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You can use the feeds in this mix as the basis for a new mix - create a new mix from this mix.
Millennium Prize Awarded For Perelman's Poincaré Proof [New Window]
epee1221 writes "The Clay Mathematics Institute has announced its acceptance of Dr. Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture and awarded the first Millennium Prize. Poincaré questioned whether there exists a method for determining whether a three-dimensional manifold is a spherical: is there a 3-manifold not homologous to the 3-sphere in which any loop can be gradually shrunk to a single point? The Poincaré conjecture is that there is no such 3-manifold, i.e. any boundless 3-manifold in which the condition holds is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. A sketch of the proof using language intended for the lay reader is available at Wikipedia." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Health Care Reform [New Window]
It appears that today might be the end of a very long road to health care reform. There's been a lot of debate on the subject really leading back before the election. The mainstream sounds like an echo chamber, so I'm hoping you guys have better insight. Will this bill do what the administration claims to do, or is it as bad for the future of America as Fox says? Read more of this story at Slashdot. [New Window]
/ : (n) family name : lineage : birth : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n n-suf) language : word : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n) learning : scholarship : erudition : knowledge : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n-suf) (intended) for .. : oriented towards .. : (P) [New Window]
/ / : (n) country-wide : nation-wide : whole country : national : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n) counter for bundles : (P) [New Window]
: (n) by : bye : (P) [New Window]
/ / : (adj-no n) example : precedent : the usual : the said : the above-mentioned : (man) in question : (n) matter : case : item : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n) good fortune : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n) bullet : shot : shell : (P) [New Window]
/ / : (adj-no n n-suf pref 1) previous : prior : former : (2) point (e.g. pencil) : tip : end : nozzle : head (of a line) : (3) destination : (4) the first priority : the future : objective : sequel : remainder : the other party : (P) : (adj-no n) the future : priority : precedence : previous : old : late [New Window]
/ : (n vs) implementation : materialization : realization : (P) [New Window]
/ : partition : allocation : deal (vs) [New Window]
/ : (n) box : (P) [New Window]
/ : (n-t) moon : month : (P) [New Window]
/ : ahead : before [New Window]
/ : think : suspect : feel : believe : suppose : assume : appear (vt) [New Window]
/ : light : photic [New Window]
/ : together with [New Window]
/ : (n) district court : (P) Microsoft Docs Indicate Future Xbox 360 Support For USB Storage [New Window]
Internal Microsoft documents obtained by Joystiq indicate that its Xbox 360 console will gain support for USB storage devices some time this Spring."According to the document, the USB mass storage device must be at least 1GB and the system will do a compatibility check. 'The system partition occupies 512 MB of space, and by default the consumer partition occupies the remainder of the device capacity, or 16 GB, whichever is smaller.' Upon inserting a blank USB storage device, 'consumers are offered two choices: "Configure now" or "Customize."' The 'Configure now' option will use 'the entire device capacity, up to the maximum of 512 MB plus 16 GB,' meaning, regardless of the overall size of the device you're using, the Xbox will only enable 16 GB of usable, non-system storage. The 'Customize' option will allow you to 'preserve some pre-existing, non-console data on the device' such as music."There have also been rumors of a new, smaller form factor for the 360, and hacker Ben Heck has given his thoughts on some leaked motherboard pictures. Read more of this story at Slashdot. UK ID Cards Could Be Upgraded To Super ID Cards [New Window]
An anonymous reader writes "Gadget lovers are used to punishing upgrade cycles but now it seems that the British ID card could be replaced with a 'super' ID card just a couple of years after the first one was released. The new card could be used to buy goods or services online, or to prove identity over the web. It's a bit of a kick in the teeth for the people who have already paid £30 for a 1st gen card that can't do any of these things." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Lag Analysis For the PlayStation Move [New Window]
The $64,000 question about Sony's upcoming motion control system, the PlayStation Move, is how responsive it will be compared to traditional console controllers and its counterparts from Nintendo and Microsoft. Eurogamer slowed down videos of Sony's tech demo software to establish a rough baseline latency that developers will have to work with. Quoting:"While exact latency measurements aren't possible in these conditions, a ballpark idea of the level of response isn't a problem at all. The methodology is remarkably straightforward. Keep your hand as steady as possible, then make fast motions with the controller. Count the frames between your hand moving, and the motion being carried out on-screen. Equally illuminating is to stop your movement suddenly, then count the frames necessary for your on-screen counterpart to catch up. While not 100 per cent accurate, repeat the process enough times and the frame difference becomes fairly evident. Bearing all of that in mind, and recognizing that we don't know how much latency the display itself is adding, I'd say that a ballpark figure of around 133ms of controller lag (give or take a frame) seems reasonable, certainly not the ultra-fast crispness of response we see from games like Burnout Paradise or Modern Warfare, but fine for most of the applications you would want from such a controller." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Microsoft Announces Windows 7 SP1 [New Window]
CWmike writes "Microsoft has announced service packs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users' hands. A company spokesman said Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will primarily contain 'minor updates,' including patches and hotfixes that will have been delivered earlier via the Windows Update service, rather than new features. One of the latter: an updated Remote Desktop client designed to work with RemoteFX, the new remote-access platform set to debut in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be upgraded to SP1, Microsoft said, presumably at the same time as Windows 7 since the two operating systems share a single code base. Besides RemoteFX — which Microsoft explained Wednesday in an entry on the Windows virtualization team's blog — Server 2008 R2 will also include a feature dubbed 'Dynamic Memory,' which lets IT staff adjust guest virtual machines' memory on the fly. Microsoft did not spell out a timetable for the service packs, saying only that it would provide more information as release milestones approach." Read more of this story at Slashdot. 1st Trial Under California Spam Law Slams Spammer [New Window]
www.sorehands.com writes "In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)" Read more of this story at Slashdot. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Uses Games To See the Future [New Window]
parallel_prankster writes "Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a professor of politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. In his new book, The Predictioneer (The Predictioneer's Game in the US), he describes a computer model based on game theory which he — and others — claim can predict the future with remarkable accuracy. The website also has a game page where he provides an online version of the game and information on how to play." The (semi-paywalled; may need to register) New Scientist has a story on de Mesquita, too; a snippet: "Over the past 30 years, Bueno de Mesquita has made thousands of predictions about hundreds of issues from geopolitics to personal problems. Overall, he claims, his hit rate is about 90 per cent." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Obama Administration Withholds FoIA Requests More Often Than Bush's [New Window]
bonch writes "Agencies under the Obama administration cite security provisions to withhold information more often than they did under the Bush administration. For example, the 'deliberative process' exemption of the Freedom of Information Act was used 70,779 times in 2009, up from the 47,395 of 2008. Amusingly, the Associated Press has been waiting three months for the government to deliver records on its own Open Government Directive." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Details Emerge On Futurama's "Rebirth" (and Return) [New Window]
Svippy writes "As revealed last summer, Futurama will be returning this year, and while there were conflicts about the cast of the show in the late summer of 2009, a deal was eventually secured. Last week, Comedy Central confirmed the airing of the first episode, 'Rebirth,' will be 24 June 2010. Several other details related to plot and production have surfaced over the months, and for those interested, a full article is available on the subject." Read more of this story at Slashdot. C-SPAN opens massive video archives [New Window]
160,000 hours of video dating to 1987
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:27:34 -0400 Joel Johnson, "Raiding Eternity" [New Window]
more tech writing like this, please
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:11:01 -0400 Piezo Crystals Harness Sound To Generate Hydrogen [New Window]
MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Google Slams Viacom For Secret YouTube Uploads [New Window]
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday."As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading. Read more of this story at Slashdot. High-Tech Research Moving From US To China [New Window]
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Coming Soon, Smartphone-Based Banking [New Window]
An anonymous reader writes "Banks will be offering a new service at the end of the year that will let customers take a photo of a paper check and have it be deposited in their bank accounts, making the smartphone one step closer to an ATM." Read more of this story at Slashdot. xkcd's Google phrase frequency charts [New Window]
"I got $x problems"
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:54:29 -0400 Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs [New Window]
1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags." Read more of this story at Slashdot. Newspaper Club designs, prints, distributes overnight newspaper at SXSW [New Window]
I was lucky enough to grab one of the hand-numbered issues
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:58:26 -0400 Crowdsourced demographic study of Chatroulette [New Window]
the info was gathered by Hacker News users
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:19:36 -0400 Progress Wars [New Window]
countless hours of fun
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:50:06 -0400 Piano Improvisation on Chat Roulette [New Window]
amazing how much creativity the site's inspiring [via]
Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:41:16 -0400 Kagaya on CNNGo [New Window]
I have a new piece up on CNNGo, covering the “performance art” izakaya Kagaya in Shimbashi. Big thanks to my Rough Guides colleague Simon Richmond for introducing me to the spot — we had a great night of eating and drinking there a month back, which some of you may remember as a string of [...]
Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:49:21 -0400 SNOW Magazine Card [New Window]
After I tweeted that I got some business cards made for SNOW Magazine, a few people asked to see what it looks like, and so here goes. Big thanks again to my fellow GOOD Inc. compatriot Luis Mendo for the image on the front, and font suggestion for my name on the back — it’s [...]
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:08:16 -0500 8-Bit Austin [New Window]
I think I'll use this map to get to Datapop 2010
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:54:13 -0500 Spritely, jQuery plugin for sprite and background animation [New Window]
see also: gameQuery
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:50:04 -0500 Surfing the Work Wave [New Window]
Where’s my PauseTalk participants list? Why isn’t there any new content on SNOW Magazine today? What the hell is up with Radio OK Fred? Life (and a cold) and work have definitely gotten in the way of things of late. No need to worry though, good things come to those who wait (and the wait [...]
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:24:18 -0500 Trololololololo Shreds [New Window]
some context [via]
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:53:42 -0500 Preview of Sword & Sworcery EP for the iPhone [New Window]
looks unlike anything I've ever seen
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:50:33 -0500 Kickstarter at SXSW 2010 [New Window]
Yancey rounded up our SXSW appearances over at the Kickstarter blog, but I thought I should mention it here...On Saturday night, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and SoundCloud welcome you to F*CK YEAH! SXSW, a party with music/visuals by Eclectic Method sponsored by the nice folks at ThePlanet. It's at Emo's on Saturday night, from 6:30pm until late.On Sunday 11am, I'm doing a solo talk about a mish-mash of my interests, focused around metagames — both games about games, and games built on games. Quite possibly the only talk at SXSW to mention Mechanical Turk, Desert Bus, Barack Obama, VVVVVV, and Metafilter.Also in amazing panels, Kickstarter's own Perry Chen (Monday w/Robin Sloan), Yancey Strickler (Wednesday w/Allison Weiss), and Fred Benenson. You should go to every one. More details here.See you in Austin!
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:20:23 -0500 Sitby.us [New Window]
essential iPhone-optimized site for SXSWi session planning
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:14:44 -0500 Forty Years From Now [New Window]
My new album Forty Years from Now is finally out! The first quote-unquote single "Cat vs. Mouse" is available for free download and features vocals from UT of the band Kiiiiiii and production from Pandatone. The twelve-song album was recorded, mixed, and mastered in various recording studios and bedrooms... Gossip is Hard to Read [New Window]
Rumor has it that Japan's most beloved female singer Koda Kumi is dating Japan's most talented dance group vocalist Nakai from Japan's most lovable replacement for Hikaru Genji SMAP. Now this confuses me a bit, since I was operating on the gossip that Koda Kumi was determined to get... Regain and Orthopraxical Labor Goals [New Window]
Like many Japanese commercials, this TV spot for the Regain energy drink reinforces product message with a playful sense of hyperbole. But note the presuppositions about labor goals inherent in the narrative. A train is delayed, so the salaryman army hauls it over land and sea and air in... Serious [New Window]
A lot of my favorite movies are in a category at the Shibuya chain of Tsutaya mega-rental store called Serious ().... Content Starts on Nojaponisme [New Window]
Nojaponisme kicks off this week with a five-part interview with Dr. Patricia Steinhoff, Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii (Manoa) and expert on the Japanese New Left/Japanese Red Army. (Post comments over there this time.)... Mein Totally Cool Kampf [New Window]
Browsing through the Kichijoji branch of the national hipster junk-shop chain Village Vanguard, I stumbled upon a Japanese translation of Adolf Hitler's very own Mein Kampf (Parts One and Two). Heil! Heil! reads the hand-written product pitch. Cute. Over the course of this blog, I have pointed out quite a... Marxy "Lecture"! [New Window]
I, W. David Marx aka Marxy, will be giving a short "lecture" this Friday, November 2 as part of Radio OK FRED's cultural cavalcade within Cyril Duval's DISPLAYSTHETICS installation at Celine. Official Info: Radio OK FRED will be hosted by Jean Snow, Egaitsu Hiroshi, Yoshi and Ay2 as a public... Neojaponisme [New Window]
Neojaponisme.com a new web journal from the founder of Nomarxisme and friends.... No Shotguns, No Weddings [New Window]
Oh, young love! Famed baseball pitcher Darvish Yu age 20 and entertainment production company employee Saeko age 20 have decided to get married! In an era where youth take their pretty time to stagger aimlessly towards the responsibilities of adulthood, there is something refreshing about a... MXUT DJ at Bar Drop 11/22 [New Window]
For those in Tokyo, I will be DJing with U.T. from Kiiiiiii as "MXUT" at Bar Drop in Kichijoji at an all-night event on Thursday, November 22. We should go on at 1:00 am or so. Lots of other super-great people will be DJing, such as Dr. Usui from Motocompo,... R$$ (or Are Ess Ess?) [New Window]
There may just be some content over here once in a while, but I just want to make sure that you've added Nojaponisme to your regular RSS reading schedule. You will find equally inflammatory articles over there. For "techy" people, here is the RSS feed.... Mein Totally Cool Kampf 2 [New Window]
Image supplied by Matt Alt of AltJapan... JJ and Johnny's [New Window]
Today is the 23rd, and I don't have to tell you that the 23rd is the sale date for the most popular women's fashion monthlies. Oh, CanCam, your 560 pages last month could hardly hold me over for thirty-one painful days! I went over to the JJ site to check... clast on livedoor NEWS [New Window]
My diabolically-corporate marketing and media insights blog clast is now syndicated on livedoor NEWS. (Japanese only)... Marxy DJ at Bar Drop 12/22 [New Window]
Short notice, but I will be DJing at Bar Drop in Kichijoji at an all-night event on Friday, February 22. No clue on timing, but I shouldn't go on too late. As usual, Dr. Usui from Motocompo and Ian Martin (Call and Response Records) will be deejaying. Live performance from... Danc on the release of Ribbon Hero [New Window]
turning Microsoft Office into a game, with competition against your friends [via]
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:45:14 -0500 "Play" by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman [New Window]
avatars as Russian nested dolls [via]
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:14:16 -0500 Chatroulette Map [New Window]
I think I'd rather not know, thanks [via]
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:06:40 -0500 Steamshovel Harry [New Window]
not sure how I missed this one last year, metagaming with music by Brad Sucks
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:17:50 -0500 El Fin Del Mundo by Alberto Gonzlez Vzquez [New Window]
there's so much I love about this, I can't quantify it all [via]
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:40:57 -0500 Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired [New Window]
also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:16:55 -0500 Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer [New Window]
related: McSweeney's categories for the meta-awards [via]
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:29:26 -0500 Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live [New Window]
for the first time, backed by The Roots
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:23:02 -0500 Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica [New Window]
related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:11:40 -0500 The Panic Status Board [New Window]
the instant feedback made work more game-like
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:38:42 -0500 Valve ports game library and Steam service to Mac [New Window]
Portal 2 will be released for Mac simultaneously with PC, along with "all of our future games"
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:18:23 -0500 Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy [New Window]
fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:13:35 -0500 8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York [New Window]
he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:13:52 -0500 Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game [New Window]
watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:06:20 -0500 Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency [New Window]
"Maybe I'll learn something."
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:16:52 -0500 PauseTalk Tonight [New Window]
Just a reminder that tonight (March 8) is this month’s edition of PauseTalk (Vol. 38) at Cafe Pause, with a start time of 20:00. As always, the cafe is reserved from 19:30, so feel free to show up a bit early. Have been suffering through a cold this past weekend and still have a bit [...]
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:45:46 -0500 PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania [New Window]
I love how expressive they are
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:44:04 -0500 Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music [New Window]
very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:20:14 -0500 GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story [New Window]
scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:15:41 -0500 Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft [New Window]
he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:26:38 -0500 LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes [New Window]
looks like the regex was a bit greedy
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:47:55 -0500 NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines" [New Window]
very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:25:19 -0500 YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos [New Window]
a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:57:41 -0500 OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" [New Window]
Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:09:38 -0500 Roger Ebert starts subscription service [New Window]
$4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:44:43 -0500 akiko's diary December 3, 2005 [New Window]
December 3, 2005I went to the Italian restaurant in Shibuya with my friend Yuko.Her boyfriend works in the restaurant.So we went to there last December too.This dinner is very special for us, because the dinner is too expensive.It is only once in a year.We ate a lot of cuisines. Those were very delicious all!!Especially, the steak was very big and very tender.It was service from chef.We drank much wine too.It was very happy day.I want to go to the dinner next December. [New Window]
On January 1, 2006, I visited to "Taishakuten" with my colleague.It is shrine in Shibamata.We went out in Kimono.I had worked in a dressmaker. So I had never gone to shrine in New Year's Day since I became to a working member of society. Because I had to work since New Year's Day!So I was so happy this New Year's Day.There were crowded with people paying their first visits of the year.And there were a lot of street stalls.There were very livery, and very funny mood. Wow! [New Window]
Thank you so much for all the wonderful information about restaurants and Odawara castle. You are all wonderful ladies. I am a lucky teacher!Today, we went to Chidorigafuchi, Happo-en, and Korakuen (to ride the Big-O and to get massage). =)(How was your massage on Thursday, Miho?)Haruka, thank you for getting all that information! I think the best idea is the Yuagaribijin course for 7,300yen. (Because I want to see my parents wear a yukatta. heehee.) We can arrive at 11am.Our names are:Vanessa HowellPaula Howell (mama)Warren Howell (papa)My phone number is 090-6119-9459.Is this enough information? Akiko - Corrections 12/3 [New Window]
December 3, 2005I went to the an Italian restaurant in Shibuya with my friend Yuko.Her boyfriend works in the restaurant.So we went to there last December too.This dinner is very special for us, because the dinner is too so expensive.It is only once in a year.We ate a lot of cuisines dishes. Those They were all very delicious all!!Especially, the steak was very big and very tender.It was service from chef.We drank much wine too.It was a very happy day.I want to go to the dinner next December. Hi everyone!! [New Window]
At least, today is last day of this year.How are you going?In American time, last day is tomorrow?Last week, I went to Enoshima with my friends.Then, I could see beautiful sunset. It was No.1 of this year!Through 2005, I got many many memories, and I was very Happy.Thank you for my family.Thank you for my friends.Thank you for Vanessa.And Thank you for someone like God.I have no particular religion. But I believe a special power which protect and guide us!I believe that next year also will be wonderfulCiao! Motoyu ryokan [New Window]
Thank you for your information, vanessa.I made a reservation for Yuagaribijin course for 7,300yen!As you can go there at 11am, You are lucky!Because the hotel man pick you up from Honatsugi station to motoyu ryokan by bus for free.So, please wait in front of a Ito building () at 10:40.The way to the ito building as follows.You get off at Honatsugi station (Odakyu line) and go to south exit,and you can see a Risona bank(, That it green sign) at the front.and you go to the right in fornt of the Risona bank to second traffic right.The Ito building is at the corner of the second traffic right.Could you understand the above explanation?It is difficult for me to explain the location of Ito building. I'm sorry.I coudn't find a map of the Ito building so please see the map of the risonabank as reference.http://www.mapion.co.jp/c/f?uc=4&grp=resona&ino=BA472795The hotel man will see you off to the Honatsugi station by bus.So please leave your private room before 3pm and go to the front.I hope you and your parents have a good time at Iiyama onsen! I'm sorry! [New Window]
I spent 1400 yen on the Christmas present... Is it ok?sorry...=/=) Miho - Corrections 1/6 [New Window]
On January 6, 2006, my relatives came to my house to celebrate a new year. There is a boy named Kai who is my cousin's child. His name is "Kai" and his age is 6.He's 6.He likes vehicles very much. As the monorail is running in my town, I rode the monorail with him.I was very happy, so he was very glad very much.The picture expresses it. This is first time of my posting in this year. Unbelievable! [New Window]
Vanessas mam & dad, welcome to Japan!I hope you have good time in Japan.Thank you for your quick response, Haruka.Instead, I research recommendable sight near Iiyama onsen.At Odawara station, next station of Honatsugi, there is Odawara castle.The cherry blossom festa is held now in Odawara castle park.So, after visiting a spring, you can see the light up the cherry blossoms, maybe.But, the cherry blossoms of Odawara castle park are in full bloom today!That is why I said maybe.But, I think the carpet of cherry blossoms is also beautiful!Odawara castle is about ten minutes walk from Odawara station.If you're so inclined, how about the sightseeing of Odawara? My Homecoming [New Window]
I went back to my home town on December 30 to January 2.My sister and brother went back to home and my family got together.My father was looking forward to seeing us and waited to buy good sake from two months ago.I live alone so I sametimes lonely. It was very good for me to see my family.When I went to my home, I felt family warmth.It was very happy for me to eat mum's dish and new year dish and ozoni.It snowd and very cold in my home town but my homecoming visit was really nice! Akiko - Corrections 1/11 [New Window]
On January 1, 2006, I visited to "Taishakuten" with my colleague.It is a shrine in Shibamata.We went out in Kimono.I had worked in a dressmaker's shop. So I had never gone to the shrine in on New Year's Day since I became to a working member of society. Because I had to work since New Year's Day!So I was so happy this New Year's Day.There were It was crowded with people paying their first visits of the year.And there were a lot of street stalls.There were It was a very livery, and a very funny mood atmosphere. [New Window]
We went to the ajisai temple in Kamakura this weekend. Ajisai in English is 'hydrangea'.Thanks for the information Ayumi!More photos here... Iiyama [New Window]
Iiyama was fantastic! It was really beautiful with cherry trees and the weather was good. It didnt rain all day. =) the doll worked! Thank you for such a nice party! [New Window]
Miho - Corrections 1/17 [New Window]
I went to Senso-ji in Asakusa that was which is a famous temple in Japan last Saturday.It was raining hard and it was a very cold day.Though the weather was very bad, a lot of people visited there it.I thought that I saw a lot of people in Senso-ji, just like a famous temple.In Senso-ji, I got a fortune. This is my first time in this year.My heart was pounding. My fortune's result was "Kichi"."Kichi" means is a good result. The fortune stated that everything went will go well in this year.I was very very happy☆My fortune will be really good really in this year because I drew a winning number.I went a camera shop to develop films. In the shop, there was a event contest that costs of developing became cheaper according to a depending on the number of on a dice. If the dice's number is 1, the cost of 30 develops rollsare free.I threw the dice naturally, and unbelievable!!, the dice's number was 『１』!!!I was very lucky!1200 yen became about 100 yen!I profitted about 1100 yen.Senso-ji fortune will win～♪ MY cousin's child [New Window]
On January 6, 2006, my relatives came to my house to celebrate a new year. There is a boy who is my cousin's child. His name is "Kai" and his age is 6.He like vehicles very much. As monorail is running in my toun, I rode the monorail with him.I was very happy, so he was glad very much.The picture expressed it. Christmas is Over! [New Window]
Pho [New Window]
Hello ladies! I forgot I have to work this Saturday until 6pm. We can meet Saturday for pho at 7pm, or, we can meet on Sunday anytime.Which day is better?See you Thursday! Snow Wedding [New Window]
I went to my friend' wedding party on January 21, 2006.It was snow and very cold day, but I went to Shibuya to attend to the party.It took about 2 hours from my house to Shibuya.The bride and bridegroom are my friends in my college days.He works in JAL that is Japanese air line. and he is a pilot.His friends are almost pilots, so many pilots came to the party.His friend who is a pilot said him an interesting congratulations," I am very happy to have been friends with him, because I didn't have tofly with a plane in the snow sky." Haruka - Corrections 1/11 [New Window]
I went back to my home town on from December 30 to January 2.My sister and brother went back to home and my family got together.My father was looking forward to seeing us and waited for two months to buy good sake from two months ago.I live alone so I sometimes am lonely. It was very good for me to see my family.When I went to my home, I felt family warmth.It was very happy for me to eat mum's dish food and new years dish and ozoni.It snowed and was very cold in my home town but my homecoming visit was really nice! To Vanessa [New Window]
Hello! I checked about your questions.At first, the recipe is right!! Sho-chu need for sterilization of Ume. And it can sterilize of a container. Sho-chu makes good "Umeboshi".Secondly, I checked abouto "Nagatoro" too.You can swim in Nagatoro.I recommend!Nagatoro's river is very beautiful.But I can't explain about Nagatoro.So I will take a paper about there at next lesson.See you later! Iiyama onsen [New Window]
Hello! My parents arrived safely, and we just ate some yakiniku in koenji. Can you help us make a reservation at Iiyama Onsen for next Friday, the 7th? We want to arrive at 1pm, and will just use the public baths. Then we will eat lunch at the onsen! There will be 3 of us. Me, my mom, and my dad. Will we all 3 be able to eat together?Thank you for your help!love,Vanessa My fortune in this yaer [New Window]
I went to Senso-ji in Asakusa that was a famous temple in Japan last Saturday.It was raining hard and very cold day.Though the weather was very bad, a lot of people visited there.I thought that I saw a lot of people in Senso-ji, like a famous temple.In Senso-ji, I got a fortune. This is my first time in this year.My heart was pounding. My fortune's result was "Kichi"."Kichi" means a good result. The fortune stated that everything went well in this year.I was very very happyMy fortune will be good really in this year, because I drew a winning number.I went a camera shop to develop films. In the shop, there was an event that costs of develops became cheep according to a number of a dice. If the dice's number is 1, the costs of 30 developsare free.I threw the dice naturally, and umbelievable!!, the dice's number was !!!I was very lucky!1200 yen became about 100 yen!I profitted about 1100 yen.Senso-ji fortune will win About Iiyama onsen [New Window]
Hello! I'm glad to hear that your parents arrived safely.I checked a homepage of Iiyama Onsen, the hotel's name is Motoyu ryokan (, in internet.There are courses at day time that you can chose as follows.1. Yuagaribijin Delax course 9,500 yena seasonal lunch and public baths with Yukata, bath towel and towel2.Yuagaribijin course 7,300yena seasonal lunch and public baths with Yukata, bath towel and towel3.Yuttarikaiseki courseA course : 11,550yenB course : 9,240yenC course: 6,930yena seasonal lunch and public baths with towel (no Yukata)I think the difference of the corse is lunch.The lunch become better as the price more expencive.You can use a guest room and eat lunch with your parents at the guest room whichever you choose any course.The guest room is private room so you can eat just you and your parents.All courses are you can use a guest room and baths at 11am ~ 14pm or 15pm.But, When I went to there with ayumi before, I arrived at 16pm. So, if you want to arrived at 1:00pm, I will call the Motoyu ryokan to ask a hotel man that you can use a guest room an baths at 1pm to 4pm or 5pm.When I went to Motoyu ryokan with ayomi before, I took C course of Yuttarikaiseki course.It was so nice!The spring quality of onsen is strong alkali. That is very good to skin.The water makes your skin smooth!Please tell me which course you like, and I will make a reservation!http://www.motoyu.co.jp/index.html is a homepage of Motoyu ryokan. Good morning! [New Window]
Hallo!I asked the Iiyama onsen of the time.If you can go to Iiyama onsen at 11pm, You can use the corse for 4 hours (untill 3pm).But you want to go there at 1pm, You can use it for 3 hours (untill 4pm).I think that it is enough to have a good time to eat lunch and take baths for 3 hours.Also, please tell me your first name!I'm sorry I forgot. Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation [New Window]
nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:05:06 -0500 Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead [New Window]
radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:09:33 -0500 Unit Testing Achievements [New Window]
I'm still waiting for a ticket tracker with game mechanics [via]
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:04:45 -0500 The Skull of Regret [New Window]
even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:53:41 -0500 NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line [New Window]
hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second [via]
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:28:55 -0500 Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project [New Window]
even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license [via]
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:22:54 -0500 Bioshock's lead level designer remakes Arcadia in Doom 2 [New Window]
don't miss his companion article about Doom as Robotron
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:07:25 -0500 Weekend Reading on SNOW [New Window]
Looking for something to read this weekend? You could definitely do worse than catching up on this week’s new articles on SNOW Magazine — yes, despite my trip to Boston, I kept updates to the site timely. I don’t usually post anything during the weekend, but I’ve just added the first column by Sophie Knight, [...]
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:01:13 -0500 Top 10 iPad Travel Apps We Want [New Window]
I have a new piece up on CNNGo — “Wanted: The top 10 ultimate travel apps for iPad.” I think the title says it all.
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:42:38 -0500 PechaKucha Control Center [New Window]
Here I am, acting all serious and shit at the “control center” this past Saturday for the big “Global PechaKucha Night for Haiti” — in the foreground you see the back of the head of Mark Dytham, and my PechaKucha colleague Tomoko. The photo is courtesy of Arvin Panwar — more photos from that night [...]
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:38:47 -0500 Pictures for Sad Children, "Play Play Play" [New Window]
Level End [via]
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:07:57 -0500 Beantown [New Window]
Where have I been? Currently in Boston — a sort of last-minute research trip for my wife, with me along for the ride. This came off the heels of a rather hectic month of preparations for the “PechaKucha for Haiti” event that was held this past Saturday. Still been busy here, mostly working from the [...]
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:53:24 -0500 Nieman Labs tallies original reporting vs. rewrites for the Google/China hacking story [New Window]
121 different versions of the story, but only 13 did any original reporting
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:46:10 -0500 Joel Johnson's extremely painful, personal story of sexual abuse [New Window]
so horrible I hesitate linking to it, but I will, if only for Google justice
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:36:31 -0500 Casey Neistat's excellent short film about Chat Roulette [New Window]
includes demographics, vernacular, and how men and women are treated differently
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:08:08 -0500 NYT on Bloom Energy's public debut [New Window]
groundbreaking fuel cell tech used by Google, eBay, others; Mashable liveblogged the launch
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:19:28 -0500 Yelp accused of extortion in class-action lawsuit [New Window]
I maintain that business owners are confused over both sponsorship and the algorithm; a former Yelp account exec debunks the claims
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:15:48 -0500 PechaKucha for Haiti [New Window]
Just a note to let everyone know about the global “PechaKucha for Haiti” event happening today. You’ll be able to watch a live stream of the entire thing from the front page of the PechaKucha website. There are also local events happening around the world — the Tokyo one is at SuperDeluxe, doors open at [...]
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:50:55 -0500 SNOW Magazine Update [New Window]
Time again for a round-up of recent articles to appear on SNOW Magazine, and also to welcome Alastair Townsend (BAKOKO) as a new contributor to the site — I’m now posting the terrific “A Few Things” series of posts he’s been doing on his blog, about contrasting housing-related issues between Japan and the West.I’ll be [...]
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:31:17 -0500 Weekend Reading from SNOW [New Window]
Here’s another round-up of the last few days of articles to appear on SNOW Magazine. First I’d like to highlight the three guest columns that appeared this week: Bianca Beuttel returns to the package design series she used to contribute to PingMag (starting with Xylish gum packaging), Audrey Fondecave provides a second column to make [...]
Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:38:56 -0500 PauseTalk in March [New Window]
Oh, don’t you just love these PauseTalk updates? So after having to cancel this month’s edition I said that it would be back in March, but unfortunately, again, it won’t happen on the first Monday (which would be March 1) because it looks like I’ll be in China at the end of this month and [...]
Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:27:59 -0500 Hello! This is Click Opera. [New Window]
1. What's this? This is the last entry in the blog called Click Opera, which means that, in the funny through-the-looking-glass world of blogs, it's the first page future internauts and web adventurers will come to. So think of this not so much as an ending as an entrance. What you've reached is the door to "probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web", according to Warren Ellis. "It doesn't get any better than Click Opera," said novelist Dennis Cooper.2. Who's behind Click Opera? The best introduction to who I am is this article in The Guardian Review. I'm a Scot, a musician, a writer, and -- according to this page, gulp! -- the 4697th most significant contemporary visual artist working today. My Wikipedia page is here. You can download six of my early albums free here. Books I've written are here and here. I want to write more books, so if you're a publisher email me! That goes for people wanting to reproduce bits of this blog in print, too.3. Where can we find out what you're up to, post-blog? From my "personal digital assistant" Maria Wolonski, who announces my engagements in the charming, ringing tones of a talking clock. From the Momus concerts page on LastFM. From my Flickr page and my two YouTube accounts, momasu and bookofjokes. I may even revive my old website (1995-2003), imomus.com.4. What do you plan to do now? I want to write books and articles. Maybe teach at an art school. Deliver lectures in many lands. Make some more records. Play concerts. Walk around the world. Learn to speak Japanese and live in Japan. Write my own regular newspaper column of cultural commentary (I've written for people like Wired, The New York Times, Frieze, Spike, The Wire, 032c). Hold some more art shows. If you can help me realise these dreams, email me, please!5. If I want to stage a Momus concert, what do I need to do? Tell your friendly local promoter (or it could be an art gallerist, store owner, festival director) that all I require is travel expenses (from Berlin), accommodation, plus a fee of around 500 for a regular Momus show (festivals tend to pay more). If that works for the promoters, get them to drop me a line and we'll take it from there. I also do art performances -- live storytelling and unreliable tours.6. Will you keep the Click Opera archive up indefinitely? Yes, I will. If you feel like helping with the modest LiveJournal and PhotoBucket hosting costs -- or compensating me directly for some illegal mp3s of my songs you've downloaded -- you can make a donation via PayPal here. 7. What's the best way to search the Click Opera archive? Simply type the word imomus plus your search term into a search engine, then follow the links headed "Click Opera". 8. Will you keep reading and responding to comments left under this entry? Yes, I will. Leave your email address if you want a personal response.9. Why did you stop updating Click Opera? Not because anything went wrong or it got unpleasant. Quite the reverse, in fact. Click Opera was just too damned good: too compelling, too time-consuming, too satisfying. It took over my life. It became my job, the main topic of my conversation, the hub of my self-mediated fame: "Aren't you that guy from the internet?" (Read the piece called Clickswansong if you want to know more about why this blog came to a "happy ending". Or listen to this radio interview with KCSB's Colin Marshall.)10. Can I step through the door now? Please do! There's a lot to read! You can browse backwards from here, or start at the beginning (Thursday January 15th 2004) and work forwards. The calendar is your friend, or you may prefer to read through the titles displayed in the month view.Thanks to everyone who's contributed to Click Opera, this big vineyard! You've given me years of pleasure! Happiness, as T.E. Lawrence said, "is a by-product of absorption", and blogging -- the best hobby I ever had -- has been absorbing indeed.
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:39:06 -0500 Meet Maria Wolonski [New Window]
Momus: Hello everyone, thanks for coming today. I'd like to present Maria Wolonski, our new... What is your official title, Maria? I forget, despite being the one who made it up!Maria: Wasn't it "Flexible Information Nexus"? Momus: "F-I-N". Sounds a bit fishy! No, didn't it have a P in it... not PA, not PR...Maria: PDA! Personal Digital Assistant!Momus: Thanks, that'll do nicely for now. So, everyone, I'd like you to meet Maria Wolonski, the new Momus PDA. We're delighted to have her aboard.Maria: Shall I curtsey? Or do you want to spray champagne over me, like Richard Branson?Momus: Ha ha, it is tempting! But Richard Branson is a sexist pig. I wouldn't treat my employees like that. I think we should tell people first and foremost to follow your feed.Maria: Yes! Right. Well, my feed is called wolon, which is obviously short for "Wolonski". It's your highly Portable Information Nexus (P-I-N) for anything and everything related to Momus. Concerts, press appearances, lectures, reactions to events, recommendations. Hey, should I be calling you "Mr Momus"?Momus: No, no, just plain Momus is fine.Maria: Should we talk about what we were discussing earlier?Momus: What was that? Oh, about possible reactions? Okay... You go first.Maria: Well, it's just that you thought... You thought there was a possibility of dismay. That people would say: "He's winding up Click Opera just to unveil... a Twitter feed?"Momus: Right. And it's important to stress that this is not a Momus-related Twitter feed. Well, not just a Momus-related Twitter feed. This is Maria, a new person. A new member of staff. In a new office. With rafters.Maria: You know, I think I will call you Mr Momus on the feed. So cute!Momus: It is cute, but remember the "Mr" will take up two of those precious 140 characters.Maria: Oh, I can slip it in there. I'm good at that. Mr Momus on BBC Radio 4's Quote Unquote "deserves to be a massive multi-billionaire" (says nice Dr Ben Goldacre). See? I tweeted all that plus a compact tinyurl. It fits!Momus: I want to ask you a few questions about your origins, Maria, because I think the readers will want to know some background. But first I just want to clear up this question of the value of Twitter. As you know, I had a piece up in April called The case against -- and for -- Twitter. It was quite damning: "You could easily see the tweet as an inherently worthless form, some kind of spreading weed, replacing meaningful content with something scattershot, trivial, phatic, desultory -- eroding topsoil, decreasing crop yields." But then -- being a dialectical kind of chap -- I saw the plus side: "Couldn't all the important things ever said be reduced to 140 characters? There's nothing more wonderful than seeing a short form given some kind of lapidary perfection." Now, the wolon feed is mostly for information about real-world Momus activities, but I hope it can achieve some of that "lapidary perfection" too. Some kind of beauty.Maria: That's why you made someone short and perfectly-formed your "flexible information nexus"? Momus: You're perfectly formed, but you're not short! Come on, Maria, you're almost as tall as me!Maria: It's true, and you wear high heels.Momus: Don't tell them that!Maria: Ha ha ha!Momus: Do you want me to show them your baby pictures?Maria: What, that one of me in my birthday suit? When you were down in the lab, fabricating me like the Bride of Frankenstein?Momus: Yes, that one!Maria: Well, I certainly don't want you holding the threat to show it over my head and using it to control my freedom of expression. So go ahead, I'm not ashamed. In fact, I think it's good to make my fabrication process clear and obvious to everybody, as if to say "This is how a PDA is made!"Momus: Okay, here's Maria in the lab, back when she was being fabricated. Isn't she lovely?Maria: I have a damn good body, I'll say that for me. You look like you had a lot on your hands before I came along. In fact, you had a lot of hands, period.Momus: That's right, I had a thumb in many pies. I had to juggle everything constantly. I didn't know what to do with all my hands. That's why I needed a new pair.Maria: Yes, today you're showing a new pair of hands and a clean pair of heels!Momus: Please don't go on about my heels!Maria: You like to wear them with spurs while sitting on your high horse!Momus: No I don't! Anyway, here's a flow diagram of how I hope we'll be working together in the future.Maria: That's lovely! I'm a penguin! Where did you get the graphic?Momus: It's a tribute to the Japanese designer Nakajo Masayoshi, a cluster of some of his motifs. He did a lot of work for the Shiseido magazine Hanatsubaki, really nice clear and simple design, but quirky, with lots of personality.Maria: Is that you in the photo?Momus: No, it's Harry Smith, but it's how I might look in a few years.Maria: You have a birthday coming up soon, don't you?Momus: No.Maria: Yes you do!Momus: No I don't! I don't want to talk about that! In fact, let's just end this meeting now, shall we, Maria?Maria: Okay, you're the boss, Mr Branson! I mean, Mr Momus!Follow Maria Wolonski on Twitter.
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:50:55 -0500 Latest on SNOW [New Window]
So what’s the latest on SNOW? I guess two new developments art that I added a dedicated Twitter feed, and also created a Facebook fan page. The Twitter feed is mostly just automated with new articles from the site — because some people actually prefer that over RSS feeds these days — but I do [...]
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:45:53 -0500 Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak [New Window]
I'm looking in the mirror and I have a dog's head. It's a small dog, rather well-groomed, with a bear-like snub nose and golden-brown hair. I have to go somewhere, see an art exhibition in rural Turkey, catch a train to the mountains... Oh, wait, that was a dream. I've woken up. I don't feel so great in the mornings -- a bit stiff. I'll be fine once I have some tea and move around a bit.I jump up off the futon, leaving Hisae to doze. The rabbit lopes after me, down the corridor -- via the bathroom, where I pee and brush my teeth -- through the living room, into the kitchen.Fuck, it's still totally white outside. I'm peering short-sightedly out into the courtyard garden as the kettle boils. This winter is just a tedious permatundra, more like Moscow than Berlin. I don't think I can take another like this; subzero, and everything locked under treacherous ice and snow for months. You never want to go out, but then you get cabin fever. Got to move somewhere warmer. Osaka, Athens.I'm in my pink Habitat dressing-gown, the one I bought at Republique in Paris when I moved back to Europe from Japan in late 2002. Wearing this thick toweled garment, I feel like a prize fighter about to step into the ring. This, if anything, is my blogging garment; my pajamahadeen battle dress. I lie back in the reclining chair that faces my big, bright iMac screen. Check the remote control for the Japanese vibration device built into the chair; no light. The rabbit may have bitten through the power cable again. Fuck! I could do with a bit of a back massage.After a cup of tea I feel better. Not just because my limbic system is flowing again and my stiff limbs are moving, but because there's a slight tingle of adrenalin now, a mixture of challenge and anxiety. My body is being led by my brain, which feels alert, crisp, purposeful. In a couple of hours I'll publish an illustrated article which people all over the world will be able to read. They'll start commenting on it almost immediately. I'll make the last editorial tweaks, and field the first comments, lying in my bath, reading my iPod Touch. But first the big question, the Scheherazade question. What to write about? This is the key part of the process. Basically, it's about redemption. I must find something inspiring and exciting in my daily round of webpages, something I want to relay, repackage, expand on, interpret, rail against, connect unexpectedly to something else.It's a bit like alchemy, turning base metals into gold. I'm actually rather unexcited by most of the stuff I read in the tight circles I make on the web. Let's see, on the Guardian news pages a law lord says the Iraq war was illegal, and British universities are having their budgets cut. You could do a piece on how those connect (Britain spent so much on the war, and later on bailing out the banks, that now they're chopping off bits of the future-national-brain to pay for it), but that way lies a bottomless pit of bitterness.No, we want something a bit more arty and colourful for our topic. Check the Culture pages. Because when everything else is winter and gloom, culture can be glitter and bloom. Hmm, Gil Scott-Heron's back, and someone's written "an explosive new history of anti-semitism" which "has liberal intellectuals in its sights". 200 comments by lunchtime! But no thank you.At this point I'm wondering if I have a "stub". A stub is a TextEdit document outlining an idea for a blog piece. It's usually just an URL and a few lines of notes connecting that topic to a photo and a few other topics. I open a folder marked "2010 alias" and arrange the files by type. There's one about Alan McGee closing his Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts ("i got fed up with being in other people's personal real life shite drama's so closed them all down.it feels like freedom", he writes in his MySpace blog). Nah, lay off McGee, let him be free. I shall also be released soon.There's a stub entitled "Modern Painters mystery" which is about how the art magazine's Wikipedia page mentions nothing about the origins of the much-relaunched title. The Modern Painters disambiguation page says "for the art magazine founded by Peter Fuller...", but the actual page doesn't mention Fuller at all, nor any of the umpteen editors and companies and headquarters the mag has gone through over the last decade. I'm sure there used to be a Wikipedia page mentioning some of these things, and the corporate gloss that now stands in for a proper account of Modern Painters strikes me as a kind of Orwellian propaganda -- the kind of thing Marxy is always complaining about re: the Japanese Wikipedia, in fact. But no. Bringing Marxy into it would feel terribly 2005, and bashing Modern Painters would feel wrong too, because they covered me at generous length in 2003. Ha, what about a waspish, self-mocking piece saying that every media outlet that covers Momus is doomed to go on the skids shortly afterwards? Then I could say that failing to respond promptly to Tokyo Art Beat's request for a TABuzz feature recently has been my way to spare the troubled website (currently requesting donations) "the curse of Momus"! No, but that's stirring it, and the TABBERS I met in Tokyo this trip were lovely people.What about a Japan-themed entry? Aha, there is a stub for one of those. It's about Wim Wenders' late-80s film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, which is about Yohji Yamamoto and video imaging technology. I saw it when it came out, and it fits (along with Chris Marker's Sunless and Elizabeth Lennard's documentary on Ryuichi Sakamoto) into a fascinating subgenre of Western takes on late-Showa Tokyo. There's a really interesting sub-theme in Wenders' ruminative, oblique film about peace-as-war. Yamamoto says that commerce has been, post-war, Japan's way of holding its head up in the world, and that it's pursued like a peacetime war effort. Japan doesn't really have that attitude any more, though maybe China does.Anyway, blogging about that would be a good opportunity to link to Toog's excellent interview with Elizabeth Lennard. God, how I admire Toog's blog! If people should read any blog after mine stops, they should read his. And Toog himself is really an inspiration: the handmade book of poetry he sent me recently, for instance, the one that looks like a passport to higher states. What an elegant project! To take orders for a book of poems then write each one by hand! It's monklike, it's quirkily humourous, it's exactly the kind of stubborn gesture that commands interest and respect in an age where it's far too easy to launch culture electronically.Speaking of "too many words", I still haven't settled on a topic to blog about. But maybe -- since I've written about trying to find something to write about -- that's no longer necessary. I can just blog about blogging. The medium is, after all, the message.Remember that piece I wrote, A cup of tea? Mischa Shoni had written asking "Momus, what should I blog about?" It was 2006, and everyone was supposed to blog. So I did an entry saying you could blog interestingly about anything, even a cup of tea. It was one of the first blog entries to use numbered paragraphs, which later became a bit of a Click Opera signature (I later discovered Alain Badiou did the same thing). It made Mischa happy, and got 80 comments. Well, I don't think I'm going to blog about cups of tea again -- Click Opera ends on Wednesday, and I don't want to repeat myself -- but it might be a good plan to drink one. For some reason Samuel Beckett's line about how "having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak" pops into my head. Maybe that would be a good title for today's entry.I raise my pink-clad body up out of the vibrating, reclining chair (I seem to have spent a big chunk of the last decade cranked back in this "driving seat", facing the big iMac "windscreen") and head for the kitchen. Instead of the wireless mouse, I click the button on the kettle, and soon the fresh water is chuckling to a boil. It's coming up to 11am, time to post. But what'll I use for pictures?
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:03:39 -0500 What's not to self-love? [New Window]
Am I a narcissist? The question itself is self-indulgent and self-absorbed, but I can't help asking it. Maybe my six years demanding your daily attention here at Click Opera have been nothing but "digital narcissism", a daily seduction, an attempt to put myself at the centre of the world, to spin myself into every story, to make myself the universal prism, the central aleph, the keystone in a grand facade. Has the motif behind every story (and almost thirty years of records, for that matter) really been "me, me, me"?I think it's clear that I am a narcissist -- God knows, I love and believe in myself strongly enough -- but I'd say I'm also rather guilty about it. I'd say I diffuse my self-love out into so many other things that it becomes acceptable. It's not sticky and repulsive any more, as immoderate self-love tends to be.Or does it? According to an article on PsyBlog, Why we love narcissists (at first), "despite being self-absorbed, arrogant, entitled and exploitative, narcissists are also fascinating... we are strangely drawn to their self-centred personalities, their dominance and their hostility, their sensitivity and their despair, at least for a while."The article reports an experiment by social psychologist Mitja Back which found that narcissists make a good first impression because they look, sound and move better. They use charming facial expressions, have a more confident speaking tone, wear more fashionable clothes, have trendier haircuts and are funnier.Wow, what's not to self-love? Narcissists sound like attractive hipsters! They must get laid a lot!If they do -- and surely they do -- their relationships don't last long, Back found. Weirdly enough, it's the narcissist-hipster's entitlement and exploitative abilities which lure people in initially: "participants liked narcissists' sense of entitlement most -- of the four aspects of narcissism they studied (leadership/authority, self-admiration/self-absorption, arrogance/superiority and entitlement/exploitativeness) it was the last of these that most predicted liking". However, "narcissists are usually soon found out and shunned since few people will put up with a self-absorbed, authoritarian, arrogant, exploitative friend".At this point my picture of the narcissist -- with his trendy haircut and funny comments -- became the image of a musician on tour, getting laid every night but exhausting sympathy just in time to move on to the next concert in the next town. But the digital dandy could fit the bill just as well: instead of sticking around long enough for real people to get the message that there's no place in the dandy's heart for anyone but himself, he can simply display himself digitally in the web's shop window."Behaving selfishly seems to bring them a rush of admiration which they get addicted to, while devaluing others when the inevitable rejection comes, covering it up by searching out new people to worship them. The reason narcissists fail to spot this cycle may well be that friends and partners never hang around long enough to tell them in such a way that they actually believe it and want to do something about it," the article concludes.That almost makes it sound like narcissism is being made into a "cycle of abuse", a "clinical condition requiring treatment", and even a "disease". And it might well be a facet of the narcissism of psychologists that they see themselves as the universal prism, the central aleph, the see-all and cure-all. Do scientists have a grudge against artists? Do they want us to be as boring as them? It's certainly understandable that these science types would prefer to vest their own value in something other than cool clothes, immediate charm, and a nice line in chat-up patter.So, therapy for narcissists. Would it remove their charm and attractiveness, or only their own exploitation and manipulation of it to seduce the easily-impressed? Would the trendy haircut, the nice voice, the funny remarks, vanish after a course of antibiotics? Would the narcissist become one of those English self-deprecators who proudly proclaims his complete inadequacy, stupidity and laziness at every opportunity (surely a kind of "inverted narcissism" even more egregious than the overt kind, since it often comes with a refusal to improve)?Attacks on narcissists disturb me just as attacks on hipsters do. After reading the PsyBlog piece -- to get the astringent flavour of crushed aspirin out of my mouth -- I watched a lot of Prince videos: Kiss, Sexy MF, Alphabet Street, Cream. You can only watch them on dodgy offshore servers, because either Prince or the media moguls who own his material slap suits on anyone showing them (and I don't mean padded-shouldered, wasp-waisted numbers with peep-holes for chest hair).The narcissism levels in the Prince vids were off the meter, way beyond the red. I loved them. I imagined that if I'd been born a girl (Sheena Easton, for instance) I'd willingly have served my time as a love-slave in the pimp-imp's harem. The idea of a "normal" Prince cured of his scandalous self-love... well, it's just plain fugly.
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:44:37 -0500 Growing old in, and with, Japan [New Window]
Someone sent me to read John Haffner's interesting blog post Immigration as a Source of Renewal in Japan. It's about Japan "growing old", and it's of particular relevance to me because it's an ambition of mine to grow old as an immigrant in Japan. Now, I'm not really the sort of immigrant John Haffner has in mind as a solution for Japan's ills. Although English-speaking Westerners do figure in his prescriptions, he sees young, dynamic, entrepreneurial people -- many from surrounding Asian countries -- as the only way to kick the nation off a demographic course which, left unchecked, will see its population shrink from 127 to less than 100 million people by 2050. Niken and Mahesa, two charming Javanese students we befriended in Tokyo in December, might fit the bill better.Niken and Mahesa plan to go back to Jakarta when their studies are over. But they'd certainly be an asset to Japan: stylish, resourceful, trilingual, full of good ideas, ambitious and friendly, they could represent one future for a Japan even I've reproached for entering a navel-gazing new period of sakoku, or cultural isolation. Other contenders might be the family of Malaysian restauranteurs we dined with in Osaka in early December. Inter-marrying with Japanese, they were bringing members of their Malaysian families up to Japan one by one.As once-solid mega-corporations like Toyota and JAL begin to wobble badly, as Japan's debt approaches 200% of its GDP, and as China overtakes to become the world's number two economic power, it's clear that something has to change in Japan. As Haffner points out, "whereas 11 workers supported two retirees in 1960, the ratio was four workers to one retiree in 1999, and by 2050 the UN projects that only 1.7 workers will support one retiree. Those workers will face a heavy burden," and "the continual improvement in living standards the Japanese have enjoyed during the last half-century will come to an end. After making an enthusiastic case for increasing Japanese immigration, though, Haffner admits it just isn't likely to happen: "The country is likely to do no more than tinker with its immigration levels. By implication, therefore, Japan is also likely to become a smaller, more debt-laden and less productive country in the coming decades." So that's the change we're most likely to see: shrinkage, decline, deflation. Ha, exactly the same processes I expect to see in myself over the next thirty years! Maybe Japan will be the perfect place to grow old!Given that we're not likely to see a sudden immigration-powered economic miracle in Japan, or a sudden massive baby boom (despite the government basically paying people to have kids), is there a silver lining to Japan's likely silver age? I think there could be several. Let's list them.* According to Iwao Fujimasa, a demographer with the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, depopulation could depress the real estate market and affect the financial standing of banks dependent on real estate prices. In other words, cheaper house and rental prices in Japan! Yay!* Fujimasa thinks that population decline will boost gender equality, break down generation gaps and bring a more relaxed way of living. Land prices will fall, people will be able to afford bigger homes, and the daily crush on trains will be lessened. (Population decline not all bad news, Japan Times)* Then there's the argument that we need to stop promoting endless economic growth as the only goal. As Sakamoto put it: "The current economic system has required people to be busy trying to achieve growth -- it's as though they're continually riding a bicycle. People have to do things fast to meet the demand for excessive efficiency.... I think it would be better if Japan became a beautiful third-rate country. It would be nice if Japan was a place of delicious food, beautiful scenery and abundant nature. If that were the case, I think it wouldn't matter if one had little money."* This could, in other words, be Japan's midlife crisis, and the best thing about a midlife crisis is that it's an opportunity to ask some basic questions: "Is that all there is?" and "What really matters to me?" Trying to catch Japanese artists in the act of asking these questions is the whole premise of the Aftergold art show I'm currently putting together.* Interviewed by De:bug magazine in November for their Japan special, I was asked to clarify my views on immigration in Japan. The editors had been troubled by some comments I'd made, and said they had a different definition of multiculturalism from mine. I responded that while I'm very much in favour of immigration to Europe, I felt that many of the things I value about Japan are only possible because of the high level of trust, harmony and homogeneity that exists there.* "To impose exactly the same sort of multiculturalism worldwide would not be multiculturalism at all, but a kind of monoculture. It would result in a decrease in diversity," I added. "Japan is not a hegemonic power in the world today. The US is. Therefore, I see the maintenance of Japaneseness as a form of resistance struggle. It opposes the homogenising globalisation which proposes the US model as the one we must all follow."* It's also important to remember that there is a conflict between internal population diversity on the national level and global cultural diversity. Global cultural diversity can only flourish if there are distinct "flavours" and identities, which are often maintained by the restriction, on a national level, of diversity. This is a swings-and-roundabouts argument. Just as Japanese women may benefit from the lack of immigrants on the Japanese job market, so the failure of internal diversity may be the success of international diversity. Let's be clear: I'd love DPJ prime minister Hatoyama's cherished personal vision of an Asian monetary and political union modeled on the European vision of Jacques Delors and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi to be realised. I'd love Japan to be filled with young, visionary and dynamic people like Niken and Mahesa, or like Hisae's Korean mother, for that matter. I think these immigrants do and would continue to expand Japan's culture in interesting ways. And I have an obvious personal interest in Japan's visa requirements getting loosened so that people like me can "flood in" and "swamp" the nation.But realistically that ain't gonna happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. So all I'm saying is that the alternative is interesting too. Japan will get cheaper, smaller, poorer, purer, wiser, more itself. Rather than forging new forms of industry and commerce (same old thing, same old bling), Japan will from now on be pioneering new ways of living; post-industrial, post-materialist, post-wealth, post-growth. This is something the world doesn't know much about yet. How to live longer, live better, yet live cheaper, live smaller. How to live for the pure joy of living, not for the grim accumulation of money. How to "decline successfully". How to be wise. Show us how it's done, Japan!
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:26:35 -0500 Mr Pantouffle's self-fab skyhut [New Window]
I escaped yesterday from winter-glitched Berlin (grit, dark, dirt, slush and slither) into the warm, clean capsule of sunlight-and-elsewhere which is the Walther Koenig bookstore. Soon I found myself flipping through an interesting architect's-coffee-table book by Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham, Portraits from Above: Hong Kong's Informal Rooftop Communities.Up on the roofs of Hong Kong buildings you often find them: corrugated shacks, little huts, self-built structures which replicate, up in the air, rural Chinese villages. "Informal" means, of course, that they don't meet any building standards and don't have any legal status, so living in one of these skyhuts is a precarious business in every sense; a government inspector will sooner or later mark your dwelling with a fluorescent ink stain which means that you have a minimal window of a day or two to vacate before they pull the place down and chuck its constituent parts onto a skip thirty stories below.Wu (the Chinese-Canadian who did the meticulous cut-away drawings) and Canham (German, photographs) asked themselves the same questions I did: Who lives here? How do they live? Do they have wifi? Do they have running water and electricity? What's it like in there? Luckily, the pair were invited in quite readily, and allowed to document the living spaces.Did I tell you I once lived for a year in a hen hutch? Well, it wasn't really a hen hutch, more a garden shed behind a house in Torry, Aberdeen. It was my last year at university, and I actually really enjoyed living there. I put a picture of Alexander Pope on the wall, taught myself Brel songs, warmed myself with a two-bar heater, and, when I had to use the loo or the bath, let myself into the adjacent house belonging to my landlady, Mrs Ross. So that's what I imagine living on a Hong Kong roof to be like.Humble, fleeting, homemade, ramshackle and cheap, the self-fab skyhut is admirable in all sorts of ways. Okay, so the toilet appears to be in the kitchen in some of these photos, and they wouldn't keep the cold out if Hong Kong ever did get cold (today it's 20c, perfect!). But from the point of view of density, recycling, efficiency and sustainability these structures -- built in a spirit of dung-beetle bricolage -- have a lot to teach us. Up on the roof it's cooler and quieter, you're out of people's way, you have good views out over the city, you can befriend the birds and watch the sun set. You haven't used up any extra land, and you haven't spent a ridiculous amount of money on construction. You're up on the roof, hurting no-one, minding your own business, listening to the aircon.The nice thing about books like Portraits from Above is that they provide a detailed decor into which you can insert characters of your own. Yesterday, after playing Grand Theft Auto for a while at the Transmediale hub, I invented a character called Mr Pantouffle. He's a semi-retired clown with a heart of gold, always being cheated by the people he meets down on the ground. Only up in his skyhut, with his beloved avifauna around him, is Pantouffle free. He hums, he feeds the birds, he works on his clown act, he scatters fresh rice into his pink plug-in cooker and flips the switch.
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:43:38 -0500 Regal Zonophone [New Window]
My City vs Your City is a fascinating information widget designed by Michael Schieben. It takes data from LastFM and organises it so that you can compare the Top 10 most-listened-to artists in any two cities of your choice (as long as they're on LastFM's list of cities, and have active listeners). The clean and attractive interface then gives you a percentage overlap between the two cities.After using the widget to make some fairly trivial observations (Kings of Leon do better in Protestant countries than Catholic ones! David Bowie is more popular in London than New York!), I found myself most interested in comparing how many domestic artists different countries have in their Top 10s. You might expect pop songs in local tongues, from local artists, to sprinkle the most-listened-to playlists of all nations fairly equally, but that turns out not to be the case at all. What emerges very strongly, in almost all the cities you care to look at, is an Anglo-Saxon monoculture. Cities all over the world list the same artists in their Top 10s: Coldplay, Radiohead, Lady GaGa, The Beatles... It's almost as if someone or something has got to them. The same "someone" who commands people all over the world to wear blue jeans seems to be laying down the law, or subtly inveigling its norms into people's desires. THOU SHALT HAVE A MAXIMUM OF THREE DOMESTIC ARTISTS IN THY LASTFM TOP 10, this "something" says, UNLESS THOU ART FRENCH OR JAPANESE. Yes, according to this widget it is only cities in France and Japan in which we find people willing to go beyond this unofficial "30% local cap", this unwritten "commandment of monoculture". Paris boasts 40% domestic artists in its list (Gainsbourg, Air, Phoenix, Daft Punk), while Tokyo charts a massive 70% of homegrown talent. That's almost complete self-sufficiency! No need to import any foreign music except the odd Beatles and Radiohead mp3!Nowhere else can match this extraordinary Japanese achievement (which could be a fantastic blow struck for autonomy, or a kind of navel-gazing autism, depending on your perspective). Even in China -- confident, fast-growing China, which just took Japan's place as the world's second richest nation, and is on track to be its richest within ten years -- LastFM users are only tending to let one single measly Chinese track into their Top 10s.Muslim Turkey stretches to three domestics, Mexico has none. Religion seems to count for more than money: the Anglosphere's cultural hegemony seems to be outlasting the financial dominance of the US, although slightly less so in Muslim countries. (Here we have to strike a note of caution, though. This is all based on data coming in via LastFM, a Western service. It's perfectly possible that Chinese music-sharing services would feature more Chinese music. Or possibly not.)There are, of course, two nations who listen almost exclusively to music made within their own borders: the US and the UK. No, make that three, because Japan does too. Where the US and the UK differ from Japan, though, is that they export their local culture all over the world. Nobody outside Japan is listening to Japanese music. Japanese music isn't a hegemony, and Japan is not a music hub.I must say, I find the picture that emerges from My City vs. Your City a deeply depressing -- and sadly familiar -- one. What this widget makes visible is the same one-way cultural flow I described in (Don't want to live in a) hub and spoke world and Culture flows through English channels, but not for long. In the terms used by airlines for their route maps, culture is flowing in a clear hub-and-spoke pattern, radiating out from a strong central point, rather than in a point-to-point way.Comparing Porto in Portugal with Porto Alegre in Brazil, I'd have hoped to see a little point-to-point cultural action going on based on the fact that these two nations share a language, Portugese. But no, neither Porto nor Porto Alegre is using LastFM to listen to anything in Portugese. If they have anything in common, it's their love of Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys. You can only "fly" from Portugal to Brazil via LA or London.Another way to look at what's going on is to say that we live in a world in which global pluralism is "asymmetrical" rather than "symmetrical". Many are not speaking to many on a level playing-field; someone is at the centre, speaking, and all the others are ranged around that "someone", listening, and mostly inaudible, even to their immediate neighbours. In the words of the Barclays Capital slogan, this is "global reach, built around you". As long as you're an Anglo-Saxon.
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:01:47 -0500 "If I commit suicide with someone, I'd like it to be you" [New Window]
1. This is the trailer for a new Japanese romcom coming out in April, My Darling is a Foreigner. It looks harmless enough:2. The trailer made me think back to the very different -- and much less positive -- way Japanese-Westerner relationships are represented in a french film made forty years ago, Domicile Conjugal (Bed and Board), the fourth in Franois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, released in 1970.3. The film is up on YouTube in its entirety, so I watched it again. The relevant part of the plot begins at the end of the fifth slice, when Antoine (played by the beautiful, mime-like Jean-Pierre Laud) is visited at his absurd job (directing model ships around a pond by remote control) by a rich Japanese family; a burly businessman and his wife and daughter (both dressed in kimonos). Antoine is given the job of accompanying Kyoko, the daughter, to the bathroom. They fall -- silently, like two mimes -- for each other, and Kyoko drops her bracelet into the pond deliberately, so that Antoine will have to return it in person.4. Now, Domicile Conjugal is a great film -- I love Truffaut's lightness of touch, his combination of charm and realism -- but Kyoko is not a great character. As far as representations of Japanese women on the screen go, she actually makes Kissy Suzuki, the double agent in the 1967 Bond film You Only Live Twice, look well-rounded. Kyoko (played by the slightly-too-old Hiroko Berghauer, announced in the titles as "Mademoiselle Hiroko", and never seen on movie screens again) is, frankly, bizarre, a bore and a bitch; both stereotypical and weird, gracious and rude.5. This is a romantic comedy, so stereotypes are forgivable, especially in the secondary characters. Kyoko draws on the 19th century imagery of Madame Butterfly, of course -- Antoine's wife Christine calls her that at one point, and even dresses up in a Butterfly-ish Japanese costume when she finds out about the affair. But could she also draw on the late-1960s stereotypology of Yoko Ono? 6. There are parallels. Released a year after The Beatles released their breakup single The Ballad of John and Yoko, Domicile Conjugal shows Kyoko breaking up Antoine and Christine. Christine finds out about the affair when some paper phrases -- half-Fluxus, half-Shinto -- pop out of a bouquet of flowers Kyoko has given Antoine. KYOKO LOVES ANTOINE, SHE IS CALLED KYOKO AND SHE LOVES YOU, COME WHEN YOU CAN BUT CAN SOON, SHE SAYS GOOD NIGHT AND THINKS OF ANTOINE, they say. Later, when Antoine's disinterest in Kyoko becomes too obvious, Kyoko also uses a note to tell Doinel to go fuck himself. It's written in Japanese on a piece of coloured paper, for all the world like a Yoko Ono instruction painting. ("Make three phonecalls to your wife. Return to your table. Examine my empty chair. Go fuck yourself.")7. Kyoko is kooky, obsessional, determined, bitchy, rich, spoiled, aesthetic. She's living in France, but stays locked within her own culture, alternating kimonos with sexy black leather mini-skirts. She shares her apartment with Maki, a Japanese roommate Kyoko pretty much throws out onto the street when she wants to seduce Antoine over dinner. Sexually predatory, she lunges (amidst spooky pseudo-oriental music by Antoine Duhamel) to kiss Doinel when he delivers her lost bracelet.8. Kyoko's Japanese lifestyle presents little interest or pleasure to Antoine. Although we see him lying in bed with Christine reading a tome entitled Japanese Women, Kyoko's apartment -- scattered with floor cushions, decorated with wind-chimes, ukiyo-e prints, a huge low-hanging paper lantern, and a groovy1970-style kotatsu table -- presents him only with discomfort (he keeps his shoes on and can't find a comfortable sitting position), and the Japanese food she serves seems to hold more horror than delight for him.9. Kyoko soon begins to frighten Antoine with weird, fanatical utterances: "If I commit suicide with someone," she tells him, "I'd like it to be you" (this statement is followed by a dramatic chord on the soundtrack, part samurai movie, part horror film). When she isn't suggesting self-harm, Kyoko is boring Antoine to death by sitting silently, spinning meals out longer than he can bear, making him smile silently so long he gets lockjaw. Soon he escapes back to his wife.10. Now, I very much doubt that My Darling is a Foreigner will trade in imagery anywhere near as negative and xenophobic as this. Imagine the Japanese film showing its American character as a kooky, unscrupulous fanatic, and the trans-cultural relationship as boring and doomed! From the trailer, it seems that the script of My Darling is a Foreigner concentrates, instead, on the happy couple's righteous struggle to overcome the prejudices of elderly family members.11. My Darling is a Foreigner is clearly a nicer film, gentler in its treatment of its characters, and much more like the kind of scenario we'd all like to be living out in our cross-cultural relationships. I very much doubt, however, whether it's a better film; despite its unkindness to Kyoko and its very old-fashioned pessimism about cross-cultural relationships, Truffaut's film is artistically very strong indeed.12. But Truffaut, with his portrayal of Kyoko, may have muddied his image in Japan. All the Japanese people I know love Godard; now I think about it, I've never heard one mention Truffaut. If they talk about Jean-Pierre Laud, it's for his role in La Chinoise, or the darker, more complex, more obscure films of Jean Eustache.
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:12:05 -0500 Look! A kitten! At Motto! [New Window]
(Assumes David Shrigley-esque voice). Things that are popular on the internet:1. Naked attractive people.2. Cute kittens, jumping.3. Opportunities to call strangers "asshole" and "douchebag".....89,374. The sort of things that Momus writes about on his blog, like arty bookshops in Berlin.As a matter of fact I was planning to write today about an arty bookshop in Berlin, Motto, knowing full well that almost nobody would pay any attention whatsoever, and preparing to console myself with an insight of the Dalai Lama: "If a practitioner thinks I hope people admire what I'm doing, expecting to receive praise for the great effort he is making... these are mundane concerns that spoil one's practice, and it is important to ensure that this does not happen so we keep our practice pure."But then something remarkable happened. As I was browsing at Motto, making notes of interesting things they stock -- a book called L'Humanisme de Michel Foucault quirkily illustrated by Isabelle Boinot (whose work is really quite reminiscent of Shrigley's), some short stories art critic Jeff Rian wrote about Paris for Purple magazine (Purple Years, which in fact you can download for free as a PDF file here), a book by Margot Zanni about film locations rather excellently designed by Swiss designer Corinne Zellweger (it made me want to produce a much more illustrated and designed book next time), a British magazine called The Mock which proclaims, in its second edition, that anecdote is the new theory (you can read the issue free online here), and the gorgeously-designed (by Zak Kyes, natch) Exhibition Prosthetics co-published by Bedford Press and Sternberg -- I was suddenly attacked by a small black kitten.Akiko Watanabe, who runs Motto, has just acquired this captivating beast -- a white-pawed small black cat, two months old, with huge pupils and a miniaturised instinct to murder. For this kitten (I didn't discover its name), Motto's piles of arty, gorgeous, intelligent and obscure books are nothing more than rocky outcrops in a tiny landscape, a "killing fields" populated by "mice" and "birds" evoked by a playful customer's wriggling, darting hands. For the kitten, a free handout advertising an art event, rattled in the air overhead, is enough to make a half-convincing sparrow.Like a masturbating internet-user or the audience at a Keiji Haino concert (I saw one last night), the kitten is willing to suspend its disbelief in the interests of having a more exciting and fulfilling life. Yes, that's almost a real naked woman on my screen! Yes, Haino really is flexing, thrashing and swishing his blond mane around in an orgiastic access of Bacchic excess, and not faking or formularising it! Yes, that really is a sparrow, flying around the shop at such a low height that I could plausibly catch, kill and eat it, staining my furry black kitten lips with warm, red bird blood!While the kitten calculated this, I was calculating myself. "If I make a short video of this kitten," I reasoned, "I could post it to YouTube, and in no time at all rack up something like eight million views. Because kittens -- along with Magibon not even bothering to hide her product placement -- are what YouTube users love more than anything else!" Then, I calculated, I could simply add the URL for Motto Distribution and I'd be transforming the Motto kitten into a very successful and effective viral sock puppet ad.What would be in it for me? Well, I'd find a populist peg to hang an unpopular blog entry on, for a start. Look, a kitten! But also, by making a free viral ad for Motto, I'd lessen my guilt about the freeloading way I tend to use the store myself: browsing the interesting paper publications Akiko has curated, noting the most intriguing names and URLs, then going home and downloading free PDFs and JPGs of the stuff off the internet. Look, everyone! A kitten! At Motto!
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:17:56 -0500 Arcade Mania Gets 3rd Printing [New Window]
Some very good news: Arcade Mania is getting a 3rd print run! Huge thanks to everyone who has picked up the book so far — hoping you’ve enjoyed it — and here’s an invitation to everyone who hasn’t done so yet. The book is available in bookstores, but of course on Amazons worldwide too (Amazon [...]
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:49:33 -0500 Twittering Kyoto [New Window]
If you follow my Twitter feed, then you may have noticed all of the tweeting I was doing while in Kyoto this past weekend, and more importantly, adding the @hitotoki tag to all of those tweets. The reason is that I’m currently helping with the beta testing of the soon-to-relaunch Hitotoki, and as you can [...]
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:53:42 -0500 The undiscovered continent needs a festival! [New Window]
1. Although you, my dear Click Opera readers, will never know the 50-year-old Momus "directly" (I'll have slung my blog hook by the time I turn that corner), this unlikely person is arriving, and imminently. I wonder what it will be like to be such a farcically old age? I read in today's Guardian, in an interview with Martin Amis, that there's a "thickening out" of life that comes after 50 "there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being," he says in The Pregnant Widow, "like an undiscovered continent." The exact nature of this "thickening out" and this "undiscovered continent" isn't made explicit; I suppose you have to buy The Pregnant Widow to find out, or turn 50 yourself.2. Stephen Moss also says, in the same article: "Amis is fascinated by the way he has changed since what he admits was a midlife crisis in the early 90s. At its simplest, he has discovered the purity of love, love without ego... Women, trophies to the early Amis, have become redeemers." Which all sounds very nice, but we need more detail. Or something else: a ritual!3. Yesterday I posted a photo to my Facebook page and captioned it "I've decided to enjoy my midlife crisis". Someone called Aki Tudor commented: "Just don't get a red Porsche:)". You could say that Aki's response -- to reach for the stereotype of the red Porsche or Ferrari as a recognised sign for substitute testosterone, a kind of symbolic Hormone Replacement Therapy -- is so conventional that it's almost ritualistic. Repeat this kind of formula enough and it becomes a reflex refrain, like shouting "Bless you!" when someone sneezes.4. An Anon wrote yesterday on Click Opera: "A side note: it is funny that puberty seems to mean a lot on nature's terms but nothing in legality's terms." That made me think of how, just as we're always creating new taboos, we're also always creating new festivals. Sometimes it takes an artist to "design" them.5. The artist Chad McCail created a new rite in a screenprint published by Edinburgh Printmakers. It's called Relationships Grow Stronger, and -- rather in the manner of my Book of Scotlands -- it imagines a parallel world where things are done differently.6. Here's how Chad McCail explained the print for EdFest.tv: "This is part of some local event that the people round about have created to mark the fact that these children, who are all about the same age, are becoming adults. It's marking their passage from childhood to adulthood; they've become fertile, they now have serious responsibilities, they can create children. And they're not fudging it, they want everyone to acknowledge that this is happening. And of course we do fudge it. We don't talk about it, we don't mark it, we don't like to acknowledge that it's happening, really. And that's difficult for children, so I wanted to make a picture where maybe it was being acknowledged." McCail's picture shows a tree outside a suburban house, garlanded with model penises and vaginas, a sort of sexual Christmas tree.7. I thought of McCail's print on the second Monday in January. We'd been late getting away from Onomichi, and I was tired after a couple of hours piloting the Daihatsu Naked up the expressway towards Kansai. Out on the freeway it's every man for himself; headlights, tunnels, passengers sleeping, sipping coffee from a pet bottle to stay alert. When we arrived in Kobe, I didn't notice them at first: girls in kimonos, brilliant as humming birds, swarming around the railway stations. Yoyo, waking and rising from the back seat, explained: today was a national holiday, Coming of Age Day, Seijin No Hi. It's a festival in which everybody who'll turn 20 this year dresses up and drinks at one of the big parties held to celebrate their ability to drink, and vote, and smoke.8. Although Seijin No Hi doesn't feature penises and vaginas balanced on Sexual Christmas Trees, it is at least halfway towards Chad McCail's vision of a parallel world in which the "seasonal" changes in human life are socially recognised and pleasantly ritualised. For me, coming to a pleasant halt (it was impossible to drive through the crowds of excited young people, asserting their newfound power over passing motor traffic) in the centre of Kobe was a magical and mood-lifting experience. After the weary modern tension of the expressway, I felt the ritual celebration take me somewhere else: somewhere youthful yet timeless, thronging and joyful, dense and urban yet pre-modern. As if the energy of youth culture had been harnessed to some kind of primal-aristocratic court culture obsessed with the fragile beauty of transition. As if adults and children -- and individuals and society -- were looking at each other with shared knowledge.9. Seijin No Hi reminded me of what a successful society Japan is. Japan succeeds, at moments like these, for the same reasons Chad McCail shows the West failing. We fail because we make important life-seasonal transitions secretive, leaving them for individuals to discover and cope with in solitude (perhaps with the aid of therapy or art or the occasional parental lecture) rather than providing something as joyful as a festival or ritual for it. 10. Watching BBC4 documentary The Waughs, Fathers and Sons last night, I noted a similar theme, again to do with coming of age. Part 3 begins with a letter Victorian patriarch Arthur Waugh wrote to Alec, his son, who'd been caught wanking in the chapel at Sherborne School. "Every time seed is lost from the body, the backbone is slightly affected," Arthur wrote. "If one feels weaker after a natural loss, it follows that a forced loss of seed, such as self-abuse entails, is much more mischievous. It is indeed a deadly danger, because it undermines the very seat of life. The result of self-abuse, if carried on persistently, is first weakness of body and mind, and finally paralysis and softening of the brain." 11. "But I suppose, in a way, it was rather wonderful of a father brought up in the Victorian age even to be writing to his son at all about this sort of thing," says Alexander Waugh, who agrees with his grandfather Evelyn that the worst thing is "being brought up in the dark". Perhaps... but a luminous ritual or a festival might have saved them all the embarrassment.12. I'm off now to invent some "turning 50" rituals. Let's see, what did David Bowie do? Didn't he dress up like a Tibetan and ask younger singers to do his songs? The thing is, you can't just invent a single ritual, or even a single festival. You have to invent a whole surrounding culture to depersonalise, dignify and perpetuate your rite of spring, your welcome to autumn, your Whitsun Weddings. If it's not cultural, it's just a party.
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:16:29 -0500 The nihilism of cold [New Window]
Seven months ago, while holidaying in Athens, I made an argument about The nihilism of heat. Citing solid empirical data from reputable sources like Camus' The Outsider, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Greene's The Power and the Glory, I stated that there was little doubt that a clear, demonstrable link existed between heat and nihilism. In the light of chilling new evidence, I want to revise that statement.To recap my argument: A sense of rationality and fairness prevails where it's cold. Human life is worth more, and humane values flourish. "In cooler, more northern countries a fundamental sense of fairness informs the idea that sidewalks are for pedestrians," I wrote. As a result of this, traffic accidents are less common and less dangerous where it's cold, I claimed.I want to change my mind. It's not that I was wrong about the nihilism of heat, or the cultural connection between hot places and a certain moral insouciance. It's that I didn't give the whole picture. There's a nihilism of cold too.Let's start with the traffic stats. Sure, in general there are fewer accidents in more northerly countries. But when it gets cold and icy, when road and pavement alike are white, accidents happen. The BBC reports that "heavy snow and high winds have caused traffic chaos across Germany with at least three deaths reported nationwide. Conditions closed some motorways and caused long traffic jams on many others. Public transport in some areas has been shut down and police have advised people not to travel if possible." In these conditions, even getting into your car is dangerous. Let's not even talk about the slithery time I had on my bike yesterday as I traversed treacherous ice and snow to see the new exhibitions at NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg. I'm lucky to be alive.In sweaty Athens I may have painted too rosy a picture of the thrillingly chilly life of winter, evoking freedom organised with Scandinavian efficiency and cheerful fishermen reeling the umpteenth plump fish up through their ice holes. But how could anything other than nihilism and despair greet the news that snow and temperatures of minus forty have killed over a million livestock in Mongolia this winter, and threaten to grip the Mongolian people in a downward spiral of hunger and poverty?It's not that I was wrong about nihilism and heat, it's that this winter has shown me there's a nihilism of cold too. I could cite all sorts of Russian literature to "prove" this with literary "data" and establish a correlation between extremes of temperature and states of the soul. But, to be quite frank, I can't be arsed. My fingers are too cold to turn the pages. The ink in my pen is a black solid, and my computer keyboard is sputtering out. It's minus ten here today, and I'm stocking up on orphans to feed the brazier.
Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:46:42 -0500 Web 2.0? Job 2.0! [New Window]
Web 2.0? It's more like Job 2.0 sometimes. Have you updated your Flickr page? Put a witty new status update on Facebook? Have you responded to the 29 invites awaiting your attention there? They come from real people, you know! And hey, your editor wants to connect with you via Linkedin! Then there's the blog... Are there enough hours in the day?Well, there might be if I just give you a Flickr slideshow today of some (only half so far) of my Japan trip photos (annotations on the Flickr page), accompanied by a rough scratch mp3 of some of the sounds I encountered on my travels (including Oorutaichi and Doddodo concerts)!Japanscratch (7.5MB stereo mp3 file, 23 mins 41 secs)Play them together!
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:34:53 -0500 Crap is a load of books [New Window]
1. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 19512. Don't read much now: the dudeWho lets the girl down beforeThe hero arrives, the chapWho's yellow and keeps the storeSeem far too familiar. Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. Philip Larkin, A Study Of Reading Habits, 19553. You can read lives and obituaries of Salinger and all that Wikipedia crap elsewhere; I'm interested in the word "crap". It sits like a sprung trap right there in the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye, the first word that really establishes the tone, the snare that catches our attention. If, in the glib formula, Salinger really did "invent the teenager", it's that surly, dismissive, deliberately anti-literary use of "crap" which starts the process. Like Prometheus making a man out of mud, Salinger creates the teenager from "crap".4. So the teenager gets born with a jibe at poor old Charles Dickens, and poor young David Copperfield! It's understandable; by 1951 it was as important for a new writer to distance himself from the 19th century novel as it was for a teenager to distance himself from a pre-teen, or for an American writer to distance himself from a British one.5. No reciprocal need was felt. British writers, post-war, weren't as interested in rejecting American idioms and models as the Americans were in rejecting theirs. In fact, British and American writers were more likely to find common cause in their embrace of a new informality, a new escape from the "fusty" literary past, and a couple of swift kicks at the dead shin of Dickens.6. And so -- not for the first or last time -- a British artist makes the exact same gesture as an American one, a couple of years later. Larkin -- like Salinger, adopting, as a literary technique, a non-literary voice and a persona -- tells us that "books are a load of crap". Later, also following Salinger (who has Holden report some "fuck you" graffiti in chapter 25 of Catcher), Larkin will unfurl his own f-word, telling us that "they fuck you up, your mum and dad". 7. They seem unlikely rebels, the preppy Jewish recluse from New England and the bald Hull librarian. They bring swearing into literature almost against their will; Larkin tells John Betjeman, in the 1964 BBC Monitor documentary that peppers this page: "I read that I'm a miserable sort of fellow writing a sort of Welfare State sub-poetry, doing it well, perhaps, but it isn't really what poetry is, and it isn't really the sort of poetry we want. But I wonder if it ever occurs to the writer of criticism like that that really one agrees with them. That what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, and the kind of environment one's had, and has now, that one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write."8. In other words, these were not radical writers who loved swearing and could sing the praises of what Ken Tynan (the first man to use it on TV) called "the sweet word fuck". They were rather cautious conservatives with strong misgivings about the modern world, but men who nevertheless believed so strongly in literature's empirical duty to reflect reality that they had no choice but to use in literature the sweary words that people use on the streets.9. The shock for readers wasn't so much in encountering words like "crap" and "fuck" as seeing them printed on a page published by a reputable and legitimate publishing house. The sword cut both ways: literature got some street cred, but swearing also received a literary blessing of sorts.10. And with that mutually-beneficial exchange the whole game began to shift, and the values to invert. When I read The Catcher in the Rye in the 1970s it was already a literary antique, its street slang ("crumby", "phoney", "lousy") faintly quaint. The cutting edge quickly became more recent, more radical American authors like Kathy Acker. Far from disparaging Dickens, Kathy Acker sat down and rewrote Great Expectations, appropriating him word-for-word in a section headed "Plagiarism" then quickly branching out into her own tale.11. In Acker's version of Great Expectations, published in 1982, "literary" and "street" reach a new settlement. You could say that Acker skips the 1950s empirical-street-literary model and goes back to the biggest, baddest European rebel writer of the 1940s, Jean Genet.12. And this is where I have to chime in and say that I'm with Acker and Genet, rather than Salinger and Larkin. In a world in which informal has become the new formal, jeans and rock are the universal signifiers of normative respectability, couture kowtows to pret and the street is the new salon, the "subversive" thing to do is to resurrect and re-invent the maligned category of "the literary". My Book of Jokes (which has a chapter featuring the characters from Genet's play The Blacks) adopts -- as Genet did -- a deliberately high-flown literary tone all the better to contrast the obscenities and street smut it trades in.13. As for Dickens and his "David Copperfield crap", I'm interested in getting closer to it. Dickens is actually a key part of the "signature specification" for my next novel, codenamed Super-Empathy.14. The informal, empirical "street" tradition isn't dead, though. Writers can still shock us by putting clumsy everyday things into published books. Since the new street is the internet, the author currently doing this most shockingly -- and best -- is Tao Lin, who filled Shoplifting from American Apparel with apparently-inconsequential Google Chats. If you want today's J.D. Salinger, look no further.15. Have a listen to Chris Harrald's radio play Mr Larkin's Awkward Day on BBC iPlayer. It isn't crap.
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:17:57 -0500 Portrait of the artist as a young snob [New Window]
We're coming to the end of our time together, dear Click Opera readers, and it strikes me that there's a huge amount you don't know about me. Really basic stuff, too; the kind of thing that would be in the first couple of chapters of an autobiography. Just how major, traumatic and formative an event it was for me, for instance, to be transported from Athens (where my family had been posted by the British Council) to boarding school in Scotland at the age of ten. I spent three years in an Edinburgh Academy boarding house, wishing profoundly I were somewhere else.I remember two things I said back then, one to my friend Thomson and one to myself. To Thomson I compared Edinburgh with Athens and called the Scottish capital "a cluster of shacks on the horizon". Now, this wasn't true at all; Edinburgh holds up well against Athens, objectively speaking. But it expressed my need for a here / elsewhere binary in which the elsewhere had the starring role. I was a Romantic, a little Lord Byron. I even started telling some of the boys I was Greek, not Scottish. I loosened my Scottish accent, adding some Thames Estuary vowels just to confuse people.The other thing I remember saying -- to myself this time -- is: "I will be try to be less influenced by my surroundings". In Mackenzie House I was very aware of the pressure to conform -- to use the same slang as the other boys, to mimic their jokes, to read what they read and listen to what they were listening to. In some instances I let my resistance crumble; in the padded music rehearsal rooms and up in the Senior Common Room I was introduced to T. Rex and David Bowie, and saw no good reason to block them out.But I very much wanted to hold myself apart from the culture that surrounded and threatened to engulf me. Books provided the secret, premonitory, consolatory world I could escape into: Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, Eliot's The Wasteland, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. If the bildungsroman offered an idealised portrait of myself, the political dystopia could mirror the "total institution" I was living in rather well, and offer methods -- more or less successful -- for resisting it.Boarding school convinced me that males (the other boys and the masters) were ultraviolent bullies or vulgar clowns. They had power over me, but didn't have my best interests at heart. They were often out-of-touch; the housemaster, for instance, knew what a transistor radio was, but not what a cassette tape recorder was. When he caught me, down in the changing room one day, listening to a tape, I explained that the school rules banned radios but said nothing about tape recorders. "It's a radio!" said Quack Mendl, and confiscated it, just as he'd confiscated my American army cap, my copy of The Little Red Schoolbook, the Hair songbook, and even Roget's Thesaurus. He caught me reading that after lights out one evening by torchlight under the blankets. (Yes, I read the Thesaurus for pleasure. Yes, I was weird.)Something else I resisted from an early age was relaxed, American-style populism. It made me shudder to hear The Beatles singing "yeah, yeah, yeah". The proper word was obviously "Yes". "Yeah" seemed vulgar and cravenly opportunistic to me, a caving-in to Americanism. It was the same with "Hi". Why couldn't people say "Hello" instead? If people said "Hi" to me I answered "Hello" back. As for television, it's just as well my parents forbade us to watch the commercial channel, ITV. It would have horrified me with its familiar vulgarities.Where am I going with this? Oh, I remember now. I wanted to talk about the internet, and how odd it is that I still, quite often, want to take a hot shower after exposing myself to it. How could that be? Surely the internet is a place where you determine your own "programming"? No longer do you have to say "I will be less influenced by my surroundings"; on the web, your surroundings are whatever you make them. No longer do you have to practice subtle tactics of evasion; what you click on is entirely up to you. If you "watch" life-cheapening rubbish on the internet, there's no condescending programmer to blame, no idiotic audience of undiscriminating morons dragging everything down to the lowest common denominator. You chose this stuff. The moron is you.So why do I know more than I want to know about the feud between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien? How did Apple manage to make me so excited about a new product announcement? Why did I read stories about a comedian called Andy Dick, and watch the above video of him pissing on someone called Steve-O? Why did I read the entire saga of the feud between Alan McGee and Drowned in Sound?It seems that I need vulgarity. I'm fascinated by it. The things I disapprove of define me as much as the things I approve of. Sure, I could spend all my internet time reading my digital copy of The Wire, watching the films on ("all avant garde, all the time") ubu.com, or listening to Arte Radio. But, even given the opportunity to be my own curator, my own programmer, I throw in some stuff that's compellingly appalling, some stuff I love to hate. Otherwise, what would there be to rebel against? How could I enjoy my trek to the cultural high ground? What would be the point in showering?
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:19:37 -0500 Comrade Pim is a good man [New Window]
1. Outside, ice glazed the dark jagged rocks, but in the small mining hut lit by fluorescent tubes, decorated with old newspaper pages and heated by three blue kerosene stoves, a dozen of us clinked soju glasses. We ate spiced cabbage and ginger pork, drank the fierce, raw rice liquor, and shouted, sang and laughed until the windows were beaded with condensation.2. I'm interested in the aesthetics of empathy. I find it easier to project empathically on Eastern people than Western, on poor people than rich, on people from other cultures rather than people from my own, and on people from the past rather than people from the present.3. The images punctuating this page come from the wonderful NHK documentary The Silk Road (1980), in which a Japanese team -- helped by Chinese soldiers and officials -- travels to inaccessible sites along the Silk Road. Music is by Kitaro, a sort of one-man Japanese Tangerine Dream.4. I've been watching hour-long segments from The Silk Road all week. Some of the commentary sounds like propaganda -- this was a Japanese-Chinese co-production made in a time when China was still very much communist. The script has clearly been vetted to eradicate any reference to tensions between the Chinese and Japanese, and to make Chinese achievements (like the "Happiness Railway" simulated in film 9, and actually activated before its completion by the Chinese government specifically for the NHK documentary) look good.5. I don't mind that something is propaganda, in other words is an obvious lie. It can still serve my purposes, for instance embody a kind of plot in which cynicism and negativity has been completely, consciously excluded. It matters less whether something is true or false than whether it takes me somewhere.6. "A toast to Comrade Pim!" called a colleague dressed in blue jacket and grey cap. "Without him, we could never have discovered the magnificent copper seam!" "To Pim, the model worker!" came the cry from a dozen throats.7. During last year's Asian Women's Film Festival, the North Korean films fascinated me. I was very interested in how the machinery of plot works when you remove all negativity. I was particularly interested in plots which worked to establish the self-effacing goodness of a character, then showed this character passing due respect on to someone even more benign, diligent, indigent and self-sacrificing. Insofar as conflict drove these plots, it was the conflict of two people insisting on each other's greater worthiness.8. I demurred, smiling, and held up a hand for silence. "It is our collective diligence that has achieved this breakthrough," I said. "Who built the tunnels that I crawled along to make my lucky discovery?" Comrade Jun smiled and looked at the floor. "Who operated the lift that brought us to the place where fresh copper was just waiting to be discovered?" Comrade Bu grinned bashfully. "And who toiled at ground level in always-difficult circumstances, maintaining the camp in this inhospitable place?" Here Comrade Pi ruffled his own hair, as if in confusion.9. In a way, altruistic virtue is our society's final taboo. I was interested to read an entry on my Friends List today entitled I am not the weirdo here. Lucy, who wrote this blog, reports that a friend criticized her recently, saying: "You're just too nice. You think people are essentially good and decent." Lucy went on to say she made no apology for being nice, or believing the best of people.10. "Nevertheless," cried out the foreman, "this great achievement, which came at enormous physical cost to yourself, Comrade Pim, and in the face of great risk, will be reported to the chairman of the mining committee, and he will report it to the local party chief, who will in turn send an electric dispatch to Victory City, where word of this will surely reach the Dear Leader himself!" 11. I assembled a counter-argument in my mind, something I might tell Lucy. What if we weren't simply looking at the dimension of Good - Evil, but also of Boring - Interesting? Might goodness fall on the wrong side of that sometimes, the boring side? Had Lucy read Blake's hellish proverbs ("Energy is eternal delight!")? Had she read Sade's Justine? Or even seen Brecht's plays, with their message that niceness is a luxury most people cannot afford yet? What about TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, with its very Christian awareness of the temptations of martyrdom and sainthood, its caution about spiritual pride?12. It's not nice to hate, but what if the nice hate the interesting for not being nice enough, and the interesting hate the nice for being boring?13. Adam Curtis, in his Century of the Self, showed how Cold War games played at the Rand Corporation fed into a Cold War mindset (you can see it in James Bond, The Man from UNCLE, and a thousand other places) of slick mistrust based on the calculability of mutually-assured destruction. He showed that the most dangerous thing, in the eyes of the architects of post-war paranoia, was the altruistic public servant, someone motivated by something other than self-interest. Altruism actually fucks up the economic self-interest and gamesmanship models by making individuals act on the behalf of others.14. And all glasses were raised to the framed, faded photograph of the Dear Leader, whose eyes seemed to twinkle, now orange, now blue, in the light of the kerosene stove.15. I'm interested in the challenge of writing (of me writing!) about "old-fashioned" values like altruism, diligence, honour, responsibility, virtue, trustworthiness and empathy. But a devil on my shoulder whispers: "And what if virtue is simply the behaviour -- a sort of non-behaviour -- of those who lack the imagination or the courage to get into trouble? What if nice people are simply too wishy-washy, cautious and conformist to be assholes?"
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:33:33 -0500 The incredible iPad [New Window]
As the tech-savvy amongst you will know, Apple is set to make a major new product announcement tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Most observers have guessed that Steve Jobs will be unveiling Apple's new tablet computer, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case.How do I know? Because, since early December, I've been one of a tiny group of privileged iPad beta-testers. The day before I left for Japan, a high-security van -- the kind normally used for delivering cash to banks -- drew up at my house, and I signed for a package about the size of a pizza box, elegantly decorated with splashes of paint, the Apple logo, and the word "iPad". I also had to sign a non-revelation agreement, but since the final date for my period of public silence was listed as January 25th (Apple originally planned to unveil the iPad today), I'm free to speak now. This will all become public knowledge tomorrow anyway.So, where to begin? The first thing to say is what an incredible machine! If I hadn't been using this gadget myself for the past two months, I truly wouldn't believe its specification possible. Imagine an iPod Touch with a ten-inch screen, running Mac OSX 10.5, and featuring a powerful projector that lets you blow up whatever's on the screen to a bright wall-projection which can rival, for resolution and brilliance, a cinema showing a 70mm film print. Above you see me using the iPad as a Kindle (the text on the screen is The Book of Jokes), but its abilities so outstrip Amazon's device that it's not even funny. The Apple iPad, for instance, not only shows you the text of a book, but reads it to you. It also has what Apple calls "active catch-up"; if you lose your place in the book, or need a recap, or don't understand the plot, the iPad (in a soothing voice supplied by critic Frank Kermode) gets you up to speed, reminding you what's been happening, and what everything means. It's the semantic version of GPS: you need never be lost in a text again!But that's just the beginning of the iPad's capabilities. It doesn't stop at reading; this machine can write too! I don't just mean via its touch-screen keyboard (though that's a vast improvement on the stabby, haphazard typing experience of the iPhone / iPod, of course). No, the iPad can actually compose. At the touch of a button marked "create text", the machine will generate any text required, from a blog entry to a technical report, a novel or a poem. Apple has developed a system of "predictive semantics" which learns as it goes along, so it pays to write a few things by your own hand first, just so the machine can get a grasp of your style and your recurrent concerns. After a month or so watching me write, the iPad grasped that I love to use the literary technique known as "lying"; to be honest, it's writing this entry for me now.There are other powers hidden in the incredible iPad that you probably won't believe until you get your hands on one yourself; for instance, if you can tuck your bum onto the ten-inch tablet and hit the right button, the tablet computer readily transforms into a cross between a hovercraft and a flying carpet. You know how I claimed to have flown to and from Japan via a Finnair Airbus A330? Well, I can now reveal that I went on the iPad, whooshing merrily along a mile or so above Siberia. It was cold, but beggars -- and beta testers -- can't be choosers.As for the repercussions of all this, we'll have to wait and see how they unfold when the machine goes public. Apple is anticipating big sales; they expect to build ten million iPads in the first year alone. Not everybody will be happy if this machine succeeds, though; travel agents and airlines, literary critics and authors -- not to mention cinema chains -- will all be joining Amazon and Microsoft, crossing their fingers and hoping fervently that each and every Apple iPad crashes, sooner than later, into a mountain.
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:26:46 -0500 Neato: the literal video meme [New Window]
Take a look at this video, in which a man called Dustin McLean (Dusto McNeato) has resung the Tears For Fears track Head Over Heels so that the lyrics reflect the actions in the video:Now, Dusto has done a neato job here. Not only is his parody executed excellently (it really does sound like Orzabal singing the absurd actions of the video as they happen around him), it's a classic piece of Web 2.0 satire, or even art; something that couldn't really have existed -- and certainly not at this amateur level -- before the existence of YouTube and cheap video editing tools. Dusto has noticed something interesting about pop music: the fact that the concepts in the video are very different from the concepts in the lyrics. Video ideas are often a lot more eccentric and creative, whereas lyrical ideas usually reflect normative, conservative and "universal" sentiments. Here's the original, for contrast:To put that another way, when a universal theme (such as being "head over heels" in love) has given a pop song commercial viability via an appeal to reproductive normativity (heterosexual reproduction, the contractual language of love and marriage), a certain kind of delirious excess and eccentricity can be permitted in the video, which can become -- as if to offset the slightly humdrum normality in the lyric -- thoroughly carnivalesque. It's almost as if the zany and expensive goings-on in the video conform to Bataille's idea in The Accursed Share that humans have an underlying need to conspicuously waste money and resources -- an impulse at least as strong as their need to manage their affairs and reproduce genetically in an orderly fashion.By shepherding this carnivalesque absurdity back into the lyric of the song, Dusto McNeato creates a highly interesting parallel world where the distinction between normality and the carnivalesque is erased, as is the time-lag between "writing the song" and "making the video of the song". In Dusto's version, Orzabal is singing, apparently, his spontaneous reactions to the events happening to him in real time.Dusto (a Current TV employee credited by Wikipedia as the inventor of the literal music video, circa October 2008) also erases the distinction between the distinct creative brains of songwriter Roland Orzabal and video director Nigel Dick, and deletes the distance between "what you're hearing" and "what you're seeing" -- a disjunct we're so used to in pop videos that we don't notice it any more.In other literal videos by Dustin McLean we see a bit more satire, and diminishing returns; the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge becomes a satire on Anthony Keidis' pectoral vanity, Billy Idol's White Wedding is already so self-parodic it's hardly worth the trouble to take it further, Beck's Loser has unfortunately had its literal video squelched by Universal Music. Aha's Take On Me is enfeebled by the fact that the song and the original video are just as silly (and as hetero-normative) as each other, and a spoken dialogue concerning a fight over a "Magic Frame" gets a bit plot-heavy (though the line about "getting an assful of pipe-wrench" amuses some viewers).But let's return to the best literal video, the one for Head Over Heels. According to Wikipedia's page about the original song, "the promotional clip for "Head over Heels", filmed in June 1985, was the fourth Tears for Fears clip directed by famed music video producer Nigel Dick. It is centered around Roland Orzabal's attempts to get the attention of a librarian (played by a Canadian model), while a variety of characters (many played by the rest of the band) take part in shenanigans in the library. The final scene shows Orzabal and the librarian as an older married couple. The video was filmed at the Emmanuel College Library in Toronto, Canada."I can't dissociate the appeal of the 1985 clothes, hairstyles and spectacle frames from my fascination with this clip; 1985 is bang in the middle of the revival period I called, in The anxious interval, "the goldmine". The parody is also fuelled by the appeal of the original Tears For Fears song, whose lyrics seem particularly opaque, silly and meaningless to me (why is the narrator "dreaming he's a doctor", and why is it "hard to be a man when there's a gun in your hand", and why does "nothing ever change when you're acting your age"?), but whose topline melody, chords and hooks are sort of gorgeous. Dustin's observations here are, in fact, rather neato, as an ongoing commentary on 1985: he has Orzabal note to the librarian "you have really big glasses", and then confess that he stole the flying index cards idea from Ghostbusters, which came out in 1984. It's as if a cultural historian had turned his commentary on a pop video into a song, or actually become one of the characters in the song himself. It's as if -- in the manner of David Foster Wallace or Alasdair Gray -- footnotes had become part of the text itself. Web 2.0, Postmodernism 1.0!The literal video hasn't become as viral as other Web 2.0 micro-forms, partly because it's actually rather hard to do well, and because nobody can quite touch the originator. Tom Vondoom's Safety Dance is okay, but isn't very well sung, loses points for lines like "this is really gay", and has only scored a tenth of McNeato's views. Fever103's Sweet Dreams veers too wildly between literal commentary and far-fetched interpretation, with some strained, lame and vulgar fart and zit jokes thrown in:Birdhouse in Your Soul fails as parody, since the original They Might Be Giants song and video were already unbearably whacky and random:Deshem's take on James Blunt's You're Beautiful is much better: he strips everything back to Neato's original formula (just sing the actions) and achieves a Beckettian minimalism which made me chuckle quite a bit:
Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:13:42 -0500 Made in Berlin [New Window]
Today's entry complements and balances yesterday's, which looked at the downside to Berlin. Today I want to look (a little more personally) at the city's upside, and to ask, in passing, a question about geographic determinism: whether we're mere chameleons who take our colours from our surroundings. Underpinning this inner conversation is the question of whether I could do all the things I do in Berlin in Osaka instead. Whether, in other words, Momus is portable and platform-independent.In the few days I've been back in Berlin, a couple of Berlin-specific work projects have come in. The Wire magazine asked me to review the upcoming Club Transmediale -- "Berlins unique Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts" featuring "performances by exciting contemporary artists from undefined convergence zones between out-pop, experimental music, noise, art and media technologies". Then the Volksbuehne theatre asked me to stage an evening of performance art at a new event called Baron Saturday at the Roter Salon. My evening will be called Exploding Beowulf and will happen on March 27th.Now, it would be easy to say that I, and I alone, came up with the adventurous idea of staging an exploded-diagram version of my song Beowulf (I Am Deformed) in which we separate the choreography from the story, interview the monster Grendel, project slides of the wounds and deformities listed in the song, play out alternative endings to the Beowulf story, and so on. It would be more accurate to say that I came up with the idea in response to curator Maximilian Haas' encouragement to put on an event somewhere between music and performance art. And, more generally, it would be safe to say that the city of Berlin (with its radical institutions, its semi-official taste for experiment) coaxed the idea of Exploding Beowulf out of me. "You can go a little further," Berlin seemed to whisper in my ear, "be a little weirder. We like that. We'll pay for that. In fact, if you don't do something like that, we won't pay you and you won't be able to eat at Yam Yam any more."I recently ended an interview by quoting Kafka's line about "this tremendous world I have inside my head". That's the Romantic view of the artist: that wherever he roams he has this world inside him, fully-formed, just waiting to be birthed. Actually, I'm not so sure. I know myself to feel, and to operate, very differently in different cities. Here, have a read of this interesting essay by Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition. I was tipped in its direction by a piece on The Null Device sparked by the Click Opera entry about Osaka.Paul Graham wonders whatever happened to the Milanese Leonardo. "Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big," he writes. "People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him? If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?"This sounds like a sort of geographic determinism, but I think there's something in it. The Milanese Leonardo would have left Milan and settled in Florence, attracted by the work being done there, the congregation of like-minds, the buzz and hype resounding around Italy. I did very much the same, moving to London, then other cities, lured by the fact that art and culture offered more possibilities there than they did in my native Scotland. Momus as you know it is a product not just of "the tremendous world I have inside my head", but also the media industries, curators, gallerists, record label bosses, publishers, journalists and other cultural facilitators who made it possible for that world to spill out. They even, to some extent, determined the shape, form and texture of that spill. My life's work is the result of a continuous negotiation between me, these facilitating people, and the cities they were based in.I'm not saying that I, Momus the artist, don't exist. I'm not saying that I couldn't exist in, say, Osaka (a city where, at the moment, I have no facilitating cultural contacts). What I'm saying is that my work has changed according to context -- according to who let me make it, what their agenda was, and what city we were in at the time. In Cities and Ambition Paul Graham is good on the theme of city-as-agenda: for him, an ambitious city can't really have more than one dominant theme. He boils LA down to fame, New York to money, Cambridge to intellect, DC to connectedness, London to hipness, Silicon Valley to power.So what's Berlin's ambition-theme? For me, it would have to be the word "experiment". The city asks me for something rather advanced, serious, unconventional, experimental. Whereas London would want me to generate revenue stream or achieve some sort of tacky celebrity, Berlin demands something a little bit Utopian, a little bit experimental and futuristic (the theme of the Transmediale this year is "futurity now!"). It can't pay me much, but that's fine, because neither Berlin nor I require much money to operate. And we both think that making things new and exciting is what life is all about.I like the me that Berlin helps produce, and I'm very aware that the mes other cities would produce would very possibly be less interesting ones; Momuses who don't write The Book of Scotlands (a product not just of my imagination, but of Berlin publisher Sternberg, Berlin editor Ingo Niermann, and so on), don't make records like Otto Spooky and Ocky Milk, don't explode Beowulf. Berlin has been my context and my creative midwife for most of the past decade, and I'm not at all sure I could easily replace her with a better one.
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 05:36:58 -0500 In the kingdom of the vandals [New Window]
In 455AD the Vandals -- the tribal name people from the area of today's eastern Germany and Poland were called back then -- sacked Rome, which is where we get the modern sense of the word "vandalism", meaning "senseless destruction, particularly in diminution of aesthetic appeal or destruction of objects that were completed with great effort." But wait, we're jumping ahead.It's cold in Berlin. Very, very cold. Today's maximum temperature here is forecast to be minus 11c, and its minimum temperature minus 15c. This is colder than the seasonal average, and a lot colder than Osaka, my last city of residence, which today is ranging between plus 1 and plus 9 centigrade. I'm suffering from culture shock. Dirty ice and crusty snow weighs heavy on Berlin; the pavement might have a little plowed catwalk you can mince cautiously along if you're lucky, but mostly you just have to slither and plod across it. The bushes outside my living room window were unlucky enough to develop a canopy of snow which kept getting heavier until the plants caved in completely. They now lie crushed under a massive snowdrift. Step outside and you're apparently wearing no trousers, and someone's apparently spraying hydrochloric acid in your face.In these conditions you try to avoid going out into the Muscovite murk, the Martian perma-grey. You avoid the pain and hassle of the city. When you do make a trip outside, there's a palpable sense of exhaustion; Berliners have been facing these conditions for almost two months now, and they might continue for two months more. The novelty of snow soon fades, leaving a certain kind of Siberian despair in its wake.That's the attitude of the downtrodden-looking middle-class majority, dowdy in jeans and boots and fleece jackets. But -- compared with Japan -- Berlin is also full of "underground people" who seem, in winter, to be more mad and desperate and poor than usual. The squat types with their big dogs look more embattled, the illegal U-Bahn ticket-sellers won't take no for an answer, and the alkies are drunker and more intrusive.Coming back from my Brel interview at the BBC bureau at the Schiffbauerdamm yesterday -- on a weekday at lunchtime -- I shared a carriage with a shouty bunch of youths who'd obviously been drinking too much, because one of them vomited continuously on the floor while the others whooped with laughter, egging him on. Soon the whole carriage reeked sickeningly of the acid insides of his stomach. I got off as soon as I could only to board another train with a set of drunken youths on it. One of them sat next to me and suddenly began tugging my hat off, patting my trousers, and asking me which of the embarrassed women opposite I'd prefer to 69. "You've been drinking, haven't you?" I asked, in English. "It's not impossible," replied the geeky thug, in German.My trips to and from the Berlin airport at either end of my Japan trip were characterised by similar encounters. On the way to Tegel in early December I was menaced by a madman who shouted (rather presciently) "Japan! Japan! Okay? Okay?" at me, but in a super-threatening way, as if I was personally insulting him. (I was dressed in Japanese style, with tenugui and cloak.) On the way back, on Monday evening, it was people shouting "Pirat!" My nerves were frazzled by 12 hours on jets, and having to lug heavy suitcases across the snow (the bus-driver decided, just two stops from the airport, for reasons of his own, to dump us at the kerbside), and I felt a sudden urge to pile into the idiots shouting at me. Six weeks in Japan had raised my standards for public behaviour to levels that Berlin doesn't come anywhere near.It isn't just random, drunk rogue males on trains who menace you here. There are also petty officials to deal with. At the building the BBC shares with Reuters and other media companies I entered by the wrong door and stood in a corridor ringing a non-functioning bell marked "BBC". A German security guard approached, seeming highly skeptical that someone like me could possibly be a BBC interviewee. Even when I'd given him the name of my contact and explained that I was here to be interviewed, his manner didn't change; I was still some kind of intruder.When the time came to exit the building the lady at the front desk called out a challenge so peremptory, rude and familiar that I assumed it couldn't possibly be for me, and walked straight past. Alarmed that she hadn't signed me in, she was in fact demanding which company I'd been seeing. It was her tone, though, that was so brash, entitled, authoritarian. I wish I could say she's a one-off, but there are times when everybody in Berlin seems like that. You go into a shop, just back from Japan, and expect the local version of a cheerful irrashaimase! Instead you get a sort of scowl that seems to say "What the fuck do you want, you weird pirate-looking guy?" Even when you say "Guten Tag!" you may well get no response.Of course, the commercial classes mistrust the customers because the customers are often the very thugs and hooligans, alcoholics and shoplifters I've described tangling with on the trains; a class of people who, in the name of some ill-defined "anarchism" or "anti-globalism", smash shop and bank windows at any opportunity, and start drinking at breakfast.It would be lovely to paint it as principled protest, but let's face facts: some Berliners have a self-righteousness about their incapacity, their unemployment, their non-participation in what they call the Scheisse-System. It's an attitude of arrogance-in-failure you just don't encounter in Asia. Osaka has a lot of poverty, but you sense that everybody tries their best, and that there's a warm glow of positive affect towards society, and towards collective property. The ugly tagging and name-scratching (and what could be a better symbol of the assertion of an ugly, arrogant individualism over collective property?) that blights every available surface (except, inexplicably, private cars) here is largely absent from Japan, where clear train windows and pristine plush fabric seat covers are still possible. In Berlin the council covers windows and seats with ugly patterns designed to deter taggers and name-scratchers.It's white Germans who are the worst -- totally disinhibited, arrogantly lazy, proud of not fitting in, beer bottle in hand, ready to assail and insult strangers. The immigrant quarters are oases of responsibility and industry; in predominantly-muslim Neukolln alcohol is shunned, which is already a huge step towards a more civilised urban environment. "Goths and Vandals, a rude Northern race," wrote the poet Dryden of the sack of Rome, "did all the matchless Monuments deface." I'd love to say it was a groundless, baseless stereotype, but here they still are today, these rude northern people. They ride the trains, they grab your hat, they deface the walls and windows of all available public (but not private) property. It's odd that they get so antsy in the midst of their long, harsh winter, because winter is the time when we realise how dependent we are on society, on co-operation, and on harmony for our basic survival. Even the proudest and bitterest of us must raise our hands to the Scheisse-System, thankful for its heat.
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 05:27:40 -0500 Contra takes it NXTLVL [New Window]
Hey, there's this band called Vampire Weekend, and they're actually pretty good! Oh, you knew about them already? I see, I see. Yes, I'm always a bit late picking up on these things. Now I think about it, I was vaguely aware that Contra, their new album, isn't their first release. There was a bit of excitement a couple of years ago around their debut, wasn't there? In fact, it even reached Click Opera, didn't it? It's all coming back to me now. Rostam from Vampire Weekend sent me their first album, and I wrote a piece entitled Fan mail to the future.Now, that particular month (February 2008) you weren't allowed to be lukewarm about Vampire Weekend -- you were either supposed to love them or hate them with a passion. So my response to their debut album got relayed by various music publications to an astounded, incensed world as Momus to Vampire Weekend: Bugger Off!.In fact, I was far from saying "bugger off!" What I actually said was much more muted and tentative: "I haven't really had my Vampire Weekend moment yet. They've sent me their album, and I've listened to it, and I can hear the basic appeal -- the directness, the economy of means, the well-written lyrics, the happy feel. I get a weird sense that there are possibilities in this music ("Wow, pop can do this!"), and yet the possibilities are all in the past. Taken a bit further, this bit could become Talking Heads, this bit could become The Beat, this bit The Police, and this bit Prefab Sprout... Perhaps Vampire Weekend will work with a producer who gives them enough experimental edge to make my penny drop." After reading this, Rostam wrote me back: "Perhaps in a weird way I expected as much, but in fact it's inspiring because it means things aren't nxtlvl enough on our end..." Unlike the music press, he got exactly what I meant. Pop music has to keep taking things to the next level. Otherwise it begins to die.My own "next level" with Vampire Weekend was meeting vocalist / lyricist Ezra Koenig in New York on May 18th, 2009. Ezra chose a vegetarian Indian restaurant called Saravana Bhavan, where we each dipped a big dosa into a delicious array of little sauce dishes. Ezra told me he was thinking of calling the next Vampire Weekend album "Contra" and asked what my immediate associations with the word were. I said: Oliver North (Iran-Contra), The Clash (Sandinista!), Hegel (the Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis, which would mean their third album would have to be Synthesis) and the idea of the internet troll or contrarian. The following week several Vampire Weekends got the table of honour at the three-hour Momuthon concert I played at the Highline Ballroom.And now Contra is out. I don't have a copy yet, but the tracks I've heard on YouTube -- the ones splashed across this page -- bode very well indeed. I think my favourite is the most experimental. This is called California English:And this is California English Part 2:The "disorienting autotune" effect reminds me of an early version of my song Zanzibar, A Canterbury Tale, but VW have a more zingy chorus and better production. In fact, it's the production on this album that excites me most. There's an excellent use of space, an avoidance of rock sludge, some wonderfully crunchy percussion rolls which nevertheless drop away to leave some good space when they're finished, and a nice early 80s synth bass sound which reminds me of The Passage:There are still, of course, reference points and influences. From Afropop, from Paul Simon, from The Police, from Two Tone ska, from Elvis Costello circa Armed Forces, from Talking Heads. But my fuzzy feeling this time is much warmer, and not just because of Ezra's charm offensive. This sounds to me like a band taking old things and making them new, making them brashly fresh. It's rather like seeing the way Japanese culture takes things from the West and recompiles them just askew enough to make them fresh, appealingly strange, and unmistakably Japanese.To my ears, from what I've heard so far, Contra is more original and innovative than the first release, without losing the infectious, accessible pop edge. Vampire Weekend did indeed take things NXTLVL.
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:23:30 -0500 The man who fell to Berlin [New Window]
I've plummeted back to Berlin amidst some oddities and ironies. Firstly, although there are dirty blankets of snow on the ground here and the temperatures are consistently several degrees below zero, Berlin feels a lot warmer than Osaka. People here heat their houses, and even when you go out you experience the cold only as a dry, sharp pang on your face and some slithery ice and snow underfoot. The Japanese thing of getting cold deep in your bones, of dreading the trip to the bathroom, just doesn't apply here. I'm wearing my samurai chanchanko top purely for the pose factor:The second irony is that I hurried home from Japan this week to deliver an address entitled "Love of Blogging" to a seminar at the Freie Universitt here in Berlin. Organised by Miya Yoshida, the seminar was umbrella-titled Tag the World: Collective Work and the Notion of the Amateur in the Age of the WWW. You can see my half-hour slot in this uStream video (scroll forward to 02:32:00 -- yes, two hours in -- and kill the annoying ads). As I began by pointing out, my love of blogging has largely come to an end, and I'm seeking other forms of expression, including much older, less amateur ones like ink-and-paper.My other engagement this week is an interview I'm recording on Friday with BBC Radio 2 about Jacques Brel (it's transmitted later in the year). The irony here is that I've felt increasingly distant from Jacques Brel (who nevertheless helped finance my Japanese trip, God bless him, via the fees for the Brel Barbican concerts) and would feel much more comfortable talking about the new film about Serge Gainsbourg, who sort of replaced Brel in my personal pantheon of heroes circa 1987.Gainsbourg: vie hroque (Being Serge Gainsbourg) is a new biopic by Joann Sfar starring ringer Eric Elmosnino as Serge, Philippe Katerine as Boris Vian and Lucy Gordon (who sadly committed suicide recently) as Jane Birkin. It's great to see Katerine (a friend, fellow Gainsbourg fanatic, and fellow Kahimi Karie collaborator when I lived in Paris in the mid-90s) singing alongside the uncannily-good, spectrally-accurate Elmosnino. Interview me about the hook-nosed tender pervert instead, BBC!
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:56:25 -0500 Naoshima Hatecrush Slideshow [New Window]
Momus, Hisae and Yoyo visited the arty f*cking island of Naoshima, in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, on an unfairly beautiful day in early January 2010. See, this is why I hate this man with a huge f*cking hatecrush.My name's Dick Murray, by the way, and Momus got me to do the narrative for his holiday slideshow because he couldnae be arsed himself. What a gantin' heedfeather.
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:03:53 -0500 Dream away an elastic day over Siberia [New Window]
In a way, the ten-hour flight from Osaka to Helsinki on a Finnair A330 is just a bus trip. People keep the window shades down, watch the seatback TV. In another way, it's extraordinary, an elastic day that streches lunchtime from East Asia to Europe, a jet that hangs under the sun and travels for five or six hours across the world's largest continuous landmass, containing some of the most freezing, gorgeous, mysterious landscapes on the planet. If this were a bus, your trip from Scunthorpe to Sunderland would go via Saturn. I don't understand people who aren't fascinated. I can gaze down on Siberia for hours. Vladivostok, Yakutsk, Novosibirsk. The names pop up on the route map amongst huge areas of empty space. Not many people live in this vast, icy waste that sometimes looks like craters and lunar ice, and sometimes like green plains curling with rivers. Well, I say not many, but Wikipedia corrects me: not many for its size. This enormous part of Northern Asia constitutes 77% of Russia's territory, but contains 25% of its population (36 million people). I wonder if more will move here if global warming continues? Already the winters are less cold: Europeans flying to Japan see this otherness (an otherness far more vast than anything that awaits them in Japan) below them for hours and hours. For the nervous flyer, it's hard not to associate it with death. I remember Mike Alway reporting to me, after the el Records Japan trip in 1987, "Siberia is like the surface of the moon. You're very aware that if the plane went down there'd be just nothing." It is, after all, minus 50c down there. You'd die within hours. Gazing down at Siberia on an almost-annual basis since the early 90s, I've found the place occupying my imagination, linking the idea of death with the idea of beauty. I wrote Trans-Siberian Express in 1992, a poem which asks you to "abandon this world for the next, cross the great plain of forgetfulness". The lyrics are here and the song itself is here. As a teenager I read Solzenitzen's accounts of the Siberian gulags, and revisited them a few years later in the form of Nadezhda Mandelstam's account of the exile to Vladivostok of her husband, Osip, the poet who died in a camp for comparing Stalin's fingers to stubby worms. "He knelt closer to the kotatsu table. There were a couple of drawings on tracing paper, and a map of the settlements of forgotten Siberian tribes living around the Sea of Okhotsk: Nao had been studying the disappearing culture of the Evenki and Eveny peoples; the Negidals, Oroks and Koryaks." From The Book of Jokes.* Siberia (and other cold places) have also cropped up on Click Opera quite a bit: In Btsfjord on the Barents Sea and Call this cold? This is nothing!, for instance, which is set in the Siberian city of Yakutsk (the one the girl in the video above says is getting warmer). It was lunchtime when we left Japan, and it was still lunchtime when we crossed the Ural Mountains, milky, jagged and orange -- the dividing line between European Russia and Asian Siberia. I remembered how I'd played a concert here in 2004, and planned to make an album called Tatartronic. Turning away from the window, I started watching the screen between the seats in front of me. There was a film showing the brilliant whites of wintry wastes, the bright oranges of padded boiler suits, and the stark environment of a research station. This turned out to be the 2007 Japanese film Nankyoku Ryorinin, or Chef of the South Polar. Typically Japanese, the film was a harmless, quirky and likeable comedy centred on teamwork and cuisine. Big questions of death and sex were eschewed in favour of winning little anecdotal moments: the team pelt the chef with peanuts for the setsubun festival, steal ramen, pose naked in front of a sign declaring the temperature to be minus 60c. The chef's tale is based on two novels by Jun Nishimura, who really was a chef with a Japense research team in the Antarctic. But a rather more interesting account (in the way that imagination often has the edge on reality) may be from a man who's never been there. Vito Acconci contributed a piece called Halley II Research Station: First Impressions & the Beginnings of a Conceptual Approach to a show last year I was also in, as it happens: A Spoken Word Exhibition at the Baltic Mill in Gateshead. Acconci's spoken text describes an unbuilt architectural proposal for a research station in the Antarctic. Above is the one that was built, which is called Halley VI Research Station. * When I announced the end of Click Opera three months ago, I happened to run a picture showing an Antarctic passenger vehicle called a Delta, a big red bus with tires five feet tall. Amazingly enough, one of my readers (someone called Mananath) was reading Click Opera from the McMurdo Staion in Antarctica and responded by telling me he was about to drive a similar vehicle out to the airport. Its name? Ivan the Terrabus. And -- to bring us full circle -- it was Ivan the Terrible who conquered Siberia for Russia.
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:34:35 -0500 Dandy in the underworld [New Window]
It's the last day, alas, of this Japan trip. Tomorrow I fly back to Berlin, and today I'm heading up to Kyoto to see Doddodo in concert. It's been a gorgeous six weeks, in which I've seen amazing sights and also tried to provide an amusing visual spectacle to my hosts, the people of the enchanted archipelago. Today, in retrospect and celebration, I'm offering a selection of the ludicrous outfits I've been wearing.Thank you, Japan! For the clothes, the experiences, the inspiration! See you soon!
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:18:29 -0500 Could I live in Osaka? [New Window]
When I visit a place, fantasies of living there start to tug at the edges of my imagination. How would I survive economically here? Which area would I pick to live in? How would I decorate my new apartment? How much rent would I have to pay? Would I ride a bike? How would I dress? Which cafes and clubs would I begin to haunt? Who would become my new friends?Since this is a game of fantasy, it would be easy to imagineer oneself into some chintzy turreted mansion in a rich, flashy neighbourhood. Dreaming costs nothing, so why dream small, right? But fantasy doesn't work like that, for me, anyway. The most evocative fantasy is one with only the thinnest membrane between itself and reality; it gets its power from being eminently possible. From being a plan. So actually, my imagination thrives on rather austere, impoverished scenarios. I like to project myself into rather stark, cheap, working class districts, and imagine some kind of free vie de boheme unfolding in them.So here's a fantasy, and here's a plan. Let's say I come to live in Osaka, sometime later this year. Yes, why not? It's a new decade, and I always like to get up and go somewhere new when the calendar changes. Ten years ago I moved, fairly haphazardly, to New York. Yesterday I got a flashback to how the Lower East Side called out to me in 1999. That year I trekked down Orchard Street, photographing abandoned TV sets and piles of Chinese boxes on the sidewalks. A few months later I was living there. Walking through the wholesale light industrial area between Shinsekai and Nipponbashi yesterday, I actually felt something like what I felt on Orchard Street ten years ago, before the art galleries moved in. I have nothing against art galleries moving in, but I like to catch a cheap, mixed-use, working class neighbourhood on the turn; that moment when there's just one art gallery is a special one. As it happens there is one peculiar little art gallery in my target area, one with the right kind of shabby underground energy. It seems to be called . It's located in an old building here in Haki Haki town, an area famous for wholesale and specialty footwear stores (plastic toilet shoes, slippers, trad Japanese sandals).I've never seriously thought about living in Osaka before. I love Tokyo best of all. But increasingly, my outlook has Berlinified, by which I mean I regard expensive cities like New York, London and Tokyo as unsuited to subculture. They're essentially uncreative because creative people living there have to put too much of their time and effort into the meaningless hackwork which allows them to meet the city's high rents and prices. So disciplines like graphic design and television thrive, but more interesting types of art are throttled in the cradle. The most Berlin-ish neighbourhood in Tokyo is secondhand-town Koenji, and that's the place I've felt increasingly drawn to on recent visits. But Osaka actually offers something much more like the Berlin environment, which may be one reason my musical heroes -- people like Doddodo and Oorutaichi -- live here.Getting a glimpse of Doddodo's Nipponbashi flat was also a bit of an inspiration. We met her in the Misono Building, itself a splendidly peeling underground and nocturnal place, the kind of building only possible in a city that allows itself some creative decay. Misono, once a chic shopping arcade near Namba station, is now full of weird countercultural bars. After drinking there, Doddodo took us to her place nearby to fetch a DVD she wanted to give me. She lives right by one of the area's quirky, bustling, gritty shopping arcades; food shopping must take her five minutes. The flat was in some disorder, so we waited outside, but I glimpsed drawings and paintings-in-progress through the door.In Tokyo terms, Nipponbashi would be Akihabara; bounding it on one side is a long street (dominated by a huge Gundam cut-out) full of electronics and porn DVD stores (as well as an amazing retro record shop). Serving the otaku clientele, the backstreets feature a number of Maid Cafes. And that's a reminder of one way Osaka is totally unlike Berlin. Despite its shabby bits, Osaka is a vastly wealthy city (if it were a country, it would be one of the world's richest) with a vulgar commercial energy Berlin can't begin to match. Osaka is massive, industrious and dense, and there are businesses here that cater to every imagineable human whim, and that don't close on Sundays. And if you want to escape the density and intensity, well, the mountains of Shikoku aren't far.So how much would it cost to have your own apartment in Osaka? The answer is, surprisingly little. This rental advert, for instance, shows an apartment you could have for just 30,000 yen a month. Now, sure, it's only 7 metres square, and sure, it doesn't have a bathroom or a kitchen. But come on, be creative! You could pee into a pet bottle and eat takeaway okonomiyaki. After all, your monthly rent is just 226 euros! And you're living in Osaka, a place known for its cheap and excellent food. As for washing, grab soap and a towel and go to the sento! Most importantly, employ the time freed up by not having to be employed to make some good art!
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:34:47 -0500
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