Barry’s latest in the John Rain series of novels - Rain Storm - is out. He was super smooth at the signing tonight at Kepler’s, Menlo Park.

Didn’t you work for the government, Barry? What were you doing?

Yes I did, … and no comment …

[Link - Barry Eisler]

John Rain, Barry’s anti-hero, Asian-American assassin who makes his victims look as though they have died of natural causes, is now in his third novel. They take you on a thriller romp through Tokyo night clubs, Brasilian martial arts, and the world of global conspiracy.

I have long been interested in the connections between crime and conspiracy underworlds and an archaeological sense of place and event (have a look at my book Experiencing the Past - soon to go online [Link]). Both are rooted in a sharp attention to detail and an awareness that all may not be what it seems - look beneath the surface. And, of course, at a scene of crime, anything could be relevant. These are edgy worlds. Our archaeological hold on the past is so often so slight, dependant on massive projection from potsherds and beetle wings. Rain’s world of intelligence services and invisible assassinations sometimes seems so distant from our everyday experience, but all the details ring true. What, after all, is the link between the everyday, and the big picture, history, power, what is really going on?

I got Barry to come along to my Mellon Workshop at Stanford on visual anthropology and ethnography a couple of years ago to talk about the way he writes. The empirics. Not least because I have heard him tell me of his trips away, to Macau, Osaka, Hong Kong, Shanghai, to research the streets and bars. He has spent a week in Palm Springs learning how to be a night club bouncer and manage adrenalin (well I think it was in Palm Springs!). He is a black belt in judo (and you should see the cauliflower ears on the guys he works out with in Mountain View!). He does serious ethnographic research on John Rain. It is fiction. But what is fiction anyway?

Then there are the descriptions of the fights.

Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, slowly, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision.

One meter. I stepped in with my left foot, bringing my left arm across my body, partly as defense, partly as counterbalance. I let my right hand drift back, the flail uncoiling on the way, then whipped my arm around, the palm side of my fist up, my elbow leading the way, my hips pivoting in as though I was doing a one-armed warm up with a baseball bat …

I caught the gun in my left hand and used my right foot to blast his legs from under him in deashi-barai, a side foot sweep that I had performed tens of thousands of times in my quarter century at the Kodokan. I went down with him, keeping my weight over his chest, increasing the impact as he slammed into the floor … I rose up to create an inch of space between our bodies, spun my left leg over and past his head, and dropped back in juji-gatame, a cross-body armlock …

Fingerprints were only part of the problem, of course. When you’re stressed, you sweat. Sweat contains DNA. Likewise for microscopic dead skin cells, which, like sweat, can adhere to metal. If you’re unlucky to get picked up as a suspect, it’s inconvenient to have to explain why your DNA is all over the murder weapon. The dead men’s clothes, which I had touched while searching them, were less of a problem. They wouldn’t take prints, and I probably hadn’t handled them sufficiently to leave a material amount of sweat or skin cells behind.

I turned into an alley choked with overflowing plastic garbage containers. An aluminum leader ran down the side of one of the alley walls and into an open drain beneath …

This is not about “description” - you don’t need the detail of the body movements.

But it is documentation.

You can track Rain’s every haunt and movement through the novels - Confeitaria Colombo coffee bar, Rio, Jardin de Luseine, Tokyo, Oparium Cafe, Macau …

Cliff McLucas came with me to my archaeological excavation in Sicily back in 98. He was the artistic director of Brith Gof Theatre, an arts company I helped manage. We were exploring the connections between archaeology and contemporary art. We were working on what became the Three Landscapes Project at Stanford. At the end of the stay he gave a lecture to the crew on what he was doing with me. He didn’t see our work anything like the way archaeologists normally do (archaeologists discovering the past). The irony was that his talk made it very clear that he was far more rigorous in his research into what was going on in the excavation of a prehistoric hilltop settlement in the west of Sicily than were our scientific colleagues. But his research was leading to a performance fiction. Our archaeology colleagues were horrified. I left the project the next year.

[Link]

The problem is that our information is limited, Rain said …

Wonderful!

Latest in the concerns about artifacts as cultural property - [Link - BBC][Link - BBC]

Aboriginal artefacts, including two early bark etchings, have been seized in Australia while on loan from two British museums.

Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

The two bark etchings and a Aboriginal ceremonial headdress were on loan to Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

Gary Murray, of the Dja Dja, accused the museums of “colonial arrogance”.

Bark etching of boomerangs - c1845

It looks as well as though the British Museum is continuing to take a hard line over the Parthenon Marbles - refusing to discuss moving them back to Athens. It will be quite something if the Acropolis Museum in Athens ever gets built and stays empty!

Previous posts - [Link - January 19 2004]

Laurence Olivier has been resurrected for a film role.

A new movie - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization.

The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir - looks very reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Getting back into the groove

News of some more fascinating media archaeology in Berkeley - recovering sound from wax cylinders too delicate to touch.

Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover the sound from recordings that are far too delicate to be played.

Sound seen in the microscope

In the corner of a California university laboratory, two men are battling against time to perfect a machine that will read old recordings - using special microscopes to scan the grooves - and software that can convert those shapes into sound. Their work could bring history to life.

A moving event this afternoon. A celebration of the life of a family friend, Barbara Levin, who died last week.

It was at her home in Portola Valley, where her son Dan Levin, Naomi Andrews and their daughter Maya now live. She loved food, travel, living life to the full.

What has stuck with me particularly are the photographs of her life.

They had been reprinted for the celebration - snapshots from the whole of her life - and mounted on boards and in frames for us all to enjoy. In Europe in her twenties. In her fifties again in the France she loved. All the way up to just last year. A record of a life, yes. And the changes, of course. The fashions and styles.

And the look of the photos. Why does a photo from the 1950s look different to one from last year? Styles, fashions, the look of places, yes. And something more subtle - the way we look at the camera, walk, sit, hold ourselves, stand - habitus. And then the medium itself - the camera and the way its lens takes in the world. Less contrast and sharpness in the 50s, but not definition. Some of it very difficult to put into words. The quality of blur, of what is and is not in focus. The habitus of a medium.

So will a contemporary life change in the way it presents itself to me if I use a 1936 Leica (Cartier Bresson), a Graflex (Weegee), a Nikon Reflex (McCullin)?

A camera - the clock for making images.

Cornelius has put me on to a new archaeology TV series in the UK -Extreme Archaeology - from Channel 4. It runs 20 June to 8 August - eight programs.

These are the people that brought you Time Team - the archaeologists who tackle a site in a weekend.

Here they are to tackle sites beyond the reach of normal investigations - tidal flats, sea caves, remote jungles, volcanoes …

Until the Extreme Archaeology team arrived to solve the long-standing mystery of the rectangular structures on the Kame of Isbister, no archaeologist had ever carried out an excavation there. The Kame, which means rocky point or promontory, is a jagged stack of rock off the north coast of Shetland and one of the most remote archaeological sites in Britain. Almost impossible to view from the shore, the site can only be approached by a narrow and eroding arÍte, or ridge, restricting access to skilled climbers and suicidal sheep …

Cornelius was with me in Sicily in 1999, maybe 2000, and went off to visit Etna - because the underworld has always featured in the archaeological imagination - Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Tolkein, H.G. Well’s Lost World, Planet of the Apes - and volcanoes are often a means of access to what lies within …

One of Wright of Derby’s many paintings of Vesuvius, this one from 1774

The eighteenth century was one of volcanic eruptions that inspired the new sensibility of the sublime - awesome spectacles that included the ruins of time - here is one of the origins of an archaeological sensibility, the archaeological imagination.

Julian Thomas (Manchester University) and Mike Pearson (Wales, Aberystwyth) were the opponents in the defence of Jonna (Ulin) and Fiona’s (Campbell) dissertation in Gothenburg (see my blog entry for June 11).

Something has been bugging me since then about Julian’s criticisms of their work.

Jonna and Fiona make a basic proposition that archaeology is performance. Even in the notion that archaeologists simply discover the past, archaeology is a contemporary performance, for the experience of discovery is never neutral or abstract but is located (in lives, memories, cultures, dreams) and is certainly beyond simple representation in narrative and image. Finds evoke. And archaeology is so much more. As I keep reiterating - archaeologists work on what is left of the past. In this we are all archaeologists, performing our pasts.

Julian is one of archaeology’s great contemporary theorists. He has been a major figure in the rethinking of European prehistory that will, when matured and assimilated, revolutionize our understanding of the broad shape of history. My latest book on the shape of history owes much to his school of thought. We had a wonderful time together as colleagues in Lampeter - true collegiality, talking about prehistoric monuments and landscapes, visiting the same in Brittany, excavating in Angelsey together on his project with Mark Edmunds. I miss his intellectual company. But I am concerned that he is slipping into a detached and scholastic world where words and ideas alone have effect. I am more and more convinced this is because he is fascinated by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

Julian took issue with the idea that archaeology is cultural production, in the sense I have just outlined - archaeologists working on what is left of the past. He thinks this means the past becomes a passive raw material subject to the whims of the archaeologist. Work implies control over raw matter, he said, and the past is not raw matter.

He also refuses to accept the notion of fragment or remains - that the past is left to us in its ruins. For him this implies that the past has primacy over what comes after, when past and present should not be so contrasted.

For Julian, archaeology’s concern should be “materiality”. We are thrown into a world of materiality, of things and thoughts, and live an indeterminate temporality of relations between past, present and future. The old modern and Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, knowing subject and object of interest and manipulation should be discarded. He invokes Heidegger’s intricate German compound vocabularies that are meant to help navigate these dualisms that do indeed pervade understanding.

I have spent my intellectual career similarly opposing just these splits in the way we think about ourselves. But which artist or craftsman ever thought that in their work they simply manipulated some inert raw material? None in my experience of twenty years of research into design and making. And what lies behind a denial of entropy, of the loss and ruin at the heart of history? Maybe a desire to retain the wholeness, to staunch the loss through verbal technics. But words don’t fit. Julian however wants to purify our language. Not making and remains. We must talk about materiality, zuhandenheit, sorge, vorhandenheit, the worldness of the world, ein ereignis der anwesenheit …

The radical and disabling splits between ourselves and the worlds we live will not go away through a denial and clever substitution of one discourse by another. The best form of criticism is not the beautifully worded put-down but an alternative practice. Embody criticism in your work. Don’t argue too seriously about the implications of calling archaeology a mode of cultural production and the implications of such a formula - just get on with what you want the past to be to us. The past is a mess of ruin and loss - denying it leads us to a jargon that seeks to resolve the contradictions of the world we live in word play, in an empty poetics. Julian’s and Heidegger’s response to the aporias, the dead-ends of our modern understanding, is a jargon of authenticity, as Adorno put it. Word games. A peotics, yes, but poetics is precisely (re)making, working with the materiality that is our social, cultural and personal fabric

Julian Thomas excavating - Bryn Celli Dhu, Angelsey, 1993

Helen, my wife and ceramic artist, taught this to me - be less interested in talking about your work than getting on with it, melding talk and making. And this is the true poetics.

Dare I quote Marx? Philosphers have so far only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.

Or Milton? - I deem it to be an old errour of universities not yet well recover’d from the Scholastick grosnesse of barbarous ages, that … they present their … novices at first comming with the most intellective abstractions of Logick and metaphysicks.

I am working my way through Julian’s new book on archaeology’s relationship with modernity and the modern world - I will report on what I find.