the story of E120 – the colour red

In the series of useless facts and trivia, here’s the story of food additive E120, also known as carmine or crimson.
It’s in your food, lipstick, sweets, meat, clothes, drinks and make up. Chances are, you’ll find it in anything reddish that is not naturally red (forget ketchup – I checked.). And you could say it’s totally organic, if not in line with Buddhist, Muslim or vegan principles.

So sit near the fire, children, and let me tell you the story of spies, bugs, state secrets, indians, daring travel and cacti in the new world.

OXYmoronic, said the misanthropic humanitarian

enforce peace
authentic replica
burning cold
friendly war
wooden irons
liberal conservative
modern history

بيروت‎ Beirut

The sea – most of all the sea.
Coming from Damascus, two things are sights for sore eyes: the sea, and green things. I drank in green; on corners, on waste ground, balconies, flowerpots. My friends had lived in, and not really left Damascus, for a month at this point and I can only imagine how they felt. Nurseries. Trees in pots. Trailing ivy. Gums. Mimosa (?). Breathing air.

And the sea.
Awfully toxic and polluted, but to see a horizon. Delicious. Sniffing salt air.
The Mediterranean sea, basically a very large and deep bathtub with originally only the shallow Gibraltar strait to replace water through, the oceanographers estimates it takes a century to replace all the water in the Med, so it’s saltier (evaporation, narrow flow) than the atlantic, and have less nutrients.
The nutrient-poor, high-salinity of the Mediterranean sea getting mixed with water from the Red sea, through the Suez canal, and tiny marine creatures with it. It’s been going on for a while, but no one know quite which way it’s going.

Do we ever?

دمشق Damascus

(gallery here) Damascus is a suprisingly small city- or at least it feels that way. The traffic is as maddening as you’d expect; but not quite as crazy as you’d might fear. The old city is as exotic as you’d hope, but not as impossible as you’d might be lead to believe.

This is not Bankok. This is not Jakarta. Thank god.

No dogs, was one of the first things that hit me. Going to bed after arriving, at four in the morning, I thought- fall asleep fast – the dogs will start the morning concerto, and then the mosque, and then the traffic.
But there are no dogs. It makes sense, of course, when you think of it, but four in the morning.. I expected a Bankok alarmclock.

Perfume for my christmas tree, salt for my hair

Going to my sisters place is fraught with danger. She’s got a large basket with newspapers, economic tidings and interior magazines. It’s the latter that contains pitfalls.
On one hand, I like to flick through others’ creativity; other ways to treat three dimensions. Bear in mind that all these magazines are worked over the same formula, and are – these days – endless pages of whitewashed walls, empty spaces and the the odd chique madonna & child, in a seemingly random combination.
Do not be fooled. The casualness is bollocks. And the fact that all the delightfully manipulated photos are taken at some unspecified holiday-lunch-time, with pale light filtered through casual fabrics the owners “picked up” in Marrakesh.

The great student riots of 2008

In the spring of 2008 campuses all over the country exploded in political protest. Riots spread like wildfire, and creative students built barricades of tables, vending machines and arming themselves with molotovcoctails and general kitchenwear found on campus.

The first buildings they occupied, was the server and computer labs, and from there coordinated their actions. In Østfold, they painted the glass walls and brick buildings with slogans of politcal dissent, and set up watches with web cameras and sensors on the roof of the university college.

The leaders of the riots said to the press, via video interviews, that they will not give in, that the demands must be met, and that the educational system..

Get out the petrol, bottles, rags and sugar, darling

Bookshops with no books. Torching is too good for them. Never mind air rage, and people going bonkers with automatics at work. Never mind that telly is a dumbing down, and that Idiocracy is one of my favourite films, for all the wrong reasons. It makes me laugh an evil I-have-always-known-people-are-idiots-laugh. Or cry.

Bookshops without books. Somebody should get shot. Somebodies head should roll.

In a corner, behind the massive display of diddle figures, pink pencils, rubber balls, key rings, balloons, wrapping paper, glittering teddy bears, and multi-coloured markers… there’s a small shelf, with a few books. It’s about the size of mine; after I removed 10 boxes and moved here.

Letraset, academics and writing

Went through some old notebooks, boxes and piles of stuff before moving here.. and the in the process found my old, precious Letraset book- it used to be a treasure, and a priced possession. Hands up, all who have done plaka lettering; meticulously drawing up and painting letters on awful quality paper. Thought not. Not a common pasttime, exactly. Art school stuff. Initially flicking past the endless pages of sans serifs, grotesks, helveticas, looking at fonts impossible to draw with silly names, flourishes and elan. Basically, it’s a good deal easier to camouflage mediocre penmanship in a swirly, messy font, than in the grotesks… and we where into art, not geometry!

God, how wrong can you be.