April 2012
33 posts
“Danger!” says this child-oriented sign outside a West Osaka concrete factory.
There are three of the signs, almost identical, mounted on the factory fence.
In each of them the splay-legged boy is being sucked into a mountain of wet concrete.
To show that the doomed boy is crying out — in vain, of course; he’ll soon be dressed in a concrete overcoat and cement...
House where my father grew up, as seen on Google Streetview. Mansfield Road, Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland.
House where my father grew up, side view.
House where my mother grew up, as seen on Google Streetview. Glasgow Road, Blanefield, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
Campsie Fells and Blanefield, as approached from the East.
House where I grew up, Great Stuart Street, Edinburgh.
Click to read Robert Wringham’s Momus feature (originally published in Cactus magazine a year ago) in which I talk about eleven “crises” I’ve witnessed.
Yesterday I visited Hattori Ryokuchi Park in north Osaka. The most interesting thing there is an open-air museum of old farmhouses.
Set in clearings amidst bamboo forests — which make a distinctive clave-like tocking noise — the farmhouses are tranquil and dark inside.
You kick off your shoes (you can transform them into slippers by flattening the heel section) and walk on the...
Since we’re on the topic of Wuthering...
I watched this documentary — which asks what, if anything, of human culture will endure — after visiting one of Osaka’s more mysterious ancient sites, the Nintoku-tennô-ryô burial mound, the world’s largest tomb, known in Japanese as a kofun. In fact the era these shrines date from (the early third to late fifth centuries AD) is known in Japanese history as the Kofun...
My new song Bibliotek (see below) manages to worm in a reference to this, perhaps my favourite book ever. To my surprise I discovered that it’s available online for free in its entirety here. It’s a melancholy, challenging read — I remember writing in a teenage diary that it “saddens the subsequent streets” — but a really satisfying way to get to know...
The Spanish translation of my novel The Book of Jokes, due from Barcelona publishers Alpha Decay in the autumn.
Cactus house.
Cactus house (side view).
Corrugated plastic house.
Octopus house.
Holy house.
Blossom house.
Glass house.
Glass house (side view).
Canvas house.
Three tin houses.
This is what the internet should be like: the most interesting bits of all the world’s cities, cut and pasted together.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your lugholes...
MOMUS: BIBLIOTEK
Bibliotek is the 2012 album from Momus. It’s a record of shudders, shivers and tingles which collides the genres of pastoral and horror, offering a landscape of forests, fields and dunes in which disturbing events seem to be happening just out of frame, and utopia is just a hair’s breadth from hell. Momus made the recordings (and accompanying videos) in Osaka, in...
A playlist-in-progress for an album-in-progress, Bibliotek by Momus, due later in 2012.
March 2012
37 posts
