I'm fascinated by ideas, and how they change the lives of the people who come up with them. It seems to be an interest that runs in the family; my mother once had a flirtatious correspondence with Cyril Parkinson, a man made famous by the simple observation that work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion.
The other day I came across another such idea, one I hadn't heard before. It's called The Peter Principle, was first described by Dr Laurence Peter in 1969, and states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, the principle states that people get rewarded for things they can do well by being promoted to the point at which they're doing something they can't do well. At that point the promotion stops, and there they stay.
There are some corollaries:
1. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties. 2. Work is carried out by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. 3. Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.
This has mind-boggling ramifications; it could account for a world in which everyone is basically incompetent, because they've all been promoted to "the position of first failure", and left there to keep failing.
As often happens when you encounter a new idea like this, I immediately started applying the Peter Principle to real world situations. I happened to watch a documentary called Kublai Khan's Lost Fleet, which examines how a Mongol navy with superior weaponry and 4500 ships was destroyed while attempting to invade Japan in August 1281, with the loss of 130,500 Mongol soldiers and sailors.
Now, the main reason was that, just as had happened the last time the Mongols attempted to invade Japan, a kamikaze or "divine wind", in the form of a massive typhoon, whipped up and destroyed the invading navy.
But there were other factors. Kublai Khan promoted a general called Arakhan to lead the naval invasion. He'd distinguished himself in great on-land campaigns, but on the sea he was... all at sea. In terms of the Peter Principle, as a nautical commander Arakhan had reached his "position of first failure". Not just because former successes had led to his promotion to a post he was incompetent for, but because geographically Japan was the Mongol Empire's "position of first failure".
For Arakhan, though, "failure was not an option". He couldn't head home, having failed to crack Japan, and report his failure to Kublai Khan. He'd have been killed. So the biggest single maritime loss of life in the history of the world unfolded off the coast of Takashima, produced by a timely typhoon, samurai bravery, poor boat design (in their impatience the Mongols had seized flat-bottomed river boats to supplement their navy; their indentured Chinese boat-builders had also done deliberately shoddy work on the sea boats)... and the Peter Principle.
"The typical Bless shopper," reports Unlike Berlin, "is usually from Japan, subtly dressed in avant-garde from top to bottom and thrilled to spend about 500 Euros for a handbag that can also be turned into a sweater." I've been looking into the Bless store on Berlin's Mulackstrasse for six years and, yes, usually with a Japanese person. I even know Japanese Berliners (like jeweler Naoko Ogawa) who've interned with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag's conceptual clothes company.
What I've never done -- not until yesterday, anyway -- is bought an item of clothing at Bless. As the Unlike text suggests, it's absurdly expensive. You tend to go in there as you'd go to an art gallery, to admire the ideas. Bless is a master of eccentricity. Here you'll find outrageous combinations of things: a graph-paper shirt with a hood tucked into a little packet under the collar, another one with a sari-like scarf sewn onto the back, an enormously heavy chunky-knit sweater, a sort of toddler's garment with a huge middle-section that you have to scrunch up, accordion-style, by lacing braces around tabs. They also do decorated USB cables (a big influence on Hisae's Mizutani Cable Knit Company cottage industry, now discontinued because it was taking her a month to produce each cover), stools made of hollowed-out wood, and other curiosities. It's basically all stuff you've never seen anywhere else, though once you glom onto the ideas, you could probably go and do your own knock-off for a fraction of the price.
Yesterday, six years after starting to visit Bless regularly, I actually bought my first garment from them, the... well, the thing you can see in the photo (not the shaggy hood, which would have doubled the price). It's a pair of very wide felt trousers which dangle at the bottom of a tight woolen boob tube thing. Instead of being held up by a belt of some kind, the trousers are kept in place by the boob tube clinging to your chest.
I was only able to purchase this weird garment with the justification that I'll wear it on stage when I play my first-ever gig in Warsaw next weekend at the Song Is You Festival (my gig is on Sunday evening). And because it was in the Bless Workshop sale, where prices are deeply slashed. The sale is held in a different location, up in a wilderness of housing estates at the top end of Ackerstrasse, a place usually used to construct the clothes.
It was lots of fun trying improbable outfits on there yesterday with Emma and Joe and various strangers (we all shared one big dressing room). The thing about Bless clothes is that they're so bloody peculiar that putting them on is also dressing yourself in the permission to look that odd -- Bless' blessing, if you like. It's this legitimation of complete visual eccentricity, this implicit license to deviate, that interests me. It suggests a parallel world in which we're all allowed to look like kindly monsters on the street, like characters from Maurice Sendak.
The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.
I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.
Although some of my more conservative fans -- notably Swede John Thelin, once (as "Count V") the mainstay of the alt.fan.momus newsgroup -- characterised the noughties as a time in which "Momus forgot how to write proper songs", others -- notably the Web 2.0 generation, who ranked Nervous Heartbeat and Frilly Military at least as high, in terms of YouTube views, as my old hit Hairstyle of the Devil -- liked my noughties stuff better than what had gone before. With 154,000 views this -- my 2001 collaboration with Montréal group Bran Van 3000, reggaeton vocalist Eek-a-Mouse and actress Liane Balaban -- is the most-viewed Momus-related track on YouTube:
So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape", the decade we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:
As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:
Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:
I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:
James Blunt Back To Bedlam Dido No Angel Amy Winehouse Back To Black David Gray Wide Ladder Dido Life For Rent The Beatles 1 Leona Lewis Spirit Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head Keane Hopes And Fears Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that allows you to turn any webpage into a slideshow.
Now, turning a website into a slideshow is a bit like turning a bicycle into a record player; it's perverse, against the grain. People put images onto their websites in a certain context. When you pull them up and turn them into a full-screen sequence of three-second images, you de- and re-contextualize them. The intended narrative gets stripped away, replaced by a new narrative which can be surreal, dreamlike, or psychologically revealing. That's the theory, anyway.
It doesn't always work. News sites like the BBC, The Guardian and Google News have done something to their html to make slideshowing impossible. Stil in Berlin works, Face Hunter doesn't. But those street fashion blogs are predominantly visual already, packaged as sequences of images. So is stripes-crazy Stanley Lieber's LiveJournal.
Some blogs frustrate the desire to escape text by bringing it into their images. Hipster Runoff sprinkles its jpegs with bitmapped lettering: "ELECTROMA = POOP", the images say, or "I deserve a better life / career / job". What emerges here is the extent to which American hipsterism simply recycles American strip malls and office cubicles with a tiny justifying sparkle of irony.
Letters of Note shows images of... letters, naturally. That doesn't preclude visual interest, of course; some of them, like the Lucasfilms recruitment ad up the page, are visually pretty arresting.
The slideshow thing works better with Awful Library Books, although, like the blog itself, the interestingness of the books depicted (rooted in their otherness) contradicts the blog's whole premise, which is to encourage librarians to weed out, name and shame inappropriate, absurd or boring books from their libraries. Leave them there, I say! We need those glimpses of otherness more than we need appropriateness.
The slideshow software works well with Japanese sites like Sajiblo (which documents the refurbishment of an old building as an organic cafe) because they tend to publish quite high resolution photos at absurdly small sizes. For non-Japanese-readers the slideshow doesn't change the essential experience of these websites (they're already image sequences), it merely strips out the clutter of text.
It's worth saying that full-screening images, while it does take away the clutter of nested windows most of us have on our screen, doesn't remove the windows metaphor entirely: what, after all, is a computer screen but a proposed "window on the world"? What it does do, though, is replace an ugly, complex collision of frames with a single, apparently-authoritative one. It replaces a messy space-sequence (lots of complicated relationships between frames and text and images) with a single, simple, tidy time-sequence. The fact that that big authoritative time sequence is actually fairly random and decontextualised is what makes it so fascinating: the big images become a sort of oracle, telling us unexpected things.
Click Opera, slideshow-ified, for instance, looks like a trailer for a sexy, didactic, utopian horror film.
"Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.
The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.
I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...
"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
Witts then goes on to set the scene much better than the Factory documentary, showing a transition in 70s Manchester from Modernist glass-concrete-and-steel redevelopment to Postmodernist restoration, pedestrianisation and heritage-orientation. He also displaces the cliché about the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall sparking Manchester post-punk, pointing out that the experimentation of Van der Graaf Generator, the "basic" rock of The Worst, and the radical localism of the folk scene also played their part.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
Forget the places you've been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
Blogs you check habitually are the wrong ones because they tell you nothing new. Try switching to Letters of Note, correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Certainly, the letters collected here are from the past. But they very readily suggest parallel futures -- for instance, a future in which Andy Warhol isn't famous.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
The everyday contains everything you need for a religion.
Stop expecting new musician Y to be "the new musician X". And stop expecting old musician X to be the new musician X.
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Conspiracy theories waste your time. It's all a big conspiracy.
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
Drums are finished. Except for kettledrums and gongs.
You know too much about LA and not enough about Laos. On the internet and in "the real world" you're consistently looking in the wrong places for inspiration. Why is that? Partly it's because the things that could really change you make you scared.
This is the decade in which you will finally make the switch from quantity to value. One ramification: you will move from an expensive place where you have to do a lot of meaningless work just to exist to a cheap place where you can exist easily and can therefore afford to dedicate yourself to work that really means something to you.
The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but they might be located on the other side of the world.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do. They are hidden next door, but to befriend them you will have to learn a new language.
You will probably be happier amongst people who do not think as you do.
Nothing could be better than a market at 5am, but to experience it you will have to get up earlier and brave the cold.
Learn to make things with wood.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Everything you know is right, but that was then and this is now.
Here are three videos of Carousel rehearsals last month at Music Bank in the Tower Bridge Business Complex in which I sang through -- for the first time with real musicians -- three Jacques Brel songs arranged by David Coulter and Mike Smith, and translated by me (you can read my translations, two of which were made specially for this performance, beside the videos as they appear on YouTube). The band of twenty musicians (including Roger Eno on piano, Seb Rochford on drums, Leo Abrahams on guitar, Kate St Clair on oboe and Thomas Bloch on onde martinot) performed these songs with me at The Barbican on October 22nd and the Warwick Arts Centre the next day.
Finally, Jacky, filmed onstage at The Barbican at the end of the first concert.
I was particularly taken with Aberdonian drummer Seb Rochford (of Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland) and his extraordinary afro. Seb exudes a 70s countercultural cool as well as incredible percussive flair, and it was easy to believe Leo's tales of Brian Eno attending recording sessions with Seb, watching all his takes. Here he is doing his stuff:
As for Roger Eno (he crosses the picture at the beginning of the video for The Town Tumbled), the man does this footstomping thing while playing the piano, and grins like Elton John, and loves to laugh, joke and do crosswords. On the tour bus to Warwick I noticed that a lot of the stories he was telling sounded familiar: there was one about the Pepsi campaign that promised "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", one about Picasso undermining representational image-making by asking a man who showed a photo of his wife "But is she really so small and flat?", one about art being a plane you can crash and walk away from, and one (at my request) about his dad the postman. Eventually the coin dropped. I'd heard some or all these tales from the same source he had: his big brother Brian. But Roger had heard them firsthand.
The nights are drawing in and the weather's crappy, so why don't you settle down in front of a crackling computer screen and direct your own frankly creepy text-to-movie movie? There are hours of fun to be had making wooden-looking 3D characters say rude things in bizarre settings. I know, I've tried it.
Now, it so happens that Dr Woodard and I will both exhibit artworks in Vienna next week in a group show called Verausgabungssymposium ("Expenditure Symposium"), held at Contemporary Concerns (COCO) Gallery. Curated by Christian Kobald and Severin Dünser, the show is about waste. My piece, intended to be displayed on an electronic signboard, is called The Facebook Proverbs. For a while now, I've been using my Facebook page's status updates as a place to put proverbs. By re-cycling these "deep tweets" as an artwork (in a medium pioneered by people like Jenny Holzer and Claude Closky) I want to embody the logic of an old proverb: "Waste not, want not!"
So my second text-to-movie effort is a film of The Facebook Proverbs as -- and not as -- they'll be appearing in Vienna.
Hausu, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1977, is perhaps the most visually exuberant film I've ever seen. The comedy-horror "watch-'em-die" flick was his first feature after a career in TV advertising; according to the film's Wikipedia page Obayashi got the idea from his 7 year-old daughter. It certainly looks like it; the film has a hyperactive pace, saturated colours, unrealistic situations taken to the extreme, storybook backdrops, and absurdly inventive cinematic devices. It's a genre film which uses the strictness of formula to allow itself a wildness of technique which is really quite extraordinary.
I discovered Hausu this Halloween just by typing "Japanese horror film" into YouTube. The clips there were enough to send me to Veoh to download the whole film (for that you need to install the Veoh player, which is free). I was surprised I hadn't heard of the film, but apparently it's been unavailable for a while on DVD and is only now being shown theatrically in the US, in places like the BAM Cinematek, with a view to appearing on DVD shortly via Janus Films. (Sorry, Janus, you probably didn't want people to know it was available on Veoh, did you?)
Generally speaking, I'm not terribly interested in genre films, in OTT horror, in 70s watch-'em-die exploito-formula flicks, in Tarantino Asian fleapit raves (not sure if he's raved about this one, but it wouldn't surprise me) and so on. I could talk about the sweet-sour contrast between the first half of the film and the second, or I could tell you the film's plot and describe how the seven teenage girls are killed one by one via a possessed house and a "seven deadly sins" structure which sees each of them offed in a way appropriate to the virtue or vice which defines their stereotypically flattened characters. Talented musician Melody is swallowed by the piano, pretty Oshare by a mirror, Kung-Fu is felled in a kung-fu fight with a witch, and there are similarly far-fetched deaths for Fantasy, Prof, Mac, and Sweet (which one drowns naked in a rising tide of cat's blood when she falls off a tatami raft? I lost track; they all sound the same when they scream).
But recounting the ludicrous plot would be a waste of time. What's really compelling about this film is all on the formal level, and it's all about excess, exuberance, license and invention. Within the first few minutes the director establishes that he can and will do anything to tell his story. He'll overlap two different musical pieces on the soundtrack, shoot a scene, Cassavetes-like, through a glass door, freeze the frame, billow a silk scarf in a wind machine, zoom suddenly down to a telescopic detail, blackening the rest of the screen, insert an animation, spin the picture upside down, use absurdly unrealistic (and gorgeously beautiful) painted backdrops featuring towering cumulo-nimbus clouds, insert a musical number... And that's even before the inventive murders begin. Here, have a look for yourself:
The sheer absurdity and excess of the film would irritate if it weren't so beautiful and charming, with a gorgeous musical score and seductive Wizard-of-Oz-like colours. It isn't just that Obayashi throws in every cinematic device he can think of, but that he makes them work so well. His next films (Drifting Classroom, Exchange Students and The Girl Who Conquered Time) were apparently quite similar; I'll be seeking them out, interested to see whether he burned out quickly or continued, on a purely visual level, to be as inventive as he was in Hausu.
To my mind -- in this film, at least -- Nobuhiko Obayashi is much better than the over-hyped Dario Argento.
I spent quite a bit of time yesterday (but it was alright, because here in Berlin it was cold and raining) shuttling back and forth "in New York" between Stuart Bailey, my new "editor" at TF/LN (The First / Last Newspaper) and Jonathan Paul, the editor of The Moment, the New York Times style blog. Basically, TF/LN, a temporary newspaper that art-design group Dexter Sinister are publishing during the Performa Biennial, launched yesterday, and I wrote a spoof column for it, The Ghost-Materialist, which picked up where my real column for The New York Times, The Post-Materialist, left off back in January. You can read the first Ghost-Materialist in a ghostly location here on Click Opera; I've secreted it, spookily, in April 2008, which happens to be the month I started writing the Post-Materialist too. It's entitled Paris Druggery-Pokery and tells a tall tale about Paris fashionistas abandoning select store Colette in favour of an insignificant droguerie-menage store in the 17th arrondissement.
Things got complicated yesterday when the real New York Times got interested in publishing the spoof column as well. It looks as if they'll be running it slash running a piece about it on Thursday. Now, TF/LN is being put together across the road from the New York Times building, in the Port Authority building at BLANK SL8 (corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street), in a continuous piece of what Dexter Sinister like to call "performative publishing". They love ghosts, mirrors, doubles and Pynchonesque-Kafkaesque semi-legitimate parasitical operations (the alternative post office in Crying of Lot 49, the alternative court system in The Trial), and this publishing operation is very much the ghost-double of The New York Times.
So what we have now is the real New York Times sitting up and taking notice of a weird temporary ghost-double across the road. Dexter Sinister's operation is intended to "reflect on the unstable condition of contemporary news and related medias", and this comes at a time when newspapers are, more than ever, questioning themselves existentially. Oddly enough, the first thing I did when I got the NYT job is question the legitimacy of the people offering me the job. I went so far as to construct a paranoid sting spoof in which an entire facade of The New York Times, with its own convincing fake website, had been constructed to entrap and ensnare me. In the end I concluded that it didn't really matter whether this was "fake NYT" or "real NYT"; the logic of the Woody Allen joke about not telling your brother he isn't a chicken "because we need the eggs" applied. I needed the eggs, so I acted as if The Moment really were the New York Times. In a sense, though, this "paranoia" reflected a reality: that "the New York Times" is making itself up from scratch every day. That it, too, is, in a sense, a daily parody of The New York Times. Hence its interest in somebody across the road doing, essentially, the same thing.
Dexter Sinister launched their TF/LN at a party last night in New York during which they screened Farewell, etaoin shrdlu, a 1980 film directed by David Loeb Weiss which documents Linotype operator Carl Schlesinger's last day -- and the New York Times' last day -- of manual hot metal typesetting, which occurred on July 2nd, 1978. As the San Francisco Chronicle explains, "etaoin shrdlu" is the phrase you get when you strike the first twelve keys at the left side of the Linotype keyboard. If a line of type got garbled, you'd write "etaoin shrdlu" just to indicate that it should be removed, but sometimes the error crept into the printed paper, along with the tag (rather like QWERTYUIOP or LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET).
Thirty years after the end of hot metal typesetting, newspapers are in a much deeper crisis. Should they charge a cover fee at all (the Evening Standard in London just went free)? Should they wind up their paper editions and go online-only (The Moment is an online-only feature in The New York Times)? What does "newspaper" mean, in the age of Google News personalisation filters and the Facebook newsfeed? Can "news" mean whatever you want it to mean? Are we all on the same page?
I recently visited The Guardian's shiny new office in London. Rather like The New York Times, the paper moved into amazing and expensive new premises mere months before being pummeled by the twin blow of economic recession and plummeting advertising and circulation figures. The Guardian's new home is a curtain of wavy glass backing onto a tranquil canal. It blends seamlessly into the King's Place arts complex next door, to the extent that you feel that it might be becoming an upmarket culture brand rather than a paper. The New York Times, meanwhile, has reportedly been letting out office space in its new tower on the square named after it.
Something about newspapers in shiny new buildings in the 21st century reminds me of Mies van der Rohe's never-built 1919 design for a glass skyscraper on the Berlin Friedrichstrasse. There's a delicious incongruity, visually, between the essentially 19th century world of the newspaper, with its gothic type and its print works full of (we imagine) artisans slaving over hot type, and the glass-and-numbers, smoke-and-mirrors world of computers and high finance and precarious immateriality newspapers currently inhabit, and seem destined, ultimately, to be undermined by. I wonder if the glassy New York Times, faced with a handmade broadsheet across the road, is being stalked (and serenaded) by the ghost of its true self?
Hisae and I will be spending six weeks in Japan soon, from early December until mid-January. We'll probably be staying in one of those rental apartments in Tokyo, but if you have a better idea, drop me a line. The trip this time is subsidised by my curation job; to recap, I've been asked to put a Japanese art / performance / video exhibition together for the Radar Arts Centre at the University of Loughborough. The show, which I'm calling Aftergold, will happen while the Japanese team is in the Midlands training for the Olympics.
Performing as Momus isn't the reason I'll be in Japan this time, but I'm hoping to put some kind of event together in collaboration with the Utrecht reading room in Aoyama. Apartamento magazine last week launched their fourth edition at Utrecht during Tokyo Design Week, and cooked people some free lunches in the reading room. Hisae and I have a feature in the new Apartamento, a study of our neighbour Jan Lindenberg's apartment in Berlin. Jan is also in Japan right now (hello Jan, drop us a postcard!).
The fifth edition of Quotation, the "worldwide creative journal", has just been released in Japan, and features interviews with both me and Hisae; I'm there as Momus, and Hisae as one half of Penquo, her mysterious performance unit with Kyoka. It's available through Amazon Japan here.
There's also a big Momus interview (by Olivier Lamm) in the new edition of french culture mag Chronic'art, which hit the streets yesterday. The magazine's website says:
MOMUS "Musician, connected journalist, web pioneer: at 50, the American Nick Currie (aka Momus) adds a string to his bow by publishing his first novel, "Le Livre des blagues", a post-modern family chronicle to make you scream with laughter. Encounter with an authentic polycultural mutant. Plus Chrono-Momus: key moments in a career as dense as a novel."
I rather enjoy being represented as "a 50 year-old American"; there's something almost Cindy Shermanesque about the idea that you're a completely different person in every press profile. And speaking of the ghostly morphing of fact into fiction, this week sees the launch in New York of Dexter Sinister's guerilla broadsheet THE FIRST / LAST NEWSPAPER, which will feature my Ghost-Materialist column, an unreliable revisit of the Post-Materialist column I used to write for the New York Times. More details here.
On Saturday, following the example of artists who'd reconstructed the Unabomber's library, I made a tentative effort to put together a shelf of the books I'd have had at the age of 18. I suppose the idea of such reconstructions is that books also construct us -- they can be the building blocks of our subsequent personality -- and that by reconstructing a library we're reconstructing a construction, and therefore suggesting that different books could have resulted in a different person.
But it isn't just books. If I think back to the Edinburgh bedroom of the teenaged me, there are posters on the walls, too. They're by David Hamilton, a British photographer living in France who specialises in soft-focus soft porn images of pubescent girls. Did David Hamilton's images "construct" my adolescent sexuality? I think they very possibly did. I was a rather sheltered virgin at a boys-only school. The internet didn't exist then, so I'd never really even seen porn. I would probably believe anything you told me about what girls, what women, "really" were.
Why did I choose to believe David Hamilton? Well, his images reflected me in female form. Like these girls, I was a teenager of slim build. Like them, I was somewhat refined and naive. Like them, I embraced a somewhat late 19th century aesthetic, a Wildean decadence. I was even, at 17, developing a bookish myopia which threw the entire world into the kind of gauzy soft focus Hamilton favoured.
I didn't at that time know the "pagan sensuality" of Pierre Louÿs, nor had I seen David Hamilton's film of his 1894 poetry collection Songs of Bilitis. All I had was Hamilton's poster of a ballerina, and -- I'm pretty sure -- the one of the two girls at the picnic table. Despite the "decadent" label -- and the fact that in a post-Polanski France, a hysterical-about-child-sexuality Britain and a puritan America these images certainly don't read now the way they did in the 1970s -- these are "innocent" images to have grown up with. If I were 17 now, I'm sure I'd be seeing much, much harder stuff.
It was in Japan, though, that I encountered the only other person to have been impressed as much by David Hamilton as I was; Kahimi Karie. The photographer-turned-singer loved Hamilton so much that she put one of his images on an early Kahimi Karie t-shirt. This t-shirt inspired me to go off and write one of my most beautiful songs, the fluid, languid composition which just bears the photographer's name as its title:
Exemplifying the post-feminist guilt of a lot of my Kahimi material, this song gives a humourously jaundiced view of Hamilton's work. Read the lyric and you'll see that the tale of a modeling session is told from the point of view of one of the waif-like nymphs; "bored and slightly chilly", she wonders why the photographer must "gild the lily" with his umbrella flash, his liquid nitrogen, his carbon snow.
Then again, the song's narrator is happy to live in the South of France, in the lap of luxury, at Mr Hamilton's expense, lying in bed until 3pm "with nothing on", and grateful that "he only asks for photos in return". In the end, she's philosophical: "If this lazy suffering can bring erection to the lap of just one man it hasn't been in vain". That's a crib from a line of Howard Devoto's: "If one life has been saved by this photography session it has been worth it."
I'm not sure if any photography session can save a life, but influence a life? Oh yes, photography can do that. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, for harder or softer focus.
I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that 
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group 
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
No previous decades are to be revived this decade. Make a little more effort with the shapes of things, please.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Hausu, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1977, is perhaps the most visually exuberant film I've ever seen. The comedy-horror "watch-'em-die" flick was his first feature after a career in TV advertising; according to the film's 
I spent quite a bit of time yesterday (but it was alright, because here in Berlin it was cold and raining) shuttling back and forth "in New York" between Stuart Bailey, my new "editor" at TF/LN (The First / Last Newspaper) and Jonathan Paul, the editor of The Moment, the New York Times style blog. Basically, TF/LN, a temporary newspaper that art-design group Dexter Sinister are publishing during the Performa Biennial, launched yesterday, and I wrote a spoof column for it, The Ghost-Materialist, which picked up where my real column for The New York Times, 
So what we have now is the real New York Times sitting up and taking notice of a weird temporary ghost-double across the road. Dexter Sinister's operation is intended to "reflect on the unstable condition of contemporary news and related medias", and this comes at a time when newspapers are, more than ever, questioning themselves existentially. Oddly enough, the first thing I did when I got the NYT job is 
"newspaper" mean, in the age of Google News personalisation filters and the Facebook newsfeed? Can "news" mean whatever you want it to mean? Are we all on the same page?
Performing as Momus isn't the reason I'll be in Japan this time, but I'm hoping to put some kind of event together in collaboration with the 
