Orientally yours

A new blog by Karen Tam updates trinketization, but with Chinese characteristics: http://orientallyyours.tumblr.com/ An example of her interests would be this scenario below by British photographer Grace Lau, but Karen’s own opium dens and faked antiquities are treasures themselves. Website: www.karentam.ca Other Blog: Pumpkin Sauce http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2wjgh5ceh1rrpskqo3_400.png

Trinket of The Week in Iran

From:  http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/iran-offers-u-s-tiny-replica-of-lost-drone/ (thanks Rachel) January 17, 2012, 4:48 PM Iran Offers U.S. Tiny Replica of Lost Drone By ROBERT MACKEY Scale models of an American drone are now on sale in Iran. While Iran’s government has so far refused an American request to return the C.I.A. stealth drone it captured last month, on Tuesday, an Iranian company that is manufacturing [...]

Belle D’Opium

Some might think this bad taste. I think its a hoot, and bad taste. A commercial sell-out I’d missed – Nitin Sawhney, Romain Gavras (who also did the MIA vid I am writing about) Mélanie Thierry working together on a Yves Saint Laurent advert with dodgy choreography by Akram Khan. My thanks to Dr Royona Mitra for [...]

Visiting Faraway: an installation by Geoff Weary at the Art Gallery of NSW

This one is really from the Vault. It was printed in the Melbourne art magazine Agenda, in about 1989 or so. The totally irrelevant picture I have chosen to illustrate this is not of Weary’s art, but since Man City beat the Gunners 4-1 yesterday I thought it amusing that when I searched ‘weary’ this picture turned [...]

Montreal

Houses with steps outside and balconies galore. People play the guitar twenty feet above the street, rooftop b-b-qs on a fantasy sunshine twilight Franco-bohemian wannabe New Orleans evening (after the flood = after the terrific snows). Singing in bars. Excellent seafood, wide streets, blue sky like Sydney, strange mushroomy aromas in the underpass, beer sold [...]

Reflections on Complicity

Good pre-Goldies rectification stuff here from Leila on CASA [CASA is a Spanish acronym for Colectivos de Apoyo, Solidaridad y Acción. In English, that's: Collectives of Support, Solidarity and Action]: “Reflections on Complicityby LeilaJune 18, 2007 It’s a party with too much food, an endless beer supply and a whole cast of music snobs (myself [...]

More on Hybridity

Nabeel makes some very good points in response to my post yesterday on Timothy Taylor’s discussion of hybridity. Especially interesting bit about seeing things through the peculiarities of your local predicament. He also pointed out a book I did not know – Marwan Kraidy on Hybridity as the cultural logic of late capitalism. I’ve published [...]

Beyond Exoticism

Timothy Taylor has a book out with Duke, 2007, called Beyond Exoticism. I asked him if he’d seen my book Critique of Exotica from 2000 – I note that he cites an early edited version of what became the first chapter – but he says it did not get in. Damn. So I wrote him [...]

Mind Boggling Trinketization

Very occasionally (why?) I feel the need to restate why it is that I use the word trinketization to refer both to the dessication of all life to mere commodities, and as a word for a critique of the poverty of theorizing that remains at the level of fascination with those commodities. Remembering that Marx [...]

Nabeel on Panto

This generous synopsis of my Auckland talk from Nabeel (who has a show on BASE FM – where you might have heard a rant last weekend!): “PANTOMIME TERROR And I’ve been working like a dawg. Time for an Easter break. I can tell I’m physically and mentally tired when I start to use the word [...]

Revolutionary Tourism Tuesday 10 April 07

I prepared these notes on the plane back from Hong Kong for a talk in the afternoon yesterday – went well, though it got a bit ropey towards the end (I blame the jet lag – arrived Heathrow Tuesday 5.40am, gave talk at 2.30 PM. Wide awake again from 2 through to (so far) 6AM [...]

‘television from Harlem’ and the ‘anti-Hoon laws’

Its not all that often that I get really homesick, but this item twanged a few lumpen-nostalgia chords. The article contains some choice quotes. Councillor Roz Blades in particular seems the most stupid with her ‘television from Harlem’ quip, and the very idea that there are ‘anti-hoon laws’ makes me not at all surprised that [...]

Mrazek – framing exotica – are you sitting comfortably?

Gotta take risks to get the image you need: There’s a revealing warning reported in what is a really excellent book by Rudolph Mrazek (from 2002, called Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, Princeton University Press, on P. 108) where the author relates the story of a colonial era photographer [...]

Zen choice

Hey hey hey – take me back to the dyakshya yoga youth refuge I first ran to after Grandpa Tate thought I shouldn’t keep camping out in his backyard shed… I was 14 – Crikey, there is a long story I have to tell one day… but already I can see this is going to [...]

Trinketization: ‘Third World Tourism’ and the manufacture ofthe Exotic

I am sort of stuck in my room. Somewhat foolishly perhaps, I agreed to write an entry on Exotica and Tourism for Jonathan Gray’s encyclopedia (getting so there are too many such things about) and I agreed to a deadline of Jan 1st, possibly forgetting that I should be indulging in some tourism myself at [...]

Indian curry powder – theory of translation

I am first of all against translation as it is mad, its impossible, it cannot ever be true to origins, its a kind of violence, it is always political, it transforms, it is creative, it is heroic to try, it is the essence of communicability, it is exchange, it disrupts parochialism, it is the foundation [...]

Che and Beret…part one

I can’t get that annoying little ditti by Kylie out of my head today – na na na, na na nana na… And I have to go give a talk later at Aga Khan University about music. This does not bode well. In the afternoon I might swing by the Victoria & Albert Museum for [...]

Che and Beret part 2

[continued from part one] But most annoying of all in the kiss-off-the-revolution in favour of a quick publicity buck is when – na na na – Kylie also dons a Che shirt… My trouble with this is that the absinthe pixie (her best role in a film was just a few minutes and she was [...]

maria_technosux’s Journal

maria_technosux’s Journal: “7:12pm: Intellectual guilt and take-no-prisonersSometimes I feel a little guilty for bashing avant garde whiteboys. They deserve it, of course, but I’m a softy deep down inside and I feel like I’m picking an easy target. I think it’s because they’re so damn infantile (intellectually lazy) that makes me feel like I’m picking [...]

Trinket Exit Strategy of our Press

Something from the newspaper yesterday which confirms all I was saying about Nepal – on the very day the Maoists declared a three month cease fire, all The Guardian saw fit to publish was just half the face of this Sadhu. Exotica unabashed. This is an old complaint about media representation however – of course [...]