had dinner with one such dear friend while she was in ny last weekend. she spent a couple of weeks at the humaniversity in the netherlands a few months ago. her experience was similar to that of other friends’ experiments. take yourself out of your comfort zone for an extended period, have a group or an individual press you past breaking point and take in all the frustrations, disappointments and unfulfilled desires that come gushing out. other friends have turned to hypnosis therapy, past life and in-utero regressions, meditation and more)

i am quite excited about trying all of these tools myself over the coming years.

amusingly, much of our dinner conversation last weekend revolved around my friend’s quest to get married or more specifically to have babies (another common theme amongst my friends). the philosophical underpinning of the humaniversity is based on melding eastern osho thought with western physicality (at least that was my understanding based on our sake-doused dinner chat). and then a few days later she emails me this really great osho interview.

obviously this dude is my hero of the week.

only to wander in to the anish kapoor exhibit which i had forgotten was showing.

kapoor’s piece, called memory, made for a lovely calm contemplative epilogue to sehgal’s participatory ‘this progress’ exhibit which was the most fun i have had at a museum since the blue whale at the museum of natural history turned me back into a little boy over the summer.

after being asked to think about progress (what is progress? is it always good? are we progressing? will tomorrow be better than today?), memory (fluid, fragmented, compressed) and lovesex (intimacy, male-female, female-male power structures / struggles, performance, sanctity), von hantelmann’s questioning of what makes art politically and socially relevant was almost too much to take in. she had some interesting ideas and theories about the evolutions of the exhibition, museums and art in the ages of industrialism, consumerism and post-modernism (i only really understood bits and pieces of her talk). though her thesis that the contemporary format of the museums and the exhibition was a representation of individualism that was not relevant in a non-western context seemed a stretch. the question of course if highly pertinent in the context of the guggenheim’s upcoming abu dhabi expansion.
there was some concern in her talk and in the audience’s questions about how museums would translate to the ‘east’ with china’s ambitions to build a thousand museums mentioned condescendingly and almost menacingly a few times.
von hantelmann did illuminate sehgal’s work placing it in the context of our consumerist, post-physical information-age: ‘if it can be bought and sold, it is a product and can therefore be defined as art’.

i don’t think the guggenheim has ever looked better completely stripped of art.

oh and you really should buy historicity.

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from the economist’s review:

and of course looking forward to this:

bonus podcast at lab out loud.

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he showed a beautiful shot of burj dubai khalifa at pecha kucha over the weekend. go seek.

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bruno dumont, who’s life of jesus i watched when first falling in love with cinema over a decade ago in london, has twice won the grand prix at cannes (the only other director to do so is tarkovsky), presented hadewijch at the new york film festival cutely inviting the incredible julie sokolowski on stage with him.

sokolowski (who dumont found at one one of his film’s screenings) plays celine, a young, utterly devout christian who is forced out of a convent by nuns worried about her extreme faith who feel she needs to reconnect with the outside world. to celine, god is love. a love dangerously pure and extreme.
a love so idealized struggles outside the confines of the convent in the ‘real world’ she finds herself in.
the abstract nature of love, particularly godly love translates to a vein, endless search for its reality. it’s always there and yet never there.
celine falls in with a moslem kid from the banlieue and is increasingly attracted to his older brother’s fundamentalist interpretations of islam and god. in particular the islamic godly concept of gheiba- invisible. absence resonates with her quest.
an increasingly fantastical narrative that see celine drawn deeper and deeper into an extreme islamic world in which violence is celebrated as a natural and virtuous trait and results in an act of terrorism leads to a rebirth of sorts.
the initial pure, godly love is reborn as a powerful worldly love albeit through blood, violence and terror.
hadewijch is a beautiful and scary essay on absolute love and faith.

one of my favorite movies of 2009.

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i am celebrating my beautiful, loving and ever-frail mother’s fifty eighth birthday today tuned into the wonderful bbc radio 4 podcast so much older then featuring katharine whitehorn.

it’s a wonderfully entertaining show, humorous and touching in a uniquely british way. retirement age (an economically unsustainable sabbatical), old age sex and retirement villages are covered and much, much more.

i’ve been obsessing about age from my early post-pubescent days and have vicariously lived my folks’ very visible aging over the past decade in the hope that lessons learned will come in handy second time round.

happy day habibi.

bonus link: katharine’s desert island discs.

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a dear friend of mine married late last year. when i asked what marriage was, she replied:

I don’t know if I can answer directly, but I like to think of marriage in this way—as comradeship, joining, an opportunity for roots to grow deeper. The commitment produces an anchor, an ally, a chosen family member. Since my father’s death, family has become ever more precious. For example, I miss the companionship I had with my brother in childhood–he was like a twin. We’re in all the family photos, sitting together, skinny legs dangling. I have a new twin! Oddly, the sibling metaphor seems apt. Practical byproducts are citizenship rights, the opportunity to stay in the same bed in socially conservative households, legal rights…
Thinking further, I imagine that being married produces a kind of social eunuch-ness. At this point in life, this appeals. There is some danger in my conversations with men and women that may be contained by this social convention. Last night in my photo class, I watched as the 60-something Texan instructor flirted with a 60-something Texan housewife who’d driven two hours from her ranch to learn how to take pictures of eagles and butterflies. The topic of their conversation: their spouses. It blew my mind, the way the energy was neutralized. I don’t want further sexual interactions with people, I’m interested in redirecting this energy. I also love being the aunt, the advisor.

These are some thoughts.

i have long been fascinated by marriage’s lingering hold on society and how little experimentation seems to take place within its constructs. the reasons are naturally economic and evolutionary as pointed out in a recent vox paper by marco francesconi, christian ghiglino and motty perry’s paper on the origin of the family. the emergence of marriage (and by extension the current dominant religions) is due to higher efficiencies for society (fathers need only expend energy on guarding and rearing their offspring when reasonably certain they are the true fathers compared to having to protect overlapping sets of offspring when uncertain).

Essential to our theory is the notion that mate-guarding by males is unavoidable when fatherhood is uncertain, even though from society’s viewpoint it is a complete waste. Therefore, any social “institution” that can, in equilibrium, reduce guarding will lead to a fitness gain at the individual level as well as at the group (or society) level. One of such institutions is religious beliefs and norms that put the fidelity family at centre stage. This reasoning will allow us to underpin why virtually all major world religions stress the role of the fidelity family – and, more specifically, marriage – as avoidance of casual sex.

as they point out, developments such as dna paternity testing and economic independence of mothers are likely to alter the evolutionary optimal familial formats moving forward.

when i traveled abroad when living in egypt, my first night out (whether in london, beirut or dubai) would always surprise me with the promise of sex. it lingers constantly in the background, unnoticed to those around me but with clear impact on the energy of those cities apparent to someone coming from a land where the possibility of sex often seemed absent (also unnoticed to us living in cairo).

the promise of sex seems like such a central part of a vibrant contemporary culture. it drives so much of what young and old alike do on many levels. i am currently subscribed to the evolutionary perspective that puts sexual pursuit at the center of of our motivations.

egyptians are of course as hot for sex as any peoples. the religious, socio-economic limitations on sex however are far greater than they are in most other countries i have been to. throw in cairo’s megalopolis-density and the practicalities of having sex put it out of reach of a big part of the population (but not to the truly committed: a friend who lived in an apartment with views of zamalek’s fish garden once spotted a a young couple, girl veiled of course, having sex in one of the man-made caves).
i am convinced this has unfortunate ramifications for contemporary cairene culture. apart from the heavy sense of frustration that many visitors sense (partially sexual in my reading), it makes for less drive, less energy than a great city of 18 million people (mostly young an unmarried) should exhibit.

so my valentine’s wish is for more sex please cairo. it’ll be good for all and oh so fun.

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drugs /// art /// sex ///music ///

compare to what i wrote about:

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