top of that it’s continually being altered. Just when I’ve gotten used to the comforting stream of souvenir images, Mr. Zuckerberg decides to do away with them. Or is it my fault again, for not liking and sharing enough?
How wonderfully simple the old algorithm was. During a time I was often in Istanbul, it actually noticed that I was often in Istanbul. Perhaps five times in a row my snapshots from there were served up for compulsory recollection.
What you see here are the shoddiest of them all. While wandering around I came upon these sequined caryatids and the rather oppressive stairwell they lined.
We’re near the subway station Osmanbey, on the European side of Istanbul. Here there’s a cluster of boutiques offering religiously compliant ladies’ fashion. High-necked, long coat dresses, for example. No, not those dismal beige sacks, but fitted creations in colorful fabrics. Hoods instead of headscarves. Some of the patterns are really stylish and made for slim, gazelle-like women. And here and there you often see store windows with fantastical eveningwear that puts what you see at the Oscars in the shade.

 

 

I’d like to inspect the boutiques more closely. But I withdraw cautiously after noticing that the staff always consists of three men, usually two younger ones and a boss. They eye me disapprovingly through their windows, before which, clothed in jeans and sneakers, I stand and stare in like a child in an aquarium. Seeing straight away that I don’t belong to their customer segment, they turn to their tea glasses or the recently delivered, Chinese-labeled bales of dresses tightly wound in kilometers of plastic wrap.
Somewhere I read stories about Istanbul’s booming fashion scene. They gave the impression that Istanbul was inserting itself into a list of the Paris-London-New York-Milano-Tokyo sort. I mulled this over. Perhaps I had to reconsider my understanding of fashion.
Later, in the endless screening line at Atatürk Airport, my eye was caught by a group of black-veiled women heaving enormous trunks and packages covered in brown duct tape onto the conveyor belt. I guessed what was in the packages. Istanbul, that much I knew, is now the shopping mall of the Middle East, and what was once the Silk Road junction is now a polyester hub. I still regret not having climbed the stairs in Osmanbey, by the way.

 


PS: Following news of the abuse of Facebook’s user data by Cambridge Analytica for Trump’s election campaign, the Facebook share has sunk to 165 dollars.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows John Lanchester’s profound analysis of the kraken that the platform is: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product

The issue of “bots,” i.e. fictive followers, is nowhere near over:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html

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This is not your blood.

Aya Momose, 11.12.2017

 

 

 

What was your first thought today?
A snow storm apparently hits New York City. I’m wondering if today or tommorrow.

 

Is it true?
I’m not sure.

 

East or West?
East, if anything.

 

How old is your consciousness?
28 years old.

 

What is the problem with solutions?
Unchosen choices constantly create all the countless parallel worlds.

 

Can you recite a poem?
I can’t, but only in fragments.

 

What is the personal form of “our”?
Bokutachi-no.

 

Where is your center of gravity?
Around liver.

 

What is your description of the word “anonymity”?
A voice without a face.

 

Duchamp or Warhol?
Duchamp.

 

 What is your spur?
An absolute difficulty of understanding the other

 

Are you serious?
Probably.

 

What does “why” mean?
Throwing a stone into a pond to stare ripples on the water.

 

Which groups do you belong to? Choice of three to five.
Something not being male, something using words, and something walking on two legs.

 

Do you translate these questions into your mother tongue and back?
この質問をあなたの母国語で翻訳して返してもらえますか?

 

What is the name of that difference?
Things like holding a sponge hammer to face each other.

 

What book are you actually reading?
The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster.

 

Dogs or cats?
Cats.

 

 

 

What would you do if not art?
I would harvest honey in a damp thicket.

 

What should happen after death?
Staying there for a while, I gaze my body like through binoculars.

 

What is the personal form of “your”?
Kimi-no.

 

Where do you think you are going to?
Voice, the place where voices come from.

 

Blind or deaf?
Deaf.

 

Who does your past belong to?
Aged mother.

 

What Knowledge?
To find a new constellation.

 

Which faith?
Depriving while giving.

 

Can you describe the face of strangeness?
Surely different, although they’re pretty similar like twins. However, I don’t know what makes them different.

 

Your favorite geometric form?
Triangle.

 

 

 

What drives you mad?
The label of bottles. I couldn’t peel them off properly.

 

North or South?
To south, definitely.

 

What are your main worries?
After my death, no longer do I clear up all the misunderstandings in the past.

 

If you wouldn’t be you. What would you be the most alike?
A leaf-mimicking insect.

 

Looking forward, what do you see?
A white squeaky door.

 

Your favorite food?
Japanese wild plants, taste bitter and a bit earthy.

 

What would you like to get rid of?
The exploitation of something, that I wouldn’t intend.

 

Thinking back, what do you hear?
I hear someone singing high notes. That’s in foreign language though.

 

What would be the antidote?
A diary of the other.

 

Your most valuable possession? Only things.
Something to write memories down.

 

Your temporary frame of mind?
What if these simple days in our life had its script written by someone, as a series of these answers itself shaped a certain narrative just here.

 

 

 

 

All illustrations:

Lesson (Japanese)
2015, Single channel video, 7'16'' (looped)

© Aya Momose

 

Questionaire by Michael Heitz

 

 

 

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Custom Creates Law

Haus am Gern, 05.05.2017

Today’s civil law derives from traditions in which undisputed norms regulated the coexistence of members of a community in the form of rights, entitlements, and obligations. Within the framework of international law, custom refers to legal norms that have arisen from the usual ways that nations relate to one another, whether through diplomacy or aggression.

On extended travels through Israel and the occupied territories, Haus am Gern fixed U-locks engraved with the text CUSTOM CREATES LAW to fences, grids, barriers, and railings. A total of 74 locks were ­illegally attached (they could only be removed by force), the keys archived, and the sites documented by several dozen photographs, which were later assembled by computer into a single image.

The choice of places was made both spontaneously and in response to the history(ies) in situ. In Israel, in the densely populated cities and the arid deserts, the memories and remains of events that occurred decades, centuries, or millennia ago overlap, and are supposed as evidence to justify legal, political, and religious claims today—not to mention those places considered by the different religious communities as “promised by God.”

 

 

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  • Israel
  • law
  • legal practice
  • contemporary art
  • closure

Paradox I: That all things kill themselves

John Donne, 12.04.2017

To affect yea to effect their owne deaths, all living are importun’d. Not by Nature only which perfects them, but by Art and education which perfects her. Plants quickned and inhabited by the most unworthy Soule, which therfore neyther will, nor worke, affect an end, a perfection, a Death. This they spend their Spirits to attaine; this attained, they languish and wither. And by how much more they are by Mans industry warm’d, and cherisht, and pamper’d, so much the more early they climbe to this perfection, this Deathe. And yf between men, not to defend be to kill, what a heinous selfe murder is it, not to defend it selfe? This defence, because beasts neglect, they kill themselves: because they exceede us in number, strength, and lawles liberty. Yea, of horses; and so of other beasts, they which inherit most courage by beeing bred of galantest parents, and by artificiall nursing are bettered, will run to their own Deathes, neyther sollicited by spurrs, which they neede not, nor by honor which they apprehend not. If then the valiant kill himselfe, who can excuse the coward? Or how shall man be free from this, since the first man taught us this? Except we cannot kill our selves because he kill’d us all. Yet least some thing should repaire this common ruine, we kill dayly our bodyes with Surfets, and our Minds with anguishes. Of our Powers, remembring kills our Memory. Of affections, Lusting our Lust. Of Vertues, giving kills Liberality. And if these things kill themselves, they do it in ther best and supreme perfection: for after perfection immediatly followes exces: which changes the natures and the names, and makes them not the same things. If then the best things kill themselves soonest (for no perfection indures) and all things labor to this perfection, all travaile to ther owne Death: Yea the frame of the whole World (yf it weare possible for God to be idle) yet because it begun must dye: Then in this idlenes imagind in God, what could kill the world, but it selfe, since out of it nothing is.

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Problem IX: Warum haben Hurenkinder das allermeiste Glück?

John Donne, 12.04.2017

Vielleicht, weil das Glück selbst eine Hure ist? Doch eine solche geht beileibe nicht so sanft und nachsichtig mit ihren Sprösslingen um. Der alte natürliche Beweisgrund (dass das Beutemachen in verbotn’er Liebe ein ungestümes Vorgehen sei und deshalb mehr Geist beisteuere als bequemer und gesetzlich zugelassener Eheverkehr) mag mich leiten, doch wenn ich mich heute umschaue, sehe ich die Mätressen häuslich und sittsam werden; und sie und die Ehefrauen warten abwechselnd, bis man sie auffordert, dann sagen alle beide Ja, als lebten sie auf der Arche des Noah. Der alte sittliche Beweisgrund (dass die Hurenkinder die Verkommenheit ihrer Eltern erben und deshalb schon mit reichlich Vorrat begünstigt sind, wohingegen die anderen vom erbärmlich armseligen der Erbsünde allein zehren müssen) möcht’ bei mir die Oberhand gewinnen, aber da wir alle in Zeiten geworfen sind, wie sie heute nun einmal herrschen, so mag die Welt uns den Teufel ersparen, denn um verdorben zu sein, bedürfen wir seiner nicht; denn ich sehe Menschen, die drauf pfeifen, dass man ihre Lasterhaftigkeit zum Exempel macht oder die es verschmähen, sich von anderen zu ihrer Verdammnis verpflichten zu lassen. Weil die Gesetze sie der Erbfolge und der bürgerlichen Vorrechte beraubt, scheint es nur vernünftig, dass man ihnen dies ebenso vergilt, wie es die Natur tut, die schließlich die Vaterschaft der Gesetze inne hat, die den Weibern die Treue zu je Einem verweigert hat, sie dafür aber listig so geschaffen, dass sie Viele verlocke, weshalb den Hurenkindern eben de jure auch mehr Schlauheit und Geschick zukommt. Aber (ganz abgesehen davon, dass uns die Erfahrung lehrt, dass es auch unter ihnen nicht wenige Narren gibt), wollen wir doch einen ihrer hauptsächlichsten Beistände hinzuziehen, soll es uns denn angelegen sein, ihnen den Titel Narr abzusprechen. Und dieser (der einzige der noch geblieben ist) lautet, dass Weiber gemeinhin würdigere Männer wählen, als es ihre Ehegatten sind; und das nun ist de facto falsch. Entweder hat also die Kirche sie aus allen öffentlichen Ämtern des Dienstes an Gott enthoben, worauf sie nun bess’re Mittel sich suchen müssen, verdorben und auf diesem Wege Glückskinder zu werden, oder Teufel und Fürsten, die zwei Großmächte der Welt, treffen sich in eben dieser ihrer Großmächtigkeit – der eine macht den Bastard, der andere bescheinigt die Abkunft, so wie selbst die Natur große Gegensätze in Körper fasst und dort aufbehält. Oder vielleicht will’s auch der Zufall, und es ist deshalb so bestellt, weil sich so viele von ihnen auf den Gerichtshöfen herumtreiben, der Schmiede, wo gar manches Vermögen gepimpert wird, oder zumindest der Verschlag, wo man es feilbietet.

 

Übersetzung: Andreas L. Hofbauer

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Quaddie

Tyler Coburn, 12.04.2017

“Quaddie” is a term awaiting political correction, but how else should we describe the four-armed workers genetically engineered for three fall environments?
The Quaddies are the legal property of a mining company. As “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures,” they’re too many links down the Great Chain to share human rights and protections.
A Quaddie body is bottom-heavy: thin hips atop massive glutes. The lower arms bowed and muscled, the wrists thick, the digits squat. It’s what you get when you put a chimpanzee on a horse, the remove the horse.
→ Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free. New York: Baen, 1988

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Hermal

K.A., 12.04.2017

Im Gegensatz zu anders lautenden, und neuerdings immer wieder erhobenen, Behauptungen, ergreifen wir hier die Gelegenheit kurz nachzuweisen, dass wissenschaftlich ernstzunehmende und empirisch belegbare Grundlagen und Ausweise für Konstrukte, wie sie im Folgenden knapp angerissen werden, schlichtweg nicht existieren. Zwar hat Plinius d. Ä. in seinem Buch XXXVI vom Tempel der Fortuna in Antium berichtet, den Nero dort neu errichtet haben soll, doch bereits dieser Bericht entbehrt gemeinsam mit seiner Aussage, er hätte zur Gänze aus phengites (Leuchtstein oder Glimmer) bestanden, jedweden Beweises. Nicht nur mangelt es uns an archäologischen Funden, die auf einen solchen Tempel in Antium oder anderswo hinweisen, es muss auch unklar bleiben, worauf sich eine Wendung wie »Neubau« hier überhaupt beziehen soll. Glimmer ist ein hochgradig transluzides Mineral, das sich in hauchdünne Scheiben schneiden lässt. Dass diese trotzdem über die Härte des Marmors verfügen, hat Guido Panciroli aber dann im 16. Jahrhundert dazu erfunden. Wenn Plinius behauptet, dass es in diesem Tempel immer, auch bei geschlossenen Türen, helle bliebe, dann handelt es sich zweifellos um ein weiteres Produkt seiner Fantasie. Ausgehend von solchen rein spekulativ-fiktiven Annahmen eines Lapis specularum, referieren in jüngster Vergangenheit nun einige Publikationen – ich erspare mir an dieser Stelle genauere Verweise, denn es handelt sich in der Mehrzahl um obskure Druckwerke oder Blogeinträge, gleichwohl derlei »literarische« oder »mythopoetische« Bezüge nun auch schon in seriösen Veröffentlichungsorganen des IKR-BNT (Institut für Konsensrealität auf Basis -faktisch nachweisbarer Tatsachen) auftauchen – auf derlei »Grundlagen« und ergänzen sie um nachgerade lächerliche Erweiterungen. Man will nun von einem Adyton dieses Tempels wissen, wo pandrogyne Priesterinnen einzelne Steine (bearbeitet und unbearbeitet), Stelen oder phallische Diorit-Skulpturen mit flüssigem Butterfett salbten und mit taktil erregenden Stoffen (es stellt sich die Frage: »Wen sollen diese eigentlich erregen – sie selbst vielleicht?«) umhüllten. Mag man nun einwenden, dass Hypothesen zu imaginären Kulten, deren vorgebliche Tempel niemals existierten, kaum der Rede wert sein dürften; dennoch scheint es in Zeiten sich steigernder Verwirrung geboten, überall dort denen scharf in die Bresche zu fahren, die meinen, sich ihre fiktiven Historien einfach selbst fabrizieren zu dürfen. Zum Beispiel die sich wiederholende Wortverwendung »pandrogyn« – handelt es sich hierbei um einen Druckfehler, der von anderen geistlos übernommen und abgeschrieben wird, oder erfindet man sich hier gleich eine ganze Begriffslandschaft? Selbiges gilt für die »Herminen« oder »Herminalen«, wie man die Priesterinnen oder Kultdienerinnen (bei denen es sich wohl auch um Männer handeln soll) mitsamt ihrem »hermalen« Dienst zu nennen beliebt. Wie bei derlei Versuchen häufig, versucht man Fakten mit Hirngespinsten so zu vermischen, dass Pseudo-Fakten entstehen, die sich für die kritische Bewusstseinsbildung schließlich als schädlich erweisen. Ausgehend von einer an sich schon kryptischen Stelle des Aristoteles aus dessen Metaphysik, der zu Folge der »Hermes im Stein wohne/lebe/sei« entwickeln sich esoterische Gradienten, die sich zum einen durch frei erfundene Zusammenhänge absichern wollen, zum anderen werden »philosophische« Mutmaßungen angestellt, die wiederum dazu führen, diesen »Tempel« gleich überall zu finden! Die ganze Welt sei heute ein solcher geworden und allein eine »hermale« Lebensform würde den Weg weisen. Siliziumsand löse sich im Licht (lysioi lithoi !), alte Prozession wandeln sich zu neuen Prozessoren u. dgl. mehr. Im beklagenswerten Zustand, in welchem sich Teile der gegenwärtigen Forschungslandschaft heute befinden, liegt es dann auch nahe, dass populärkulturelle Elemente hier einfließen können. In einem erst kürzlich eingereichten Vorschlag für ein Symposium wurde ganz ernstlich nahegelegt, dass zwei Akkordfolgen [Eb F# Eb F# Dbm H F# und Am D Am D Cm G], die dem Soundtrack zu einem sechsminütigen Experimentalfilm aus dem Jahr 1949 eines obskuren kalifornischen Filmemachers entstammen, sich als quasi-pythagoräische Tonalsegmente dafür anbieten würden, mathematisch basierte Universalverhältnisse zu prüfen – und all das versehen mit dem Hinweis, dass jene Akkordfolgen der Begleitmusik hurritischer Zeremonialgesänge exakt...

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American English

Hendrik Rohlf, 12.04.2017

 

Richard Prince: American English
Sadie Coles HQ/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König: London/Köln, 2003
Limited Edition, ohne Paginierung

 

Das Foto mit der Frau auf dem Fahrrad wiederholt sich auf der Rückseite. Etwas ist anders, der Mund geschlossen, der Bildausschnitt leicht nach links verrückt. »American English«: Als Tableaus inszenierte und fotografierte Erstausgaben aus der Sammlung von Richard Prince, jeweils eine englische und eine amerikanische: J.G. Ballards, »High-Rise«, Jim Thompson, «The Killer Inside Me« (Lieblingsbücher von mir, weshalb ich das Buch unbedingt haben wollte, um jetzt zu bemerken, dass Philip K. Dick nicht dabei ist, obwohl ich mir dessen so ­sicher war) und Bücher von Kerouac, John Lennon, William Gibson u.a. Richard Prince schreibt im Vorwort: »I don't see fancied interest, I don’t see hobby or appreciation, I don't see exhibition or connoisseurship. The thing is, I don't see these things on my shelf. I just stare at them. They are there everyday. They change me.«

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How to Pilot an Aeroplane

Luc Meresma, 12.04.2017

China frisst Menschen

Damian Christinger, 12.04.2017

 

Richard Huelsenbeck: China frisst Menschen
Orell Füssli Verlag: Zürich/Leipzig, 1930
Erstausgabe, 352 Seiten

 

Richard Huelsenbeck, Mitbegründer und Drummer des Dadaismus in Zürich, kehrte in den 1920er Jahren den Querelen der künstlerischen Avantgarden den Rücken, um als Schiffsarzt anzuheuern und die Welt zu bereisen. China war für ihn eine Offenbarung. »China frisst Menschen« ist ein erstaunlicher Roman, wider seine Zeit geschrieben, in der im Westlichen Mainstream von der »Gelben Gefahr« die Rede ist. Huelsenbecks aufklärerischer Roman, verortet China als Spielball der Westlichen Mächte, als einen gnadenlosen Ort zwischen den Imperien, in dem das gesamte Personal des Buches, ob Deutscher oder Chinese, am Schluss scheitert und von der Geschichte verspiessen wird. Das Fazit des Buches ist so einfach wie nüchtern – Huelsenbeck beschreibt den Hafen von Shanghai so: »Auf den Bänken träumen mit hochgezogenen Knien einige Bettler, Strandläufer, Chinesen und Europäer. Der Hunger hat die Unterschiede der Rassen ausgelöscht.«

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Human Oddities

Oliver Hendricks, 12.04.2017

 

Martin Monestier: Human Oddities. A Book of Nature's Anomalies
New York: Citadel Press 1987
transl. by Robert Campbell, 192 pages

 

Bearded Ladies, Dwarfs and Giants, Hermaphrodites, Siamese Twins (see Heng and Chang on the book cover), the Mule-headed Lady, The Serpent-Woman, The Amazing Half-Boy (famous for his appearance in Tod Browning's »Freaks«), The Man with the Rubber Skin and many more, as well as one picture and a story that haunted me most: Pasqual Pinon, The Two-Headed Mexican, who apparently had an extra head on his forehead that could open and close his eyes and his mouth, but was unable to speak (in Per Olov Enquist's novel »Downfall: A Love Story« she is called Maria). The book ends with a picture of a bareheaded young monk with a perfect ball on a pillow in his hands. »The future of humankind?« is the final question beneath this picture.

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HER

DJ Helioglobal, 12.04.2017

 

Andreas L. Hofbauer, René Luckhardt: HER
Wien: Der Konterfei 2015
limitierte Ausgabe, 50 Seiten

 

In einem Onlineforum, das sich mit dem Umzug ins 40 Lichtjahre von uns entfernte Planeten-system TRAPPIST-1 beschäftigt, antwortet mir kürzlich einer, als ich anmerke, dass es ohnehin egal sei, auf welchem fliegenden Steinhaufen man herumkrieche, mit einem Zitat: »Es gibt in den Parawissenschaften bisweilen merkwürdige Sommermorgen, da sollte der Leser, der nur als Gast hier verweilt, beizeiten hineinwandern in hermetische Räume und sprachlos vor Staunen an grün-goldnen Anamorphosen sich erfreuen. Nah ist fern und nichts als sattgrüne Trance.« Das hätte Herman Melville  geschrieben, in einem Brief an einen Freund und sich dabei auf ein Buch zweier alter Jungfern (oder Großmütter?) bezogen, die dem Kreis um B. P. Randolph nahe gestanden haben sollen. Ausgerechnet diesen Band über Hermetik, Raumüberbrückung, Magie der Lachenden Fenster und der Kunst verzerrter Vorahmung, hätten bei einem Wiener Subkultur-verlag zwei Typen dreist -plagiiert. Der Band sei vergriffen, gleichwohl der Verlag schon ein HER 2 ankündige. Kurz: Ich solle das mal lesen (besser noch das Original, dieses sei allerdings noch schwerer aufzutreiben) und dann ausprobieren, ob es nicht doch einen Unterschied mache, auf welchem Gestein man dahinschreitet. Ich habe mir das Buch beschafft und es gelesen.

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Self-portrait

Pierre Guyotat, 07.04.2017

 

 

“This self-portrait is dated March 1962. I had returned from a mission as radio­man in the interior, in the Djurdjura, having received a warning from my comrades in the radio station. I already knew when I got out of the jeep that I was in for a bad quarter of an hour, a quarter of an hour that could last a whole lifetime. I came back, and saw a secret service or military police jeep. I immediately disappeared into our room. My buddies had already hidden my notes and a few of my things—soldier soli­darity. I only had time, only had the reflex, to go to the barrack room mirror and take a photo of myself. It’s almost a kind of self-portrait of civilian death. I thought that I would disappear from civilian life and find myself in who knows what kind of a hell. Shortly afterwards I was arrested, arraigned, and incarcerated”.

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12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media

Barbara Basting, 05.04.2017

The Facebook algorithm has noticed that I have something to do with art and museums, and presents me with a snapshot of a Louvre ticket from the pool of my earlier posts. At the time of the post the scrap of paper had already survived for years as a bookmark in a non-digital storage medium, a paperback from my time as a student in Paris.
Back then my day at the Louvre was always the first Sunday of the month. Free entry! Too bad that the side cabinets with Dürer and Vermeer were only open on weekdays, when students were entitled to the “tarif réduit C.” Half price, eight francs: equivalent to three baguettes. Today the Louvre is free for the youth of the EU under 26. The full price is 15 euros, equivalent to at least fifteen baguettes.

 

 


Mind you, the Louvre is now a great deal larger than it used to be. The “Grand Louvre,” with I.M. Pei’s hotly discussed glass pyramid, was one of President François Mitterrand’s “grands projets.” He led a cultural offensive along with his minister Jack Lang, as if this might save the already dented “grande nation.” No government since then has believed so resolutely in the reforming power of culture. The only foolish thing was that even the socialist Mitterrand was royally fixated, as it were, on “grandeur”—and on Paris.
The Grand Louvre is a huge success with tourists, and the most frequently visited museum in the world. But despite its expansion to Lens, into an economically stricken province, and the opening of an Arts of Islam gallery, the cultural belief that a Louvre could strengthen social cohesion has evaporated. Such manoeuvers, like the controversial founding of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, served more to focus a cultural-historical brand.
But suddenly now this: the newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, uses the neo-pharaonic glass pyramid, of all things, as the backdrop to his first speech, and sets the bar high in referring to its “audacity” and the Louvre as a founding icon of republican culture.
Not only in the light of such emotionalism do my visits to the Louvre in 1984 feel like time-capsule dives into the nineteenth century. At their heart were the Grande Galerie, the Italian collection, and the halls with the sublime historical daubs of Delacroix and Géricault. You just stood there and tried to make something of them.
For the Louvre, that product of the French Revolution, from which its founder Vivant Denon wanted to make a people’s museum, was still a museum of the elites in 1984. Communication, apart from date and title: zéro. But it was a treasure trove of art before the flood of images, a museum before the museum shop, the museum selfie, and solicitous impartation. There was nothing except the art. So you tried to understand what this art was. If you didn’t understand it here, where else?
It was all cloaked in magic, which for me has been lost in the oiled wheels of the art-consumerism machinery with direct shopping-mall connection. The ticket from 1984 has unexpectedly become the entry into this yesterday world.

 

PS: The share is fluctuating around 150 dollars. Ex-Facebook executive ­Antonio Garcia-Martinez reflects in the Guardian on Facebook’s ethical problems with ­target-group advertising: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/ 02/facebook-executive-advertising-data-comment. And Internet critic Geert Lovink asks in his recent book: “What is the social in social media?” http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1509507760.html

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12 Feb 2011 — 12 Feb 2017

Barbara Basting, 05.04.2017

Facebook recently wanted to make merry with me. To this aim it posted an entry on my notice board, which is actually closed to others. Because of the trolls. But for the FB people this barricade apparently doesn’t apply. Must be in the small print. The post I’m now sharing was somewhat unsettling: “Barbara joined Facebook 6 years ago!” I recognize my profile picture on the largest button. A selfie I took some time ago in front of a very corrugated silver-foil wall in an exhibition by Joëlle Turlinckx in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel, and in which I look like a streak of oil paint. Absurd attempt at camouflage. On the smaller buttons I recognize the selfies of my so-called Facebook friends. In the middle of the button salad an arrow. An animation to click on.
Here an urgent warning. It’s cringeworthy. A mockery. As thanks for all the years of FB membership I’m offered a mediocre animation in the style of a somewhat inane children’s book. It shows a balloon rising into the air with a wow-smiley and a card with my first name hanging from it. Then comes the text “Today may be just another day. And yet it’s something very special.” Why? Because it’s my Facebook anniversary, of course. Apparently I’ve been on Facebook since F­ebruary 12, 2011. The animation then presents me with a pinball machine with the magic date on a calendar page on top. Then like-love-rage buttons race through the gadgetry like pinballs, and along with a few pics from my past—called my “timeline”—the machine emits a spinsterly sigh of “How time flies!” The following five or six photographs have been fished out by the algorithmic ladle.

This so vivid presentation of my Facebook anniversary warrants a comparison with my hitherto service anniversaries as an employee. It’s the way of the world that sitting tight in a job is no longer acknowledged as generously as it used to be. On the whole you can be glad if you’re allowed to stay, or if you can stand the work long enough—and in particular if it isn’t just supposed to provide you with a living but also, quaintly, with meaning and work fulfillment. The unpaid work for Facebook is unconvincing in this respect, I’m afraid.

It does, at least, provide some gratification in the form of likes and free souvenirs. To be more exact these are algorithmically generated chance and forced souvenirs. I recently read, in a clever and most enlightening study by the literary theorist and social-media expert Roberto Simanowski, that precisely because of their algorithmic randomness these souvenirs, these memories are never joined into a genuine, coherent narrative, but only bait us with the illusion of one. Sadly, I admit it, this visual bait works fine with me. Because Facebook does without material gratification and remuneration, I have decided to participate monetarily from now on in the success, to which I have contributed, of the network as an advertising platform. For my Facebook service anniversary I have purchased a Facebook share (entry-level price: around 133 dollars). Now we’ll see how the trade in illusions develops.

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THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CLOUD NAMES

Dorothee Scheiffarth, 05.04.2017

Cumulus tuba ;
Cirrus cumulonimbogenitus ;
Wallcloud ;
Bannerwolke ;
Föhnfische ;
mother-of-pearl cloud ;
Altocumulus translucidus ;
Stratocumulus castellanus ;
Cumulus mediocris ;
Punch-hole nuage ;
Cumulonimbus calvus ;
Iridescent cloud ;  
Nuage nacré ;
Altostratus pannus ;
Cirrus floccus ;
Schäfchenwolke ;
Instabilité (cirrus) de Kelvin-Helmholtz ;
Plume nuage ;;;

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BIG BUGS

Beni Bischof, 05.04.2017

Forever!

Star

Shame!

Cheat

War

Wedding

Psych

Suicide

Dying!

Love

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GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE

Andreas Reihse, 05.04.2017

Setlist:
1 Luminous Procuress
2 Zero
3 Brass Canon
4 Mexican Tea Party
5 Jaguar
6 New Earth
7 Gas Giants
8 Evil Love

On stage: 10pm – 11pm
Zuschauer, gefühlt: ca. 3.000
Zuschauer, gezählt: 5.000
Klima: abendlich auffrischend, leichte Brise, zur Nacht hin schwer abkühlend
Bühnensound: zupackend
Publikum: euphorisch bis euphorisch verwirrt
Vor uns: Atom TM
Hinter uns: Ada
Backstage: Wagon
Sonstiges: Fotos, Autogramme, ankuschelnde Fans

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ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

Blixa Bargeld, 05.04.2017

Liebhaarber
Schnittstelle
Schnittweise
Haareszeit Friseur
Pierette res capillorum Haarschneiderei
über Kurz oder Lang
Salon Stilkamm
Wasser und Welle
Ja-hairgroup - Timecutter
Kommheim Haare schneiden
Hairtrend-Vision Berlin
HAIRLICH NATÜRLICH
Kopfgeist Beate Kodat Frieseur
Der Haarflüsterer® Berlin
Methaarmorphosen
haarjongleur Sylvia Scholz
Ha(a)rmonie
Haarstudio Abschnitt 22
Haar für Haar
KopfKunst Friseur
haargenau  & schnittig
Haarstudio Mit-Schnitt
Haareszeiten
Flhair
Kopfgeldjäger
Zu den Schnittigen
Haarstation (dabei das H gestaltet wie das H der Bushaltestellen)
Kaiserschnitt
Kamm 2 cut

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TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING

Hanno Leichtmann, 05.04.2017

1. Ringo Starr
2. Mike D.
3. Roland TR 808
4. Jaki Liebezeit
5. Paul Lovens
6. Anthony Williams
7. Valerie Scroggins
8. David Moss
9. Moe Tucker
10. Dannie Richmond
11. Robert Görl
12. Georgia Hubley

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Ich erinnere mich…

Discoteca Flaming Star, 05.04.2017

Ich erinnere mich an gewellte goldene Kornfelder.

 

Ich erinnere mich an mich; in der ­Peripherie des Bildes.

 

Ich erinnere mich an die Geheimpolizei Francos, wie sie mich eines nachts aus meiner Wohnung holte, wie sie mich die ganze Nacht be­fragte über meine Liebesbeziehung zu Antonio R. L. Ich erinnere mich an das Stück Zeitung, welches Antonios Tod am nächsten Tag wiedergab.

 

Ich erinnere mich an das endlose Wiederholen einer Szene; ich am Rande.

 

Ich erinnere mich daran, wie ich im Korridor eines Krankenhauses von einem melancholischen Monster ge­schlagen wurde.

 

Ich erinnere mich an die Ecke eines Zimmers mit seinem kleinen Fernseher und dessen gebogenen Bildschirm; gefüllt mit US-Militär­hubschraubern, kleine Soldatenauf Panamas Boden herablassend. ­Operation Just Cause.  

 

Ich erinnere mich an das gemeinsame Lächeln mit meinen zwei Vampirfreundinnen; ich erinnere mich, wie wir spielten einen Mann zu töten.

 

Ich erinnere mich an mein Bild im Kino: die Kamera fest auf mich gerichtet; ich war die Krankenschwester, die Kamera der Kranke.

 

Ich erinnere mich daran, wie ich ­meine Vespa verspielte und zwei Stunden zu Fuß nach Hause gehen musste, während mich die Spielsucht meines Großvaters begleitete.

 

Ich erinnere mich an das Herauskommen aus dem Zimmer, an das Herauskommen aus der Szene.

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I remember…

Stephen Barber, 05.04.2017

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and determined still to explore that city to his last living instant. Walking across the Shinjuku plaza, after taking the subway from Ueno district, I watched the livid ­multi-coloured projections from the digital image screens on the surrounding towers incise and deepen the already-entrenched furrows of his aged, disintegrating face, casting animated sequences across it—in Tokyo's illuminated plazas, memory corrosively infiltrates the body itself, abrades it, honing-in especially on the face, eyes and mouth—as his lips vocally conjured memories of his friendships of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s: Kawabata, Hijikata, ­Mishima… After passing the derelict structure of the immense Koma cinema that he loved and would be demolished soon after, we entered the near-darkened dense alleyways of the Golden Gai area, almost untouched for fifty years, and arrived at the discretely signposted bar, La Jetée, owned by Richie's friend, another obsessive agent of memory, the French film-maker Chris Marker, possessed by his own memories of the future, which Tokyo above all other cities disgorges, annulling or reversing linear time, oscillating between future-directed political contestations and now-lost corporeal gestures, transforming the megalopolis's malfunctioned facades and the imprinted bodies they momentarily contain…

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Exodus. Gods and Kings

Trmasan Bruialesi, 05.04.2017

Dear Paul,

 

Shortly after your hasty departure from Warsaw I took a moment to look at the DVD you left behind—I assume on purpose. But why Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, from 2014? You will have had your reasons, and you’ll have to take responsibility for them. Because when the first plague broke out over Memphis in full digital force after a mainly indifferent first hour, there was a knock at the door. It was the young German photographer from the opening the day before—I had suppressed the encounter and forgotten the appointment—accompanied by his Polish girlfriend and his portfolio. He wore a béret and a beard and seemed ambitious in a self-satisfied sort of way. He was working, he said, on a big thing; it would be “wielki,” he added coyly in Polish. He wants to portray the most important Polish artists—musicians, painters, authors, photographers, and of course filmmakers—and then “immortalize” them, as he put it, in gum bichromate prints. Without boring you with technical details, you need to know that gum bichromate was the preferred method of the pictorialists at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a process that contrary to the classical silver photograph is exceptionally stable, but also exceptionally pretentious. With the gum bichromate the photographer turns himself into the painter of eternity. My objection was that impermanence appertains to the genesis of photography, that the light that draws the image and makes it visible should sooner or later be permitted to erase it, indeed must. Although the quiet rotting of the photographic paper, of the plates and films in the archives, is only a gentle echo of the decaying of their Barthesian referents; and had he seen Nicéphore Nièpce’s Point de vue du Gras in the original? which (unlike the familiar reproduction authorized by Gernsheim) barely shows a trace of the light that fell on a tin plate covered with bitumen of Judea—a light-sensitive bitumen, by the way, that has been extracted from the Dead Sea from time immemorial. I asked him if he knew that the Persian word for bitumen was “mumia” and gave the name for what we understand as mummification in ancient Egypt: artificial or natural circumstances prevent the process of decay at the cost of permanent physical presence, which only manifests permanent mental absence. In short, I said, gum bichromate prints are the mummies of photography! In retrospect that was the point at which his Polish girlfriend started making moves to leave. When the two rather indignantly departed, without our having looked at or discussed a single picture, I felt tired, depleted, and surrendered once again to the plagues over Memphis. I slept through the flight of the Israelites, and was only woken by the frenzied deluge of the showdown—not much of a sublime awakening. Do you know what I really miss in this film? The scene that every Bible film has to have, because of its unbelievable mythological power: Exodus, chapter 2, verses 1–10, the one with baby Moses cast upon the Nile in a “reed casket,” as Luther has it, daubed by his mother “with bitumen [really!] and pitch” to make it waterproof—or even lightproof? Was the casket a camera? Was Moses a film? A false conclusion, to be sure, but a fine one!


Yours,
Trmasan

 

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