February 2012
38 posts
“The Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus was designed by the architect Bernhard Pfau and opened to the public in 1970,” says the theatre’s website, adding, correctly, that “it creates an exciting contrast with the nearby Drei Scheiben Hochhaus (Three Section Tower) by architect Fritz Eller”. The modernist, minimalist architecture (curvy, Jumbo-jetty) is...
Two great, strange songs from Fanal III, released on the Sonig label in 2010. This is painter Kai Althoff’s musical project. The videos are by Brett Milspaw.
West Germany is understated, rich, safe, solid, serious, superlegitimate, Japanese (well, Immermannstrasse certainly is). I’m picking things up at Koenig in the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle, rather glad to be here after Belgium, listening to Toulouse Low Trax, aka Detlef from Kreidler, also the promoter of my show tomorrow evening at the Kunsthalle (Salon des Amateurs next door), also my dinner...
Farewell Brussels, hallo Dusseldorf.
For those left dangling uncomfortably from the...
Visiting the Jubelpark museums with artists Abel Auer and Dorota Jurczak, Sunday.
Finland: The Welfare Game is the latest national redesign proposal in the Solution series from Sternberg. Architects Martti Kalliala and Tuomas Toivonen (the latter currently building the new Helsinki sauna I mentioned the other day) are joined by writer and curator Jenna Sutela and a couple of anonymous insiders to suggest a few outlandish ideas for Finland’s future. Artwork is, as usual,...
This, the 5th in a series of Emotional Lectures...
You touch down at the Atomium by throttling gently back on your jetpack, of course. This, after all, is the future as the past (specifically the 1958 World’s Fair) saw it.
If you’re too cheap to fill your jetpack with hydroponic superfuel, you can always take the 51 tram instead.
It’s modelled on the Higgs Boson. Or a big bosom. The first puzzle is finding the door. ...
For the non-believer, a church is a sequence of pleasingly eccentric information displays.
This postcard of Kerk Sint-Jan-de-Doper in Brussels shows that its forecourt on the Begijnhof was once a car park featuring white Datsuns.
The pegboard on which the church proudly mounts its postcard collection is a kind of proto-Tumblr page, locked with a physical key rather than a password.
But no...
“The public sector is the sector with vision,” architect Rem Koolhaas is telling me over Skype, “and I think this is something that, for whatever reason, we haven’t had for a very long time. Compare Archigram in the UK to the Metabolists in Japan: in Europe similar ideas were doomed to remain unrealized; in Asia those very ideas were implemented by an industrial culture that...
Next month, as part of Helsinki’s status as Design Capital 2012, Marimekko launches a series of guerilla recreations — across Helsinki and online — of the Mari Village, a utopian project (and money sink) started in 1962 by Armi Ratia, the firm’s tough-yet-visionary founder.
Marimekko’s own PR about what this will involve is vague, and doesn’t show any...
If we’re to believe British Eurosceptics, Brussels is the home of a scary authoritarian standardisation, a floppy paper fist heavy with regulations intent on crushing all character, variety and eccentricity out of the world. But evidence on the ground suggests quite the reverse. Take No Parking signs, for instance.
The semi-fascistic (and yet infuriatingly liberal and anti-car)...
I’m delighted to announce that the fifth in a series of Emotional Lectures by Momus will be delivered in Brussels on Saturday 18th February at 3pm at The Settlement, Bottelarij, Delaunoystraat 58, bus 11, 1080 Brussel (Molenbeek).
The Emotional Lecture series is delivered by an academic paying tribute — he begins measured and objective, but becomes angry and personal — to a...
The new edition of Mousse magazine is out, and in it you’ll find my essay about the Abbey Road webcam, which I became strangely fascinated with during December. I’d sit on my tatami mats in Osaka, watching London tourists line up in real time to reproduce the Abbey Road sleeve. Better yet, I’d catch the cam in the middle of the night, when nobody was there, the Beatles were...
In early March I’m being interviewed at the BBC’s new media centre in Salford by longtime ally Stuart Maconie for his Freakier Zone show on BBC 6 Music.
The original idea was for me to talk about pieces of music that meant something to me, so I proposed — and they accepted — the idea of an all-Cage programme. 2012 is the centenary of Cage’s birth, but Cage is...
The very first gig I played was in a cinema, the Odeon on Clerk Street in Edinburgh.
It was (and I’ve only just learned this, thanks to The Edinburgh Gig Archive) November 26th 1981. My band The Happy Family was only a couple of months old, formed from the remnants of angular janglepop legends Josef K.
Because of Josef K’s legendary status, things happened rather rapidly and...
Trains olympic and theoretical.
Essay from Bruno Munari’s Design As Art, 1966.
Tropismes is a very good french-language bookshop in an arcade in the centre of Brussels.
What I want to find in such a place is a serious experimental work, between fiction and documentary, by an angry artist who wants to challenge the terms not just of his medium, but of his society. A book which — behind a deceptively restrained, classical and generic cover — gives me access to...
Sometime in the next couple of weeks the March edition of Frieze will hit the streets with my Rem Koolhaas interview about his book (with Hans-Ulrich Obrist) Project Japan: Metabolism Talks.
For those who want more depth on the Metabolist movement — as well as the rhythms of Rem’s nervous, precise, committed speaking style — this video of a recent Architectural Association...
My Poison Boyfriend album gets the retromania treatment in this week’s NME, which ranks it at 72 in a Great Lost Albums poll and gets Brett Anderson to write a blurb on it.
The photo caption reads: “As passport photos go, at least this one had romance.” Which is odd, since the file photo they’ve run isn’t a passport photo. They asked me for a picture last week and...
At the Bozar bookshop I browsed through an excellent and funny children’s book called Le Nez by Olivier Douzou. It’s the story — told in language completely altered by nasal mucus — of a blocked nose which sets out with a band of similarly-blocked companions to find “the big handkerchief”.
The book is visually very effective, set in Bodoni and illustrated...
Brussels. So close to Paris on the train. And yet here snow lies on the ground.
Signs of life in the inner city are almost exclusively muslim, and francophone. “Because of the cold you’ll find the fruits and vegetables inside the shop.”
“I recognise no method of living that I know / I see only the basic materials I may use” David Sylvian, Red Guitar ...
Seeing this beautiful Suhrkamp edition of Walter Benjamin’s writings at the Jewish Museum in Le Marais yesterday rekindled in me a nostalgia not just for the time when my intellectual life was dominated by German-speaking Jews, but for a time (before I was born) when to be an intellectual was the most important and dignified thing you could do with your life.
As Hannah Arendt says in a...
This is a new book of essays by Haruomi Hosono entitled The Ambient Driver. I particularly like the design of the inside of the dust jacket.
January 2012
37 posts
From this weekend I’ll be living for a month or so by this canal in Brussels, where I’ve rented a room — a sort of self-appointed residency — from the Q-02 Art Centre.
I chose Brussels because I’m playing there on the 8th, because it’s centrally located in Europe (I arrive in Paris, and have shows in the UK, Sweden and Germany), and because it’s an...
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...
Canvas
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...
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...
Here’s a curiosity from the years of my...