Oxford is the afterbirth of Bonn

20Oct07

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Well, day one on the job. The good news is that Bonn is really quite a cool city. I was expecting far worse. It is also significantly grander than Oxford, with some serious museums, churches and other grand buildings. Well, it was the capital I suppose. It’s just that most people I had spoken to had been pretty down on it.

The bad news is that I had absolutely no luck with doubles. Pretty soon after I left the hotel this morning (the owners are still fighting), with 99 photos of my face burning a hole in my pocket, I realised today would be a day of observation. I didn’t feel ready to go about distributing photos of my face. I wanted to see what Bonn had on offer.

So I wandered the streets, or stalked perhaps, peering into the faces of the Bonn peeps. It’s quite exhausting looking at everyone in the face, a bit like trying to concentrate on the cuts in a film. Its not long before you just give in to the flow of information and one face blurs into the other. There didn’t seem to be even any close candidates and I began to wonder whether I would even recognise my double if he passed me by. I sat on a bench to think about this and remembered a Borges story in which he is sitting on a bench and a person sits down next to him who shares his name and addess (El Otro). In the precise moment that I thought this two women and a girl sat next to me on the bench. Could they perhaps, as a sum, be my double? Was quite a frightening thought. I left the bench.

But as if to make up for the lack of doubles I did witness lots of other vignettes of daily life. My favourite was probably the respectable, bespectacled, grey haired man, dressed all in black, running in a short stepped gait in the park with an expression of agony on his face and a t shirt that said ‘keep santa cruz crazy’. Beautiful. Also cool was a dad on rollerblades going down a hill really quite fast with a kid in one of those three wheeler SUV pram things.

So tonight I am going to stick up some of the passport photos of my face around town. Bait. To see what happens…. Where is my double? Well,if he really is like me then he spent the day wondering about in the sun looking at people. Maybe he’s inside now, writing his blog, about to lay a trail of photos later on tonight. I wonder if I can imagine him into existence?


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One Response to “Oxford is the afterbirth of Bonn”  

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  1. 1 Mark on October 20, 2007 said:

    Hello Sam
    Best of luck with the finding of your Doppelganger in Bonn. The references to references (literary or otherwise) seems like an interesting focal point within your quest for significant others. Perhaps the work of Maurizio Cattelan, where he had acquaintances dictate to a identikit photo portraitist what Cattelan looked like could be a useful lead. I have attached a photograph of Cattelan to your email address – perhaps it’s of help – hard to tell. At any rate, it will be interesting to hear whether your connection with an other that enables the de-othering of that subject, and it’s sublimation into your own sense of self – does in turn further or diminish your notions of singularity attached to your own sense of self. A tangled web – keep me posted…


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