breaking down the categories, or just breaking down, as the case may be

So for those of you who are interested in the photo album from the Czech (or Slovak, or Rusyn or Ruthenian, o) canoeist, and not in the 1848 map of railways or the 1812 map of Vienna, here is the specific URL from travis-hill-europa, who will send out e-mails under his real name if you ever buy stuff from him:

http://cgi.ebay.com/OLYMPIC-GAMES-1936-BERLIN-PHOTOGRAPH-ALBUM-Kayak_W0QQitemZ160319070547QQihZ006QQcategoryZ37788QQcmdZViewItem

and there are other news items of interest to habitues of the crowleycrow LJ that I'll list separately for the sake of easier access in days to come.

The Power of Stories: a symposium in London, March 28 and 29

It's a touch pricey for hard economic times, but for £75 you can acquire face time with Marina Warner, Tahir Shah, Iain Sinclair and others, who will lecture on topics ranging from The Arabian Nights to "Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire." My not inconsiderable U.K. readership (actually, all of my readers are considerable) might find this of particular interest, as might those with sufficient frequent flier miles to afford making the trip from other countries. Details at the Institute for Cultural Research website:

http://www.i-c-r.org.uk/events/seminar/semMar2009.php

I stumbled across this one via news of the March 12 appearance in U.K. paperback of Tahir Shah's most recent book (on the power of stories, if you recall my original post about it). His website has a most interesting description of how he came to write the book, concluding with how his unexpected detention in Pakistan led him to remember the details of his childhood, which he now sees as a process of indirect teaching that was far from evident at the time: "...an upbringing that's diverse can set someone up, and get them ready for all sorts of situations, preparing them to be ready in the most unconventional way. If anyone's interested, I suggest they look for zigzag paths in life, as throughout human history it's been the zigzag route that's been most instructive, most beneficial."

Got that? Now on to the next topic.


(I've corrected the Freudian typo above, though I suspect that those who are interested are also interesting.)

also in London on March 12, "Mythologies" opens at Haunch of Venison

The same day as the paperback publication of Tahir Shah's In Arabian Nights, by sheer coincidence Haunch of Venison London will celebrate its relocation from Haunch of Venison Yard to the former site of the Museum of Mankind by turning 6 Burlington Gardens into "Mythologies," an immense group show of internationally celebrated artists whose work "evoke[s] the uncanny and extraordinary, as seen in historic anthropological and archaeological collections such as the Pitt Rivers, Hunterian, Petrie, Horniman and Sir John Soane's Museums. For the exhibition Burlington Gardens will be transformed into a giant Cabinet of Curiosities."

It would be lovely to see this show, which recalls Eduardo Paolozzi's "Lost Magic Kingdoms" at the Museum of Mankind a quarter century or so back. The difference, I suspect or hope, is that now we have lost the sense of outrage at potential political incorrectness that Paolozzi's show stirred up: global migration has so hybridized our cultures that perhaps we can recapture the naive—or "second-naive"—sense of wonder, realizing that everything that we regard as ordinary is exotic to somebody else, and our silliest everyday phrases are grist for somebody else's T-shirt full of garbled foreign slogans. (I still cherish the denim jacket I saw in Berlin on which a completely nonsensical English sentence was prefaced by the all-caps declaration "SLANG:"...and as utopyr said of his sojourn in the Czech Republic, he wanted to stay long enough that he wouldn't just be exclaiming about how wonderfully strange the fire hydrants were, but would see what was really distinctive about Czech culture.)

This raises a lot of art issues dealt with in the past by Thomas McEvilley and others (beginning with the row caused by the 1984 "'Primitivism' in Twentieth Century Art" show at MoMA in New York and continuing at least through 1989's "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Georges Pompidou, after which "The Decade Show" at several New York venues more or less announced, from a distinctly American perspective, the arrival of the era of artworld globalism), but if I ever deal with that, I ought to do it on Counterforces, not here.

Next topic.