The grandeur of ancient ruins

[imomus]

Above, you see Silk Scarves With Tartan Plaids and Led Zeppelin Lyrics by Jerome Jerome. It's one of the works in an online exhibition called Heraldic Pomp held by Repellent, a magazine and 'gallery on paper' based in Brooklyn, with strong Japanese connections. The pieces in the show are somewhere between graphic design and fine art (a colourful, modestly pretentious grey area I like a lot) and contain exactly the kind of era and genre-splicing I tend to get up to in my music -- in this case, making wry observations on the contrasts and parallels between European royal crests and street-turf tagging, or between Classicism and classic rock (interesting in the light of yesterday's entry). (Link courtesy of Shift Blog.)

Speaking of the links between a certain kind of graphic design and a certain kind of pop music, I've just prepared a shortened and slightly re-written version of my essay Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative for the excellent design / visual culture magazine Dot Dot Dot. It'll appear in Issue 8. (Thanks to James Goggin of Practise for the introduction to Dot Dot Dot.)

I wish I could post the latest track for the 2005 Momus album, The Artist Overwhelmed, but I really can't. Suffice to say that it's chilling, grand, ruined, spooky and beautiful, and that there's an incredible moment when the ultra-prolonged word 'death' leads into a Purcell-like instrumental passage overlaid with a text from an early Edison phonograph demonstration record. The phonograph itself is speaking, boasting its qualities -- how it connects you with loved ones, records and plays back your voice, etc -- but in the context of the song it becomes the voice of death, and the extraordinary insight that opens up (and I didn't intend this, but I love it) is that for artists, death is the ultimate recording medium. Death remembers and plays back only the important stuff, the durable stuff. Don't choose Memorex, choose death!

Speaking of preservation, and Memorex, I've just been made aware of The Momus Museum, an interweb institution entirely dedicated to shards, stones, ruins and fragments from my own recording history. Like all good museums it has shopping (or at least the track of that name I recorded with Bran Van 3000) and memories (aha, here's Mnemorex, the track I made with Kreidler in 2000!). I have nothing to do with this site, and I can't vouch for the legality of its displays. But that's true of The British Museum too; after all, who really owns the Elgin Marbles?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Death as the ultimate recording medium - that's a rather romantic notion for the likes of you, isn't it?

What you have to say about classicism and romanticism is thought-provoking - although I do think you're in denial about a certain quixotic romanticism that runs through your artistic projects, if not your writings.

Hugo

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally ping pong between the two. The dialectic is the important thing. I don't like it when they solidify into orthodoxies, and I feel that's what a certain kind of Rock music has done. But I'm delighted to be set loose at the end of the 18th century, where you have both, and they're all delightfully confused, and you sort of have to choose between them, but at the same time, everyone's equally steeped in both, and someone like Sir Walter Scott (pictured above) gets a neo-classical bust of himself, no matter how Romantic his writing is.

[(Anonymous)]

We see romanticism and classicism as binaries, and perhaps possible paradigms for a post-monotheistic world. But it seems to me that they're both glorious failures in their different ways. "The search for order and balance leads to immobilism and death" vs "the search for passion and beauty leads to madness and death". Or as Beckett once wrote: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

Hugo

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is life also a failure because it leads to death?

[(Anonymous)]

Life maybe a failure, but it's a glorious failure! (and what a romantic notion that is.) No, I just think our overarching paradigms tend to have self-destruction programmed into them, and so I think your playing at the edges of the paradigms is probably a good idea. Increasingly, it's impossible to baldly and directly talk about the things that really matter - sex, existence etc., and the best way forward is perhaps to address these things obliquely, try to nudge oneself forward.

Hugo

Save the music for the big release

[thrunq.livejournal.com]

Odd that so many fans and admirers are anonymous in that sense. By the way, I'm a fan. Just saying hello.

[(Anonymous)]

Life would be nothing without death. If you’re not able to die, you’re not able do live either. Think of immortal Fosca in Simone de Beauvoirs novel «tous les hommes sont mortels». Honouring or even worshipping death as something substantial for human life is quite natural, and out of any “–ism” I suppose, well, as long as you’re not exaggerating. anna

Re: Human Diversity

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Mincing about the house to "Human Diversity". I'll likely be humming this all week as I ride by the paddocks. Sheer delight!

Regarding busts: the full-sized bronze bust of my person is almost complete. Now I just need that trireme...

Enjoyed your AIGA article. I'm a bit weary of my older illustrator colleagues' insisting that they're artists with a capital "A". I beg them to stop caring, but the poor things are inconsolable; I do so fear for their health.

W

Re: Human Diversity

[imomus.livejournal.com]

When your bust is completed, Whimsy, try to ensure that it falls into a ruin as quickly as possible! Nothing better conveys the idea of eternity.

Re: Human Diversity

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Quite right, my dear Momus. I would sooner strut out of my house wearing only my hat before allowing my bust to be seen without patina, looking like some parvenu's golf trophy! I'm pondering over suitable ruins to have constructed on the grounds for the bust's setting: I am leaning towards modeling the tableau after the ruins of Delphi--or Poussin's Et In Arcadia Ego--with the bust presiding over a fountain festooned with weeping fauns, holding aloft my epitaph: "Not Dead: Extinct". One should mourn oneself before one expires, no?

(Perhaps Andres Serrano might aid me in the oxidation? No--"Piss Whimsy" might be a bit much.)

W

Re: Human Diversity

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"Perhaps Andres Serrano might aid me in the oxidation? No--"Piss Whimsy" might be a bit much..."

...or redundant.

[kid-stationary.livejournal.com]

Death as recording medium!! Of course, the CGI whores are already looking to take this idea to its next, horribly logical, conclusion....edited footage of Marilyn Monroe in crass tv advertisements is one thing, but soon they'll be 'starring' in their latest 21st century epics....

A splendid entry and a wonderful blog.

[ciaan]

While it's sad, I understand why you're no longer putting up songs; I went and made my story entries no longer viewable for the ones under contract.

At this point, having heard the songs you've been putting up, it's made me quite curious to hear the finished version of this album, and so I will probably buy it very soon after it comes out. (I almost never buy things right when they're released, except for certain serial publications (comics).) I want to hear the song about ancient ruins, as I like ruins. It would be trite to say that they have a tragic beauty, but they are paradoxical, because they make me sad that the original beauty was destroyed, but that destruction is also the creation of a new beauty, because ruins and fragments are wonderful and mysterious in their own ways. Of course, creation and destruction are always the same thing.

I, too, generally find myself bouncing between supposedly opposed theories and ideas in philosophy and aesthetics.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Information cannot be created or destroyed.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Just lost and found?