Wax Scrawls is a constantly morphing feature on Scrawled in Wax in which I either link to things I find interesting and fall out of the general focus of my blog, or are just little random thoughts or happenings from my life. Enjoy!
I went to see renowned sitarist Irshad Khan today at Toronto’s Harbourfront. YouTube videos don’t really do him justice, but they’re a start. It isn’t the easiest music in the world to get into, partly because of the way it moves off and deviates from the root note or key and partly because it’s long and often bewilderingly complex. And because the structure of the music is somewhat random – though ragas are ancient and handed down through generations, like jazz, the structured bits are anchors between the improvisation – it can be difficult to ‘feel it’. But today I couldn’t help but think that to really get into it, you need to let yourself go – to abandon yourself to ups and downs and changes in mood and tempo chosen by the musician. Oh, and from previous experience, whisky also helps. Anyway, the show was mind-bogglingly good and if you’re generally curious, you can listen to another sitarist, Niladri Kumar, at the end of my Muxtape.
A Guardian Q&A with Slavoj Zizek [via]. Sample: “Q: What makes you depressed? A: Seeing stupid people happy”. Charming. More insightful – and useful for explaining the tone of the the Q&A – is this Nation piece on the seeming strangeness of Zizek and his approach.
Also, I had no idea who Zizek contemporary and French Marxist philosopher Alan Badiou was, but anyone who argues against art as a mimetic act, instead suggesting that ‘the inaesthetic’ is a-referential, ’singular and immanent’, is okay in my books. I’ll add it to the list of Things Which I Must Read (and, likely, never will).
Diana Kimball, one of the organisers of ROFLcon, has a remarkable and lovely piece on what she thinks it means “to live in a liminal state between the screen and the sensory world”. It’s not that I think it’s full of revolutionary ideas (though some are very clever). Rather, it’s the fact that she chose to produce a narrative of her thoughts, to form an aesthetic frame in which to map out the movement of conceptions of identity, the self and presence from ‘3d-space’ to ‘virtual space’. It’s neat stuff, and I almost wish I could hear an audiobook version of it. [Update]: I forgot to mention – I think this sort of aesthetic/artsy approach to contemporary culture is increasingly the only thing that makes sense to me. Analysis is starting to feel impossible; making stories at least seems doable.
The Times has a piece up about Kafka’s porn collection. Would you like a prim, odd British reaction? Here ya’ go: “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.” Um, what? Why, exactly, is bestiality and ‘girl-on-girl’ action in the same sentence? Anyway, are we really surprised that someone as dark and visual as Kafka was into porn?
