shortly

it's late, 2.20 AM.
i've been working till now, smoking and drinking red wine, in the house everyone is sleeping. that's the time when i usually feel more inspired to write.
shortly I'm going to sleep..
shortly i also have a deadline to hand in a chapter (or a decent part of it) to my supervisor and the "evaluation committee" and that's why i'm working now instead of sleeping, being out with friends, reading a nice book or doing anything else.
it's not that i don't enjoy working/writing, i do, but for some reason i'm always late with deadlines and i don't work when i should.. few days ago i figured out that maybe i have some unresolved automatic attitude that makes me be childishly rebellious against academic duties.. i'm usually not very fond of psychoanalytic explanations that connect everything with some sort of "family pattern" or childhood experience.. but in this very case maybe it makes sense..
i'm not really going out, pubbing, or seeing friends in this period, and i'm also not writing email or messages to friends.. which actually sucks 'cos i love to feel close people who i care about and who are in my same city or far away..
anyway i'll come back to my social habits and communication shortly.
but now i go to sleep.

oh love!

good intentions none cares about

today i woke up relatively early, well early for the standard of the last weeks. so now i feel like i have a looong day ahead of me. (un)fortunately i have a thousand things to do, so before i have time to realise it, it'll be 6pm and time to cook and eat the evening ritual.
this evening ritual usually means "the day is almost over and, if you haven't done your thousand things yet, you are a lazy ass and you'll need to work till late tonight, which you won't 'cos you're sleepy so you have just spend yet another procrastination-day".

things i need to do today:
finish preparing lecture; sending tons of emails to thank people, push people, inform people, please people, gently send people to fuck off, etc.. ; buy primary house&food necessities; go to various offices at the univ; fill in a series of different forms, reimbursement, papers and the like; bring VHSs to official place where they can be copied or digitalised; ideally read&study.

things i'd like to do today:
read fun stuff; edit some footage that is starting to be 2 centuries old; blog about something interesting/clever; figure out how to work with the online jumpcut platform; talk with titz 'cos i miss her (and with other friends 'cos i miss 'em too); shave 'cos it getting warm, i'm melting in my jeans and, after all i seem to be a standard girl homologated to massified gendered stereotyped of feminine images (sometimes at least); play some nerdy computergame; play bass.

Maybe if i'm quick and i stop wasting time on internet i'll manage to do everything.. (?)
i'll give it a try...

snapshot #1

Monday 5th of May
h: 17:30

I'm sitting at my desk, preparing the outline of a lecture, listening to RadioOndaRossa; I just had some pineapple; I'm drinking black tea. The window is open to let some "fresh" air enter. It's so warm I'm sweating considerably, I'm quite undressed and a big strip of sun hits my shoulder and I can't close the curtains anymore otherwise it gets too dark. I have a dozen of windows open on the computer 'cos I'm looking for the right article. In half an hour I'll need to start cooking, I'm bored only thinking about it. It's a beautiful warm spring day. People chat outside. Now I'm going get a beer from the fridge.

when I am 60, will I drown in my own 'paper memories' (a.k.a. trash)?

Sometimes I need to tidy up my desk. It's not that hard when it involves filing or throwing away bank statements, articles for the Univ., old meaningless train tickets or shopping lists; but it becomes a gigantic enterprise when it comes to 'meaningful' pieces of paper, 'meaningful' train or museum tickets, notes from beloved people, nice postcards, etc.. I can't throw them away, I just can't do it!

The result is a kinda folder full of stuff that is almost exploding and a couple of drawers or small boxes in the same state. Importantly I've been in Utrecht for little more than 2 and a half years. So just imagine what I left in Rome....

I'd like to 'travel' light. And I'm getting a lot better. I'm learning to let go of objects: "keep the memory, trash the object". Now I can even (often enough) get rid of useless and barely meaningful stuff like bus tickets, fliers of I-don't-know-what, notes, shopping lists, very crappy drawings I do in pubs (only the very crappy though), etc...

This is what, for example, was on my desk for months (together with a 'happy-new-year" postcard for 2008, in theory for a friend of mine, that I have never sent. NOTE: Bodina, it was for you!! if you want I can still send it now! :) ) and ended up in my 'memories' folder in my closet.

Dance-films flyer, Film festival flyer, film conference, T-shirt LEGO label, a postcard from video-artist U.B.:
Explanation of a cool video installation that was in October/November 07 (?) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam:A card from my mum and a card from a lovely old lady neighbour in Rome:
This is the final result! My desk is clean and spacious and I'm proud like a baby who pooed for the first time and stares at the product of her effort with infinite self admiration.
[Flowers kindly offered by the sweet other inhabitant of the house :) ]

Go China?: For decoration only and (not) for consumption

On the 1st of May I went to see this exhibition that is travelling around Europe. Admittedly I only went to the Drents Museum in Assen (North Holland) where the archaeological part of the collection is shown; so no contemporary Chinese arts, ‘cos that’s in the Groninger Museum. Admittedly is also not a great idea to go on a holiday day when all families, older people and the 50% of the Dutch population is out for a day-trip. In fact, you risk having a heart attach seeing the enormous queue waiting outside the entrance of the museum for a hundred meters or more, to get the tickets. More importantly you risk getting’ stuck in the corridor of the museum with hundreds of people rambling around, flocks of 70-80 years old people staying still in the middle of the rooms chatting, twin-buggies occupying the whole space in front of like 5 display-windows where you are supposed to see tiny objects, and you need at least 20 minutes to reach a toilet.

Okay, point taken, not a very clever day to go there. But we had the tickets already (long live the internet) so at least no queue for us.

Anyway, the collection was interesting, the Terracotta Army impressive, other statues and various objects beautiful. The general installation of the exhibition was good, interesting set up, cleverly made cloth walls and elevated bridges to observe the real life-size Terracotta statues. The written explanation was total crap. 30 lines in total of text giving nothing else but dates, names and numbers (how many statues, how old, how deep in the ground, etc..), nothing at all about why? who? how? under which circumstances?

But what stroke me the most was the museum shop:

The exhibition is called “Go China!”. Possible subtitles could be: “China goes pop for western dummies: ready for consumption” or “Go China, do the 2008 Olympic games*, expand your market in Europe, we are ready, we don’t understand anything of Chinese culture and traditions but we like your cute statues and handsome soldiers”.

Please notice that the ‘original’ statue of the soldier kneeling looks pretty much like this.
[From the cover of the museum guide]
And please notice how in the colourful ‘pocket’ versions he becomes more slim, his face longer, his facial traits more ‘western’, all in all, like some kind of cute actor in “The three Musketeers” with just a bit of a pleasant oriental look.

[The pictures here were taken in the shop].

China goes Dutch:
China goes cow (?):
Yes, there are also statures of women. A lot less in fact.
I leave to you the analysis of those statues..
Noteworthy is that almost ALL the shops in Assen used the subtle marketing strategy of putting random Chinese or oriental looking objects to decorate their windows, this is one out of hundreds of examples:
Finally, the 30th of April is Queen's Day in Holland, so this is what the streets of Assen looked like the day after:
Notice that also the compulsory orange items that you have to wear on Queen's day went Chinese for the occasion:
Orange 'Chinese' hat!
[Holland is soooo multicultural!]

- fine -

* From the website of the Groninger Museum: “In het Olympisch jaar 2008 staan het Drents Museum en het Groninger Museum geheel in het teken van China.”