Princess Bari – drawing comparisons with Pina Bausch

My preview of Princess Bari, Eun-Me Ahn Company, can be read at STV- Edinburgh  and also at Edinburgh International Festival website

Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawings

Read my review on Edinburgh International Festival

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawings is at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art Two until 25 September.

That revolution…

That revolution
With eyes glittering like a goat
With gestures of a plump insect
Make women pray and children cry

That revolution
Thirsty for blood
In a torn robe of a hermit
Scans the woods
For a thousand corpses
A thousand times

I thought corpses were taller
Bigger
Heavier

That revolution
Hostage to the dream of the Just
Is a mountain with two profiles

I thought corpses lived
Under polychromes roofs

When the night draws back her curtains
A monk and his twin shadow
The innocent and his murderer
Dig the earth for cubic spaces
To bury the dead

‘When everything is possible, nothing is’. Alain Badiou avec Fabien Tarby

If you thought philosophy was only about the art of dying, think again. Fabien Tarby’s ‘entretiens’ with Alain Badiou is about philosophy as ‘the’ art of  living; philosophy as bouncing and alive, so alive its dynamic visions still manage to ignite our minds with more questions than definitive answers.

Publication: Gutter magazine- extract of my novel

Extract of my novel, ‘Dear Monsieur Marx’, is published in Gutter Issue 2 (printed journal) and is available in bookshops/newsagents from mid-March 10.

Sir John Soane – A Romantic at heart ?

My first encounter with Sir John Soane‘s work was in 2001 on a visit to Lincoln Inns, London. My life-long passion for the long eighteenth century was further enriched by this ‘encounter’ and I became fascinated with Soane the man. Was he a Romantic, as his tastes and temperament indicate, or was he an Enlightenment product par excellence? How can one do justice to the magnitude of the public and private aspects of his architecture and career? How can one contrast the truly exquisite tension between his most remarkable architectural work (Bank of England, Tyringham) and his ‘domestic’ interiors (Lincoln Inns)?

People in boxes- Le singe is off to Paris

Monkey: Why do people live in boxes?
Woman: Do they?
Monkey: They do, they do, look, see that man there?
Woman: I see nothing
Monkey: He has a scar on his face
Woman: The box is scarred, but I see no man inside it!
Monkey: Look, he’s bending now, he’s picking up a banana skin off the floor!
Woman: Oh that! That’s just a frame, the silhouette of a man..
Monkey: Why do people live in boxes?
Woman: Only their silhouettes do, come on monkey, let’s swing to the next tree.
Monkey: Wait! The man is rubbing the banana skin on his scars! Why do people rub banana skins on their scars?
Woman: Because silhouettes want to be real, so they sting themselves, now and then, so that they can pretend to be real. Come along now, let’s swing to the next tree, we have a new book to write, and we’re starting in Paris, rue Chanez, at Porte d’Auteuil.

Was Goethe’s Faust ‘modern’?

From its conception to its reception, Goethe’s Faust was sixty years in the making. A tall order then for Faust (the character) to mirror the intellectual currents of the time, namely Christianity, Classicism, Sturm und Drang, Enlightenment, Romanticism and German cultural nationalism. Yes, the list is long, so are the six decades that marked a profound change in Germany; what with the transformation of philosophy and literature by the Kantian revolution and the establishment of the European movement of Romanticism. Was Faust in synchrony with Goethe’s age? In other words, was Faust the character, Romantic? Was he Christian, or Gothic? Was he Kantian? In sum, was he ‘modern’? I will argue that indeed Faust illuminates the intellectual vogue of the time while simultaneously reflecting the complexity and often overlapping popular impulses of Goethe’s (long) age.

Mind your Kant and that banana skin!

The man on the bench wants to be old and wise. The monkey in the tree eats a banana and watches the man get old, but not wise.

The Taxman in Kilt

The taxman in kilt has hairy legs, crooked teeth and no pants!  He huffs and puffs and walks the Royal Mile , scares old ladies and babes in arms. He sees the banker squatting behind the tree, counting his gold with glee.

Nakba

Dirty wars
Sweaty plasters
Fragments of cameras
Fragments on screens
Black on white
And white as time.

The Stench of Ethical Flesh

The man stirs his coffee anti-clockwise. He is a wealthy man.
The woman sharing his table stares at the man’s hand as he stirs his coffee, for the second time.
The man does not take sugar in his coffee but wealthy men stir unsweetened coffee, all the same. They like to do that.

The disembodied ballot

The cross on the ballot
The monkeys are told
Is the internal energy
Which moves your jungle
Which moves the world.

In Defence of Alain Badiou- Riposte

You can add your signature to Riposte (French & English versions).

1000 Ripostes, ouvert à tous, est un collectif fidèle à l’Idée d’un communisme à réinventer

Spot the difference

‘Human rights and human wrongs! Spot the difference!’ says my monkey.

Spots breed spots, monkey, ‘ideas’ do that too. Like floaters they circle on that philosopher’s eyes, and in that fool’s speech. They distort visions, compute divisions and masquerade in Derridian revisions or Marxist whims. That’s what spots do, monkey, they spray that activist red and turn that goat green! Yes as green as funny frogs, all those human rights and human wrongs. Spots dribble fragments of alphabet too, no not *that* alphabet, the other one. The Rectitute Alphabet, masturbatory and indigenous to this part of the  land.  Just look at that woman squatting behind the tree: she’s multiplying one times two, two times one, and one and two and all that’s in between. Yes of course there is plenty in between! Between one and between two, human rights and human wrongs dance in unison on stiletto heels, as we all cry out for spots of differences, for a differential geometry that isn’t real.

‘Human rights, human wrongs, now you do, now you don’t! You humans are funny green frogs!’ .

Be quiet, monkey, for my eyes are so full of  floaters, I can no longer read…

 

 

Edinburgh Fringe- two theatre reviews

You can read my reviews of East 10th Street and Funny at LTB.

The Seller of Monkey Icons

Dedicated to salesman Jeff and all fledgling entrepreneurs.

The seller of monkey icons is a man of ‘a’ certain..well.. localized importance! He likes to quench his thirst on tea and gossip in the same café, every evening. Just watch him walk in now- a Moses like figure towering over the lesser-mortals, radiant in his white Darwinian broadcloth cloak, striped caftan and ivory cane.

…Il est des jours où Cupidon s’en fout

The man inside the room receives an email, in French. The man does not speak French. He throws the email in the spam folder.

Darwin stands by the window and looks with great interest at an ape leading a woman up the tree.

Damned

You are damned,
like me,
a stranger in a laugh that grows,

Table for one – The War of the Camps

Table for six.
The women talk. The men drink and nod. They eat. I smoke. I cough. This damned cough. He rubs my back. He’s angry. I know he hates the smoke. He knows that I know. He pushes me away, in his mind. I retreat. He’s gone. It’s cold.