adam in the world

Oh Yeah - there's a party going on... as part of Copenhagen Distortion the boys from This Issue has put together a Balkan Streetparty in Blågårdsgade tomorrow.

And yours truly aka DJ Cvrst is gonna entertain for the first hour with a hit mix of beats from the east. After when I plan retiring to the dancefloor (street) in the company of a bottle of Slivovitz (IPA pronunciation: /slivovɪts/) (Serbian: шљивовица, šljivovica; Bulgarian: сливова, slivova, or сливовица, slivovitsa; Slovenian: slivovka; Croatian: šljivovica; Bosnian: šljivovica, šljiva; Macedonian: сливовица, slivovitsa, or сливова ракија, slivova rakija; Polish: śliwowica /ɕli.vɔ.'vi.tsa/; Romanian: şliboviţă; Slovak: slivovica; Czech: slivovice)

Sometimes there's a long way between the snaps'... or should that be snapses - as in shots drunk in collectivity at regular intervals during lunch. The snaps itself and its digestive qualities being the only reasons for the toast.
Anyway - the snaps'... sometimes they're just too far apart in the big lunch of life. And sometimes they're just to far apart on a blog with more ambition than... erm... blogging... and sometimes they land on shore like long sets of waves sailing in from an endless sea of snaps. Yes, that's how it is.

The above picture depicts mr Green, sculptured by Juan Balandran, blogging rough and intimate short stories from LA as The Red Rooster. He doesn't post often. But the snaps' are very very close. And come full of booze and sweat and painful women.

His subject matter - people and destinies in LA I guess we'll call it - reminds me of P.S. Zollo who take fantastic portraits and descriptions of the encounters with people on the streets of Hollywood. Many of them homeless. Read the whole story and comments about Persephone and cry in your heart.

Persephone & Bert, originally uploaded by P.S.Zollo.

I am sorry for not posting lately... it just so happens that I have become a bit stressed at work. Just a bit. For the first time. The project has recently moved into the so-called porridge fase. All the while the sun has been shining as mercilessly as possible this time and place. So, only really merciless if you are sitting inside an office.

In other words summer has actually arrived now. Oh yes, I've even been swimming in the sea... and grilling freshly caught fish. And reading about songlines - just you wait, it'll be spread on this blog like flakes of gold...

The picture above I'm afraid does not have anything to do with anything. But as the aborigenes say "nothing is nothing"... so why not - it does fit the theme of this blog well. It is a facade in India made of cow poopoo, each with the imprint of a hand. The action of building becomes the ornament, as the builder imprints himself onto each brick. Scanned from the lovely photobook "suspended on a line" by Walter Battistessa (so it's actually only half a photo).

We need to get more political here. Even in my quiet corner of the world it is turbulent times like never before in my lifetime... perhaps I should blog about it... but for now we'll zoom out a bit and have a little lesson about political communication:

Frede tipped me of on this one ... and now i see he has made yet another well written post about it (in Danish)
.

After reading the previous post my beautiful assistant Petter reminded me of Eddie Lins Deep End Dining-blog...well written and witty gastro journalism by a man who fears nothing. So please be introduced to the term extreme dining. Best way of being that is this video I believe:

live tentacles from alba on Vimeo

Live tentacles served in The Prince restaurant in L.A. "The Prince, however, has a culinary dark side. At the end of the heavy bound menu near the bottom of the page are a couple of secret items known only to those who can decipher the Korean script. " - a masterpiece in gastro-journalism starting off with a beautiful story of his little sister.

Also be sure to read other classic posts such as the egg of darkness - balut aka duck fetus or Eddies take on a extreme dining classic - Eat Fugu - or Die Tryin' ... the poisonous-blowfish-sushi also famously eaten by Homer Simpson:

Food, it's production and consumption - the act of eating is fundamentally connected to human existence and experience. On level with only sex. And as sex it is an act of close contact between two bodies. Resulting in complex sensorial experiences of smells, flavours and textures. Be it a chicken or a pomegranate, processed or whole and raw - there's a bit of cannibalism involved in every meal. And as such it is ourselfs we look into when we eat.

"In the “Disembodied Cuisine” we will attempt to grow frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption. A biopsy will be taken from an animal which will continue to live and be displayed in the gallery along side the growing “steak”. This installation will culminate in a “feast”. The idea and research into this project began in Harvard in 2000. The first steak we have grown was made out of pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle). We used cells harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born."

A view of the installation including the kitchen, the frog's aquarium and the dining table - all enclosed within an airthight environment to comply with regulations for biohazards. Photos from the feast here.

Marti Guixe is celebrating 10 years working with food design. And he has made so incredibly many, incredibly nice small and big, funny and thoughtprovoking designs. Fx. above orangeflavoured lollipop with an orangeseed inside. Lot's of pictures at his site. I believe he has also been associated with Droog Design somehow... they do quite a lot of food-stuff too...

Finally we are obliged to end this trail of thought with Cloaca - a wonderful installation, a machine that turns food into shit.

Via Culiblog - a must for all food designers... oh - a post on Drawing Reastraint 9 and food

and We Make Money Not Art

On a friday night like this you've deserved some light entertainment... but you'll have to promise to read through the entire post below as well... yes, the exiting one about songlines...

By Lasse Gjertsen

I think a bit of genious is involved here..

Ayers Rock a.k.a. Uluru a.k.a. Beethovens 5th + Ulysses

OK... I have to write something about songlines now. It's a term, a concept, I've been circling the past year and a half. Since I was led on to read the aptly named book "the Songlines", written by Bruce Chatwin. Compulsory reading for all architects and planners - when I become president.

Songlines is a virtual map of Australia used by the Aborigenes. That is one way to describe it and my main angle of interest. Imagine a nomadic people. With stoneage technology. Walking the desert for 50.000 years (go home Jesus and your 40 days). They have no practical way to carry around maps of routes they only use once every 50 years. They have to keep all in their minds. They use song for this. Stories, narratives, with a melody.

"In the beginning the earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight."

The beginning describes a world, an earth, where all things is allready there. As lumps of matter hidden in the ground. The Ancients. All this potential is released when the sun first feel the urge to be born. It's not an outside force who pulls it up. It's all there allready. All in right time. The Ancients, the Ancestors, awaken and rise in the sun.

"The mud fell from their thighs, like placenta from a baby. Then, like the baby's first cry, each Ancestor opened his mouth and called out, 'I AM!' "... each one "put out his left foot and called out a second name. He put out his right foot and called a third name ... calling all things into being and weaving their names into verse".

Thus the land was not there before it was named. It must exist in the mind first. Not far from a buddhist idea of the world as an illusion. The land is the stories told about it. And vice versa the stories can be read in the landscape - each rock and river and featureless plain of gravel playing their part. Noting the melody as one walk past.

This all points to a number of interesting ideas - which will be discussed in upcoming posts and filed under the brand new label "songlines" :

- The question of identity and belonging.

- Memory of a space through a narrative

- The landscape as a representation of itself.

- Space perceived as a network

... and more - so stay tuned...

Last night I went to Kristine and Petters place and saw their brand new child for the first time. It's a she. She's got red hair. And her name is Saga. Which is a bit strange, but we'll just have to get used to it. Anyway it means the one who sees and tell stories. So there's already great expectations on her little shoulders. And she looks very very sweet. Hip Hip Hooray for Kristine and Petter - they are so cool

This however has made me wonder. About the more practical side of this whole procreation thing. The process. Or rather - the production design. It doesn't really seem thought properly through in my opinion.

Now, what we see here is an entire child on its way out, head first, through an opening we men know to normally fit rather nicely around something the size of large carrot. Incredible, but not very practical.

Also notice how clean the child looks on this image - made to be shown in American courtrooms. This of course has nothing to do with actual conditions...

by Raul Gutierrez

What a mess. Not even the baby looks happy about it. Intelligent designer - come on! The umbellical cord is rather cool though.

Apparently there was a time when it could be done with grace and dignity... only the bare foot reveals a bit of tension, a slight twitch of the toes. I'm sure that's how Kristine handled the situation as well (well, actually Petter said she'd made faces he'd never seen before and sounds he'd never imagined her able to voice) :

Ah, the good old days - all a woman would need was a stool and a pair of fashionably dressed and descrete ladies to hold up her dress. Now please enjoy Monty Pythons take on the situation:

Robert Gligorov - born 1960 in Macedonia, working in Italy - makes disturbing and fascinating images. With a strong sense of materiality, texture, tactility. Though many of them are pretty darn gory, they are at the same time poetic and sensitive... a combination I really appreciate.

He's a photographer who also works with other media and artforms. And even in his photography it seem to me that the greatest part of the art and work lies in the construction of the motif. Some extremely elaborate and some snapshot-like of a simple great idea (...all great artists have a little octopus and a white bird in their studio - just in case serendipity should strike).

Here's a couple of galleries of his images... lots of fantasticness:

Lipanjepuntin

Artnet

Are you satisfied Petter?

Motel de Moka seem to be an excellent music blog that I happened to wander by.

The real reason though I'm posting about this is to show you this extremely delicious bookshelf that accompanied one of their posts... Some day, somehow, I'm gonna steal this idea... so help me God...

"The design house of mike and maaike developed a wonderfully elegant and simple bookshelf for a curated series of bookshelves. Its title: "religion".

Niches for seven influential religious texts are carved out of a three-foot-long piece of hardwood and reverently cozied up to one another."

The piece is called Juxtaposed: religion is the first in a series og "Juxtaposed" bookshelves and produced in a limeted edition of 50. 2500$.

via Motel de Moka via Speaking of Faith

Teis send me a link to this..."Hashima Island (meaning "Border Island"), commonly called Gunkanjima (meaning "Battleship Island") is one among 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture about 15 kilometers from Nagasaki itself. The island was populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility." A ghost city on a small small island. It had one of the highest population densities in the world and some of the first residential concrete buildings was erected here in 1905. It looks almost to good to be true. Photos from it's deliciously abandoned concrete buildings HERE and watch a documentary about it HERE.

It brings to mind the dead zone of Chernobyl. And then the movie Stalker - watch it if you haven't already.

It also brings to mind this abandoned Japanese amusement park. The LINK is in japanese, but the pictures are great. Also Chernobyl had one, in Pripyat - the city build to service the powerplant.

There's something particularly fascinating about the amusement parks I think - to see, empty of any life, a place that was designed to attract it. Certainly an ambigous twilight zone.... the fantastic anime movie Spirited Away takes it starting point exactly in such a place.

An extensive collection of abandoned places can be found at the Forum ov Psychick Blah. And many more from the Japanese site.

This picture showed up in a google image search for something else. It comes from a possibly very interesting online essay "The UNCERTAINTY OF BEING - a philisophical reading of Bladerunner". And if it's not interesting it's at least full of pretty high resolution screenshots from the movie. As Rutger Hauer says:

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes"

More Bladeruner quotes here

Politiken reported the other day that Copenhagen pedestrians are in the world elite. Of the 32 cities in the survey, the pace of life project, only singaporeans are faster.

In each of these cities prof. Richard Wiseman has chosen 1 (just one?!) 20 m stretch of street and measured the average time it would take people to walk it. Copenhagen 10.82 sec. Blantyre in Malawi 31.60 sec. For 20 meters. That's pretty damn slow. Complete list HERE.

" A study carried out in the early 1990s demonstrated that pedestrians’ speed of walking provides a reliable measure of the pace of life in a city, and that people in fast-moving cities are less likely to help others and have higher rates of coronary heart disease."

Meanwhile over at Pruned the latest post is about piezoelectrical technology. Fx. as used in this shoe, BrightWalk, “that incorporates piezo-electric transducers and electroluminescent polymers to generate light while the user is walking or running.”

Pruned has several other very (more) interesting examples. Fx the wavegarden and the sustainable dancefloor... and from there the imagination of a young urban planner just goes on and on...

The original thought with this post was to say something clever about the energy potentially produced in Copenhagen and Blantyre. But now I lost it. If you have anything smart to say please enlighten me.

Instead let's look at Muybridge (not him personally) one of the fathers of looking very closely at (naked) people walking...

I think we need a song...

Superman and Spiderwoman (!?) in indian 70'ies disco inferno. Breathtaking dancemoves, action and effects.

The world is a big and strange place. Forever expanding over time... so, we move 20 years forward...

Photos by Stephane Fugier.

Are they surreal or symbolic? I fear the answer. And since it's his birthday I'll dedicate them to my friend Jeppe. Then he can think about it. They're definately both beautiful and funny.

More excellent photos, including real women, on his site.