The Leeds Arcades Project and Walter Benjamin are just as popular in the Far East as they are in Europe. So it is that on our recent trip to Japan and Taiwan, we discovered that both countries have their own versions. Lets have a quick look at how they introduce themselves:-
Taiwan:-Leeds arcade project. Many World Walters. As a time travel average person's Walter librarian, strolling modern day Leeds shopping arcade; In WWII period, he stretches across Spain; Will see him and his Eastern lover struggles in the reverse side Utopia future.
Japan:-
Project of arcade of lease. Many World Walter. Time travelling average person; Way Walter; The moderate librarian who today walks the shopping arcade of lease of day; In the period of WWII does he extend crossing Spain? Him and you look at the sweetheart of the east; fight with future utopia reverse side
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Walter's Japanese Diary
In Japan, at the airport, there are signs telling you that if you attempt to take any fake designer items through customs, you will be arrested. The notice is accompanied by pictures of Louis Vuitton bags and Burberry shirts.
Monday, 8 June 2009
Futurists
Contempraneous with Walter, but not liked by him, the futurists were fighters. They revelled in provocation - "the pleasure of being booed" was a kind of catchphrase - but their default mode was denunciation. They defined themselves against. What they were against was far-reaching and ill-sorted. They were against sadness, moonlight, sentimentalised love, syntax, monotony, the tango, Parsifal, Venice, marriage, the papacy, modesty, museums, English art, verisimilitude, the nude ("we demand, for 10 years, the total suppression of the nude in painting") and, perhaps most surprisingly, "that idiotic gastronomic fetish of the Italians", pasta. ("It induces sluggishness, depression, inertia brought on by nostalgia, and neutralism.")
Fundamentally, they were against the past. More than that, they were against what they saw as an infatuation with the presence of the past. Futurism set its face against passéism, as they called it, wherever it might be found. Hence the magnificent diatribe against Venice, "this putrescent city ... this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores", with its "stinking little canals ... its shady little businesses", and its gondolas, "rocking chairs for cretins".
To be against the past, or the passé, was to be against tradition, or traditionalism, and all manner of ism. Futurism held in equal contempt symbolism, classicism, moralism, parliamentarianism, feminism, "Don Juanism", individualism, archaism, egoism, pessimism, "and every kind of materialistic self-serving cowardice". In the same vein, when it came to art, the futurists had a field day. They found something to say for Courbet, Manet, Renoir and Cézanne - Cézanne in particular was too wayward to be ignored - but as a general principle they cared nothing for the painting of modern life. Modernity was not enough for them; they subscribed to what Umberto Boccioni called "modernolatry". Cubism as practised by Picasso and Braque they thought courageous, up to a point, but misguided. Their considered opinion was that "the great and famous art of the past is, in fact, a very trivial thing".
The major defect of that arthritic art was "illustrationism" - weak work by weaklings for weaklings. Futurism, by contrast, was bold and unblinkered. "With our pictorial dynamism true painting is born." The futurists rejected greys, browns and all mud colours, the passionless right angle, the horizontal, the vertical "and all other dead lines", and the unities of time and place. Instead, they exalted the painting of sounds, noises and smells, as Carlo Carrà had it. Pictorial dynamism is an assault on the senses. It is strong on the swirl, the spiral, the welter of sensation. These canvases are as if amplified; the chromatic volume is turned right up. "Reds," hymned Carrà, "rrrreds, the rrrrredest rrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut." Freely expressive orthography was one of the futurists' big ideas. Their mantra was "words-in-freedom". Futurist phrase-making is arrrresting. Futurist painting is deafening.
Futurism was nothing if not dynamic, in art and life. For a few years before and after the first world war, it became a kind of movement concept, sweeping across Europe like a craze or a plague. Its contrarian nature gave it a propulsive energy, and its performative aspect gave it a cross-cultural appeal. So much of futurism was a performance that its exponents may be seen as the original performance artists. What they performed was a revolt - a revolt into something new, now. Futurism was among other things a call to action, if not to arms, in politics and poetics alike. "Action art" was an essential part of the project. The arena for action was the public sphere: not the museum, but the polis. In futurist flights of fancy this would become a grandiose affair, ending only with the "futurist re-fashioning of the universe".
In the meantime, they had to lead the way out of the existing stultification. Put differently, they performed the role of the avant garde, a term whose transposition from the military to the artistic realm might have been made for the futurists, whose ideas and antics travelled faster than the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Automobilists formed by their leaders when they joined up. Futurist ideologues wanted nothing more than to be the avant garde of the 20th century, or at least the cultured people. For that, they had to shake existing preconceptions. "Anti-tradition" spoke powerfully to such ambitions. "Antipasto" seems to have been one bit of wordplay that passed them by.
Their supremo was FT Marinetti (1876-1944), philosopher, novelist, playwright, poet, propagandist and self-publicist. It was Marinetti who brought the futurist message to the world. He did that first by means of the manifesto, perhaps the single most significant invention, or appropriation, of his chequered career. Marinetti knew The Communist Manifesto well enough to paraphrase it ("Idealists, workers of the mind, unite . . ."), but in his hands "the art of making manifestos" became almost a new literary genre - an art of its own.
For Marinetti, the secret of the successful manifesto lay in its violence and its precision ("l'insulte bien définie", "l'accusation précise"), to which we can add its wit. According to legend, the founding "Manifesto of Futurism" was introduced to an unsuspecting public when it was splashed on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. It performed the principles of its author:
It is from Italy that we hurl at the whole world this utterly violent, inflammatory manifesto of ours, with which today we are founding "Futurism", because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquarians.
For far too long Italy has been a marketplace for junk dealers. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards. Museums, graveyards! They're the same thing, really, because of their grim profusion of corpses that no one remembers.
The manifesto was of a piece with this rodomontade. Its tenets were a marinade of Marinetti and his influences, poetical and political, acknowledged and unacknowledged, among them Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and émile Zola's "J'accuse", Henri Bergson's élan vital and Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence
1. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.
2. Courage, boldness, and rebellion will be essential elements in our poetry.
3. Up to now, literature has extolled a contemplative stillness, rapture, and reverie. We intend to glorify aggressive action, a restive wakefulness, life at the double, the slap and the punching fist.
4. We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . a roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
And more, much more, including the notorious paragraph 9: "We wish to glorify war - the sole cleanser of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women."
In fact, the manifesto had been extensively trialled in Italy before it appeared in Le Figaro. Such was its inflammatory potential that it was prefaced by a disclaimer from the paper's editors:
Mr Marinetti, the young Italian and French poet, a remarkable, hot-blooded talent known throughout the Latin countries by virtue of his resounding public appearances . . . is solely responsible for the ideas [expressed in the manifesto], which are singularly audacious and exaggerated to the point of being unjust to certain eminently respectable and - fortunately - generally respected matters. However, we thought it interesting to offer our readers the first edition of this publication, whatever opinion they may form of it.
"Futurism as preached by Marinetti is largely impressionism up-to-date," Wyndham Lewis responded witheringly. "To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt." Yet the manifesto caused a sensation. With the beauty of speed, the French text was turned into a leaflet and all Europe leafleted. Excerpts appeared in newspapers and magazines the world over. "Futurism" was launched. So, too, was the talented Mr Marinetti.
In the beginning, Marinetti was a commander-in-chief without an army. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the futurist movement consisted initially of five men and a dynamic dog: Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. These men collaborated on the successor "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" (1910) and on 50 more manifestos, in various permutations, over the next five years. And this same group collaborated on an exhibition, The Italian Futurist Painters, that opened at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February 1912 and transferred to the Sackville Gallery in London the following month.
That exhibition is in some measure the template for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, which is at the same time a reconstruction and celebration of their pioneering work. Appropriately, the Tate exhibition is a collaboration between London, Paris and Rome. At the heart of the catalogue are the 32 paintings that Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini exhibited in 1912, in the order devised for that occasion. They include Severini's kaleidoscopic, jigsaw-like Dance of the "Pan-Pan" at the Monico, the star of the original show, which has the additional distinction of being executed in 1909-11, lost and presumed destroyed, then reproduced by the artist from a postcard, half a century later, in 1959-60.
If Severini always remained a little sceptical in his adherence to futurism, Boccioni embraced it wholeheartedly, practically and prescriptively. It was Boccioni who laid down that the spectator must be placed at the centre of the action. "If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaught of the cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding to the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence of the picture. These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture." His own treatment of The Forces of the Street (1911) illustrates this futurist force-field very well, as does Carrà's exemplary subject, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-11), a composition reminiscent of Uccello with a futurist twist.
The reconstruction of 1912 accounts for around one-third of the Tate's exhibition. It is preceded by a smattering of early work by the Italians - futurists before futurism - and, in apposition, some fascinating cubist and proto-cubist works by Braque, Picasso, Léger and others. These paintings do not shout. Indeed, they barely raise their voice above a whisper. They, too, seek to engage the spectator, but their approach is different. They propose a dialogue, not a wrestling match.
The latter part of the exhibition is an enterprising and eclectic selection of futurist and futuristic work from all over the world. There are some big names (Duchamp, Picabia) and choice pieces (Bomberg, Villon); there is a bunch of Boccioni; there are Lewis and Nevinson, in strength. Most interestingly for these purposes, there is a good sample of Russian futurism, or cubo-futurism, including work by Exter, Goncharova, Kliun, Larionov, Malevich, Popova and Rozanova.
All of these artists, and many more besides, were affected in some fashion by the bounding Marinetti. In intellectual circles, Marinetti was unavoidable and irrepressible. He was not a painter, but he was a figure. The symbolist writer Merezhkovsky, piqued, had characterised all futurists as boors. Malevich took up the cudgels: "Boors continue to follow on one after the other and I've lost count of how many there have been in our time! Monet, Courbet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Millet, that boor Cézanne and the even more boorish Picasso and Marinetti (not to mention our own selves, the local boors)."
Picasso and Marinetti. There was a moment when he could be set that high. The pioneers of dadaism - the next big thing - were full of admiration for Marinetti, Apollinaire and Kandinsky as "the greatest figures in modern art". Tristan Tzara, the capo of dadaism, and André Breton, the pope of surrealism, knowingly followed in his footsteps. As manifestoists and strategists, artists and revolutionists, such men were in many ways mini-Marinettis. For all his borrowing, Marinetti was a true original. Not only did he instigate something that could credibly be called an artistic movement; as mobiliser, organiser and proselytiser, he was as important in the history of European modernism as Trotsky was in the history of Russian revolution.
Like Trotsky, Marinetti and his movement came to a sad end. Predictably, he saw in fascism the possibility of realising futurist dreams. He was soon disillusioned. His own relationship with Mussolini quickly curdled. So began a long decline. Some speak of a "third phase" (circa 1931-40), in which futurism attempted to reinvent itself under the banner of "airborne life" - automobilism to aeromobilism in one generation - but in truth the moment had passed. By 1923, Marinetti was already marginalised; in the cut-throat world of the avant garde, futurism was history. Even spaghetti could not save it. "The Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine" (1930) signified nothing more than a dwindling into decadence.
Fundamentally, they were against the past. More than that, they were against what they saw as an infatuation with the presence of the past. Futurism set its face against passéism, as they called it, wherever it might be found. Hence the magnificent diatribe against Venice, "this putrescent city ... this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores", with its "stinking little canals ... its shady little businesses", and its gondolas, "rocking chairs for cretins".
To be against the past, or the passé, was to be against tradition, or traditionalism, and all manner of ism. Futurism held in equal contempt symbolism, classicism, moralism, parliamentarianism, feminism, "Don Juanism", individualism, archaism, egoism, pessimism, "and every kind of materialistic self-serving cowardice". In the same vein, when it came to art, the futurists had a field day. They found something to say for Courbet, Manet, Renoir and Cézanne - Cézanne in particular was too wayward to be ignored - but as a general principle they cared nothing for the painting of modern life. Modernity was not enough for them; they subscribed to what Umberto Boccioni called "modernolatry". Cubism as practised by Picasso and Braque they thought courageous, up to a point, but misguided. Their considered opinion was that "the great and famous art of the past is, in fact, a very trivial thing".
The major defect of that arthritic art was "illustrationism" - weak work by weaklings for weaklings. Futurism, by contrast, was bold and unblinkered. "With our pictorial dynamism true painting is born." The futurists rejected greys, browns and all mud colours, the passionless right angle, the horizontal, the vertical "and all other dead lines", and the unities of time and place. Instead, they exalted the painting of sounds, noises and smells, as Carlo Carrà had it. Pictorial dynamism is an assault on the senses. It is strong on the swirl, the spiral, the welter of sensation. These canvases are as if amplified; the chromatic volume is turned right up. "Reds," hymned Carrà, "rrrreds, the rrrrredest rrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut." Freely expressive orthography was one of the futurists' big ideas. Their mantra was "words-in-freedom". Futurist phrase-making is arrrresting. Futurist painting is deafening.
Futurism was nothing if not dynamic, in art and life. For a few years before and after the first world war, it became a kind of movement concept, sweeping across Europe like a craze or a plague. Its contrarian nature gave it a propulsive energy, and its performative aspect gave it a cross-cultural appeal. So much of futurism was a performance that its exponents may be seen as the original performance artists. What they performed was a revolt - a revolt into something new, now. Futurism was among other things a call to action, if not to arms, in politics and poetics alike. "Action art" was an essential part of the project. The arena for action was the public sphere: not the museum, but the polis. In futurist flights of fancy this would become a grandiose affair, ending only with the "futurist re-fashioning of the universe".
In the meantime, they had to lead the way out of the existing stultification. Put differently, they performed the role of the avant garde, a term whose transposition from the military to the artistic realm might have been made for the futurists, whose ideas and antics travelled faster than the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Automobilists formed by their leaders when they joined up. Futurist ideologues wanted nothing more than to be the avant garde of the 20th century, or at least the cultured people. For that, they had to shake existing preconceptions. "Anti-tradition" spoke powerfully to such ambitions. "Antipasto" seems to have been one bit of wordplay that passed them by.
Their supremo was FT Marinetti (1876-1944), philosopher, novelist, playwright, poet, propagandist and self-publicist. It was Marinetti who brought the futurist message to the world. He did that first by means of the manifesto, perhaps the single most significant invention, or appropriation, of his chequered career. Marinetti knew The Communist Manifesto well enough to paraphrase it ("Idealists, workers of the mind, unite . . ."), but in his hands "the art of making manifestos" became almost a new literary genre - an art of its own.
For Marinetti, the secret of the successful manifesto lay in its violence and its precision ("l'insulte bien définie", "l'accusation précise"), to which we can add its wit. According to legend, the founding "Manifesto of Futurism" was introduced to an unsuspecting public when it was splashed on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. It performed the principles of its author:
It is from Italy that we hurl at the whole world this utterly violent, inflammatory manifesto of ours, with which today we are founding "Futurism", because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquarians.
For far too long Italy has been a marketplace for junk dealers. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards. Museums, graveyards! They're the same thing, really, because of their grim profusion of corpses that no one remembers.
The manifesto was of a piece with this rodomontade. Its tenets were a marinade of Marinetti and his influences, poetical and political, acknowledged and unacknowledged, among them Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and émile Zola's "J'accuse", Henri Bergson's élan vital and Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence
1. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.
2. Courage, boldness, and rebellion will be essential elements in our poetry.
3. Up to now, literature has extolled a contemplative stillness, rapture, and reverie. We intend to glorify aggressive action, a restive wakefulness, life at the double, the slap and the punching fist.
4. We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . a roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
And more, much more, including the notorious paragraph 9: "We wish to glorify war - the sole cleanser of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women."
In fact, the manifesto had been extensively trialled in Italy before it appeared in Le Figaro. Such was its inflammatory potential that it was prefaced by a disclaimer from the paper's editors:
Mr Marinetti, the young Italian and French poet, a remarkable, hot-blooded talent known throughout the Latin countries by virtue of his resounding public appearances . . . is solely responsible for the ideas [expressed in the manifesto], which are singularly audacious and exaggerated to the point of being unjust to certain eminently respectable and - fortunately - generally respected matters. However, we thought it interesting to offer our readers the first edition of this publication, whatever opinion they may form of it.
"Futurism as preached by Marinetti is largely impressionism up-to-date," Wyndham Lewis responded witheringly. "To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt." Yet the manifesto caused a sensation. With the beauty of speed, the French text was turned into a leaflet and all Europe leafleted. Excerpts appeared in newspapers and magazines the world over. "Futurism" was launched. So, too, was the talented Mr Marinetti.
In the beginning, Marinetti was a commander-in-chief without an army. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the futurist movement consisted initially of five men and a dynamic dog: Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. These men collaborated on the successor "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" (1910) and on 50 more manifestos, in various permutations, over the next five years. And this same group collaborated on an exhibition, The Italian Futurist Painters, that opened at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February 1912 and transferred to the Sackville Gallery in London the following month.
That exhibition is in some measure the template for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern, which is at the same time a reconstruction and celebration of their pioneering work. Appropriately, the Tate exhibition is a collaboration between London, Paris and Rome. At the heart of the catalogue are the 32 paintings that Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini exhibited in 1912, in the order devised for that occasion. They include Severini's kaleidoscopic, jigsaw-like Dance of the "Pan-Pan" at the Monico, the star of the original show, which has the additional distinction of being executed in 1909-11, lost and presumed destroyed, then reproduced by the artist from a postcard, half a century later, in 1959-60.
If Severini always remained a little sceptical in his adherence to futurism, Boccioni embraced it wholeheartedly, practically and prescriptively. It was Boccioni who laid down that the spectator must be placed at the centre of the action. "If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaught of the cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding to the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence of the picture. These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture." His own treatment of The Forces of the Street (1911) illustrates this futurist force-field very well, as does Carrà's exemplary subject, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-11), a composition reminiscent of Uccello with a futurist twist.
The reconstruction of 1912 accounts for around one-third of the Tate's exhibition. It is preceded by a smattering of early work by the Italians - futurists before futurism - and, in apposition, some fascinating cubist and proto-cubist works by Braque, Picasso, Léger and others. These paintings do not shout. Indeed, they barely raise their voice above a whisper. They, too, seek to engage the spectator, but their approach is different. They propose a dialogue, not a wrestling match.
The latter part of the exhibition is an enterprising and eclectic selection of futurist and futuristic work from all over the world. There are some big names (Duchamp, Picabia) and choice pieces (Bomberg, Villon); there is a bunch of Boccioni; there are Lewis and Nevinson, in strength. Most interestingly for these purposes, there is a good sample of Russian futurism, or cubo-futurism, including work by Exter, Goncharova, Kliun, Larionov, Malevich, Popova and Rozanova.
All of these artists, and many more besides, were affected in some fashion by the bounding Marinetti. In intellectual circles, Marinetti was unavoidable and irrepressible. He was not a painter, but he was a figure. The symbolist writer Merezhkovsky, piqued, had characterised all futurists as boors. Malevich took up the cudgels: "Boors continue to follow on one after the other and I've lost count of how many there have been in our time! Monet, Courbet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Millet, that boor Cézanne and the even more boorish Picasso and Marinetti (not to mention our own selves, the local boors)."
Picasso and Marinetti. There was a moment when he could be set that high. The pioneers of dadaism - the next big thing - were full of admiration for Marinetti, Apollinaire and Kandinsky as "the greatest figures in modern art". Tristan Tzara, the capo of dadaism, and André Breton, the pope of surrealism, knowingly followed in his footsteps. As manifestoists and strategists, artists and revolutionists, such men were in many ways mini-Marinettis. For all his borrowing, Marinetti was a true original. Not only did he instigate something that could credibly be called an artistic movement; as mobiliser, organiser and proselytiser, he was as important in the history of European modernism as Trotsky was in the history of Russian revolution.
Like Trotsky, Marinetti and his movement came to a sad end. Predictably, he saw in fascism the possibility of realising futurist dreams. He was soon disillusioned. His own relationship with Mussolini quickly curdled. So began a long decline. Some speak of a "third phase" (circa 1931-40), in which futurism attempted to reinvent itself under the banner of "airborne life" - automobilism to aeromobilism in one generation - but in truth the moment had passed. By 1923, Marinetti was already marginalised; in the cut-throat world of the avant garde, futurism was history. Even spaghetti could not save it. "The Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine" (1930) signified nothing more than a dwindling into decadence.
Benjamin and Futurism
As manifest in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated statement, however, the critical reception of Futurism has often been conditioned by its entanglement with Fascism: “‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus,’ says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expect war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ […] This is the situation of politics that Fascism is rendering aesthetic” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936). While in Italy the marginalization of the movement, especially in literary studies, ended with the early 1970s, significantly the great amount of critical work produced since then could not prevent the questionable exploitation of the connection between Fascism and Futurism in the new political climate of the 1990s.
Happy times for Walter
"Benjamin himself viewed the few years between the onset of the world economic crisis and the Nazi seizure of power as the high point of his life. Not only had he consolidated his professional situation and , for the first time, fulfilled his vocation as a critic working in Brecht's circle, he had also, after emancipation from all familial entanglements, found his way to a personal life-style that suited him. ...
To this picture of new-found existential security belongs also the quest for new experiences, which Benjamin sought in smoking hashish since 1927 and with special intensity in the years 1930-31. Under the scientific supervision of two doctors, Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, and sometimes in the company of Ernst Bloch or other acquaintances, he would take a previously fixed dose of the narcotic and note down his sensations during the intoxication. These notes, on the basis of which he planned to write a book on hashish, try to crystallize the 'cognitive field' from absorption and trance, and reveal vividly traits of an aesthetic mode of existence such as was characteristic of Benjamin's life-style at the time.
Happily he notes the fluid connectedness engendered by intoxication, in which he knows himself to be 'at the center of all excesses': 'People and things relate to each other at such times like those elderwood props and elderwood figures in a glassed-in tinfoil box, which have become electric through rubbing of the glass and now, with every movement are propelled into the most bizarre juxtapositions with each other.' The person at the center of these narcotic images experiences his own being as that of an omnipotent essayist with the world at his disposal, ceaselessly projecting new configurations in the kaleidoscope of his text.
To come closer to an understanding of the joy of intoxication, one must re-think the story of Ariadne's thread... We are going forward: But as we go we not only discover the bends in the cave into which we are penetrating, but experience this joy of discovery only on the basis of that blissful counter-rhythm which consists in the unwinding of a skein. Such certainty about the ingeniously woven skein, which we are unwinding - is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose form? And in smoking hashish we are prose beings enjoying our existence at its highest potency.
The feeling of professional and emotional independence finally achieved leads Benjamin to an admission surprising for someone almost forty years old: ' I could say - and certainly material difficulties have their part in this- that I seem to myself to be an adult for the first time in my life. Not only no longer young, but adult, in that I have virtually realized one the many forms of existence that were latent within me.' But the image of the intellectual who has found peace after outward storms and lives only for his work --this image is deceptive. The extent to which the delight in hashish smoking has to be seen against a dark background can be gleaned from a sentence written in the state of hashish intoxication on 18 April 1931: 'No one will be able to understand this intoxication, the will to awaken has died.'
To this picture of new-found existential security belongs also the quest for new experiences, which Benjamin sought in smoking hashish since 1927 and with special intensity in the years 1930-31. Under the scientific supervision of two doctors, Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, and sometimes in the company of Ernst Bloch or other acquaintances, he would take a previously fixed dose of the narcotic and note down his sensations during the intoxication. These notes, on the basis of which he planned to write a book on hashish, try to crystallize the 'cognitive field' from absorption and trance, and reveal vividly traits of an aesthetic mode of existence such as was characteristic of Benjamin's life-style at the time.
Happily he notes the fluid connectedness engendered by intoxication, in which he knows himself to be 'at the center of all excesses': 'People and things relate to each other at such times like those elderwood props and elderwood figures in a glassed-in tinfoil box, which have become electric through rubbing of the glass and now, with every movement are propelled into the most bizarre juxtapositions with each other.' The person at the center of these narcotic images experiences his own being as that of an omnipotent essayist with the world at his disposal, ceaselessly projecting new configurations in the kaleidoscope of his text.
To come closer to an understanding of the joy of intoxication, one must re-think the story of Ariadne's thread... We are going forward: But as we go we not only discover the bends in the cave into which we are penetrating, but experience this joy of discovery only on the basis of that blissful counter-rhythm which consists in the unwinding of a skein. Such certainty about the ingeniously woven skein, which we are unwinding - is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose form? And in smoking hashish we are prose beings enjoying our existence at its highest potency.
The feeling of professional and emotional independence finally achieved leads Benjamin to an admission surprising for someone almost forty years old: ' I could say - and certainly material difficulties have their part in this- that I seem to myself to be an adult for the first time in my life. Not only no longer young, but adult, in that I have virtually realized one the many forms of existence that were latent within me.' But the image of the intellectual who has found peace after outward storms and lives only for his work --this image is deceptive. The extent to which the delight in hashish smoking has to be seen against a dark background can be gleaned from a sentence written in the state of hashish intoxication on 18 April 1931: 'No one will be able to understand this intoxication, the will to awaken has died.'
Pills for kids
The Leeds Arcades Projects are going to be away for the next few weeks, on holiday in Taiwan. Here we see some sweets in Taiwan, that's right, they're shaped and packaged like prescription drugs.
Hitler in Taiwan
In Taiwan everything is cute. Here Benjamin's friend, cute Mr Hitler is being used to sell coffee. He's even doing that cheeky salute hes so famous for
Leeds Arcades Projects going on holiday
The Leeds Arcades Projects will be taking a break for a few weeks as they travel to Taiwan where the campaign to discourage police from using criminals as ironing boards and ash trays still rages
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Walter's Poem for Lomay
We should think of a codeword
So that should one of us
Stop loving the other
We can simply say the word
And remember how we feel now
So that should one of us
Stop loving the other
We can simply say the word
And remember how we feel now
Monday, 1 June 2009
On the Road to Shangri-La
On the way to Shangri-La the bus stopped off at the base of Snow Mountain, by a narrow crossing point of Snow River. They say that Snow River is the coldest river in the world. Young men stand in the water to impress girls. It’s said that if a man wants to marry a girl he has to stand in the river for 10 minutes to prove his devotion and resilience.
One the day Walter was there, no one was standing in the water. The bus group all stood around looking at the river. Well, thought Walter, I’ve come all this way; I have at least got to find out how difficult it is. He waded in, whilst all the Chinese stood around watching the podgy little westerner standing in the water. It was cold, but it wasn’t so bad. Lomay was delighted as he passed 5 minutes...6 minutes…7. He waded over to Lomay and putting her on his shoulders, carried her to the other side, all the time staying in the water. By now other coach groups had pulled up and were watching, people chatted amongst themselves obviously filling each other in on how he was doing. 10 minutes, no problem, he waded out to handshakes and applause. Ah, his circulation had never been very good.
One the day Walter was there, no one was standing in the water. The bus group all stood around looking at the river. Well, thought Walter, I’ve come all this way; I have at least got to find out how difficult it is. He waded in, whilst all the Chinese stood around watching the podgy little westerner standing in the water. It was cold, but it wasn’t so bad. Lomay was delighted as he passed 5 minutes...6 minutes…7. He waded over to Lomay and putting her on his shoulders, carried her to the other side, all the time staying in the water. By now other coach groups had pulled up and were watching, people chatted amongst themselves obviously filling each other in on how he was doing. 10 minutes, no problem, he waded out to handshakes and applause. Ah, his circulation had never been very good.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Twisting the legs off a cow
From Walter's Diary:-
"In the 1820s, a Highland Games in Inverarry included a sporting event called ‘twisting the legs off a cow’. Only one man managed to twist all four legs off, taking over an hour to do so. Information is not available to tell us whether the cow was alive or death."
"In the 1820s, a Highland Games in Inverarry included a sporting event called ‘twisting the legs off a cow’. Only one man managed to twist all four legs off, taking over an hour to do so. Information is not available to tell us whether the cow was alive or death."
Poem
Walter’s Poem for Lomay
When I am trying to wee,
And she is cleaning her teeth,
She turns on a tap for me,
To help me go, more easily.
When I am trying to wee,
And she is cleaning her teeth,
She turns on a tap for me,
To help me go, more easily.
On the Road to Shangri-La
By the side of the road on the way to Shangri-La sits the Temple of the Stone God. The story goes that when the road was being built in the 1980's, and the builders were clearing the land, this one particular stone could not be moved. Try as they might, no man or machine could dig up or break the stone. Naturally, they decided this must be because the stone was a God and a Temple was promptly constructed around the stone. The stone is now regularly worshipped.
Another story tells that the Stone God stops the 'Dirty Things' escaping from the nearby lake.
Ruskin on Women
John Ruskin on “pure womanhood”; - “enduringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation.”
Friday, 29 May 2009
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