August 2012
35 posts
Parallel Lies: The house that Jack built →
parallellies:
“Post-occupancy” has become a trendy buzzword in architectural circles, but how many architects are really prepared to make a break in their busy schedules to go and see how their completed buildings are actually being used? Leaving Venice earlier today, I was lucky enough to run into one of…
Parallel Lies: The architect who fell to Moscow →
parallellies:
Yesterday at the Venice Guggenheim I attended a fascinating magic lantern lecture by the Scottish fauxblogger Momus on the topic of the reclusive Soviet architect Divadovych Eiwobski. The early years of the Soviet Union were a time of seemingly limitless possibilities for utopian…
Parallel Lies: Build absolutely nothing anywhere... →
parallellies:
It’s an urban planning axiom that building more roads doesn’t make city centres less congested, it just brings more traffic. Banana Associates — showing in Venice at an exhibition entitled Christ, Enough Already! — apply the same principle to architecture. Their slogan is “Everything humans…
Parallel Lies: Will work for likes! →
parallellies:
It happened to music, then movies, then books: their production, distribution and consumption became digital. People started sharing them over the internet. Since consumers now expected this stuff to be free, creators were forced to switch their motivation from money to attention in the form of…
Parallel Lies: Down with emotional connection! →
parallellies:
Architecture as a discipline can be cold, esoteric, intellectually demanding, and sometimes theoretically pretentious. And that’s how we like it — those of us prepared to fly to Venice to see the Architecture Biennale, anyway. So it’s disheartening to see signs that populism is creeping in even…
Parallel Lies: Google Dominion →
parallellies:
About ten years ago architectural theorist Bruco Snith began to notice that when he fed his own name into Google’s search box the message came back “Did you mean: Bruce Smith?” or simply “Showing results for Bruce Smith”. Rather than struggling against this correction of the correct, Snith…
Parallel Lies: Heterofascist Park →
parallellies:
“Three’s company, two is heterofascism.” That’s the motto of Macfarlane Hundred, a provocative young Scottish architect currently showing an installation called Heterofascist Park in Venice (I’ll be blogging daily from the Architecture Biennial until the end of the month). Hundred’s…
We’re in an arcade in Osaka’s Yodogawa ward with a Gundam hanging from the ceiling.
It isn’t just a welcoming place for cardboard robots, though. There’s a shop on the right dedicated to insects as pets. It’s called Okamoto Insect Store. The symbol is a tree, because insects like trees.
This place is mostly about beetles, grasshoppers and crickets. In Japan,...
What’s this lurking under a shabby South Osaka expressway? A laundromat?
Heavily-fortified vending machines! Featuring video tape? And is that Interesting 16mm, or Interesting Age 16? Oh, it’s because there are sixteen buttons!
Why buy your porn DVDs from a human in a shop when you can skulk under fluorescent tubes (anonymised by a semi-transparent purple “privacy...
Recently my passion in trouser fashion is pants with a low-hanging crotch, quite tightly fitted from the knee down, and ending some way above the ankles. Jodhpurs would be one form of that, I suppose (“originally,” Wikipedia tells us, “jodhpurs were snug-fitting only from just below the knee to the ankle and were flared at the hip”).
Another form is the lower half of...
An eye-patched foreigner attempts to calculate the distance between claps at the Seika bon odori. On a count of 20, you clap on the last two beats. Does that make it 5/4 time, with claps on the last two beats of every fourth bar?
These three faces are from Muji’s Funny Face Sticker Book.
Momus
Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, addenda...
I’m very much enjoying Chris O’Leary’s blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, despite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that it’s now applying its Sherlock Holmes skillset to some of David Bowie’s worst crimes: the material he produced during the late Tin Machine years.
My comment under today’s entry concerns the possibility that the Bowie-Belew composition...
As it happens, as it were
As it happens, someone called Daniel Yates has included a spoof Momus Tour Guide in a spoof tour of Edinburgh’s public toilets as part of Exeunt magazine’s coverage of the Edinburgh Festival. My first Unreliable Tour at the Whitney Biennial in 2006 was a recreation of a 1993 Andrea Fraser tour of the Whitney Museum toilets, as it happens. Reading Daniel’s piece, I was hoping he...
Godard images sourced here and here. You can see Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group films here.
Unalaska, Alaska, unOsaka, Osaka.
This is a photo of me meeting Ivor Cutler in early 1999, when I was recording Stars Forever. He was sitting alone in the Photographers Gallery. I approached saying “I believe we’ve been on the same record label, Creation.” Cutler said: “Oh, is that what it was?”
This is Brian Dillon in The Guardian: “If The Book of Scotlands reads at times like a knowing...
Play this recording of Antonin Artaud simultaneously with the Toog piano track below. They go well together.
Ben Butler & Mousepad: i’m ten tracks into a new... →
bbandmp:
i’m ten tracks into a new album with Momus, which’ll probably be called ‘Sunbutler’. We made a record together before in 2008, called ‘Joemus’ and more recently, I contributed keyboard solos and stuff to a song called ‘Strawberry Hill’.
For this record, I set myself some rules….
Ivor Cutler meets God.
July 2012
27 posts
