Albania celebrates | The Culture of Independence and the Unmaking (i.e. Redesigning) of Skanderbeg’s legacy

MVRV design proposals in Tirana, screenshots via

A state-run institution whose disposition is composed of half-truths, and whose sensibility and form is in the habit of wearing — thus bearing — only two masks: its own take on (tacky) kitsch, a mannerism not to be confused with vernacular, and its public ‘at work’ image that depicts the same short-sightedness of any social media ad campaign, hence an interfaciality laced with insecurities and conceit — which it then promotes as CULTURE — can be very telling, namely in revealing its agency as the inability to grasp and accept the shared reality it imposes its ‘legitimacy’ on, thus pretending to educate those living in it so to ‘cultivate’ it; when, in fact, it is this legitimacy that gets cultivated to become its main legacy — CULTURE.
The answer to the question What does CULTURE (have to) celebrate, then? is quite simple: self-preservation, namely its ability to suspend a shared reality in favor of a hegemonic one that hangs suspended over it as to cast the deepest shadow with the blindest of lights (i.e. half-truths), so to render people’s perception and consciousness obsolete, namely their bearings of and in any reality.

 

MVRV design proposals in Tirana, screenshots via

Cultural Hegemony deceives people into ceding their faculties, thus freedom, in favor of a universal reality hinged on this exact cognitive disorientation, which it then proceeds to stabilize — i.e. manipulate into acceptance — through erasure (of their shared past) and abstraction (of its continued imposition on them), thus normalizing specter as a totality where a potent panoptic gaze blinds lives into spectrality. Such a celebration then becomes nothing more than an omnipresent surveillance, better known as CULTURAL NORM.

The survival instinct from the loss of one reality persists as consumption of and over-indulgence in the other, with neither realities being fully grasped. Such a living, at the edge of two unknowns, might as well be resignified as a life in and of unknown unknowns — though the edge itself marks a duration that is persistently historical. Hegemony limits the chances and choices of an intelligible reality by reducing this duration — i.e. mental health — to a coping mechanism. So power becomes the only intelligence able to draw a(ny) distinction — devising the line, the edge, the limit, and even the history of the reality it forcefully offers. A reality that starts as discrimination is then cultivated into a stability, thus becoming the only way of life. As it appears and it is perceived as a ‘stable’ reality, it assumes autonomy, hence responsibility to secure its own duration — i.e. self-preservation and legacy.

via

As a powerful device (e.g. tool, weapon, mechanism) of enunciation, CULTURE regulated as such works to increase the hegemonic choices of articulation. Hence, the responsibility of CULTURE is indeed to celebrate this stability in order to guard (i.e. surveil) its legacy. In fact, such a celebration seems to be its only agency — i.e. its ethical capability and aesthetic capacity. So, in this year of Skanderbeg, 500 years after his death, it’s not at all shocking, probably even fitting, for the state-run institution of CULTURE to celebrate itself instead.

*********************************************

What is Happening? | In search of missing pieces

The text below could've easily been written for the neoliberalism (aka latent fascism) of present day, especially in Albania. It so clearly articulates a few cloudy sentiments I've been carrying around these past few days. This growing sensitivity has been more of a persistent bad taste in the mouth, one that usually becomes unbearably pungent after scrolling through social media newsfeed and the many (nauseating) reactions it provokes. The more it consumes my time with emptiness and distractions, the more it discourages me about any positive change I'd like to think about or even be a part of. The chances of it happening seem slim and insignificant, at least from my discouraged perspective. It is not self-doubt or pity for the efforts done by many until now, myself included, it is just the cynic announcing herself - optimistically staring at the abyss, the very shallow grave we've dug up. The very same whole (inhabitable cave?) we call future.

We have been made out to be monsters of progress. Whose progress?! As if our insistence for critical thought and public discourse were the real culprit of 'their' failure. Their schemes have set up their own failures. The forces that be. Or maybe they were meant to fail, and all along our criticism has been used as a diversion 'noise', while they've continued to do whatever's necessary 'to progress.' Does that make us accomplices? Naive, yes. Sitting ducks, maybe. But not quite accomplices, or as I'd like to define it piggybacking onto their 'accomplishments'. No, we're not parasites. Our polemic continues to be expelled and displaced, which means there is a (mis)represented distance (Bergson would be all over it) that keeps shifting and changing the paradigm (enough rope, i guess) without knowing towards which direction we're moving (migrating) at which speeds (the significant distance (in time and territory) between exit and escape). Or, as John Coltrane is famous of saying: "I start in the middle.. and go both directions at once."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter the cloudiness and discomfort I feel about the many things that are happening (esp. in Albania) - which in my opinion are eventful only in their chosen documentation methods of (aka aesthetic capture through) PR photography and tagged praises/likes/comments - there is a strong feeling (a ghostly voice/specter) that my critical (thought and effort) is not without value and meaning. It is driven by a willingness (even though cynic at times) and curiosity of wanting to understand and articulate - to make legible why so many (seemingly) well-intended schemes for improvement or 'progress' are stalling or have gone so 'tragically awry'. And more importantly, what part might I and others play to undo it, while unfortunately (maybe not completely) aware that their potential disentanglement might be an act of continued unravelment in and of consequences. 

Lastly, yes, my feelings might have become jaded lately as a result of mixed signals / messages /emoticons sent (or received) from the newsfeed and other online conversations, but the more I read 'experts' talk and write nonsense about the art, architecture, and urbanism in Albania, the more I want to scream: Who are you? What is happening? Where does your expertise come from and do you see/feel/get the reality you live in? I mean come on. Start with common sense and work your way up the chain of thought. I don't mean to be mean, but I have the right to voice my opinion. On what I know. On what I study. On what I teach. I have a right to be critical and question someone's expertise if I feel they don't know what they're talking about. When they have it completely wrong. I am not against them. I could care less about who they are as people, I care about what they tell others that don't understand this expertise. I care when they're ethics are as wishy-washy as the knowledge they claim to impart. How else can anyone be capable enough to critically and constructively participate in the design and use of their own built environment? At the moment, I would trust landscape architects (are they any landscape architects in Albania?), farmers and/or local artisans to have a better grasp of the Albanian build environment social and ecological health and consequences than artists or architects. Until the latter have their act together, and get off the political ride (aka malfeasance). Many are misunderstanding the statement "Everything is political." Think about it. 

As I've said it before about the Albanian State and its politicians: "Edi Rama is as much an artist as Sali Berisha is a doctor." The same goes for many others. Let's call upon all the 'experts' to think about it for a hot second too, while the rest of us is introduced to certain failed schemes below. Happy hunting reading!

Owen: What is happening?
Yolland: I'm not sure. But I’m concerned about my part in it. It’s an eviction of sorts.
Owen: We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?
Yolland: Not in...
Owen: And we’re taking place names that are riddled with confusion and . . .
Yolland: Who’s confused? Are the people confused?
Owen: And we’re standardising those names as accurately and as sen­sitively as we can.
Yolland: Something is being eroded.

—Brian Friel, Translations 2.1 (quoted in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed) 

An excerpt from James C. Scott's Introduction of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed:

It is not so difficult, alas, to understand why so many human lives have been destroyed by mobilized violence between ethnic groups, religious sects, or linguistic communities. But it is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the mainte­nance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.
High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term "ideology" implies, a faith that borrowed as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization ; the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.
High modernism was about "interests” as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities), because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials.
Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people's work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform. Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.
In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.
I have not yet explained, the reader will have noted, why such high-modernist plans, backed by authoritarian power, actually failed. Accounting for their failure is my second purpose here.
­Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well. 

*********************************************

On Expression | In search of missing pieces

Thoughts on voicing, expressing, and taste of the recent events in Albania (Tirana & Gjirokaster). A summary of not only the events, participants, media coverage, public spending, and the generated online waste, of time, effort, and criticism - but, our cultural heritage, folklore, gender identity and (in)equality, history, the making of history, the present, integrating the present, the future, inspiring a future, and so on - via Derrida's Economimesis.

In his essay Economimesis, Derrida examines the terms of the contract to see if it actually does sustain an economy of expression rather than of representation, taste rather than consumption. As fine art is a form of speech, the aesthetic turn away from bodily consumption towards taste does not leave the mouth, which is the site of both bodily consumption and ideal detachment. For Derrida, the privileging by philosophy of expression disguises an economy of secret consumption, of covert representation governed by desire. Everywhere it carries out its work of consumption behind the disguise of detachment, consuming what it detaches itself from. Detachment is but a disguise entrapment. [1]

“If hearing-oneself-speak, in so far as it also passes through a certain mouth, transforms everything into auto-affection, assimilates everything to itself by idealizing it within interiority, masters everything by mourning its passing, refusing to touch it, to digest it naturally, but digests it ideally, consumes what it does not consume and vice versa, produces disinterestedness in the possibility of pronouncing judgments. 

What is excluded from it and what, proceeding from this exclusion, gives if form, limit, and contour? And what about this over-board with respect to what one calls the mouth?

There is no answer to such a question. One cannot say, it is this or that, this or that thing. We will see why.

What this logo-phonocentric system excludes is not even a negative. The negative is its business and its work. What it excludes, what this very work excludes, is what does not allow itself to be digested, or represented, or stated-does not allow itself to be transformed into auto-affection by exemplorality. It is an irreducible heterogeneity which cannot be eaten either sensibly or ideally and which-this is the tautology-by never letting itself be swallowed must therefore cause itself to be vomited.” [2]

[1] Mark Wigley, Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of Derrida, Perspecta 23, p.159.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Economimesis, p.20-21

*******************************************************************

On Theory | In search of missing pieces

While going through my bookmark list, I came across this article from The Funambulist, one of my favorites and the most insightful blog & podcast, so I thought I'd share a bit of it with you. The quote below is part of a conversation Gilles Deleuze had with Michel Foucault in 1972, in which Deleuze quotes Marcel Proust to illustrate his interpretation of theory and theoretical work. You can read the rest of the piece here.

On Theory:

A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don’t revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat.  

A theory does not totalise; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalise and it is your position. and one I fully agree with, that theory is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners’ demands can puncture Pleven’s [French Prime Minister in the 50’s] pseudoreform. If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you [Michel Foucault] were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this “theoretical” conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. (emphasis via The Funambulist)

 *********************************************************************

Dérive #Tirana | In search of missing pieces

“not a town planning project, but rather a way of thinking, of imagining, of looking at things and at life.” 1

On the eve(s) of new competing campaigns for the ultimate power honor of reigning over serving Tirana, I'd like to point out that the city is a public space and the ultimate power is held by its people. Their vote will elect. Their vote does not mean ownership, but participation. Engagement. Responsibility. Competence. Their vote and subsequent implementation of what it represents will determine the kind of comprehensive public(s) we will have (physically, socially, economically, politically).

Will it be a (Roman) Arena or a (Greek) Agora?
Will it favor:
Spectacle or Discourse?
Spectatorship or Participation?
Separation or Integration?

Materialism or Idealism?
Image or Value?

Power or Demos(cracy vs. crazy)?
Ownership or Accessibility?

Public polity in Albania is in desperate need of “a stiff, clarifying test...” 2

There will be a lot of talk about the (physical) infrastructure of public space, which is fine because Tirana definitely needs it - but again, I think many will steer away from the real problem, identifying the real public polemic. A public that has been hiding in plain sight. A public in fight and/or flight.
Once identified, how, do we then see it? How do we engage it, not enforce it?
What is its public dimension? Is it a landmark or an entire urban context?
Is it made of signage, architecture or bodies?
What is its public threshold? Is it edging domesticity, privatization, or blighted voids?
What are its public multitudes? What are its habitats: humans, ecology, pollution, etc.?
What is the public condition in Tirana?

“Is it possible to imagine collective human agency as productive of something playful, joyous, communal, even beautiful?” 3

As we approach election season, I'd like to remind all involved: those who are strategizing the implementation of what public vote stands for (i.e. campaign promises) and those of us who will indirectly be involved by writing, discussing, consulting and challenging along the way and from far away - to not be so short-sighted and get lost in the creative promises of town planning projects of art and architecture, but dig deep into our capabilities as citizen voters, holding the power of electing our public servants, that these elections are our public space, that our vote is our right to access, use and transform the city.

“Beneath the pavement, the beach. Wherever the boredom with given forms of art, politics, thought, everyday life jackhammers through the carapace of mindless form, the beach emerges, where form is ground down to particles, to the ruin of ruins. There lies what the old mole is always busy making: the materials for the construction of situations. These too might be recuperated into mere art or writing some day, and sooner rather than later, but not before their glorious time. Our species-being is as builders of worlds. Should we consent to inhabit this given one as our resting place, we're dead already. There may be no dignified exits left to the twenty-first century, the century of the flying inflatable turd, but there might at least be some paths to adventure. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn't bear thinking about.” 4

**************************************************************

1 Constant, “Lecture Given at the ICA, London” (1963), The Decomposition of the Artist, p. 9 (a). As noted in McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street, p.144.
2 William H. Whyte and Albert LaFarge. The Essential William H. Whyte, New York: Fordham UP, 2000. Page 317.

3 McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street, p.144.

4 McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street, p.159.

**************************************************************

In search of | missing pieces

Containing multitudes (most of them flawed) ... indeed. 

in Albania

multi-s in search of their tude-s.
me in search of their relevance.

art in search of its authors.
authors in search of their institution.
institution in search of its responsibilities.
responsibilities in search of their exception.
exception in search of its evaluation.
evaluation in search of a narrative.
narrative in search of its language.
language in search of its jargon.
jargon in search of its pixels.
pixels in search of their image.
image in search of its recognition.
recognition in search of its identity.
identity in search of its future.
future in search of its past.
past in search of its territory.
territory in search of its capacity.
capacity in search of its occupancy.
occupancy in search of occupation.
occupation in search of its margins.
margins in search of a defense.
defense in search of justice.
justice in search of its visibility.
visibility in search of its aesthetic.
aesthetic in search of its ethics.
ethics in search of culture.
culture in search of its anthropos.
anthropos in search of their apology.
apology in search of its rhetoric.
rhetoric in search of its discourse.
discourse in search of its publics.
publics in search of their domain.
domain in search of its ownership.
ownership in search of its stake.
stake in search of its market.
market in search of its art.


*definitely forgetting a few, or an infinitude. (warning: might not make sense as a totality to many)

*************************************************************

On the Beaten Track | In search of missing pieces

The intent of this post is to expose the (Albanian) public at large (or whatever narrow readership this blog has) to the work of Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track: tourism, art and place. A gesture that is meant more as an introduction to and understanding of travel vs. tourism, tourism of and as art, the implication of both these acts on space as “inauthentic attitudes to place”- and my (own research) interest in this space vs. place as one of expulsion (to borrow from Saskia Sassen) rather than inclusive in its difference.

photo credit: diagstudio.com _detroit, michigan

In order to begin comprehending the scope (and depth) of tourism industry in Albania, do we even know the entirety of developments going on in its name (to make the country visitor-ready)? Why are we not questioning and demanding public transparency when it comes to our public assets? Why are we more vocal and loud when it comes to destruction, but not construction? Why are we so timid in (wanting, and) requesting to be informed, when the rest of the world is already facing challenges of the same bureaucratic, industrial, political, and economical dealings with rapid anthropocentric consequences on natural resources, gentrification (social expulsion/land grabbing) and (planetary/public) health? 

The ‘architecturally modern’ models and renderings, advertised to us via marketing campaigns that promise visions of simpler, puritan (plastic) times and idyllic havens to escape to, have a surgical feel, a put-off quality and determined attitude (more of a regimen) that screams urban cleansing and renewal (which in itself can have some serious repercussions). We should remind ourselves that there is no real urban regeneration or development in these acts (or mindset). They have the aesthetics of what is called boutique and the ethics of social (economic) cleansing. This model of the future not only reinforces tourism as an “inauthentic attitude to place,” but it marks the site as a generic “non-place,” a space of uncertain citizenship. 

There are people who think this is a good move, looking to the West as inspiration and precedent for our development. Sure, we want to be included, be part of EU and so much more. But, is it the smart way of going at it? EU and the West are coming undone. The weaknesses and instabilities of their financial system, surveillance and control of a deep fractured social structure (with prejudice), foreign and biological (not forgetting nuclear) threats, just to name a few. Will we be able to withstand all this? We've come undone ourselves, spiraling (down + out of control) really, for quite some time now, a quarter century to be exact. We are in desperate need of something catalytic, not catastrophic. What is it? I don't know. Something just short of resurrection, maybe? Well, I might be a bit harsh in wording this specific need for a miracle, but I definitely insist on it not being constructed as a monumental, modern, puritan mise-en-scene act of the beautiful. The beautiful needs to be sustainable, contextualized, to infiltrate social complexities, to inform mentalities, thus become realized in the everyday acts of the mundane, and not as a perceived abstraction of an icon or image (unresoluted pixels) only for a chosen / selected few (locals or tourists). Don't let the beautiful be an inside joke of a (pseudo-bourgeois) club membership, but a shared engagement within public interest - as its most fundamental public asset. 

photo credit: diagstudio.com _hamtramck, michigan

In tourism, development's been built on maximizing the potential (aka exploitation) of our public assets, our natural resources, which of course, is standard procedure. But, to me, first and foremost, our public assets are people. Us. Why are we not maximizing our potential first (through education and information) to increase the capacity of making the decision if and how to maximize the potential of our natural resources? It has become a very diplomatic battle (and when I say battle, I mean strategy in planning it as such, and tactical in its implementation) between thinking minds and natural resources - in deciding which is a more immediate investment (in terms of returning profit) and important in being seen (perceived) as beautiful (aka. useful as a commodity) 1) by the entities (i.e. visitors) we so much need the approval of (and be accepted by) or 2) by our own people, the valued identity (i.e. heritage) we've so much fought for, well pretty much since the beginning of times. Diplomatic because it has felt very docile. Docile because it has been overwhelmingly one sided. We are serving our (tangible) crown jewels on a platter. With a bow on top, for kicks. A catered party where the real crown jewels (our thinking minds, our people) are not invited to, but (yet again) linger outside, by the door and windows looking in. Their heaviness imprinted on the glass. An unbearable lightness of being, indeed.

photo credit: going west | the happy hermit via 

Don't get me wrong, I am all for travel and exploration - but as Lippard tells us, there is quite a difference (and displacement) between travel and tourism. And, I would like us to realize that, to understand the definitions given, so we can challenge their intended use (aka. all shades of transparency) when addressing the public. Tourism is not bad, but it has been vilified and used as a commodity tool to advance financial agendas to devastating consequences for the masses. 

Who doesn't want to escape the everyday slumming, even for a fleeting moment in a well packaged promise? We all do, right?! Who, then, dares say that reality and imagination are two different things? Reality has indeed become fiction. What I'm trying to understand and unpack is the kind of fiction it has become, other than what it already was. A well designed perception (algorithm) for those who can afford it. Not the expelled, the poor, the electors, but the opportunists, the preferred, the elected. 

I'll stop my thoughts here and let you read a few paragraphs from Lippard's, On the Beaten Track: tourism, art and place. As always the reading and emphasis is mine. I strongly recommend you read the book to draw your own conclusions. 

***

Introduction: On Rubbernecking

photo credit: amazon.com

Most literature about tourism is written from the viewpoint of the visitor (the supposedly “fresh eye”), rather than that of the visited. Immigrants and the internally displaced are rarely asked how they see their surroundings. Yet every place is both local and foreign. The same place is the site of two very different experiences. Domestic tourism [...] rests precariously in the gap between the familiar and the strange, the close at hand and the far afield. It is a metaphor for multicenteredness, offering experimental approaches to change.

Some sources suggest that tourism will soon be the largest global source of employment; others say it already is. Add that to the subcategory of armchair tourism via print and electronic media, and we're on our way to becoming a society of visitors and voyeurs on one hand, and commodified actors or targets of strangers' fantasies on the other.

Critical tourism may sound like an oxymoron. We don't “tour” to exercise our brains. A vacation is literally an emptying out, a voiding of daily experience and responsibility. Vacations are supposed to be fun, but then some of us get off on critical thinking. It raises questions about other people's lifestyles and value systems and opens us up to reciprocity as we re-invent them for our own delectation.

John Urry suggests that the “tourist gaze” uses “difference to interrogate the normal,” whatever that is. This is of course what artists do as a matter of course.

Since teaching people how to see is the artist's business, it seems odd that tourism as activity (rather than as an image or a symbol) has piqued so few progressive artists' imaginations, despite its heady vortex of cross-culturalism, mixed signals, disjunctive codes, faked authenticity, deterritorialization, and other hot topics. While scholars in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies have feasted at this classic pomo trough, artists with ambitions outside the current market system have only sporadically recognized the affinities, realizing that they could have some effect on these ways of seeing. 

If there is little art about tourism, there is still less art within tourism. Monuments, museums, parks, and tourism itself have hitherto been thought of more as frames than as forms. But they can easily be seen as covert art forms, effectively practiced, like advertising, by official and commercial “non-entities” rather than by celebrities more interested in art fame than in social power. The current art system, for all its “critical” trajectory, encourages this kind of real-world timidity. Just as tourists often deplore situations brought on by their own presence, so artists are complicitous in the way the world is seen.

Tourism (like art) has been touted as a form of transformation, even cannibalism - the consumption of other places, other cultures, or the digestion of their powers. [...] Complex cultures, wildly oversimplified for mass production/consumption, are celebrated with a certain relief and disappointment. (“They're really just like us!”)

Traveling can be a kind of performance piece. We can reinvent ourselves instead of our surroundings. We can surprise ourselves as well as of being surprised.

Travel is between a beginning and an end, a circular form in which the point of departure is as influential as the destination. Victor Turner and Nelson Graburn have pointed out that the structure of tourism resembles all ritual behavior - a beginning, a change, and a return to the normal. When we travel, we “cross over,” as in Turner's notion of liminality - the experience of being on the threshold, in the throes of passage. We cross not only from place to place but also from time to time, and sometimes we are changed in the process.

On a local level, tourism is both additive and subtractive. Although its parasitic role is often remarked, today it is widely perceived as a cure for regional economic woes. Tourism has become a kind of caulking that fits in the cracks of a supposedly unsinkable economy.

The bottom line of leisure travel, after all, is enjoyment, which for many means comfort. “Paradise is a place where all your needs are met effortlessly. Paradise is a place where you are not allowed to feel pain.” Some talented souls actually know how to rest and relax on a tourist vacation, as advertised. For most, “doing the sights” is hard work.

Class and gender are salient components of travel's contradictions. [...] Tourism is by expectation constricted, while travel is by implication freer, partaken of by the well-heeled or by the down-at-the heel (“drifter tourism”). 

A better distinction might be between passive and active tourism, with artists falling in the second category. Passive or active, loud or courteous, affluent or working-class, tourists' behavior stems from a wide range of motives. They may be asserting their right to dominate, or rebelling against being dominated, or passing on the unwelcome experience of being dominated, or simply struggling with ambivalence about new roles in unexpected social situations. [...] Such situations can bring out the best and the worst in people. Some identify with those serving them and are able to perceive tourism from both sides. Others switch roles with dexterity and become irrational dictators.

If you have pretensions to being a traveler rather than a mere tourist, it is intensely embarrassing to be perceived as a visitor at all. 

Tourists who perceive themselves as “sensitive,” capable of appreciating the finer points while traveling [...] are still separated from those of us who lack the resources to know all those right things.

For those educated into a sense of social superiority, kitsch can generate a delicious sense of betraying one's class and educational expectations. Believing that nothing is real, some have trouble recognizing the real when they see it. [...] Despite a prevailing political indifference and the tendency of tourists to see no evil, lived experience comes first and theory later, once we realize what we should be thinking.

The underlying contradiction of tourism is the need to see beneath the surface when only a surface is available. However, peeps behind the stage set, or the wizard's curtain, offer just another layer of artifice. Destinations are chalked up rather than savored. Some places are merely “famous for being famous,” and some of them don't even exist. [...] Few would argue that much tourism is anything but frankly superficial, what Armand Mattelart has called the “shop window effect,” in which visitors' consumption patterns are taken on by those visited.

The historical roles of pilgrimage and curiosity have been filled (though hardly fulfilled) by tourism and museums.

Having discovered how attractive this toe dipped in freedom is to most people, the tourist industry has also gotten into the off-the-beaten-track business, usually more expensive and fundamentally more snobbish in its appeal for places where “the rest of them” won't be. In fact, we expect it to be a place where the rest of “us” or “you” will be - and we know who “we” are. We are unpleasantly surprised when we find we were wrong, and find ourselves lumped with “them.” At this point we are involuntarily back on the beaten track.

It's useless and hypocritical, though not difficult, to be generally “against” tourism. [...] Progressive people in regions that are economically dependent on “visitors” (sounds like they are from outer space, and they often seem to be) are struggling to imagine a progressive tourism that doesn't exploit local people or places and doesn't create rifts between personal lives and economic goals, history and spectacle, genders, races, and classes. A few artists are wondering what role progressive visual artists might play in facilitating, even creating, a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry - or alter-industry.

Must tourism be [...] an “inauthentic attitude to place?” Must it be [...] “something insidious...the sucking of difference out of difference [...]?” Or will the consciously multicentered person-artist eventually be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places?

******************************************************************************

Ghosts in the city | In search of missing pieces

In continuing to make sense of what is and has been happening in Albania the past twenty some years, I'd like to take on the challenge of explaining it to anyone who's not familiar with these flawed ways of rehabilitating a country after half a century of totalitarian rule and complete isolation. Flawed (even cruel), because they have managed to debilitate it further.

However, I will not be doing it alone. I will use the words of Michel de Certeau. I am reading his book again, The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking Vol.2, and right under Intermezzo (‘in-between’ how fitting) is his wonderful essay Ghosts in the city. Important, because he so wonderfully captures the struggle between ‘spirits’ or ‘resistances’ of the past and much speculated [albeit contradicting] ‘restorations’ or better yet, ‘salvations’ in the near (or past) futures. 

A city as a product of compromise, no doubt. But, according to which criteria? What are the Crown Jewels of Albania (and the Albanian city)? What are its ghosts? How are we defining ‘National Heritage’? How's ‘National Heritage’ been used by the gov apparatus to restore/change/communicate (through gestures and narratives) with Urban Planning? Architecture? Culture? Arts? People? (All caught ‘in-between’.)

** This is a long read. I am using solely excerpts from de Certeau's essay. The reading emphasis is mine. I have selected them (sometimes out of the original context) as a tool to understand what's been happening in Albania, in order to question the intentions and methods (gestures and narratives) used. 
(Granted, de Certeau has written this book with Paris in mind and on paper, but the points he brings up cannot be ignored in today's Albania. Thus, my interest in posting it. I recommend you read the original essay to draw your own conclusions.)

Ghosts in the City

All photos are mine via diagstudio. (pardon the quality)

An Uncanniness of the “Already There”

The strategy that, yesterday, aimed at a development of new urban spaces has been little by little transformed into a rehabilitation of national heritage. After having considered the city in the future, does one begin to consider it in the past, like a space for journeys in itself, a deepening of its histories?

The watch-word: “I don't want to know about it.” The remnants had to be eliminated in order to be replaced. This urban planning destroyed. Yet, some old buildings survived, even if they were caught in its nets. [T]he debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown. They burst forth within the modernist, massive, homogeneous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language. They surprise. [S]educe the nostalgia attached to a world on its way toward disappearing. Ancient things become remarkable. An uncanniness lurks there, in the everyday life of the city. It is a ghost that henceforth haunts urban planning. 

Naturally, this uncanniness did not come back all by itself. It was brought back by the protectionist economy that is always reinforced in periods of recession.

This ghost is exorcised under the name of “national heritage.” Its strangeness is converted into legitimacy. [T]his tradition articulates the protection of selected monuments that have a “national” interest over the necessary destruction of a bygone past. First placed under the sign of “treasures” to be extracted from a body doomed to die, this museumesque policy already takes on [...] the character of an aesthetics. Today it encounters the point of view of urban planners who notice the premature aging of modern buildings rapidly changed into obsolete and outmoded constructions. (read: Piramida, Paint the City project - or, any new construction for that matter) Must we then renew our buildings every twenty years? For economic as well as national and cultural reasons, one comes back to this past that has often aged less than that which is new. Therefore, renovation is preferred to innovation, rehabilitation to development, and protection to creation.

But something insinuates itself here that no longer obeys the “conservative” ideology of national heritage. This past is generally looked on as imaginary. A stranger is already there, in residence.

Quite far from aligning itself with the historian pedagogy, that still often organizes the museum into one of a small or a big “motherland”, the new renovation distances itself from educational or state-controlled perspectives that inspired the protection of a treasure “in the public interest.” It is less interested in monuments that in ordinary housing, less in the circumscriptions of national legitimacies than in the exogenous historicities of local communities, less in a privileged cultural period [...] than in the “collages” produced through the successive reuses of the same buildings. The new renovation still undertakes to “save” things, but now this involves complex debris that it is impossible to classify within a pedagogical linearity or to lodge within a referential ideology, and that is disseminated throughout the city like traces of other worlds.

A population of “Legendary” Objects

In the urban imaginary world, there are first of all things that spell it out. They impose themselves. They are there, closed in on themselves, silent forces. They have character. Or, even better, they are “characters” on the urban stage. Secret personas. [T]hese inanimate objects acquire a certain autonomy. They are actors, legendary heroes. They organize around them the city saga. They are witnesses to a history that, unlike that of museums or books, no longer has a language. Actually, they function as history, which consists in opening a certain depth within the present, but they no longer have the contents that tame the strangeness of the past with meaning. 

These wild objects, stemming from indecipherable pasts, are the “spirits” of the place. [T]hese objects play the roles of actors in the city, not because of what they do or say but because their strangeness is silent, as well as their existence, concealed from actuality. Their withdrawal makes people speak - it generates narratives - and it allows action; through its ambiguity, it “authorizes” spaces of operations. 

But where does one stop, how does one demarcate the population from these things that are “spirits”? Trees too are a part of them; they are the “sole, true monuments.” But also a fountain, the detail of a facade, the corn or ham hung from the ceiling of a small cafe, [...] the curved shape of a table leg, toys, family photos, the wayfaring fragments of a song... This population spreads out its ramifications, penetrating the entire network of our everyday life, descending into the labyrinths of housing, silently colonizing its depths. [T]his population traverses time, survives the wearing away of human existences, and articulates a space. [T]hey teem, transforming our streets into forests and our buildings into haunted houses; they extend beyond the dogmatic borders of a supposed “national heritage”; they possess places even though we believe to have shut them in, stuffed, stamped, and set them under glass in the hospitals for popular arts and traditions. Some of them undoubtedly died in these museumesque zoos.

The promoters of urban renovation are thus rightly suspicious. They should be even more suspicious when they open up the city and accord legitimacy to these unknown immigrants. From all these ancient things, they only admit what can be tenured as “national heritage.” According to which criteria? This remains unclear. [A]s with all things tenured, in return for conforming to the law of renovation, they become modernized. These stories corrupted by time, or wild ones from who knows where, are trained in the present. Certainly, the pedagogical processes of which they are the object include an internal contradiction; they must at once protect and civilize that which is old, make new that which is old. The products that come out of restoration are thus compromises. They are passageways on the multiple frontiers that separate periods, groups, and practices. They play an important role in the urban polyphony. Whatever the framework in which this “salvational” will is inscribed, it is true that restored buildings, mixed habitats belonging to several worlds, already deliver the city from its imprisonment in an imperialistic univocity.

A Policy of Authors: Inhabitants

Restoration [...] tends to transform these heterodoxies into a new cultural orthodoxy. Even distributed outside the patrimonial temples of memory and placed at the inhabitants' disposal, restored objects turn into museum pieces. Their dissemination works yet again at extending the museum outside of its walls, at museifying the city. It is not that the museum is a plague or that it can be transformed into a scarecrow or a scapegoat. The museum often exercises the role of laboratory, ahead of urban planning. But it functions in its own way. It conceals from users what it presents to observers. The question no longer involves renovated objects, but the beneficiaries of the renovation.

If one refuses to accept the logic of conservation, what other hypothesis will take over? When the museum pulls back, what wins? The law of the market. Such is the alternative presented to the interventions of the state: either uphold the institutions of preservation (more or less pedagogical), both public (museums) and private (associations and hobbies of all sorts), or enter into the production-consumption system (real-estate agencies, project developers, architectural firms). In the second hypothesis, the museumesque “subtraction” (building taken away from private housing in order to be transformed into public theatrical institutions) is replaced by an economic misappropriation (building taken from disadvantaged inhabitants in order to be improved and sold to better-off buyers). This urbanistic restoration is a social “restoration.”

A politics of renovation seeks to play between the “conservationists” and the “merchants.” Some rules aim at limiting or controlling one group by the other. Certain intermediary powers insinuate themselves into these power relationships. But the first “intermediaries” to be promoted should be the people who practice these places to be restored.

Through its own movement, the restoration economy tends to separate places from their practitioners. A misappropriation of subjects accompanies the renovation of objects. 

They obey this rule precisely as therapeutic institutions. Renovation participates in the medicalization of power. Passing from the individual body to the urban body, this therapeutic power does not change its methods. It treats organs and circulatory systems by not taking people into account. In this widened medical administration, the misappropriation of subjects remains the prerequisite for a restoration of the body. This is the hospital system.

[S]till very marginally, within the field of medical technocracy, the dynamic relations between inhabitants and specialists must be restored. It puts power relationships into play between citizens who are supposed to be equal before the law. A policy is involved here that goes beyond and controls any economic management.

Inasmuch as a policy takes its inspiration from the principle that “national heritage,” must “become the business of all [...] people,” a particular but fundamental form of it must be underscored, the right to creation, in other words, an autonomy in relation to the draconian regulations fixed by certain specialists. The inhabitants, especially the disadvantaged ones, [...] have a right to select their own aesthetics.

Among many other reasons, urban futurology itself requires these unrecognized artists to regain their authorship in the city. A democratization of artistic expression must correspond to this democratization of techniques. How can one expand the latter if one censors the former?
It wastes the true capital of a nation or a city because its national heritage is not made up of objects it has created but of creative capacities and of the inventive style that articulates, as in a spoken language, the subtle and multiple practice of a vast ensemble of things that are manipulated and personalized, reused and “poeticized.” In the end, national heritage is made up of all of these “ways of operating.”

The everyday artists of ways of speaking, dressing, and living are ghosts in officially recognized contemporary art. It is high time that an urban planning still seeking an aesthetics recognize the same value in them. The city is already their permanent and portable exposition. They turn the city into an immense memory where many poetics proliferate.

Mythical Texts of the City

Within the perspective of a democratization, a condition for a new urban aesthetics, two networks in particular hold our attention, gestures and narratives. They are both characterized as chains of operations done on and with the lexicon of things. In two distinct modes, one tactical and the other linguistic, gestures and narratives manipulate objects, displace them, and modify both their distributions and their use.

Gestures are the true archives of the city, if one understands by “archives” the past that is selected and reused according to present custom. They remake the urban landscape every day.

The wordless histories of walking, dress, housing, or cooking shape neighborhoods on behalf of absences; they trace out memories that no longer have a place - childhoods, genealogical traditions, timeless events. Such is the “work” of urban narratives as well. To the visible city they add those “invisible cities” about which Calvino wrote. [T]hey render the city “believable.”

These narratives also constitute powerful instruments whose political use can organize a totalitarianism. (They exploit.) [T]hey make people believe and do things. They require a democratic management of urban credibility. Political power has known for a long time already how to produce narratives for its own use. The media has done even better. Living is narrativizing. Stirring up or restoring this narrativizing is thus also among the tasks of any renovation.

Narratives are certainly not lacking in the city. Advertising, for example, multiplies the myths of our desires and our memories by recounting them with the vocabulary of objects of consumption. (including photo-ops as publicity stunts) But the city is a stage for a war of narratives. [T]he grand narratives from television or advertising stamp out or atomize the small narratives of streets or neighborhoods. Renovation should come to the aid of these latter. 

Renovation does not, ultimately, know what it is “bringing back” – or what it is destroying – when it restores the references and fragments of elusive memories. For those ghosts that haunt urban works, renovation can only provide a laying out of already marked stones, like words for it.

****************************************************************

Bits and (Missing) Pieces | Congested Thoughts

“Sepse bunkerët më të frikshëm janë ata të subkoshiencës e jo ata të nëndheshmit!” (via)

In trying to make sense of what is happening with the arts and culture in Albania, (which in my opinion the above article clearly and objectively does) while reading it, I realized that I wasn't aware of half of the circumstances and intentions of the so-called integrated, multidimensional and (very) public art strategy, which I've seen being promoted for quite some time on social media.

Now, this becomes somewhat of a (big) problem, since I'm continuously trying my best to communicate with and be part of the conversation from afar. Unfortunately, with not much avail - no matter the effort. I don't mind getting blocked or slightly misdirected, (I can do my own research and with a bit of common sense put two and two together) - but I've noticed that it is becoming a boilerplate response and an intentional attitude that is making it harder for me to shorten this fictitious (and indeed very real) distance. To borrow the word ‘off-limits’ from the article: It has become just that, for those of us not in the EU or without an EU fueled agenda. Our interests are simple, really. To create and sustain value!! We remain profoundly concerned, and see the need for a (‘back to basics’) fundamental restructure and healthy growth of Albanian culture first, and then a European and global amalgamation. I am not alone in thinking that Albanian culture is becoming a commodity, praying on people's refusal to deal with a dark (and poverty-stricken) communist past - whilst the state (apparatus) itself uses EU integration as an excuse along with state-of-the-art (pun intended) publicity stunts. What I mean with people's refusal to deal with their past, is that I don't think they quite know how. The refusal is just that, a lack of knowledge fueled by hegemonic influences and speculative markets, thus fear, insecurity, and anger have nested instead of the capacity to establish principles and create value(s). In this past quarter century, there hasn't been anyone to show them how to grieve. To accept. To care. To tell them they matter. To show them their potential. To help them move forward. What are the cultural values in/of Albania?

“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.”

(David Foster Wallace, The Pale King)

Yes, publicity campaigns (#communismporn #ruinporn) are grand and might just be effective in attracting the tourists (to get that economic quota) but it will all be in vain. It'll be a photo-op. A hollow museum mausoleum of obsolete things (be that in object form or in transcendental significance). No values. All aesthetics with none of the ethics. There will be no heart or soul to greet, tour and educate these tourists. To teach them about what Albania and its people are all about. What has happened to 'buke kryp e zemer'? We need to take our shattered fulcrum (bosh-t) and nurture it (not control it - read: "Foucault's Panopticon) until it has grown to a solid maturity. Until it has established value.

But, if information is given to the public (again, me) in such a redacted way that even when reading between the lines, one is bound to miss and misinterpret bits and pieces - then, what good am I? If I can't participate, then my comments (as per usual) become somewhat congested, because already scattered thoughts struggle to express themselves clearly. Albanians tend to take criticism as an insult and go for a quick defensive strike, sometimes cutting (us, individuals more so than the public at large) off at the knees or below the belt (ouch). I read articles like the one mentioned above, along with other constructive (let's not wrongly define it please) criticism, first and foremost necessary in order to understand what is going on, then as a true gesture to continue the conversation. To be invited to it. To be included. To participate.

“Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror...” 
(David Foster Wallace, The Pale King)

And, speaking of congested thoughts, I'll leave you with these:

If Hoxha's bunkers were built for an enemy that never came, the newly branded communist mausoleums will (be fit to) attract the western tourist - and if he comes, he'll think of (us) people, as just props. Two very similar 'slap in the face' paranoia-driven/arrogance-fueled acts directed (yet again) at the masses, no? The latter (as of course a neoliberal staple move) is masqueraded as PRopaganda, delivered as infoTAIN(T)ment by media, and lived experienced only as a representation by (us) the society of the spectacle (a condition of “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life”), thus turning into (stage-play-al-fresco) parade (not at all subtle in opportunism) floats (i.e. staged leaves from the artificial lake park, as mentioned in the article).

So, it becomes a battle of the fittest spectacle.





Agorae vs. Arenas
Democratic Debates vs. Spectator Fights
Exchange of Ideas vs. Circus Parades
Ethics vs. Aesthetics

**(contrary to popular belief, I am very much interested in/researching the potential of float, agora, arena, and circus spatialities as public space or privately-owned public space)

***************************************************************

A few thoughts | Observing the (not-so) silent summer (from afar)

It baffles me how little we learn from our work, how little we learn from the vulnerability it exposes us to, how closed off and unreceiving we are to the possibilities it opens up (light and dark, positive and negative) when it leaves us and becomes public, when it touches other people in form of critique, praise, motivation, lesson and even failure. The reason we want more people to see and participate in our work, (discussions, exhibits/events, social media pages/posts), is after all a move (or need) to reach out, to become defenseless but still hold its ground, to be part of something, of someone. We are opening it and ourselves to critique, interpretation, understanding and misunderstanding, support from our peers, dismissal or indifference from the bourgeois (pseudo-professional), vulgarity from the clueless - so it can grow, and we can grow with it.

This is not about pointing fingers or naming names and projects, but about the attitude that surrounds them in general. The wrong attitude in giving and receiving, in letting the work express the fragility of our ego (not be shadowed by it), in growth, and most of all in the human right of free speech. It baffles me how little we have learned about free speech. After all, we've chosen a life in creative jurisdictions (arts and humanities), being defensive and verbally abusive to our public will not honor the work, it will smear it. And, please, let's not justify it by mentioning similar acts and works of well-known and respectable others, because if a work it's truly ours, it should be inherently and fundamentally different, because we are different. My daemons are different from yours. My weirdness is different from yours. My life experiences are different from yours. My (ir)rationality, imagination, thought and behavior are definitely different from yours. I speculate (a fancy word for make) my own ideology. If you know better, you might want to too - right after failing to blindly following another's, just for the sake of art or life(style) or death for that matter.

Backbone. Throw me a bone?

If you're not ready to entertain the idea of being vulnerable to the exposure, then keep it to yourself. Why invite others to like or/and participate in your events? There is nothing wrong with keeping your work and yourself to yourself, if you're not ready. (Lonely is nothing to mess with. Not everyone can understand oneself that deeply to pull it off.) At the same time though, don't forget to keep that PR spotlight-loving ego of yours in check. Let's resist the adrenaline of self-promotion in the media if not completely ready to accept free-speech in return. Let's not wound or castrate free speech (don't confuse constructive free speech with rude arrogance and judgmental ignorance). We got enough problems already (insecurity being one of them) that's why we end up with aggressive negativity, character bashing and wasted talent. If you're not ready to receive guests, don't invite them.

Not a smirk.

Let's not pretend to give to the arts, culture, nationalism (and what have you) our all then. A work of something that is not ready to face a glimpse of exposure and absolutely refuses (better word would be fights) to receive free speech (or as I'd like to call it growth) - becomes simply nothingness, a wasted effort, an attempt at (a possible though unwanted) maturity. A 'trick or treat' of how to get away with murder art (& humanities) in Albania. Alleged crimes of this sort are more for 'extra, extra, read all about it' kind of enthusiasts, personally I'd prefer a 'did you hear...?' joke. A laugh is always better. Sadder than the real thing.

* Sporadic thoughts and opinion of a non artist (nartist) and a Chaplin fan. (too many quotes left behind. google at your own risk.)

***