It was very fine to be evicted from the David LaChapelle exhibition at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, for carrying a bottle of mineral water; especially since the work concentrates itself around images of immersion. Water lay still in every image–shallow so far, and seeping only slowly, but imperiling and transfiguring everything. I [...]
Entries from March 2009
March 17, 2009
mexico city
An old Ford Taunus with a drift of fallen petals across its bonnet; sunshine at the end of a side street off Reforma; guns in the cafes. At dawn yesterday, I thought Mexico City had this strange brown soapy light, but it’s the dust on the outer window. Already bored with the resurgence of the [...]
March 14, 2009
allegra goodman
My review of Allegra Goodman’s The Other Side of the Island, in the NYT today. Interesting reactions to the same book by Liz Hand & Abigail Nussbaum here & here.
March 14, 2009
i wanted to be a junkie but Buffy wouldn’t let me
Urban fantasy: the domestication of a few images & behavioural tics which were barely unacceptable in the first place. It was a frisson obtained not so much by glamourising or romanticising the disordered (though it did both) as by denying or correcting the trait paradigms of some common dysfunctional behaviours. It cleaned up what it [...]
March 13, 2009
i think i’ll go to mexico
Reviewing: Far North, Marcel Theroux. Reading: Peter’s Room, by Antonia Forest. Re-reading: Michel Faber’s extraordinary Under the Skin–what can you say ? Looking forward to: Mexico City–the Festival del Centro Historico–in a couple of days’ time. I might blog there, or I might be too overcome by the thought that the writer of The Night [...]
March 11, 2009
winners & losers
A chimpanzee did pre-planned violence, something we believed only human beings had the intelligence for. While that’s interesting & –of course–comical behaviour, it might conceivably have been a safety hazard for visitors. So we castrated him. This solution (a) maintains the very important distinction between humans & other primates; & (b) eliminates the risk [...]
March 8, 2009
can we please not have the global conversation any more, please
This is all so dreary. No one in the 50s quite understood what the term “global village” would actually mean. What it turns out to mean is that village concerns become globalised. Those of us who left Deep Warwickshire in utter fear & rage, in 196-whatever, looking for the many benefits of an alienated & [...]
