maguro blues

while taking a rest from writing notes for a lecture that spans from the cafe voltaire and dada to the japanese avantgarde in the 1920s, v stumbles upon a disturbing, and yet hopeful bit of news. you see, we still believe in talks and committees, despite their utter uselessness.

the japanese government is hosting a conference on tuna conservation, bbc news online reports. tokyo has recently agreed to halve its annual tuna fishing quota, facing up to the truly devastating ecologic footprint of a maguro-obsessed nation. my friend t., a geographer and urban planner, warned me a couple of years ago in tokyo that, at this pace, tuna would be done and over with in only a couple of years, especially as the u.s., europe and even countries like chile are catching up in the massification of tuna fish consumption, partly due to the rise of the crappy sushi fad and its concurrent industrialization. "maguro? that's sooo noughties!" we will most probably be thinking in 2020-- will it be because quorn will become the new sushi? or because maguro will be the new dodo?

a world without tuna!! what sort of decadence would that be like???

take ohtoro, the fattiest, rosiest cut of maguro sashimi (the raw fish cut), the most prized piece of the imposingly large tuna fish's body-- it truly is corpus delectabilis, it is the o in orgasm, it is the very stuff of dreams, it is the matter of the kantian sublime human logos cannot account for-- it is not body, soft, pink, curvaceous and lovely as it is, but moment, performance, absorption, dissolution of the self in the palate, in the moment the ohtoro covered in a thin coat of soy sauce explodes in perfect harmony massaging every taste bud and we are completely overcome by successive waves of being-in-oneness-with-the-world. to think that in its folly, humanity would be deprived of yet another three-second happiness...!
so much for "progress," venus infers.

from back to front, rosiest to reddest: ohtoro, chûtoro and the more frequent but still delectible akami, all appearing as nigirizushi, accompanied by some yellow ginger pickles and a small dish of soy sauce in the background. the blogger i took this snapshot from identifies the setting as "somewhere in roppongi (tokyo), and i'm not saying more because it's quite small, and people are always lining up..." via kirinuki (in japanese).