Writing and no pictures
May. 30th, 2005 07:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSo the French voted "no" to the European constitution. I said a month ago that this was much more important to me than the British general election, and it's a battle my side has lost. I want to see rapid supra-national integration of Europe, the inclusion of new states like Turkey and even, I must admit, eventually Russia. I want Europe to rival and outstrip the US, and to hold its own against emerging superpowers like India and China. I believe in the "European Dream" Jeremy Rifkin talks about in his book of the same title, and I agree with him that Europe could be an example to the rest of the world; Europe could be the world's most rational, liberal bloc. Pressure on resources is going to cause conflict throughout the world in the future, but a rational and liberal Europe could lead the way with post-industrial, eco-friendly Slow Life values, or what the French call decroissance. A strong Europe could also stand for peace, aid and quality of life issues, in strong contrast to America's taste for war, resource hogging and neurotic over-work. But the European Dream took a blow yesterday, and will probably take another on Wednesday when the Dutch vote. It took that blow, ironically, because it let the people speak, something it's accused of not doing enough. Unfortunately the people, like children, have mixed and dark emotions. Many of them—the majority, it seems—refuse to see the big picture, and let fears rather than hopes guide them. The only bright possibility I see in this disappointing result (it almost certainly spells the end of Turkey's bid to join the EU, something I strongly support) is the idea that it might somehow lead to a "social" EU that really is about controlled slowdown rather than endless growth. It might be a "no" to capitalism itself, or capitalism as we've known it, with its unrealistic models of eternal expansion.
Last Thursday Hisae and I went to see Berlin artist John Bock presenting his new videos at Kunst-Werke. Bock stood on a chair and scribbled on the screen. There was a sketch of Alice Cooper for the first film, in which he impersonated Alice Cooper running around in a field in Finland. Then there was a tractor scribble for a film in which Bock runs amok in a tractor. That was followed by a third—rather Matthew Barneyesque—film in which Bock is pursued around an underground parking garage by a gigantic aspirin. Oh, and my favourite film saw Bock hanging upside down in a well talking to a camera installed at the bottom, making up a crazy story which he illustrated with squirts of toothpaste and prods with sticks and bits of twisted wire. It occurred to me that one of the reasons art is so important is that in art you can be very intelligent yet also very irrational. This is important because rationality trammels intelligence. Bock seemed like a very smart kid, absorbed in his world of play—a kid who'd never let school, the adolescent need to be cool, the need to become sexually attractive, the need to become adult or rational, trammel him or stop his insane games. I have to say I believe in art even more than I believe in Europe. Art can take the irrational in its stride; in politics it causes chaos.
On Sunday I bought a chi machine for ten euros at the trodelmarkt. A chi machine grips your ankles and wiggles them from side to side for fifteen minutes or so. In fact it makes your spine flex like a goldfish's back, and when it stops you lie there for a few minutes tingling, your breathing clearer, your sinuses popping. I'm super-sensitive to vibration; for some reason my body goes insane at the slightest exposure to it. The bus stops at the lights in high gear and my sinuses pop. I even enjoy turbulence on planes now: it jolts and judders my spine about pleasantly. Japan, of course, is the country with the biggest array of vibro-massage products, from the vibro-beds in love hotels to the vibro-chairs in sentos (and in fact in many private homes) with their elaborate programming. This stuff doesn't come cheap, though, so I'm having to accumulate it slowly and secondhand. I have a great little buzzy vibro-massager I got for four euros at Humana. It's mainly good for my lower back, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't used it for sex. I'm not the kind of person who buys big phallic vibrators in sex shops, but give me an innocent therapeutic device that just happens to look like an inverted erect penis with one big throbbing testicle and, well, of course I'm going to use it sexually. The thing about vibration (as a language, as a kind of sixth sense, as a miniature new age religion) is that it makes you aware of how all the body's systems interconnect. Sex and relaxation are just different points on the same continuum, maaaan.
"Isn't it delightful?" might be a good reaction to an electronic massage. It's a statement you sense running strongly through Japanese culture, a breezy affirmation of shared pleasures and simple physical delights. The pleasures being celebrated are often tied up with food, travelling, sitting together on trains or in cafes, bathing in sentos, or appreciating nature and the changing seasons. They're mainly feminine pleasures, but men can express them too. Above all they're positive, without a trace of protest or sarcasm or cynicism. "Isn't it delightful!" The emotion is a casual one, and yet it runs very deep and shouldn't be underestimated. It's about turning to the person you're with and saying "Isn't it great to be alive at this moment?" and meaning it, despite the formulaic framing, and despite the fact that it's totally expected. Those things don't make it any less true: it is great to be alive, and it's always good to acknowledge that. Sister feelings to "Isn't it delightful" are "Wouldn't it be nice..." (II na!) and "Tasty!" (Oishi!). These feelings are all over the Japanese media. They're in songs, magazines, TV shows, blogs. They clearly fit consumer culture like a glove, but it would be cheap cynicism to think they were born with consumer culture or modern capitalism, or were some sort of plot designed to keep citizens from protesting. The other day I was browsing Barrie Shelton's excellent book Learning From The Japanese City (unfortunately, at over a hundred euros, it was way too expensive to buy). One of Shelton's points is that many of the things Westerners have thought of as recent capitalist intrusions into the Japanese cityscape are in fact well-established indigenous features — the elaborate electric and electronic signs everywhere, for instance, descend from the flags and banners and flaps which have made Japanese cities gaudy and exciting for hundreds of years. Anyway, I raise this not only because "Isn't it delightful" has been under attack recently in comments on the feminine superficiality of Japanese blogs, but because I've set myself a challenge for my next album: to make an entire record in which drama is replaced by wisdom, negativity by positivity, and complaint by delight. There are certain types of music which seem to present static plateaus of pleasure: children's records (I listen to a lot, the latest being road safety songs from Portugal, another Hindemith's Wir Bauen Ein Stadt), instrumental post-techno music by people like Lullatone, Arabic-Andalusian music from the early middle ages, and the canons of Moondog. I was listening to Moondog 2 the other day, just ravished by the absence of angst in his complex-simple roundelays. Here's a man who was blind and homeless most of his life, but who couldn't sound further from the emotional tonescapes of maudlin millionaires like Coldplay and Radiohead. Isn't it delightful?
Last Thursday Hisae and I went to see Berlin artist John Bock presenting his new videos at Kunst-Werke. Bock stood on a chair and scribbled on the screen. There was a sketch of Alice Cooper for the first film, in which he impersonated Alice Cooper running around in a field in Finland. Then there was a tractor scribble for a film in which Bock runs amok in a tractor. That was followed by a third—rather Matthew Barneyesque—film in which Bock is pursued around an underground parking garage by a gigantic aspirin. Oh, and my favourite film saw Bock hanging upside down in a well talking to a camera installed at the bottom, making up a crazy story which he illustrated with squirts of toothpaste and prods with sticks and bits of twisted wire. It occurred to me that one of the reasons art is so important is that in art you can be very intelligent yet also very irrational. This is important because rationality trammels intelligence. Bock seemed like a very smart kid, absorbed in his world of play—a kid who'd never let school, the adolescent need to be cool, the need to become sexually attractive, the need to become adult or rational, trammel him or stop his insane games. I have to say I believe in art even more than I believe in Europe. Art can take the irrational in its stride; in politics it causes chaos.
On Sunday I bought a chi machine for ten euros at the trodelmarkt. A chi machine grips your ankles and wiggles them from side to side for fifteen minutes or so. In fact it makes your spine flex like a goldfish's back, and when it stops you lie there for a few minutes tingling, your breathing clearer, your sinuses popping. I'm super-sensitive to vibration; for some reason my body goes insane at the slightest exposure to it. The bus stops at the lights in high gear and my sinuses pop. I even enjoy turbulence on planes now: it jolts and judders my spine about pleasantly. Japan, of course, is the country with the biggest array of vibro-massage products, from the vibro-beds in love hotels to the vibro-chairs in sentos (and in fact in many private homes) with their elaborate programming. This stuff doesn't come cheap, though, so I'm having to accumulate it slowly and secondhand. I have a great little buzzy vibro-massager I got for four euros at Humana. It's mainly good for my lower back, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't used it for sex. I'm not the kind of person who buys big phallic vibrators in sex shops, but give me an innocent therapeutic device that just happens to look like an inverted erect penis with one big throbbing testicle and, well, of course I'm going to use it sexually. The thing about vibration (as a language, as a kind of sixth sense, as a miniature new age religion) is that it makes you aware of how all the body's systems interconnect. Sex and relaxation are just different points on the same continuum, maaaan.
"Isn't it delightful?" might be a good reaction to an electronic massage. It's a statement you sense running strongly through Japanese culture, a breezy affirmation of shared pleasures and simple physical delights. The pleasures being celebrated are often tied up with food, travelling, sitting together on trains or in cafes, bathing in sentos, or appreciating nature and the changing seasons. They're mainly feminine pleasures, but men can express them too. Above all they're positive, without a trace of protest or sarcasm or cynicism. "Isn't it delightful!" The emotion is a casual one, and yet it runs very deep and shouldn't be underestimated. It's about turning to the person you're with and saying "Isn't it great to be alive at this moment?" and meaning it, despite the formulaic framing, and despite the fact that it's totally expected. Those things don't make it any less true: it is great to be alive, and it's always good to acknowledge that. Sister feelings to "Isn't it delightful" are "Wouldn't it be nice..." (II na!) and "Tasty!" (Oishi!). These feelings are all over the Japanese media. They're in songs, magazines, TV shows, blogs. They clearly fit consumer culture like a glove, but it would be cheap cynicism to think they were born with consumer culture or modern capitalism, or were some sort of plot designed to keep citizens from protesting. The other day I was browsing Barrie Shelton's excellent book Learning From The Japanese City (unfortunately, at over a hundred euros, it was way too expensive to buy). One of Shelton's points is that many of the things Westerners have thought of as recent capitalist intrusions into the Japanese cityscape are in fact well-established indigenous features — the elaborate electric and electronic signs everywhere, for instance, descend from the flags and banners and flaps which have made Japanese cities gaudy and exciting for hundreds of years. Anyway, I raise this not only because "Isn't it delightful" has been under attack recently in comments on the feminine superficiality of Japanese blogs, but because I've set myself a challenge for my next album: to make an entire record in which drama is replaced by wisdom, negativity by positivity, and complaint by delight. There are certain types of music which seem to present static plateaus of pleasure: children's records (I listen to a lot, the latest being road safety songs from Portugal, another Hindemith's Wir Bauen Ein Stadt), instrumental post-techno music by people like Lullatone, Arabic-Andalusian music from the early middle ages, and the canons of Moondog. I was listening to Moondog 2 the other day, just ravished by the absence of angst in his complex-simple roundelays. Here's a man who was blind and homeless most of his life, but who couldn't sound further from the emotional tonescapes of maudlin millionaires like Coldplay and Radiohead. Isn't it delightful?
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Jesus!
Date: 2005-05-30 05:30 am (UTC)Re: Jesus!
Date: 2005-05-30 05:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 06:33 am (UTC)now that, in Europe, "the majority, it seems—refuse to see the big picture, and let fears rather than hopes guide them" shouldn't you be exhorting like-minded (to yourself) folk to exit Europe? Much as you advised Americans to leave America after Bush was re-elected? By an even slimmer majority than the French who rejected the constitution it should be pointed out. But the again, where to go...? Seems fear sells well these days.
Also, how can you invest faith in consumer culture while deriding "capitalism as we've known it, with its unrealistic models of eternal expansion"? Isn't that consumer culture in a nutshell? The ever expanding circle of temporary need?
I suppose these questions are all rhetorical, but your positions on these things seem rather fuzzy.
BTW, this American left the empire and hasn't really missed it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 06:48 am (UTC)When there's art, I'm 1000% alright with the world. Better yet when it's got scary giant aspirins and Nordic landscapes.
A friend is writing a paper on Hong Kong and I'm trying to look up a link for him. It has many soundclips of Japanese cartoon theme songs - but are original Cantonese compositions! Kids in the 80s would act out their favourite characters and make up new lyrics related to the obvious poopoos and weewees. For some reason, the songs now aren't nearly as much of a cultural phenomenon for children as they were for my generation.
I'll post the url here once I find out.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 07:17 am (UTC)I think that much of the problem is that people have no real idea what the constitution actually stands for, and there is no real coherence from the parties as to why they should vote "yes". In the absence of a clear vision, people seem to be vulnerable to and confused by the fractured and muddled messages from the different political parties. Yesterday I noted that the Party for Animal Rights has plastered the town with vote "no" posters because the constitution will allow bull fighting and foie gras production to continue. This stuff feels like some kind of dark joke-- but is very likely taken seriously.
The major parties seem to be all insisting that we vote "yes", but for reasons that appear to contradict each other. Voters generally aren´t stupid, and if there is this much apparent confusion then I think many people will vote "no" until there seems to be a more coherent story.
On the other hand, the major news outlets this morning all seemed to be very annoyed at the French, so perhaps there will be a "yes" vote simply because the French voted "no". Anything is possible, sadly.
Thanks for your thoughtful posts.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 07:39 am (UTC)Adam
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 07:48 am (UTC)I agree with you on most parts, but that "big picture" you're mentioning was not the one the one proposed, in parts, in that *bloody* constitution
because i believe in the same transnational utopia than you, i voted yes yesterday
but let me tell you something: a lot of the people who voted no did so precisely because they believed in it too, and because they didn't want to vote for something they didn't totally agreed on. this no is, partly, an idealist one, rather than a forced yes (the one i eventually chose).
let's all be hopeful, and eagerly for someone to propose the right tracks.
apart from that, i can't wait to kaori and hisae go back to business, and shall i add, strongly advise you to listen to that julie andrews' "tell it again" lp, where she sings old nursery rhymes and is accompanied by mister moondog himself on percussions and pipes. it's ravishing.
odot
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 07:55 am (UTC)I'm afraid as far as this Europe goes and this Constitution goes, that argument for a 'yes' vote is like someone trying to sell rotten eggs on the basis that cakes are delicious. The French and, hopefully, Dutch, voted no because of the resurgent realisation that nations each have their own dream and their own task, that working together is a lovely theory and useful some of the time, but if pursued as an end in itself just leads to remote, elitist, grey bureaucracy, and that we really can each do our own thing without it leading to german rearmament. It is no coincidence that the constitution in France was rejected by 78% amongst manual workers, 64% amongst public sector workers, and 60% amongst the under 24s. Europe didn't let the people speak - the EU elite are already saying that the French result will be ignored (http://permanent.nouvelobs.com/europe/20050530.FAP8293e.html?0133) and ratification (without referendums in most countries) will continue.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 08:26 am (UTC)As a sidenote though:
I read your blog immediately before bed a few days ago, and as a result had a dream about Click Opera. In it, you were giving a presentation about a few very stylish record players you had. There was nothing perverse about it at all, though it was strange. Now, I think I'll wait a good fortyfive minutes to an hour after reading your blog to go to bed.
Just thought I'd tell you.
-John
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 09:58 am (UTC)http://home.kimo.com.tw/childsong2003/
... in Cantonese.
Compare and contrast with the original versions here:
http://home.kimo.com.tw/japansong2003/index.html
Enjoy.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 10:00 am (UTC)As for consumer culture, my solution to the contradictions you outline is secondhand shopping, plus recycling. My piece Fashion for victims (http://www.moondogscorner.de/disco/rec15.htm) was about this, and even today I'm talking about shopping in junk markets for secondhand vibro-machines, not buying new ones.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 10:58 am (UTC)Are you referring to yourself, Momus? Does this mean that you consider yourself to represent an entire, non-unified, yet homogenous population of beings?
Hello, neoimperialist. ¿Como puedo servirle?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 11:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 11:44 am (UTC)I hope so to, but feel that outside of Europe's metropolitan cities there are still a great deal of right-wing, bigotted NIMBYs...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 12:01 pm (UTC)This is in part a symbolic issue, but symbolism is something with which artists should concern themselves, I think.
Article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code punishes "mockery and insults against state institutions", including anyone who insults "Turkishness", the Turkish nation, the Turkish state, Parliament, the Council of Ministers, ministries, courts, the armed forces and security forces, as well as their soldiers and officers.
Much as I'd love to see the EU as a force to rival America, I wouldn't want to encourage this type of rabid nationalism and restriction of expression.
Rather drab stuff, I know, but that's reality for you...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 12:16 pm (UTC)Small Is Beautiful
Date: 2005-05-30 12:19 pm (UTC)Some famous Italian - maybe Galileo? - asked why something as beautiful as a butterfly couldn't be as big as an elephant. He realized that gravity would crush a butterfly that size.
I suspect most of the features of the US you (and I) dislike are the inevitable, automatic byproducts of its elephantine immensity. And it seems to be envy of this immensity that's motivating the people who drafted the EU constitution. These people always say "Europe must spend more on its own defence", when I think most European countries could happily follow Costa Rica and abolish their armed forces altogether without any ill effects. I guess they want "Europe" to be big, important and powerful, to "throw its weight around", while I want it to be small, irrelevant, friendly, decentralized. The European country I envy the most is Iceland, which has fewer people than the London Borough of Brent, and zero ability to invade or economically blackmail third world countries.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 12:39 pm (UTC)Re: Small Is Beautiful
Date: 2005-05-30 12:41 pm (UTC)It's worth remembering, though, that ugly but useful little word "glocal". The global and the local enhance and complement each other. It's the intermediate level, the nation-state, which has outlived its usefulness. It must be "disintermediated". In the future, we will be working on both a smaller scale than that, and a bigger scale.
The things I dislike about the US are nothing to do with its size, they're cultural. They're to do with its political culture, its religious outlook, its habitus, its way of believing, being, consuming, relating, working, travelling, fighting. While the US throws its weight around with only its own short-term interests at heart, other more liberal blocs need to be there to counter it. They need to be powerful and rational, and to command respect. Yesterday just threw us back quite a long way.
The referenda
Date: 2005-05-30 12:45 pm (UTC)On another point: alleged "pro-Europeans" who refuse to compromise their ideals miss the point of liberal integration altogether.
Re: Small Is Beautiful
Date: 2005-05-30 12:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 01:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-30 01:24 pm (UTC)