So shoot me

[imomus]

Last week I got shot. Let me clarify. Last week I got photographed for Street, a magazine from Shoichi Aoki's stable of grassroots fashion publications comprising three titles: FRUiTS, Street and Tune. These mags, almost entirely ad and editorial free, are dedicated to full-page non-styled verité shots of people on the street, wearing outfits they've put together themselves. FRUiTS and Tune focus on Japan, whereas Street wanders the globe in search of interesting-looking characters.

The photographer was Fumi Nagasaka, a Japanese woman who lives in Brooklyn and, the day we met, sported a Glass Spider Tour t-shirt and bleached eyebrows. I ran into her while showing Fumiko Imano around Mitte, and we all went on a café crawl, trying (and failing) to find one with air conditioning (this has been Berlin's hottest July since records began).



Who knows if the picture will run -- five years ago, Street scouts in New York photographed me twice the same day, in different parts of the Lower East Side, but in the end neither photo ran in the magazine. Here are some of the folks who do run, from the Street magazine site (which puts thumbnails of the whole magazine online):



In the context of the war currently raging in the Middle East -- and through these pages -- it's impossible not to look at these pictures and think "Wow, there are people in the world who aren't firing mortar shells at each other! How entirely admirable!"

Comments

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

so what were you wearing?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, just something a bit bland, like this (http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y296/imomus/momusatberlintokyo.jpg). But with a Graniph (http://imomus.livejournal.com/204100.html) shirt. Which is why it won't run.

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

oh.

[(Anonymous)]

However, like those firing weapons in the Middle East, they are evidently full of their own self-importance!

Eamonn

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's a much better way to vent it, though, isn't it?

I doubt Street magazine will ever go to Haifa or Beirut, although I hear the Hamsa in Beirut is a bit of a fashion district. As for Israel, its misfortune is that when it does leisure things they look sinister, just because of the juxtaposition with the suffering of the Palestinians so nearby. The videos of Yael Bartana (http://imomus.livejournal.com/2004/03/14/) spring to mind.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This makes interesting reading, from that Yael Bartana piece I wrote in 2004 (it was actually picked up and used in one of Yael's own catalogues):

"The pretension of the Orthodox Jews ('God's chosen people' -- quelle pretension!) is actually refreshing. Orthodox Jews look so interesting on the street because they are, like the best actors, pretentious in a rather magnificently unapologetic way. They are not ashamed of proclaiming their utter difference. Practising a fearless, often dangerous, self-ostranenie, a deliberate Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarisation and distanciation, Orthodox Jews seem to bring to the street the provocations of the avant garde, that state of mind where the tepid feelgood generalisations of faux-tolerant, covertly evangelical liberalism are left behind.

"We're not all the same deep down, damn it! Where the liberal orthodoxy is a joyless and conformist hedonism, the Orthodox are austere and abstemious. Where the liberal orthodoxy is secular materialism, the Orthodox are religious and metaphysical. Where the orthodoxy is expansion and evangelism and pluricide, the Orthodox keep themselves to themselves and focus on staying weirdly different."

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

That last bit made me crack up because the "truthiness" of it is so simple.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Advice to the outlandishly vain:

Throw shade? You're awesome!
Grenades? That's gruesome

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

What the FUCK are you trying to prove?

Would you rather, for example, someone:

A)Write a song about how much they want to kill their band teacher.

B)Actually kill him/her.

No further comment, man.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that I'm saying "We're not all the same deep down, damn it!" That seems to contradict my "Man equals man" riff of the other day. The difference, of course, is that when you shift from art (which is all about distinction, originality, hierarchy) to war, everything changes. An artist who killed his rivals, rather than merely doing better work than them and gaining more distinction for himself, would be utterly insufferable.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, skipping from the Lebanon war to matters sartorial with even less apology than me is the Daily Mail, who demand to know why journalists covering the conflict aren't wearing ties (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2006/07/tieless_in_gaza.html#more)!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, given the tendency of thinkers like Zizek and Etienne Balibar (http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=426) to debunk the whole idea of neutrality and objectivity, I think it might be interesting to see BBC or CNN reporters wearing hassidic outfits while reporting the war, rather than ties. Not giving an Orthodox account of events, just wearing the clothes to re-contextualize the reporting they're doing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming your comment was meant for Eammon, since we seem to be making the same point here.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, I recently read a book called Difference, by someone I am reliably informed is your brother. I thought it was a pretty solid read, and went to Amazon.com, to see what other readers had to say. There I encountered a rather weak parody review, written very much in your style, and signed Momomomus, whom I assume to be you. It made me wonder if you are in fact jealous of your brother. In a sense, you have reason to be. After all, in his field, he has all the "legitimation" that you crave and no don't get in your field. What he's also managed to do is narrow his intellectual focus, taking one area and exploring it in a lot of depth, and becoming an established expert in it, leading to the aforementioned legitimation. Your approach, on the other hand, lacks this sort of consistency and depth. One moment you're offering sub-oped pieces on Israel of a type you'll find in a million blogs across the Net, the next you're musing self-importantly about whether you'll have a walk-on role in a minor fashion magazine... Momus, I think you could do worse than take a leaf out of your brother's book.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

You just made me remember about Sigfried Landau's Barbed Hula (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/14/1065917392565.html). It's quite a memorable work.

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

I want to say that it is indeed terrible how the other half lives; you'd almost expect that the Gulf States that express sympathy with the Palestinians to actually, you know, give them money. You'd also expect the Israelis to stop killing them at some point, but I guess either I or someone else cannot possibly understand the realpolitische ramifications of the situation.

And besides, I said "I want to say" because I'm not sure it's appropriate to the tone of the article. I really dug the guy in the red shirt and tartan pseudo-kilt on the left; I wish my boyfriend would dress like that more often.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

this must be one of the fastest blogs in the universe..
an hour ago there were like 4 comments and after dealing with some tax issues, domestic chores and phone calls, its a vast reservoir of opinion

so easy to disappear in the momus fulcrum..

anyway..i was just pondering army hats last night and the price of russian naval tops, you know the blue and white striped affairs..army and navy stores are useless..but, it did make me ponder the fashion aspect of reappropriating the "war on terror" mindset..remember when Arafats headdress was common on the "New Wave" scene in the Uk? The Apocalypse Now trend? The bloody Clash fer chrissake!

if we are being conditioned to feel the terror of the other and by doing so reenact terror personally can we do it with some style? by which i mean wit i suppose..play as engagement, rather than the engagement of war

oh if all the worlds assignations and engagements of conflict were fashion wars as in the house battles of Vogueing..but then, this could be called the thinking of the "Godless"

only yesterday i threw a few pieces of apparel together in a "living right" sense..felt the tremor of terror that i would conflict with the standard "dress code" of everyday life and thought, "I am doing a Momus"

even open toed sandals raise eyebrows round here

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

oh and a friend who was studying for theatre design and costume tells me part of her syllabus was the Victim's Ball of post Terror France with its necklines and strange dance steps and invitation rules

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've already taken a leaf out of my brother's book, and placed it here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/53369.html). As you can see, I describe Mark there as "one of Britain's leading writers on deconstruction".

What does make me jealous is that he wins at Google Fight (http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Nick+Currie&word2=Mark+Currie). I console myself with the knowledge that most of those Mark Curries aren't him, whereas most of the Nick Curries are me.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll bet Momus is at least jealous of his brother's full head of hair...


Momus, are you related at all to the philosopher Gregory Currie? If not, then it's quite a coincidence that his field of interest seems to be so similar to that of your brother's, ie nature of fiction, the relationship between fictional and non-fictional discourse. He has a good essay on art and delusion here:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/philosophy/downloads/artanddelusion.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I believe I am related to Gregory Currie. But it's a delusion.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yves Saint Laurent also did a catwalk show in 1968 or 1969 called the "Protest Collection", featuring duffle-coats with gold toggles.

[(Anonymous)]

Israel has been giving the Palestinians money; and are they grateful for it? Of course not. But we shouldn't let facts get in the way of our self-righteous moralizing.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, when you do somebody a favor they only end up resenting you for it. Free money just makes people demand more free money. When an entire population becomes dependent on aid, they become idle and angry. Palestinian leaders use Israel as a straw man to distract their public from the real failures stemming from their own leadership.

Western intellectuals constantly decry Bush for seeing the world in black & white; yet, Western intellectuals themselves have great trouble seeing this conflict in any light other than White Opressor/Brown Opressed.

When Muslim militants execute an attack on Israel they run and hide amongst women and children in the hopes that the Israelis will retaliate, killing those women and children, so that they can print a photo of a puddle of blood next to a little girl's flip flop in the morning paper. And it all plays so perfectly into the simple-minded black & white universe that the Western intellectuals live in.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-henryperri

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"My job is to export violence to the four corners of the globe, awaken the four horsemen, open Pandora's Box, unleash the seven terrors, torture millions, play the fool, shoot some pictures, and sound the last trump. The blowback is gonna be amazing."

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Why is this anonymous? Who are you trying to hide from? Is there some danger or embarrassment that will befall you from chiming in on a little blog?

That said, why would two brothers, both intelligent, have to follow the same path to career happiness? Maybe they are coming to the top of the same mountain, from different sides. It is good, as you say, to focus tightly on one area of research and become an expert, but it is also good to ignore the usual divisions between fields and bring together things which are normally disparate. Putting together things which normally don't belong together is an excellent way to discover new thoughts and sensations, and maybe get a new and distinctive perspective on events. People wearing street fashion and warring people in the Middle East all live on the same planet, and they're all people with similar needs, what does this mean that they act simultaneously? I find it very interesting, and refreshing.