Nature-in-culture, culture-in-nature

[imomus]

Lots of nature-in-culture, culture-in-nature stuff going on this weekend:

Friday: Berlin Zoo.
Sunday: Schloss Lanke, where a "future folk" music festival was going on in a crumbling former mental asylum on the Obersee. I liked the pine huts people were staying in (slats, a mosquito net, an opaque plastic wraparound shell). And it was good to bump into Horton Jupiter, an old acquaintance from years back.

Because I lack the Berliners' capacity for laying back in a cloud of dope smoke and whiling away endless hours chattering or showing off bobo kids, I took along a book, "Japan At Play" (Routledge). While the DJs played "demon child" type stuff (like The Moles' "Mickey Macaroni" from Residents' offshoot album Demons Dance Alone), I sat reading stuff like:

"French sociologist Roger Caillois... makes a very broad definition of human play identifying just four different types: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), ilinx (vertigo). To this categorization Yoshida Mitsukuni added one further Japanese category: play of seasons, which refers to activities like the tea ceremony, flower arranging and moon viewing, which express elements of nature in refined and highly cultivated forms".

The Jeremy Clarke installation in a nearby oasthouse—dozens of Atari STs playing an odd, discordant, compelling MiniMoog symphony—was impressive, but almost upstaged by a shrieky nest of baby swallows in the rafters. Hisae and I quickly got tired of the "future folk" and set off on a ten kilometer hike through the forest, beating sticks in rhythm to keep the pace. (By the way, if you love nature, Schloss Lanke is on the market for half a million euros, the price of a two bedroom flat in Islington.)

Comments

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

aw i wonder what sort of person tags a monkey cage...


what's in the 2nd photo?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The second photo is a row of unusually-shaped birds' nests at the zoo.

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

what are the petit cages hanging on a plank in the picture beneath the monkeyhouse? lovely pictures by the way.

[(Anonymous)]

Well written, as always, but does any of this clever-cleverness really matter? Your world seems quite flat.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Care to expand?

[(Anonymous)]

A man died in the bed next to me this morning.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Are you in hospital?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. I have an irregular heartbeat. I'm in the acute ward, hooked up to a monitor and surfing courtesy of Patientline.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah! Well, I hope the treatment is going well for you and you're soon out of there.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Also from "Japan At Play", I enjoyed this chart, about changing attitudes to the rural:

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I don't quite understand this. I thought that the words in parenthesis were paired with their opposites, but that doesn't seem to be the case throughout. Is the word in each pair that is not parenthetical the 'privileged' concept?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think it's to be read as "from the 50s to the 70s in Japan, urban values were displacing rural ones due to the association of cities with development, prosperity, sophistication, etc and rural areas with backwards, poverty, etc. From the 70s to the present, however, there's been a shift to the rural being seen as authentic, traditional, sacred, communal etc as opposed to the city's alienness, modernity, secularity, individualism, etc..."

It just shows how the same binaries can be given a positive or negative slant depending, I think, on whether we're looking at the modern period or the postmodern, the industrial period or the postindustrial. Interestingly, the author of this piece (Okpyo Moon) sees the Osaka 1970 Expo as the turning point. There is a good case for seeing that expo as the beginning of postmodernism in Japan.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is the word in each pair that is not parenthetical the 'privileged' concept?

Yes.

silly billy goats

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

*whistles along with george formby*

Last night I met a French girl, she smiled and said "Wee, wee".
I said don't put rude questions please, to My Little Goat and Me

;-)

Schloss Lanke

[(Anonymous)]

One of my favorite experiences this summer was listening to Ekkehard Ehlers DJ set in the garden of Schloss Lanke on a sunday evening. Do you know that the building was used as a mental hospital during the DDR times?
There are beautiful lakes in this area as well.
One of our friends can stay in one of the big rooms on the first floor for the whole summertime. Unfortunately this summer has been so cold that we didn't show up there very often...
We can take you with us next time we go there.
eRiC

Re: Schloss Lanke

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know that the building was used as a mental hospital during the DDR times?

ah... in fact, you do know! now i've read properly after i've only watched the pictures...

according to reports of people who stayed one night in one of those pine huts, they must be quite uncomfortable. and they're for one person only! so, no hot parties inside!
i've been told that those huts were installed to get the permission as a hostel...
eRiC

Re: Schloss Lanke

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting! They looked extremely uncomfortable, but I liked the design aesthetically. Unfortunately it rained the whole time we were there.

Re: Schloss Lanke

[aberrantangels]

Do you know that the building was used as a mental hospital during the DDR times?

I may as well admit that initially, I didn't interpret those initials as "Deutsche Demokratische [sp?] Republik", but something quite different and non-political. And I got the mental image of a country ruled by Dance Dance Revolution. ^___^

[anglerfish96.livejournal.com]

Your girlfriend looks a lot hotter in that hat than you do.

Or maybe that's just me.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Hm! I think I disagree with J "play of seasons" as a separate type of play. So many of the activities associated with Japanese seasonal festival/fun observances fit into Caillois' four. For example, dancing at O-Bon is a vertigo thing. Eating tsuki-mi udon at moon-viewing is mimetic. Incense-mixing contests or poet-naming contests, a la Genji, were still competitions. Just off the top of my head.

[(Anonymous)]

Will you ever get it , Japan is unique.. and any means, lame logic, dubious taxonomies are justified in proving it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Too bad the lame logicians and dubious taxonomists are writing for Routledge and you're writing for LiveJournal, then, isn't it?

[(Anonymous)]

you really are a postmodernist then: i.e. it's those with the power who get to define the meaning of truth.

MMPHWAH

[(Anonymous)]

duty is beauty, beauty as duty, fruity as shooty, shooty as fruity..mmm..mmm..mm yes, very special, very mmm...mmmm lemon merangue nurture in nature in nature in nurture...mmph mmph mmph and the momus dribble goes on and on and on and on

Re: MMPHWAH

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hmm, an Anglophone in Japan, eh? Hope you weren't harmed by the earthquake.

[slime-slime-sly.livejournal.com]

did you find out if it's half a million including the lake?that's what i heard but i'm not quite sure

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Obersee is for sale. It's half a million to buy the house, but you have to commit to several millions' worth of repairs, apparently.