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Summer looks

2008-05-13T07:38:54Z

May is a month of sensuality, a month in which we schlepp around ideally hot, sunny streets in the year's first flip flops (scrubbed of last summer's dust), casually displaying our slightly neglected winter bodies. Later in the summer we'll have tans, and grow accustomed to the tans of others, and be much more casually embodied.

But for now there's still a glancing winter whiteness to our bodies -- they've been hidden from the ultraviolet rays for so long. There's a seasonal self-consciousness and a prurient curiosity to our interest in the newly-revealed flesh of others. Girls have bare legs, and sit on the ground cross-legged showing the tops of their panties over the hem of their trousers. Boys sport a visible mokori bulge. Breasts are suddenly massively -- or slightly -- present. Bums are wrapped in saris or hidden in a salwar kameez.

So this is my truth, show me yours. I am wearing a straw hat, chest-revealing shirt, wristbands to match my pink eyepatch, cheap sports pants and flip flops. I am remembering, and connected to, summers past. How are you dressed this season? How are you celebrating the relaxed, stripped-down sensuality of "the May" -- and the return to public scrutiny of your body, cocooned all winter in layers of fibre?

Photographs please.

Celebrate the idea 'America'

2008-05-12T07:45:30Z

I spotted these posters -- a campaign entitled "Make yourself an agent of BRAND AMERICA" -- on the mushroom-shaped billboard at the Maybachufer market near my house in Neukolln.

The posters purport to be cultural tips for Americans visiting other countries. I haven't seen them anywhere else, and I can't find any reference to them on the web. I guess they're an art project of some sort.

CELEBRATE THE IDEA 'AMERICA'. Americans have specialized in selling dreams, fears, and folklore of other people back to them. So bring back the best of the world and leave a little of the best of yourself wherever you go.

THINK BIG. ACT SMALL. BE HUMBLE. When Americans meet each other for the first time, our job and implied status is a key part of "who" we are, and how we introduce ourselves. This is less important elsewhere. Disguise your immediate business affiliations. While thinking big, act small. Be humble.

TRY THE LANGUAGE. Try to speak some of the language. It's easier than you think and ok to sound like a child. "Hallo" means "hello" and "Danke" "thank you".

SMILE. GENUINELY. IT'S A UNIVERSAL EQUALIZER.

The strange and silly world of Daniil Kharms

2008-05-11T07:03:14Z

I'd never heard of Daniil Kharms, the Leningrad microliterary absurdist and corpse-faced poseur -- he always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe -- before reading Tony Wood's interesting article about him in the current London Review of Books.

He was a follower of the original generation of Soviet formalists, and was persecuted by the Stalinists for his refusal to knuckle down to the kitschy heroic styles with which they displaced and replaced this formalism. Kharms (who named himself after Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps "charms") made some headway as a children's author, but died in a prison hospital during World War II. What I mostly love about his short, silly and hilariously pointless stories is the sense of a childlike glee in breaking the rules, and an obvious relish in the crazy things a single sentence can do. Some of the techniques on display in his stories are things I do in The Book of Jokes. Although they can get Pythonesque in their silliness, they also give glimpses of Russian life in the 20th century.

Anyway, today I thought I'd just lay out some of the short (very short) stories I've found by Kharms in various places on the web.

The Redheaded Man (from The Blue Notebook)
There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.

Falling Old Ladies
Because of her excessive curiosity, an old lady fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Another old lady looked out of the window, staring down at the one who was smashed, but out of her excessive curiosity she also fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Then the third old lady fell out of the window, then the fourth did, then the fifth. When the sixth old lady fell out of the window, I got bored watching them and went to Maltsev market where, they say, someone gave a woven shawl to a blind person.

Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin (number 7)
Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn't even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to be honest. It used to be quite hilarious: they'd be sitting at the table, at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end, his son. One wouldn't know where to look.

Symphony no. 2
Anton Mikhailovich spat, said "yuck", spat again, said "yuck" again, spat again, said "yuck" again and left. To hell with him. Instead, let me tell you about Ilya Pavlovich. Ilya Pavlovich was born in 1893 in Constantinople. When he was still a boy, they moved to St. Petersburg, and there he graduated from the German School on Kirchnaya Street. Then he worked in some shop; then he did something else; and when the revolution began, he emigrated. Well, to hell with him. Instead, let me tell about Anna Ignatievna. But it is not so easy to tell about Anna Ignatievna. Firstly, I know almost nothing about her, and secondly, I have just fallen off my chair, and have forgotten what I was about to say. So let me instead tell you about myself. I am tall, fairly intelligent; I dress prudently and tastefully; I don't drink, I don't bet on horses, but I like ladies. And ladies don't mind me. They like when I go out with them. Serafima Izmaylovna has invited me home several times, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also said that she was always glad to see me. But I was involved in a funny incident with Marina Petrovna, which I would like to recount. A quite ordinary thing, but rather amusing. Because of me, Marina Petrovna lost all her hair -- grew bald as a baby's bottom. It happened like this. Once I went over to visit Marina Petrovna, and -- bang! -- she lost all her hair. And that was that.

An Encounter
On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was on his way home. And that's just about all there is to it.

TV Revisionism: Caledonia Dreaming

2008-05-10T11:00:26Z

Caledonia Dreaming, the recent BBC documentary about Postcard Records, is now online in its entirety. Right from the start, it's as infuriating as it is intriguing. "And now on BBC Scotland we celebrate the ups and downs of one of Scotland's most iconic record labels," says the continuity announcer, "Postcards". It's so iconic that the man has never heard of it, apparently. The woman doing the documentary voice-over doesn't sound much better. Luckily, though, my cousin Justin appears within a few seconds to tell us that the A&R men coming up to Scotland in the early 80s were cocaine-snorting, vodka-swilling wankers. Now there's someone who knows what's he's talking about!

The framing of Caledonia Dreaming is wonky. First there's that title, which of course refers to California Dreaming, and ignores one of the key points about Josef K, for me anyway: their Euro-centrism. Secondly, it's assumed that Postcard was all about the city of Glasgow; Edinburgh's music scene is hardly mentioned at all. Thirdly, all that happened before Postcard is summed up with a couple of stock shots of Rod Stewart (not a Scot) and the Bay City Rollers. No mention here of the Incredible String Band, Donovan, or other acts from the 60s and 70s who had already put Scotland on the pop map.

Even in the post-Postcard sections of the doc, there are curious omissions. There's lots about Wet Wet Wet and The Proclaimers, but no mention at all of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. There's also an odd emphasis on commercial success or failure; this is a documentary about Postcard, after all, which had zero success. Yet Altered Images (who weren't on Postcard) get more screentime than Josef K, who were. Aztec Camera get about two seconds in the whole programme, and the Go-Betweens aren't mentioned at all. Quite a lot is made of Franz Ferdinand's re-discovery of the early 80s sound, but the Fire Engines, who toured with FF and influenced their sound a lot more than Orange Juice, don't get a single reference. And John Peel, an important influence, wasn't spoken of at all.

There's far too much emphasis on the Blue-Eyed Caledonian Soul period of the mid-80s (Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue, Texas and, dare I say it, Del Amitri); music which, though it may have shifted mega-billions of units in its time, isn't musically innovative enough to inspire anyone in the future, and, as Paul Morley rightly says, represents the major music industry reasserting its control and reining in the very maverick talents whose creativity brought them on flights north in the first place. As my cousin Justin (a great interviewee and narrator) puts it: "They were absolute wankers, these guys. They didn't know anything about music. They didn't care about music. They only cared about getting paid a hundred grand a year."

I had an odd feeling, watching the film. For a start, I've met so many of the people interviewed, despite not having lived in Scotland since 1984. It was great to see the young, beautiful, camp Edwyn Collins smirking on a sofa and talking about how the major labels could come to Glasgow "and bring the coals to Newcastle and the fish from the fire". It was interesting to catch one solitary glimpse, in Part 2, of what Paul Haig looks like now (slightly mad-eyed behind dark glasses, and complaining that Alan Horne merely tolerated his band).

Although I did get glimpses of the scene that birthed my own music career, it was through the depressingly revisionist lens of mainstream TV which, as the Reid Brothers would put it, will "never understand, huh huh huh". They'll never understand what exquisite mysterious pleasure there was to be had from the Josef K album in 1981, what a secret rush of amphetamines and darkness it contained, how it turned away from America and towards Brussels and Prague, how it transformed Edinburgh into an Eastern European town, how it channelled Camus, how it fitted with the Citizens' Theatre's Genet season.

That'll all have to wait for my own autobiography (not that I'm promising one, mind), as will any account of my own part in Scotland's music scene, a shifty and peripheral and commercially-insignificant role, to be sure, but, in that sense, not much different from Postcard's. One thing I'm happy about is that I've never had a golden age, a hit, an anchor. I'm not pinned to any of the three decades this documentary covered, just as I'm not pinned, ultimately, to the geographical location of Scotland.

I'm making a record right now with a Scot, Joe Howe from Gay Against You. The track I finished minutes before watching the Postcard documentary takes a sketch Joe had made, a 180bpm 8-bit baroque fantasia, and marries it to the urgent existentialist spiky sparkery of Magazine's third album.

Is it a "Scottish" song? In some way it is; we're both Scots. It also spans the exact period Caledonia Dreaming covers; I started in the Postcard era, very much because of Postcard, and Joe wasn't even born when the label disappeared. The new song audibly contains both 1980 and 2008. But I think it's fair to say that this is a song nobody from television will ever hear or understand. And maybe that's no' such a bad thing, hen.

Gallery: Adidas-clad ectomorph gousters

2008-05-09T10:37:16Z

I love the 1979 film Rockers, which I first saw -- and watched on repeat loop -- in a wooden house in Hokkaido three years ago, buried under several feet of snow. It was the perfect antidote to the Japanese winter, and yet, at the same time, the perfect complement to it: in a weird style-swap, many of the sartorial modes you see in this movie are preserved in Japan much better than they are in today's Jamaica. Watching the movie, I kept seeing "Japanese" faces (look, there's Eye Yamataka!), and imagining the record shacks where Horsemouth flogs his dub plates were in Shimokitazawa or Koenji.

Under the cut I've put a big strip of freeze-frame pictures from Rockers, which shows more cool dandies -- Adidas-clad ectomorph gousters, many of them reggae musicians in real life -- than any other film I know. But you really have to see the film to get the full effect, because you need the music, and you need to watch the way these guys (and they are mostly guys) walk. Like wounded tom cats or swaggery, staggery lions of Judah with ludicrous, loose-limbed ganja gait. Oh, to walk -- and dress -- like that!

Distinction strategies, unrecognisability, and the forbidden

2008-05-08T08:32:48Z

I had a meeting last week at Sternberg, who'll publish my Book of Scotlands in 2009 (just in time to inject a little insanity into the lead-up to Scotland's likely 2010 independence referendum). Present were series editor Ingo Niermann, graphic designer Zak Kyes, and Caroline Schneider, the publisher. Zak was showing them designs for jackets and posters for the Solutions series.

What immediately struck me was the wrongness of Zak's designs. They were brutally stark, geometric, angular, functional, utilitarian. Looking at a dark poster of the floating eye pyramid from a dollar bill with an inverted triangle superimposed over it, I asked Ingo playfully "If this were a poster for a band playing tonight in Kreuzberg, what would the music sound like?" Ingo hesitated then said "I suppose it would be a Goth band of some sort. Or some kind of weird early 80s death metal."

Now, this is going to get us into all sorts of self-contradictory circles, but when I say Zak's designs looked wrong, I mean they really looked right. I'm not sure if his work is part of The New Ugly we've talked about here in the context of Mike Meiré, but I do think it's got the same kind of energy -- and I stress that word energy, because it's a dynamic quality, a sort of beauty-on-the-move rather than beauty-in-stasis.

Above all, Zak's work isn't coffeetable. The rough design I made when I pitched the book was a "coffeetable" design. It used a funky fat typeface, simple shapes and pretty colours to communicate the idea. Most good design is coffeetable design -- the other day, for instance, we looked at sleeves for records by The Chap (shown above), designed by Non Format. Immediately easy on the eye (another term for coffeetable might be "Easy Looking", a kind of visual version of Lounge), these sleeves, like my Scotlands jacket, aren't bad design -- they might even be good design -- but they don't go the extra length. They don't distinguish themselves. By failing to take a step ahead, they fall, inevitably, a step behind. By failing to risk wrongness they become, themselves, wrong.

This is where we have to talk about Distinction Strategies. A really good designer doesn't just want to work within established paradigms of accepted good taste. He wants to change those paradigms, making something truly distinctive-looking as well as distinguishing himself professionally. Now, you can't do this without plunging people, at least momentarily, into crisis and confusion. You can't do it without making work that looks, in some way, wrong. So my sense last week that Zak's work looked "wrong" was a sign, paradoxically, that he was doing something right. My rough sleeve instantly looked fey, dated, smooth.

Looking at the shelves at Sternberg, it was possible to see a corner being turned as Zak's work for them started to appear. Stuff which looked good in a coffeetable way suddenly started to be supplemented by stuff that looked noticeably different, odd, intriguing, wrong. I could see a battle of legitimation happening there on the shelves. The new look -- rather brutal and ugly, but full of the energy and strangeness of the new -- was starting to assert its wrongness as a new form of rightness. It was doing this by breaking the rules (which of course, in another paradox, is a rule in itself) and embracing the forbidden.

Distinction strategies cannot work successfully (in other words, can't do anything more than make you look like an amateur, a madman or an eccentric) unless they go hand in hand with legitimation, and Zak has that in spades, which is another reason he's so interesting. He's visual director at London's Architectural Association, one of Britain's few institutions wholly committed to the idea of the avant garde ("avant garde institution" is, of course, yet another paradox). He's also curator of the touring critical design show Forms of Inquiry, an important and influential exhibition dedicated to shifting the graphic design paradigm.

Without critical design, without this restless process of legitimation-distinction (and I'm invoking Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu when I use those words), we'd be stuck in a wilting coffeetable world. It wouldn't really be such a bad world -- we'd have pretty colours and catchy shapes that we'd recognise instantly, the way we recognise the chords and arrangements in an Oasis song, the way it sounds familiar even on the first listen. But, like the creative world of Oasis, it would be a limited and lazy world.

I'm making a new album just now, and I'm making sure it sounds "wrong". In other words, that it has the energy of strangeness rather than the comfort of familiarity. I don't know if it's "progress" to keep ripping up rules and habits, but it's change, and that's good enough for me. Sure, we sometimes come full circle and re-invent Goth. Sure, we're brushing up against the 19th century Romantic idea of the artist as madman and the 20th century Modernist idea of the artist as scientist-innovator. And here we are in the 21st century, with the idea of the graphic designer as distinction-legitimation machine, forever teetering on the brink of the forbidden and the forgotten, forever struggling to recuperate, redeem and recontextualize. It's what makes the game, for me, worth playing.

Widow Twanky

2008-05-07T15:49:25Z

I ain't blogging today because I'm recording very intensely for the "Joemus" album and writing my next New York Times piece.

Joe Howe is a fucking genius, man, he sits in Glasgow sending me, pretty much every day, completely amazing stuff that sounds like Guernica jamming with unicorns and colour television masts up on the moors. I then sing songs on top of it. I'm also working on my own stuff, and today made a song I really love.

The song's called Widow Twanky (seen here in a rather natty early 20th century version) and I sing it super-electro-falsetto. It's a 50s-style ballad about a man ditched by his girlfriend, who internalizes her in order not to lose her, and becomes a female impersonator. Anyway, back to work...

Partition: the spatial logic of new humans

2008-05-06T09:21:01Z

I first met artist Mika Tajima (Japanese roots, LA-born, New York resident) during the 2006 Whitney Biennial, when her band (with Howie Chen) New Humans put on the most visually-striking performance I think I've ever seen -- sheets of pure white noise lit from below by pure white strips of fluorescent light. Mika is in the current Whitney Biennial too, with relics of a 2007 performance called Disassociate which ended with Eames chairs being thrown into a wall of champagne glasses.

Last week Mika opened her new painting show at COMA in Berlin, and it's full of the same visual intelligence as her performances with collaborators like C. Spencer Yeh and Vito Acconci. Like Disassociate, her Berlin show sees the gallery space partitioned by a row of sound-baffles -- double-sided paintings on wheels. Mika has painted angular Modernist modular forms onto the baffles (which look like swing mirrors too -- in fact, some of them are mirrored on one side), their purples and oranges derived from the late-60s decor of a San Francisco subway station.

The baffle-forms partition the COMA gallery -- not far, itself, from the site of that infamous partition, the Berlin Wall -- but make other references too. A very interesting mesh of references, in fact.

1. Mika told me she was referencing the Iraq partition currently being built in Sadr City in Baghdad. This isn't just to protect the Green Zone from rocket attacks, but to control the upcoming vote and try to diffuse support for Moktada al-Sadr, who looks likely to triumph in the upcoming Iraqi elections.

The Sadr City Wall is a concrete barrier which rises to about 12 feet. It's being built along the main street dividing the southern part of Sadr City from the northern part, where al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters are concentrated. Taking a cue from the Berlin Wall, perhaps, Moktada al-Sadr has called for his followers "to draw magnificent tableaux that depict the ugliness and terrorist nature of the occupier, and the sedition, car bombings, blood and the like he has brought upon Iraqis" on the partition.

It hardly needs to be added that the Iraq wall resembles the Israeli security barrier rising on the West Bank, and that there's a real double standard in the way the Berlin Wall is depicted as an oppressive relic, but the walls we're currently building to cage Palestinians and Iraqis aren't.

2. Mika is also referencing the studio sound baffles in Jean-Luc Godard's film about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968).

This is a more positive, creative take on partitioning. In a recording studio, baffles allow the clean recording of sounds, free of reverberation and separated from ambient sounds.

Studio baffles symbolize creative collaboration, but also give each musician a semi-private space to work in, so there's a balance between teamwork and autonomy. And these screens are structures on wheels, designed to change the open layout of a studio's big live room quickly and easily. Partition can make things possible, as well as make things intolerable. Which brings us to the final reference Mika is making.

3. Mika could have referenced Japanese screens (also about quick, light room transformations) or hospital screens (about giving privacy to moments of agony or embarrassment in open hospital wards) in this work, but instead she's decorated the screens with photocopies of utopian articles about the Herman Miller Action Office, pioneered by systems designer Robert Probst in the 1960s.

In a project started in 1964 and brought -- with massive success -- to market in 1968, Probst devised the world's first open-plan office system of reconfigurable components. "Today's office is a wasteland," he said. "It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort."

"The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves," reported Fortune. "Partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion."

But, as Time reported, rationalization and economic greed transformed the Action Office utopia, over the years, into a dystopia. "Today 70% of U.S. office workers sit in cubicles... A typical workstation in the 1970s measured 12 ft. by 12 ft., according to the American Society of Interior Designers. By 1995 it had shrunk to 10 ft. by 10 ft. Today's cubicles average 6 ft. by 8 ft."

Some people feel the Action Office is, by now, more devil than sympathy.

Spatial definition doesn't have to be malign, though. When I got home from Mika Tajima's opening I noticed that she's defined my own space: her imagery (you can see it on the left side of this photo) has been a part of my living room ever since I moved into my Neukolln apartment.

In which I applaud The Chap

2008-05-05T07:38:12Z

There's this arty London band called The Chap, see. Four of them, a German called Johannes Van Weizsacker, a Greek called Panos who plays keyboards, a girl called Claire and a bloke called Keith. They live in Manor House and they're actually very good, in a Wire and XTC and Talking Heads and Krautrock way. There might even be a touch of Renaldo and the Loaf in their sound. And if you read New York magazine, "the music has identity problems in the best way, sounding like Momus mixed with Morricone".

That comparison might just be related to the title of the lead track from their new album Mega Breakfast. It's called "Carlos Walter Wendy Stanley". It's just some first names, don't get excited. I'm not going to talk about the associations you personally bring to the title. I can't. But you can hear the song on the Pitchfork site, anyway.

It's amazing to me that I hadn't heard of this band until now. And it's amazing to me that they sound so English despite being so European. And I like the poised, proggy, measured, middle class way they sing. And the pointilliste, subtle way they arrange their pieces. There's a lightness of touch there.

They've been around for about five years; here's an older track, I Got Flattened by a Pig Farmer. Which is a funny title. This is them performing a song called Woop Woop live. This is where I really started to get interested:

Here's The Chap's discography, and it's important to note that their sleeves are well designed. Here's a rather extraordinary epic called BITSS!!!:

I like to listen to good music when I'm recording, music that gives me a sense of new formal possibilities, and The Chap make that kind of stuff. Since you asked, I'm right in the middle of recording the Joemus album, there's about six tracks so far, and the latest is called The Jah Wise Hammer of the Babylon King. Anyway, I'll leave you with The Chap's tidily, daintily deranged song Auto Where To:

Haunted by a horse

2008-05-04T07:38:30Z

I was haunted on my trip to Denmark. Not by the ghost of a murdered king on the ramparts of Elsinore, but by some of the most mournful air conditioning systems I've ever heard. The bathroom in my room at the Cabin Hotel in Aarhus was filled with spine-tinglingly creepy sighing, as if a spirit were trapped under the shower drain. Later, the same spook seemed to follow me on the train to Fredericia.

Danish TV is already creepy enough, filled with the subtitled ghosts of old 80s American TV shows. I sought something more specifically Danish at the reconstructed village called Den Gamle By (The Old Town) and in the Aarhus art gallery, where I found the windswept 1930s canvases of Jens Sondergaard and Nils Lergaard satisfying, in a harrowing, windswept way. But the spookiest, most fascinating thing was the song that accompanied a 1970 Super 8 film of a horse being sacrificed out on the pack ice. I got obsessed with the mourning song about the horse, returning time and again to try and record bits of its strange open chords, its mournful shamanic singing, part Nico, part Bjork. And of course the wind, keening in the background.

Fluxus seems to have had tentacles everywhere -- the Danish wing was represented by people like Bjorn Norgaard, Lene Adler Petersen -- who made the horse film -- and the composer Henning Christiansen (right) who made the song that accompanies it. They came to Scotland with Joseph Beuys in the early 70s, invited by Richard Demarco, and you can hear the results (someone -- possibly Beuys himself -- tuning a piano in the courtyard of the Edinburgh Art College, for instance) on the Henning Christiansen page at Ubu.com. There's nothing quite like the Horse Song there, though perhaps Abschiedssymphonie comes closest; field recordings and vocal gestures mixed with piano composition and primitive scratching noises.

The Fluxus Danes killed a horse out on the ice partly as a protest against the pointless human sacrifice then going on in Vietnam, partly to "comment on the way in which museums accumulated our common heritage". You can actually see clips of the Super 8 film "Hesteofringen" -- warning: it's rather disturbing -- here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I've made an mp3 of the song so that it can haunt you as it now haunts me:

The Horse Sacrifice, Henning Christiansen (stereo mp3 file)

I'd never heard of Henning Christiansen before, but you can read about him on this page -- how he attended the Darmstadt summer school in 1962, then hooked up with George Maciunas' crew in Wiesbaden and joined Fluxus, "embracing a multitude of disciplines verging on the political, including performance, painting and making music with stones, buckets of water, glass bowls, sheep, birds and tape delay". And here's a glimpse of a 2007 show he mounted. He's an old troll now with green ears, but still making music more haunting than the Danish air conditioning.

As for the horse, its spirit lives on; we don't need to look far to find new pointless wars for the poor beast to symbolize.

Putrih and Kyes

2008-05-02T04:43:52Z

I'm in Denmark playing a concert today and tomorrow, so here's a picture of a groovy Tobias Putrih shelf installation I saw at MUDAM last week and made the lead item in my latest New York Times dispatch, which will be up later today.

More recent snaps here, including this image of the graphic designer Zak Kyes, who's designing my Book of Scotlands jacket.

Scourge of the Danes

2008-05-01T08:22:07Z

I'm always a bit last minute with these announcements, but today I want to tell you that I'm scheduled to folk the fuck out of Denmark tomorrow night in the form of an appearance at Pop Revo 08, a music festival in Århus.

Or should I say "rock the land of Hamlet in the manner of Led Zep"? Nikolaj Thorenfeldt, one of the festival organisers, raved on his blog:

"Of course Efterklang, El Perro Del Mar and Xiu Xiu are fantastic bands who enjoy great recognition in almost every part of the world. Still, in terms of the Pop Revo spirit, this year's absolute headliner is without a doubt a Scottish man named Momus. You still have 2 weeks to get into his music, there's more than 20 records to choose from. I'm not gonna tell an awful long story about the man's genius, you'll experience that yourself very soon. To cut the story short, even if we get Led Zeppelin next year, you'll still see those overlooked musicians who we believe have played an equal part in the music history."

Gosh, on a par with Plant! I have no complaint, except that it looks like I'll miss Xiu Xiu, a band I find very interesting, because I'm leaving early on Saturday. Maybe I can change my train.

Pop Revo 08: a two-day music festival in Aarhus, Denmark.

Friday night line-up:
Speaker Bite Me
Momus
El Perro del Mar
Frightened Rabbit
Cola Freaks

Saturday night line-up:
The Brunettes
Efterklang
18th Dye
Xiu Xiu
Larsen & Furious Jane

Tickets are 150 Danish crowns for one day, 250 for two. Doors open 8pm, with the first band going on around 8.30. Location is Pakhuset, Studenterhuset, Nordhavnsgade 1, 8000 Århus, Denmark (map). More details here.

Lost ways of looking at looking

2008-04-30T07:02:36Z

I made a passing reference, yesterday, to John Berger's TV series Ways of Seeing, and how the rightward swing of British art critic Peter Fuller could be mapped in the transition from his 1980 book "Seeing Berger" to his 1988 revision of it, entitled "Seeing Through Berger". I linked to a short piece I'd written last year about Ways of Seeing. The YouTube embeds from the series were dead, but they were pretty short anyway. A YouTube search yesterday revealed that -- just in the last month -- all four half-hour episodes of Ways of Seeing have gone up online. I watched them last night, and I think this is still the most intelligent glance television -- a medium, ostensibly, about looking, but actually very bad at looking intelligently at looking -- has ever cast on the act of looking.

It would be easy to say that Ways of Seeing is hopelessly dated -- made in 1972, the films come across as a puritan-groovy mix of Monty Python, the Open University and the Look Around You spoofs. And yet what's so remarkable about this series is that it seems more apposite, subversive and thought-provoking than ever. The Britain we glimpse in the films, already alienated by spooky BBC Radiophonic Workshop music by Delia Derbyshire, is alienated even more by the passing of time. Alienated usefully, in the Brechtian sense; we look at a capitalist society which is like, and unlike, our own.

One way our own society is unlike 1972 is in the fact that, despite the enormous plethora of TV and internet TV we have now, nobody has made anything quite like this. In art history, the treatment of women's bodies, in our relationship with objects and property and in advertising (the themes of the four films) the same mystifications and objectifications and manipulations carry on. What doesn't carry on is analysis of them on this level.

Sure, there are a thousand media studies courses out there. But several things have happened since Ways of Seeing was made. Firstly, Western societies have swung right; they're much less resisting of the capitalist beast -- much more infused with its values -- than they were in 1972. There's very little actually-existing socialism now, and perhaps globalisation has also eroded national differences quite a bit in the thirty-six years since the series was made. Secondly, postmodernism has made it much more difficult to critique popular culture now. PoMo collapsed high and low, then and now, author and writer, and as a result it became much more difficult to attack authority; in PoMo there was no more them-and-us, no more there there. Everything was just scales on the ouroboral snake. Ways of Seeing is not just a Marxist take on representation, but a late Modernist one, informed by Benjamin, Barthes, Brecht. There are no TV Modernists left; people who believe in the avant garde, and believe that the mandarins -- in the form of a radical intelligentsia -- can help the masses to shed their ideological chains. (Well, apart from me, obviously!)

The series is also Reithian; a riposte to Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series, which had recently gone out over the same antennae, but a riposte which shares Clark's mandarin sense of mission, his Reithian confidence in his entitlement to educate. And that, too, is something TV stopped doing in the dismal, deregulated New World Order that followed.

Berger's authority here is a moral and poetic one, though, and he's at pains throughout to make us question the authority of commentarists seen and unseen, question the use of music and context in media, look at editing, make our own ethical juxtapositions (an ad for an aperitif next to images of refugees). There's a wonderful moment in the first episode where he mocks the commentary in a recently-published book about Caravaggio (it jumps straight from tediously specific formalist analysis to talk about "the human spirit" with nothing in between) then takes it to a group of schoolchildren, who immediately spot the epicene ambiguity of the central figures in the paintings -- who spot, in other words, that Caravaggio was gay. Berger also takes a group portrait by Franz Hals of some benefactors who saved Hals from starvation by feeding him, and reads out a formalist commentary critiquing the poor composition. I can't think of an art series since which has dared to criticize other art critics so directly, and so systematically.

The second episode, about the female nude, has some particularly troublesome and interesting things to say about structural narcissism ("men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of"), the difference between nakedness and nudity, and the institutionalised misogyny deep in our culture -- the tendency of men to desire women and simultaneously blame them for provoking that desire. Berger traces this back to the biblical tale of the expulsion from Eden. There's a great discussion at the end with a group of highly articulate women, including the writer Eva Figes. Episode three is about oil paintings, their relationship with saleable objects and property, and their fate as saleable property, valuable for depicting objects of value. And the last episode -- for me the most compelling -- is about advertising and envy.

I actually find it rather disturbing that -- despite our claims to be a culture that's increasing freedom of choice all the time -- we haven't come up with anything quite as astute, subversive or beautiful as Ways of Seeing since. Not on the BBC, and not even -- especially not -- on the internet. Download it while you still can.

Episode 1 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Episode 2 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Episode 3 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Episode 4 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Art and crashes

2008-04-29T10:20:22Z

I'm now safely back in Berlin (and we'll return to the significance of that "safely" in a moment) after being treated like a king by Candice Breitz and MUDAM in Luxembourg for four days. Or should I say "treated like a Grand Duke"? Apparently when I.M. Pei designed the pyramid-ish, cathedral-ish museum he was asked to create a special balcony from which the Grand Duke could survey both his principality and the art on display. Below you can see the view I got from this balcony when I transformed it into a sort of pirate-crooner's crow's nest:

Okay, here's why I stressed the safe return bit. I asked the very sympatico director of MUDAM, Marie-Claude Beaud, who the most famous artist from Luxembourg was. She said Michel Majerus, but that he'd left Luxembourg to live in Berlin, and then died in a crash on a Luxair flight between Berlin and Luxembourg -- exactly the flight I'd just arrived on, in fact! In 2002 Majerus' Fokker F50 crashed in thick fog on its approach to Luxembourg airport. The crew had mistakenly switched the propellers into reverse. Majerus was just 35. One of his works -- a curved canvas big enough to be used as a skate ramp -- was called, spookily, If We Are Dead, So It Is.

Other art tattle gathered here and there over the weekend: David Elliot, who was replaced by his Japanese second-in-command Fumio Nanjo at the MORI Museum in Tokyo in late 2006, then took up a post at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum only to resign ten months later ("musical differences" with the museum directors, apparently), may have a new job in America.

Similar turbulence is creating "interesting times" for Modern Painters magazine, whose new editor Susan Morris sat dutifully through all the Call and Response sessions. I remember her from her appearances on BBC 2's The Late Show in the 90s. Now she's remaking Modern Painters -- her first issue is devoted to artists' responses to the Iraq war. The magazine was bought by LTB media (who publish Art & Auction, Gallery Guide, Museums Magazine) and relocated from London to New York in mid-2006, though it still keeps its "co.uk" domain name. Some would say it's lost its way somewhat since losing a circulation and advertising war with Frieze circa the creation of the Frieze art fair. The new edition of the magazine looks distressingly anorexic -- less than 100 pages, compared to Frieze's 200. Susan Morris is the second new editor since the move to New York -- let's hope she can pull the Painters into useful shape. I'll keep reading it for Matthew Collings' musings, anyway.

Susan told me a terrible story about how Peter Fuller, the Marxist (but then conservative) art critic who created Modern Painters, died. Just three years after founding Modern Painters, Fuller, 42 at the time, crashed on the M4. His car burst into flames with Fuller trapped inside it. His political shift rightwards can be measured by the bellwether of his attitudes to the great John Berger: in 1981 Fuller published a book called Seeing Berger (about the excellent book and TV series Ways of Seeing). In 1988 Fuller revisited Berger, but this time the book was entitled Seeing Through Berger, and sported a cover with Berger's name scored out in the style of the blackboard erasures in Godard's film La Chinoise.

I also met a Swiss curator hero of mine in Luxembourg -- Hans-Ulrich Obrist. I was a bit bashful as I shook his hand. Obrist was talking on his cellphone at the time, so I just thanked him for his energy -- an energy that's energised me, in turn, over the last decade or so. The man is physically and intellectually tireless -- he only sleeps four hours a night -- but also restlessly curious, recording and publishing interviews with all the artists he meets, and helping to mediate Asian art to the West. Along with Rem Koolhaas he was responsible for the great Cities on the Move exhibition, and he was in Luxembourg talking about the big Chinese art show at MUDAM and introducing the artists. He lives in London these days, directing the Serpentine Gallery, but mentioned that he rents a flat in Berlin just for his books. He buys so many of them they need their own house.

One thing that amazed me, watching artists present their work off laptops all weekend, was how few of them -- despite the super-advanced feats of digital manipulation they were displaying -- knew the keyboard commands for entering full screen mode in Apple video software. Maybe it's because Quicktime uses Apple + F whereas DVD Player uses Apple + 0. So, if you're not quite sure which program you're in, you have to fiddle around with the drop-down menus. The same artists who could digitally erase a whole character from a feature film didn't seem to know that the floating control pad in DVD Player only leaves the screen when you move the pointer off it.

French artist Pierre Bismuth (he co-wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) used this very public privacy to make a funny conceptual joke for us. We'd spent the whole weekend looking at other people's computers projected onto the auditorium screen, wincing for them as they fiddled around with DVDs and left a room of a hundred people gazing at their tax returns, flight schedules and jpg files. Bismuth's desktop was greeted with a subliminal, growing peel of giggles -- it contained files entitled "Cory Arcangel is a son of a bitch.doc", "and Jonathan Monk.doc", "and what about Gabriel Lester.doc". All three artists were in the auditorium. When the laughter started to drown out his talk, Bismuth casually dragged the insults to the trash.

Another funny moment was Jonathan Monk's screening of various interpretations (in book and film, in America and China) of a silly story by Ed Ruscha, Crackers. The tale is pretty ridiculous; a rich man arranges a huge salad on a hotel bed, directly on the sheets. He then picks up a girl, brings her back to the hotel, and gets her to strip and lie down in the salad, whereupon he douses her with vinaigrette sauce. That's when he remembers he's forgotten the crackers. He goes to a grocery store in his chauffeur-driven limousine, leaving the girl lying there in the salad, buys the crackers, then goes to a completely different (and much better) hotel and, in a weird auto-erotic gourmet act, changes into a dressing gown and eats them alone.

In the question and answer session after this film the bolshy feminist girl who'd been challenging just about everyone throughout the conference (there's always one, and they often turn out to be the smartest person there) asked "Do you like this story?" Monk -- who's obsessively collected a dozen copies of the photo book it's based on and even made his own Chinese version -- coolly replied "I quite like it". The girl kicked up a meta-fuss in the final session, questioning the gender quotas (there were almost no women artists present), the arrangement of the chairs, and the over-formal division of artists from non-artists. Later, at dinner, I told her about a pamphlet I'd read when I was a fiercely critical student myself: The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It's about how even alternative movements -- particularly alternative movements -- need structure. "The pamphlet by Jo Freeman? I just read it two weeks ago," she said. "But have you read The Tyranny of Tyranny?" I hadn't, but the student enlightened me: the left may provide structure, but it's male structure. Ah well.

MUDAM, I'm Adam

2008-04-28T10:30:27Z

Second postcard strip from MUDAM, Luxembourg, where tonight I'll play my set of misremembered cover versions.

You can see Lawrence Lessig there delivering his ameliorist lecture on how to save copyright, as well as Cory Arcangel, who played glockenspiel over Bruce Springsteen.

Painter and Bowie impersonator Steve Harvey (pictured somewhere in the middle) will join me on my cover of 'The Candidate'. In the picture next to him you can see James Webb, who gave a great talk describing how he'd invented a Japanese noise artist called Wa and employed a Korean tourist in Cape Town to play her at a festival there. Everyone fell for the ruse, mainly because they wanted to; every city needs one young Japanese noise artist playing sheets of sheer distortion, it seems.

Plato's TV studio, supermarket, concert hall

2008-04-26T22:06:37Z

Halfway through Call and Response, the artists' thinktank I'm attending at MUDAM Luxembourg, I'm not sure what I feel about the whole issue of artists' appropriation of popular culture. Candice Breitz gave an interesting talk at the beginning in which she said that all artists draw on the work of other artists, but that this use of existing work is authorized in some cases (usually when the artist involved can pay for legal clearance), unauthorized in others. The poor artists who can't pay for their quotes, samples and steals, said Candice, become "unauthors".

Candice then threw the stage of the MUDAM auditorium over to a succession of "unauthors", who mostly took the opportunity to talk us through their work via PowerPoint and YouTube presentations. First there was Matthieu Laurette, who showed amusing clips of his appearances on French game shows -- TV appearances as media art. Then Guillaume Paris gave a rather desultory glimpse of what looked like very interesting work: he's made a sort of museum of products, and made them speak to each other (in a decayed state which Paris sees as a sort of redeeming de-reification) using the voices of the models who posed for their packaging.

After that, Cory Arcangel played us some very loud Bruce Springsteen live videos off YouTube, playing live glockenspiel along with the tracks. He's recorded a glockenspiel-heavy version of the Born to Run album and put it up on p2p networks all over the world without any warning that it might be anything other than The Boss' original album.

After a while the Plato's Caveness of the presentations got to me, and I skipped the last couple of Saturday sessions, going instead on a glorious walk through some of Luxembourg's dramatic urban ravines, filled with weirs, waterside walks, high bridges and crumbling castles (it reminded me of Edinburgh's Dean Village area).

I suppose my take on the appropriation theme is that I agree wholeheartedly that art should be able to cannibalize other art to its heart's content -- a key point in my Folktronia / Folktronic project was the idea that there's a parallel between the pre- and post-copyright eras, between oral folk culture and the neo-folk art of digital appropriation. And I loved the Steve Harvey deconstruction of Bowie's reading of "My Death" which launched the conference. Yet I find myself unsatisfied by art which comes from the margins yet fetishizes the commercial mainstream. I find myself, right now, looking to art to come up with mysterious, austere, disorienting new forms of beauty (it's the theme of my new piece on the New York Times site) and I feel like commercial TV and pop music and supermarket shelves are not the place to find this new beauty. Artists who squander their valuable marginality on tapping into the undoubted power of the mainstream are shirking the search: unauthors of a different kind.

Chinese Whispers from Luxembourg

2008-04-25T10:49:54Z

I've just arrived in Luxembourg, where I'm participating in MUDAM's Call and Response event, organised by artist Candice Breitz. It's a four day schedule of talks about appropriation / fandom / copyright / folk culture / Chinese Whispers, with artists' performances (including, at 6pm on Monday, my set of misremembered cover versions, delivered like a papal address from a balcony in the atrium).

Later today, Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard kick things off with their remake of a Vito Acconci piece, "Relearning with Acconci".

The rise and fall of magazines

2008-04-24T07:25:11Z

Over the next day or so two new articles I've written go up online -- a piece about the 101 Tokyo art fair for the Frieze site and a piece about the 5th Berlin Biennial for The Moment. They probably won't get much attention -- art pieces never do -- and, after a week or two, will be completely swept away in the ephemeral rush of fresh online commentary.

I've been thinking recently about magazines, newspapers, kiosks, newsagents. In the days before the internet, the closest thing for an information addict was the newsagent. But nothing could be harder than reconstructing the magazines (let alone the cultural and intellectual climate) of a bygone era. There are hardly any pictures of the outsides of British newsagents in the 1970s, let alone the magazines on their shelves or the content of those magazines.

Here's a quick snapshot of the periodicals I would have been purchasing in newsagents in particular periods of my life:

Typical Teenager, 1975: Time, The Listener, The Montreal Star (with its groovy supplement Scene), The Radio Times, Amateur Photographer, Car, Design.

Make it new, 1980: New Musical Express, New Society, New Statesman, New Left Review, Spare Rib, Gambit, Bananas, Zigzag, Studio International.

Style Press and London Listings, 1985: Smash Hits, The Face, i-D, The Fred, TLS, City Limits, Time Out, Blitz.

Getting More French, 1990: Actuel, Liberation, Lime Lizard.

Digital and Japanese Culture, 1995: Les Inrockuptibles, Select, Nova, Wired, Interactif, Magic, Barfout, H, Beikoku Ongaku, Cutie, Olive.

Japan Seen from New York, 2000: Studio Voice, Tokion, Raygun, FRUiTS, Relax, Frieze, Index, Sleazenation.

Esoterica and Slow Life, 2005: The Wire, De:bug, OK Fred, Kidswear, Exberliner, Vice, Artforum, Ku:nel, 032c.

British newsagents in the 70s were feral, shabby, habitual places, corner shops filled with confectionery, cigarettes, mags. The struggle was always to find something intelligent in them, yet in the 70s there was still something Reithian on the racks -- the BBC's magazine The Listener, for instance. There were still left wing sociology magazines like New Society, for which John Berger, Rayner Banham, David Cooper, Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Dennis Potter wrote.

When the 80s rolled around you could find intelligent writing in the style and music press, though it was a bit more glam and flashy than the Reithian voices of the 70s. I began to turn to the French press -- Actuel and Libé. Globalization meant that you could buy those pretty easily in London. As for the art and design press, in Britain they were still in the dark ages. Peter Fuller's Modern Painters didn't launch until 1988; before then you had Artscribe and Studio International, both now gone. The Design Council's Design magazine, despite the nice cover, was full of rather snoozy insider's reports on Thorn lighting rails and trade fairs. It's gone now too, although consumer design commentary has percolated and permeated everywhere.

The fact that I'm writing now for the online presences of journals like the New York Times and Frieze (reports which don't appear in the print versions) says a lot, I think. Magazines and newspapers will be eaten by the web, and when that happens newsagents will become tobacconists and confectioners, and nobody will have to go out in the rain to try and find an interesting magazine to read. Nobody will walk up to Waverley Station's news kiosk at midnight -- as I did one evening in 1978 -- and come back with a typewritten copy of Zigzag with Iggy Pop on the cover. It'll all just be a click away, with a banner ad.

Hisae tells me that a magazine she used to read regularly, Kokoku Hihyo (広告批評) has announced that it's to cease publication in April 2009, soon after celebrating its 30th anniversary. Kokoku Hihyo (literally: ad criticism) is a cultural review about advertising. It reviews the work of ad directors and copywriters, celebrating commercial creatives pretty much the way the music press celebrates musicians.

Former editor (now publisher) Amano Yukichi is getting on now, and he's closing his mag not just because magazine culture is being eaten up by the web, but because advertising is. The mass culture ads he's reviewed -- ads familiar to all Japanese -- are becoming targeted niche ads online. The situation described by Keiko Sei in this 1990 article is rapidly vanishing:

"CMs enjoy such immense popularity in Japan that advertising comes to seem less an accessory and more a primary industry in itself, an important creative output generating yet further spin-off media. From wholly dedicated CM magazines to regular mention in the 50 million daily newspapers and 1100 million other magazines, discourse on CM takes many forms. Japan’s leading "intellectual" newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, features a weekly column, CM Watching by Amano Yukichi , chief editor of the monthly Koku Hihyo (Advertizing Critique), as well as another weekly column, Cheerful Consultations by major copywriter Nakajima Ramo. Both claim a huge readership, the former known for his skill at educing a picture of the world at large from a single CM, while the latter adopts a tried-and-true CM format to discuss eccentric queries from readers. Cheerful drivel to be sure, yet Nakajima’s media presence is telling. In any other country, the persons behind-the-scenes in advertising remain invisible; in Japan, they are familiar household names. Where else but Japan do hit commercial makers step forward and become stars? Ask any Japanese: there’s top copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and CM "creators" Kawasaki Toru, Nakahata Kishi, Sugiyama Kotaro and Lee Taeyong, to list but a few. This "up-front-behind-the-scenes" awareness is paradigmatic of the critical doublethink relationship that exists in Japan between the media and the viewer."

Eighteen years later, Yukichi says "Kokoku has come to a big turning point once more, the transition from the era of exclusive devotion to mass media to the era of coordination with internet. As things were going slowly with mass media Kokoku, we decided to have a break now." The break, I suspect, will be forever. Once-lively Kokoku Hihyo will join the list of interesting, defunct periodicals old codgers recall fondly on their blogs.

Every photo you've ever taken with a Japanese camera is Japanese

2008-04-23T09:51:37Z

Made in Japan is an essay by Gary McLeod (a student at Camberwell School of Art currently living in Tokyo) on the TAB site which poses an outrageously provocative question: are digital photographs inherently Japanese? McLeod thinks they are, and while his arguments are somewhat ridiculous, I do think his modest proposal leads us into a fascinating parallel world.

McLeod starts off with something Donald Keene wrote in 1971: "It seems safe to say that the aesthetic ideals which have formed Japanese taste over the centuries will find their outlet in media yet undiscovered and maintain their distinctive existence."

Now, that's a fairly straightforward idea. It simply says that Japanese national distinctiveness is not confined to the past, but will keep expressing itself via new technologies. Applied to digital photography, Keene's idea could be expressed: "Digital photography in Japan is, and will continue to be, distinctively Japanese." Nothing too shocking there.

But McLeod takes this much, much further when he suggests that digital photography, as a technology, integrates specifically Japanese aesthetics. Therefore, digital photography wherever it is practiced worldwide is inherently Japanese.

Now, that's a radical idea. It means that whenever you take a photograph with your digital camera, you're making, in some sense, a Japanese image, whether you're in Japan or not, and whether or not you've been influenced by Japanese aesthetics and are consciously thinking about Japanese ways of seeing. There's something in the mechanism itself which leads to -- excuse the pun -- Japan-eyes-ation.

What this "something" is, McLeod tells us in the least convincing part of his thesis, is two Japanese sensibilities, yûgen (a kind of strategic nebulousness or vague essentialism) and aware (the sigh-ness of things, perishability). McLeod admits that Sony got the CCD (Charge Coupled Device) technology which underlies digital photography from AT&T Bell Labs in the 1970s, but then attempts to say that this appropriation itself is characteristically Japanese (a logic which conveniently but confusingly makes everything non-Japanese Japanese!), and then tells us that CCD arrays have yûgen because there's a gap or flattening between the curves seen in the real world and the stepped straight lines of digital representation, and have aware because (and this really takes the biscuit!) your hard disk might crash and you might lose your snaps.

Now, this argument is, to say the very least, unconvincing. But the parallel world it opens up is very interesting. I think, for a start, that the world in which we're Japanizing (or Japan-eyes-ing) when we use our digital cameras is no more ridiculous than the world in which we're assumed to be Westernizing (or Western-eyes-ing) when we use modern technology. And although most of us would dismiss McLeod's thesis about the imagery from digital cameras being inherently Japanese, we all too often give a free pass to cultural commentary which suggests, for instance, that Chinese who drive cars are somehow more "Westernized" than Chinese who ride around in rickshaws, even when the cars involved aren't Western ones.

In other words, McLeod's nihonjinron argument flushes out, usefully, a series of Westernjinron assumptions that often fly below the bullshit radar. Modernization and Westernization are not, as we never tire of saying here at Click Opera, the same thing. The West's avant garde has often resembled the East's antiquity, our periodic "modern" rediscoveries of our mojo-libido (in the 1920s and 1970s, for instance) are frequently outstripped by Asian versions, and even our modern plumbing achievements have been leapfrogged!

What I do find quite persuasive is looking at my own formation in the West through the eyes of McLeod's thesis. I'm a media man, profoundly influenced by the ways electronic media mediate our experiences. Just about all the music I've listened to has come to me via Japanese-made devices, from the Sony "cigar box" radio I heard the kabuki-clad (and Kansai Yamamoto-styled) David Bowie singing on in the early 70s through the National Panasonic music centre which pumped out postpunk later in the decade to the Sony CD player I bought in 1990. When I came to make music -- and long before I made music specifically for the Japanese market -- I used almost exclusively Japanese technology. Kawai and Roland and Technics synths, for instance.

My flirtations with motorbikes and cameras were also mostly Japanese-themed: the cameras I lusted after were, in the chemical age, Pentax, Nikon and Olympus models. In the digital age they've been mostly Fujis. I have lived in an age dominated by Japanese electronic goods (in all areas except computers, where I've bought American). The idea that there might have been something inherently Japanese in the music I made with Japanese synths, for instance, doesn't strike me as too outlandish. After all, even if McLeod's arguments about CCD arrays and mono-no-aware are ultimately unconvincing, I do find a lot of truth in McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message.

Scenes from the life of flowers

2008-04-22T09:52:40Z

I've been watching romantic Hindi musicals, retro ones from the 60s and 70s. I've been watching them for their breathtaking floral references -- sometimes it seems like flowers are the main characters -- but also listening to their arrangements, which I find admirable, and would like to learn from.

It's a style given to unison, solos, and turn-taking. Only one thing is foregrounded at any one time, but over the course of the song many elements come to the fore one by one, each with its own texture. A man's voice, a woman's voice, a sitar, a cimbalon, a flute, a string section, a rhythm, a synth. Here's a scene from "Ghar" (1978):

When you listen to that (it sounds a bit like Ariel Pink, the way some things jump out of the mix "too loud"), you almost feel like you're recording the parts one by one. They aren't mixed down into sludge yet. Everything is distinct and fresh.

Of course, the actors aren't the ones singing. A playback singer -- in this case, Lata Mangeshkar (the female voice) and Kishore Kumar (the male) -- has laid down the song, and the actor only lipsyncs, pirhouetting in a landscape of flowers. I like the deep focus on male-and-female in these clips. Somehow, we never take male-and-female seriously enough in the West. We're embarrassed by it. We skirt around it, trouser it. We'd like everything to be male-and-male. Maybe it's because we trace our culture back to Christianity and ancient Greece. We think we've advanced "past" male-and-female, but it may well be that it's something we've really yet to discover, something still ahead of us.

Even the bit where Vinod Mehra blows cigarette smoke in Rekha's face is sort of cute. She doesn't seem to mind. And the dresses... Anyway, here's another one, it's from "Saathi", a melodrama made in 1968. Here a blind man falls in love with his guide. But the main characters in this clip are flowers, representing sexuality but also the beauty of the world the blind man can't see:

I love the sinuous hummed melody (so catchy, despite the weird key change!), the rich colours, the surprisingly funky rhythm fills. Here's another, from an unidentified film featuring heaving branches of blossom and ethereal mountain views:

The actress is dressed, herself, like a white flower. The strings cascade as her lover climbs the slopes to be with her. Later, they're on a boat and there's a moment similar to the cigarette-smoke moment we saw earlier: the man splashes water in her face, and instead of reacting in fury the woman smears it suggestively across her mouth. The play of capitulation and resistance is super-stylized.

Here's a clip set in an orchard heaving with apples:

The point that human fertility is part of the natural cycle is screamingly obvious, but it's rare to see Western films in which people are treated like fruits and flowers. For some reason, this seems to be a thought more entertainingly entertained in India and Asia. It appears least of all in American and British films, and is particularly absent in our cinema since the 70s. We have become unfertile, or uninterested in fertility, it seems.

Here's a scene from "The Jewel Thief" (1967):

This is from "Shagird" (1967):

That's a bit more earthy and comic. There's a parallel made between the girl and a monkey in a tree. The actors hardly even bother to lipsync properly. The emphasis is on the over-emphatic dance moves -- and the flowers, of course.

Let's end with a song in English. This is from "Julia" (1975):

"My heart is beating, keeps on repeating", sings Laxmi. "My love encloses a flood of roses... Spring is the season that drops the reason of love in our dreams."

Water chiming like a bell

2008-04-21T05:28:37Z

After the ethical water in my Moment piece this week, here comes aesthetic water! Tomoko Miyata and I have been rehearsing in Berlin for our installation performance on May 24th at the Technical University in Vienna, at which, over the course of three hours, we'll occupy the student cafe. I'll chant chemical symbols as if they were mantras, Tomoko will play... water.

That's right, water. Water in bowls, with ordinary wooden cooking spoons as mallets. Water tuned by the resonant frequency of porcelain and its own depth. Water played like a non-digital synthesiser, with modulation, portamento and vibrato created by waving, stirring and swilling.

Water chiming like a bell! Water captured with waterproof subaqueous microphones! Water accompanied by an electronc shruti box, a transistorised Indian sitar drone which just glows in the background! It's enough to make Mesmer resonate in his grave!

Yesterday, after we'd played, Tomoko told me she'd learned her water bowl technique from an Indian musician she met in Paris three years ago. She's been playing concerts ever since, including at La Generale, the legendary Paris art squat where she has a studio. La Generale is in Sevres, famous for its porcelains, and Tomoko has set up a relationship with local artisans, hoping to get their flawed pottery and turn it, too, into notes in her "liquid synth". (Those same flaws, of course, would be virtues if Western manufacturers were savvy to wabi sabi.)

Tomoko told me she wants our performance in Vienna to have something of the magical incongruity of Jonathan Miller's film Alice in Wonderland, where Ravi Shankar's sitar accompanies -- enhances and estranges -- English Victorian afternoons, lacing them with some kind of orientalist psychedelia. I suppose, in the metaphor, the shruti box and bowls are the Eat-Me, Drink-Me drugs and science the hatter's logic of strange-but-true.

If Tomoko's Ravi, I suppose I must be Alice. Or -- with that melodica hookah hanging out of my mouth -- maybe the caterpillar?

The candidate

2008-04-20T02:35:52Z

It's my endorsement of Obama...

The Candidate (stereo mp3 file, 5mins 11secs, 4.8MB)

...it's the best song David Bowie didn't release in the 70s, and it's a preview of the covers set I'll deliver next week at MUDAM in Luxembourg.

I and I deal in righteousness!

2008-04-19T09:02:34Z

My latest piece for New York Times magazine blog The Moment is Ethical consumerism's next wave. It links Virtual Water with secondhand clothes and the non-consumerism of Fumiko Imano's "Dream Closet" performance.

I won't keep pretending the blog isn't real, but I'm fascinated by the kind of dialectics my Post-Materialist slot sets up with its context -- this week, for instance, the message "just don't buy clothes" finds itself luring readers towards ads for Bloomingdale's bags.

With my current thinking on hypocrisy, I'm much more inclined to see this as "generative dynamism" or "an interesting tension" or "a realistic complexity" than the h-word. Or, if it is hypocrisy -- a secular ethical sin of sorts -- it's also an opportunity to introduce the concept of other secular ethical sins, like the list I begin this week's article with: unfair trade, non-recycling, carbon emissions, water waste.

In other words, in order to bang an ethical drum about the evils of consumerism in a consumerist forum, I need to be a hypocrite of some sort. I need to commit at least one sin in order to raise consciousness about others. Anything else would be preaching to the choir. But there are risks. For a start, there's the risk that I'll become like some kind of homeless rasta at a swank cocktail party, tolerated but ignored as I slump in the corner muttering about how Babylon shall fall as the mighty Lion of Judah rises in righteousness. Secondly, there's the risk that ethical consumerism just fits into the dialectic already at work in our attitude to our own consumerism: guilty pleasures, rich and poor, need and plethora, famine and feast, boom and bust, anorexia and bulimia.

A consumer magazine can as easily appetize its readers as ethicize them by talking about scenarios in which people are too poor to consume. Take Fumiko Imano's Dream Closet performance, for instance. I try to present it as something ethical -- consume expensive clothes without actually buying them! -- but when I interview Fumiko she tells me she isn't interested in that. She's rather down on ecology and ethical consumerism. She thinks it's hypocritical. But even if she'd been 100% eco-ethically correct in her statements, the vision of her trying on clothes in London and Paris could well be appetizing, a consumerist lure. There's a distinct sense, in the film, that Fumiko is "getting something for nothing" -- the exact same sense that advertisers often invoke when they offer free prizes as a way to lure us into thinking about making purchases.

It's an idea I keep coming back to: things contain their opposite. An ethical post-materialist column could well kindle consumerist urges. It seems to be working that way on me: I may be the Times' post-materialist Babylon Critic (an' ting), but the person I'd most like to be is Chandler Burr, the paper's Perfume Critic. I've become fascinated by Chandler's slot in The Moment, Scent Notes. Yes, I have column envy. While I write plainly and sternly about water, Burr is writing the most florid, elegant prose imaginable about Ballade Verte by Manuel Canovas.

"Ballade Verte," purrs Burr, "smells to me like the authentic aromatic gum resin galbanum, an ancient raw material from modern-day Iran. Galbanum is listed as a sweet herb in chapter 30 of Exodus. (”And thou shalt make it a perfume,” God tells Moses, “a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.”) It is, in fact, bitter to the taste, but the scent is like nothing else: deeply, darkly, earthily green, old and musty in the best way, a rich and almost rotting organic green like fresh branches mixed into soil. Dirtier than vetiver, richer than basil, greener than myrrh... The result is a scent to wear on chilly nights at parties in marble halls — perhaps the foyer of the New York Public Library."

Burr gets to be biblical too, but instead of invoking sin he conjures an ancient sensuality through olfactory poetry -- the necessary descriptive impressionism scent (still impossible to quantify or qualify any other way) demands. And how completely fabulous that he gets not only to describe these musks, but recommend the locations (the New York Public Library, "where the candles burn, the men are wearing black tie, and the women wear long black gowns, pearls, and ancient green galbanum") they should be worn in! No wonder Morrissey leaves a comment!

Something about Burr's evocative, aristocratic style reminds me of my favourite Times writer, the late great Herbert Muschamp, the paper's architectural critic, who died last year of lung cancer aged 59. Muschamp was an outrageous stylist, comparing Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, for instance, to Judy Garland's face "framed by her splayed hands". Here he is recalling his student days at the Architectural Association and being shown around London by a young Derek Jarman. That article is flawed -- Muschamp attributes a building to the Smithsons which wasn't by them at all -- but his prose is rich and aromatic. And what would a great perfume be without its flaws and contradictions? A bit like consumerism without sin, perhaps. Jah Rastafari!

Anne Other

2008-04-18T09:58:38Z

As we've seen here (often), one of the things the internet allows us to do is to self-mediate. If I want to present myself as Paris Hilton, it's up to me. I go, girl!

Self-mediation is still virtuous in other media -- check this documentary about 1920s "It Girl" Clara Bow, known for her personality more than her beauty, and praised (especially by her contemporary Louise Brooks) for putting lots of her own "business" into her films; flipping up the tail of a toy dog in one scene, sprawling right across the boss' desk in another:

Though still virtuous in film or television, self-mediation in these big, scripted, collective, centralised media is difficult. Someone makes you up, someone else lights your shot, someone else again wrote the script. There are people responsible for interpreting your physical presence, and they're professionals. That means they mostly make you look like everyone else on TV. Sometimes it means they make you look really bad, too. After all, they don't know your Achilles heels as well as you do, your good and bad points.

Magibon, the vlogging superstar, the semi-silent "it girl" of the roaring Web 2.0ies, recently discovered this to her cost... in Japan.

Magibon established her brand and her legend at home, tilting enormous blepharoplastic eyes up at her wideangle webcam. Her genius was to reduce blogging to a pure minimalism of raw cuteness. On her vlog, Magibon speaks elementary Japanese, gestures, impersonates a manga character, lets the visual-cultural dialectic between her super-childish face and her big breasts set up its own disturbing resonances, or simply does what she does best: nothing. Here she is doing nothing with a fan. Here she's doing nothing with an empathetic look. This is nothing sideways and this is nothing pulling faces. And here's the original nothing -- Magibon doing nothing wearing a Real Thing t-shirt. Not since the 20s has silence been so potent a star-making device.

Earlier this month, Magibon achieved a longstanding ambition -- she visited Japan. She did so at the expense of a television company (which is odd, since for months Magibon has been collecting donations from her YouTube fans to make a trip of her own). The price she had to pay was an appearance in a Japanese television studio, using their lights and angles rather than her own. In other words, Magibon got to see the magic land of her dreams only on condition that she waive the power of her own control over her own image. She got to see the land of magic on the condition of losing some of her own.

The result was a self-mediator's disaster. A Magibon -- absolutely mortified by adolescent body-consciousness, and covering her face with her hands -- emerged who looked quite unlike the It Girl her fans were used to. This Magibon was baggy-eyed, lantern-jawed and tombstone-toothed, a sort of spinster librarian rather than the sylph-like manga sex fairy we knew. Television had transformed the IT-age it girl into plain old Anne Other.

There's a lesson for us all in there. You know me, here, as Momus Hilton, glamour tart, thinking woman's crumpet. But were I ever to appear on Japanese television (and I won't, I promise you I won't) you'd see quite a different me: a 48 year-old Nosferatu with thinning yellow hair and horribly yellow teeth. I'd lose my glamorous art and style press columns, my book and record deals, overnight. The Nick Carrie Bradshaw of postmodern self-mediation would emerge, under the pitiless glare of the studio lights, as a living nightmare: Nick Carrie.

Nordic roots

2008-04-17T11:39:34Z

One of the unexpected side-effects of my first trips to Japan in 1992 and 1993 was that I developed a fascination with Scandinavia. Just flying over the region's ragged coastlines, scattered islands, myriad lakes, gazing down from a 747, I felt some kind of pull, some sort of call. Luckily, at the same time real Scandinavians were calling too, with expenses-paid invitations to visit. I made a concert tour of Sweden and Finland in 1994, and a trip to Helsinki to make the "Man of Letters" video in 1993. After shooting videos for some of my songs with director Hannu Puttonen, I took a train up through Finland to the Arctic Circle, rented a Volvo, then drove around in Finnmark, that weird topmost part of Scandinavia where Finland, Sweden and Norway all join up.

Talking into my video camera (some of the footage turned up in "Man of Letters"), I remember saying that the region felt like an older, richer version of my native Scotland -- a Scotland with all its features exaggerated. Instead of bare low hills, Finnmark had tundra. Instead of sheep, it had deer. Instead of grey squirrels, red. Instead of low squinty sun in winter and halfhearted overhead sun in summer, Finnmark had total blackness and the midnight sun. It was an Ur-Scotland, a Scotland on strange drugs, a Scotland with millienia-long deja vu. I remember driving the Volvo back to the rental shop through the night, racing to make my flight back to Helsinki. At 2am and 3am the sun still shone brightly. I felt completely disoriented -- yet oddly at home.

I always suspected that I had Scandinavian ancestry, but my mother -- an avid ancestor researcher -- has now confirmed it. She's traced our family tree (through her father's line) back to 1660, when people with Norse-style patronymic surnames lived on Shetland, an island almost as close to Norway and Iceland as it is to Scotland. The tree goes like this: Jarem Robertson (from Grobsness, Shetland) begat Hercules Jaremson (born 1690). His son John Herculesson (you see how the surname changes according to the father's first name?) sired William Johnsson, who married Margaret Jarmsdochter and produced Hercules Johnson in Muckle Roe. We're now at about 1800. The Icelandic-sounding names break down at this point, replaced by more Scottish-sounding ones. Laurence Johnson marries Catherine Sinclair. Their daughter Jane marries Alexander Mackintosh, and their daughter Margaret Munro Mackintosh marries William Robert Hood, who lives into the 20th century. His son is my grandfather, who marries my granny Janetta MacKechnie (the MacKechnies come from Mull, an island my mum has written a history of).

Now, I normally glaze over when the subject of genealogy comes up -- and if one's own genealogy is dull, other people's doesn't stand much of a chance. But I have a great interest in northernness (as this rather odd entry from earlier this year shows), and of course this all makes for great research / daydreaming opportunities for my Book of Scotlands.

In the second week of June I'll take the overnight ferry from Aberdeen to Shetland in the company of my mother. We'll spend a few days there, the two of us (the tenth and eleventh generations on from Jarem Robertson) and visit Orkney too.

Perhaps it'll be a bit like W.H. Auden's trip to Iceland in 1936, with Louis MacNeice. Auden believed himself to be of Icelandic descent, and thought of Iceland as "holy ground". But, as the New Statesman tells us, Auden was quickly irritated by the reality of the Iceland he discovered: "In his letters home, Auden mocked the mediocrity and shabbiness of the architecture, the gloom of the locals, and the awful food - the bitter soups, the dried fish, the overcooked mutton and, a speciality, the rotten shark pickled in sour milk... "Reykjavik," he wrote, "is the worst possible sort of provincial town as far as amusing oneself is concerned, and there was nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence."

Auden went back in 1964 and found the place much more to his liking. Iceland was now an independent republic. It was more prosperous, but "had not yet become vulgar". Anyway, I'm looking forward to some generational time travel this summer; in preparation I've been watching Michael Powell's film "Return to the Edge of the World", documenting his 1978 trip to the Shetland island of Foula.