As possibly the first, and certainly the most obvious, canvas upon which human differences can be written and read, skin has been a topic of continuous interest in anthropology and related disciplines from the earliest descriptions of exotic people to postmodern theorizing about the body in contemporary society.
Skin, as a visible way of defining individual identity and cultural difference, is not only a highly elaborated preoccupation in many cultures; it is also the subject of wide ranging and evolving scholarly discourse in the humanities and social sciences.
Although my focus is mainly on the anthropological literature, it is impossible to ignore work in other fields. Today, archaeologists and historians are rewriting the history of the body using evidence from newly discovered ancient bodies, artworks, and texts.
Discussions of contemporary “body work” merge the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, philosophy, and gender studies… each discipline mapping onto the body its shifting theoretical preoccupations.

Check out this silent film from 1926 that takes us “through the basic physiology of the human skin, combining anatomical education and basic healthcare advice. We see the epidermis and its replacement, the structure of the underlying dermis, nails, sweat glands and hair follicles.”

The ‘Skin’ exhibition was discovered by our editor Adeena Mey.

Scraped together a flight to Bermuda to see my oldest friend, now we’re sitting here on the South Shore, waiting for hurricane Danielle to hit. Could be a bumpy night…

COME AND CELEBRATE WITH US THE OFFICIAL PRESENTATION OF NOVEMBRE MAGAZINE IN NEW YORK CITY, TUESDAY from 7 to 11 ! Details below.

AliasOne | SangBleu Bag (also exists in black) BUY IT HERE !!!

On the Sleeve (by Bradley Paul)

Oh, I was angry.
The guy was like “you’re a dick”
and I was like “No, you’re a dick,”
and he was like “I want to kill you”
and I was like “No, I want to kill you,”
and we kept that up for a good while.
But we resolved it so
now I’m happy, and
the sugars are solid
in the flesh of the pear
until a gale of diesel exhaust
blackens our lunch
and soots the café window.
Now I feel frustrated
at the cosmic antipathy
toward eating a decent pear.
It’s like this Iraq business,
or cancer out of nowhere.
One day everyone’s surplussing along,
the next day
all these people are dead.
The guy says
“That’s what a dick like you deserves,”
and I am angry with him again.
Call this a volatile
and artless set of moods,
self-centered, whatever,
but when the dog soldiers come to eat my heart,
their red velvet tunics
crusted hard in guts
that used to be wet,
I easily toss them my spleen
and as they gnash each other’s haunches
in a bloody dog soldier scrum
I skip away,
keeping my heart,
or so one says
to stay happy, happy, happy.

(Undertitle: Socrates, Mozart, Queen Elizabeth, and these guys)

רעב דבר (The Hunger) is on Myspace.

Originally looking for something completely different, I came accross this article about The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, apparently very famous, whose disciples claim to be “the true biblical and ethnic Jews.” The foundation of the ICGJC doctrine consists in the following statement: everything we’ve been taught is a lie: The real Jews are black.

The article was written by Ms Angela Valdez and published in The Washington City Paper on March 21th, 2008.

Following a pretty simple explanation (obviously), we end up facing the possibility that Hebrews actually had and still have “skin as dark as the earth”. The article is directly linked to stories the journalist apparently experienced herself. Extract:

The teacher calls upon his reader to recite from the Song of Solomon, Chapter 1, Verse 5.

Here is the entire verse from the King James edition: “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.”

Whereas the psychological, philosophical, cultural and theatrical reasons why we keep looking for new explanations of our more or less conventional being on earth (may our skin carry a color that is more or less close to its) are most of the time either exhausting or boring to discuss, the resulting (but indeed, not only) aesthetical aspect of it is most usually an thrilling delight.

רעב דבר (The Hunger), at home.

Real Jews might be black, yes, just as much as True People are hedonists.

While dropping out of the techno-age marathon is an ethical decision anyone could easily make, it also means giving up the only real outlet for subversion. But if there is a sadder case than the lonely, radical farmer-luddite who thinks the world noticed their conscientious desicion to give up the cell phone and the laptop, it is the person who cheerleads for progress, who excitedly feels like they’re relly on the cusp of SOMETHING each time they laud the newest techno-innovation, salivating on the instant opinion dispersers of the day over the i-whatever. Like the out-of-touch Hillary Clinton giving a commencement speech at Barnard College and shouting to the graduating class of women, “Get out there, girls! MySpace and Twitter! Social network your way to the top!” This kind of blind faith in the power or social networking betrays a person eager to be tapped into the “next big thing” in order to more efficiently wedge themselves in with the status quo, as we saw McCain try during the presidential debates when, looking like a child expecting to be given a cookie, he made some desperate and cringe-worthy comments about how he had been using Ebay.

It was easy to live without these things before we had them, but now we must not only have them, we must talk about them constantly. Was it really so bad to run to the corner in the middle of the night to use the payphone? How about when we, Europeans, left the continent to come to America, goodbye was goodbye, possibly forever? We cried, we felt sad, we committed suicide, we knew it was serious and didn’t want to fuck up.

Dear people of the future, this is how we lived, and how we will no doubt be re-enacted in your bizarre “period piece” movies: standing at payphones, writing letters, throwing rocks at windows, meeting up by chance, failing those things, weeing each other in dreams.

Cholesterol on the arteries, cancers in prostates, the joke is on us now. Especially on me.

Anyway.

Now give an ear to Akay’s flaring-up mixes!

(all vinyl, no computer wankery)
(and see blog for detailed playlists)

Mix9 100220 (nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-20) by Akay

Mix8 100206, 1/2 (Live at nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-06) by Akay

Mix8 100206, 2/2 (Live at nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-06) by Akay

Mix3 080504 > All vinyl (no computer wankery) by Akay

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over tabletop scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

Until now.

HERE, download “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelley in New York Times Magazine (May 14th, 2006)

The essay is divided into 9 rather appetizing sections.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries
2. What Happens When Books Connect
3. Books: The Liquid Version
4. The Triumph of the Copy
5. The Moral Imperative to Scan
6. The Case Against Google
7. When Business Models Collide
8. Search Changes Everything

Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Above: woodcut from Swift’s Battle of the Books.