Oh, modern media making us obsess over weight!!! It looks like we’ve been body nazis for ages. Seriously, tapeworms?! These people probably didn’t study proper biology in school, otherwise they’d regurgitate food just thinking about it. I mean, those things sometimes pop out of your mouth or nose like a periscope and check out the weather. (Thanks V for pic)

Low points: people giving out fliers for some Christian tv channel, 2 pounds for a Cola Light, and the children poverty quiz.

High points: the music, the toilets, the chickeeeeeeen.

Last night the Beeb had another great programme. “Imagine a wild sheep chase” tried to trace the inspiration for Haruki Murakami’s spectacularly popular novels. The portrait of a writer turned into a hybrid story of the writer’s inner world and the culture it takes its sap. It wasn’t an easy feat mind you, as famously reclusive Murakami only communicated his answers through email. So the producers used  reconstruction of scenes from his books, translators, editors, fans, students from the dormitory where Murakami lived and which inspired one of his more famous books “Norwegian Wood” trying to recreate a sense of Murakami. One of the interviewees described the feeling one gets when reading one of his novels as having the brain turned inside out. He vouched for that.

I vouch for that too. I can’t pinpoint which of his books I first saw on a bookshelf, but the one that I first read was “The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Probably one of the lesser known ones, but I was gobsmacked by the title. As the character goes deeper into the bowels of the earth trying to escape the hard-boiled wonderland (eerie modern day Japan) into a fantasy world on the border between psyche and technology, one’s synapses are snapping into the unsettling sensation of merging with the character’s loneliness.  One can’t help but wonder if the relationships he builds along the way are in any way real and if in the end, he is still alone in his mind.

My favourite part of the whole programme was the conversation with the white cat on backstreets of presumably Tokyo.

Tate has some smokin’ exhibits as usual. The street art selection is wildly varying and bizarre. The one that got me – and I ashamedly have to admit I fell into the optic illusion and cliche trap – is the young black man holding what looks like a gun at a sweeping glance, but is in fact a camera.  The other exhibitions were interesting but not that memorable, except for the 50 (?) pieces of silverware made into some sort of floating/hanging household  UFOs… Otherwise, modern art (again, some of the exhibits gave me flashbacks of college philosophy class in which we discussed endlessly what is art and what is the function of art) cannot contact me on most wavelengths. A red painting with a white line one third to the left. What? Is? That? A room in black with white geometrical forms intersected by a flurry of parallel white lines. Vertigo.Then a stack of bricks. Someone somewhere could use that better.                                                                               Another room that almost provoked a hysterical/depressive fit was the hall with Communist propaganda poster  from the 40′s and 50′s. The friend accompanying me who had also lived some 8-odd years through Communism albeit in a different country found them comforting. I found myself displaced in a creepy history loop on the corridors of my primary school. Funnily there were some posters in Arabic talking about the Muslim comrades. How outdated the political/economic model is… China is going capitalist, Cuba has access to internet and cellphones, and even the FARC are struggling to keep the revolution alive in the jungles of Latin America.                                                                                                                                 But that is deviating from modern art… The works of modern art that stuck with me are a falling piano and Bill Viola’s “Five Angels for the Millenium”  five years ago at Tate Modern. One made a lot of noise and looked dangerous and the other was an engrossing experience.