03 May 2006

Oysters=Poison; Taussig Talk

I'd been all geared up to write a restaurant review or two, since we had couple of interesting meals out recently, one at Casalingo in Preston Street and the other at the newly opened Okini in East Street. Alas, I got food food poisoning at the latter. It was my own fault. I ordered oysters, a lovely dish of them stir-fried "Malaysian" style with bacon. I was aware that oysters and me don't always agree, but I thought this was more to do with uncooked oysters, as I seem to be ok with deep fried ones when I'm home in the US South. Suffice to say, this isn't the case, and I've obviously got some kind of allergy to them. I was violently ill on Monday night; I did wonder if I might possibly be dying, feeling as did that someone had stuck a knife in my guts, severing most of my nerves, but also splitting important internal tubing into little pieces so that lethal toxins were set free into the rest of my body, leaving my in a state of shivering near-paralysis. But it passed. Given my still-slightly-queaesy state, though, the food reviews will have to wait.

I am off to London today for a talk by Michael Taussig. He's desribed it as follows:

"I want to give a 'color-reading' of Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, understanding color as a living force taking you into the object of study. This is part of a book I am working on called 'What is the Color of the Sacred?' The title comes from surrealist-ethnographer Michel Leiris and my jumping off point come from Goethe's 1810 book on color where he states that people of refinement are averse to vivid colors whereas 'man in astate of nature,' kids, the women of southern Italy, love them. Seeing modern world history as the struggle between chromophobes and chromophilliacs, I side with Walter Benjamin, William Burroughs, and Marcel Proust is seeing color as something alive, like an animal, akin to what I call 'magical polymorphous substance.'"

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