My resume for 2009

2009 was to me more a year of discovering and rediscovering things, than a ferocious if not desperate attempt to be au courant with all the novelties (and it will probably be continued, hopefully as long as possible), as it is usually the case nowadays. This year I spend probably more hours on, most of the time completely futile, groping in the darkness of the internet, marked as so called “research”, than ever before. Like millions of my addicted compatriots, I was digging the tenth references of my current, usually most trivial excitements, spending sleepless nights in search of a holy Grail, measuring out my life with coffee spoons and cigarette butt-ends, not even knowing, when I’ve become some sort of a human-vacuum machine, in all the endeavors, doomed at the bottom obviously, to know or at least to be aware of what is there, to excite a life of a culture zombie or at least to kill the omnipresent boredom, that defines the present moment.

The boredom combined with nostalgia, defines our moment of culture, and can be discovered even in some under-aged kids making this. if some kids born ten years after me are already expressing this kind of ennui and nostalgia, what does it say about the whole culture?

So being already 26, I should probably start to think of myself what my coeval T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) thought back 96 years ago, when being nearly exactly my age he wrote one of the best poems there are, The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock: I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.

The main plan for the upcoming 2010 will be to balance (not merge) the omnipotent “online” with the more and more dubious “offline”, when it is still possible. That is: replacing “software” with the “hard copies”, reading more books & magazines, than digesting blogs, more listening to the music than READING about music. Traveling & going outdoors in general as often as it’s possible, when it’s not interrupting the actual work etc. Wishful thinking, but at least let’s try to stick to those few simple principles.

Anyway, what will follow, will be a bunch of things that I probably devoted the most of my doubtful cogitations and considerations, things that excited me, taught me things or simply gave me pleasure, hopefully, unmediated with the self-censorship, internet hype, and silent culture requirements.

Oh, and btw, below it's me, on my especially powerful 2009 moment, accidentally. I discovered I don't have any photos of myself. From 2010 I'll try to document my exterior slightly better. And the Chicks on Speed image on the top is there simply because i liked it.

Pretending I'm updating

So I'm working a lot, but outside the blog, that's for sure.

below some of the effects of my work:

two interviews from the 6 Week Notebook, on with the expert, scholar and journalist Edwin Bendyk and the second with a group of very interesting Lebanese artists, who told me some about the difficulties of being an artist in a bombed and distroyed city

go here fo the pdf

and here the interview with Mr Owen Hatherley, which I've published nearly 3 months ago, but since Owen is coming to Warsaw for a short visit to have a lecture in MoMA, I can't not re-post it:

go here

I know the future of this blog, if there's any, lies in writing it i POlish and I finally will start doing it...

Awesome tapes from Africa!

A real treasure hunt:

go here

lately only music "outside western idiom" brings me any joy or rest.

listen to the Middle East Divas as well: Fairuz, Googoosh, Ofra Haza. though all of them represent different worlds, from LIban to Israel, from more traditional-influenced arabic music to euro-pop, they are still something different. i wonder if im not committing the classical sin of orientalisation, famously postulated by Edward Said, a Palestinian himself; nevertheless, this trip into the world of different rhythms and pitches was and still is fascinating.

6-weeks-Notebook #56 & some explanations

hello again, after a while...

first, a link to 6-weeks-notebook that just appeared:
go here

contains my interview w/ David Crowley, London's V&A curator.

"Winter kept us warm", TS Eliot famously wrote in the Waste Land, but it's not enough an explanation, when winter is paving her actual way through our houses and hearts. the toughest time of the year has just begun and I have no solution to this amount of a sudden lowkey mood and depression. many things has just collapsed in my life.

it appears, that maintaininig a blog is really a job that one has to devote to to some level...
and it seems my latest work totally eclipsed my blog activity.
so my freelancing job pushed me to conduct a number of interviews of more than 10, including established London curator (effect above in the link, though in Pl as usual), Renata Salecl, a famous psychoanalitic theoretician, , Ewa Kuryluk, my cherished artist and writer, some artistic collective called Critical Practice, a guy from Chto Delat, Swedish writer who authored a book on Ulrike Meinhof and Milena Jesenska, a journalist, who wrote a book on Marlene Dietrich, Hungarian author of a 800-pages long novel on Adam Mickevitch...
last few days I spend with Jakob Jakobsen, founder of Copenhagen Free University and our improvised Flying, Nomadic University of Warsaw, which was based on meeting in private flats and parting while exchanging knowledge...

and now I have to write all of it down. make a story. write articles people would read. make it interesting and useful. make it a source of knowledge.

is blogging really for me? I started to ask myself this question after I haven't desired to write anything for the last 3 weeks.
maybe I will return to regular writing, but I just feel better outside the omnipresent NET at the moment. if anyone started to read this blog and were ever interested, forgive me for this impertinence and inconsistence.

i just know i have to focus more on something else now. some form of life, people, taking care of someone/something. that sounds extremely cheesy, but this is just the way it is. since I didn't have any agreement w/ anybody about this blog and it's a mine and mine only space, I just decided to suspend it for a while.
maybe im just not a material for a blogger, maybe this form of responsibility and discipline have to wait for a better moment.

so see you soon!
A.

Let's dance

I'll now try to explain to you, why this is probably my favourite scene in the whole history of cinema (ok, one of favourites).

In Godard's Vivre sa vie (To live one's life) Anna Karina plays a girl, who out of some circumstances (breaking up with a dull man, boredom, then lack of financial means or sheer indifference) becomes a prostitute. This shot in a pre-experimental, pre-Marxist, pre-Dziga Viertov Group, more "traditional" style, that has more to do with early Nouvelle Vague style - more or less open form, freedom and improvisation on the plan, lots of plain air, streetlife from Paris. This scene has always seemed to me as autotelic, sort of self evident, without any greater need for explanation - one of the few moments, when Nana can "escape" her existence and devote herself to a "sheer being", without any reasoning (as opposite to the last scene and her conversation with the old man about language and possibilities of self expression), just simply being and dancing as a purposeless act. But of course this is also the last stage, when Nana is concerned with the society, she's not ashamed of putting herself on display, she no longer cares about her position. from this peak moment her existence will become more and more problematic, until her accidental death from the hands of mafia.

The other scene from "Bande a part" is another example of a quite independent, taken out of time, scene in Godard's films. With the reflection on time ("one minute" scene and a commentary on the individual sense of time in cinema), then - an interruption from an autotelic dancing, and then the opening of a narrative with "parentheses", it proves also a sheer cinematic bliss.

All the flowers for Herta...

Nobel prize for literature for my cherished author Herta Muller

Depression...

[contemporary Chernobyl]

Oh no, not mine: it's just due to the publication of Dominic Fox's book Cold World, which I had the, excusez le mot, *pleasure* of reading earlier in pdf. It's a great book, where the author examines the *positive* potential of so called dysphoria, as opposed to euphoria, calling it "militant" in every case when the dysphoria and displeasure (or dejection) is an *active* state practised by the subject. or, as Alex Williams claims, "[T]he Left is trapped in a sort of depression, in a dysphoric state itself. Here “militant dysphoria” means the dysphoria of the militant. The hope arises that it is through a radicalisation of this very negative state that a future emancipatory politics might be born. A radicalisation in what sense though?" Good question and follow the rest on Splintering Bone Ashes blog on the right from this post.

I'm not going to outline the book now, the right time will come when I will have more time, but here just to sum up an event that took place just few days ago in London at Goldsmith's, where a panel discussion with few persentations by very interesting thinkers grouped around Zer0 Books took place.

I'm quoting a piece by Nina Power she posted on her blog Infinite Thought, where she refers to, among other things, von Trier's "Antichrist" (which I personally, had to admit that, rejected as pretentious soft-slasher kitsch), Herzog and Shulamith Firestone, famous feminist and her reflection on woman's body. lots of links to other speeches at her blog.
here it goes:

[Herzog on 'Fitzcarraldo'] Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all. And that’s what’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity … And nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain …. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony. There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder …. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. (see this post on Conjunctural a while back, with useful comments from Ben)



A dysphoric relation to nature may see itself fascinated and reflected in a world of killing and eating but our age is characterised by a dyphoric relation to forms of nature in general much closer to home: human nature, particularly bodily nature. Think of eating disorders, self-harm, particularly prevalent in young women, where any concern for health gets subsumed into a desire for thinness, beauty or desirability. In this sense, then, there exists a common, generalised form of dysphoria in the west, a turning away from 'health', either mental or physical, towards a lessening (if not a worsening) of the world, to exist in a smaller way, to take up less space. To be dysphoric in the shape of body dysmorphia is, particularly though certainly not only for women, to be on board with the idea that our inner nature is to be punished. Just to give you a strange example of these priorities, yesterday I was walking past a pharmacy and saw a sign advertising a cervical cancer vaccine for £379 and beneath it, Botox for just £50: the vaccine that one might hope would be distributed for free by the state is more than seven times more expensive than having a barely-legal poison injected into your face.

the paradoxes and seeming dualisms of health/disease, positive/negative penetrate us at least since Romanticism and were probably most famously put by one of the most "entrenched" and powerful Modernists, Thomas Mann, who was a late heir of a long philosophical tradition, culminating in his last great novel , Dr. Faustus. I hope to muse on that more later.