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...
Architects in the 70s are sitting at graph-paper tables working on problems while records by Soft Machine play (autostop mechanism employed at the end of each side).
Architects in the 70s, named things like Adolfo Natalini and Peter Cook, are ahead of their times.
Architects in the 70s are highly intelligent yet funkily countercultural. They must enjoy cooking and sexual intercourse,...
You can play these pieces of music separately or together.
These people were much poorer than you, yet effortlessly outstrip you visually. Why is that? One hundred years ago in the Russian Empire. Thanks to Ant Hampton.
Good day. First I meet my old friend Simon Fisher Turner (the King of Luxembourg) at the Biwako Hall in Shiga, where he’s doing the music for a Dumb Type dance production opening in September.
Then — quite by chance — I run into Akio Suzuki at Artzone in Kyoto.
Before there were road movies there were road poets, wandering sages who would return from years of travel with nothing to show but a few scrolls covered in verses. In the case of the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, these mostly took the form of haikai no renga , collaborative haikus. Basho published Oku-no-hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) as an account of his wanderings through...
Do you ever find yourself wondering whether you visited a place in reality recently or just in Google Streetview? If not, perhaps you don’t find Streetview as absorbing as I do, or as trippy (in all senses).
Apparently this service has been live since October 31st, but I’ve only just discovered that Streetview has taken another dizzying step forward with Look Inside, which allows...
This reading is my contribution to D’APRÈS...
I didn’t expect David Bowie ever to be 65. I didn’t expect him ever to retire. I didn’t expect ever to hit 50 myself. Like you — my dear David, my foundational index, my first referent, my Aleph, my internet-before-the-internet, my Dorian Gray, my Buster Keaton, my advance party, my only shared, generational, inspirational, endlessly generous star — I desperately...
You’re at the Belbury Youth Club at The Outer Church, enjoying an evening of anomalous audiovisual entertainment featuring the Moon Wiring Club and Pye Corner Audio. Arcane televisual artefacts are being screened, along with vintage public information films and a short film by Julian House.
House is a key figure in the Ghost Box aesthetic. A graphic designer by trade, House co-founded...
The 127-page booklet accompanying the Ursula Bogner box set includes my essay about the mysterious radiophonic pioneer, which makes a connection between the Clicks and Cuts music movement and surgical gender reassignment.
Bogner’s music was used in the German Public Radio documentary about Momus, and I’d like very much for it to feature in the film I’m currently writing for...
Macau: Two weeks after the onset of his illness Father invited the young man from Singapore to live with us, describing him as a “personal assistant”. They sat in Father’s study reciting to each other from a Mandarin translation of a book of poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Business: The young man, whose name was Ming Wong, was an artist. Sitting beneath the fluorescent lights of...
Are you a grad student looking for a provocative topic for your thesis? One which allows you to meditate from a fresh angle on the relationship between time and technology, the rational and the irrational, sublimation and civility, etiquette and revolution? Well, I may have just the thing for you. You’re going to compare a porn genre called Stop Time and Fuck! to the French Republican...
December 2011
55 posts
