Bukkake St Augustine

[imomus]

My new piece on Wired is Blogging with a wooden tongue. But here in meatspace I'm just finishing a song called "Ex-Erotomane" which is, if I may say so, a classic piece of Momus. You can hear lots of Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen in it... although I don't think any of their songs contain the line "Ex-gokkun princess white pearl necklace sperm bukkake jeweller". The song mentions St Augustine, the tearaway who changed his ways and dedicated his life to building the City of God, so here he is, with a rather lovely hairstyle.

Comments

bad example

[(Anonymous)]

Using an English version of a Japanese blog to strengthen your argument seems hardly appropriate. There is no real culture of corporate or even art style blogs in japan by companies and organisations, and if there are, they are hardly expected to keep them updated in various languages that is not of their own mother tongue. The rest of your article seems to deal with blogs you can actually read, so why not write about those, rather than focusing on a culture where you have very little insight because of language barriers other than anecdotal stories

Does everything have to be about japan? I am sure even your rabbit probably reads manga, partakes in hamster bukkake or also has a wild japanese rabbit school girl fetish.

Re: bad example

[imomus.livejournal.com]

In a short piece where there really isn't room for more than one detailed example, it might indeed seem strange that I chose a Japanese blog. But I think it's a legitimate choice, for these reasons:

* The Yokohama Triennale is an international art event. It aspires to global reach, and the appearance of the director's blog in English signals this ambition. It is a blog I "can actually read".

* My attention was drawn to the blandness of Kawamata's blog by the blog of another Japanese curator, Roger McDonald at Tactical Museum (http://rogermc.blogs.com/tactical/). Roger is based in Tokyo, half Japanese, and thinks that curators' blogs could be more controversial than Kawamata's was.

* Asian countries are a part of the world we live in, and increasingly so. It's silly to exclude them. Even the Prince Charles comment at the end referring to "appalling waxworks" is a reference to China.

By the way, I find Kawamata a very sympathetic character, and this issue of "breeziness" versus criticism-as-hard-love is one I'm very conflicted on. It's actually what links my article with the album I'm working on right now, an album which is more on the side of Kawamata than Prince Charles (in terms of the binaries of the "Wooden Tongue" article).