July 2011
42 posts
Roll up for the mystery tour!: While sitting at home in Osaka, I’m simultaneously giving a tour performance at this year’s Edinburgh Festival via (G)host City, “Edinburgh’s virtual festival”.
The idea of my Unreliable Bus Tour started when I realised, on a recent trip to Edinburgh, that I’d never been to any of the places displayed on the front of local...
Although I’ve just published a book mocking experts, I must say I find the breed beguiling, especially when their technical prose is detailed and limpid. I love to read (or listen to) an elegant and intelligent expert — especially an amateur, self-appointed one — explaining an approaching storm, literal or metaphorical.
Two I’ve recently appreciated have been the...
Japan is a mountainous country, a country in which dense urban areas are squeezed between beautiful forested mountains and the sea. In summer, people in the cities head to the mountains (advertised in the train stations in wordless posters like this one) for fresher, cooler air and a particularly Shinto take on the pleasure of nature.
It isn’t just train companies which cater to this...
Martin Skidmore, the man who inspired this song, died of cancer in London yesterday. I’d been following his accounts of his illness daily on Japanese Arts, his LiveJournal. The starting point for the song was my astonishment that when he was told he had mere months to live, Martin announced he was going to re-watch some of his favourite TV shows, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and re-read...
For the project I’m working on now, provisionally entitled Stevenson in Samoa, I’m trying to find a new musical language for myself, to break my compositional habits. I’ve borrowed a violin, and plan to make most or all of the music with that.
Since I can’t play violin well (I took lessons for a couple of years as a kid, but hated them), I need to use a style of radical...
A couple of days ago I was watching a clip from James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture, in which he called the BBC “chilling” and cited Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, as if Orwell had been warning against the rise of the BBC rather than of totalitarianism.
That sent me off to an online edition of the novel, because I was sure I remembered a section in which Orwell describes...
Kazunari Hattori’s characteristic cross-hatching, squint lines, oval lozenges and other quirky, refreshing motifs on wallpaper and posters on show at Osaka’s ddd Gallery.
On Saturday July 16th Agi Yuzuru interviewed Momus...
From Berlin Subjective Directory by Adeline Mollard.
Summer in Japan is oddly precise. Bang! The rainy season starts (this year it was officially declared to have begun on May 28th) and — bang! — it ends about fifty days later (this year, July 10th, again early).
The really hot part of the summer has now officially begun — temperatures this weekend will be about 34C — and this morning another bang!-event occurred: the semi...
I have no interest in the fashion system. But that doesn’t mean I have no interest in clothes. I’m very interested in clothes. Clothes would of course exist if there were no fashion system, and still be just as capable of startling splendour.
These knitted woolen trousers are splendid, and make me jealous. They were spotted in some FRUiTS “mook”, and were the only thing...
If disco-glitz supermarket Super Tamade is my favourite place to grocery-shop at midnight…
…a 5am shopping hop is more likely to see me at Oda — a catering-oriented cash-and-carry vast, empty and satisfyingly austere — in the Kizu market.
What I like at Oda is the austerity not only of the aisles themselves, but also the look of the generic catering cans containing...
“Godard solves the Greek debt crisis: The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for...”
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/12/jean-luc-godard-film-socialisme
Released today by Darla, in physical and digital formats, the long-playing record Thunderclown. Order here.
Five Years: Briefwechsel 2004-2009 Band 1: 2004-2007 (Taschenbuch) Christian Kracht und David Woodard
Born late 2004, died earlier this evening, Pok the rabbit gave Hisae and me — his “parents” — endless hilarity and fun with his foot-fetishism and angry biting, his ludicrous antics, his constant wallpaper-damage (I forfeited my entire Berlin deposit because of him), his joy-leaps out in the Berlin garden, his digging and his head-butting demands for affection (but only...
Ikea Osaka. I particularly like the warehouse section for the fresh woodboard smell, the relative darkness, relative uncommerciality, coolness and the very un-Japanese dimensions. It’s a sort of industrial cathedral, the polished concrete floor suggests an art biennial in a post-industrial space, yet there’s also a hunt-the-thimble atmosphere, with people grasping sheets of paper...
This is a long and interesting interview with Alison Knowles, from the American Mavericks page. It made me realise that I’ve rather idiotically been leaving out Knowles and Fluxus from my accounts (like the one I gave recently at the Free Criticism event at London College of Communication) of “conceptual design”.
I usually telescope straight from Duchamp (seen here with...
I read Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider in 1980, when I was 20.
By that time, the 1950s existentialism Wilson was steeped in when he wrote the book had come back into fashion. Not in literature, but in pop music. The Cure and Josef K were citing Camus and Kafka, Magazine were citing Dostoyevsky, and so on.
Wilson’s 1956 hairstyle would also have fitted perfectly into 1980...
Gilles Weinzaepflen (the real name of long-time Momus collaborator Toog) published, just over a month ago, a collection of ten years’-worth of his wonderful lefthanded poetry with publisher Le Clou dans le Fer (“the nail in the iron”). It’s 128 pages long, sells for €16, has a cover illustration by Flo Manlik, and forms part of a series called Poetic Experiences directed by...
The second and third videos from the Microstories About Microstoria tour made on June 11th in Edinburgh. Part one is here.
After our coverage of Homeless Guy, here are two more postmaterialist magazines from Japan. Kinari is an ecology magazine which is kissing car advertisers goodbye with a bold NO ! CAR cover featuring Japan’s coolest man (and presumably confirmed non-driver) EYE Yamataka. Mago No Chikara translates as The Power of Grandchildren. It’s a magazine about the relationships between...
22 minutes of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone...
Nojuku Yaro — the title translates as “Homeless Guy” — is a magazine for and about homeless people in Japan, started in 2006. Its motto is “the magazine that makes your life lower!”
Here’s a flavour of some of the articles and columns featured in the first five issues, seen here displayed at Osaka’s Standard Books:
1
Vox pops
Featured homeless...
The new edition of bilingual Viennese art mag Spike is a particularly good one (and I like the redesign; no more typewriter typeface!). The John Kelsey essay about his collaboration with veteran “situations on streets” artist Stephen Willats interests me. And of course there’s also my piece about the metaphorical confusion surrounding the Facebook “like” button,...
WatchThis video is one of the things I liked best in Show Battersea, the RCA degree show at their Battersea complex. It’s The Unnameable by Kevin Gaffney and Sally-Anne Kelly. It’s as if Beckett and Cocteau directed Buster Keaton in a dark scenario involving frightening sculptures.
At the Wellcome Collection on London’s Euston Road they’ve got a mold of Momus on the ceiling. Antony Gormley thought it would be funny to stand under it.
Or should that be the other way round?
