About watches, fat bellies and culture

Reading Fran’s post gave me the impression we could – nearly at the end of the time we are supposed to be here – be getting to the place this was al supposed to lead: a discussion about the many roads of history on the net. Saw the movie from India (already mentioned that) and could not help it: I thought about the movie as if it were the movies I saw as a kid (old movies based on Astrid Lindgren books for instance) and then – total shock - I saw the video clip intermezzo’s. I try to look at Chinese movies with western eyes, but then I realize there is no suspense in them, it is just a straight line, you don’t know what is going to happen next, there is no tension, it is almost epical in the Bachtine sense of the word.

If we are talking interactivity: I do not know the signals someone from another culture would get, when hearing a story. I mean: what are the triggers to suspect that something is going on. I heard a story about Rambo being depicted with a fat belly in India (dunno if that is really true) because all hero’s in movies from India have fat bellies. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Back to the interactivity.

Number 1: Rhizome art as a revolutionary art form is as Eurocentric as it can because it is connected to philosophical idea’s here (philosophical idealism). Without that philosophy it is just plain chaos.

Number 2: If I want to play a game with someone while telling a story, we need to agree on the basic rules. The basic rules of a story are symbols. I can not play a game with someone in India. I don’t know the rules for that, so I’m not qualified. Man, maybe I even don’t know how to email with someone from Mexico, because I live in a cold hearted country that sometimes scares kids from other cultures because the houses look so identically ugly wherever you go, and if someone is nice to you without reason the general tendency is to think: what does he want from me? (Don’t worry, I live in a beautiful small old house myself with a view on a park with a little lake).

A theatre group from the Netherlands did a show in some eastern European country (Dog Troop). It involved - among other things – the butchering of a toy bear and getting a whole bunch of wristwatches out of his guts. To their amazement, the audience could not stop laughing. Why? Symbol for USSR is a bear. What did naughty USSR bear do in that country? Build wristwatch factories and all the wristwatches were shipped to USSR papa bear.

Somehow writing here becomes an addiction as Osfa stated. And if we continue - he said - we need a new architecture. How about an original piece at least once a week but with more room for comment (more than once a week), but inline, not in the dead end cul de sac comment window where interesting things are said but don’t know if anyone reads it and if they do: will they read what I say next?

Ayway: only two persons responded to my post, so: it will probably be over on march the 1st.

Pods: I will check out the avatar chat. I spoke John Lennon once when he was still a big java applet. Since he has become another type of program, he is not that good anymore. And it is a pity that Active Worlds is no longer free.

Posted by Jeroen Goulooze at February 23, 2003 03:30 AM