Cassandra, by Christa Wolf

“Freedom!” shout the Yanks. “Equality!” bellow the Commies. “Life! ” yell the people, but their voices are drowned out.

Christa Wolf wrote about prophetess Cassandra and her role in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. She saw parallels between herself and Cassandra, between East Germany and Troy - both states insist on absolute loyalty, both keep fighting on when there is nothing left to fight with, both are eventually defeated by a stronger state. In the Greek –Trojan war, the ideological cause of war (Helen, epitomizing beauty and love) is little more than a noble myth to disguise the power struggle over territory and trade routes: namely, the Hellespont. The war between the USSR and the USA was the same - argues Wolf - although portrayed as an ideological struggle, the Cold War was actually about economic control and territory. The Cold War, like the Greek-Trojan war, brought both states to the brink of self destruction with the arms race; the people of both empires lived in perpetual fear of attack.

~~~~~~~~~~

…a few hours after reading Cassandra we start talking about Nicaragua, and the fact that mum was a foreign reporter there in the 80s. She told me she travelled with a Nicaraguan translator. A year after she left he ended up dead. My dad produces a book of photos from the country, taken in the '70s. I flick through the book of photos, trying to get a handle on the political situation of Nicaragua of the last thirty years. Reluctantly I move from the timeline at the back to the beginning – for how can I judge the people in the photos or understand their plight if I do not know the dates and facts of their story?

Fool. Has the Cassandra allegory taught you nothing? Troy could be a state now; the disputes for territory and ideology continue. The earth is the earth is the earth. I look at the photos: the women intently studying pistols; the guerillas with their dirt-studded jeans; one lighting a cigarette below the ubiquitous Coca Cola posters (that hint at the American involvement); the lower half of a body; a skeleton jumped and livewired out of the earth – the remnants of a man, his love, his legs.

The red blood tinge, always somewhere in the frame. I don’t need to know the dates to get the story: humans, suffering, pride, fighting, desperation, intense poverty of materials and intense creativity of spirit – a people to despair of and a people to admire – a people that we first world Westerners rarely have to face and never really understand. We don't get it, because we have not in seventy years been forced to face ourselves, bloody and skeletal in the mirror, with almost nothing left as future or past, and ask ourselves if we will fight.

Blood, feuding, fighting, revenge, death. Revolution, civil war, guerilla fighting, collapsing government, exile. As a Westerner, I find that this is the language of the newspapers. I never have to read it in the mirror.

An article about Christa Wolf from the New York Sun
Another article about Christa Wolf from the Goethe-Institut

courrier international

After a bad day at work , I walk to a newspaper stand and ask for the Courrier International. The newspaper-seller grins. He has dark weathered skin and his wrinkles glow golden.
"Etes-vous Parisienne?"
I smile back uneasily. I am always defensive when people inquire about my origins.
"Non. Pourquoi?"
"Bahhhh..." The newspaper-seller lifts a copy of the latest Courrier International to the light.
Les Parisiens: quelques raisons de les détester.The front cover is crowded with grumpy Parisians, like the ones I encounter on the metro every morning: the ones who never stand up to give little old ladies their seats, the ones who listen to oversized music on oversized headphones, the ones who stare unsmilingly back, who mutter "pardon" before barging past you like you're a pillar...I'm not saying all Parisians are like this all the time. It's simply commuter culture here. The morning metro's a hostile, humid rainforest peopled with commuters clutching canopies of newspapers, trying to protect themselves from others' prickly stares.

I grin back at the newspaper-seller. The characters on the cover are definitely from the metropolis, there's no doubt about it. These are Parisiens all right; and the magazine's got their ca-fait-chier attitude down to a T.

Then I realise that the newspaper guy might actually *be* a Parisian. I stifle my grin, just in case, and hand over 3 euros.
"Ne vous inquietez pas, je cache la manchette," I reassure him, folding my magazine in half so the front page is hidden. He nods, solemnly - and then grins back. Perhaps he's not a Parisian after all...

adbusting

In Britain and indeed Europe, we are consumers. We do what the capitalist system expects and needs us to do - we buy things. Nowhere is this clearer than in the snaking queues at department stores this Christmas.

Trapped in this conformity of action, we turn to images and objects - we are now defined by the objects we own, rather than the deeds we do. We buy objects not for what they are, but for what they seem to be - even the most simple of objects projects a complex brand identity, a kind of appealing hologram; turn it to the light and see it for what it really is. Adverts are the way that companies project an object's identity, exaggerating the product's powers and personifying it, giving the product human characteristics: family-orientated, environmentally concerned, caring, macho, attractive. Every object now has a human face: its brand.

Advertisers are personifying objects here, this is metaphor on a vast scale, only the metaphors are deceptive rather than descriptive. In literature, a metaphor will shed light on the true nature of the object. In design, the ad acts as the product's false face - a mythic mask which seeks to conceal the ordinary, unethical origins of the product, giving it a heroic backstory and alter ego.

Instead of being given real information about the product - where it was made , by whom, under what working conditions - we consumers are given a brand, a name, a 'face' via advertisements - thus we choose the object on the basis of its projected persona, and overlook its inherent value as a product. Through these objects' personae, we seek to define ourselves too: just as we choose friends to reflect well on us, so we choose our brands on the basis of what they say about us.

Yet the only thing they say about 'us', the human race, is that we are easily fooled. An advert is not purely the face of an object; collectively adverts form the cultural surface of our society. They change the way we look, think and talk. They distract us from the reality of the product and the world, and they falsely reassure us. Nescafe, endorsed by G. Clooney, is trusted by consumers who like the actor. Distracted by his catchphrase 'what else?', which suggests that there is little 'else' beyond the realm of this advert and his reassuring smile, consumers forget to ask questions about Nescafe's business dealings with third world coffee growers. We are distracted from the political reality.

Interestingly, people have taken to advertising themselves on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, consciously shaping alter egos and mythic masks, projecting a new flawless version of their identity out to other people. The internet is perfect for this, as its mixture of image, text and sound enables full-scale advertising and content does not have to link to reality in any way: images and sounds can be created on the computer, virtually, without any need to resemble external reality.

Thus with the internet we move towards a virtual world with little need for stable, fixed reference points in reality. We have search engines that can 'read' the internet and programs that can 'draw'. Though the internet was created and interpreted by people in reality, its importance as a cultural phenomenon lies in its capacity to detach from the real world.

Of course, artists and graphic designers have always looked beyond reality during the creative process. I'm not calling for a return to purely realistic art. The world of the imagination and of visual arts is a wonderful place. But it's dangerous that this world is no longer free- that it is being exploited by companies to deceive and brainwash - rather than stimulate and liberate consumers.

(This post was inspired by a lecture at Middlesex University and none of it is particularly original, just a synthesis of ideas I've heard about advertising, hyper-reality and the internet).

idiotidioms

"Ca fait chier!" is probably the most (m)uttered phrase in Paris. 'Chier' being the verb 'to crap', it comes as no surprise that the idiom is so popular in Paris, probably the most crapped-upon city in Europe. Pigeons and dogs express their appreciation for the city perversely, by defecating all over its beautiful cream-coloured skyline.The phrase itself: "ca fait chier" or "ca me fait chier" means "that pisses me off" or "That bores me". It expresses an irritation or boredom that seems to be frequently experienced by people here. I quite liked the expression as a little defiant nod to the bodily basis for human civilisation, the boring mundane things people have to do, like eat and sleep and go to the toilet, before they can be civilised, cognizant beings.

I liked the expression, that is, until a little old woman and her mutt decided to make a toilet-stop on my street. Her well-groomed terrier turded the terrain right outside my flat. I went batshit. Gesticulating wildly at the dog and his gutter-gift, I walked after the woman and asked her to woman to remove her dog's faeces from my front door.The parisienne looked at the steaming pile of poo and shrugged. "Ca fait chier, huh?" she said, and walked on.

Well, quite.

life drawing

She thought she saw herself once though, in the shimmering torso of the naked man. They had come for drawing classes and were met with Adam, the nude. The door was pulled open by a man with a moustache and a mischevious regard. He tugged them into his world of sin (what would her mother have said?) and there, before the bright lights and crimson curtains was a naked man lying on a canape. He was very intently still whilst twenty women art students focused on him, trained their eyes on his shadows.
She didn't know where to look, so she fixed her eyes on his torso and drew in a frenzy. She tried to untangle the scene but from any angle it was licentious. Life drawing. This was what she'd signed up to: sketching this naked man all flesh, displaced from Eden, ballerinaed against the blank bright screen. These women were all pursuing knowledge. They drew the blocks of shade and light over and over again, exploring the demarcations of sin/virtue with their hazy 2B pencils. Thought in the act.
His cures intersected ruler straight lines. She found she could not bring herself to draw the dangling fact, so left it blank. A neat square space between the dip of the hips and his two legs.

latex heads and lather

Latex heads and lather sounds like it could be some kinky ritual in the shower, but actually - sorry to disappoint you - I'm talking about my local pool. Having swum on my return to the UK and enjoyed it, I promised myself I would take a dip with the Frogs. French swimming pools couldn't be that weird, could they?

My trip to the local pond proved more complicated than I'd imagined. Feeling exposed and foreign, I tried to tiptoe into the changing rooms, only to be stopped at the border and ordered to take off my shoes - wearing them beyond this point gets you a 5 euro fine. Entering the pond included dodging lilipad-swarms of AquaFitness classes and sporting a skin-coloured swimming cap, which stretched ears back beyond recognition.

Swimming with the frogs became swimming among the Frodos; our shiny bald heads and stretched ears certainly placed us in the land of sci-fi. The feeling that I had landed in some fantasy novel was confirmed by the wacky orange walls resembling Martian craters (let's face it, swimming pools are not the best place for the 1970s colour scheme that seems ubiquitous in parts of Paris). The turquoise and purple lockers were computerised and whizzed shut, nearly slamming my fingers in. Annoyingly, they did not respond to normal things like keys and thumping. Instead, I needed an 8 digit pincode to recover my possessions.

In the swimming pool, the Aquafitness class had luminous faces like distant stars. Pregnant women doing backstroke kicked the water viciously as their faces curled into sweaty masks of pain. One woman passing me had a bump like an island that she seemed to be trying to swim away from. Listen ladies, I wanted to say, save it for the delivery room... An enormous man in a tiny speedo wailed to himself as he swam. When a young and overeager kid dived into the water and missed, crying loudly on the side, I decided it was time to leave.

Swimming with the frogs was interesting, but I think I'll wait till the pond's empty before I try again.

do sculptures get crushes?

Leaves fall on them. So does faeces, rain, dust, sometimes snow. Love, never. Scuptures in Paris certainly don't get crushed by the heat of the moment, but they must get crushes - with so many beautiful people walking around, how could they ´not? Human hearts crafted these sculptures, remember - something of love still fizzles along the stone outlines.

Paris is alive. To be in a city of busy traffic, buzzing telephones and racing pulses, among scattered couples - to be among all this, and yet stone, motionless, eternal, must be torture.

Sculptures that see this vivid living daily - of course they desire it! Of course they chase it, the way men in bars chase women in red skirts and smiles - how could you not covet the life that flows through people here? Imagine being a sculpture here - perched among trees that blossom, leaves that fall, fertility consummated and confirmed before your very eyes, yearly anew, whilst you - fruitless, barren, old - are strapped in stone for ever.

I like to think that every now and then, one of these statues slips out of her stone chrysalis, winks at a beautiful young man with Monoprix bag, and smiles a little sadly when he saunters past, oblivious.