Makes you think (again)

Do please !!! have a look at this website: Storyofstuff.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's been said before, written about before, filmed before (remember the movie Koyaanisqatsi?). We in the 'West' remain, majority-wise, a comfy crowd, not wanting to deal, one a regular basis, with where "the stuff" comes from that we buy and use. Still, many of us have a lingering sense of the absurd, the insane, the 'it can't go on this way'.

If you need a little push to act - to figure out what you and I can do to stop over-wanting, -consuming, and -wasting, the people behind this website might give you the push you need, not least because of the quirky graphics and to-the-point messages and info-bytes; some of which sound so preposterous, one feels like saying: "Give me the source!" or "Give me a break!". I came across it by accident, having checked out the website of a singer I like very much, Nikka Costa, who seemed to have disappeared from public view.

Lemme' tell ya. I try! (I could try harder...). To buy local, organic. To buy organic cosmetics. Haven't gone as far as only buying organic clothing yet. Don't even want to think about the dyes, how the cotton or the wool was produced ... . But then the dental hygenist says I should buy an ultrasound toothbrush. Do I want to find out where all the parts come from? My mobile phone has probably got coltrane in it, from Congo. I should chuck it.

Aleppo - Italian-sounding Syria

There's so much I'd like to tell you about Aleppo in August; though I hardly saw anything of this Syrian city, one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements on our planet (e.g unlike struck-down-by-the-Lord-Babylon or Mesopotamian Ur). The backache did not help (disk problem) and my focus was on facilitating the multi-issues, multi-stakeholder and multi-participant workshop, which took place 30 minutes outside Aleppo, at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas ICARDA.

Just imagine though: The old Peugeots in town (ex-French colony), which integrate into a constant-juggling-for-position-but-fluid-nonaggressive traffic; the Mediterranean meza tapas food, the tractors and amazingly decorated trucks (like in India?) driving on the motorway, the motorcyclists driving in the opposite direction on the (so very close) highway's curb, the hot but dry climate, the sprawling built-upness of the city, the surprise of seeing trees lining streets, the bazaary inner-city shopping streets sub-divided into the 'diesel motor' or 'tyres alley' (I never even made it to the Souk), the Lebanese white wine I sipped whilst listening to the cacophony of muezzin callings on a hotel terrace in the Christian part of town; not to forget the general friendliness and the good-looking males; nor the shopkeeper laying out his praying carpet towards Mecca at five o'clock in the morning (backaches make you look out the window at that time of day). I hope to be back; maybe you, too?

How to become an expert

... on a curious and rather particular subject - Some of you will remember how I came to transform my personal interest in the grotesques (grottesche, Grottesken), that weird form of Renaissance ornament, into a somewhat scholarly book. Thanks to an open-minded publisher (and an investment on my part, called "print subsidy"), Metamorphosed Margins was published in 2008 and has since entered many more a library (art history section) than expected, including, to my delight, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Hertziana in Rome.

Who might have taken it out to read is quite another matter, of course - but why be pedantic (or impatient)? Nonetheless, coming across the book being cited in the appropriate wikipedia entry gave me a pleasurable kick.

From Sabbath year to Sabbatical

Number Two. Another non-fiction book. In German. I have published. 'Twas to be a project with a Berlin-based art historic publisher that came to naught. No other publisher I contacted was interested, nor the literary agent I work with. So there it lay in a cupboard (digital, computer, these days).

When a friend of mine recently published a thriller, partly set in China, via books-on-demand, I figured: "Me too". Die Wandlungsreise (transforming travel, the metamorphosing trip, the voyage of change ....) is a brief cultural history of the sabbatical - investigating the links between the ancient sabbath year and the 'sabbatical' of our days (nobody has written about this so far, it seems) - enveloped in episodes of my sabbatical travels in Italy (2005) and reflections upon them (later). Some photos are mingled in and there's an index, with travel tipps and brief descriptions of artists mentioned - who created works with grotesques, during the Renaissance (the topic, which fuelled my sabbatical travels). Naturally, I very much hope that some of you shall want to read it!