19 years ago on 1. December I was enjoying this wonderful sensation. I had been with my dad to see the parade for the Romanian National Day, and was pulling frantically my sled down my back street.

There are currently, 7 deg C in Bucharest, but there still was a small parade, and they did turn on the city Christmas lights.

more awsome things here

One happy night on the Naviglio Grande in Milan. We stepped into a tiny osetria with 4 dishes to chosose from and a story-telling owner. He told the story of every piece of delicious goat cheese we had and told us of this film.

“I do not like the word tolerance. If you need to tolerate someone – there is no sense of equality.”

That which one does not see cannot be made visible by any amount of experience and reflection. Rather the essential point here is being aware of the possibilities of being deceived. Eduard Imhoff Swiss cartographer

What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Thomas Reinhard, playwright

the b/w video

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I’d really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I don’t like your fashion business mister
And I don’t like these drugs that keep you thin
I don’t like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I’d really like to live beside you, baby …

And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I’m ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I am guided

Ah remember me, I used to live for music
Remember me, I brought your groceries in
Well it’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

(L. Cohen) Stranger Music, Inc.

“Theater is a thousand-year-old-perversity that mankind enjoys madly. Therfore do they enjoy it madly: because they madly enjoy their own hypocrisy.”¹

Last night I saw a funny and bitter play acted out in a tiny underground theater in Bucharest. The 60 sqm basement is probably the safest part of the crumbling house above it. The leading actor played what could well be his self-portrait as if it were the first time, as if it were the 1000th time, as if he were giving lessons on acting (which he mostly is, for half of the play). What tickled me most was his laying out the same scene five (it might have been six) times one different one after the other.

Der Theatermacher (ro. Creatorul de Teatru) is a a sharp piece of the Dutch-born writer Thomas Bernhard. A critique on a post-war, post-revolutionary slain society and its actors that have come to a mellow acceptance of their little misery. In a postmodern fashion it takes one in and out of the aura of theatre. The most acute irony though is the fact that the actual situation (the undergound venue, the stage, the handful of spectators) and the play are similar to a point that they mirror one another. The grave monologue of an actor delusioned by the state of his art is carried out in a forgotten corner by an actor who has abandoned the formal theatrical system and plays in his own underground venue in front of a tiny audience.

¹Creatorul de Teatru. by Thomas Bernhard. direction Alexandru Dabija. cast Marcel Iures, Valeria Seciu, Constantin Draganescu, Afrodita Androne,  Vitalie Bantas. Teatrul ACT

to skeptics, with admiration and question marks

I recently learned of  an ancient Greek philosopher who questioned most certainties of others. Bernhard called Heidegger “carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher” and took ridiculing very seriously. I think somehow they would have gotten along swell. When the latter was not busy being critical of music, theatre, and ancient master-painters (sic!), he was busy caricaturing. I give you one of my favourite very short stories.

more please!

more Bernhard

baroque 2.0

How can you get under some body’s skin? How can you shed your skin and become someone new? Lately I have come across various approaches on the subject of Skin. Several of them entice me.

In the design class lead at the AAM last week, Riccardo Blumer talked about the skin as limit-boundary. The skin is what we see of a human – their limit, that by which we can tell they exist.

If one thinks about the movie starring Kevin Bacon, “the Hollow man”, the character become invisible, can only be noticed when he wraps himself in an artificial synthetic skin – creating for his inside a new boundary. what I find interesting in this weird story is that once the skin is made invisible we do not see what we expect to lie underneath the skin – organs, muscles, blood vessel- but the whole inside disappears. It stops existing. When there is no boundary from the surroundings there is no more Inside and no Outside, but just one indefinable, imperceptible fudge.

Like a city without walls, or a piece of land without a property line, we cannot exist without our skin that delimits ourselves from what surrounds us.

But then, if the skin allows us to exist, does it define us as well? It is said beauty is not skin-deep. But more so we, as individuals, are not skin deep. As a city or a country is not defined by its limit we are not our skin. Still our wrapping is our physical expression.

So how can we make known our interior? The challenge of communication, of human interaction, is to manage to trespass our skin and reveal what lies beneath it, ourselves.

A Dutch dance company I used to dance with, Dattah Dans, is now working on a project on this precise subject.

Playing with our skin means understanding it as a physical limit and as an image. It means understanding what the interior – ourselves – is and what lies beyond, in order to allow a flow from the inside out and from the outside in.

In R Blumer’s design studio, we are now working of crafting leather in order to make it show its limital character. A piece of leather becomes a simulation of the skin. What I find interesting in this is that skin – as physical representation of a content – has to become a representation of itself.

I imagine one of the traps that many things and people fall into during the game played with their skin – that of identifying themselves with this skin, with their image. Italo Calvino’s city of Tamara is a lady and a city as such. Inside her everything is a symbol of something else. One can only perceive Tamara as a sum of the images she projects about herself. But is Tamara only the sum of these images?

At best, this trap means becoming skin-deep. At worst it means devoiding oneself of content. As in JL Borjes’ story of the 1:1 map of a city (“on exactitude in Science”) and in Baudrillard’s theory on simulation, one ceases to exist beyond their representation. Thus the representation remains without a subject, without backup, it becomes a representation of nothing. If we were talking about a gas-filled balloon, if there were nothing on the inside the balloon would implode. It’s funny though how, nowadays, such cases of subject-less representations continue to exist.

There is a serious problem when we cannot understand our skin for what it is, when our image remains our only reality. The “wrapping” in itself may exist, but it is nothing unless it wraps something in and lets something out. A limit is nothing if there are no two realities it divides. Each of the three elements is necessary for the others to exist. We need our skin in order to exist as individuals separated from an outside. In the same way, however, we need to acknowledge ourselves in order for it to make sense to have a skin that separates us from something else.