Hello! This is Click Opera.

DAETH! DEATH! DAATH!

Bye Cick Opera. You made my interest in Japan remain fresh and vogue even when I got past my youthful William Gibson-influenced Orientalist stage and felt a little disenchanted. And now: Hello Momus. Come visit forum.koohii.com sometime when you're learning Japanese.

(and happy birthday to my favourite birthday Grinch)

xxx

Dear Whiskery Asian Grandma,

10,000 thanks for these long years of Internet companionship. I
haven't posted a single worthwhile response to any of the entries
you've written, but your essays (and the free-for-all discussion which
often ensued in the comments section) certainly gave me a lot to think
about. As luck would have it, I've ended up living in many of the
same places as you over the past decade: Japan, France, Berlin, and
the United States. I even saw you once or twice at social functions,
for examble that offbeat rice cracker soy sauce printing press
exhibition a few years back at Staalplaat...floating around in an
eerily parallel geographic orbit, I found myself confronting and
musing over a lot of the same cultural phenomena. Your blog was
always there to point out curiosities and dwell on the details of
these places, all the while mixing it up with a healthy dose of art,
literary recommendations, and philosophical banter. Whether I agreed
with what you said or not, it was great to feel challenged by the
content of a blog, and to be able to look forward to having a
well-written, engaging lump of media to digest almost every day of the
week for years. Considering the relentless barrage of criticism which
any blog featuring even slightly debatable content is bound to
attract, there is no question that your perseverance deserves
acknowledgment (cue "Pomp and Circumstance"). As is often the case
in ceremonial circumstances, the Japanese know how to say it best:

先生、長い間お疲れ様でした！

Happy 50th, and good luck in your endeavors from here on out~

- patrick

thanks so much momus, the songs have always been amazing, click opera has been fantastic, the next stuff is going to be, well... surprising - I guess we can predict that much...

at my own horrible edinburgh boearding school [a near neighbour of the one you attended I believe] my final report from one of the teachers read: 'he was often perverse but never dull' - I was so proud and now of course I think of that wee epithet as highly click-opera-appropriate...

bon voyage!

It seems that the long-dreaded moment has come, eventually.
Thank you, Nick Opera! For the past six years of clicky, juicy posts; for your generous attitude towards us readers and your sheherazadian efforts that have made this fabulous opera possible.
Please, keep telling stories!

Filippo

(Oh, no! Look! The end of Click Opera has already made its first victim!)

(http://s756.photobucket.com/albums/xx203/creeeatura/?action=view&current=anonlescaut.jpg)

(by the way, happy birthday!)

Clumsy me, I made the pathos deflate! This bad, tautological image link formatting is the visual equivalent to faltering while telling a joke.

Jarod Lanier, Carles from HipsterRunoff, and a pile of others are shouting to anyone who will listen that the human race has overdeveloped infrastructure for spreading ideas, especially those producing high short-term gains for self-interested imitators. So it seems important to balance this with infrastructure for producing new ideas with long-term other-interest.

This is where a published collection of Click Opera posts would come in handy. Some of the more productive recurring threads are those about challenging the social and cultural cognitive mechanisms that underlie restrictive preconceptions, not just the preconceptions themselves. These could be used to circuit-bend some recurring cultural/political/aesthetic debates, or at least make a textbook for conceptual art majors. Since you're not necessarily confined to the linear physical format of a bound volume, different entries or sections could be styled after the Oblique Strategies deck and called up at random.

Of course, the dullest and most dead-end way to use the ideas in Click Opera would be to mindlessly re-apply them instead of re-interpreting them. As I think has been suggested before, perhaps including some of the more interesting comments along with the entries would showcase the vital process a bit better (rather than only using them to polish up the original work and thanking the commenters in acknowledgments that very few read, as in the traditional publishing model). Maybe call it "Click Opera: Selected Blog Arias, with Chorus"?

An obvious assignment for students would be to continue a particular conversation, perhaps in the voice or style of a "real" commenter. This is similar to the way participants are assigned a position to argue in competitive debating, and I don't know how the process could be prevented from degenerating into that or tedious PC / academic cultural philosophy exchanges. Perhaps instruct students to try to have exactly the same conversation about something else, and improvise in character when it starts falling apart.

Or maybe you could forbid the teaching of this curriculum by any but yourself and selected disciples, and become a subculture therapist cult leader à la Carl Rogers or Moshé Feldenkrais, though that doesn't seem your style.

Tom W.

By the way, congratulations on making something this interesting and fun for so long, and good luck in whatever you end up pivoting to.

This is a pretty good send-off / birthday party / funeral you're having here. Do you feel like Tom Sawyer?

(and sorry for the typo above -- Jaron Lanier, not Jarod.)

...happy birthday for yesterday, and thanks so much for writing this blog (so regularly and for so long). I've got some more stuff to send you by mixtape to Berlin, though perhaps this time I'll have mercy and send some kind of digital copy instead of an analogue tape.

All best wishes and thanks once again

Simon

Thanks Momus - my daily reading in Kraków of your blog has been an immense pleasure.
-Adam