In Memoriam
Anna de Casparis
July 20, 2006
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15th August 1947 – 18th July 2006
Anna died on Tuesday evening. Her extraordinary, indomitable spirit was evident to the end. We will miss her as a comrade, mother, sister and friend, as someone who lived life with relish and brought great beauty and delicious tarte oignon into so many of our lives.
Okay, the tarte oignon was great, but her tortilla, the Spanish kind of tortilla, were really extraordinary. I guess you can’t put every dang yummy morsel into in an obituary, but while we’re remembering the culinary Anna, I’d like to also remember her tortilla.
Anna was among other things, the translator of a book by farmer/activist José Bové, The World is Not For Sale, and it is oddly because of Anna that I re-encountered Bové in the summer of 2002. José Bové, as you may know, is the roquefort farmer/producer who, in an eloquent expression of Yanqee, Git yer Ass off my Acre, dismantled a McDonalds’ building site in his home town of Millau. With his colleagues he then paraded the debris through the town as trophée, the bits of the McDo held high in whatever tractors use for arms, crowds lining the streets cheering praise.
Bové was sentenced to three months at the prison in Montpellier, which is close to where I was staying with dear familial friends, and where Anna lived upstairs. A lot of extraordinary Anna-centric things happened in just a few short days that summer, including a near-death experience involving dear Anna.
Because near-death experiences tend to involve a lot of waiting around worrying for the living, we decided to distract ourselves I mean do something constructive, by attending an event that Anna would have attended, had she not been half a nanometer from death’s door. This event was an enormous demonstration on the hills above Montpellier, on the occasion of Bové’s release from prison.
Life is one big fashion show, so the night before the ‘demo’, we spent quite some hours preparing a rather large banner painted with the words,
Fort
Bové’
The demo was held on a hill covered with wild thyme and other scrubby plants, which we attendees trampled and pulverised in the walk to get to the protest/celebration. I shall always remember this day for the feeling of release it gave our little group, to not only worry about Anna cum sui, but to start living again. I shall also remember this as the most aromatic political demonstration I’ve ever attended.
Thank you Anna, Rock Fort!
debra at 18:40 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
Grow yer own dang biomass inadvertently
July 16, 2006
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Occitanian kitchen garden in May, as neat as you please
Way back in January, and then again in March, and again in April and May, I had big plans for my kitchen garden. Big and neat. Knowing that I would have to return from Occitania to the Polar Circle for two months of gainful employment, I alphabetized my seed beds and planted sticks for beans and gourds to climb up and a trellis for what I hoped would be groves of tomato plants, dripping with 4 sorts of fat tomatoes. I made a shockingly Dutch-looking irrigation system, so that when it came time to water, my neighbour, Sidi ElGouche could throw open the sluices and let er rip. And Sidi ElGouche being the sweetheart that he is, was not shy about making sure that in my absence, my kitchen garden got a goodly amount of water.
When I returned to my garden on the 14th of July, I encountered a solid plot of homegrown biomass.
.'))
Occitanian kitchen garden in July 2006, a little less neat, but inadvertently producing what will become a thick mat of biomass (Please read more… )
debra at 15:54 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
Soy story: food subculture club visits an exhibiton of Romanian otaku culture
July 9, 2006
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An array of Romanian textured soy products
What could be more obvious than the fact that the noble soybean, or rather, the humble hunk of textured soy and contemporary Romanian otaku culture are inextricably linked. You already knew that, right?
About one month ago, Mediamatic hosted a most unusual food-related exhibition about the intricate and vivid world of Romanian otaku. Otaku, a once Japanese, and now ubiquitous term for fanatic, refers to the group of people that live out the bulk of their social and cultural lives in social game spaces online. Artists Stefan Tiron (curator/artist), Bogdan Marcu (artist, musician) and Linda Barkasz (cosplayer/artist) playfully offered a glimpse of the inner workings of this subculture through a multi-media installation, comprised of costumes, hacked and remade computer animations, collections of manga literature, glittery stickers, sparkles, a replica of a Romanian otaku’s room, a goodly amount of oral history and a good old-fashioned BBQ featuring about as many Romanian soy products as anyone could stomach.
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Stefan Tiron opens the Mediamatic BBQ and tells the Romanian textured soy story
To attempt to sketch the outlines of a living subculture through art (or the medium of BBQ for that matter) was an inspired move by curator Arne Hendriks. All the more so because in the selfsame building at the very same time, the Stedelijk Museum was hosting a flat and populistic exhibition about the role of art in online game culture, Next Level. Obviously I prefer an exhibiton initiated out of engagement with the creators of contemporary culture to an exhibition produced to increase visitor numbers amongst teenagers whether there’s a BBQ involved or not.
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Curator Arne Hendriks and artist Bogdan Marcu converge. Sausage on the left, soy on the right
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Artist Linda Barkasz tells Katerina the story of the Romanian otaku whose offline personality was in need of a boost and for whom she made this costume.
What I learned during this food subculture club outing is that although soy is probably only specifically important to these particular Romanian otaku, soy has certainly played an important role in Romanian cultural history. For realsies. (Please read more… )
debra at 18:13 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
