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mariacallous · 22 days

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When Richard Nixon defied expectations and went to China in 1972, Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, packed the president’s briefcase. Among Nixon’s reading materials was The Chinese Looking Glass, a book by British journalist Dennis Bloodworth about understanding China on its own terms. In his opening pages, Bloodworth sets the stage by going back to the beginning: “The gaudy catalogue of China’s disasters and dynastic glories, whose monumental scale has given the Chinese much of their character … brings us to our true beginning.”

Kissinger, one of America’s most consequential foreign-policy leaders in recent memory, clearly internalized the centrality of China’s “true beginning.” In his 2011 tome On China, Kissinger marveled at China’s “singularity” and staying power. Indeed, even the hardest of hearts cannot help but be moved by the continuity of a civilization that predates the birth of Christ by hundreds, even thousands, of years.

Awe, however, is no substitute for knowledge. In the opening pages of On China, Kissinger writes of China’s “splendid isolation” that cultivated “a satisfied empire with limited territorial ambition.” The historical record, however, contradicts him. From the Qin dynasty’s founding in 221 B.C. to the Qing’s collapse in 1912 A.D., China’s sovereign territory expanded by a factor of four. What began as a small nation bound in the fertile crescent of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers morphed into an imperial wrecking ball. In the words of Bloodworth, the very author Kissinger recommended to Nixon in 1972, “It would be absurd to pretend that the Chinese had never been greedy for ground—they started life in the valley of the Yellow River and ended by possessing a gigantic empire.”

To be sure, China was not the aggressor in every war it fought. In antiquity, nomadic tribes regularly raided China’s proto-dynasties. During the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, Western imperialist powers victimized and preyed upon China at gunpoint. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regularly refers to China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European empires brutalized China and killed or wounded tens of thousands of Chinese men, women, and children. Indeed, the party has memorialized these grievances in a permanent exhibit of the National Museum of China, just steps away from Tiananmen Square.

For all of Beijing’s legitimate and long-standing security concerns, however, the sheer scope of China’s expansion is undeniable. Western leaders often deny or ignore it, usually at the behest and prodding of Chinese leaders. When Nixon finally gained an audience with Mao Zedong, he reassured the chairman, “We know China doesn’t threaten the territory of the United States.” Mao quickly corrected him: “Neither do we threaten Japan or South Korea.” To which Nixon added, “Nor any country.” Within the decade, Beijing invaded Vietnam.

At the time, Nixon’s gambit was to split the Soviet bloc and drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nixon and Kissinger saw the Sino-Soviet split and took stock of the PRC’s trajectory: a growing population that, once harnessed, was poised to dominate the global economy. It was textbook realpolitik: cold, dispassionate tactics divorced from moralism. If Washington could turn the Soviet Union’s junior partner, the West could significantly hamper Moscow’s ability to project power into Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

During the final years of Nixon’s life, his presidential speechwriter William Safire asked him about that fateful trip to Beijing in 1972. Had opening up to the PRC made Americans safer and China freer? According to Safire, “That old realist, who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: ‘We may have created a Frankenstein.’” Over time, many in the United States have come to realize this predicament. Unfortunately, articulating that problem well has proved difficult.

During her brief stint as director of policy planning at the State Department in 2019, Kiron Skinner previewed the shop’s keystone intellectual project: a strategy to counter China, in the spirit of George Kennan’s “containment” strategy. At a public event in April 2019, Skinner tipped her hand and revealed her philosophy of U.S.-China competition: “This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before.” She went on to add, incorrectly: “It’s the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian.” Skinner received widespread criticism for these remarks and was soon after dismissed for unrelated issues.

Skinner’s mistake was twofold. First, she simply got the history wrong and ignored imperial Japan in World War II. Of deeper consequence was her failure to explain what strategic culture actually is, why it matters, and how China’s past shapes the CCP’s behavior today. In fairness, these errors aren’t unique to Skinner. Understanding Chinese history can be difficult for most Westerners. In some ways, it’s difficult to think of two more different nations. The United States is less than three hundred years old.

China was unified more than two hundred years before Christ was born. Immigrants founded America. Denizens established China. The United States was born out of revolution against a colonial power. China came into being from a regional conflict of gigantic proportions. Favorable geography allowed America to grow economically and territorially on its own terms and at its own pace. China came into being surrounded by rival kingdoms and tribes on every side.

Americans turn to one source more than any other to make sense of these differences: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. One of his more recognizable dictums, “All warfare is based on deception,” has captured the imagination of many Western thinkers. Instead of investigating the history that informed Sun Tzu’s counsel, however, many policymakers take the easier path of Orientalizing China. “China thinks in centuries, and America thinks in decades” is a well-worn trope. Another well-meaning but vapid cliché is, “America plays chess, but China plays Go.”

These statements are often left untethered from history and offered as self-evident axioms. What’s left are useless clichés that offer no actual understanding of why Chinese strategists advised cunning and deception, or how China’s unique historical experiences informed military tactics. In the absence of curiosity, an impression easily forms of China as “the other,” a mysterious, inscrutable competitor. A shallow understanding of Beijing’s past leads to incomplete conclusions about its present behavior.

More often than not, policymakers find it easier to avoid China’s history entirely. In late 2020, the policy planning office finished the 72-page report. It was a commendable attempt to reprise Kennan’s strategic clarity, but China’s dynastic strategic culture received a single page of attention.

Reducing strategic culture to vague racial differences helps no one except Chinese President Xi Jinping and his party henchmen. The CCP works to enmesh itself with the Chinese people and regularly uses them as a rhetorical human shield. To criticize the CCP, according to the well-worn rhetorical trope of Beijing’s diplomats, is to “hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion people.” As a matter of course, Beijing uses this specious logic to construe anti-CCP policies as evidence of racism. Years before former U.S. President Donald Trump fell headlong into this trap with his careless rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung-flu,” a young generation of China hawks had vowed to evade this pitfall.

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote about this resolve in his 2021 bestseller, Chaos Under Heaven, which documented the collective decision of Washington, D.C.-based China hands to blunt Beijing’s attempts “to divide Americans by party or ethnicity, to divert attention from its actions.” I was a regular member of those meetings and still believe America’s leaders must differentiate the party from the Chinese people—not only out of respect for those who daily live under the CCP’s jackboot, but also for the safety of Chinese Americans, who faced a rise of race-based crime in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, in doing so, America must avoid a separate trap: equating the party with China.

China’s history did not begin in 1949 when Mao and the CCP established the PRC. Nor did it start with China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European imperialist powers forcibly opened China in the mid-19th century. Chinese civilization predates America and the West by orders of millennia. That context gives meaning to the party’s contemporary behavior. The themes of greatness, fall, and restoration hidden in Xi’s remarks in 2013 constitute the essence of Chinese history.

They are the four-act play of China’s story, or “strategic culture”—without which it is impossible to understand the CCP’s strategy today. Strategic culture explains how a country’s unique experiences shape distinct national identities that translate into foreign policy. These three elements—story, identity, and policy—reinforce and shape one another. To be sure, the CCP has its own story, identity, and policies, but the party is one tributary in a long river. American leaders cannot prevail against the CCP without understanding the story and identity that belong to China.

From the start, China has been a civilizational juggernaut striving for political hegemony. China has often attempted to conceal this ambition with conciliatory diplomacy, but its neighbors know from experience the struggle to live—and survive—in the dragon’s shadow. CCP diplomats often bully China’s neighbors by claiming sovereignty over part or all of their territory “from time immemorial”—an inadvertent admission that the party is the latest crusader in a long line of imperialists. This struggle that was once relegated to the nations of East Asia is now a challenge for every country in the world.

Beijing is approaching the world not to embrace it, but to rule it. The Western world has no excuse for missing this reality, and American politicians have badly misjudged Beijing for decades. Washington’s China policy will continue to be a “two steps forward, one step back” affair until it reckons with the Middle Kingdom’s penchant for imperialism.

This reality calls into question the unspoken objective of American policymakers: seeking a democratic China. For all their differences, both hawks and doves in the United States have framed the “China problem” as an ideological challenge. Proponents of engagement believed that economic contacts would necessarily lead to political reform, a belief rooted in liberal internationalism. Advocates of confrontation couch the CCP regime as the problem, which implies an ideological solution.

The one unchanging constant in America’s China policy since Nixon’s meeting with Mao in 1972 is the steady commitment to regime change, either by commerce or competition. The underlying belief in the universal power of democracy has proved intoxicating. “If we can just make them like us,” the thinking goes, “we can turn an enemy into a friend.”

Perhaps this self-delusion is inevitable. America’s national identity is steeped in beliefs about liberty, equality, and opportunity. But the CCP’s heritage raises an uncomfortable question for the United States: Even if modern China were to become a democracy, would it cease to be the Middle Kingdom?

If the CCP collapsed and China followed Taiwan’s path of economic and political liberalization, would it suddenly lose its appetite for hegemony? Maybe. Then again, perhaps simplifying Beijing’s behavior to its current Communist Party overlords ignores thousands of years of China’s own history, as well as the strategic culture that informs those decisions.

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notwiselybuttoowell · 2 months

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On an unseasonably warm day in October, the silence outside broken by birdsong and artillery fire, Olga Goncharova sat in her office on the ground floor of the Kherson Regional Museum, a bulletproof vest wrapped around the back of her chair, the windows covered with plywood, and cursed the Russians. “They’re vandals, the people who did this,” she said.

Ms Goncharova escaped from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, shortly after Russian troops poured into the city. By the time she returned, in November that year, Kherson had been liberated. The Russians had evacuated to the other bank of the Dnieper river, from which they have been bombing the city ever since. Ms Goncharova wept when she entered the museum where she had worked for over two decades. “There was broken glass everywhere,” she says. “They had torn some of the exhibits out.”

In fact Russian officials, assisted by local collaborators and the museum’s then-director, had removed more than 28,000 artefacts, loaded them onto lorries and shipped them to Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Gone were the ancient coins, the Greek sculptures, the Scythian jewellery, a precious Bukhara sabre—and even the hard drives containing the museum’s catalogue. Three decades ago, Ms Goncharova says, the museum recovered a collection of Gothic bronzes looted by German occupiers during the second world war. Now the Russians have stolen them.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the loss of life and suffering in Ukraine has been great. Many of its museums have been plundered, too. The country’s ministry of culture estimates that over 480,000 artworks have fallen into Russian hands. At least 38 museums, home to nearly 1.5m works, have been damaged or destroyed.

Ukrainian officials have also sent a number of collections to other parts of Europe to protect them from Russian bombs. These include dozens of Ukrainian paintings from the early 20th century, on display at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels before travelling to Vienna and London. When the evacuated treasures will return to Ukraine is unclear.

Artists have not been spared either. Ms Goncharova points to a painting of dried flowers and pottery that hangs opposite her desk. The artist, Vyacheslav Mashnytskyi, from Kherson, went missing after Russian troops turned up at his riverside dacha and requisitioned his boat. Friends who stopped by the house days later found traces of blood. Mr Mashnytskyi has not been heard from since.

Putting a price on the stolen works is nearly impossible, since only a fraction had been appraised for insurance purposes. Last April the un estimated that the war had caused $2.6bn-worth of damage to Ukraine’s cultural heritage. That now seems to be a conservative figure. Tracking what the Russians have looted is also a headache. Many Ukrainian museums, especially smaller regional ones, had relied on paper catalogues, often outdated or incomplete, says Mariana Tomyn, an official at the culture ministry. Some of those catalogues have now gone. Efforts to digitise inventories, which began only three years ago, have taken on a new urgency.

Ukraine will seek redress. Prosecutors in Kyiv are investigating Russian officials and Ukrainians involved in the plunder. Mrs Tomyn is working on a new restitution law and the overhaul of an outdated one on the protection of cultural heritage. And since late October a special army unit has begun to monitor damage to cultural sites. But there is little hope of recovering what the occupiers have stolen. Russian officials will ship Ukrainian collections stored in Crimea to Russia if Ukraine retakes the peninsula, says Vyacheslav Baranov, an archaeologist at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences.

There have been some breakthroughs. On November 26th, after a long court battle, hundreds of historical treasures from Crimea were returned to Ukraine from the Netherlands. The collection, which includes Scythian gold carvings from the fourth century bc, had been on display at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam in 2014. Russia demanded the return of the objects to the Crimean museums which had loaned them. The Dutch supreme court ruled in 2021 that they belonged in Ukraine.

They are not the only ones to make their way back. At the Lavra museum complex in Kyiv, Maksym Ostapenko slowly unwraps a bundle of white packing paper. Out of it emerges a Bronze Age battle-axe. Another bundle yields a sixth-century Khazar sword. In the summer of 2022 the weapons, plus a few other objects probably destined for America’s antiquities market, surfaced at John F. Kennedy airport. The American authorities sent them back to Ukraine a year later. Most were probably excavated illegally in southern Ukraine, near Crimea, says Mr Ostapenko, the museum’s director, or discovered by Russian troops digging trenches. Such archaeological looting has thrived in the occupied territories, he adds. “The damage done to cultural heritage is immeasurable"

#excerpts

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mybeingthere · 8 months

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Chohreh Feyzdjou grew up in Iran in a Jewish family of intellectuals and moved to Paris in 1975. It was here that she completed her artistic training at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and also learned about the Kabbalah and Sufism. Her untimely death in 1996 put an abrupt end to a unique body of work, which had only just begun to be exhibited in major museums across Europe.

Feyzdjou made her name at the start of the 1990s with a vast corpus of objects culled from her atelier and from her past, among them drawings and paintings, all of which she covered with a more or less diffuse layer of black pigment. Each one was carefully catalogued, stored in boxes, in glass jars, in crates and trunks, or wrapped in plastic, put in tubes, stocked on shelves or tables, and in drawers or on scaffolding which were themselves covered in black pigment. Nothing remains identifiable apart from the fact that each element bears the archive reference, “Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou”. While this installation may bring to mind a post-apocalyptic catastrophe, its presentation also evokes the stalls full of goods that can be found in grocery stores and bazars across the Middle East.

CONTINUE READING https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/chohreh-feyzdjou/

Évelyne Jouanno

Translated from French by Lisa Cizo.

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whispersinthedawn · 11 months

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The Sand on your Shores (2)

There was nothing quite like being spat out of the Sea of Chaos to drive home just how annoying you could be. Then again, Percy reflected, when your opponent was Gaea, perhaps being a pest too annoying to countenance was what you ought to aim for.

It would prove terrible for your continued good health though, as the steadily growing ache in his chest indicated.

Percy couldn’t quite bring himself to open his eyes. Any second, the grass stinging his hands would trap him in verdant loops, the pebbles under his back would burrow into his body, and the thick loam all around engulf him in its constricting embrace.

He sucked in a reluctant breath.

The air taste weird. A strange thing to fixate upon when he'd just brought about the end of the world, but Percy couldn't take his mind off it.

The air smelled weird too, but the stink radiating off his own body made it impossible to catalogue his surroundings.

And the pain – couldn't forget the pain even if it had become a regular companion. A splitting, shrieking agony as exposed nerves and sinew screamed at being so summarily cleaved from the protection of the rest of his body.

He didn’t want to look at it.

Didn’t want to think about it.

So … the air. That tasted strange.

He couldn't quite identify why. There was a certain lightness to the air, a distinctly pastoral sweet pollen and sharp grass, mixed with the wet mud of just rained upon land. But the absence of tangy pine needles and gritty exhaust shouldn't have struck him as strange as the glass shore of the Cocytus.

It was reality – just a step to the left.

The reminder that there were directions other than straight on top of a rock galvanized his head into lolling to the side.

Percy's head tipped to the left.

Glistening black eyes without a hint of sclera stared back at him.

Percy flinched.

Before forcing himself to take a closer look.

A thin yellow ring of skin encircled fishlike eyes that seemed to take up half the face.

A face that stared back at him like a distorted reflection, like his bathroom mirror had malfunctioned and silver shimmered to craft an illusion of a twin not quite right.

“You look just like me,” the doppelganger whispered, flashing sharp fangs that must have been sheathed into the top of his skull to have any hopes of not slicing his own mouth into pieces.

“You … don’t,” Percy mumbled back.

He couldn’t deny a certain similarity to the facial structure, couldn’t deny that they shared the same bend in the bridge of their noses, the same dip in their chin that didn’t quite reach a cleft, certainly couldn’t deny the matted black hair that shone with blue highlights underneath the Mediterranean Sun.

But he had never sported odd, defined scars along his neck that reminded him of nothing but a fish’s gills, had never exhibited gossamer filaments growing from between his shoulder blades in a pale mimicry of a backfin.

“Who’re you?” the fish person demanded, flailing but failing to push himself into a sitting position.

“Percy,” Percy replied. “Percy–”

“Jackson,” the other finished in a horrified whisper.

His own name shouldn’t have struck such unnamed horror into his being.

“But I’m Percy Jackson,” the half-fish person refuted intensely.

“You can’t be,” Percy rejected instantly. “I’m–” he broke off.

What had been the last thing he’d undergone, what was the cause of the torn, weeping, gaping wound in his self? His every fibre throbbed like it had been stripped of something indelibly crucial.

Fingers trembling only partially with exertion, Percy reached out and touched the blue half-moon protrusions covering the fish-person’s naked chest.

Bliss.

Just for a moment, the pain disappeared.

Just for a second, one that ended much too soon, Percy felt whole.

The person on the other side of his hand flinched back.

The ecstasy faded back into the ever-present agony of existing, made all the more excruciating from the momentary relief.

Sea green stared into nocturnal black.

“We’re both Percy,” the other person voiced the conclusion Percy couldn’t quite prevent himself from reaching.

Percy shuddered.

Split in two, on land distinctly different from his memories, with a Sun indecipherably brighter, in a climate without the markers of industrial pollution Percy had never lived without – it jogged memories he’d done his best to bury inside the room with the glass mirror.

The room that might have slipped at containing the poison-manipulating tormentor of Akhlys, but which would certainly hold memories at bay.

The room with its glass fragments and a gaping void where there should have been a maelstrom of power.

Screaming. The very Earth was screaming. Roiling, cracking, burning. Every single second the inferno in the sky continued blazing, was accompanied by another mighty heave of the land.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, landslides.

Toppled civilizations.

Dust rose in the distance in a great cloud as Gaea’s dying spasms destroyed skyscrapers and laid mountains low.

Percy … Percy was the son of the Earthshaker. Son of the Lord of the Sea.

As Jason, Leo, and Piper fought to kill Gaea, Percy shattered the boundaries within himself, until his body burnt with the power flooding through every single blood vessel of him, until fragile flesh burst in star-blooms.

Grip the earth, hold the ocean still, calm the magma bubbling below the crust.

“No, I won’t die. You can’t kill me!” Gaea shrieked with the eruptions of a thousand geysers.

Percy tightened his grip as the very land rolled over onto itself in an effort to stomp out flames fuelled by human life.

Grimly determined, Percy tightened his hold on every domain his father would allow him access to and refused to give an inch.

“You would defy me?” Gaea shrieked. “You can’t. I am Chaosdaughter, the first primordial. I am Earth. I have been and always must be. You can’t stop me.”

“I already have,” Percy thought back at the goddess and restrained yet another twitch that threatened to send the Eastern Seaboard under.

He refused to think of the broken bodies at camp, the snap of bone that had reverberated in his ears, the blank stare that should have never entered those grey eyes.

Annabeth …

“No, you haven’t,” Gaea whispered back.

Something punched through him. Percy looked down, not particularly surprised to see the spear-shaped rock impaling him.

He didn’t let Gaea go.

Gaea writhed, twisted the ground and the sky and the very fabric of reality itself.

Like sand struggled to capture water, she slipped through Percy’s fingers.

No, no, no. She didn’t get to. Not when everyone else …

Percy severed the lingering connection to his dying body and chased Gaea. He’d never let her accomplish her goals. Never, never, never.

Gaea, the queen, the eternal, the sleeper – what power did she hold against Percy, who’d destroyed every single enemy he’d ever opposed, who’d fought and fought without respite? Gaea might have taken refuge in sleep and century wide plots, but Percy had never had that option.

Gaea attempted to retreat, but Percy only knew how to attack and attack even as the nothingness of the void ate away at him.

“You’d follow me to the past?” Gaea demanded hysterically. “Then see how much you like the world ruled by my children!”

“You don’t deserve to live in a world you like,” Percy hissed back.

Gaea glittered in the midst of nothing like a thousand stars, like a constellation taking shape in the Sea of Chaos.

Percy dove into her and split her into a million pieces, to be consumed by the cold fire of creation.

Percy dove into her and was consumed by the cold fire of creation.

Percy dove into her and landed on an Earth inhabited only by a fragment of Gaea.

Percy twisted around.

Percy sat up.

Someone once told Percy that at any given point in time, there were at least seven unrelated people that looked just like him, so he ought to rein in his arrogance lest he be replaced by his more biddable doppelganger.

It might have been Mr D.

A young man that could have passed as Percy were it not for his colourless hair and dark skin looked back at the two Percy’s with the polite attention of a person who had nowhere else to be and no knowledge why he ought to be anywhere at all.

“And you are–” Fish Percy broke into the tense silence.

Sitting cross-legged, without even a stitch of clothing to conceal his body, the piece of Gaea that had survived all of Percy’s attempts at mutilating her by transforming until it could pass as Percy himself in a black-and-white colour test, tilted his head.

“Who am I?” he asked back with an innocence that made Percy throw up a little in his mouth.

Some people might consider time travel as a boon – an opportunity to set right what went awry, to fix that which broke under not careful enough hands, to meet friends long dead and kill enemies that should have never grown this powerful.

Unfortunately, Percy wasn’t one of them.

This was Gaea’s do-over, the attempts of a homicidal goddess to remake the world according to her vision.

This was a moment in time that she’d wiped out more than seven people to reach.

Percy looked at the young, confused man beside him. The shock of white hair atop his head only exacerbated the perplexed look in his eyes.

Eyes golden as the Phlegethon, set in a face the rich brown of fertile soil.

Who am I?

Percy inhaled, counted to five, glanced at his twin from the depths, and arrived at a conclusion he dearly wished he could have avoided.

This was Gaea’s opportunity to fix the world – Percy had merely hijacked it.

“Can’t you tell?” Percy asked brightly, only the slightest hints of hysteria creeping into his voice. “You’re Percy too. Percy Jackson!”

***

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#pjo #perpollo #percy x apollo #fanfiction #apollo x percy #percy jackson #time travel #three Percy's #ruined labours of Hercules #the mortal the marine and the eldritch #gaea #the sand on your shores #inimical intentions #ancient greece

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mywifeleftme · 1 month

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365: Patti Smith // Horses

Horses Patti Smith 1975, Arista

There’s a man named Nicky Drumbolis who lives up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in an apartment that doubles as perhaps Canada’s greatest bookstore almost no one has ever seen. The septuagenarian Drumbolis is short and nearly deaf, a master printmaker and eccentric autodidact linguist. For years he ran a second-hand shop on Toronto’s Queen St. called Letters, until push (the size of his collection) came to shove (skyrocketing rent) and he went north, where he could afford a sufficiently large space to spread out. Unfortunately, Thunder Bay has little market for antiquarian books and micro press ephemera, and his shop is located on one of the most crime-ridden streets in the country. And so, the transplanted Letters has no storefront—in fact, the building looks derelict, its windows boarded up and covered with what at first glance seems to be graffiti but on closer inspection resembles a detail from the cave paintings at Lascaux. Letters’ patronage is limited to the online traffic in rare first editions that brings him a small income, and the occasional by-appointment adventurer willing to make the long, long 1,400 km drive from Toronto or further abroad.

When you enter, you find yourself in what appears to be a well-kept single room used bookstore, the kind there used to be dozens of in every major city. Books of every type and topic line the shelves, neatly arranged by category, and a long glass display features more delicate items, nineteenth century broadside newspapers and the like, some so fragile they seem on the verge of crumbling into dust. But this is not, Drumbolis warns you as soon as you attempt to take a book off of the shelf, a bookstore: this room is a facsimile, a tribute exhibit to as he calls it, “the fetish object formerly known as The Book.” The real bookstore lies in the chambers beyond this front room, the full catalogues of bygone presses, the one-of-one personal editions he’s assembled over decades of following his personal obsessions, the stacks which crowd his own modest sleeping quarters.

To Drumbolis, the original utility of the book as a container and mediator of information is now effectively passed; virtually every popular book in existence has been digitized, their contents instantly available in formats that are better-indexed, more easily parsed, and more readily transferrable than the humble physical book ever allowed. To desire a book is to desire possession of the thing rather than its contents, this edition, this printing, perhaps this particular copy that once passed through the hands of someone significant. He can show you the copy of John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty that was owned by Canada’s founding father John A. MacDonald, and argue convincingly that this object helped set the course of a nation’s history; or a set of Shakespeare’s complete works bearing Charles Dickens’ ex libris, which sets off a long anecdote about how Dickens liked to troll his houseguests with a collection of fake bookshelves. Drumbolis’s collection is threaded through his life like an old wizard in a fantasy novel whose flesh has fused with the roots of a tree: he eats with his books and he sleeps with them; collecting fuels his arcane research and dictates where and when he travels; 25 years ago he uprooted his life when his collection bade him, and though he’s starved for company in the frozen city it chose for him, he abides.

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My own case of collectivitis is not so advanced, though Lord only knows what I’ll be like when I’m Old (I’m currently 47). And despite the conceit of this blog, I’ve seldom spent much time in these reviews dwelling on the physical properties of my records, evaluating the relative merit of pressings and the like (or even mentioning which one I’ve got). But as I sit here listening to my copy of Patti Smith’s Horses for the first time, I feel a small but definite sense of wonderment. It’s an early ‘80s Canadian pressing, so near-mint I might’ve stepped back in time and bought it new, still with what I take to be the original inner-sleeve, pale azure (to match the Arista disc label) with a texture almost like crepe paper.

It’s a delightful, surprising contrast to the iconic black and white cover portrait of Smith by her former paramour Robert Mapplethorpe. Generations of fans have stared at this image as they listened, not simply because Smith is hot (though this is undeniably true) but because the music’s visionary qualities demand an embodied locus. That a record, unlike a book, can speak aloud, has always primitively fascinated me; that this one contains what I can only describe as rituals makes it magical, this physical copy that is unique because it’s this one that is speaking to me in this moment.

Smith writes on the back of the sleeve:

“…it’s me my shape burnt in the sky its me the memoire of me racing through the eye of the mer thru the eye of the sea thru the arm of the needle merging and jacking new filaments new risks etched forever in a cold system of wax…horses groping for a sign for a breath…”

“charms, sweet angels,” she concludes. “you have made me no longer afraid of death.” The record becomes an extension of Smith’s body as it existed in that time—I think here of the physicality of the moment in “Break it Up” where you can faintly hear her striking her own chest with the flat of her palm to make her voice quaver. It makes me wonder how anyone could sell this thing once they have it: not because it is particularly rare or difficult to acquire, but because it’s hard for me to imagine the experience of slipping the lustrous black disc from its dressing and setting the needle down upon it as anything but a personal one. It is poetry and waves; the subliming of the idea of a rave-up; Tom Verlaine shedding his earthly mantle in an explosion of birds; John Cale; Kaye, Král, Daugherty, and Sohl; one of my boys from Blue Öyster Cult; the pounding of hooves and the Mashed Potato.

I suppose what I’m describing is a fetish, my pleasure in acquiring these things and writing these reviews the hard and strange work of finding life’s joy in its dusty corners. This year has run through my fingers like water, as it seems they all do now. But on my good days, all these words behind me and the records in front of me seem like a document of abundance.

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#patti smith #horses #john cale #lenny kaye #ivan král #blue oyster cult #tom verlaine #punk rock #art rock #female singer #poetry #collecting #music review #vinyl record #'70s music #the end

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fashionbooksmilano · 2 years

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FontanaArte Vivere nel vetro House of Glass

a cura di Christian Larsen

Skira, Milano 2022, 192 pagine, Italiano/English, 31,5 x 24,5 cm, ISBN 978-8857248011

euro 38,00

email if you want to buy :[email protected]

La storia della leggendaria vetreria milanese nel nuovo capitolo de Le Stanze del Vetro FontanaArte. Vivere nel vetro è una pubblicazione dedicata alla produzione della leggendaria manifattura milanese di complementi d'arredo in vetro nel periodo che vide l'avvicendamento di quattro grandi direttori artistici: Gio Ponti (1932-1933, con un coinvolgimento costante anche in seguito), Pietro Chiesa (1933-1948), Max Ingrand (1954-1967) e Gae Aulenti (1979-1996). Il volume, realizzato a corredo dell'esposizione veneziana, traccia l'itinerario storico e stilistico di FontanaArte attraverso il design del XX secolo, da quando Ponti fondò l'azienda nel 1932 fino al momento in cui Aulenti la lascerà nel 1996, dalla logica razionale del modernismo all'arguzia ludica del postmoderno. In tutto questo tempo l'azienda ha sempre definito gli standard del design italiano: la continuità tra il passato classico e il presente tecnologico, il perfetto connubio tra arte e industria, la qualità superlativa dei materiali e della lavorazione artigianale, l'elevazione dell'oggetto quotidiano a lussuoso simbolo di art de vivre. Curato da Christian Larsen, il volume propone un percorso suddiviso in capitoli dedicati a ognuno dei designer (Gio Ponti e Pietro Chiesa; Max Ingrand; Gae Aulenti), cui segue House of Glass, la "casa di vetro", una sezione che rievoca uno spazio domestico arredato esclusivamente con oggetti FontanaArte. I saggi critici degli autori presentati nel catalogo (Renata Codello, Christian Larsen, Kellie Riggs, Pierre Martin-Vivier, Andrew Gardner) descrivono una complessa rete di relazioni capace di esprimere l'idea di "Vivere nel vetro", tracciando percorsi di comprensione in buona parte nuovi e, quindi, aperti a indagini, ricerche e approfondimenti.

06/11/22

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#FontanaArte #vetreria milanese #Gio Ponti #Max Ingrand #Pietro Chiesa #Gae Aulenti #design exhibition catalogue #Venezia 2022 #Vivere nel vetro #House of Glass #Ettore Sottsass #design books #designbooksmilano

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kangseluigi · 5 months

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Elon Musk pisses me off so much, because he wants to save the world, as long as he gets credit for it, but doesn't do anything productive!!! If I had his kinda wealth, it would be SO EASY to do it!

First of all, for climate change:

I'd just buy a goddamn piece of land in the desert, the bigger, the better, and FILL it with solar panels. A land the size of a small country, cool, lay lines to a nearby city, boom, whole city gets switched to solar, every person is charged cents per year for electricity, companies a little more. I can use that money to a) keep the panels, lines etc intact, clean and whatnot, and b) to install more panels elsewhere. Go to Vegas and cover every tall building and hotel from top to bottom with solar panel windows and will power itself AND its entire neighbourhood. Rinse and repeat in all kinds of places. Add wind turbines by the sea and in the middle of roads. Boom. Fixed. (obv we add batteries for it all, idk why anti-solar people always forget that, it's been obvious in the 90's when I was a CHILD)

All workers put out of a job because coal mines, power plants etc are closing? Whoever can retire pls do that, the rest, we offer as many as possible to be re-trained for installing and maintaining our stuff, the panels, the turbines, the lines, etc. Others can be put into re-foresting areas like were coal mines were with appropriate plants for the region, balance the ecosystem.

Improve public transport in those places, have Tesla work on GOOD public transport methods, improved subways/trains and buses, also with solar and wind power, thing that don't fucking break in the car wash or rain, and through that, have it be free! I promise every country can afford the drivers' wages and minor maintenance when you don't have to substitute 43829019384 cars and fix roads all the time, and there is 0 gasoline or electricity to be paid for, ultimately.

THEN!

I'd pester every single museum in the world. Remember the fire in the Brazilian Museum that destroyed plenty of things in it? Let's not have that happen again! Everybody give me your stuff for 3 seconds, so I can do super high quality 3D renders of it all and preserve it for all eternity, maybe in Zuckerberg's weird bunker idk, and have all museums access all scans in there through their own network, so that a) IF disaster strikes again, we won't lose as much. Even if the original may be destroyed, we still have some form of access to it. b) if some artifacts and objects can't be shipped around, you can still include them through screens or projections, or even have a goddamn VR glasses exhibition of old temples in life size! Imagine! You can only import so many Egyptian artifacts for your exhibition, it will never be truly complete, but you can include a screen that allows visitors to scroll through all the related things and view them closely. You can project the pyramids into an empty space in the room and have them digitally disassemble the thing, piece by piece, to show exactly how they were built and how the corridors inside run, what someone could expect. You can project the pyramid's corridors AROUND visitors to give them a taste of it. You can have them go into the VR room and have them walk the hallways digitally, or have them stand in the Colosseum or ancient temples, the way they looked 2000 years ago, filled with life! Maybe I would "accidentally" ship all objects back to their original owners and leave most european museums with the 3d printed copies but that's not relevant right now

With that, we could also open up websites where all objects in the catalogue can be VIEWED by anyone in the world, with a little texty-text from experts, which means more accessibility, for people across the globe who'll never get to that specific location, people who can't necessarily leave the house for whatever reason, people who simply cannot enter some museums, etc etc. It means students can more easily find in depth, high quality information. It means all people regardless of income can theorise and discuss these things. Imagine how fun Covid would have been, had we had access to all that information. If everyone had been able to make posts about how "I found this fun detail on this object/art piece and nobody seems to have talked about it EVER?!" and "So, I couldn't sleep and I was looking through the catalogue and came across this thing, and then fell down a rabbit hole. A thread 1/127" !!!!

Maybe (!?) we could also, additionally, do it similarly to archive.org and let people rent digitally, but also rent/sell non-commercial (!) licenses for the 3d renders. Eg. if someone wants to 3d print something just for their own hobby, or to let their blind relative feel the objects they cannot see, and of course wouldn't be able to touch in the real museum. Additionally, it may allow the gift shops to 3D print or otherwise model mini-versions/copies of some of the artifacts for purchase cause ??!?!? who wouldn't want a copy of whichever crown!

The same with paintings etc.

It would make history, art, and knowledge SO accessible!! It would allow anyone to really learn, to draw inspiration, to theorise! To FEEL the art, the heavy strokes of Van Gogh's paintings, build something, to understand humanity as a whole in a new light! To spark new conversations and understanding between us all.

It could be SO easy.

But no, he has to play stupid games to bring down the price of twitter, then be forced into buying it, and fuck everything up, instead ruining a source of information, just like he bought Tesla and ruined it!

#fuck Elon Musk #Elon Musk #art #history #3d printing #technology #I may be insane #and MAYBE someone will come along and say none of this would work #but you know what?#this is still better and smarter than anything musk has ever done #Loui thoughts

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pwlanier · 1 year

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James Cox (ca. 1723–1800), Musical Automaton: Rhinoceros Clock, ca. 1765–72. Gilt bronze, silver, enamel, pearls, and colored glass. Pedestal: white marble and agate. Two enamel dials, one signed JAs Cox London.

The “rhinoceros mania” began in Europe when a rhinoceros from India named Miss Clara was brought by the Dutch East India Company to Rotterdam in 1741 and exhibited in several cities until her death in London in 1758. Standing on a white marble pedestal and carrying a musical clock on its back, this rhinoceros figure is modeled after a celebrated print by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). The animal supports a small edifice that includes a clock and jeweled flowers. The chime mechanism, concealed on the back of the rhinoceros, strikes every half hour and can play two different tunes. The clock and its pendant may have been part of a more complex automaton that is described in Cox’s catalogue in 1774.

Courtesy Alain Truong

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maria-aegyptiaca · 2 years

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dreamt that i was at a familiar creek, wading in to about waist deep while my little sister took photos of the banyan trees nearby. i saw on the creekbed a projection of the veneziano engraving of daphne and apollo, in the sunlight filtering through the water. it seemed to be the shadow of a ghostly square of plastic floating near me, so I ducked underwater to grab it. the plastic (which was printed with the veneziano illustration) was connected to a bunch of other objects: a large piece of frabric, a necklace with a deformed, green cast glass pendant, and a barely legible exhibition catalogue for a show from a decade prior. i laid these objects on the grass of the creek bank. the fabric was three rectangular pieces of rough, stained calico stitched together, each with a different image printed on it. the first was a female centaur shot with arrows in a similar style to the veneziano print. the second was an abstract black and white screenprint. the third was a series of sentences in a complicated font that obscured the words, if it was even in english.

#oh there was also an owl following me throughout. a blue eyes grey owl with a face more tyto than strix #thats the meat of that dream #earlier in the dream i was at a girls house doing crafts with her father who was a successful artist #and made these assemblages of beads and stones and insect parts that always had a central pin that you could push which would #transform the assemblage and move every component making the light reflect off it differently and changing the colour #we were going to go sailing up the river in my city using my friends little catamaran #but everyone was antsy about there allegedly being a costly tax for sailing on the river #dream journal #the scenes in the creek were unbelieevably beautiful #what spending many hours writing about metamorphosis in sculpture does to a mfer

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kattestrophe · 2 years

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I demand to see the Katte board on your shelf :D

Sure :'D

It ain't much, but it's mine. Just moved them from the board, actually, that one was facing a window and I don't want these to get damaged by the light.

From left to right there is:

An entirely unrelated glass dome from IKEA with an old silver cup I got from my grandma and two Friech related coins, one D-Mark, one Euro (the dome is the most expensive part of this setup)

Burte's terrible, hilarious Katte play (funny music)

"King in Prussia", the one where nobody understands his connection to the Crown Prince 🥺

"Das Richtschwert traf den falschen Hals", aka "I love you so much, my Prince. Jk."

Zeithain. Oh Zeithain.

Actual acclaimed German author Theodor Fontane's "Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg - Havelland", featuring his fictional one shot about baby Katte spending quality time with his dad. I want to get a copy of Oderland eventually (for the Küstrin chapter), preferably also this pretty edition (which only cost me a euro more than the ugly modern one)

Ahnert's "Friedrich und Katte", the one where Katte has A Terrible Beard

A short amateur biography about Katte's father that I got in Wust. Hans Heinrich is quite the personality and I'd love to find out more about him too.

A collection of letters by European monarchs concerning the trial of 1730

A brochure I got in Wust that includes info about the church and the Kattes ("Hans Hermann's first ever letter was to his Engelsschwesterken", I NEED THAT SOURCE, also look at that k, we can see how he pronounced stuff!! 🥺) as well as some letters

Hinrichs' "Kronprinzenprozess", primary sources printed in a particularly exhausting to read Fraktur

Kloosterhuis' "Katte. Ordre und Kriegsartikel", second edition with added list of Ingersleben's 50 teacups

"Schädel-Schicksale" which includes some details about Katte's (?) remains in Wust

"Kriegsgericht in Köpenick", another one of Kloosterhuis', wonderful exhibition catalogue that left me with many new questions (he built a cabinet???)

And a collection of the letters between FWI and Müller the priest that I also got from the nice people in Wust.

Oh. And a bust of Frederick William III. My friend 3d printed it as a surprise for my birthday; Friech wasn't available as a 3d model :'D

I bought all of these except Ordre und Kriegsartikel and the brochures used for a few bucks ^^ Richtschwert cost me a whopping 35 cents with two euros shipping :'D

There are a few more things that I'd like to add. Like "Sorrows of Frederick" (fridged wife Katte, my beloved), but the only copies I can find are in the US and only available if I pay by credit card - which I don't have :(

#hans hermann von katte #anon

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