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

[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.