During the cultural revolution, Chairman Mao pretended to "let a hundred flowers bloom" -- only to use the resultant openness to find out exactly who his enemies were. I won't say yesterday's Flipwhack Metaloop poll was anything like that, but LiveJournal's extremely detailed feedback on who'd said what did tempt me to investigate the blogs of the critical minority who thought I was, for instance, relentlessly self-promoting. Would someone who thought I was self-promoting be promoting themselves on their blog? What kind of self-effacing culture would they be talking about?



I received a deliciously appropriate answer to that question from one Click Dissenter's blog -- a ringing endorsement of a documentary called Koolhaas Houselife, which looks at the Dutch architect's 1998 Bordeaux house not from the perspective of the owner (a disabled writer whose wheelchair necessitates the house's centrepiece, a vast hydraulic floor that rises and falls across acres of bookshelves like a cherry-picker) but of the housemaid, a plump and fussy cleaner who's far from impressed by the grey, cerebral minimalist slab. I rushed to download the film from my favourite clandestine server.

Now, I love films about architecture -- the kind featured on 0300TV, for instance, or the structuralist kind made by Heinz Emigholz. But Houselife is a step beyond -- or do I mean below? -- other films about architecture, because it concentrates not on the intellectual or utopian blah that characterises much architecture-talk, but on the daily task of vacuuming and dusting the house, catching the drips when it rains, and fixing the broken entry system. This is history written not by the winners but by the cleaners. As such, it's the perfect film for someone who wants to burst an intellectual's self-justifying bubble.



Houselife sees Koolhaas' building from the perspective of Guadalupe Acedo, the frank, no-nonsense maid, as she dusts and vacuums. We see not only the public areas, designed to impress with their originality, but also the maid's own quarters, a humdrum, cramped little flat in a hidden corner of the house, stuffed with depressingly standard equipment and fittings bought, no doubt, from a local branch of Darty. We also hear the maid's opinion of the house she looks after: she wouldn't have any house of her own that grey and that stark, she says. Just as no man is a hero to his wife, so no house is a hero to its cleaner.

The Houselife trailer contains nods to the utopian-dystopian tension in two famous films about architecture and technology, Tati's Mon Oncle and Kubrick's 2001. But the Bordeaux house can't help reminding us, also, of the writer's house in A Clockwork Orange, scene of a terrible rape. The writer in that film is, like the invisible owner of the Bordeaux house, confined to a wheelchair after one too many visits from Alex and his droogs. This misfortune somehow throws his utopian-modern house into much darker relief, giving the enviable setting a heavy dramatic irony. There are also shades of Dr Steven Hawking in the way technology here is an impressive -- but finally inadequate -- substitute for an able-bodiedness most of us take for granted.



Of course, theory trickles back into a film admirably void of it the way rain trickles into a dream house through cracks. It's easy, for instance, to see Houselife as an example of what Koolhaas himself has called post-occupancy design, which I've defined as "the stuff that happens to design after it’s left the designer’s workshop (and architecture after it’s left the studio)... the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn’t see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive."

In an interview on the Houselife DVD, Koolhaas himself tries to combat the maid's acerbic disrespect. Far from representing reality, Koolhaas says in this clip, the maid is a sort of ideologue, a Schweikian demagogue: "You see two systems colliding, the systems of the platonic conception of cleaning with the platonic conception of architecture. It's not necessarily daily life confronting an exceptional structure, it's two ideologies confronting each other."

I think he's right, but I can't help finding it satisfying to see an extraordinary building mopped down to size by a waddling, polka-dotted housemaid -- its nemesis, apotheosis, and household goddess. If Koolhaas represents the power of architecture, Acedo is a force of nature; you might as well try to resist the weather.

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Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Faber & Faber -- as previewed in a multimedia feature in The Guardian -- jogged a few memories for me. Faber is probably the publisher I've owned the most books by, after Penguin and Picador. Seeing the covers laid out in this way made me think of Emily Jacir's artwork Material for a Film, which displays the books owned by a Palestinian poet assassinated by the Israeli secret services.

The two Lawrence Durrell covers visible in the glimpse below of Jacir's piece were designed by Berthold Wolpe, a long-time Faber designer. We had them on our family bookshelves in the 1960s, so when my mother and I met and drank a pastis with Lawrence Durrell in Avignon in 1985 it felt like meeting an old family friend. (My mother embarrassed me by saying "My son Nicholas writes too!" Which totally wasn't true.)



Of the Faber covers, I found the ones designed by the books' own authors the most interesting. T.S. Eliot's design for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats looks like a zine -- surprisingly light and scrappy, twee and pungent.

David Jones' Anathemata almost reminds me of a Peter Saville Factory Records design. Letting this poet-painter design his own jackets was totally the right thing to do -- as with the great Alasdair Gray, the effect is to create the impression that the artist has a personal stylistic universe which can be extended into any medium. That can be a welcoming and charismatic thing; the feeling that an artist's vision is immersive and comprehensive, different from everything you know.

Looking at the cover for Crow by Ted Hughes reminded me of how this book of visceral reports "from the life and songs of the crow" influenced my debut record The Man on Your Street ("songs from the career of the Dictator Hall", whose thoughts are described in The Courier as "hovering on like rooks as he wings his way below").

The generic postmodern Pentagram design that wrapped all Faber poetry titles from the early 80s onwards made me start thinking of Thomi Wroblewski, the designer I befriended and worked with from 1987 on. Thomi -- employed by Mike Alway to do the least el set of el single sleeves ever -- was known for his Talking Heads and Siouxie and the Banshees sleeves, as well as William Burroughs jackets for Picador:



When we started collaborating, Thomi had a big studio above the office of maverick Scottish publisher John Calder, in Green's Court, just off Brewer Street in Soho. I ended up spending a lot of time there, meeting Calder and some of his unlikely hangers-on (the Jewish doctor from Eastenders!). Thomi shared my taste for refined erotica (he designed an edition of Apollinaire's 1907 smut classic Les Onze Mille Verges, which publisher Peter Owen had to paraphrase, so subversive was it still considered to be in 1980s Britain), and liked to photograph you naked, writhing like a dancer. So it was up in that Soho studio that I posed, naked and masked, with various pretty girls for the Murderers, The Hope of Women sleeve. Thomi even dressed me up as dandy barfly Julian Maclaren-Ross, and put me on the cover of Memoirs of the Forties, his book about Fitzrovia. I'm seen from behind, toasting Soho.

What I notice about Thomi Wroblewski's 1980s book jacket work now is that while it often transgresses against the standards of good taste, it has an interesting maverick diversity -- exactly the sort of quirky zing that Wolpe-period Faber books had, but Pentagram-period Faber had lost by the time they standardised their poetry line with the tight-assed, Laura-Ashley-like "pomo ampersand classic" design.

This period of 1980s late pomo design is now coming back with a rush; the stretched typefaces on Thomi's 1988 Quick End anthology, for instance (The Quick End was a collection of short stories by Michael Bracewell, Don Watson and Mark Edwards, a writing group formed under the tutelage of Kathy Acker -- I faithfully attended all their readings) look rather like what Mike Meiré is doing now at 032c magazine. There's an awkward, ugly energy here which suddenly looks interesting again.

When I first moved to the northern tip of Neukolln in 2006 there was a funky little record store (it also sold comics, jagged grungy silkscreens, books of pervy photos of wounded Japanese girls by Romaine Slocombe, and copies of FRUiTS magazine) on my street called Le Petit Mignon, run by a frenchman called Guillaume Siffert.



In March 2007 Le Petit Mignon closed its Neukolln shop, moved up to the Torstrasse in Mitte, and merged with Staalplaat, a Dutch record shop and label which started as a cassette distribution operation in 1982. At the time, it looked like Le Petit Mignon was getting "upwardly mobile", moving from a marginal area to hipster central in Mitte. But in early 2009 rumours started to reach our ears that Le Prodigal Mignon was seeking to return to Neukolln, bringing Staalplaat with it. Guillaume spent a couple of months scouting locations, and finally settled on Flughafenstrasse, a busy commercial, working class street that slopes down from Tempelhof Airport to the Neukolln town hall.



The new Neukolln Staalplaat -- called Staalplaat Working Space -- opened in late April. I made my first visit last night, to see a Midori Hirano show in their concert space at the back. I actually missed Midori's set because of a fireworks display at Tempelhof, catching instead the sensuously placid guitar sounds of Rac-ka, a duo from Osaka.

It felt good being in there, even if there was something a bit cautious about the way Guillaume had to unlock the door to let us in. On the Staalplaat blog page Rinus details not just the new venue's problems with noise-obsessed neighbours, but their view that "the neighbourhood is turning into a red-light district, with illegal prostitution, women-, drugs-, and arms trafficking, bribery, violence and noise disturbances."



I personally felt a big hippy-alternative vibe of calm. Staalplaat's concert room has sofas. It's very quiet in there (and not just because of the neighbour with the decibel meter) and the only lighting is a couple of candles and some ghostly ambient seep from the backyard. When experimental music is playing, you're instantly in a Wire magazine article, and when the show is over and the audience mills out into the shop area you feel something of the vibe of the old Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden, the one under Slam City Skates.

The move back into Neukolln -- deeper into Neukolln, in the developing area around Boddinstrasse -- seems to have given Staalplaat a rush of relevance, a new mission and energy. Whereas, up in Mitte, Staalplaat pretty much blended in, sensibility-wise, with neighbours like Bongout Gallery and Neurotitan, down here in "deep Neukolln" it seems to be back on the cutting edge, joining semi-squat cultural guerilla operations like Loophole (from which I did a livecast back in February at the invitation of the ubiquitous Rinus Van Alebeek). The gamble seems to have paid off; foot traffic into Staalplaat during the day is apparently rather higher down here "in the middle of nowhere" (actually close to happening spots like Weserstrasse) than it was up on tacky Torstrasse, the Oxford Street of Berlin hip.



Neukolln may not have Mitte's buy-yourself-hip clothes boutiques (oh shit, did Best Shop close down already? Maybe Mitte doesn't have them either!) but it does offer less conventional clothing possibilities. I'd recommend a trip to the gigantic Bauhaus store on Hasenheide, directly across the road from Viet-café Hamy, our cut-price version of Mitte's Monsieur Vuong. At Bauhaus you can marvel at gorgeously utilitarian gas cannisters, chipboard slabs, orange-painted trolleys and red nested toolboxes.



Copying Jan Lindenberg -- my personal style guru, who uses them to soften his recycled MDF chairs -- I bought a €4.60 recycled Bauhaus packing blanket yesterday and modeled it for Hisae's camera right there in the store, to the amusement of Saturday shoppers. I run the pictures here so that Twit Opera and the Anons can mock me as if I weren't already mocking myself, and because milky_eyes was complaining yesterday about the absence of photos of me. Packing blankets -- like deep Neukolln -- are where it's at, man. You read it here first.

On Wednesday Yoshito, Naoko, Hisae and I took the train to Blankenfeld, a satellite suburb about 25 kilometers from central Berlin. Japanese friends had invited us to Workshop Japan, an afternoon presentation of the part-time work they'd been doing over the last three months, teaching German children about Japanese crafts, lifestyle, language and philosophy.



Coming from dense, Turkish Neukolln to Blankenfeld was like entering another world. After riding two trains and a bus we found ourselves skirting a poppy-dotted wheatfield in a thunderstorm. Boat-shaped suburban houses were surrounded by gnome-haunted gardens, many boasting ornamental fountains, statues of goats, and clumps of bamboo. Even in the heavy rain, we paused to marvel at flowers and plants we never see in the inner city.



At the school -- a clean, modern brick box -- ten-year-olds scurried about in Japanese headbands, guided by the friends who had invited us. Look, there's Ido-San, the performance artist! But today she's Ido-San, the judo instructor! Look, there's Saiko, the art student who works in the kitchen at Smart Deli! But today she's the kimono lady!

Like Superman, these friends of ours have secret powers. We thought they were artists, but after a quick change of clothes in a phone booth they become... ambassadors for Japan! Speculating idly as the slick Workshop Japan DVD played to the teeming assembly hall, I wondered if I too could earn money from the German government teaching "the Scottish Way" to kids? Is there even a Scottish Way worth learning? How do we arrange our gardens? How do we fight? How do we dress? Is it sufficiently different from the German way to warrant a three month course? Is it charismatic enough? Could this be what my Book of Scotlands leads to?



I suppose I was perceived as a parent at the Workshop Japan afternoon -- a parent nobody had ever seen before, not attached to any particular child. Like all the other "parents" I raised my Japanese digital camera and snapped dutifully during the kimono fashion show, as young German girls paraded past in unlikely kimonos featuring what looked like the double-headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire.

In fact, if I was the "father" of anyone, it was the Japanese instructors themselves. It was with some kind of paternal pride that I told Saiko-San that the arrangement of hair at the back of her neck had achieved the pinnacle of iki beauty.



What I noticed, out at Blankenfeld, was that we all became different people there. In central Berlin the culture allows us to be somewhat ageless and cultureless. Out at Blankenfeld, we suddenly had ages and cultures. I was "old", the girls (in their mid to late 20s) were "responsible adults", and the kids were "kids". Your perceived age slotted you into this syntagmatic hierarchy, did away with equality, made you act a certain way. We also had more noticeable ethnicities. All the kids were white, and German. All the instructors were Japanese, and did stereotypically Japanese things, like paper-folding and flower-arranging. I passed, I guess, for a German.

Despite the emphasis on culture, there was less cultural mixing going on out at Blankenfeld than happens in central Berlin. Last week Ido-San did one of her multimedia performances in Neukolln -- an act that mixed Japanese and Western idioms. But out at Blankenfeld she was being 100% Japanese.



It was a relief to get back to dense, dirty Neukolln, where people are as various as flowers are in Blankenfeld. It seems to me that central Berlin is the exception and Blankenfeld the norm, in the sense that rather few places allow you to escape your age, your class, your race and your culture -- should you wish to! -- in the way that urban Berlin does. Here nobody ever says "Act your age!" or "Scots don't do that!" or "Be a man!"



But if it's a sort of freedom to escape your age, your gender, and your culture, it's also a sort of freedom to embody them gorgeously, generously, even stereotypically. Perhaps, out in blank Blankenfeld, my Japanese friends were suddenly free to express a repressed part of "themselves" -- the part, paradoxically, that we're not at liberty to change.

When the Serpentine Gallery Pavillion opens on Sunday, it'll be Britain's first exposure to SANAA, the architectural team of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, responsible for New York's wildly successful New Museum.



Every July the Serpentine Gallery -- currently under the direction of the enlightened Hans Ulrich Obrist -- lets an architect erect a temporary pavilion in its Kensington Gardens enclosure. SANAA's, the ninth in the series, is certainly the least bombastic. As the Times' architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff explains in a video on the paper's site, the Japanese team has built a light plane of polished aluminium sloping modestly towards the ground across pillars and bendy plexiglass walls. The inside space, dotted with Nishizawa's white bunny chairs, merges inside and outside. From a distance, the mirrored structure seems to blend with the trees, like a calm sheet of reflective water.



Equally reproachful of bombast is the music of Otomo Yoshihide, the subject of a new documentary called KIKOE. Filmmaker Iwai Chikara (who also runs a club with Yoshihide) filmed the musician over ten years, building up 500 hours of footage of concerts, interviews and sessions, which he's edited down to 99 minutes. Chikara calls it "a document of a system observed from a fixed point" -- the fixed point being Yoshihide himself, and the "system" being collaborators like Sachiko M and Kahimi Karie. The film shows at Shibuya Eurospace later this month before heading out to European film festivals.



Yoshihide is part of the No Input onkyo movement which shares a certain organic minimalism with SANAA's architecture. "I just wanna listen, no playing," as Sachiko M puts it, and I can imagine SANAA saying the same about Kensington Gardens -- their building really seems to want to listen to the park rather than dominate it.



My final example of a Japanese dislike of bombast comes in the form of the documentary Jesus Camp, which we watched last night on the recommendation of Japanese friends. The Christian evangelicals depicted in Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's 2006 film probably won't surprise anyone -- they're a well-explored, even over-familiar subject, and for the moment they've lost their mainstream political capital -- but what I found interesting here were the cut-aways to a Japanese studio discussion in which a short-skirted woman exclaims to an expert how sorry she is for American kids whose ideologically-motivated home-schooling doesn't allow them to study art or music -- let alone Darwinian evolution -- and whose parents are so out of love with the world that they can't wait to die.

"It's truly scary that 25% of Americans think this way!" these Japanese commentators agree. A religion, or a culture, with a little more love for its surroundings -- and a little less bombast -- suits them better.

Momus
Playground column, July 2009
Travels of a Chameleon

My beloved readers! How are you doing? What have you been up to? It's been too long -- almost three months! -- since last we met.



I'm not quite sure how it happened, this gap in communications. It's partly because I went traveling. I spent a month in New York with only an iPod Touch to keep in touch. I imagined I'd have something to tell you about the music scene in New York, something I could tap out on the iPod's tiny keyboard. But in the end I was so busy doing other things that I hardly saw any live music.



The only new band I discovered this time in New York was Twi The Humble Feather, a trio who play acoustic guitars and sing in ways that remind me of the Animal Collective (though they're a bit tired of that comparison). In the video lounge at the back of Monkeytown in Brooklyn I saw the Twi trio play a refreshing, relaxing set accompanied by the quirky projected animations of Nobuko Hori, one half of the Matsuri-kei girlband Groopies.



When I got back to Berlin, a funny thing happened. Kyoka, the other half of Groopies, brought the touring guitarist from the metal band Korn round to my house. It turned into a real-world re-enactment of my last column, in which I attempted to scandalize my own internal "good taste Taliban" by listening to music I wouldn't normally tolerate.

Shane Gibson sat on my sofa and politely watched the Mower videos I cued up for him, before taking control of my bluetooth mouse and showing me songs by (ahem!) "progressive metal" bands Sikth and Meshuggah. I made polite noises, but my inner Taliban hated them.



Metal music out of context doesn't have to be a bad thing, though. I heard a nice example when I attended Dexter Sinister's "documents opera" True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA in London in late June. Hunched at overhead projectors or standing stiffly at podiums, actors and art world personalities performed press releases and read pages of text, interrupted occasionally by a guitarist and drummer who played very short, very loud phrases from a Napalm Death song. The dryly cerebral texts were beautifully counterbalanced by the aggressive spurts of grindcore; the dream collaboration of Apollo and Dionysus.

But the music that's touched me most over the last couple of months hasn't been Western, and hasn't been rock. I heard street musicians in the Athens district of Kerameikos playing the most beautiful Balkan mountain music on accordion and clarinet. I held a pajama party at my flat in which we played only Greek Orthodox church music and the music of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, and it was the most fun party I've ever had; we whirled till our skirts spun high!

Most of all, I was impressed by an American called Jonny Olsen, who's become a big star in Laos and Thailand singing his own version of the local folk music. As the No Age blog explains, Jonny was a skate kid in California who started working in a Thai vegan café and, through it, fell in love with Thai culture.



Jonny Olsen moved to Thailand, mastered the language and several traditional instruments, and began making records. He's now a pop star there and in neighbouring Laos -- an incredible cultural chameleon, and an example to us all. With love and dedication, anything is possible!

Translated from the original Spanish by a robot chameleon. Tip of the hat to the Pulled Up blog for putting me onto Jonny Olsen.

I moved to the Neukolln neighbourhood I live in because of the market that happens twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. To give you some idea of the importance of this food and cloth market to me, I'll say that it can totally lift me out of the foulest mood, supply the kind of visual excitement I once got from Tokyo street fashion, and compensate for some of the limitations I run up against in other parts of Berlin. The most important adjective for the Maybachufer market is "Turkish".



Here are the gözleme girls from whom I bought my lunch yesterday at the market. They work at a window facing the street, three of them in a row. I find their pattern-clash muslim workwear style totally admirable. Gözleme is a filled, griddled flap of lavas bread, a recipe from Turkish mountain villages. You can have your pancake with spinach, cheese, lamb, potato or sweet fillings. Here's a video of someone griddle-baking the dough and adding the fillings:



There's a new "designer's market" which runs from time to time on Saturdays at the same Maybachufer location, but I have to say I find it super-lame. It's a product of white gentrification of a predominantly Turkish neighbourhood, and represents the "Boxhagenerification" of the Maybachufer (the Boxhagenerplatz market, like others in Berlin areas where the demographic skews white, focuses on slightly hip, slightly ironic goods). Stalls at this occasional, subtly menacing, designer's market sell vinyl bags with rounded 90s logos on them, models of the Berlin TV tower, twee hamster mousepads, pink t-shirts with "cool" slogans on them, perfumed soaps, and Jarvis Cocker glasses made of wood-effect adhesive. No gözleme are for sale, but sausages sizzle on grills.



The colours, smells, shapes and references of the Saturday designer's market are as "wrong" as the colours, smells, shapes and references of the Tuesday and Friday market are "right". They're "wrong" not because they're a culture I don't understand, but because they're a culture I understand all too well. After all, I'm one of the white people gentrifying this neighbourhood. Turkish people would just look blank if you said "Jarvis Cocker", but I know exactly what the cardboard Jarvis glasses and the cardboard Terry Richardson camera are about. They're references to a culture I'm part of. But it's a culture I wish would widen its horizons a bit, and love itself less.



The Wikipedia entry on Turks in Germany points out the ways in which Turks-in-Germany differ from the Germans -- and therefore, you could say, provide a corrective alternative to the limitations of life in Germany.

First of all, the Turks are younger than the Germans. Whereas 25% of Germans are over 60, only 5% of Turks are. This means that if you're living in a Turkish neighbourhood, it's going to feel a lot more youthful than a German neighbourhood. Secondly, the Turks are more urban than the Germans. They mostly opt to live in high density inner city communities thronging with small-scale commerce. This provides a bustling, lively street life notably missing from other parts of the city.

The Turks are working class, but also bi-cultural; they're likely to travel more, in a year, than the average German, clocking up air miles with cheap flights to and from Turkey. The Turks in Germany vote, massively, for the red-green alliance -- in 2005 90% of them voted for the socialists and greens. A majority of Germans, meanwhile, elected conservatives.

Turks were invited to Germany as "guest workers", and therefore there was no expectation, either from themselves or the Germans, that they would assimilate. Instead, they've integrated -- complementing German culture rather than reproducing it, becoming a syntagmatic element in the German sentence -- a qualifier -- rather than a paradigmatic one.



This is probably Freud's "narcissism of minor differences" at work, but if I hear music floating from a nearby flat into the evening air, I vastly prefer it to be Turkish music than anything from "my own" culture. And -- while it's nice to have art events, organic cafes and ice cream stores and trendy mobile coffee stalls in our hood -- I continue to be much more inspired by the style of the Anatolian gözleme girls on the Maybachufer than by people carrying vinyl bags with logos of the TV tower on them.

1. Every few years I shave my head. The first time I did it was when I was 26, and had just signed to Creation. I wanted to look harder, less bourgeois. The next time I did it was when I was 33. You can see it on the Pierre et Gilles Timelord cover. There was another shave when I was 40 and living in New York, and another four years later. I did it again this weekend.

2. It's not like you suddenly say to yourself "I know, I want to look bald!" or "I want to resemble Namihei, the father in Sazae-San!" But sometimes you get the sudden impulse to do it. To shave it all off! For the way it feels!



3. It was really hot and humid last week. Hisae was out at the dentist. I was shaving my stubble with my American electric shaver as usual, going up my sideburns. I went a little further up, then a little further.

4. At this point I should say that Hisae hates men with shaved heads. In fact, she's often told me that if I shave my head again, she'll leave me. So I was taking a risk. I'd have some explaining to do.

5. Nevertheless, I couldn't help pushing the warm, oiled, buzzing shaver further across the side of my head. The resulting fuzz felt so cool, so smooth! My heavy, hot hair fell to the floor soundlessly. It felt reckless, transgressive!



6. I played around with half-shaved styles for a while. Ha ha ha! Mohican! Bald uncle! Blind nutter!

7. When Hisae got back from the dentist, she was truly appalled. "I'm going to leave you!" she screamed. "That looks horrible! Who are you? Are you a monk?"

8. "Well, at least other girls won't like me now!" I said. "Yes, and neither will I!" retorted Hisae.

9. We eventually negotiated that I would wear Curly Carl, my performance wig, until my hair grew back.

10. We went out that evening to see Ben Butler and Mousepad play at Madame Claude's. I wore the wig. People looked at me very strangely. But they do that anyway.



11. When we got home, Hisae was in a more conciliatory mood. "The wig makes you look like you have cancer. It's okay not to wear it. I'll just wait patiently for your hair to return."

12. I both hate my new shave and love it.

13. Good points: It feels really nice and fresh. I feel streamlined, and I can feel excess heat just evaporating effortlessly away through the top of my head.

14. Bad points: It's really difficult to look good with a shaved head. I don't like how it looks, and I like even less how it's going to look in a couple of months, as it grows out. See the photo above with Kumi Okamoto, for instance. It's at that horrible standy-uppy phase. It'll be doing that in about three months from now.

15. My hair has been thinning for at least the last ten years. It's happening very, very slowly, but every time I shave my head I wonder "Will it grow back?" Each time it does I'm pleasantly surprised, even if it's clearly thicker in some areas than others.

16. I don't really like the hairline or the head shape a shave reveals: I have a pronounced widow's peak and a double crown.

17. Men try to compensate for having no hair by growing a big bead or wearing interesting spectacles (the red "Buggles" ones above belong to Emma Balkind), but they always just look like... men trying to compensate for having no hair.

18. On the other hand, lots of people have a ton of hair and still look crap. Yes!

19. In a sense, waiting for hair to grow back is condemning yourself to months of unhappiness with your own appearance. Was that spontaneous decision to shave really worth those months of pain?

20. At the same time there's something energising and delightful about a shaved head. It feels so good, so prickly, under your palm! People love to touch it! It's -- literally, if not stylistically -- cool!



21. I also notice that the times I've had a shaved head tend to correspond to times I've had a surprising amount of success with women. Even if I thought I looked bad, something seemed to appeal. I think one reason might be that when you have a shaved head you look like a huge, erect, walking penis. That works, you know, subliminally on women. When they look at you, something deep in their subconscious says "Penis!"

22. Despite the obvious compensation of "looking subliminally like a huge erect walking penis", I wish I hadn't shaved off my hair! Oh well, it'll grow back. Possibly.

It's the question our moonwalking grandchildren will ask us: where were you when you were asked by a major media outlet for your reaction to the death of Michael Jackson? And what did you say?



Jarvis Cocker ended what was apparently a lacklustre appearance on BBC TV's Question Time with an attempt at the question he'd obviously been invited there to answer: Had the media over-reacted to Jackson's death? Cocker, of course, had interrupted Jackson's Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards with a weird arse-flapping intervention -- rather feebly choreographed, it has to be said, in comparison with performance artist Michael Portnoy's spastic-electric Soy Bomb dance beside Bob Dylan at the 1998 Grammys:



Jarvis told the Question Time audience that Jackson hadn't made a great record in twenty years, was pretending to be Jesus, and had invented the moonwalk. Fact-checking suggests that tap-dancer Bill Bailey invented the moonwalk and that David Bowie was the first rock performer to use it onstage (Bowie also arguably did the Jesus thing first too, since Ziggy was "a leper messiah").

My own mainstream media reaction to Jackson's death -- you can be my grandchildren now, since I won't have any -- came in the form of an AFP wire article by Shaun Tandon, syndicated yesterday. After 'King of Pop', an Empty Throne wonders -- rather in the way people wondered when Peel died -- whether anyone will be able to fill the void Jackson left. I was probably asked because I'm known for saying, in a 1991 essay entited Pop Stars? Nein Danke!, that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people". That essay ended: "The King is dead. Long live the peoples!"



The AFP article has me saying: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop". The article continues: "Momus pointed to the rise of digital culture, which has fragmented music consumers into small, targeted audiences. "Then there's the question of the sheer rarity of Jackson's combination of talents, his neurotic work drive and his eccentricity. Lightning like that takes a long time to strike twice," Momus told AFP."

Actually, the original quote I supplied said rather more -- spot the bits AFP left out: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Three major factors will prevent there ever being another one: digital culture and its fragmentation of the big "we are the world"-type audience into a million tiny, targeted audiences; the demographic decline of the "pigs in the pipe" (the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, who made pop music's four-decade-long pre-eminence possible); and the decline of the influence of the United States."

The AFP article ends with me in a head-to-head disagreement with Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California. Del Colliano thinks that stars will emerge from social networking software.

"Momus, however, believes that social networking may have the opposite effect. He said the world may be headed back to what celebrated sociologist Pierre Bourdieu found in 1960s France -- white-collar workers preferred high-brow classical music, while manual laborers listened to cheap pop. "A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson 'intelligently,' people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him 'passionately.' But everybody spoke about him," Momus said. But social networking is now limiting interaction among groups with different tastes, Momus said. "I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described," he said."



Since this is my blog, not a syndicated wire service, I'll run the original quote I gave AFP in full:

"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."

The King of Pop is dead, long live pithy, battling Kings of Pop Sociology! For fifteen global media minutes, anyway.