My Saturday

[imomus]

Dear Diary, I wake up late due to a fraught Skype chat in the early hours. Woman trouble. Have to reschedule my appointment with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the photographer who's taking my picture for Currency, a Dutch magazine which comes glossy hardbound, like a children's book. My Belgian friend Pascal Meuwissen is doing a little Momus feature in the next one. It looks like the kind of mag expressly designed to sell in the Colette bookstore in Paris.

I dress in plain t-shirt, as requested by Paul, but add an apron because I'm into them just now (how they change your shape). Apparently Sico at Currency has also requested that I be smoking a cigarette, despite the fact that I'm a non-smoker. Paul lives near my loft, just off Grand Street. This neighbourhood, which I once considered so dangerous, turns out to be incredibly bourgeois, the kind of place that stocks lots of organic produce in its groceries. Paul lives in a clapperboard house, and shoots me with a Mamiya RZ67, sitting on his dishevelled bed, against a white wall. He's chatty and very hot; this, plus sitting on his bed, makes me think that if I were gay I'd totally be flirting with him. He'd be just my type. I'm sure he thinks I am gay; I tell him about spending last night at Julius, the gay bar where I was hanging out with Matmos.

After the shoot I walk West and see a group show at a gallery called NURTUREart on Keap Street, by Lorimer Street subway station. Really like two photos by Matt Siber, one of a strip mall with all the language Photoshopped off the signs, the other with nothing but the language.

I eat lunch at the Asian deli on 3rd Avenue, beef teriyaki. The only trouble with this place is the commercial radio they pump in. Even with blu-tak screwed into my ears and my red Chinese ear protectors clamped on, I can still hear it. Maudlin, weary pop music that makes you feel industrially lonely.

On the bus to work I'm scribbling notes on "Blings v. Organics". The idea is that the very rich and the very poor are united by a Darwinian-materialist philosophy of Bling. The middle class are the "Organics", guilty, responsible, tasteful, environmentally-conscious. Trouble is, the birthrate amongst the Organics is low. The Blings screw more, and will screw up the world.

At work I'm on very good form, drawing quite large groups of people who actually follow me from room to room, laughing heartily. It's amazing what a slick comedian I've become, how smoothly my patter flows. I could reproach myself for having left the more poetic, ambivalent material behind, but actually I think "art comedian" is a perfectly acceptable role. There aren't many art comedians around, and humour is an interesting way to think about art.

An Asian woman follows me more tenaciously than the others. It's Vietnamese-Californian performance artist Lan Tran, who's appearing in her own one-woman show "Elevator Sex" in the Pan-Asian Theater Festival. We take tea together downstairs, and she invites me to see her show later. I leave the museum at about 5.30 and -- it's become a habit, and one of my delights -- meander through Central Park, sipping green tea and watching the life going on. Discover new areas, a pinetum where a Jewish wedding party assembles and lint falls from the trees like snow.

The Upper West side is an area I hardly know. It feels very Jewish this evening, and I imagine its residents shuttling regularly from these apartment blocks to places in Tel Aviv. I eat moussaka in some tacky diner; a handsome hippy kid carrying an acoustic guitar tells me rather breathlessly that he's currently "obsessed with your Hippopotamomus record, been listening to it obsessively for three months now". That cheers me up.

"Elevator Sex" is pretty good, Lan plays a whole cast of characters, catching the inflections of black people and Vietnamese immigrants especially well. The piece connects memories of 9/11 with tales of child abuse. I'm also fascinated by the church it's staged in. You have to walk along the upper story of a decaying church to get to the theatre. A man plays Beethoven on a viola on the stage. There are all sorts of dingy community center areas with noticeboards sporting conspiracy-theory-type rants against the Bush administration (detailing how Prescott Bush helped the Nazis, etc).

Subway home; as usual it's the oddballs and misfits who inspire me most. A black man keeps mumbling that he has to go back uptown because "there's a colour bar, coloureds ain't allowed downtown". And on the L train there's an amazing Ukrainian wearing a grey smock, fresh from some church service (I can see the leaflets he's carrying). He looks like he should be an art world intellectual, but he's clearly a committed Orthodox Christian. I like the otherness of his puritanical dress, and somehow imagine him carrying a sheep over his shoulders. The L train hipsters, in contrast, tend to evoke less exciting images of skateboards and surfboards. Apparently I'm fairly shocking looking tonight, though, in my apron and red headphones; some girl at Union Square shouts at me "You're the craziest shit I've ever seen!"

Back home, I watch a lot of old videos by Scritti Politti on Bibbly-O-Tek, a new Scritti fan site. The only one that really touches greatness is Absolute, a really transcendental song with a great video in which "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (with Green as Bottom) is being performed in an early 80s New York dance club full of robotic body-poppers.

Comments

[paranoidkoala.livejournal.com]

How about ice cream. Did you eat any ice cream?
An ice lolly? Anything cold and wonderful?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No. Even my green tea was room temperature.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Momus,

I wanted to be the second person to comment on your blog today.

Love,

Stephanie

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Whoops, sorry Stephanie!

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

This was an enjoyable post and I like the new blue & tan background.

"You're the craziest shit I've ever seen!"

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

that is one hell of a compliment.
i'm totally jealous.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

ah, yes, and: glad about the new colours. the old style became a bit of an eyehurt to me (pardonmypidgin).

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

eyeache - betterpidgin

[trini-naenae.livejournal.com]

It seems like you're enjoying New York. Quite different from earlier posts when you were ranting about the sharkyness, excessively use of black and skulls.

I think just about everyone will have "I can't stand this culture" and "I love this culture" and "I like this culture" moments whenever they are living somewhere new.

I really like the new background. It's relaxing.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I just LOVE what you've done with the place!

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's sackcloth and ashes! Maybe Momus is repenting for something.

--form.mimic

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

what's the difference between your apron 'n' earguard combo, and some other person's bling? the fact that it's more original, or more an authentic reflection of yourself? bah...

changing the shape of your body and the function of your sense organs through fashion seems plenty "darwinian-materialist" to me.

sorry if I seem mega-critical but your comment about the blings screwing too much and fucking up everything is totally problematic.

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

I particularly enjoy the fencing in the background of "Wood Beez".

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

that was good. i miss new york. i like the burlap. i came here today and said "WOW!" and woke up my boyfriend. i was born on the upper west side. went to a school called "ethical culture." you look very nice. those photographs are great; good idea. wish i'd had it first. i'm wearing hospital pants and they keep falling off. this entry is cute. i think i'm moving back to new york.

[madge-pastiche.livejournal.com]

I don't know about bling as anti- organic, though: it's a good word, but the inclusion of "tasteful" in the list of definitions for the organics strikes me as wrong. There's something a lot more passionate about the bling aesthetics of the lower class than the beige simplicity of the organics: the middle class apes the upper class in terms of aesthetics, and there's little bling involved in being truly upper class. Those people are all about less being more, expensively of course. Which is bling, maybe, but it's also anti- bling, or insulting bling...Or something else. I'm of the impression that most sweet middle class organics are tasteful in a way that's very conservative, and very far from being individualistic or connected to their desires: it's a very received taste, I think, although there is something about guilt there. It's all about being far from their own desires, even in terms of taste- there's no bling there because there is no relationship to visual pleasure that isn't associated with purity- thus the watered down minimalism and beige and "taste". It's a sense of restraint where no restraint is necessary. Maybe it does all come down to guilt. Ach. I dunno.

[pyrop.livejournal.com]

But the middle class is pretty wasteful and materialist too...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

How would the Blings v. Organics idea play into this notion? (http://imomus.livejournal.com/2005/07/09/)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I see strains of Paul Fussell (http://www.paulryburn.com/journal/aug_6_2001.html) in your response. His book on class has since become dated, but some of his observations (many of them bitchily humorous) are still not altogether wrong, I think--specifically the notions you raise here. These sorts of delineations are more akin to parlor games. Good fun, though.

New money consumes conspicuously, but the old money will often wear threadbare bespoke Saville Row suits and custom John Lobb shoes that are decades old. The desperate, chromophobic upper middles and lower uppers will try to ape this sprezzatura and fail, as they haven't yet learned how to artfully violate the ground rules in order to make their attempts convincing.

The occasional nitwit will accuse me of trying to "pass" for money, when nothing could be farther from the truth; if anything, I'm a "suspect character" that is making fun of his own ineptitude at such an attempt: A rascal.

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

I thought you were anti-headphone? What is it that you're listening to? Or are you just wearing those to block out the noise pollution and not playing anything through them?

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

so much more like it. the new look. old one made my eyes hurt.

3 entries found for pinetum

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

"An area planted with pine trees or related conifers, especially for botanical study."

A new word! I'd never seen "pinetum" before.

[myrrha.livejournal.com]

what are you doing when you get to berlin this summer?

[spin-the-blade.livejournal.com]

Ozu inspired layout?

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

mr. whimsy, you are a great english teacher. i'll never forget the day i learned callipygian.

Re: 3 entries found for pinetum

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

i had to check that up too. what a beautiful word.