Winter beyond the human.

Blad was hibernating. What rhizome can be itself when its originator is being frozen to the core during the depths of a northern English frost? Blad breaks free of the origins, takes up on a new plateau, brings power to the untimely and addresses a new line of flight.

Shocking aftershocks of a Deluze conference....

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A non Deleuzian recipe

Blad was interred to the munching of this alternative dessert. It is only slightly purple, has a distinctive flavour (!) and moist, velvety texture. Green and Blacks put it in the 'create a stir' section of their addicts cookbook : Unwrapped.

Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Use: Tin (approx 18cm or 7in)

Ingredients:
100g drinking chocolate
230g self-raising flour
200g golden caster sugar
100g dark chocolate (min 60% cocoa solids)
125g unsalted butter
250g cooked beetroot
3 large eggs
Icing sugar

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 180C, 350F or gas mark 5.
Butter and flour your cake tin.
Sift together the drinking chocolate and the self-raisign flour then mix in the sugar.
Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl suspended over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Puree the beetroot ina food processor, whisk the eggs, then stir them into the beetroot. Add the beetroot and the chocolate mixtures to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly together.

Pour the mixture into the cake tin. Bake for 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave the cake to stand in its tin for 10 minutes before turning it out on a wire rack to cool. Serve dusted with icing sugar. Creme fraiche if desired.

Images from the Blad Story

Thought for the day

Along with this...

No procrustean beds here.

On Lobsters

http://www.boston.com/news/odd/articles/2006/07/14/maine_lobsterman_pulls_up_rare_lobster/

http://www.secretlifeoflobsters.com/faq/stuff.asp

From abstract to root to abstract again.

Blad has made it in to abstract form. See below.

The leitmotif of this paper is the act of bridging gaps between the conceptual, methodological and experiential. Foremost it is an attempt to fuse aspects of the abstract and literary philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with anthropological understandings of Global Assemblages (Ong and Collier 2005) through incorporation of theory in to everyday life.

We are challenged, by A Thousand Plateaus, to incorporate philosophy in to our lives and by doing so, think new thoughts, experience new emotions and create new concepts. It is to this challenge we have responded. It is not a conventional paper but a performance and description of this (ongoing) journey, inspired by the text as an ‘open system’, from which elements of philosophy are woven in to the ‘melody’ of everyday life.

We describe our journey exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual Rhizome, which was undertaken in order to allow these ideas to inform our current and future ethnographic research and thought relating to bioethics, clinical trials and the complexities of international science collaborations in Sri Lanka. In working to bridge a perceived gap between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and our familiar anthropological canon, we made real the abstract rhizomic thinking they describe through interaction with a physical rhizome, or plant root.

In this paper we introduce BLAD, the Double Articulated Lobster Body (BLAD, acronym, in reverse) which acts as the focus of the narrative of the journey: how BLAD came to live in our house in a vase, how BLAD got ‘its’ name, how BLAD is a rhizome, a lobster and a deity, and how we subsequently replanted it. We suggest that just as a root of the rhizomic plant needs to be close to the surface to flower, so does rhizomic thinking need to be present in daily life to affect thought. It is a tool most effective when personally incorporated. The story we tell in this paper is just one way in which the gap between the physical rhizomic root and the conceptual tool has been bridged. The method described is as much creative as it is destructive. In order to ‘live’ the theory as commanded, the tool has been woven in to thought as more than a metaphor. For this to occur, a physical root has served as the means for breaking prior (arborescent) templates of thought, clearing the path for the thinking of new thoughts, extension of ideas and hopefully a fuller understanding of the productive relations between Deleuze and Guattarian Rhizomes and anthropological analysis.





Thinking about the actual content of the incarnation of Blad may take some rhizomic magic. Ginger biscuits?


Badges. Dancing lobsters. Shadow puppets. Testimonials. Audience participation. T-shirts. Enemies. Warhammer. Forces of arboresence must be defeated.....and the clowns are going down, naturally. Unless they're rhizomes in disguise. Difficult to tell at that stage.