December 2011
55 posts
Just south of Osaka Zoo is Tobita Shinchi, Japan’s largest prostitution district.
Technically, prostitution is against the law in Japan. These establishments pose as “restaurants”.
When I give visiting friends my Alternative Osaka tour, I take them to Tobita Shinchi and the homeless area just to the West.
Compared with Red Light districts in the West, this place has a...
Lesage: Turcaret Jim Turcaret has been meaning to replace a faulty boiler in his house for months. Little does he know that toxic gases from the device have caused genetic mutations in the family next door. When he catches sight of the fabulous mermaid Fatima, Jim hatches a plot to murder his wife. Fatima is installed in an enormous goldfish bowl in the living room. Jim makes frequent visits,...
“A post-Protestant unbeliever doesn’t believe in hell and the personal God....”
Momus tumbls through 2011: The past four months September 2011
It’s the hottest month of the Japanese summer and — in between violin-scraping sessions for my sonata and readings from The Book of Japans — I’m cycling up to 60km a day, discovering weird octopae and peculiar towers in distant suburbs. At the end of the month, after visiting an art event on top of Mount...
Momus tumbls through 2011: The middle bit May 2011
Spring hits Osaka and I’m out at the docks, riding the ferries and admiring industrial cathedrals. My Book of Japans is published. I put some cedar decking and plants on my roof. By the end of the month I’m back in Britain, experiencing jet- and culture-lag in a borrowed apartment in Windsor. Best Post: Thinking about the Glasgow...
Momus tumbls through 2011: The first third January 2011
I visit the Ise Shrine and discover new ramen joints, cafes, cheap clothes shops and organic farms in chilly Osaka. Best Post: The Tsurumibashi Arcade podcast. Music Tip: Laurence Crane Octet. February 2011
I tour the fishmarket in Athens, give a lecture about sheds in Sweden, and one about buildings at the Glasgow School of Art. Best...
Why is a raven like a writing desk? And what does Yuichi Yokoyama have in common with a contemporary dance choreographer?
I can’t answer the first question, but I can tell you what I think Yokoyama has in common with a choreographer.
In books like Travel (I saw the original drawings in Osaka recently), Yokoyama elects to use a narrative-driven artform — the sequences of...
* The girl called Marie Calloway, somewhat suddenly famous.
* The New York Observer article about Marie Calloway, entitled Meet Marie Calloway: The New Model for Literary Seductress is Part Feminist, Part ‘Famewhore’ and All Pseudonymous.
* The Gawker article about the New York Observer article about Marie Calloway, entitled Girl, Microfamed, stating that she is both “oversharing”...
It’s legendary in my family that when we moved to Athens in 1969 we were so poor — my dad, who’d just taken up a posting with the British Council, hadn’t been paid yet — that a bare chair in our Psychiko flat had to stand in for a Christmas tree. I only got one present that year: a copy of Abbey Road, which The Beatles had released three months earlier. It was to be...
This is my version of Ballad of the Bastard by Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat, from their album Everything’s Getting Older.
This song of gorgeously moral and woozy-boozy self-loathing is so restrained in the original that I immediately wanted to make an elaborately sickening, extrava-vacantly gorgeous Christmas cover version.
Supposedly the season of goodwill to all men, Christmas is, in...
I very much appreciate Enzo Mari’s “old man anger” in this video, at 3 minutes and 45 seconds. The Italian designer’s valuable rage here against redundancy, repetition and data chimes with what I think is the major cultural problem of our time: We’ve forgotten how to forget. We don’t know how to evaluate, how to eliminate, how to evacuate. We’ve let the...
TONIGHT: Osaka Amerikamura
Monday 19th December, 7.30pm Coming of Age in Samoa Nu Things Jajouka
Momus song + sonata set
Adv 2000 yen Door 2500 yen
Has there ever been an era so bleak? asks an article in today’s Guardian, headlined “The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?”
I might be a little more concerned if it weren’t for two things. First of all, the things I respond to aesthetically these days — the things that cheer me up — are not luxury brands and high-end shopping centres....
In Kobe yesterday I stumbled by chance on the Center for Overseas Migration and Cultural Interaction, a building up the hill near the Kitano district. Once an active emigrant station, this place now houses an art centre, an emigration museum and a cafe animated by the delicate kalimba music of Robbin Lloyd.
Much of the building is dedicated to the experiences of Nikkei-Brasilians. There are 1.3...
Garish, elegant clusters of fluorescent tubes illuminate Umeda underground station in Osaka. They’re bright white, but when you zoom in to photograph them close up some of the tubes show yellow. This optical frequency confusion just makes them more mysterious.
He pretended that there was a political movement called Fruit and Flowers.
Then he remembered that “fruit and flowers” is a euphemism for drugs.
Drugs are historically the product of plant extracts, he reminded himself.
He did not have a guardian spirit, not even a guardian spirit of nothing-in-particular.
It was important to reinforce binder pages with staple-hole...
Ted Hughes: Memorial Tones on BBC Radio 4 had a...
Move On is a song on David Bowie’s avant pop...
At Beyer Books, trying to generate story ideas for the March edition of Spike magazine.
Interviewing Rem Koolhaas for Frieze.
Berlin-based artist Johannes Vogl produced Column of Steam during his Istanbul residency. “A sculptural work drawing its inspiration from the omnipresent Turkish practice of tea drinking, casts traditional family structures in a light that is both humorous and precarious. A tower of teapots stacked one upon another up to the ceiling boils without end over a stove plugged into a gas tank...
Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… is a really fascinating read, elegantly presented; the story of the last modernist avant garde movement. I’m boning up on my copy because tomorrow I’m interviewing Rem Koolhaas about his book — and the five-year research project behind it — for Frieze.
Enjoying the sort of mindless relational-aesthetic experiences Jerry Saltz rails against in The Long Slide at Art Area B1, Osaka.
The 25 Most Popular Momus Songs (as measured by YouTube)
Here — measured by the number of YouTube hits they’ve received to date — are my 25 most popular songs, as sung by me.
1. Momus I Want You, But I Don’t Need You First released in 1997, 94,019 hits on YouTube
Thanks, Ms Palmer! (Her version is approaching a million hits.)
2. Momus The Hairstyle of the Devil...
Tao Lin “explains” how the New Yorker rejected his cover image of a whale-sized Xanax, from an ongoing series for Vice magazine entitled Drug-Related Photoshop Art.
Alexandre Singh on the cover of ArtReview! This is the art fan version of the soccer fan seeing his favourite striker score the winning goal in the cup final! (Is that what you call it, “the cup final”?) Declaration of interest: I not only stayed in Singh’s house when I was in the Whitney Biennial, but also interviewed him for Art in America. Further Declaration of Interest:...
