May 2011
28 posts
When I was in Helsinki in February I found out that the Design Museum there was about to open a big Marimekko exhibition. I’d miss the opening, but it just so happened that the final day of the exhibition, May 29th, was the day of my return flight from Japan.
So on May 29th I touched down in Helsinki after a 12-hour flight from Osaka, boarded the bus, and went into central Helsinki to...
I’m using an empty flat in Windsor, on the genteel westerly fringes of London, as my hub for the next month. Arriving here from Osaka via Helsinki, I’m reminded that identity is best specified not just with a body, clothes, a name, an age, but with a place and date too.
For instance, the oddness I feel walking from a gated housing estate over a skywalk to an elevated shopping centre...
I often fall asleep listening to the adventures of dapper flapper sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Since the only bit of the programme I’m guaranteed to be awake for is the signature tune, and since it’s so groovy and 1920s, I hunted it down. It turns out to be the Paul Whiteman ensemble, recorded in 1927 with Henry Busse on cornet, playing a song called When Day Is Done. The...
Mai Ueda visits my Osaka den. Orange, purple, blue and pink tones dominate.
Instead of gardens, roofs.
Instead of fashion magazines, the streets of Nishinari.
Instead of boutique architecture on Dezeen, authorless ramshackle confections of corrugated tin and bamboo.
Instead of rooms, a polythene sheet around a bit of street.
Instead of Dwell, Apartamento.
Instead of driving to the mall, riding right through it.
Instead of normality, mystery.
I’ve spent my first six months in Osaka pottering around in the slums, hanging down but not out in glamourous Nishinari, where I find a valuable liberty of spirit and eccentricity. I’ve interfaced little with the Osaka music scene, apart from reviewing an Oorutaichi show for The Wire (I think it’s in the current issue) and visiting Boredom Yoshimi in her Mount Ikoma hideaway. ...
Citizen: I started thinking about the Glasgow Citizens Theatre yesterday; friends are moving to an area not far away, and I started clicking around on Streetview. In 1981 and 1982 I became “Citizens-crazy”. I’d dropped out of university to form my first band, The Happy Family, and was greedily exploring writers like Brecht and Genet. So, it turned out, was the Glasgow theatre...
Do I view them through rose-tinted glasses, those epic industrial spaces out west in the Osaka docklands? Is it because I’ve never had a job that the places people work in seem so mysterious to me? Not offices, but great warehouses smelling of industrial chemicals and wood shavings, places where bright yellow cranes and Tonka-style diggers squat on concrete floors amidst musty old oil...
Japanese people definitely have an interesting relationship with insects. Yet another excuse to embed this Togawa Jun song about moths:
This may not be entirely obvious as a marker of cultural impact, but when you appear on Google Streetview even after you’re dead, you’ve really made it.
Samuel Beckett has really made it. I don’t mean that Streetview has recorded his ghost lurking outside the Foxrock Cricket Club. I mean that when you look at the storefront of the Motto store in Zurich (Langstrasse 84) you...
Stills from Off The Charts, a PBS documentary about the weird underground world of vanity song-arrangers and their batty customers. This is the home and studio of a “song shark” called Ramsey Kearney, who earns a living by setting amateur lyrics to music and cutting souvenir records for people who half-believe they’ll get famous one day. Watching this film gave me a few...
My new Pentax Optio camera takes panorama pictures. It’s actually pretty clever at joining contiguous shots, but for me the interesting pictures result when I give it impossible things to stitch together, and it fucks up royally. That’s when David Hockney would start to pay attention, anyway.
Found orientalist poem: I am anti-anti-orientalism, which is why I love this short 1959 film by James Ivory, The Sword and the Flute. It’s about Moghul miniature paintings. Ivory’s script is read by Saeed Jaffrey over music by Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan.
Ivory went on to be a bit of a “mogul” himself as one half of Merchant-Ivory Productions, a gay business and...
I was watching The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The True Story, a BBC4 documentary about L. Frank Baum, creator of the Oz stories. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oz stories were what Harry Potter became a hundred years later, and the bestselling books were illustrated by W.W. Denslow.
I particularly like the look of Denslow’s illustrations, not just because his Wicked Witch of the...
In the late 1980s I found a secondhand vinyl copy of Dirk Bogarde’s 1960 album Lyrics For Lovers and bought it. I found it fascinating, and played it many times. Dirk can’t sing, so he just talks his way through romantic song lyrics. Sometimes it verges on the camp, but there’s something peculiar about it, related to Bogarde’s slightly dark and haunted aura, and the fact...
Concentrics: first in an occasional series on sartorial matters. “I am not eccentric, I am concentric.” Salvador Dali
What’s remarkable about Sinatra is how little documentation there is of his early communist phase, the time when he was still young and charismatic, with an edge of volatility and vulnerability. I care little for the dinner-jacket swagger of Rat Pack-era...
April 2011
34 posts
The Thunderclown finds himself in a remote district of Osaka called Amagasaki. He’s searching for Hard Off, the junk hardware section of bookstore Book Off, where he hopes to buy a cheap portable record player.
No such luck. But he does find a nostalgically postmodern apartment block which captures his imagination and makes the 20 kilometer bicycle trip worthwhile.
