Surprised woman waiting for Takeo Toyama piano performance in the art room at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, Sunday. Takeo Toyama at his piano. Art from one of the books lining the room.
The designer Eiko Ishioka died yesterday in Tokyo of pancreatic cancer, aged 73.
As well as directing this Bjork video, Ishioka was one of the key architects of the look and feel of Japanese postmodernism in the 1980s. I wrote about her in articles like Saison Culture and Classicism and Atrocity.
Casual glosses of my journalistic activities tend to mention blogging for Wired and the New York Times, but those jobs ended in 2007 and 2009 respectively. In fact, I haven’t earned a wooden nickel from American magazines since the collapse of design bible ID in 2009.
The new decade has seen me shift from online technology and lifestyle features to paper-printed art and culture features, and from the US to Europe. The magazines I write for now on a regular basis are The Wire (music, UK), Apartamento (design, Italy), Mousse, Frieze and Spike (all art, Italy, UK and Austria). Here’s a gloss of some of my features due to appear in the next month or so. The way I write now, themes tend to clump together and articles complement each other.
The next Frieze runs my extensive interview with Rem Koolhaas, focused on his book about the Japanese architects of the Metabolism movement. This will be my first feature in the paper edition of Frieze, though in the past I wrote occasional columns for their site. The next Apartamento runs a piece I’ve written about John Cage’s methods of improving the world. The next Mousse runs my essay about the Abbey Road webcam, and how smitten we are by overshadowing canonical artefacts and their “iconic” signatures. The next Spike continues this theme with a piece connecting the newly-discovered footage of Bowie performing The Jean Genie on Top of the Pops with Derrida’s Freudian essay Archive Fever, and asks “how can we kill the archive before it kills us?”
Several things please me about my journalistic trajectory. I write now for paper, not just for whizzing electrons on a screen. I’m generally free to pick my own topics, so I write only about the issues which are really gnawing at me. I write for the kind of publications — and there are very few of them — that I actually read for pleasure and interest. And they pay me money for it.
This Marie Calloway interview with Momus in The Rumpus has a lot going on in it, but I want to highlight just one theme: my emerging tendency to see what once might have looked like conflicts as productive dialectics.
I mention, for instance, how a North European Protestant mindset might produce both the UK tabloids and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and later how the Japanese manga industry is capable of producing both the clichés of its most formulaic conventions and the originality of Yuichi Yokoyama. This relates to The Arrow and the Frame, a breakthrough Click Opera entry inspired by — of all things — Google AdWords, but also to what T.S. Eliot called Tradition and the Individual Talent:
“Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.”
I was browsing at Beyer Books recently (my favourite Osaka cafe / library) in Metropolitan World Atlas, a visual breakdown by Arjen Van Susteren of data on global cities.
When talking of Osaka, this book lists a city they call Kobe-Osaka-Kyoto, the continuous urban region known in Japanese as Keihanshin. This makes sense to me: I buy my shoes in Kyoto and my tea in Kobe Chinatown, and although the feel of those cities is pretty different (Kobe is like Hong Kong, clinging to a hillside, overlooking a spectacular harbour, while Kyoto is a sacred, touristy place up in the mountains), they seem contiguous with Osaka; local.
Osaka on its own has a population of 2.6 million (by night) and 3.7 million (during the day), making it comparable, size-wise, to Berlin, the previous city I lived in, which has a population of 3.49 million. But Keihanshin is in quite another league; it’s the seventh biggest city in the world (according to the stats in Metropolitan World Atlas, which date from 2000; the ranking has probably changed slightly in the last ten years). With almost 18 million inhabitants at the last count, Keihanshin is comparable to the two cities I lived in before Berlin: New York and London. And that feels about right, in terms of the sprawl, bustle and vitality here.
Interestingly enough, a thousand years ago Keihanshin — centred on Kyoto — also featured in the top ten of world cities by population. Kyoto in the year 1000 was the fifth most populous urban area in the world, surrounded by cities like Kaifeng, Angkor, Neyshabur, Al-Hasa and Patan, places people today would have a hard time placing on a blank map. Then again, people today have no idea where the megacities of 2020 are on a map, according to this article in The Observer. Test yourself: where are Chengdu, Surat, Faridabad, Toluca, Palembang, Chittagong, Beihai, and Ghaziabad? The fastest-growing cities of the 21st century are as obscure to Westerners as the phantom megalopolae of the year 1000 — proof, if any were needed, that this really isn’t our century.
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