Ethnographic

polish paper-cut art doesn't move only intersects with light or beige backgrounds - in fact depends on them as accents require the noise of pub chatter ... meaning only comes through reinterpretation invention or else all life is a museum a display ... leather-bound irish boats on the other hand possess an abstract magic when transported elsewhere & today st. brendan lives on through someone's crazy re-enactment of his impossible arctic journey - kind of like the north's answer to kontiki or la balsa ... taking photographs of headless models sporting the latest slovenian fashions seemed a good idea at the time but now it feels vaguely pornographic - listening to croatian tambouris likewise reduces folk music to an HMV listening stand (still there's the nativity scenes to go and find or re-appropriate somehow in muenchen if that is your desire ... but reindeers dis- sected in the snow or black & white images of the finnish hunt - that's something else completely something carnal oblivious anthropological ... it encourages only the most empty of identifications - false as plastic trees or yesterday's weather report

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Before ... and ... after!

Image
I got my haircut just before leaving Australia on July 1 and, until last week, hadn't had it cut since. Okay, so it's only been four months but as you can hopefully see from the image above it was developing nicely into a Steve Winwood style, with a touch of bogan at the back. Normally I keep it pretty short however and the major question was whether I would be able to stop myself from getting it cut before returning to Australia, presumably looking a little more like Tom Hanks in Castaway . I needn't have troubled myself worrying about it. Last Thursday night I got a call from an American friend named Sean, with whom I share quite a few musical tastes, and with whom I had some great conversations that night in the suitably-named Ho Bar in Hongdae, including one where we assigned 1970s bands to colours of the rainbow. Six shots of tequila, five beers and two gin and tonics later, I asked him whether he had a pair of clippers. Answering in the affirmative, he led me ba...
Read more

Funeral for Democracy

Summer revolution, flowers in your Air. Nike sweatshops. You are here: be there. For Pericles' printable version of our democracy has died. Come & join the funeral, bring a Lotus. Or your own war dead. We have shredded our constitution like ham. I don't take the peace movement seriously. Then again as a National Security Anal(yst) I might be wrong & so I tell it like it used to be, with a cortege of (Shit, the Fourth Reich's appearing at the following venues! A page has been torn from our torso, I swing high my own private drive. Democracy�s dead. The hand brake's �
Read more

Personality Crisis ... Got It While It Was Hot

Well, like most blooooogers, I sometimes wonder whether anyone actually reads this stuff. While I have a site counter that gives me a lot of fascinating information, I'm noticing that most visitors to this site stay for one second or less, then leave. I'm sure a part of it is just people clicking the "next blog" button at the top of the page but I'm also sure there's more to it than that. Recently I've been visiting Ron Silliman's blog quite a bit and am envious of the way he manages to combine the poetic and the personal, without going overboard. He doesn't seem to post much of his own poetry on his site either. However, posting poetry here was one of the reasons I set up this blog in the first place. I just wonder whether anyone really cares? Even my PC Bangs blog , which I intended to be a travelogue/ diary type site, has degenerated into prose poetry, an altogether unexpected turn of events. I'm going to try and start posting more of my...
Read more