Momus, what do you make of Marxy's manifesto for neojaponisme.com? Without mentioning you by name, he seems to be tossing a few peanuts your way...

Well, as Clay Shirky says, "It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year."

The Neojaponisme manifesto isn't a good start. It's boring, overblown waffle which mixes humourous pomposity with the statement of serious aims (and some abjuration of past mistakes -- hey, "we like Japan"!). The site is going to have to come up with more interesting content than that to overcome its late-entry penalty. I hope it can avoid the grousing, ethnocentrism and tediously narrow focus (Johnny's! Can Cam! Black vans!) of Neomarxisme.

I'm fascinated to see how Marxy's deep, dark despair will mesh with Jean Snow's bright, light enthusiasm, though. That should make for some funny bathos: "For a corrupt, declining feudal state, Japan sure does come out with some neat keitai designs!"

Do you still read Neomarxisme, despite seemingly abjuring from commenting there?

I read it just to remind myself why I stopped reading it.

Is this thing mutating into some off-beat replica of jay-z vs nas feud?

francesco

I read it just to remind myself why I stopped reading it.

Oooh, nasty! Beneath all the so-called tender-mindedness lies a bitterly competitive heart...

Who was it who said the fights in academia were so vicious because the stakes were so low? As in academia, so in blogging, it seems!

I was just responding to the caller's question out of courtesy, caller.

Who was it who said the fights in academia were so vicious because the stakes were so low? As in academia, so in blogging, it seems!

Amen, anon! Maybe that's why I quit both around the same time...

You're no one to talk, Momus. You're beginning to sound like someone's great uncle, always banging on and on and on and on about the same old themes, using the same old methods. Give me any subject and I can already tell you what your opinion on it is going to be. What would be truly challenging for you, Momus, is to give up blogging for a while and see what that did to your thought patterns. Because they're positively circular these days.

always banging on and on and on and on about the same old themes

Let's see, the chaykhanas of Bukhara, renaissance humourist Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), Helmut Newton, Goldmund Festival, Tsai Ming-Liang's film The Wayward Cloud, Heinz Emigholz's architectural biographies, the death of Tony Wilson, a rail wagon community, Kahimi Karie's new DVD, jazz played on credit cards, the way zoos code exoticism... and all this in the last month. And what eclectic marvels were you pondering this month, Anon?

(I'm a different Anon by the way.) Perhaps Anon's comment is a testiment to their consumption of Click Opera. No matter how diverse our intake, our synthesis of what we see will follow familiar patterns because each of us is one person and one voice. There is a theory that it's healthy to reverse default thought patterns, very deliberately, if only once a day, or one week per month - as it will open a personal dialectic.

Example Click Opera topics could include:

Slayer or Metallica: who was gayer?
Beautiful, flattened Basra
All in the family - why difference is weird

etc..

Heinz Emigholz's architectural biographies

You haven't told us whether you finally got to see the movie! If kumakouji (might have misspelt the name, sorry in that case!) failed on his plan to get and upload it somewhere else for you, I just happened to become a Demonoid member...

I still haven't seen it! I went to the kino where it was playing, but they'd changed the time without updating their website with the information. Then microworlds was working on downloading it, but couldn't find a way to host the huge file.

Oh, has she tried hosting it here? It's a one-click-hoster that allows up to 1024MB to be uploaded and shared (for 30 days). If that won't work either (my experience with this hosting site is zero), I'll soon have finished downloading and could either spend a long night putting it online somewhere or send it via snailmail, if you like.

I did post a link to a site that hosts files larger than 1gb in the comments section of that entry....

http://www.badongo.com/

Alright, that site looks more trustworthy. If there's no sudden break in speed, I'll start uploading tonight and can provide a link to plural-you tomorrow.

cool, i hope the upload works - i really want to see this one too.
many thanks!

I didn't try that, I was originally going to upload it to badongo.com, but the computer I was using crashed every time I tried uploading it. But that would be cool if you download it and upload it for him before I do! The download is painfully slow though, since there aren't very many seeders for that specific torrent.

C'mon, don't play dumb. You can see he was referring to thought-form, not stuff-content!

"The Neojaponisme manifesto isn't a good start. It's boring, overblown waffle which mixes humourous pomposity with the statement of serious aims... "

...OF WHICH, This is my favourite part:

"Spread across manifold longitudes, we took terminal shifts at our terminals, engaging in a two-handed clatter to further embellish a never-ending reel of electronic dialogue."

Did anyone else cream their pants just a little reading that? I know I did.

That's called "one-handed clatter".

Also

"Spread across manifold longitudes, we took terminal shifts at our terminals, engaging in a two-handed clatter to further embellish a never-ending reel of electronic dialogue."

"We live in different countries so we talk on MSN Messenger."

Whoever writes that stuff writes like a 3rd year English Lit student. Not EVERY SINGLE WORD HAS TO BE FROM A THESAURUS.

The writing is stilted, bloated and loses its meaning in the giant spray of hot, verbose diarrhea that splatters all over that site. At least Momus's wacky ideas are written in a very natural and flowing style. I would imagine that Momus leaves the pretentiousness to music and Marxy fattens his prose with so much pompousness that it becomes too much to swallow, even in small doses.


I much prefer Click Opera.

Ah, would that be the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea that you decided to post as an image? That building has always interested me, as with the rest of North Korea. At one point I was obsessed with reading outsider photojournals of their travels. I wasted a day reading all the photojournals listed on that website.

Haha, yes it is! I saw it and immediately stopped reading.

http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3094418&origin=bldgdailynews

Well, that makes sense, Rem Koolhaas pretty much equals death. Bleh!

Reminds me of when I worked at the florist's... all our business was funerals.

Keeping flowers cold and preserved in walk-in coolers, then arranging them to present in front of the preserved deceased. Obscene, and wasteful.

Green burial for me, thanks.

momus you have become so boringly mundane whilst it is good to recognise bullshit reality and we can make so many references to this psychological and socio cultural codings and that stupid equation attempt at an always subjective understanding i think that in the meantime you have actually cancelled your subscription to your own unconscious the unconscious does not deal with this kind of mundane nonsense please get a grip and become again stop trying to be as knowledge always fails fuck your supposedness and go with your stupidity you are too old or too young for anything else

momus you have become so boringly mundane whilst it is good to recognise bullshit reality and we can make so many references to this psychological and socio cultural codings and that stupid equation attempt at an always subjective understanding i think that in the meantime you have actually cancelled your subscription to your own unconscious the unconscious does not deal with this kind of mundane nonsense please get a grip and become again stop trying to be as knowledge always fails fuck your supposedness and go with your stupidity you are too old or too young for anything else


are you dead where is you now now

i think that in the meantime you have actually cancelled your subscription to your own unconscious

Florists are good for boutonnieres, too. I have a flowerbed specifically for them, but try finding a tea rose growing in your garden in February.

I don't waer boutonnieres often, but were I to don one in February, I'd use ornamental kale! It would look so beautiful with your black watch suit.

Death (or more precisely the funeral business, which isnt really the same as making money out of war...) has always been a money spinner, it really isnt anything new. Ironically it's more important to the living than the actual dead.

I have to say, reading your journal is like looking at the flurried writings of a brainstorming session after everyone has left, like you'd see at a board meeting on one of those giant flip pads. You start off with a point of topic and you branch out to other ideas... but sometimes there doesn't seem to be any logical connection between the two, or at least, it lacks obvious context.

How did you manage to link death with middle aged music consumption? Considering youre middle aged and a consumer of music yourself I think I can say that even though that link lacks context theres something very telling about it...

fooolish how fuck cld something be more important to the dead
back tometaphysical the drawing board asshole

Talking about death, you should see this...

http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/NewsUpdate/index_90147.htm

but please continue to make music

This english academics are getting crazier than ever!


Pedro Félix

talking about death you should listen to yourself you jackass pointing to the other fool

creativity is about not remioniscence so we do not have to fking repeat

happy rock what you know about death nothing so think before you speak of such a non existent knowledge

Kim Jong-il? Is that you? Were you offended by Momus saying the Ryugyong Hotel was unfinished?

Goodness, people can be so nasty here! Sometimes makes one wonder if most art schools have now become finishing schools for entitled little pricks.

They should teach gardening in those schools, instill some empathy and a sense of the primacy of living things over toxic abstractions. We need more hippies here. Sheeshus.

Whimsy, fuck off. Pretending to be a 19th century dandy was tired even in the 19th century. Your blog is even more about tedious self-aggrandizement than Momus's. I wonder if either of you can go a full week without posting a photo of yourselves on the Internet.

Given a choice between an internet that was full of gentle, thoughtful people self-aggrandising and posting pictures of themselves (and their gardens), and an internet fuelled by spiteful, not-particularly-insightful personal attacks from anonymous detractors, Anon, which do you think would lead to an overall worse world?

(Answer with a photograph of yourself, please.)

Given your snotty criticism of fellow blogger Marxy upthread, I'm not sure you're in a great position to ask that question, Momus. But I'm puzzled by your disdain for anonymity: if it really concerns you, you can always turn off anonymous comments. And yet you don't. I guess you're narcissistically hooked on your blog comments from whichever quarter they come.

sheeshus, talk about self-righteous.

Wow, what a strange bunch of commenters you attract! If the quality of commenting is any reflection on the quality of the blog, then I'm afraid your old sparring partner Marxy well and truly has you beat.

If I didn't live in Ohio, and had some other way of keeping up with what you're doing, I'd stop reading your blog: the posters lately are just too rude. And not rude in a fun way, just uncouth and off-putting. Why are they even reading this? Go to the Justin Timberlake site, or My Chemical Romance, or Nascar, or what have you.

My lucky husband has just bought his ticket for your NYC show. He looks kind of like a non-Asian Yxymalloo.

Mr. Woodard and his crew are a bunch of nazis

Really? Do you want to back that up with some substantive detail or just let it hang as an "internet insult"? Do they dress up as Keith Moon? Are they planning a fire at the Reichstag?