ph: Natalya Arefieva
Friday, July 17, 2009
Vignettes #32
Working for the customer service of a large online retail store is just monotonous most of the time. You rarely get unusual requests or weird mishaps. But there is the occasional amusing story.
One customer mail I got was an interesting case. Just by reading his query you could sense that he was very upset. He said he had received a very disturbing package from our company, which he had never had ordered. He had opened it in his wife's presence, and ever since has trouble at home. His wife refused to believe him that he had not placed the order himself.
Luckily he could give me the order number. It was true that he had not placed the order himself. Someone else had done so, paid for it (80 bucks!) and had sent it to his address as a gift. The content of the present was: an artificial vagina (also known under many other names like pocket pussy, sailor's darling, etc)!
Since it's not against the law to send someone a gift I only wrote back that it indeed was not an order he had placed, but for security reasons it was not possible for me to reveal who the donor was.
I wonder whether his wife believed him after seeing my response...
Indeterminacy 5
One evening I was walking along Hollywood
Boulevard, nothing much to
do. I stopped and
looked in the window of a stationery
shop. A mechanized pen
was suspended in space in such a
way that, as a mechanized roll of paper
passed by it, the pen went
through the motions of the same
penmanship exercises I had learned
as a child in the third grade.
Centrally placed in the
window was an advertisement explaining
the mechanical reasons for the
perfection of the operation of
the suspended mechanical pen.
I was fascinated,
for everything was going wrong.
The pen was
tearing the paper to shreds and
splattering ink all over the window
and on the advertisement,
which,
nevertheless, remained legible.
- John Cage
The Ape Man (1943)
Conducting weird scientific experiments a crazed scientist has managed to transform himself into a hairy, stooped-over ape-man and now needs to turn himself back into a human being.
Pretty bad low-budget horror fair, the cast lost at sea for most of the time.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Indeterminacy 54
One day down at
Black Mountain College,
David Tudor
was eating his lunch.
A student came over to
his table and began asking him questions.
David Tudor
went on eating his
lunch.
The
student
kept on asking questions.
Finally
David Tudor looked at him and said,
“If you don’t know,
why do you ask?”
- John Cage
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Vignettes # 31
I take the bus to work every day, and there's always this older distinguished gentleman who sits behind me each time and also gets off at the same stop as I do.
Recently another same-age gentleman met up with him and sat himself to him on the bench. They started up a conversation (unfortunately in perfect Bavarian dialect which is untranslatable) about the virtues of going to the pub in the evening with a meal and some pints and meeting friends.
Soon the discussion aroused on what the perfect amount of pints was, my regular fellow stating that 3 was grand, but then the other said another 1-2 pints are just as fine and makes you feel even better.
I could literally feel my gentleman deliberating, obviously agreeing halfways, but not willing to give up his previous statement. It took a while till he exclaimed: "But in the morning 3 pints are the limit!" His friend agreed immediately and there was general consent not to drink more than 3 pints before noontime...
A Song a Day
I'm a great fan of John Cage, you can hardly underestimate his influence on today's music. Besides posting his Indeterminacy texts on my blog I just started reading the biography Roaring Silence by David Revill. Compared to other prominent artists I've always felt that Cage was a genuinely good and honest person, somehow you could easily have been friends with.
I'm not going to go into any theorizing about his work, but I want to emphasize that his work is - despite being so experimental - it is also quite entertaining. Cage said one problem for him was that - both his musicians and his audience - took his work either too seriously or not serious enough. I think there's no problem to keep the balance.
Both clips are performances of Water music. The first one is performed by the artist himself, 1960 on a TV show! The second is a more recent performance by Brown New Music's Clara Schuhmacher & Whit Bernard at the Grant Recital Hall, Brown University.
I'm not going to go into any theorizing about his work, but I want to emphasize that his work is - despite being so experimental - it is also quite entertaining. Cage said one problem for him was that - both his musicians and his audience - took his work either too seriously or not serious enough. I think there's no problem to keep the balance.
Both clips are performances of Water music. The first one is performed by the artist himself, 1960 on a TV show! The second is a more recent performance by Brown New Music's Clara Schuhmacher & Whit Bernard at the Grant Recital Hall, Brown University.
Uwe Johnson: Jahrestage 2
As I may have mentioned before I'm planning to read several monumental novels that I so far have avoided. This includes Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), but I started out with Uwe Johnson's 4-volume novel Jahrestage (Anniversaries). I just finished volume 2.
You'll find an English description of this massive novel here.
As far as I know there has been only a partial translation published in English titled Anniversaries.
The novel's main storyline depicts an exact year of Gesine Cresspahl's life with her daughter in New York City in 1968 going day by day like in a diary. However, the novel goes back to tell the story of Gesine's childhood and youth in wartime Germany and in the Sovjet zone of Germany after the war. The second volume ends with the end of WWII in the flashbacks.
Although massive the novel is actually an easy read since the daily chapters are fairly short. Johnson goes in quite minute detail retelling the German history, while the 'present day' story very much relies on everyday observations of New York and the reports of each day in the New York Times. In this way you get an kaleidoscope image of 20th century history, somehow exemplified on the fates of a few protagonists, but never losing touch with the actual historic context.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
