click opera

Barry Greaves (1977 - 2009): the unsung twitterer

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:10:15 GMT

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Barry Greaves, the author of the satirical Twitter feed Twit Opera.

Greaves (32, unemployed) lived with his parents at Newfield Drive, off Selby Road in Garforth, Leeds.

"We noticed something was amiss at about six o'clock on Friday evening," Mary Greaves (58), Barry's mother, told Echo reporters.

"He hadn't taken in his lunch. I always leave it outside his door on a tray. Barry likes -- liked -- his privacy."

"Aye, he wasn't banging around like he usually does up there," echoed Barry's father Greg Greaves (62, retired). "I went over to the computer to see if he'd updated Twit Opera that day, and he hadn't. That's when we realised something was very wrong."

Since April, Barry -- a graduate of Leeds University's Engineering department -- has been writing a daily micro-parody of Click Opera, the blog of Scottish artist Momus. He became a master of Twitter's unique capacity to boil complex, interesting things down to 140 characters or less and make them look trivial and superficial.

"Twit Opera became the focus of Barry's day," Mary told reporters, "especially after he lost his job at the car wash."

"Barry tended to be restless and edgy until Momus posted. He'd reload the Click Opera homepage over and over murmuring 'Come on, come on, post, you bastard!' His day's work couldn't really start until Momus published something, you see. When the blog went up, he'd spend a couple of hours just thinking about how to make it look small, silly and self-serving. He'd compile lists of the most withering summaries he could come up with and read them aloud in different voices and accents, dressed up in front of the mirror."

"After he'd polished five or six of the most vicious summaries, Barry would take the momentous decision on which one to finally tweet. He'd do that by tossing coins or invoking spirits using his ouija board. Then he went live before his audience on Twitter. At that point there'd be a couple of minutes of euphoria -- we'd hear him punching the wall, calling out 'Gotcha!', and opening the door a few inches to take in his food."

"Then the whole process would start again."

Emergency crew were called to the scene when Greaves failed to answer prolonged and persistent knocking by his parents at his bedroom door on Friday evening. They found Greaves stretched out on his bed, dressed as the poet Chatterton. Medical staff quickly determined that his feed was tweeting feebly and his RSS was flat-lining. He was rushed to St Benedicts Parish Centre, but ceased to twitter in the ambulance. No amount of reloading could revive him.

"The thing you have to realise about Barry," said his mother Mary, "is that no matter how much he may have seemed to be slagging it off, he really loved Click Opera. He didn't intend to hurt or disparage Momus in any way."

"In fact, deep down Barry aspired to be Momus. He took everything he said to heart. For instance, when Momus declared oblong-shaped glasses had been superseded in 'a spectacles paradigm shift', Barry was devastated. He burst into the living room that day, threw his 1990s-style 'designer' spectacles -- the ones he'd worn at uni -- down on the carpet, and stamped on them repeatedly, uttering gruff shouts as he smashed them to smithereens. The next thing we knew, he had a pair of retro Raybans. He wore them when he was sleeping."

"He even had his room papered in wood-effect wallpaper to make it look like the background behind Momus's LiveJournal. Click Opera was his whole world."

"Aye," echoed Greg Greaves, "he started dressing in packing blankets and wearing them daft plastic Birkenstocks with no socks. Then he demanded to know where the greatest concentrations of Turkish guest workers were to be found in the greater Leeds area. I told him I didn't think there were any. Once I caught him looking -- with one eye covered -- at pictures of naked pregnant Japanese lasses in a dirty book. I told him 'You're just turning into a shorter version of that tosser Momus, you are!' He didn't like that one bit. He didn't like it when you said he was short, or made fun of Momus. That was his job."

Mary interrupted: "The last week was very hard on him, very hard. Momus ran a poll which revealed that most people disagreed with Barry's big theme that Click Opera was too personal to be interesting. The final straw was discovering that 30% of Click Opera readers thought that Momus wrote Twit Opera himself. Barry was crushed. Even an anonymous twitterer needs some kind of recognition, you know."

"That's why we've decided to make all this public now in the Leeds Echo, and give you the pictures to print. It's what Barry -- God rest his feed -- would have wanted."

Reprinted from the Leeds Echo, July 20th 2009

12 visual ideas from the UdK rundgang

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:38:58 GMT

What I love about walking round the annual degree shows at the Universität der Künste here in Berlin is the rush of ideas (some good, some bad) I get. They're ideas in visual form, and many of them combine immediacy with originality, proving that things can make sense quickly yet still be quite counter-intuitive and fresh. Here are a dozen ideas I spotted on my tour of the UdK rundgang yesterday:

A visual breakdown of classical portrait faces, from the Art in Context department.

There's unsuspected naked fun to be had with recycled Christmas trees.

You can still do painting and make it fresh and appealing, especially if you prop it on cool chairs.

Birds on a wire: turn them into notes on a stave and play that tune! It sounds random!

Let's document the kind of technology Granny has in her house!

Let's make Michael Jackson a kind of saint in halftone!

What if suits were totally transparent and people wore nothing underneath?

Let's make those maneki neko cats welcome themselves!

A bird cage is like an apartment block, and vice versa! Men are canaries!

A well-placed glass of water would make these sexist dickheads cool down!

Let's shoot pretty, waif-like hipster boys in a tombola rifle game!

In memoriam Web 2.0, with apologies (presumably) to David Shrigley.

Living in NKLN to keep PZBG alive

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:19:12 GMT

When you do a lot of interviews you tend to trot out rather similar answers to (inevitably) similar questions. But sometimes the phrasing of a question, a nudge or an effort -- a mental splurge further -- brings you to a new statement, a new insight which you find yourself making on the record. Those are the times it's really fun to do interviews -- as much fun as I'd imagine psychoanalysis must be.

On Friday I found myself sitting in my favourite Prenzlauer Berg cafe during a violent thunderstorm, talking to Jenna Sutela from a yet-to-be-launched Finnish design webzine called OK-DO. Just before Jenna arrived I snapped the photo above, which shows a part of the cafe sign (the word "happy") and, above it, the building's seriously bullet-pocked facade, a remnant of heavy fighting on this street between Nazis and Soviets back in 1945, and a very Berlin reminder of how even the happiest area might have been -- within living memory -- a site of strife.

Jenna's questions were nudging me towards the relationship between place and creative process, and I found myself telling her (it happens in psychoanalysis) something I didn't even quite know myself until I started saying it: that I live in Neukolln in order to incarnate the values of Prenzlauer Berg, whereas if I actually lived in Prenzlauer Berg I'd have to rebel against them.

Now, Prenzlauer Berg is what I've called an "end of history district" -- "no tension, no build, no conflict, no surprises". Here, all the problems of life seem to have been resolved, and here everybody thinks the same way. Everybody in Prenzlauer Berg is white, is creative, has excellent taste, and is reproducing. I exaggerate, of course, and the bullet scars show how recently things were different (why, even fifteen years ago this was a dangerous area, I hear). But that's the impression I get of PZBG now.

PZBG isn't Neukolln. After the interview was finished I met up with Hisae and we walked up Lychener Strasse, feeling like people shopping on holiday. There was lots to investigate: a new, super-chic stationery store, a Japanese crafts shop selling delightful handmade cloth bags from Kyoto, a shop selling sexy dresses for young pregnant mothers, the biggest organic supermarket I've ever seen, and Sasaya, Berlin's most tasteful, tasty Japanese restaurant, where we leafed through copies of Men's Fudge and Numéro Japan.

It was all great, but at the same time it was all way too bourgeois. Living here, I'd feel there were no more battles to fight, no more doors to kick open. History would stop, there'd be nothing to do but create future generations to hand one's good-taste, enlightened, healthy-living values down to.

Stuff in PZBG is stuff white people like. I'm a white person, and I like that stuff, but it all feels a bit tribal when you're there in PZBG, in the thick of it. You can't really feel individually responsible for that stuff any more. And if you're like me, you want to feel personally and individually responsible for communal and tribal values. Because you're perverse, or something. So what you do is live somewhere else, somewhere like Neukolln, and live in poverty, and only aspire vaguely to PZBG values, without ever seeing them realised around you. Because, as Kafka said, happiness consists in having an ideal and not advancing towards it.

Living in NKLN as a way to keep PZBG values alive in yourself, that's perverse! But it reminds me of how I felt when I married Shazna, my Bangladeshi wife. I felt like I could, for the first time, stop slumming, stop denying my bourgeois origins, but incarnate those values completely, precisely because Shazna didn't come from that background, and perhaps aspired towards it. If I'd married someone from my own culture and class, it would just have been robotic and tribal and idiotic. But because there was a cultural exchange going on, I could actually be proud of my Edinburgh New Town values, and since I was the only one there (in Paris, with Shazna) subscribing to them, I could feel personally responsible for them, feel like I owned them.

It's also possible that I came to share Shazna's aspirational perspective towards those values, in other words that I came to see them as something difficult-to-achieve rather than something fated and inevitable. And that's a bit like living in NKLN and only making the occasional trip up to PZBG, and working to bring little bits of PZBG to NKLN without seeing the hood swing entirely that way, and feeling the strangeness and frail glamour of PZBG, on tourist trips up there, without ever having to feel it pressing in on you from all sides like an oppressive totalising tribal system, a binding etiquette, a monoculture.

I don't want to live in PZBG because I don't want to have to rebel against it.

While seeming to vanish, class digs deeper

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:15:30 GMT

In my quotes for AFP about the Last King of Pop, I outlined the idea that social networking software might be joining with increasing Gini-gaps and the collapse of postmodernism's flattening of high and low culture to produce a new social stratification, or, rather, a return to a kind of social stratification not seen since the 1960s:

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

Another way to put this is to say that the only kings to exist in the future will be actual blue-blood kings (since monarchy seems to show no sign of going away) rather than self-proclaimed meritocratic entertainment world kings whose pomp, though it might have annoyed some, was also a way to say "anybody, from any background, can become a king". Calling yourself "the king of pop" was therefore, in a sense, a statement about social mobility, and a deconstruction of the blood claims of the aristocracy.

Yesterday I happened to be reading a Guardian Media article about -- of all things -- Graham Norton, the camp BBC host. The article quoted BBC1 controller Jay Hunt calling a Norton show "popular with C2DE viewers who we traditionally struggle to bring to the channel". The journalist (Stuart Jeffries) added "I'm not actually sure what a C2DE viewer is".

Since I wasn't sure either, I looked the term up. The NRS social grade scale was devised in the 1930s and describes the British class system (except for aristocrats, mysteriously absent) in a coded way. The letters are assigned according to the occupation of the principal breadwinner of a household (ah, that's why the aristocrats aren't there!):

A = Upper Middle Class: Higher managerial, administrative or professional (doctor, solicitor, barrister, accountant, company director)
B = Middle Class: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional (teacher, nurse, police officer, probation officer, librarian, middle manager)
C1 = Lower Middle Class: Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional (junior manager, student, clerical/office workers, supervisors)
C2 = Skilled Working Class: Skilled manual workers (foreman, agricultural worker, plumber, bricklayer)
D = Working Class: Semi and unskilled manual workers (manual workers, shop worker, fisherman, apprentices)
E = Those at the lowest levels of subsistence: Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the state for their income (casual labourers, state pensioners)

These categories can still describe the British class system fairly well -- and are still widely used by media and marketing people, despite the advent of rival systems from potato graphics to Mosaic geodemographics. You can use the NRS system to say things like "80% of Auto Trader readers are made up of social grade bracket B, C1 and C2" or "87% of Society Guardian readers are social grade ABC1 and 86% are educated to degree level or higher", and advertisers will know exactly who they have lined up in their sights. There's a fairly strong link between your NRS ranking and your cultural consumption patterns: "57% of Independent readers are deemed A or B on the NRS social grade, while just 11% of Sun readers, 14% of Daily Mirror readers, and 29% of Daily Mail and Daily Express readers occupy these socio-economic spaces," for instance.

But there's been a shift in the actual spread of the British population across the grid. The balance between ABC1s (middle class, white collar, broadsheet-reading) and C2DEs (working class, blue collar, tabloid-reading) has altered. The majority of British people are now ABC1s, whereas in the 1970s the middle classes would have been outweighed by C2DEs. This has happened through what we might call the "internationalisation of labour"; Britain doesn't really manufacture any more, so its working class has, in a sense, been outsourced to China (picture millions of Chinese in flat caps pigeon-fancying, supporting United, and watching Benny Hill). So it isn't so much that class has disappeared as that it's been internationalised. You have to travel a long way to see the people who smelt your steel now. They've been "hidden on the far side of the world".

Another reason that class has become less visible even as it's become more determinant is social networking. The internet has allowed us to filter our contact with others to such an extent that we're seldom likely to encounter anyone who thinks or feels significantly differently online -- unless we consciously seek them out. And why would we do that? To "challenge our own values"? Because "it's good for us"?

But perhaps the ultimate class gap today is between people who are and people who aren't on the internet. If you have internet access, you're part of a 15% global elite. Don't expect to encounter the other 85% online, your highness. They ain't here.

Scot Trek: To boldly come...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:07:27 GMT

The Book of Scotlands -- my first book -- has been, up until now, vaporware. It's existed, publicly, as a series of proposals, promises, premises, outlines, excerpts and readings. Not only is the book a series of descriptions of Scotlands which do not actually exist, but it hasn't, itself, existed either. Until now.

I'm delighted to announce that The Book of Scotlands -- did I mention it was my first book? -- is now available for immediate delivery via Amazon.de. The other Amazons will get it in a few weeks (stock is being shipped to the US by sea). Meanwhile, people out there are actually reading the tome, and some are already tweeting their impressions. Press reviews are imminent, and on August 15th I'll be doing dramatised readings from the book at ProQM in Berlin. Here's an extract from the book, the bit where Stanley Baxter tells Scotland to stop masturbating -- with impressive results!

* Scotland 45

It's a little-known fact that Alfred Kinsey came to Scotland shortly after publishing Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. He came with his friend Alan Lomax, the ethno-musicologist. It was partly a holiday, but the pair also wanted to pursue their interests; Lomax wanted to make recordings of sea shanties, Kinsey to compile data on Scottish masturbation.

And so, over three weeks during the hot summer of 1954, the two Americans travelled the length and breadth of Scotland. They listened to old sailors singing what they remembered of sea songs, and harvested sensitive data on masturbation. No sooner had an old man put down his fiddle after playing for Lomax's Revox than he was quizzed by Kinsey on his one-handed technique. The pike-faced old musicians were assured that, although all credit would be given them for the music, for the sex survey they would be strictly Trad/Anon.

Lomax managed to record some wonderful ballads, but what Kinsey discovered shocked him profoundly. Scots were masturbating far too much; on average, 6.7 times per day. At this rate of sexual squandor, the nation wouldn't last far beyond 1978. Something had to be done.

Kinsey and Lomax formed a delegation and made an urgent visit to the Scottish government. Lomax handed over priceless folk recordings, then Kinsey rose to speak.

"Gentlemen," he said, "after an extensive random survey of Scottish sexual habits, mostly focused on fiddlers, I have made a disturbing discovery. The Scots are masturbating too much. Birth and productivity rates are sure to nosedive over the next decades. At this rate, there won't be a single Scot left by the year 2000."

The Scottish leaders took Kinsey seriously; after all, he had recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine, surrounded by birds, flowers and bees.

"What do you suggest we do?" they asked.

Kinsey outlined an extensive promotional campaign with the slogan "Stop masturbating!"

Only this direct approach could bring the nation to its senses, and save it from sinking to its knees.

After the meeting, Kinsey and Lomax were given bowls of Scottish onion soup and glasses of Scottish mead before being driven to Turnhouse Airport and put aboard a Caravelle jet bound for New York. They sat in first class, smoking briarwood pipes and gazing down at the Atlantic through the gaily-curtained floor-to-ceiling windows (later deemed a serious design flaw).

The Scottish government decided to act on Kinsey's advice. They launched a major publicity campaign advising the Scottish people to "Stop masturbating!" Ads were shown in cinemas before and after every film (it was still the age of almost universal cinema-going). They featured a crowd of old sea-dog fiddlers sawing away vigorously at violins, suddenly interrupted by Stanley Baxter. Pushing the men aside and screwing up his rough-hewn Glasgow face, Baxter said directly into the camera: "STOP MASTURBATING!"

The campaign was a great success. Masturbation went quickly out of fashion in Scotland, and the results didn't take long to make themselves felt. Work productivity rates soared along with the birthrate, and the nation's GDP skyrocketed. Before long there was enough excess income for the Scottish prime minister, Margaret Muir, to promise, in a famous 1961 speech, that Scotland would put a man on the moon before decade's end.

In 1969 the entire world watched as that promise was fulfilled on live television. I remember the scene well. I was lying in an air-conditioned room in the French city of Montpelier, masturbating.

Things I said about Dash Snow while he was still alive

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:10:55 GMT

"He stuck a needle in his arm and lives and breathes no more". That's basically my reaction to the death-by-heroin of New York artist Dash Snow on Monday night. Others reacted differently, from ArtForum's "meh" blog report to Francesca Gavin's Guardian piece calling him "an icon for our times".

My response yesterday was that "I need to have more thoughts about something before I want to write about it," but today I thought I'd dig up some previous thoughts I'd published about the artist -- things I said about Dash Snow while he was still alive -- just to see what kind of composite sketch they created. I emphasize sketch, because I never met Snow -- though I knew some of his friends, like Ryan McGinley -- and didn't think about him very much.

One thing I did share with Snow was that we were both selected to represent (ahem) young American art at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Dash had a corner with some semen-spattered newspaper clippings and a record turntable, and I was the Unreliable Tour Guide. It was my job to mock the other art in the show, so when I came to Dash's little heap of yellowing books and papers I'd point to the record player and say: "Some people use turntables to listen to music, others to snort cocaine. You can snort it at four speeds, 16, 33, 45 and -- if you're really in a hurry -- 78 RPM."

Sometimes I'd take the opportunity to tell the story of Rob Pruitt, who was hounded out of the overly-PC late-80s art world after a "black show" featuring minstrelsy, and welcomed back into it after a "white show" fifteen years later that featured a long line of cocaine on a gallery floor, free to anyone undignified enough to get down on hands and knees and snort it.

The other Dash Snow narrative I did at the Whitney concerned his hatred of phones, computers, email, magazines, newspapers and other communications media, a fact which was often inserted into profiles of Snow to establish his Romantic otherness. "It's just a shame I had to read about this in a fashion magazine," I lamented, "rather than scraped in the dust of a desolate forest clearing with a ram's horn."

In The camera is mightier than the rock, my riposte to a silly anti-hipster article in Adbusters, I said: "Unfortunately, Haddow fails to get down to the serious business of art criticsm -- to tell us whether Dash Snow is better than Terence Koh, and whether Ryan McGinley is more interesting than Ryan McGinness, and why. You cannot dismiss a whole culture based on one sketchy description of a DJ mix. But the Catch-22 is that as soon as you start talking about how skulls are dull, or how Koh is better than Snow, you're basically carrying on the conversation the subculture carries on with itself on a daily basis. Jeremiads are therefore a safer option for the naysayer than prac crit."

That, by the way, was my opinion; the art world would have lost a much more talented artist had Terence Koh died on Monday.

In a comment on the Neomarxisme blog (the topic was Tokion Japan's relaunch as a magazine vaunting creative foreigners to Japanese as "exemplary") I flagged the problem with hyping edgier-than-thou scenesters:

"Matthew Damhave, who leaves a message a couple of lines above mine here, has recently set up a New York magazine which is very much a "me and my friends" magazine (his friends are NY hipsters like Dash Snow). There's no racial element there. But what is very much there is the whole idea of "me and my friends" being exemplary because other people are less interesting, even to other people themselves. This is where the whole idea gets sketchy... My people are interesting, yours are dull. This gets problematical when you're actually trying to sell a product to the people you think are dull. That problem then gets compounded when there's also a racial divide between the "interesting" and the "dull". I think Japanese readers will find this, as Marxy seems to be implying rather more politely than I am, distasteful. It's not the 80s any more." I could have added, it's not the early 19th century any more, because this is a Romantic trope (and perhaps Romantic tripe too).

There was also a mention in The post-fashion forest, a piece about Mark Borthwick. "The thing about this neo-hippy thing -- and there's a darker shadow-version of it in figures like Dash Snow and Jonathan Meese -- is that it's super-sexy. Devendra is sexy, Borthwick is sexy, Hisham is sexy, and Eye... well, according to the Papermag blog "He generates such great energy, power and sexual vibes that my friend Kazumi kept saying, "I need to go home and take a cold shower!""

And actually, I do think wild, inventive sex is what Snow probably did best, and most valuably (as documented by the Rivington Arms archive of his Polaroids, for instance). He may have written his own epitaph when he scrawled on the wall of a Deitch installation: "I MAY NOT GO DOWN IN HISTORY BUT I'LL GO DOWN ON YER LIL SISTER".

No house is a hero to its cleaner

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:02:56 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:44:54 GMT

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Wrapping books with quirky zing

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:34:35 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeper into Neukolln

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:23:31 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Japanese in Blankenfeld

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 09:36:16 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contra-bombast

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:10:48 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the world in a column

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:17:01 GMT

Momus
Playground column, July 2009
Travels of a Chameleon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gözleme girls

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:34:21 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish I hadn't shaved off my hair!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:00:18 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I come to praise "the Last King of Pop", or to bury him?

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:47:51 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The death of Pina Bausch

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:48:21 GMT

The death of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch on Tuesday struck me harder than the death of Michael Jackson. She was someone incredibly cool, beautiful and talented, someone I'd followed and admired over the years.

I never queued for Michael Jackson concert tickets, but I did queue for Pina Bausch returns at the Paris Opera in February 1991, and when a few precious second-row box seats for Iphigenie auf Tauride (a piece she premiered in 1974) became available, Suzy and I sprinted up the baroque hall to the box office to grab them. Here's a glimpse of what we saw, and of Bausch's originality (note the "coughing dance"):

I never wore out VHS tapes of Jackson in concert, but I watched over and over again my tape of a Pina Bausch video, set in Wuppertal, broadcast on Channel 4 at some point in the late 80s. I never made a pilgrimage to Neverland, but I did go to Wuppertal, where Bausch's company was based, and ride the town's monorail, slung over its winding river, because I'd seen it in my Bausch tape, with dancers and a cellist. As far as I was concerned, Wuppertal only existed to give Pina Bausch a theatre. Simple as that.

Where did I first hear about Pina Bausch? It must have been from Lois Keidan, who ran the Live Arts department at the ICA. I was completely in thrall to Lois in the late 80s, and anything she said was good just had to be investigated. Lois had worked with Michael Morris, who said in his tribute in The Guardian the other day:

"Pina was well known for not talking about her work to journalists. She very rarely talked about her work to anyone at all. Whenever I went to Wuppertal, everything under the sun would be discussed around the dinner table but not the work. It wasn't that she didn't want to; she didn't know how to talk about it. She was not an intellectual. She was motivated only by emotional truth and was not frightened to put difficult and paradoxical feelings on stage, almost as a way of evacuating aspects of humanity that she was fearful of."

Fear -- total terror -- dominated my next exposure to Pina's work. It was 1998, and her 1980 piece Café Müller was playing at the Barbican. I had tickets to see it on a Saturday night, but on the Friday my opthalmologist declared that my cornea had perforated and that I'd need a corneal graft immediately. "What's in your stomach?" he demanded, hopeful that if I hadn't eaten he could perform the operation -- removing the front part of my right eye and sewing the front part of a dead woman's eye on instead -- right away.

I'd recently eaten, so we scheduled the operation for Monday, but I was, for the rest of that weekend, living in dread. Somehow, though, Café Müller lifted my terror, calmed and soothed me. The production seemed to understand pain, and time, and life. The dance lifted me completely out of my distress.

Pina's last week must have been rather like that; she'd been diagnosed just five days before she died with terminal cancer, probably caused by the "perennial cigarette in her hand". The 68 year-old went quickly and efficiently, I hope with a sardonic smile on her proud, beautiful face and her favourite Argentinian tango music playing. Tango comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and Pina Bausch certainly touched me.

I, slenderly, like to be dirty

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:12:38 GMT

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

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:41:21 GMT

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

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:10:23 GMT

"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

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:12:32 GMT

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

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:01:30 GMT

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"

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:47:13 GMT

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

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:50:20 GMT

"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

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:20:13 GMT

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!