September 2011
31 posts
Postmodernism, I gave you the best years of my...
At the top of Mount Rokko (the mountain behind Kobe) for Rokko Meets Art, the highlight of which was the Himalayan-art-school-style cafe featuring the work of Patrick Tsai, Ume Kayo, and others.
“Over the last twelve months,” playwright Joe Orton told the police in April 1962, “we started to cut pieces out of these books and make false book jackets. I tried to make them as effective as possible by making it look like part of the book.”
More than seventy books from the Islington Library were repurposed in this way. It’s one of the best pieces of...
“Even the catalogue was fun to read,” says Kimberly Bradley in her Artnet review of the recent ABC Art Fair in Berlin, “featuring both curator essays and lighter pieces by writers like Nick Currie (aka Momus)”.
My piece, commissioned by Milan publishing house Mousse, was a Nat Tate-style hoax which took as its subject an imaginary Scottish-Italian painter modelled partly...
The Alchemy of Things is a multimedia project in...
Professor Sarah Churchwell makes a good and...
Momus Interview 2006 (Part2) by Shintaro Taketani on Mixcloud
“The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy, sentimentalities. The sentimentalism and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our...
Momus is a happy cult, known to a happy few. An apiculteur is a beekeeper. This autumn Momus will fly from his home in Osaka to create a small, happy buzz in art and music venues across Europe as he performs his songs or makes up stories in art museums. Here are the venues — if you want to add your city to the tour, drop Momus a line. London
Date to be confirmed, around October 1st
Momus...
“We make laws. Laws are text. What’s strange is that the authors of laws...”
– Jean-Luc Godard
These men have been in the news recently for refusing to display orange safety triangles on their horse-drawn carts. They’re Amish, from the ultra-conservative Swartzentruber order, and don’t believe in bright colours. I must say I admire their visual style and strong aura of otherness.
It’s so nice to be beautiful: I love Laurie Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed. This week, if you scroll forward to about 16 minutes, you can hear Catherine Hakim and Daniel Hamermesh arguing (but mostly agreeing) about Erotic Capital, or how beauty affects our life chances. My notes are below; this is what these two social researchers said.
Beauty is generally agreed,...
Momus Interview (Part1) by Shintaro Taketani on Mixcloud
An interview with Shintaro Taketani from 2006, recently posted online, in which I cover the usual talking points.
Just when I think I’m exhausting all of Osaka’s mysterious buildings, a new one looms on the horizon. Look, over there, what the hell is that?
We’re somewhere in the south-easternmost suburbs of the city, and I’ve cycled about 25 kilometers from home. It’s a scorching hot afternoon. The skin on my nose is red. Hey, there’s that thing again, behind the golf...
The first tako-no suberidai or octopus slides appeared in Japanese playgrounds in 1968, built by the Maeda Environmental Art Co. of Tokyo. The outrageous pink or red multi-directional slides are now everywhere — you can see over a hundred collected on this page alone.
Few people know the origin of this trend in British 19th century educational thought, however. It was the famous...
I was in the Japan Folk Art Museum.
I was quite enjoying the air-conditioning, and the peculiar bunker-like architecture of the building.
The pottery collection was only moderately interesting. I found the display cases and the lights (yellow and white fluorescents, bouncing off the oblong cases) more gorgeous than the pots.
The whole of the top floor is given over to kokeshi dolls. ...
Entering the French bookshop, she felt almost furtive, like someone who didn’t really deserve to be there.
The books seemed serious yet libertine, severe yet playful. As she picked them up and began leafing through their pages, it seemed to her that even their austerity was sensual.
In the culture she came from, books seemed embarrassed to be books. They seemed to want to be...
It may be one of the most remarkable pieces of “humanitarian intervention” in history. In 1465 a flotilla of Walloons left Belgium and made the long voyage to Japan. Conquest would have been easy, for the Walloons had gunpowder and the Japanese did not. But the Belgians had nobler ideas.
Call it “technology transfer”; all the Walloons wanted to do was build cathedrals...
On Saturday, dressed entirely in plastic to keep the rain off, I went back to Osaka’s domestic airport at Itami to watch jets arriving in typhoon conditions. No Nietzsche this time. But I did discover a different counterpoint in the form of…
…the Tano Archeological Site Museum.
At some point in the late 1960s — possibly when the airport runway was being extended...
August 2011
24 posts
Erik Satie lived, from 1897, in this building in the south Paris suburb of Arcueil. He moved there because it was cheaper than Montmartre (itself a cheap area at the time). Satie was so poor that he had to walk ten kilometers each day to Montmartre to work, as described in an interesting radio documentary called Erik Satie Walks To Work.
John Cage lived in the rear top-floor apartment of the...
