Ban this, ban that! No, we don't mean business! We the Swiss would never ban that! No, ban the poor, ban the different! Ban and stigmatize the things the poor and the different do, the shapes they wear and build! Don't ban the rich! Court the rich! Attract them by enabling capital, incentivising business, indemnifying the banks, making their risk public and their profit private! But minarets, veils, burkas -- ban, ban, ban! Ban in the name of freedom! Ban in the name of feminism! Ban in the name of national identity! Ban in the name of fear!



On Sunday, the Swiss voted in a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets. Existing minarets can stay, but new ones cannot be built. The measure will now pass into Swiss law. A particular building shape is now forbidden. A 4% minority of the Swiss population -- also, and not coincidentally, its poorest 4% -- has been told that its buildings "endanger Swiss security". Banners held up banners in front of models of minarets that declared: "That is not my Switzerland".

In late 2004, France banned the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools. Alain Badiou wrote at the time: "France has astonished the world. After the tragedies, the farce."

"France has finally found a problem worthy of itself: the scarf draping the heads of a few girls. Decadence can be said to have been stopped in this country. The Muslim invasion, long diagnosed by Le Pen and confirmed nowadays by a slew of indubitable intellectuals, has found its interlocutor. The battle of Poitiers was kid's stuff, Charles Martel, only a hired gun. But Chirac, the Socialists, feminists and Enlightenment intellectuals suffering from Islamophobia will win the battle of the headscarf."

Badiou demolishes, in this splendidly angry, numbered text, the arguments that banning the headscarf is either a feminist or enlightenment gesture: "Either it's the father and eldest brother, and "feministly" the hijab must be torn off, or it's the girl herself standing by her belief, and "laically" it must be torn off. There is no good headscarf. Bareheaded! Everywhere! ...Everyone must go out bareheaded.



"One will never go into raptures enough over feminism's singular progression. Starting off with women's liberation, nowadays feminism avers that the "freedom" acquired is so obligatory that it requires girls (and not a single boy!) to be excluded owing to the sole fact of their dressing accoutrements."

Badiou is quite clear about what really underlies the ban.

"In truth of fact, the Scarfed Law expresses one thing and one thing alone: fear. Westerners in general, the French in particular, are but a shivering, fearful lot. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Those from within, i.e. the "young suburbanites"; those from without, i.e. "Islamist terrorists." Why are they frightened? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. They are guilty of having renounced and attempted to annihilate -- ever since the 1980s -- every kind of emancipatory politics, every revolutionary form of Reason, and every true assertion of something else. Guilty of clutching at their lousy privileges. Guilty of being but old children playing with their manifold purchases. Yes, indeed, "in a long childhood, they have been made to age." They are thus afraid of everything a little less aged. A stubborn young lady, for instance."



This is confirmed in European coverage of the Swiss minaret ban: "The Belgian newspaper Le Soir noted that some people found minarets "scary," and added, "There is a strong chance that if there was a vote in Belgium, a majority of citizens would be against it too."

The only thing that would prevent the Germans enacting similar bans would be the all-too-resonant similarity to the persecution of a religion in their 20th century history. And the EU's human rights stance. Here's the EU's human rights commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, righteously hammering Sarkozy as well as the Swiss (Sarkozy is currently leading a debate on whether the burka should be banned in France; his own stated position is that the burka "is not welcome"):

"In a statement on the Swiss vote, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, warned against narrowly defining national identity and pinpointed France's debate as a potential "trap of promoting one single identity, which defines who is included and, by extension, who is excluded."



Badiou points out that Islam is, in France, the religion of the poor. This is its real crime; to be associated with the economic underclass. Meanwhile, symbols of France's real mass religion -- business -- go unchecked in French schools:

"Isn't business the real mass religion? Compared to which Muslims look like an ascetic minority? Isn't the conspicuous symbol of this degrading religion what we can read on pants, sneakers and t-shirts: Nike, Chevignon, Lacoste... Isn't it cheaper yet to be a fashion victim at school than God's faithful servant? If I were to aim at hitting a bull's eye here -- aiming big -- I'd say everyone knows what's needed: a law against brand names. Get to work, Chirac. Let's ban the conspicuous symbols of Capital, with no compromises."

In a great lecture reprinted in the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt asks What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it," Judt says. "Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?"

The short answer: we are afraid of difference, and reluctant even to try to imagine it. As Badiou puts it in his Hard Talk interview: "We have no great and clear idea of another world."

"It is not necessary that you leave the house," wrote Franz Kafka, perhaps anticipating Google. "Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." Otto Spooky is an odd album, a treasure trove of worthless things found whilst googling, or, as I wrote at the time, "the record David Bowie would have made if he'd worked on Lodger with ex-members of The Incredible String Band instead of ex-members of Roxy Music".

Otto Spooky is the first Momus album made in Berlin (and arguably the only one, since Ocky Milk was half made in Osaka and Joemus half made in Glasgow), the first post-blog album (Click Opera already existed, and in fact was financing these songs via a donation system). It's an album made in an age of iPods and Web 2.0 applications. I think of it as a neo-Elizabethan googlepop record: an aleph-album, with google as "the place from which everything in the world can be seen simultaneously". It's an album on which everything is visible and nothing matters. It's rich but lost, observant but dizzy. Digital form has become a rush, a torrent leading us anywhere and everywhere and nowhere. From Elizabethan England to Tripoli to Eritrea to Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, the album melts and flows, carried along by John Talaga's mind-warping transitions and the constant sound of water.



"The 2005 Album From Momus" was recorded in my apartment on the Stalin-esque Karl-Marx-Allee between April and July 2004 and provisionally entitled The Artist Overwhelmed By The Grandeur Of Ancient Ruins, a title from Henry Fuseli, the early Romantic painter of irrational nightmares. I was 44, and I'd moved to Berlin the year before after a somewhat nomadic three years in New York and Tokyo. By 2004 I was living with a fashion student called Ayako, writing for Vice magazine and various design publications, getting more interest from art mags than music publications (Modern Painters gave me four pages in 2003), rummaging in Berlin's flea markets, lusting after its hipster scenester girls, visiting art shows.



The year before I'd made a record with Anne Laplantine. Summerisle (not a regular Momus album, and therefore not included in the sequence here) referenced The Wicker Man and -- without bandwagon-jumping -- fitted quite neatly into the then-trendy Wicker Folk or Weird New Folk meme. Appropriately enough, Otto Spooky opens with a couple of tracks which sound as if they're mining the same meaning-seams as Summerisle -- experimental folk music -- slightly more articulately. But, as spring 2004 turns to summer, things diverge... and keep diverging, endlessly, exhaustingly. In April I record (and blog about; click the links) Jesus in Furs, Life of the Fields, Robin Hood, and Corkscrew King. In May I write Sempreverde, Klaxon, Bantam Boys, The Water Song, Cockle Pickers, Your Fat Friend, Belvedere and Lute Score. Things are rounded off in June with the composition and recording of Mr Ulysses, The Artist Overwhelmed and, finally, I Refuse To Die. In the summer I head off to Japan and Hong Kong.

( Otto track by track... )

In retrospect, Otto Spooky feels like an oblique, exhausting album. It's like wandering in some sort of mad art biennial. The range of references is dizzying, mystifying, disorienting. The record is rich and strange, yet light and nebulous; political yet politically-incorrect. You get the impression of a cavern of junk treasure, a butterfly fluttering over jewels. A rush of information becomes a spinning globe, a kaleidoscopic blur.

This may be the weakest of my noughties albums, but if he's lost, Spooky Otto, the "artist overwhelmed", is lost in a respectable, calculated, arty, playful, gainful way. This absurdist interview, recorded at the time, may confuse you further.

Otto Spooky can be ordered on CD here (UK) or here (US).

The new edition of Berlin "electroniclivingaspects" culture mag De:Bug is out, and it's a Japan Special.



A writer called Timo Feldhaus came round and interviewed me about Japanophilia for the issue, and later Mary Scherpe took some portraits in Jan's apartment round the corner, sitting on his tatami mats:



I think De:Bug used a different photo from the same session for the article (I haven't actually seen the paper copy yet). Mary is one of the founders of streetsnap style blog Stil in Berlin, which has just launched as a free paper magazine too.

Being a Japanophile, I'd have to say Drop Japan is probably my favourite street style blog at the moment.

On Friday night at Madame Claude there was a fantastic chance to see Ben Butler and Mousepad supporting Oorutaichi, the future of music. He turns out to live remarkably close to Hisae's family home in Tennoji, Osaka, so we're hoping to drop in on him in Japan when we visit (we fly on Friday).



Oorutaichi's set in the Madame Claude cellar was wonderful -- shrieky and tribal -- but I just want to note here how great Ben Butler and Mousepad now are live. The group consists of Joe Howe and his friend Bastien. Here's Joe with his girlfriend Emma, both wearing some "Jewish" glasses Hisae made for me, with locks of her own hair hanging off the arms (I'm wearing them in the Oorutaichi snap too):



Ben Butler and Mousepad sound like a blend of YMO, Herbie Hancock and Synergy. Who's Synergy, I hear you ask? I didn't know either until I watched this clip on Joe's blog:



Synergy is someone called Larry Fast, who made music for Commodore computer games in the 80s, I guess.

And here's a snatch of Ben Butler and Mousepad on Friday night playing their most YMO-ish number:

Ben Butler and Mousepad Live at Mme Claude's (mp3 file)

More on their MySpace page. If you want to book Ben Butler and Mousepad (festivals! weddings! bar mitzvahs!), email marie@julietippex.com.

Read today's papers and you'll find that there's another major financial crisis brewing, as banks like HSBC and the home of my own overdraft, RBS (now 84% owned by the British taxpayer) find themselves dangerously exposed to debt defaults, mostly in the construction industry, in the bling-bling dictatorship, Dubai.



Like everything else in Dubai (its highest building -- not, incidentally, the skyscraper sporting the huge portrait of the enclave's resident dictator, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum --is 40% taller than the next nearest rival), the debt crisis is one of elephantine proportions: $14 billion of syndicated loans to Dubai World are said to be looking very iffy indeed, and the total debt is estimated by some at about $90 billion, and others as far beyond that.

It would be tempting just to shrug this off, if it weren't for the fact that the Dubai hype reached even my post-materialist ears. Members of my family have been to Dubai, my bank lends my overdraft interest to the state's construction firms, my book editors are visiting with a view to writing books about the speculative bubble and the fascinating way in which it's burst.



"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.

It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.



The people close to me -- editors, writers I know here in Berlin -- were interested in Dubai not just as a speculative bubble and a sort of Brechtian fable (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny played out in a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s), but because they're close to architect Rem Koolhaas, who was preparing to unleash his own sort of bubble on the city. Truly the architecture it deserved, you might say, but will now never get.

Here's a fairly superficial and, I'd say, immoral TV documentary by Piers Morgan about Dubai:



Watching that, my first reaction is "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to live in a place like that!" It looks like everything I hate and avoid in the cities I know: endless anaemic shopping malls with ludicrously inflated prices, vapid celebrities and self-made, flabby entrepreneurs, absolutely zero culture you'd want to spend any time with (unless you're really into Kylie shows punctuated with "the world's largest fireworks display"), Sunday Times Rich List types with parasitic hangers-on, people with dyed blonde hair who talk about money and drink champagne, people who've never encountered a single interesting idea (let alone an idea critical of the kind of world they inhabit) in their lives, bubble-headed people floating about in a bubble economy.



Burst, Dubai, burst! And take your dictator with you! But don't take my bank, my sister, my editor, or the entire world financial system down into hell with you, please.

1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)

2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.



3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.

4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.

5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.



6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?

7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."

8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."



9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:

"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."

10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:

a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism

11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".

12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:

"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.

13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.



14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.

15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.

16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".

17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".

18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.

Monday's International Emmy Awards saw a win for Japan in the Comedy category. NHK's production of Hoshi Shinichi's Short Shorts presents "one author's tales of strange worlds, told with an odd accent, grownup fairy tales". Shinichi, who died in 1997, wrote over a thousand of these "short shorts", stories just three or four pages long. He's often called a sci-fi writer, but most of his fictions are earthbound, and concern parallel worlds where strange things happen. Here, for instance, is the tale of Mr Teal, a space travel insurance agent whose life is so mechanised that nobody notices he's dead:



And here's the tale of a woman brought to hospital by her boyfriend, who tells the staff she thinks she's a fox, because the last thing she said was kon, which is the bark of a fox in Japanese. In fact, she was starting to say kondo, which means "next time", and was trying to warn him that next time he cheated on her she'd leave him.



This is a very odd one. A young girl has a much older lover, who keeps her in the lap of luxury, in a room with strange white flowers and a fountain bath. He goes away on a trip, leaving her (totally naked) in the care of his butler. The servant has to relay the news that the old man has died in a car accident, but the young girl already knows it somehow:



There are times I wish I could draw well. I think manga, or the visual novel (The Crib Sheet prefers the term gekiga, or "drama pictures"), has the capacity to be a much higher artform than written-word-only novels. Just about anybody can write, but not so many can write and draw with talent. So it seems unfair that we generally rank visual novels lower than literary novels.

Japan tends to observe this hierarchy less. When Tomoko Miyata was visiting Berlin recently, she told us that her favourite writer is the mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge. He's still alive, but hasn't made any new manga since 1986. Here are a couple of rather remarkable films I found on YouTube, in which a fan has animated still Tsuge manga in a superbly weird, almost psychedelic style:





I think it's the capacity of drawing to evoke -- better than photography, film, or the written word -- parallel worlds which both resemble our world and don't that I like so much. That plus the fact that a single auteur-creator, sitting at a kotatsu table, can produce these worlds with very few resources except time, effort, skill and imagination. And possibly the fact that the manga industry has something abject and underground about it, rather like the world of indie record labels (the Wikipedia entry on gekiga basically says they were to Japan what rock was to the US). Is it too late for me to learn to draw and switch careers?

2003's Oskar Tennis Champion is my first proper album of the new decade, if you see Folktronic as a belated summary of 90s themes. Oskar draws its power from two collaborations with women artists: the Milky album Travels with a Donkey I made with my ex-wife Shazna in New York in early 2002, just before leaving for Tokyo, and the Mashcat mini-album Mashroom Haircat, recorded with Emi Necozawa when I arrived in Japan. What these records share with Oskar is the genre-collision I began to call vaudeville concrete; they were the kind of record that might have emerged if Georges Brassens had worked with Pierre Schaeffer, or Tom Lehrer had studied with Stockhausen.



It's a powerful combination. On the one hand you have the conservative, enduring, folksy appeal of strong narrative lines, universal timeless themes, stories, content. On the other radical, innovative Modernism, and with it a certain elitist formalism, futurism, the shock of the new, the untried, the experimental. How to reconcile them? Well, one method is to do what the brilliant physical, textural cine-clown Jacques Tati did in Mon Oncle and Playtime; present an exaggeratedly pure and dogmatic Modernism whilst making a folksy satire on it. Another might be to do the vaudeville in the songwriting and lyrics, and the concrete in the music by, for instance, bringing in a formalist collaborator -- here, John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh, the "reproducer" with a license to "fuck things up" musically. In fact -- as the pre-mixed, pre-reproduced Oskar Originals show -- Talaga improved the record no end.



I take the title of Oskar Tennis Champion from an early Tati short. The album is recorded in Tokyo, where I've moved after being shocked by 9/11. The destruction of the WTC hangs over Oskar Tennis Champion, thematically, like a low-flying passenger jet. How could it not? I saw them, those jets, with my own eyes. Well, one of them, with one eye. So how does 9/11 impact on the Oskar album? Because this is a record in which Modernist utopia slips on a banana skin, and 9/11 was modernity slipping on a very big banana skin (religion, the irrational, resentment, the guerilla resistance, self-appointed nemesis, call it what you will).



You know those Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd films where the clown is dangling from the clockface of a 1920s skyscraper, or saved only by the position of an open window when a whole facade crashes down? The collapse of the graph-paper rationality of the World Trade Center seemed like one of those moments -- as in a Tati film, modernity had been challenged by something absurd, insignificant, clumsy, stubbornly human. The irrational, the uncontrollable, a slight change in plan leading to clumsy catastrophe, and slapstick about clumsy catastrophe. In retrospect, it's particularly interesting to me that this theme plays out in Oskar so much on the level of a comedy of gesture and sonics, just as it does in Tati's Playtime:



The retro-Modernist side of the equation involved delving back into the theories of the Russian formalists, and particularly Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, which I finessed into a concept I called disorienteering. Needless to say, living in Tokyo without speaking Japanese was, itself, a form of disorienteering for me, a time of being pleasantly lost, and a series of irrational episodes played out in a relentlessly Modernist cityscape. The irrational defamiliarization on display in Oskar was a "logical" and "natural" choice for someone in those circumstances.

There's a ton of documentation of the making of Oskar on the Momus website, but let's move on to a track-by-track play-through.

( Oskar track by track... )

Overall, in retrospect, I think Oskar Tennis Champion is a very ambitious and exciting album, funny, provocative and serious, bursting with ideas but also able to be moving and personal, oblique yet also politically thoughtful, provocative and, artistically, richly suggestive. Rather than Folktronic (which is where many of my American listeners took their leave of me), this is the record which would map out my noughties, texturally, conceptually, thematically. I'm actually very proud of it. It also doesn't sound sonically dated to me; I think that by this point I'd arrived at a style that was completely my own. At the same time, the glitch and "aesthetics of failure" stuff does root it in the early 21st century.

Buy Oskar Tennis Champion from Cherry Red (UK) or Darla (US).

I used to do travelogue podcasts fairly regularly. They're collected here, but there hasn't been a new one since January 2007, because the recorder I used to use stopped working. But in Warsaw I made a nice big juicy long one in which I rave about the city's Stalinist architecture, interview my fellow artistes at the Song Is You festival, look at some art, throw some bouncy balls down a street, get a headache, eat cold herring in apple sauce, and run into members of design group Åbäke.



Warsaw Podcast (mp3 file, 67 mins 22 secs, 33MB)



Above you see some of the details referred to in the walky-talk -- a decorated communist-era building (now a Pizza Hut) near the Central Square, some funerary patisserie (that's what the window looked like to me, anyway). Below you see the forecurl style I was sporting as a tribute to Kantor (excellent video of The Dead Class under that link), and a local Victorian-style dandy.



And finally some of the pretty, Disneyfied architecture of the old town, and Kajsa and Benjamin from Åbäke.

Who should I run into at breakfast this morning in the Hotel Metropol, Warsaw, but Kajsa and Benjamin from Abake? Swedish Kajsa is the cover star of my Ocky Milk album, and French Benjamin is also part of music fashion label Kitsune. They told me they'd come to Warsaw to visit the artist Pawel Althamer, and started describing his Common Tasks project to me.



Like Abake (who mount socially-oriented conceptual projects like repairing park benches or setting up plant exchange schemes, and describe it as "design"), Althamer makes social interventions. For Sculpture Munster he made a path leading into the middle of a barley field, for instance. Common Task involves him dressing up a group of his Warsaw neighbours (he lives in a somewhat Stalinist tower block) in sci-fi gold suits and flying them (sometimes in a gold-painted Boeing 737) to various utopian locations: the Atomium in Brussels, Brasilia, or to Mali to meet the Dogon tribe.



Listening to Kajsa and Benjamin describing this over breakfast, I experienced "comparative visit envy". I'd come to Warsaw to sing (dressed up in a pair of spectacles with forecurls attached, as it happens). They'd come for a studio visit with this very interesting artist.

But actually Pawel Althamer had been a part of my visit too. As you'll hear when I post an hour-long podcast of my Warsaw wanderings tomorrow, I spent a while in front of a video of his yesterday at the CSW art museum. In 1997 Althamer selected a group of homeless people and got them to undress, hold hands, and dance naked in a ring in an empty white cube gallery space. I spent a minute or so describing the flabby bodies as they crossed the screen one by one. I didn't realise they were tramps; what interested me was how their middle-aged sag made it difficult to tell men and women apart.

A decade later Althamer would have dressed his tramps in gold foil and sent them on a golden plane to witness wonders.

Krautrock - the Rebirth of Germany is a BBC4 documentary on the mystical electronic music British rock critics dubbed "Krautrock" (which is a bit like calling Alberto Camerini a "Woprocker"). Directed by Ben Whalley, the film is a companion to the one I linked the other day about UK synthpop, Synth Britannia.



Does anyone else see the influence of Adam Curtis here? The voice-over sounds a bit Curtis-like, and Whalley has a similar approach to selecting and editing clips. Whenever I think of Adam Curtis I think of the artist Luke Fowler's documentaries, which seem to have headed even further out in the same direction. Like Curtis, Fowler selects dramatic, texturally-interesting clips -- glimpses of radical sixties and seventies subcultures. Whalley does the same thing: his very short clip of Kraftwerk dancing, for instance, is masterfully placed as a glimpse that leaves you wanting more.



If documentaries move more in this direction it's not hard to imagine them employing an interesting and successful rule Fowler sets himself to keep his textures consistent, and his subjects consistently mythical: never show people as they look today. Watching these documentaries, it's hard not to be distracted by counting the lines on Iggy Pop's stomach or regretting the fact that a surviving member of Popol Vuh who looks as if he's undergoing chemotherapy is lighting up cigarettes on camera. We could say that all documentaries about cool and charismatic subcultures are doomed to a basically bathetic narrative structure (it's nature's very own bathos, but that shouldn't excuse it) when they balance young, good looking, cool people against the prunes they inevitably become. The viewer is forced into playing a constant game of Spot the Difference, rather than experiencing the full revelation of an aesthetic revolution at its peak. The end result is a sort of temporal embourgeoisement. "Don't worry," this narrative structure seems to say "we all go slack and paunchy in the end. Even the visionaries."



Then again, there is a fascination in discovering that venues which are part of past legend are also part of your regular experience. Before watching this documentary I didn't realise that the Zodiak Arts Club, a Berlin experimental arts centre founded by Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster, is what I know today as HAU2, part of the Hebbel-am-Ufer theatre complex in Kreuzberg where we watched the Tokio Shibuya theatre season last month.



There are other niggling critiques you could make of the Krautrock doc. The presence of Iggy Pop and the absence of Eno, for instance, is odd. Julian Cope could usefully have popped up at some point. They could have employed a critic to sift bad records of the period from good. Kraftwerk is arguably over-familiar and part of a different genre.



Then there's the questionable scene-setting at the beginning, where footage of 1968 student disturbances in Berlin is played while the script tells us that pop music in Germany at the time was Schlager, which said nothing about "the reality of what was happening on the streets". If the documentarists are trying to set up a "Punk swept away Prog" sort of scenario, they're barking up the wrong tree. First of all, Schlager is still with us; its audience of working class Germans in kniepes doesn't overlap with the Krautrock audience at all. Secondly, Krautrock has as little relevance to urban political uprisings as Schlager has; it's a music of mystical introspection, for the most part recorded in country barns.



Grousing aside, though, this is a very interesting film, and I'd like to see BBC4 continue to employ Ben Whalley. They should also think about screening Luke Fowler's film about Cornelius Cardew, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, though, because Fowler shows how a documentary about a visionary artist can, itself, be visionary art. It's a good deal more uplifting than counting Iggy Pop's stretchmarks.