click opera

I, slenderly, like to be dirty

2009-07-04T09:12:38Z

This is a photographic approximation of my first column for Japanese art magazine ART-iT, which recently migrated from a paper to a web publication. To read this on the ART-iT site you have to go through a rather tedious one-off registration process, but considering it makes the magazine available worldwide for free, it's a small price to pay.

One of the peculiarities of the ART-iT site is that the magazine -- which has been bilingual from the start -- uses mechanical web translation for its contents. So if you click the Japanese / British flag at the top of the page, your English text automatically goes into Japanese, and vice versa. Just for fun, I google-translated the Japanese version of my column back into English, and came up with the following. I've picked out a few "found poems" in bold:

I, slenderly, please give the event a collection of art and MAKARETA Map dilapidated buildings. I am a happy person. Or Not Museum dim pure white cube for me; I like to be dirty but my art venues. I, And peeling wallpaper, the accordion by crush, and prefer to feel a bit damp and wet and that they are. I The Kerameikos in Athens was abandoned as the district office, county amended plots between the two events Perez recently called They are inherited in the same place for the Gallery project, we prefer to be re-occupied.

Event Type Art gives you a map to the art if not bigger - and, in revised county parcel, it marked a significant And elephant - no longer a winner even if the cluster of buildings to explore unfamiliar. Glass display case for a temporary art And over the entrance was converted into apartments or workshops, adventure amazing city break a padlock of a forbidden I want the house.

2006 was a big city adventure biennial Berlin; Maurizio Cattelan and his co-curator, the re-building of the upper and lower. The art was, it was necessary to match the wallpaper a basin and discard them inspire Auguststrasse Residential flat used by the stables, mobile utility shed, a Jewish school for girls and older people. I sense In addition they were inside the two-day, 48 hours Neukolln I held near Berlin, as part of the event called Last weekend to explore as I SHAGAMIKOMI meager.

Tokyo is the closest ever to arrive, the town was building Shokuryo-Saga. "Site of emotion" - former U.S. cooperatives -- Is this for Ishii and KOYAMAGYARARI home earlier than 10 years, to inspire. It was taken in 2002 RI has been paid. However, Omi Biwako bee man as a biennial event, since they use the old movie tradition, the living to hold a sake museum and tea house at a factory.

However, there is a risk. Last year, I collect old streetcar repair shop in the Berlin district of north-filled immigrants to marry I saw the show was first called KYANPUBERURIN. It is a dialog between the artist and from Berlin Been thought, but for me to Hiroshima, it is the tram shed full of atmosphere and it became more store art Like the charisma of the competition. The building won.

Hot gossip from Japan

2009-07-02T21:41:21Z

We've mentioned Kahimi Karie a few times on Click Opera over the last week or so, showing old pictures of her from 1996 or noting that she's recording a new album. But there may be bigger Kahimi news -- or at least Kahimi gossip -- coming out of Japan. One of Kahimi's oldest friends, Kenji Takimi, boss of Crue-L Records, (the label which released I Am A Kitten), made a very strange blog posting on Monday.

Entitled Life's hard and then you die, this posting lamented the passing of Michael Jackson, but then turned an emotional corner and stated that the same weekend that Michael died, something "blissful and unexpected" had happened. What this event was, readers were left to wonder, but two blurry, dark photographs (click 'em to see 'em bigger) show what looks like a wedding party. Post-rocker Jim O'Rourke is identified in a caption. He's playing a guitar, and beside him is the unmistakable figure of Kahimi Karie, singing and wearing something that looks remarkably like a wedding dress. Kahimi is visible in another photo, still wearing the white confection while others dance. Can it be that Kahimi Karie got married last weekend? Did she marry Jim, or someone else? Is there any substance to Twitter rumours that she married a tap dancer (could it be Kazunori Kumagai, seen tap-dancing below?) and may have a kitten of her own on the way? Only time will tell, but somewhere, to persons unknown, congratulations are clearly due.

The other gossip coming out of Japan is the sad but not unexpected rumour that Studio Voice magazine -- long my favourite cultural review -- is going on "extended hiatus", which is usually a euphemism for harvest by the Grim Magazine Reaper. A recent issue celebrating the 400th edition of the magazine, with thumbnail photos of all 400 covers and capsule descriptions of contents, was suspiciously elegiac. It now seems to have been the "multi-media mix" magazine's swansong. Studio Voice was known for its excitingly exhaustive theme issues on subjects from Acid Psychedelia to Africa Remix. I wrote just one column for it -- about musique concrete -- but bought it regularly. It's probably the mag I'm least able to throw out; there are more back copies of it lying around my house than anything else.

Disappearing from the world of print doesn't have to mean death for a magazine, of course -- you can trans-substantiate webwards, relaunching as an electronic publication with lots of extra features. That's just what Art-It magazine did recently -- and this might be the time to reveal that I'll shortly be joining the Art-It team as an official blogger.

It might also be the moment to declare a suspicion that Roger McDonald, who recommended me for this "job" (it's unpaid), had me well and truly hoaxed with his first post for Art-It, the one about radical Japanese fashion label The Afro Ninja Destiny and the Black Panthers. This time he's blogged about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin hunting in Yamanashi, but his Photoshop skills have slipped -- terrible lasso technique on the layers -- suggesting to me that the whole series is a tendentious farrago of febrile fabrication.

Everything else in today's post, I hasten to add, is solid... well, solid gossip, anyway. Like most things in Japan, the facts are there for all to see -- between the lines.

An Employee's Guide to the Scots

2009-07-01T22:10:23Z

"In not one but two forthcoming books, artist, critic, and one-time unwitting pop star Momus challenges readers to imagine different worlds," says Interview magazine, pointing its readers towards an interview by Matthew Evans entitled It's Momus' World.

I'm reading in the video here from a finished copy of The Book of Scotlands, which comes out in Europe within the next couple of weeks, and in the US in mid-August. There's a bit in the Interview interview that touches on this Employee's Guide text:

Matthew Evans: The quotation on the front of your new book reads, "Every lie creates a parallel world, the world in which it is true." You like alternatives.

Momus: Well, Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.

Matthew Evans: In what sense?

Momus: Well, in the sense that for every reality there are many parallel, co-existing states.

Matthew Evans: Because the physical world that we're accustomed to is not at all the physical reality discovered in the realm of physics?

Momus: Quantum physics says that there is an infinite number of possibilities and parallels to the one that we know, and every event is also played out in a parallel world. It's kind of a crazy idea, but someone called Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam says that if you could back up your memory in case of a catastrophic event, you could actually revert to that back-up and find an alternative world in which the Earth didn't explode or collide with Mars. In The Book of Scotlands, I present a series of parallel Scotlands that aren't tied to the theories of quantum physics, but instead to the idea of delirious speculation. And if you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence right now, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands—because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities—you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.

Matthew Evans: So part of the book's purpose is to reveal the current efforts towards Scottish independence?

Momus: That's the general context, although I don't really talk about it specifically. I'm more interested in the possibilities that could arise from that context, the crazy peripheral and unlikely scenarios.

Matthew Evans: But some of the content seems to be about places other than Scotland.

Momus: They might be about Japan. They might be about a company working in a Third-World situation bringing a manual to its employees, saying, "Don't trust the Scots, they might be terrorists. They might be trying to infiltrate our company."

Matthew Evans: It reminds me of the Instructions for American Servicemen series that were passed out during WWII to culturally prepare soldiers for France, Britain, or Japan.

Momus: Those types of manuals continued in Japan after the War, only they concentrated on how to do business instead of warfare. And each one presents a conflicting picture of Japanese etiquette, a conflicting idea of what Japan is.

The entire Interview interview is here.

Ink on paper

2009-07-01T00:12:32Z

Woodard and I -- impecunious writers of pending, possibly promising books -- dropped by Pro QM yesterday afternoon. Rather than buy anything in this admirable bookshop (lunch had already eaten our available resources), we noted the purchases we would have made in the parallel world where we have money. Here are my "buy notes".

Hisae tells me this has been out for some time, but its brilliant colour hasn't faded on the shelf. Neon Addict: The Fluorescent Color Book (BNN) is full of eye-searing patterns and acid-neon colours.

As soon as I saw the primary block colours, matching ink-tinted page-edges, loose obi paper jackets and Johnston type of the paperbacks below, I knew Zak Kyes must be behind this series from the Architectural Association, AA Words. There's a close family resemblance here to Zak's design for my own forthcoming book, finished copies of which are apparently expected back from the printer later this week. (Excited!)

Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture by Kengo Kuma was number 2 in the AA Words series. Kuma doesn't like buildings which are built like objects. Here's the architect with the name of a bear talking about his design for a Noh Stage in the Forest:

"Emptiness," says Kuma, "is the most important idea in Japanese culture... Ma (empty space) is the real mother of every creation and every activity." (By the way, if you like short films about architecture you'll love 0300 TV.)

Back at Pro QM, I was tempted to splash out €12.50 for Monu magazine, which is about urbanism. Here's a flip-though of their issue 10:

Don't you just love the paperiness of that? The sound of the paper swooshing by? In a digital era, paper becomes a luxury. Sometimes a luxury we can't afford (here I am, after all, finding digital traces for the paper things I'd ideally like to have been able to buy).

I enjoyed flipping through this book on the right, too. It's a survey of student work, made over a decade, by Werkplaats Typografie, a graphic design school in Holland. They call it The Wonder Years.

Audio.Visual -- On Visual Music and Related Media is a flashy tome about "visual music" -- the place where sound and image meet. It comes packaged with a DVD. Like a lot of the books I found visually appealing yesterday at Pro QM, this one comes wrapped in an obi; a partial paper cover that adds to its visual appeal, and the almost fetishistic paperiness of it.

Woodard and I left empty-handed, emerging from the hot shop into the fierce Berlin afternoon and shading our eyes against a sun powerful enough to wilt the brightest computer screen, but incapable of dimming ink on paper.

A cache of old photos

2009-06-30T11:01:30Z

I discovered a cache of Polaroids taken in February 1996, when I lived in Paris -- surrounded, it seems, by some of the world's most beautiful women.

This first one introduces "the characters". Top left is my wife Shazna, next to her someone whose name I've forgotten, next to him is Vicky Bogle, my flatmate in London between 1990 and 1993. Vicky is talking to Edouard Baer, who's now one of France's most famous film actors. I'm in the middle, and below me Laila France is throttling Ariel Wizman, who's a pretty famous TV presenter in France (and was even back then).

I have to say it was fun pretending to be Serge Gainsbourg at this point in my life (and having big hits in Japan on the strength of it). Here I am with two of my "songbirds", Laila France and Kahimi Karie. I made a string of EPs with Kahimi between 1994 and 1999, and an album with Laila in 1997, Orgonon (which you can hear / download here).

Here's Shazna with Alain Gac, who'd just been put in charge of an indie record label distributed, I think, by Barclay (which was Jacques Brel's label, of course). I later heard Alain was running some pretty big label. Not sure what he's up to now.

Here's Shazna with Vicky. Shazna now has a high-powered media job in New York, Vicky is a secondary school teacher in Auckland, New Zealand.

Vicky and Kahimi, who, as I noted last week, is currently working on a new album with Jim O'Rourke.

Here's Laila ("50% Thai, 50% French, 100% funky girl" as she describes herself) in a state of orgasmic bliss. Laila now DJs in Paris under the name of Samantha Cru, and runs a party organisation called Crash Bandi.

Me (with 90s "curtain" hair and 90s "goatee" beard) being kissed by KK. I'm wearing a remade retro-70s suit from a shop called TGV, my "tailor" at the time.

Kahimi and Laila. They duetted, shortly afterwards, on the song David Hamilton, which is one of my best, but least-known songs (Kahimi actually covered the song recently with Jim O'Rourke, Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M accompanying her -- it's on the Muhlifein DVD, but I've never heard it).

Kahimi in Index magazine in 1999:

STEVE: You have another beautiful song, "David Hamilton." What is that about?

KAHIMI: I made a t-shirt with a picture of David Hamilton on it. So I sent it to Momus. After that, he wrote the song for another singer called Laila France. And Laila wasn't interested in David Hamilton. I'm very good friends with Laila, but because of my t-shirt he wrote it. So I called Momus and said, "Why did you write that song for Laila?" [laughs] He said, "Okay, okay."

STEVE: I'm beginning to think Momus does his best work with you.

KAHIMI: He's a very strange man. A little like Mike Alway. Sometimes we have a catfight, but it's for fun.

Finally, here I am waiting to appear on Ariel Wizman and Edouard Baer's Radio Nova show, Cocktail Hour (La Grosse Boule).

Proposal for a Wikipedia page about Humperson, father of "the laws of meta"

2009-06-29T08:47:13Z

I've referred a few times here on Click Opera to Norman Humperson's Laws of Meta, and thought it might be time to dedicate a whole entry to this enigmatic and subtle thinker, who died in 1999 (or 2000, according to some reports). Shockingly enough, there isn't -- as far as I can see -- a Wikipedia page about him yet. This Click Opera entry, then, must serve as a kind of tag, hold or "stub", a proposal for a Wikipedia page about Norman Humperson. I hope it will at least establish that Humperson, as a thinker, is not non-notable.

Humperson was born on February 29th, 1933 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to immigrant Scottish parents. His childhood was marked by a strong Oedipal conflict with his father, a defrocked clergyman who had never even been ordained in the first place. He also liked to play with Russian dolls, of which he had an ever-diminishing collection, all stolen.

At the age of 15, Humperson ran away from home to become a lighthouse keeper on the rugged, storm-lashed Atlantic coast. During this time he worked on a new signaling system intended to warn sailors of the various complex dangers -- extending far beyond mere storms and rocks -- presented by the sea. Unfortunately, because of widespread unfamiliarity with the system amongst sailors, wrecks were caused and a great many lives lost. Humperson fled to Jerusalem, where he studied anthropology and sociology in Hebrew under Martin Buber.

It was here -- swatting flies in the fierce Palestine sun -- that he began to develop the ideas for which he's best remembered. Later, as a tenured professor at the University of San Marino, Humperson developed these preliminary insights into the five Laws of Meta as we know them today:

The Laws of Meta

1. Iteration is reiteration. If you remove the time element, all language acts are reiterations of each other, in a continuous circle Humperson called the "great totentanz of signification". Humperson did not discount the possibility of original communicative acts, but declared that the first time a new thought occurred it was, by virtue of its novelty, incomprehensible and incommunicable, and therefore not a communicative act at all. He therefore consigned original communicative acts to a parallel universe, the mysterious "world of origins" -- a place completely barred to mere mortals. "Originality exists," he said, "-- but not for us."

2. The great are devoured by the small. Since every statement is a summary of a pre-existing statement, knowledge is doomed to shrink and wither endlessly. Each summary loses some of the value of the one before it, while seeming to add to its value. Summaries are like banknotes, promises to pay the bearer on demand which, asserts Humperson, cannot be fulfilled, because a summary is a shorter, less valuable version of the thing it refers to, just as promissory paper is less valuable than gold. A demand for the full payment of implicit or promised meanings would cause a semantic "run on the banks" which, warned Humperson, would cause the whole system to collapse. Luckily, quipped Humperson, "one summary does not make a swallow".

3. No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement (in other words every statement except for those in the mysterious "world of origins") will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely.

4. Dependency is destiny. Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases). Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

5. The soul is soulless. In later years, perhaps because of the onset of deafness and other ailments, Humperson became something of a mystic, a dabbler in "meta-metaphysics". He changed his name to Noman R. Humperson, explaining that moving the "R" in this way drew attention to a secret message within his name: "No man are human person." By this, Humperson understood that no-one is any more human than anyone else -- or, in fact, human at all -- just as no statement is any more meaningful. Influenced by Adorno's idea that "in the end, soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption," Humperson declared he had "discovered" a fifth and final Law of Meta. To extract the soul from something, he said, was to extract the soul from something. Summaries and translations -- precisely because they try -- must inevitably fail to capture the essence of the things they start from. Since summaries, in attempting to capture essence or soul, inevitably discard it, and since all statements are summaries, there is no such thing as soul, except insofar as soul is the wish, precisely, that there should be soul -- the wish, in other words, that zero and one should come to be the same number. This wish became the basis for a sort of mathematically-based religion Humperson was working on at the time of his death.

Humperson, who had been fitted in 1970 with a mainframe pacemaker, was the only recorded fatality of the Millennium Bug. At five minutes to midnight on the 31st of December 1999 Humperson's last recorded conversation -- with his private nurse, also his wife -- ran as follows:

Private Nurse: "It's time for tea, Mr Humperson!"

Humperson: "What's that?"

Wife (repeating the nurse's words more loudly): "IT'S TIME FOR TEA, MR HUMPERSON!"

Humperson (laughing): "Oh, I thought you said "It's time to die, Mr Humperson!""

No sooner had he uttered this sentence than faulty code in Humperson's pacemaker diverted a routine kernel error into a fatal core dump, and the philosopher slumped forward in his wheelchair. He is survived by his laws.

Japan hand

2009-06-28T08:50:20Z

"Japan hand" is a term I dislike. There's something colonial or corporate about it, something (let's drop the false distinction between those historical phases) colonial-corporate. It's used in phrases like "longtime Japan hands" or "experienced Japan hands", and it basically means "foreigners living in Japan", with the sense that they've been posted there and left to accumulate some kind of marginal seniority based on arcane knowledge of "the natives" and "the tricky situation on the ground".

"Japan hands" also contains an ambiguous positionality; these "hands" are "lending a hand", like deckhands on the deck of a ship. But who's their captain? What language do their instructions come in? Are they under the command of the Japanese, or of corporate and governmental headquarters in far-off lands? Is Japan a ship? Is it moving, going somewhere? If so, who determines its direction, Japanese or foreigners? How many foreign hands are allowed on the ship's wheel, and how much of an effect can they have?

"Japan hands" tend to eke out their time in Japan as liminal observers, spies of a kind. Some "report back" to the West with foreign-language books explaining the Japanese to non-Japanese with apparent expertise. They sometimes seem to have a common purpose in the form of a vague -- yet slightly hopeless -- wish that Japan were different, which is to say less different, more like the West. They combine this wish for difference-that-is-less-different with a wish (equally hopeless) that they themselves could cease, in the eyes of the Japanese, to be different. They want both to change Japan, and to become Japanese without changing themselves. Generally they remain loyal to a home audience, framing Japan for head office and the foreign public for whom they pass as "Japan experts" rather than the Japanese audience for whom they are -- and will always be -- foreigners, people who don't quite understand.

The french verb assister catches the shadowland ambiguity of the Japan hand's position; it means both attending something as an audience member and helping change it as a participant. It's in the nebulous semantic territory between these two senses of assister that the "Japan Hand" dwells and -- inevitably -- ages, preparing either to die in Japan, or to leave one day.

I've noticed a small exodus of creative foreigners from Japan recently -- people I thought were there longterm, people who seemed to be heading for "Japan hand" status. The recession, while it makes Japan cheaper, may be making Tokyo a less exciting or practicable place to pursue a creative career in. Photographer Zoren Gold, who seemed like a fixture in his airy house atop a hill in Nakameguro, recently exchanged Japan for California, taking his muse-model Minori with him. Actually, they met in LA, so I suppose they had roots there. The artist Pol Malo, after eleven years in Japan, is now (according to his Art-It blog) "moving from kyoto to berlin. see you once i get there". Musician Digiki (Antonin Gaultier) is also considering a move from Tokyo to Berlin. Another Art-It blogger, Hanayo, has already been here for a decade. I wonder if the Japanese call her a "Germany hand"?

A small example of "Japan hand" frustration: Marxy recently twittered on the Neojaponisme feed: "The "Kitano Affair" reveals how lame the Japanese media is. A guy's career is ended and no one can reveal exactly why?" Background, via Japan-Zone: "Popular talento Kitano Makoto (50) gave a press conference at the Westin Hotel in Osaka to apologize for the verbal gaffes that may yet end his career. Long known as a straight talker, he has a history of upsetting people with the things he says on his radio show. He bowed repeatedly to reporters and said that he had allowed his image as a "dokusetsu" (poison tongue) talento to become his "curse." Neither Kitano nor his Shochiku Geino management have clarified exactly what he said that caused the latest uproar, but they denied Internet rumors that his target had been either a certain religious organization or show business management agency (the strongly politically affiliated Soka Gakkai organization is sometimes referred to as a cult, while the Burning agency is said to be a front for the yakuza). Kitano was in tears as he talked about his family and how he had asked them to be patient with him until he got his career back on track. He has been dropped from all his regular radio and TV shows, the last one having been broadcast on Monday. His forced sabbatical is open-ended but he insisted yesterday that he doesn't want to quit show business and will aim to get back on the air someday."

Now, I'm not sure what Marxy's definition of "the Japanese media" is, but in far-away Berlin the Japanese community somehow knows all about this story. They tell me that Kitano said something about the boss of Burning Agency being gay, and that as a result Kitano has had to apologise tearfully. He'll never work in Tokyo -- at least not in anything related to the entertainment industry -- again, I'm told. Japanese in Berlin know this from a combination of sources, all freely available on the web. Their view is not that Kitano (and other "poison tongues") should be allowed to speak up, point fingers, accuse, open Pandora's Box, "advance towards a more transparent media landscape", etc, but that his enforced retirement sends a good sign, spelling out loud and clear the message that people shouldn't slander each other in public. As on most issues raised, the Japan hands and the Japanese have completely different takes on this story.

There are zones of cultural convergence between the West and Japan which succeed better. Art-It's move from a paper to a web magazine has been excellently implemented -- the registration process is rather mendokusai, but the results (a big range of interesting content) well worthwhile. The image I've borrowed here is from Roger McDonald's Art-It blog. Tagged "pataphysic past fashions", it shows an "intentionally faked photograph" produced in 1974 by radical Japanese fashion label The Afro Ninja Destiny.

McDonald takes up the tale: "The label probably produced one collection in its existence, presented in a thin photocopied booklet titled ‘The Closet of Richard Aoki’ (Richard Aoki, 1938-2009, was one of the first members of The Black Panther Party, eventually promoted to the position of Field Marshall). The label is thought to have operated from a large lean-to shelter constructed by fashion students in Northern Nagano prefecture. This photograph shows a woman (perhaps a model) in a winter costume which was included in ‘The Closet of Richard Aoki’. Created in layers almost solely from silk and home-spun wool, the woman holds a classic andon lamp. On the wall behind her are two posters: The official 1973 release version poster for the film ‘Enter the Dragon’, starring Bruce Lee, and a single page from the Black Panther newspaper with an image by Emory Douglas. Note the unusually heavy looking left arm of the woman’s kimono which probably contained kindling and wood for fire-making."

No hands are visible in the image.

As serious as the Cold War

2009-06-26T23:20:13Z

I'm serious. A very serious writer, artist, intellectual, or something like that. You can tell I'm serious because I wear a serious expression, a black shirt, a black eye-patch, and black spectacle frames from the Cold War. They're not those oblong 90s "designer" ones which went out of fashion in the recent "spectacles paradigm shift", but some proper "serious person in the Cold War" glasses. During the Cold War things were very serious indeed, because you could get blown up at any moment by nuclear weapons, and there were serious things like existentialism and liberation theology to think about.

Because I'm fascinated by the transformation they effect, I've taken to asking friends to try on the serious frames I bought recently for €3 in an Athens flea market. The results -- please study them seriously -- are below. They begin, top left, with Joe Howe.

Actually, those are Joe's own Raybans. He's had them for quite a while -- though when I first met him two years ago he wore a pair of oblong 90s "designer" glasses. Joe then got the Rayban Wayfarer frames, the ones Buddy Holly died in, which came back in the late 1980s (I had a pair in 1987), the ones Robert Lowell was wearing in 1962 when he wrote: "One swallow makes a summer / The moon rises, luminous with terror". Of course Lowell meant, by "swallow", a nuclear missile, and by "summer", a nuclear holocaust triggered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those were serious times.

Really, who would wear 90s-style "designer" oblong frames when you could be wearing serious Cold War retro frames like Michael Caine's? The paradigm shift to Cold War seriousness is well underway in Japan, too -- witness these street fashion snaps taken in the streets of Daikanyama and Harajuku over the last month or so:

Not only do they make you look as serious as the Cold War, these frames fit well with 80s-retro clothes, which are of course the "correct" ones to be reviving at the moment. Serious Cold War frames were still being worn (on their first return) as late as 1994 -- here's Konishi from Pizzicato 5 in the Twiggy Twiggy video made that year, looking seriously geeky-funky:

Of course Konishi -- a bit like Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian -- is forever in thrall to the 1960s. Here's the whole P5 video, just because the frames and the dancing have to be seen together. You really need to catch that 1960s moment when squares started to get groovy, that's what these serious-yet-switched-on frames signify here:

Do The Twist, because we might all die by The Bomb tomorrow! Here's Rolf Harris in the early 1960s, looking like an art student and singing silly songs about wallabies and peg legs to take our minds off the impending nuclear holocaust. Doesn't he look like Jan, below Joe in the picture above?

I'm pleased with my new old frames, and the transition they effect, a move towards deep nuclear seriousness. After all, I do have two books coming out. But Hisae tells me these Cold War frames are boring. She's more into the owl-eye frames worn by late-1960s David Hockney -- and just about every architect ever.

You can see Hockney wearing the owl frames in A Bigger Splash, the best film (I think) ever made about an artist. Perhaps not the most serious, though.

Though I didn't realise it when I posted it, this entry owes a lot to artist Catherine Soto's Glasses project, where she gets people to pose in her Raybans. Catherine had the idea first -- and her business card even says "I'm serious" on it!

Never land.

2009-06-25T22:58:24Z

(First published on Click Opera March 13th, 2005.)

One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.

When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.

Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.

Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.

There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.

And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.

Also possibly relevant: The Tragedie of Michael Jackson, King of Pop (2002)

The importance of not-improvising

2009-06-25T09:19:59Z

The first performance of Joemus the band last night at West Germany in Kreuzberg was pretty dire, to be honest. If only I'd listened to Mark E. Smith! In Slates he shouts at The Fall, bashing out a primitive riff behind him: "Don't start improvising, for god's sake!"

What we did last night -- playing everything live by hand, with no material prepared (unless you count the paper masks Joe and Bastien assembled) and just making it all up as we went along -- is very much a Berlin thing to do. When I do shows outside Berlin, I both respect and disrespect the audience. I respect them in the sense that I give them highly-edited, polished pieces of music I know in advance they're going to like. I disrespect them in the sense that I don't "challenge" them by doing anything too weird and unexpected. But because Berlin is a big laboratory, an experimental city, I like to try out different things when I play live here. My last show consisted of remade versions of songs I'd written in my teens and rejected because they were embarrassing. This time, we decided to improvise. The idea was to recreate onstage the process of making the Joemus album, rather than simply recreate the finished album.

The results -- when I listened back to the recording I made -- were depressing. Joe and Bastien had technical problems, while I flailed around trying not to rhyme "park" with "dark" and "tree" with "sea". There was one moment when the ghost of a nice song -- something a bit like Gilbert and Lewis (from Wire), a bit like Modern English, a bit early 80s and melancholic -- emerged. Here it is:

Modern English (mp3 file, mono, 4MB, 4mins 18secs)

At other moments I rapped (in the "Cockney menace" style of my collaborations with o.lamm and Hypo) about a Mrs Abraham Jones ("running from a burning Bible, with her hair on fire, with blood spilling from her foot, screaming of nothing and frightened of the world") or made up a tale of "three significant stalkers, stalking me all the time". It's the kind of improv I do in my art performances with language, and I've done it successfully in a musical context with, for instance, the loop-building pedal delay trick and Tomoko Miyata's bowl music.

But this time -- perhaps because I know Joe's capable of shining when he broaches shaped pop structures -- my feeling is it fell flat. We never really got started. We could've done so much more with the audience's time and attention. I came away from the first Joemus-as-band show more than ever convinced that you should do this kind of brainstorming in private, edit ruthlessly and meticulously, and only confront the public when you've got something worth showing them. Even in Berlin.

In praise of tiles

2009-06-24T10:24:51Z

Staying in the Athens district of Kerameikos last week, it seemed appropriate to get interested in the ceramic environment; the floor and wall tiles the area is famous for. But tiles have become, more generally and rather surprisingly, something of an enthusiasm for me recently. They improve any environment they're added to, and I certainly wouldn't say that about, for instance, graffiti, wheatpasting, or tagging.

I haven't been to Islamic North Africa, which is obviously the world centre of mathematically-intricate non-representational tiling. I haven't been to Isfahan in Iran either. The paragon-paradigm of European tiling is obviously Portugal, and I have been there, and snapped the walls. Both the trad and modernist designs in Lisbon pleased me, and I liked the crumbliness of it all.

I also like the tiles in the New York subway, the tiles in the old ProQM bookshop in Berlin (a converted butcher's shop), and the tiles -- of course! -- in Japanese sento bathhouses.

In Athens I found myself shooting photos of tiling manufacturers' demo assemblages, mounted, weirdly, in the boarded-up windows of derelict buildings in eastern Kerameikos. In this one you see various clashing modes of floral representation, more or less abstract, plus a representational tile of showjumping horses leaping over a hedge. At some point these tiles must've been new, but they've got chipped and cracked like an old set of teeth, left to weather. Now they look like remnants from a lost civilisation.

These tiles were in the entrance hallway of the building we were staying in, and the ones below in a shop in Nea Ionia.

Back to Berlin, these are the tiles on the floor of a gallery called Artspace Berlin, in Mitte. They often (for me) upstage the art on the walls.

Here's a slideshow of other photos (taken with my dubious Camson) from my Greek trip:

Momus plays live tonight -- as one third of a band called Joemus! -- at West Germany.

Retro-robo-impro

2009-06-23T08:46:59Z

"Shibuya-kei princess" Kahimi Karie reveals in her lifestyle column in the MyLOHAS blog that she's working on a new album, her first since 2006's Nunki. Jim O'Rourke -- who's collaborated as much with KK this decade as I did back in the 90s -- is involved.

Kahimi doesn't revisit her 1990s hits much -- she's much more interested in quiet left-field experimentalism these days -- but another singer is currently doing that for her. Aira Mitsuki released her first album, C.O.P.Y., at the end of 2008. Here's her cover of Kahimi's early song Mike Alway's Diary, and this is her take on Cornelius' big hit Star Fruits Surf Rider.

When I first heard these, I thought that Aira Mitsuki must be a robot singer, like Yamaha Vocaloid2 "singer" Miku Hatsune:

I marveled at the engineering feat of catching Kahimi's inflexions so accurately in software, and planned immediately to buy the Aira Mitsuki package so I could score a new string of hits in Japan. But it seems she's a real girl, albeit with definite tendencies towards the robotic, the technotic, and the Barbie-baric.

When it comes to summing up the true essence of Shibuya-kei, though, I think "melody designers" (that's their jingle showreel above) Lullatone probably do it better. Their song A Plastic Bag in the Wind (from the new album Songs That Spin in Circles) has the naive bossa feel of I Am A Kitten. If I ever wanted to make a robotic-retro version of Shibuya-kei, Lullatone would be my bitches.

But -- like Kahimi -- I'm too interested in the present to do that. Joemus -- now a band! -- plays a live set of improvised, unheard material at West Germany on Wednesday night. Rather than recreating the Joemus album, we've decided to recreate the experience of making the Joemus album -- that moment when I received unfamiliar tracks from Joe and tried to write and sing lyrics over the top of them. So I'm going to be attempting to sing new songs over Joe tracks I've never heard before. Impro is the opposite of retro.

Publish and be...

2009-06-22T06:57:11Z

Question: Your first review of your first novel, how exciting is that? Answer: Exciting enough to mention! And publish, damn it!

The review appears (three months before the book is officially released by Dalkey, damn it!) in Dossier, a Brooklyn culture review which also titillates its readers in the new issue with Lou Doillon's breasts. Reviewer Adam Novy is a novelist and poet who teaches literature at Pratt. His students call him "hilarious" with "a dark sense of humor", so I can see why he liked the book. Here's what he wrote.

Dossier issue 3, 2009
The Book of Jokes by Momus
Review by Adam Novy

At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.

Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” (124) He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” (150) And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” (49) This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.

The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem. Adam Novy

The temple gift store

2009-06-21T11:18:24Z

In Bali, the beaches and sea are traditionally considered the realm of chthonian forces, whereas the stratovolcano Gunung Agung is the seat of the gods. I thought of this as Hisae and I left the tourist-thronged beaches of Aegina behind on Friday afternoon and our Yamaha climbed the pined slopes of the small mountain (the "Mountain of Pan-Greek Zeus") topped by the Temple of Aphaia. Nobody was there; as soon as I cut the motorbike engine the only sounds on the mountaintop were doves, cicadas, crows, chickens, the keening wind in the pines, and perhaps the odd light plane flying overhead.

We didn't leave commerce entirely behind, though. Before heading up to the sacred site on the summit, Hisae and I made for the temple gift shop and cafe and ordered two iced coffees. An old man mixed up Nescafe with ice and foamed milk, serving it with two glasses of water. Hanging beside the bar was a Japanese calendar.

This calendar threw me into an interesting state of gestalt confusion. Was I in Greece, or Japan? Was it a Shinto temple we were about to visit, or a temple to an ancient Greek nymph? I'd already seen this juxtaposition from the other side: in Scratch Japan, find ancient Greece I documented an Osaka exhibition dedicated to the idea that Alexander the Great and the traders of the Silk Road brought a Greek influence to early Mahayana Buddhism.

Something about the Aphaia temple cafe reminded me of the Buddhist gift stores I love so much around Japanese temples. They're usually surrounded by the same pine trees, lit by the same fluorescent lights, enchanted by the same sense of fusty neglect, and offering the same odd commercial spin-off products from arcane and archaic religious artifacts and symbols.

These stores aspire, in a half-hearted way, to be museums; the Greek one boasted reproduction masks and busts, painted plates, statuettes, costumes and other "treasures", some displayed in glass vitrines. In Japan, the stores feature similarly didactic, eccentric wares. Imagine a house furnished entirely with this stuff!

Like the gift store at the Kōtoku-in temple in Kamakura, the gift shop at the Temple of Aphaia offers refreshment as well as trinkets, confectionary and snacks themed around the temple experience.

In Kamakura this takes the form of "spiritually-themed food" in attractively-restrained packaging depicting the daibutsu, the Great Buddha, a hollow bronze statue of the Amida Buddha you can climb inside for the princely sum of 10 yen.

At Aphaia the food of choice is locally-grown pistachio nuts. Or how about some sponges, caught in the sea nearby? Or some "precious" earthenware pots that might date from 500BC (the date of the extant Temple of Aphaia) or from yesterday (does it really matter)?

It's important that the cafe be somewhat stark and monastic, be staffed by someone very ancient and relaxed, and offer very little. In Japan, you should order a matcha green tea and some warabi mochi -- sweet things are allowed, but they should be traditional, and not wrapped too gaudily. In Greece, you might want honey-soaked or sugar-sprinkled melomakarona or loukoumia.

Around the temple gift store great peace should reign, and a sense that things haven't changed, in their essentials, for thousands of years. Old gods haunt this place, but they are not serious ones, not evangelistic or scary or monopolistic or omniscient, like the mushroom-cloud-shaped deity of the Christian religion.

No, these deities are sexy nymphs like Aphaia herself -- her Shinto-like cult goes back more than twelve centuries before Christ (she's a local Aegina deity "associated with fertility and the agricultural cycle") -- or relaxed, kindly philosophers like the Buddha. They lay no claim to your eternal soul, but might have some good advice about life -- or how to use your cock.

The Man from Messagros

2009-06-20T14:01:48Z

Myth and mystery of the house at Messagros was a Click Opera entry I posted back in April, prompted by a film by Olaf Nicolai shown at the first Athens Biennial. Yesterday, chugging up and down the hills of Aegina on a rented Yamaha Neo's with Hisae clinging pillion, I found the house and saw it with my own eyes. Well, eye.

It wasn't easy. The house is a ruin, located in a rather remote inner area of the island. We only found it because, at Messagros, I approached a young farm labourer and said "Rodakis House?" Luckily the man had heard of it, and signaled us to follow his pick-up truck.

We drove up to a family house, and here the farmer jumped onto a motorbike and again told us to follow him. We sped down a side-lane, then took another off it, then zoomed up a hill, and suddenly the derelict shape of the Rodakis house was on our left.

"Archeologos?" quizzed the man as he led us through the thistles, avoiding the bees, assailed by huge and vicious horse-flies. No, I said, just tourists.

The man made to leave us alone with the house. I tried to stuff a €5 note into his hand, but he protested "Ochi, ochi!" and said, as if in explanation: "I am from Messagros!"

The nihilism of heat

2009-06-19T05:49:12Z

Earlier this week the mercury hit 38 celsius here in Athens, which is 100 fahrenheit. Shuffling along slowly in my salwar kamiz, radically reducing our plans for the day, I found a phrase forming in my head: the nihilism of heat.

Western novels -- particularly books with a colonial or post-colonial setting -- are full of this "nihilism". There's Mersault, the "outsider" in Camus' novel of the same title, who feels an inner void during his mother's funeral and is finally led to murder an Arab out on the sand, spurred on by the sun itself: "All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, instinctively, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes."

In hot places, human life seems to be worth less. Iraq is a place where an army of Mersaults in the form of soldiers and "contractors" are constantly on the brink of breaching their own culture's taboos, driven to acts of violence by the murderous heat. Under the sun, nothing matters any more.

In hot places people drive like maniacs. According to the European Council for Transportation Safety, Greece has the highest rate of traffic accident fatalities among all EU member- states, followed by Portugal and Spain. I'm not surprised: our taxi driver on Sunday evening drove with just one hand on the wheel, the other clicking worry beads. Greek driving tends to mean overtaking on blind corners, assuming the Orthodox saint dangling from the rear-view mirror will see you clear.

It's not just human life which is cheap in hot places, but animal life too. Dead feral dogs and cats litter the roadside. There's also little respect for the idea of pavements or sidewalks. In cooler, more northern countries a fundamental sense of fairness informs the idea that sidewalks are for pedestrians, roads for cars. In hot countries, though, cars hog the pavements too, using them for parking and completely blocking them, forcing people -- even mothers with prams -- out into the highway.

Graham Greene is an excellent chronicler of the dreary nihilism of life in hot places. Tench in The Power and the Glory is a seedy washed-up dentist with lax anaesthetic habits, desperate to get back to England from Mexico. He opens the window and "immediately the sun came in like a white-hot bar". Later, Tench hunts for an ether cylinder in "the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust" and "memory drained out of him in the heat". Again and again, heat saps and empties the characters in novels like this. In Conrad's Heart of Darkness the northerner's inner void is replaced by "the horror, the horror".

In hot places things rot, literally and physically. Hygiene goes by the board, and you experience an inner void in the form of the sudden expulsion of your lunch, the victim of "holiday tum". But the inner decay is not just literal. There's corruption, political and financial corruption, everywhere. It goes to the very top. Everyone is on the take. No-one is incorruptible, and only a fool would try to expose the baksheesh-takers. Life can only go on if you pay a bribe into the right hands, a bribe that will turn the eyes of scrutiny away and deflect the laws that actually apply in more northerly climes (laws, perhaps, devised in Brussels).

Some say that cultural psychology changes as you move closer to the equator. In Discovering Psychology with Philip Zimbardo, a precis of a film about cultural psychology made for the University of Stanford, James Jones of the University of Delaware argues that a way of being has evolved near the equator featuring particular uses of time, rhythm, improvisation, orality, and spirituality. What he describes is a failure to defer gratification:

"Time in mainstream America is a commodity used to control the future, regulate our economy, and shape our behavior. But time ticks differently in the West African cultural context where time is often focused on the present. The closer you get to the equator the more you describe people in terms of present time orientation. In some cases people call it social time. Time is defined by behavior and by feelings and by being in the world so time doesn't have an independent meaning that imposes itself on our behavior from moment to moment. Our behavior actually determines time."

That might be the best take on the inner void created by heat: that it places us firmly in the now and in the here, and forces us to improvise and impose our will, directed by our desire. And you can't fault weather that makes women take so many clothes off.

Priests of the Fruit and Flower religion

2009-06-17T22:42:16Z

On arriving in Athens, I began to speculate about the ancient Greek religion. Little did I know that I'd become an initiate, before the week was out, in a new religion that partakes in some of its mysteries.

It all began on Tuesday, when Hisae and I entered a crumbly old house in Kerameikos and found a group of people assembled in a courtyard at the back, distilling. A priest-like man began to explain to me that they were making a sacred sort of vodka flavoured with a stone obtained from the Acropolis. A Greek friend later told me that taking stones from the Acropolis is punishable by a prison sentence, but I am informed the priestlike man intends to return the stone after the vodka has been made.

For some reason the man (seen above, disguised by sunglasses) began to speak of an oracle, a ghost, a double seen in a mirror. He said that he was the keeper of a gallery on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side of New York, and that he had access to an oracle. He advised me to come back and drink the vodka when it was ready.

The following day we met this man by chance near the Agora. Despite living in New York, he seems to be from the Mediterranean. His gallery is called Fruit and Flower Deli, and its mysterious cult is described here. According to sacred documents he is actually called Rodrigo Mallea Lira, and he is the Keeper of the Oracle. The Oracle is a painting by the Swedish artist Ylva Ogland, wife of The Keeper. The painting -- which we saw -- represents a mysterious oracular mirror brought by her family when they came to Sweden from Britain. This mirror apparently makes prouncements about the state of the gallery, and of the world. (Is it true, by the way, that the Delphic Oracle obtained her visions by inhaling ethylene fumes from a poisonous stream that flowed through her temple? I believe so.)

Later, we encountered The Keeper at a party in a vacant Kerameikos lot where Ylva Ogland -- whom I believe is also called The Ghost -- was folding paper hats bearing oracular invocations. Donning one of these hats and sipping the sacred Acropolean vodka instantly inducts one into the Brotherhood of the Oracle, so Hisae and I both became, immediately, priests in the Fruit and Flower religion. We were photographed in front of a sacred oleander by Pablo Leon de la Barra, who kindly conferred his own priesthood -- in the shape of his folded paper hat -- on Hisae.

ReMap2 redeems Athens

2009-06-17T09:26:56Z

ReMap2 -- supposedly a secondary and parallel event -- is everything the official Athens art biennial isn't. Whereas the official biennial (whose frustrations I listed yesterday) battles indifference and motor traffic down at the beach, ReMap2 is positively buzzing with curious people, and is sited in the charismatically crumbly inner city district of Kerameikos / Metaxurgeio.

Kerameikos / Metaxurgeio (often abbreviated to KM) means ceramics and silk, and the district, just to the north of Plaka and the Agora, traditionally housed those professions -- as well as a bunch of undertakers. It has a tight streetplan which restricts traffic damage, big immigrant communities (Chinese and North Africans, many of them illegal and paperless), lots of weird post-acid bouzouki ballrooms (trad music has a new lease of life here amongst the young), and a ton of industrial infrastructure, like the gasworks where the first Athens biennial took place in 2007.

Even if the art weren't good in ReMap2 -- and it's mostly excellent -- the tour of KM that you take to see it, map in hand, would be worth the visit alone. I don't think there's a more charismatic area in any city I know. Imagine the Lower East Side in the 1980s, with crumbling old Greek buildings instead of tenements. Imagine bits of Tokyo -- Daikanyama, say, but much poorer -- and bits of Hong Kong. Imagine the evocative patina of Berlin. KM has all of that.

Just as in the official biennial, you can borrow bikes at ReMap to see the district. But here the bikes are much funkier, artist-modified machines sprayed gold, tiny stunt bikes and big mountain bikes. Here it's done with panache. Everywhere you go there seem to be empty buildings, and they seem to have lain empty since the 2007 ReMap event, despite rumours of gentrification in the area.

In fact, some things have got worse in KM since 2007. Plots of wasteground hosting artworks also have used condoms and syringes lying on the ground. There's a lot of prostitution and drug addiction here, and recently there's been a spate of drug-related stabbings and shootings in the area too. And yet, at 11pm, on the pavement outside The Friends restaurant (officially a bar, the excellent, cheap food isn't listed on any menu, and gets whispered to you when you arrive), you feel like you're in Athens' best-kept, most charismatic secret. It feels like a village in the Greek islands, with its crumbly white-painted walls and shuttered windows.

The only place more bombed-out looking than KM is the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. We learn this from an exhibition of photos taken by 500 Palestinian children with cameras given them in a project called Lahza -- the arabic word for "glimpse". Elsewhere, we encounter old friends: Michael Portnoy's gambling pieces, David Woodard's Wishing Machine (I entered the wish "David, wish you were here!"), and a wonderful hammock by Bless.

We'll be back in KM today to sample more of the (free) delights of ReMap 2. Thank God -- well, the gods -- it's on, and here, just a short walk from where Hisae and I are staying. Today we'll borrow funky bikes and see the bits we missed, and visit the nearby Puzzle Festival. Tomorrow we might trek out to the Deste Foundation, on the recommendation of Javier Peres. Deste is the creation of billionaire collector Dakis Joannou -- a big fan of Jeff Koons, apparently. It's housed in the suburb of Nea Ionia, fifteen kilometers outside Athens.

Bigger pictures on Flickr.

Heaven: the biennial from hell

2009-06-16T07:32:49Z

I was pleasantly surprised by the crisp, modern clarity of the first Athens Biennial, staged in (and focused geographically by) a converted gas works in Kerameikos. With panache, the 2007 edition (titled Destroy Athens) avoided any of the bungling and bad curation you might expect from a nation not quite on the contemporary art map. The 2009 version -- titled, ironically, Heaven -- is a bit different.

We'd already heard that things were chaotic. Over the weekend, two preview days were arranged for the press and the international art set. You could only get in, officially, if you were invited or an accredited press person. But one friend who was planning to review the biennial for a British monthly art mag hadn't managed to get her accreditation confirmed, and scrapped her review in frustration.

Hisae and I opted to see the biennial on Monday, as normal punters (openings aren't a good time to see art). It proved very, very difficult even to find. This year it's spread out along the beach at Flisvos, though you wouldn't know this from the terrible biennial website, which lists an administrative address in central Athens. Only if you know to click the blue heaven button (it looks like an advert) do you reach a part of the website with a link to actual visitor advice -- though still no actual address for the venue, Google Maps link, or, in fact, a map of any kind.

Getting to Flisvos involved taking a subway then a tram, and Hisae and I spent a frustrating couple of hours in which all we could find of the biennial were small blue labels promising, here and there, a performance on a day we weren't going to be there. Staff at venues supposedly holding biennial events -- the Flisvos Marina, the Village Cinema -- knew nothing about it. "The biennial is happening all over Athens," one security guard told us, after making a phonecall (in fact, there were events in the marina he was guarding). Even the biennial's own car park attendants -- presiding over vast, car-less lots -- didn't know where the event's component parts were. The main biennial venue turned out to be a disused motorway flyover bridge near the Delta Falirou tramstop. Who knew? (That's the venue behind Hisae in the picture.)

When we eventually located "heaven" we had it -- on its first day, which should have been super-busy -- to ourselves. We were outnumbered by the staff, and wandered through the halls (which, because of the shape of the flyover, got lower and lower as you got further in) alone. Sound spilled from one video installation to the next -- which often happens at biennials. What doesn't happen so much is an electricity problem which knocks out 40% of all video projections. Signs begged us not to use cellular and wifi devices because "they interfere with the video".

There was some good-ish art and some shockingly bad art all mixed up, but it was hard to get past the utter organisational failure of the Second Athens Biennial. Even the brand-new bicycles hidden round the back (the staff seemed astonished we even knew about them -- we discovered them by accident) turned out to be mostly defective, so as well as signing a long claims waiver document (in Greek only, but laboriously translated by the staff, clause by clause) there had to be extensive car park testing to find a bike that actually worked. Ours had saddles that slipped around and cables that tangled with the spokes.

Revisiting the biennial venues with bikes didn't help much. Heaven staff had told us, for instance, that a film by Malcolm McLaren was screening every thirty minutes at the Village Cinema's Gold Cafe. This came as news to the waitress there, who consulted with her manager and told us that the film would only be shown after 10pm. Further down the coast, the Live Events pavilion boasted a screening of Kantor's seminal avant garde play The Dead Class. Only trouble was, the monitor was off, and nobody was around to switch it on.

In the end, the biennial was upstaged by the violent traffic roaring down the coast, by elderly bathers wallowing in the sea, by the almighty sun, and by a dramatic bush fire on a nearby mountainside, which required small seaplanes to dive-bomb it with water. If this aerial operation had been mounted as lackadaisically as Heaven was, Athens would probably now lie in cinders. I'm told the fires themselves are organised, a scam builders use to raze legally-protected scrubland.

Steve and Vasiliki

2009-06-15T07:33:40Z

I first met Steve Harvey last year in Luxembourg, where we were both performing at MUDAM, at a conference about appropriation in art. Steve had recreated the final Ziggy Stardust concert as an artwork for Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and in Luxembourg he did a performance in which he "learned" Bowie's Brel cover My Death onstage, rewinding the tape over and over until he had the exact inflexions of Bowie's voice, the exact chords and rhythms of the 12-string guitar part.

Steve -- who's a painter specialising in sci-fi-like scenarios -- lives in Athens with his Greek girlfriend Vasiliki, who's an actress. Yesterday Hisae and I spent several hours in their company. It's one of the things I like most, just to visit people in their apartment, find out how they live and how much they pay and what they do. I'm a "life inspector", but you don't have to tidy up when I come round!

I can report that Steve and Vasiliki are living very well. Their Kypseli apartment is high on the slopes of Turkuvounou, the low mountain I lived on the other side of, growing up in Paleo Psychiko as a child. (When evening began to descend we took the obligatory hike over the mountain and I showed everyone my old house.)

Steve and Vasiliki pay €520 for a space that's about 70 square metres -- two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom and living room, plus big balconies on either side. It's up on the top floor and near the peak of a steeply-sloping street, so by the time you get out onto the back balcony the view out over Athens is pretty impressive -- a glittering white sprawl hemmed in by mountains. In this city almost as charismatic as Kyoto, the rents are almost as cheap as Berlin's.

Vasiliki had some interesting tales to tell of her work with the avant garde theatre companies M-Kultra and F2 Performance Unit. In one, the audience had been taken from location to location, and Vasiliki, barefooted and mini-skirted in an alley outside the Bios theatre, had met individual audience members and allowed them to think they were determining a random route through the city by casting dice. The walk ended in a shady Kerameikos car park, where the punters were spirited off to the next location, the next interaction, in a three-wheeled motorbike.

This approach to theatre reminded me of the work of Japanese avant garde director Shuji Terayama. Here's a clip documenting his piece Knock, from 1975:

The audience for Knock picked up a map at the west exit of Shinjuku station. On it were marked locations for eighteen performances happening simultaneously across Tokyo during a thirty-hour period in places like public bathhouses, balloons, dark boxes, astronomical observatories. The performance was finally ended by the police -- you can hear them asking peevish questions at the end of the clip.

Chinese or Japanese?

2009-06-14T07:54:00Z

* A day walking around Athens -- Plaka, the Acropolis, Kolonaki Square and the floral slopes of Likabetos, dinner in Keiramikos -- taking out-of-focus snaps with my cheap Camson camera. I'm torn between rage that a whole tranche of memories will be blurred, and fascination with the highly original effects the Camson produces.

* At the Parthenon Hisae and I play "Chinese or Japanese?" It's getting more difficult; as Hisae points out, chains like Uniqlo are now pan-Asian, and economically there's also convergence between the two nations (they're neck-and-neck). But differences remain; I become fascinated by a young tour guide in a blue and white pinstriped shirt, United Bamboo style. This handsome woman in her late 20s is dressed as the kind of Edwardian English boy who might have played with a hoop-and-stick, ipso facto she can only be Japanese.

* Babis tries to convince me of the virtues of Cormac McCarthy. I read chunks of one of his novels, The Road, and admit that it's (inverted commas) good writing. But something annoys me about it. It's "emotionally correct". There's a man in it who acts as men should, and a child who acts as children should. Profound emotion is milked from their relationship, in words that are well-chosen. A critic on the jacket calls for the Nobel Prize for McCarthy, but I tell Babis the Nobel goes to much more subversive writers, people like Elfriede Jelinek, who constantly surprise and outrage and subvert.

* I'm much more interested in remembering the communist writer Aldo De Jaco. Aldo was married to Babis' mother until his death in 2003. He loomed over my holudays with Babis in Rome in the early eighties, a "reticent statue". Aldo and B's mother, both communists, met in prison in Athens during the military regime of the colonels. They lived together in Rome. Aldo wrote novels, accounts of his trips to Moscow, books about his beloved Sicily, and a constant flow of journalism for left wing Italian newspapers and magazines. Although he didn't speak much to me, he impressed me deeply. Not just intellectually -- as a member of a venerable generation of "committed" European intellectuals -- but physically. He was like a bust of Karl Marx brought to life in flesh. If I get a chance, I might interview Babis' mother -- she lives in Athens now -- about Aldo. Long mp3s are something my Camson handles with panache.

* For some reason Greece and Italy always put me in a literary frame of mind. I'm getting ideas for a second novel. It will be called Balbus, or The Book of Fuck, and concern a purely instinctual man-mountain, part-Baal, part Mr Hyde, trying to exist in a graph-paper, airport security sort of world. Late Freudian stuff about the incompatibility of instinct and civilisation, then, but -- oh hell! -- I've jinxed it now.

In Athena's city

2009-06-13T07:51:58Z

Ah, Athens. It's still in the eurozone -- no passports, no currency exchange -- and yet it's as oriental and strange as Europe gets. Up on the roof terrace of my old friend Babis' house in the warm night, I'm gazing at the most amazing sight: the skull-like stones of the Parthenon, with the skull-like hulk of a hollow moon looming above it. I'm here for the Athens art biennial and its funky spinoff ReMap2, but I'm wondering about the Greek religion.

How come it doesn't have a name, that religion? We just call it "Greek mythology", but of course no active religion ever admits it's a mythology. Religions in general don't tend to give themselves names -- it's a little too relativistic, and a religion is a cosmology, an account of everything that is. It would prefer to be totalitarian -- to be the account of the origins of everything rather than another account of the origins of everything.

But the Greek religion was a religion, and on the Acropolis stood a magnificent temple to Pallas Athena in her role of Athena Parthenos, Athena the virgin. There was a gigantic golden statue of this virgin, born by parthenogenesis (springing fully-grown and armed from the forehead of Zeus) inside the pillared main hall of the temple. As for Athena's origins, thousands of years BC, people say she originated in the ancient Egyptian religion (there isn't a name for that either) and came to Greece via Libya and the Minoan culture of Crete.

Athens is the virgin's city, and her temple still looms over it. I was a virgin when I first came to live here, but the orgasmic cries drifting up to the roof terrace and the couple dramas being enacted on the narrow, vibrant, orange tree-lined streets below suggest that Athenians don't stay virgins long.

Later in the week we'll take a 7 euro, one-hour ferry to the island of Aegina, to see the mysterious house -- itself containing the symbols of the cosmology of an unnamed religion -- I blogged about a couple of months back. Aegina too is Athena's island. The virgin seems to be flirting with us.

Deutschlandfunk

2009-06-11T23:53:18Z

If I were to link to a bootleg mp3 of the 50-minute documentary 700 Minutes with a Flaneur: The Modern Life of the Scottish Artist Momus, transmitted over the terrestrial German public radio network on the 27th of February this year, it might be for the following reasons, and with the following provisos:

* I'd say, first of all, that I was delighted with this programme, and how it angled Click Opera and its themes in the direction of a specifically German romanticism, idealism, protestantism, even mysticism. (No, that's not Jesus on the left, it's a Dürer self-portrait, and therefore perhaps the most famous German image of an artist.)

* I'd say that since the content of the hörspiel originates in Click Opera entries, there's a kind of organic, ecological symmetry to the fact that it should end up back here, and that since one of the main themes of the documentary is digital flow, it's completely apt that it should itself flow.

* I'd say that releasing this bootleg today is appropriate because the juxtaposition with yesterday's Cherry Red interview is a telling one; Katharina Teichgräber's elegant sonic articulation is a more arty, immersive way to present my ongoing projects, intimate and evocative in the way only radio can be.

* I'd point out that whereas the Cherry Red interview mostly concentrated on the past, 700 Minutes is focused on the present and the future.

* I'd want to stress that Katharina Teichgräber, the author of this piece, has not approved the bootlegging.

* I'd underline that the programme was aired back in February without warning, missed by most interested parties here in Germany, and not repeated.

* I'd caution that the show is, of course, in the German language, but say that it's texturally rich enough to be interesting nevertheless, and contains chunks of interview (with, amongst others, Bob Stein from if:book) in English.

* I'd add that I very willingly pay the Deutschlandfunk's hefty license fee. Just yesterday I was round at my friend Jan's flat, and from his little kitchen radio came the most incredibly beautiful, sober, spiritual music -- a programme in which 16th century European music was mixed with Japanese traditional music, inspired by the voyages of the monk Francis Xavier. Deutschlandfunk, of course.

* I'd say that the measured, clear, super-civilised tones of this station really take me to another planet, and that when Deutschlandfunk turns its attention to Momus and Click Opera it puts them on a different planet too. Momus becomes Albrecht Dürer, and Click Opera his meticulous drawing of a hare (Pok, perhaps?).

* I'd say the best British radio parallel I can think of would be the work of producer Piers Plowright, whose Radio 3 documentaries about artists employed the music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. His Paul Klee feature Going For A Walk With A Line, with music by the late Malcolm Clarke, really changed my life back in 1979. In the 700 Minutes programme Clarke's music is evoked by the snatches of Ursula Bogner music, a project in which Jan Jelinek was -- for sure -- consciously evoking the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

* Blushing slightly and dreading the inevitable vanity-slashing Twit Opera jibes, I might quote the programme blurb, translated from German:

700 Minutes with a Flaneur
The Modern Life of the Scottish Artist Momus
By Katharina Teichgräber

"Slender, with a penchant for wristbands, blonde wigs and Japanese pants -- this is the musician and performer Momus. His blog, started in 2004, has been ranked amongst the best in the world. When Momus is, for example, riding a bike without brakes, he might be thinking about the architecture the Americans have erected in Baghdad and Berlin, or the modern forms of aesthetic asceticism. He might be thinking about a Japanese Bin Laden seduced by 'food porn', or about 'emotional communism' from Walter Benjamin and John Berger to Karl Kraus and Brian Eno. The ideas in his blog entries, illustrated with beautiful pictures and movies, come to him during early morning baths. Some find Momus' immense classical education disconcerting; others see him as a semi-legendary, ironic post-New Wave experimental pop musician who makes CDs with dirty lyrics (according to The New Yorker). But Momus is indoors and out. He talks happily about "constant flow", and spends a few hours a day in the chair in front of his iMac. For in the end, his homeland is the net."

* I might add that though I never achieved, in my music career, that tense, electric moment when a hush descends on the thousands waiting in the arena as the revered band picks its way across a stage lit only by amplifier lights, I did achieve this. (I say this in case my plane to Athens crashes later today.)

* I'd probably end by saying how happy this radio feature made me, and how its sympathetic treatment of Click Opera vindicates a page -- a "probe", as McLuhan would have put it -- you and I launch daily. I'd like it to make you happy too. This was Click Opera's moment on the Deutschlandfunk. We were heroes... just for one day.

How did I pass my time on earth? Now it can be revealed!

2009-06-11T00:35:22Z

Got an hour or so to spare, and find yourself wondering "How the hell did this Momus guy pass his time on earth, musically speaking?" Now it can be revealed in The Momus Story, the interview I recorded for Cherry Red TV on May 29th:

Pirates in the lagoon

2009-06-10T00:39:22Z

On Sunday the world's biggest art biennial -- the 53rd Venice Art Biennale -- opened. I'll be there in the flesh at some point before November, but for now I'm depending on the Vernissage TV coverage. Oh, and did I mention I'm sort of in it this year?

A mere week before the biennale opened, Oliver Laric (one of the artists behind VVORK) asked me to make a new commentary track for his video piece Versions (warning: containing, as it does, a naked humping Madonna, Oliver's video is Not Safe For VVORK). I made an absurd, incomprehensible lecture about the difference between duplication and duplicity (clue: it's pretty similar to the difference between erotica and pornography).

My version of Versions is now being projected (as part of a "collateral event" organised by Miltos Manetas, a thing called The Internet Pavilion) in a corridor in the Magazzini del Sale, an old salt depot located between the Venezia Guggenheim and the flashy new Punta della Dogana Museum. The salt depot, a squat-turned-official, has been hosting lefty-anarchist events featuring Toni Negri and Claire Fontaine. They got raided on Monday by the Italian police because Swedish copyright activists Pirate Bay were giving away books, records and films there. (Update: this statement is corrected by a member of Pirate Bay in the comments section.)

I declared my support for Pirate Bay a couple of months back, when the filesharers were handed down prison sentences and hefty fines by a lower Swedish court. They're currently appealing, but the judgement is now seen to have been an epic fail on the part of the Swedish authorities, raising the Pirates' profile and swelling the ranks of their supporters. This week their official wing, the Pirate Party, won 7.1% of Swedish votes in the European elections, ensuring them a seat in the European parliament and the chance to push officially their agenda of deregulating copyright, abolishing the patent system, and reducing internet surveillance.

Italian newspaper Il Gazzettino reported the police raid on Pirate Bay's Venice "collateral event" and quoted a government bod calling the action by these "pirates in the lagoon" "a very serious and harmful initiative". A video by one of Manetas' other artists, Aleksandra Domanovic, caught the Pirate Bay spirit better: a model town in a lagoon catches fire as the chords from Brecht's song The Ballad of Pirate Jenny play in what sounds like a cheap, freely-downloaded MIDI version.

It's appropriate, then, that I should end this entry with a piece of self-piracy. The latest Darla compilation, Dr Darla's Magic Music 32-in-1 Hemp Peppermint, features a previously-unheard outtake from the Joemus sessions, a Bond theme-like song (with a time signature change and a Howard Devoto reference!) called Odd Man Out. Follow this link and you can hear Odd Man Out in its entirety, over and over again, for no money whatsoever!