Chunks’ Neighborhood

Cairoscape - Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City introduces the dynamic situation of contemporary art and culture in Egypt to the Berlin public.
Taking the Arab-African megalopolis of Cairo as a starting point, Cairoscape proposes a different way of looking at the modern city and at the phenomenon of contemporary urbanization. In the project Cairo is held up as an emblematic place, catalyst and generator of new narrative series that ultimately transcend local context: Cairo as translocal place, simultaneously recipient and origin of a set of cultural influences and ideas floating in the region, and privileged observation point that as such may disclose unexpected yet familiar scenarios.

Cairoscape features artists and practitioners that in their work reflect a certain contemporary and existential urban condition connected to the city of Cairo, its suggestive power and urban imaginary. Works by both artists from Egypt and artists who have recently done residencies in Egypt are included, allowing differing views of Cairo to be juxtaposed. At the same time, Cairoscape examines the possibilities, the potentialities and the paradoxes of Cairo as a site of artistic production today.

A project curated by Marina Sorbello and Antje Weitze.

...Eric Dolphy suddenly exploded into my musical consciousness... As a teenager, it seemed almost psychedelic, something I had never before expereinced with jazz. This kind of musical revelation tends to happen less often as one gets older. This process has always seemed pretty natural to me - as you absorb more and more sense sense-data in aging, you're less likely to encounter music which manages to conclusively blow all of these accumulated expereiences out of the water...

Such epihpanies do keep coming with age though...

If musical epiphanies are less frequent as you age, it suggests to me that they tend to cut that much deeper when they finally do arrive.

- derek walmsley in the wire's masthead eloquently captures what i was groping at here.

i've been patiently waiting for geeta dayal's book -Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3)  (part of the excellent Continuum 33 1/3 series of books) on brian eno's seminal album (Another Green World).

her intro has just been published on the 33 1/3 blog:

My own background is in the sciences, and I approached this book as a sort of scientific experiment. I came up with hypotheses and tested them by doing research... I did a lot of interviews, read a lot of books, and spent a lot of time thinking and listening. I spoke with dozens of people; one of the great gifts of writing a book on Eno is getting to interview some of the very interesting collaborators that he has worked with over the past thirty-odd years...

I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects -- from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking to tape loops -- for inspiration. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno's methods are not explicitly about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) A Pattern Language, Stafford Beer's The Brain of the Firm Brain of the Firm, and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) Experimental Music. What these books have in common -- besides being books that Eno rates highly -- are that they unite a variety of seemingly disparate things, and lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking, such the "Oblique Strategies" cards he created with Peter Schmidt. (I used a deck of these cards myself while writing this book, whenever I reached an impasse)