• It's morning, Tokyo, Meguro. I'm sitting in the apartment Hisae and I will occupy until the end of the month. Hisae travels up from Osaka later today.
• Drinking tea and looking out over a sunny urban slope leading down to the Meguro River -- the very place I lived in 2001 and 2002, in fact -- I feel richly contented. Any moment now the doorbell will ring (I'm told) and my lost suitcase -- which finally arrived at Kansai International Airport yesterday after a week's delay caused by glorious free collective bargaining a baggage-handlers' strike in Helsinki -- will be delivered.
• In happiness terms, having the flat, Hisae, Tokyo, friends to see, wifi, a laptop and a few fresh clothes (my absurd flappy Bless kabuki romper suit) is absolutely optimal. I don't need more. And when I have more (all the accumulated junk of the years that clutters my Berlin apartment) I feel worse. I feel old surrounded by those constant reminders of a long, long past. Suitcase living suits me.
• The apartment we're subletting belongs to photographer Ariko Inaoka, who went to Parsons School of Art and lived in New York for ten years. Her Super 8 films (which I like very much; somehow they're very Scottish!) punctuate this page. On Tuesday we had lunch with Ariko in Kyoto, where she treated us to the excellent cold soba served in her family's 500 year-old restaurant, Owariya. Ariko will shortly take over the running of the restaurant, taking on -- in the manner of kabuki actors -- an inherited name (a male name, in fact; a kind of persona, almost a family ghost).
• Ariko's Tokyo apartment is somewhat more luxurious than anything I'd be able to afford myself, were I to move back to Tokyo, and that contributes to my sense of pleasure.
• The habituation treadmill (in other words, the patent relativity of happiness) is something I now take so much for granted that I build it into my calculations. Living in Tokyo full-time wouldn't -- thanks to the habituation treadmill -- feel as wonderful, after a year or so, as just visiting the city annually or bi-annually does, so I visit. And paying rent 12 months a year for an apartment like this would simply make it a new base-level for acceptable dwellings, so it's much better to rent it for just one month and experience it as "luxury" at one twelfth the price of mere "acceptability"!
• I'm not sure where that logic goes if you take it further, though. Perhaps periodic spells in prison because "nothing beats the sense of release you get from being released"? Stiff beatings with birch twigs because "it feels so great when it stops stinging"? We hedonic relativists are surely strange beasts.
I've discovered a connection between two battles I find myself fighting on Click Opera: the battle against people who think I should pay more attention to the downside of Japan, and the battle against purveyors of a 1980s-style identity politics focused on victimhood.
The connection became clear to me when I answered this anonymous comment in the early hours of this morning:
Momus' perception of Japan seems to be skewed by the fact that his mates are all successful creatives or else trust-fund kids; I mean, how many Japanese does he know who've been hospitalised through overwork, for example? I can count four among my Tokyo friends just off the top of my head, unfortunately. That's a side of this country subject to wholesale sweeping-under-the-carpet on this blog, unfortunately.
Now, I could have answered this by saying that I know very few trust fund kids, somewhat shun the ones I do know, and would much rather have dinner -- as I did on Monday night -- with a group of recent immigrants to Japan from Malaysia, people who get up at 6 in the morning to scour the markets for food ingredients for the Malaysian restaurants they cook in. Or I could have answered that Hisae's family, with whom I'm staying here in Osaka, are mixed Japanese-Korean. Hisae's mother runs a small clothes store on an arcade, importing items from China and Korea. (Neither Hisae's mum nor the Malaysians, by the way, complain about overwork.)
Instead, I wrote a mini-manifesto, between the lines of which anyone attuned to these things can clearly read the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche:
The fundamental premise of this blog is that you get to the essence of a culture via its talents, not its problems. Ability, as Joseph Beuys put it, is the true human capital. Now, of course there's a place for examinations of the stumbling blocks a culture faces on the way to its achievements. But I think the Dogs and Demons approach -- examining Japan through its problems -- does not get to the heart of Japan's amazing achievements, and its massive success. Problems are distractions from the essence of something, someone, or some place, not a key to understanding it.
The useful thing about this statement is, I think, that it expresses -- in the words of Joseph Beuys -- the single most powerful idea of Marxism: that ability, not money, is the true human capital. But there's also a Nietzschean element in the thought, an emphasis on contention, striving and ambition. The underclass wants to become, if you will, the overman. Problems and distractions cannot bend it from a historic act of will: the fulfillment of (in Marxist terms) its historic destiny to enjoy the fruits of its labour, and take the ascendent position warranted by its productive abilities.
Now that's what I call a left wing position! That's the long march! That's the shining future that justifies present austerities and struggles! Unfortunately, I think a lot of power has been sapped from the radical tradition by what I'd call "problem narcissism": the tendency to make problems, obstacles, or deficiencies the key to identity, and a destination in themselves, rather than mere distractions from the goal of dominance-through-ability. The result is the PC identity politics landscape we all know so well, with its emphasis on victimhood, on symbolic reparation and tokenistic compensation, on "respect" based on the hiding of (unchallenged) stigma via policed language, and, worst of all, on the built-in presupposition (so damaging) that all difference is bad difference, and must therefore be suppressed and spun out of view.
Anon's critique raises the spectre of class war in its association of success with "trust fund kids and successful creatives", but it's a phoney class war. As Beuys and Marx (and Nietzsche, for that matter) agreed, creative ability is absolutely key to all human ability. For Beuys, "everyone is an artist". Anon wants to say that rich and privileged people are the only artists, and that normal people are basically victims, falling by the wayside.
Of course victimhood is an important part of Marx and Beuys' thinking: Beuys said "Show your wound!" and Marx covered the problems of 19th century workers in enormous detail. The important thing is that Marx didn't end with that suffering, victimhood and failure. Marxism is a praxis dedicated to putting those who work, those who create, those who control the ultimate human capital of ability, in the place they deserve: the place of power, will, success and determination. Marx would have been appalled by the "problem narcissism" of identity politics, which -- like a sick man proposing you identify him entirely with an illness which is nevertheless unmentionable -- proposes the gaining of respect for "identifying deficiencies" ("deficiencies" mapped spuriously to identities based on difference: being a woman, being black, being gay) as the ultimate goal of radical politics.
Just as Japan reportage which looks at perceived problems (themselves, all too often, seen through an ethnocentric lens focused on "bad differences") rather than its core creative abilities as a nation misses the essence of Japan -- the Japanese people's extraordinary will matched to their great abilities -- so 1980s-style identity politics defines identity as a series of shortcomings, sees them as "bad differences" from the norm, and demands respect for them in terms which merely underline its bad faith; the perception it shares with its enemies is that it perceives difference as deficiency. And so political struggle gets turned into a series of semantic negotiations in which supposedly-bad differences are spun, if not into good differences exactly, at least into a series of respectful silences, compensations, tips of the hat, correct terminology (according to an endlessly-turning treadmill powered by stigmas which are never, themselves, challenged, probably because the stigmas encode the victimhood so essential to the whole enterprise) and "appropriate language".
I fundamentally reject the idea that this is a progressive politics. As I've said, this negotiation simply encodes more subtly the prejudice it seeks to rebuff. Progressive politics, for me, has to go back to Marx's basic, positive, clear and forceful idea (it was William Morris's too) that ability is the true human capital. We have to stop associating creativity with privilege or class. All human beings are creative. That, rather than problems or victimhood, is what's at the core of an individual, a class, a nation, and the species itself.
Kahimi Karie -- musician, singer, blogger, essayist for Mayonaka (she has a text in the current issue), star... and now mother! At the end of last week Kahimi (who earlier this year married tap-dancer Kazunori Kumagai) gave birth to a baby daughter.
On our way to eat with friends (a big group of Malaysians and Japanese, plus one Malaysian-Japanese baby) at an Okinawan restaurant in Osaka last night, we saw copies of the new Crea magazine, hot off the presses, and featuring these photos of Kahimi pregnant. The pictures (by Mika Ninagawa) join images of Nobuko Hori and Isshiki Sae as compelling visions of Japanese fertility at a time when the nation's birth rate is sputtering. They're also deeply beautiful.
Later, when we all got a bit merry at the Okinawan restaurant and started singing karaoke, it seemed completely appropriate for me to pick this hit song I wrote for Kahimi in 1995. Good morning, akachan!
I'm a little too jet-lagged at the moment to claim to be whirling up the Japanese archipelago like a cultural typhoon, but I do have some early interests. Mayonaka is publisher / gallery Little More's regular magazine, and the current edition sees an inspired teaming of their regular designer Kazunari Hattori with conceptual manga man Yuichi Yokoyama, who's taken photographs of children and dropped them into his characteristic halftoned, colourblended backgrounds, or inserted his oddly abstract baseball-capped figures into their midst.
Mayonaka is the most inspiring magazine I see on the Japanese racks at the moment, and Little More are little wonders. On Saturday night the gallery's biggest star, 28 year-old photographer Ume Kayo, appeared in a panel talk at Osaka's AD&A Gallery.
We've met Ume Kayo before on Click Opera, in a somewhat gossipy context. In My disappearing little dick she appeared as (nudist, bohemian, photoblogger) Patrick Tsai's love interest. Pat Pat (name-checked on the Joemus album for his rock-diving exploits) was, at the time of telling, heading to Japan to pay court to Kayo, having been "thunderstruck" by her at a french photography biennial. The quest for Kayo's favour seems to have failed; Pat Pat is now with someone else.
I missed the Kayo appearance on Saturday, preferring to sleep deeply, catching up timezones one by one. But Hisae went with her friend Kazumi and reported that Ume Kayo had spoken of her influences: a Japanese wildlife photographer famous for his shots of bathing monkeys, and Ninomiya-san from Johnny's idol group Arashi, and more specifically his erect boy-nipples. (Here Hisae could totally identify.)
A cursary leaf through Ume Kayo's three photo books in, say, your local branch of Tsutaya will give you the impression that her favourite subject is people goofing around. Her first book, Umeme, won the Kimura Award and scored sales of over 100,000 copies for Little More, her publisher. That was mostly Ume and her friends goofing around, giggling at the sight of a bald man with a grain of rice on his head, and so on. The next book, Danshi, sold "only" 40,000 copies and focused on schoolboys goofing around in playgrounds. Her latest, Granpa, is a tender study of Ume's grandfather goofing around.
Last night I drank a lot with some of Hisae's Osaka friends and ended up doing synchronised enka dancing and thinking -- as you do when drunk and jet-lagged -- about how different socities organise inhibition and disinhibition. I must say I admire both; a semi-legenday character like Pat Pat impresses me for his mad Baal-Byron exploits, his disinhibited impulsiveness (although only a certain tweeness saves that stuff from Dash Snow-style tragedy). But ultra-shy, ultra-quiet, inhibited people impress me too. I really identify with their interiority, their withdrawal.
I wouldn't do anything as crude as align Japan with either inhibition or disinhibition. Clearly, though, this country has very distinctive ways of organising when and how you transition from one state to the other. From the extremes of one state to the other. For Japanese people can be the most massively reserved, autistically detached people in the world. And yet, as a drunken night of enka singing -- or the photographs of Ume Kayo -- demonstrate, they can be super-disinhibited when etiquette calls for it. And that -- the fact that there's an etiquette of disinhibition just as there's an etiquette of inhibition -- is an interesting paradox in itself.
I'm in Osaka, jet-lagged but happy, eating sashimi and about to go soak in a sento.
The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.
Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.
South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.
There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.
Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.
The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.
The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.
Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.
Today I'm flying Finnair to Japan. It's been a couple of years, but that's okay; I like to leave long enough between trips for Japan's unfamiliarity and difference to gather afresh. Even if it's just for a few precious hours, I want to feel like a Japan virgin again.
If every time feels a little like the first time, what did the first time feel like? Well, I landed in Japan in 1992 and 1993 into a very particular time, place and culture. Anthropologists of 20th century Japanese subculture call the thing I encountered "Parco-Saison Culture". Press them for more precision and they'll distinguish those terms: the Parco Culture period actually lasted from 1975 to 1985, and the Saison period from 1983 to 1993. So technically, I arrived in "late Saison Japan". All the artifacts I saw and bought (Poison Girlfriend CDs, Sony Walkmans, copies of CUTiE magazine) are technically Late Saison Japan artifacts, bought from late Saison stores (Wave Records, Libro books). Even unrelated phenomena -- the Animal of Airs shop Hibiki Tokiwa kept in Aoyama, the Nadiff bookstore -- had close family ties to the Saison empire. Nadiff, for instance, was started by the manager of the Libro bookshop inside the Ikebukuro branch of Parco. In British terms, that's as if Magma had started life as a spin-off from Selfridges.
The Japan I witnessed in the early 90s consisted of a small hill between Shibuya Station and Yoyogi Park. Here was my hotel, the Tobu. Here was chic department store Parco, and the club where I played my concerts, the Quattro, located (it seemed bizarre at the time) atop a department store and reached by escalators which traversed the deserted sales floors after closing time. Here also were LOFT and OIOI, the Parco art gallery, the record store Wave, and the arty basement bookshop Libro (Saison Culture loves Italian names, clearly). Not far off was Muji, another specialty store owned by Seibu.
I didn't know it at the time, but my first Japan visit was circumscribed almost entirely by a world conceived and invented by one man, Seiji Tsutsumi. A novelist, award-winning poet, and one-time member of the Japanese communist party, the young Seiji inherited the department store business from his father. Yasujiro Tsutsumi founded the Seibu empire in 1912. Typically for Japan, it consisted of a department store (Seibu) and a railway line to bring people to it (the Seibu line). Seiji's half-brother Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a much tougher cookie, inherited ten times as much as Seiji did when the old man died in 1964, and by 1990 Yoshiaki was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world, thanks to property and transport holdings in bubble-era Tokyo. But Seiji was the artistic one. He retired in 1991, but the Japan I first encountered bore his mark the way quattrocento Florence bore the imprint of the renaissance princes. (Like the princes, these magnates were financially corrupt, allied to the mafia, and autocratic, but that's another story, and one Seiji was well out of by the time the prison sentences were being handed down.)
While his half-brother (and rival) did business the way businessmen all over the world do, refined and cultivated Seiji got to work creating something rather more poetic; a cultural environment in Shibuya, a blend of art and commerce. A department store doesn't need an excellent art bookstore in the basement, its own culture magazine (Bikkuri House, which published 130 issues between 1974 and 1985, and whose readers were called "housers"), a concert venue, or a well-curated gallery. It doesn't need to commission arty postmodern posters and adverts from the likes of Eiko Ishioka, or music from Sakamoto and Hosono. But Seiji wanted Parco-Saison culture to have these facilities, and he had the power to make it happen. It's something we still see today -- look at the way Soichiro Fukutake, CEO of the Benesse Corporation, is revitalising the islands of the Seto Inland Sea with cultural patronage, art tourism, museums by international architects, and a series of commissions.
Seiji Tsutsumi left such a mark on shoppers that one blog account measures the separate impacts he had on a succession of Japanese generations, from the Baby Boomers and the Apathetics to the Juniors and the Blanks, and across a succession of cities (Parco brought Saison Culture to Sapporo in 1990, so the capital of Hokkaido lived its Saison a little later than Tokyo).
The YouTube clips reveal Parco's interest in sophisticated visual culture. I saw some of these commercials on my hotel TV during my first trips to Tokyo, but I didn't catch the earliest, purest phase of them. Art director Eiko Ishioka, for instance, was headhunted to make posters and TV spots for Parco in the late 70s after working for Shiseido. According to The Postmodern Arts by Nigel Wheale (Routledge, 1995): "In 1978 she directed a one-minute TV commercial to promote Parco, a new Japanese department store. The ad showed Faye Dunaway wearing a black dress against a black background, peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg. The department store name was faded up for the last few seconds of the action, and a low-key voice-over uttered a sentence in broken English: "This is film for Parco." The ad was highly successful, and Eiko rationalized its effects in terms of performance art: eating an egg was a totally "global act" done by rich and poor, advanced and developing peoples."
Much later, in 2001, I signed a deal with the Parco label Quattro (located directly across the road from the Loft store on the same Shibuya hill) and made a record for them with Emi Necozawa. It was deeply uncommercial, and sold almost nothing, but the label didn't seem to care. Perhaps that huge empire -- "Saison Culture" -- gave them a certain stability, even if it was achieved by sleight of hand. Four years later the police raided Seibu, and accusations of insider dealing and falsification of share ownership flew. The company was acquired by the owners of 7-Eleven. But Parco still stands on top of that hill in Shibuya. And although the money this time comes from a British University rather than Quattro-Parco concerts, the credit card that paid for my plane tickets carries the Saison logo.
Planning for Ocky Milk -- codenamed, at that point, The Friendly Album -- begins in March 2005. I've just got back to Berlin Friedrichshain (and Hisae, and the rabbit) after two months as a sound artist in residence at the Future University in Hokkaido. Japanese ideas infuse the record's concept: "I want to make something as static, as friendly, as consensual, as self-effacing, as Japan itself. It will be a feminine record and a friendly record... The values of pleasure and friendliness, modesty and elegance seem more important than ever to me right now..."
By March 22nd I'm saying the album will be "a warm record all about social connectedness, with the sprightly, breezy gait of Charles Trenet, wearing a straw boater, singing Boum. It's an Asian-sounding record, a Brazilian-sounding record, it's pentatonic enka ticky-tocky dubbed by the 1970s King Tubby. And it sounds a bit like Misora Hibari." An art show in New York with Mai Ueda interrupts things, and in September I'm still cogitating. By now the concept has become to make "random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch" music. At the end of September I announce that I'm flying New York producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Black Dice, Boredoms) to Berlin in November to work on the record with me. I lay down some Dogme-like rules of chastity which are forgotten as soon as we get to work. The record is inspired by Ozu, Caetano Veloso's experimental Araça Azul album, Webern and Harry Partch, but mostly by the sensation of having your back scratched.
With Rusty hunched behind his laptop or cross-miking his Sennheisers, we soon get some songs in the bag. By the end of November 2005 Devil Mask, Buddha Mind, Dr Cat, Moop Bears, Bonsai Tree, Pleasantness, 7000 BC, Permagasm and Ex-Erotomane have been recorded (in that order). They're odd, stilted, experimental. Rusty returns to New York and I negotiate my first novel in Paris and announce that I'll spend three months of 2006 in New York, appearing at the Whitney Biennial. By the end of December I'm heading off to Osaka (Hisae has been temporarily barred from Germany), where I'll finish the album with a mic and a laptop running Garageband. At this point I'm a bit iffy: "Some days I think what I've done so far is utterly wonderful, other days I think it's rubbish." But Hisae's deportation has given me the record's most emotional songs: Hang Low, Zanzibar and Nervous Heartbeat.
In Osaka, slightly anxious about the lack of strong conventional pop songs on the record, I record Frilly Military and Dialtone (reworkings of songs I wrote for Kahimi Karie and Emi Necozawa), The Birdcatcher (an unrecorded song written in the mid-90s) and Count Ossie In China. Finally I add I Refuse To Die, an outtake from the Otto Spooky sessions. The record is done. James Goggin's sleeve -- a saga in itself -- gets finished in June, and the record comes out in October 2006.
My overall feeling about Ocky Milk now is that it's a murky, peculiar, sensual album. I don't think it achieves the friendliness that I started out hoping to capture, and if it aimed to scratch your back, well, the person doing the scratching is some kind of schizoid vampire with a personality composed mostly of scrambled, obscure cultural references and poor web translation. The album's evasion of coherence at every turn reminds me of Captain Beefheart's prayer: "Oh Lord, please fuck my mind for good!" But with the mind fucked by editing, by randomising, by google poetry, and by spontaneous improvisation, emotions can take over. And Ocky Milk is surprisingly coherent emotionally. What emerges is a mysterious new form of half-lit tenderness. Tenderness in another world, which is a beautiful one (laced with terror, but "what's beauty but terror we're still just able to bear?").
You can hear pop music defiantly edging its way back through the sound experimentation -- a development that will lead to the blippy-boppy Joemus, the next Momus album, and the decade's last.
I know from my correspondence that many of the readers of this blog are young and idealistic, and would like to dedicate their lives to tracking down evil and doing their bit in eradicating it. I sense their fervour to be "sleuths and slayers of evil". For these readers, today is a red-letter day. Because today -- via a source I cannot endanger by revealing -- I have unexpectedly received a quantity of statistics on evil, statistics I believe to be entirely accurate. They certainly confirm many hunches I've had about the location and habits of evil. The main thing they confirm is that evil is counter-intuitive: that it would be foolish to expect evil to be accompanied by thunderclaps and sinister music. Instead, the avid evil sleuth must seek it in much more subtle -- and much more banal -- places.
I'll start with some of the most interesting statistics revealed in the secret research:
Over 70% of all evil in the world is contained in things that we all do. This is probably the report's most important finding, and a great time-saver for the "evil sleuth". Basically, it means that when you're tracking down evil, you probably shouldn't waste your resources investigating freaks, weirdos, eccentrics, people who dress up as women, clowns, minority immigrant communities, would-be-dictators who live in hollowed-out volcanoes, and so on. Evil-doers are much more likely to be someone who lives next door and seems like "a pretty decent bloke all round".
Evil people probably strike us as trustworthy: It goes without saying that shifty, criminal-looking types are at a very big disadvantage when it comes to getting away with crime: everybody is watching them like a hawk. No, like successful confidence-tricksters, evil people need to inspire trust, to lull us off our guard. They're more likely to be popular than unpopular -- everybody loved Bernie Madoff! Which brings us to...
Insiders: Evil-doers are massively more likely (88%, according to the secret report) to be insiders than outsiders. In other words, they are completely integrated into the infrastructure. They are, to all intents and purposes, legitimate. Throughout November sociologist Laurie Taylor broadcast three very courageous and revealing programmes about white-collar crime in Britain. The overwhelming impression these programmes give is that white-collar crime happens on a scale which makes car thieves, drug-dealers and other criminals who clog up prisons look like jaywalkers. And yet white-collar crime is almost never punished. That's because it's so integral to the system we live in that it passes for legitimacy, and for normality.
All that isn't behind us now: There's a tendency to think that evil is something that happened in the past, but doesn't happen now. The research knocks this over completely: of all the evil ever committed, it tells us, a stunning 56% of it is still happening right now. It's just not happening where you expect. The trouble for an aspiring evil sleuth is that humanity, massively, has a tendency to close barn doors after the horses have bolted. We're always looking back, trying to "prevent" the last crisis rather than thinking laterally and forward to prevent the next one. For instance, armed police currently patrol Akihabara because a man killed seven people there in a freak incident last year. But lightning doesn't strike twice. Clearly, the police should be patrolling the district where the next freak incident will occur. Now, that could be anywhere. But we have one resource-saving tip: it probably won't be Akihabara again. No need to send men there, then.
Evil is a habit: A good deal of the literature of evil focuses on premeditated acts the perp knows to be evil. (This is also what the law considers the most evil type of evil.) Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, decides to kill an old pawn broker to see what it feels like to be evil. Sure, it makes an interesting story, but in the real world evil doesn't work like that. The research shows that a whopping 92% of all evil currently being perpetrated in the world is an unintended and often unacknowledged side-effect of what we think of as perfectly normal, innocuous behaviours, like driving cars or eating food. What's more, rather than intentional acts, evil tends to be a habit. It's what you do when you're on auto-pilot.
Evil is obedience: It's hard to overcome those formative years in which your parents tried to convince you that you were being "naughty" when you disobeyed. But the evidence proves that more evil occurs through obedience than through disobedience. There's a good reason for this: the disobedient really have to think through what they're doing, because they're probably going to be punished for it. Disobedient acts are therefore subject to all sorts of cost-benefit analysis and moral scrutiny that obedient acts aren't. Disobedient acts are generally more intelligent acts.
Over here, not over there: When President Bush outlined an "axis of evil", all the nations named were, unsurprisingly, quite far away from the place where Bush made the speech. Using new evil-location technology developed by Google (the company whose motto is, of course, "Don't Be Evil!"), the report reveals that the world's greatest source of evil was located in the same room as Bush while he gave the speech. The technology isn't yet able to locate specific individuals, but my bet would be on Dick Cheney.
There are no evil opinions, only evil framings: We have a tendency to judge people's evil levels by their expressed opinions: "Oh, he believes x, he's an evil cunt." Tempting though this is to believe (if it were the case, evil sleuths would just have to sit around in bars all day waiting for people to express evil opinions), it's barking up the wrong tree. Evil resides in the way the question is framed, not the opinion you express once you accept the framing. For instance, people arguing whether the term "prawny" (I just made it up) is needlessly offensive or justifiably offensive to prawns both agree that it's offensive. They're therefore "on the same page" with the idea that being a prawn is generally A Bad Thing. Evil resides in their agreement, rather than their disagreement. If you're keen to find it, look for it not in their conscious, calculated, publicly-stated opinions, but in the things they both take for granted.
Evil can be controlled: There's good news built into the finding that evil is close to home. An evil that is inside us is an evil that we can alter, if we only allow ourselves to see it, assume responsibility for it, and consciously change it. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Jackson said: "I'm looking at the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways."
I was going to say "Go forth, young sleuths of evil, and change the world!" But you can probably achieve more by staying at home with a mirror.
Ban this, ban that! No, we don't mean business! We the Swiss would never ban that! No, ban the poor, ban the different! Ban and stigmatize the things the poor and the different do, the shapes they wear and build! Don't ban the rich! Court the rich! Attract them by enabling capital, incentivising business, indemnifying the banks, making their risk public and their profit private! But minarets, veils, burkas -- ban, ban, ban! Ban in the name of freedom! Ban in the name of feminism! Ban in the name of national identity! Ban in the name of fear!
On Sunday, the Swiss voted in a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets. Existing minarets can stay, but new ones cannot be built. The measure will now pass into Swiss law. A particular building shape is now forbidden. A 4% minority of the Swiss population -- also, and not coincidentally, its poorest 4% -- has been told that its buildings "endanger Swiss security". Banners held up banners in front of models of minarets that declared: "That is not my Switzerland".
"France has finally found a problem worthy of itself: the scarf draping the heads of a few girls. Decadence can be said to have been stopped in this country. The Muslim invasion, long diagnosed by Le Pen and confirmed nowadays by a slew of indubitable intellectuals, has found its interlocutor. The battle of Poitiers was kid's stuff, Charles Martel, only a hired gun. But Chirac, the Socialists, feminists and Enlightenment intellectuals suffering from Islamophobia will win the battle of the headscarf."
Badiou demolishes, in this splendidly angry, numbered text, the arguments that banning the headscarf is either a feminist or enlightenment gesture: "Either it's the father and eldest brother, and "feministly" the hijab must be torn off, or it's the girl herself standing by her belief, and "laically" it must be torn off. There is no good headscarf. Bareheaded! Everywhere! ...Everyone must go out bareheaded.
"One will never go into raptures enough over feminism's singular progression. Starting off with women's liberation, nowadays feminism avers that the "freedom" acquired is so obligatory that it requires girls (and not a single boy!) to be excluded owing to the sole fact of their dressing accoutrements."
Badiou is quite clear about what really underlies the ban.
"In truth of fact, the Scarfed Law expresses one thing and one thing alone: fear. Westerners in general, the French in particular, are but a shivering, fearful lot. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Those from within, i.e. the "young suburbanites"; those from without, i.e. "Islamist terrorists." Why are they frightened? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. They are guilty of having renounced and attempted to annihilate -- ever since the 1980s -- every kind of emancipatory politics, every revolutionary form of Reason, and every true assertion of something else. Guilty of clutching at their lousy privileges. Guilty of being but old children playing with their manifold purchases. Yes, indeed, "in a long childhood, they have been made to age." They are thus afraid of everything a little less aged. A stubborn young lady, for instance."
This is confirmed in European coverage of the Swiss minaret ban: "The Belgian newspaper Le Soir noted that some people found minarets "scary," and added, "There is a strong chance that if there was a vote in Belgium, a majority of citizens would be against it too."
The only thing that would prevent the Germans enacting similar bans would be the all-too-resonant similarity to the persecution of a religion in their 20th century history. And the EU's human rights stance. Here's the EU's human rights commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, righteously hammering Sarkozy as well as the Swiss (Sarkozy is currently leading a debate on whether the burka should be banned in France; his own stated position is that the burka "is not welcome"):
"In a statement on the Swiss vote, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, warned against narrowly defining national identity and pinpointed France's debate as a potential "trap of promoting one single identity, which defines who is included and, by extension, who is excluded."
Badiou points out that Islam is, in France, the religion of the poor. This is its real crime; to be associated with the economic underclass. Meanwhile, symbols of France's real mass religion -- business -- go unchecked in French schools:
"Isn't business the real mass religion? Compared to which Muslims look like an ascetic minority? Isn't the conspicuous symbol of this degrading religion what we can read on pants, sneakers and t-shirts: Nike, Chevignon, Lacoste... Isn't it cheaper yet to be a fashion victim at school than God's faithful servant? If I were to aim at hitting a bull's eye here -- aiming big -- I'd say everyone knows what's needed: a law against brand names. Get to work, Chirac. Let's ban the conspicuous symbols of Capital, with no compromises."
In a great lecture reprinted in the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt asks What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it," Judt says. "Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?"
The short answer: we are afraid of difference, and reluctant even to try to imagine it. As Badiou puts it in his Hard Talk interview: "We have no great and clear idea of another world."
"It is not necessary that you leave the house," wrote Franz Kafka, perhaps anticipating Google. "Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." Otto Spooky is an odd album, a treasure trove of worthless things found whilst googling, or, as I wrote at the time, "the record David Bowie would have made if he'd worked on Lodger with ex-members of The Incredible String Band instead of ex-members of Roxy Music".
Otto Spooky is the first Momus album made in Berlin (and arguably the only one, since Ocky Milk was half made in Osaka and Joemus half made in Glasgow), the first post-blog album (Click Opera already existed, and in fact was financing these songs via a donation system). It's an album made in an age of iPods and Web 2.0 applications. I think of it as a neo-Elizabethan googlepop record: an aleph-album, with google as "the place from which everything in the world can be seen simultaneously". It's an album on which everything is visible and nothing matters. It's rich but lost, observant but dizzy. Digital form has become a rush, a torrent leading us anywhere and everywhere and nowhere. From Elizabethan England to Tripoli to Eritrea to Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay, the album melts and flows, carried along by John Talaga's mind-warping transitions and the constant sound of water.
"The 2005 Album From Momus" was recorded in my apartment on the Stalin-esque Karl-Marx-Allee between April and July 2004 and provisionally entitled The Artist Overwhelmed By The Grandeur Of Ancient Ruins, a title from Henry Fuseli, the early Romantic painter of irrational nightmares. I was 44, and I'd moved to Berlin the year before after a somewhat nomadic three years in New York and Tokyo. By 2004 I was living with a fashion student called Ayako, writing for Vice magazine and various design publications, getting more interest from art mags than music publications (Modern Painters gave me four pages in 2003), rummaging in Berlin's flea markets, lusting after its hipster scenester girls, visiting art shows.
The year before I'd made a record with Anne Laplantine. Summerisle (not a regular Momus album, and therefore not included in the sequence here) referenced The Wicker Man and -- without bandwagon-jumping -- fitted quite neatly into the then-trendy Wicker Folk or Weird New Folk meme. Appropriately enough, Otto Spooky opens with a couple of tracks which sound as if they're mining the same meaning-seams as Summerisle -- experimental folk music -- slightly more articulately. But, as spring 2004 turns to summer, things diverge... and keep diverging, endlessly, exhaustingly. In April I record (and blog about; click the links) Jesus in Furs, Life of the Fields, Robin Hood, and Corkscrew King. In May I write Sempreverde, Klaxon, Bantam Boys, The Water Song, Cockle Pickers, Your Fat Friend, Belvedere and Lute Score. Things are rounded off in June with the composition and recording of Mr Ulysses, The Artist Overwhelmed and, finally, I Refuse To Die. In the summer I head off to Japan and Hong Kong.
In retrospect, Otto Spooky feels like an oblique, exhausting album. It's like wandering in some sort of mad art biennial. The range of references is dizzying, mystifying, disorienting. The record is rich and strange, yet light and nebulous; political yet politically-incorrect. You get the impression of a cavern of junk treasure, a butterfly fluttering over jewels. A rush of information becomes a spinning globe, a kaleidoscopic blur.
This may be the weakest of my noughties albums, but if he's lost, Spooky Otto, the "artist overwhelmed", is lost in a respectable, calculated, arty, playful, gainful way. This absurdist interview, recorded at the time, may confuse you further.
Otto Spooky can be ordered on CD here (UK) or here (US).
The new edition of Berlin "electroniclivingaspects" culture mag De:Bug is out, and it's a Japan Special.
A writer called Timo Feldhaus came round and interviewed me about Japanophilia for the issue, and later Mary Scherpe took some portraits in Jan's apartment round the corner, sitting on his tatami mats:
I think De:Bug used a different photo from the same session for the article (I haven't actually seen the paper copy yet). Mary is one of the founders of streetsnap style blog Stil in Berlin, which has just launched as a free paper magazine too.
Being a Japanophile, I'd have to say Drop Japan is probably my favourite street style blog at the moment.
On Friday night at Madame Claude there was a fantastic chance to see Ben Butler and Mousepad supporting Oorutaichi, the future of music. He turns out to live remarkably close to Hisae's family home in Tennoji, Osaka, so we're hoping to drop in on him in Japan when we visit (we fly on Friday).
Oorutaichi's set in the Madame Claude cellar was wonderful -- shrieky and tribal -- but I just want to note here how great Ben Butler and Mousepad now are live. The group consists of Joe Howe and his friend Bastien. Here's Joe with his girlfriend Emma, both wearing some "Jewish" glasses Hisae made for me, with locks of her own hair hanging off the arms (I'm wearing them in the Oorutaichi snap too):
Ben Butler and Mousepad sound like a blend of YMO, Herbie Hancock and Synergy. Who's Synergy, I hear you ask? I didn't know either until I watched this clip on Joe's blog:
Synergy is someone called Larry Fast, who made music for Commodore computer games in the 80s, I guess.
And here's a snatch of Ben Butler and Mousepad on Friday night playing their most YMO-ish number:
Read today's papers and you'll find that there's another major financial crisis brewing, as banks like HSBC and the home of my own overdraft, RBS (now 84% owned by the British taxpayer) find themselves dangerously exposed to debt defaults, mostly in the construction industry, in the bling-bling dictatorship, Dubai.
Like everything else in Dubai (its highest building -- not, incidentally, the skyscraper sporting the huge portrait of the enclave's resident dictator, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum --is 40% taller than the next nearest rival), the debt crisis is one of elephantine proportions: $14 billion of syndicated loans to Dubai World are said to be looking very iffy indeed, and the total debt is estimated by some at about $90 billion, and others as far beyond that.
It would be tempting just to shrug this off, if it weren't for the fact that the Dubai hype reached even my post-materialist ears. Members of my family have been to Dubai, my bank lends my overdraft interest to the state's construction firms, my book editors are visiting with a view to writing books about the speculative bubble and the fascinating way in which it's burst.
"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.
It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.
The people close to me -- editors, writers I know here in Berlin -- were interested in Dubai not just as a speculative bubble and a sort of Brechtian fable (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny played out in a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s), but because they're close to architect Rem Koolhaas, who was preparing to unleash his own sort of bubble on the city. Truly the architecture it deserved, you might say, but will now never get.
Here's a fairly superficial and, I'd say, immoral TV documentary by Piers Morgan about Dubai:
Watching that, my first reaction is "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to live in a place like that!" It looks like everything I hate and avoid in the cities I know: endless anaemic shopping malls with ludicrously inflated prices, vapid celebrities and self-made, flabby entrepreneurs, absolutely zero culture you'd want to spend any time with (unless you're really into Kylie shows punctuated with "the world's largest fireworks display"), Sunday Times Rich List types with parasitic hangers-on, people with dyed blonde hair who talk about money and drink champagne, people who've never encountered a single interesting idea (let alone an idea critical of the kind of world they inhabit) in their lives, bubble-headed people floating about in a bubble economy.
Burst, Dubai, burst! And take your dictator with you! But don't take my bank, my sister, my editor, or the entire world financial system down into hell with you, please.
1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally b) alienating an ally c) splitting a united front against bigots d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement 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." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
Monday's International Emmy Awards saw a win for Japan in the Comedy category. NHK's production of Hoshi Shinichi's Short Shorts presents "one author's tales of strange worlds, told with an odd accent, grownup fairy tales". Shinichi, who died in 1997, wrote over a thousand of these "short shorts", stories just three or four pages long. He's often called a sci-fi writer, but most of his fictions are earthbound, and concern parallel worlds where strange things happen. Here, for instance, is the tale of Mr Teal, a space travel insurance agent whose life is so mechanised that nobody notices he's dead:
And here's the tale of a woman brought to hospital by her boyfriend, who tells the staff she thinks she's a fox, because the last thing she said was kon, which is the bark of a fox in Japanese. In fact, she was starting to say kondo, which means "next time", and was trying to warn him that next time he cheated on her she'd leave him.
This is a very odd one. A young girl has a much older lover, who keeps her in the lap of luxury, in a room with strange white flowers and a fountain bath. He goes away on a trip, leaving her (totally naked) in the care of his butler. The servant has to relay the news that the old man has died in a car accident, but the young girl already knows it somehow:
There are times I wish I could draw well. I think manga, or the visual novel (The Crib Sheet prefers the term gekiga, or "drama pictures"), has the capacity to be a much higher artform than written-word-only novels. Just about anybody can write, but not so many can write and draw with talent. So it seems unfair that we generally rank visual novels lower than literary novels.
Japan tends to observe this hierarchy less. When Tomoko Miyata was visiting Berlin recently, she told us that her favourite writer is the mangakaYoshiharu Tsuge. He's still alive, but hasn't made any new manga since 1986. Here are a couple of rather remarkable films I found on YouTube, in which a fan has animated still Tsuge manga in a superbly weird, almost psychedelic style:
I think it's the capacity of drawing to evoke -- better than photography, film, or the written word -- parallel worlds which both resemble our world and don't that I like so much. That plus the fact that a single auteur-creator, sitting at a kotatsu table, can produce these worlds with very few resources except time, effort, skill and imagination. And possibly the fact that the manga industry has something abject and underground about it, rather like the world of indie record labels (the Wikipedia entry on gekiga basically says they were to Japan what rock was to the US). Is it too late for me to learn to draw and switch careers?
I'm a little too jet-lagged at the moment to claim to be whirling up the Japanese archipelago like a cultural typhoon, but I do have some early interests. 
A cursary leaf through Ume Kayo's three photo books in, say, your local branch of Tsutaya will give you the impression that her favourite subject is people goofing around. Her first book, Umeme, won the Kimura Award and scored sales of over 100,000 copies for Little More, her publisher. That was mostly Ume and her friends goofing around, giggling at the sight of a bald man with a grain of rice on his head, and so on. The next book, Danshi, sold "only" 40,000 copies and focused on schoolboys goofing around in playgrounds. Her latest, Granpa, is a tender study of Ume's grandfather goofing around.
"It is not necessary that you leave the house," wrote Franz Kafka, perhaps anticipating Google. "Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet." 
