The ten-year-long March
Mar. 21st, 2007 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm writing my column today, so I could just have sent you off to look at hatsuhana, the first cherry blossom of the season, as reported by the BBC. But then I had a better idea -- what about a little formatted content guide stretching back ten years, and covering the kinds of things I was pondering in my writings at about this time of year? A long march through March?
1997
On Unsuccess
It's March 1997, I still have two functioning eyes, I live in London in a penthouse overlooking Barbican tube station. Tony Blair is still two months away from election victory. I'm rather angry that Ed Ball has called me a "fucking middle class wanker" for dissing Oasis. But insults aren't the way to hurt me. Being my friend, and getting to number one in the charts, and telling me that I could too -- that hurts. So a friendly "ouch" goes out to Jyoti Mishra of White Town, currently riding at number one in the UK singles chart with Your Woman.
1998
On Transgression
It's a year later. Wearing an eyepatch for the first time in public, I'm talking about free speech on a panel at the ICA. I'm sitting next to Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, and the MC is Tony Wilson of Factory. I describe how I feel I'm morphing between two types of animal; the "national transgressor" is a satirist who finds himself tied to the establishment. The "pluralistic intervidual" is post-national, a web citizen. "In the hyperstimulant rush of this new world (digital TV, internet, pull not push, bits not atoms, moral disintermediation) we are increasingly operating our own 'censorship' by NOT PAYING ATTENTION," I declare. "Transgression is the other side of the medaille d'honneur called Consensus. Transgression is how Consensus, which often is doomed to being merely reactive, gets its dirty work done."
1999
I Love My Work
I'm just starting "Stars Forever". "This collaboration is so weird, it's more intimate than sex. It's like borrowing people's souls, remaking 'The Incredible Journey' through their bodies in a tiny space capsule full of musical technology. I have a feeling this album is going to be my best ever... Time goes at a different speed when I'm alone with my recording equipment, it really is an invocation of spirits and my emotions change. Normally cool, restrained, polite, distant and shy, I suddenly overflow with tenderness for people when I'm working."
2000
Electronics in the 18th Century
I've moved to New York and am performing in a webcast cabaret at the Knitting Factory with Torquil Campbell of Stars. I'm the Earl of Amiga, he's the Duke of Atari. Or is it the other way around? Here's a little excerpt: "Everywhere you go in the 18th Century you see John Malkovitch. God knows why, but it gets bloody annoying. Malkovitch in a huge powdered wig, Malkovitch with painted beauty spots, Malkovitch bowing low to a milkmaid and looking up with a dirty twinkle in his eye. I went on the Grand Tour of Italy and there, in Naples, was Malkovitch, sporting with a Countess, wearing baggy britches and buckle shoes. I went to Venice and there he was again, lying back in a gondola, sharing witty thoughts with the Doge. Fuck you, Malkovitch, get back to the century you belong in! You've completely ruined my holiday."
2001
Organic Cafe
And now (pay attention at the back, there!) I'm about to move to Tokyo to live with my girlfriend, Shizu, in Meguro. "I'll be playing some shows in support of the Japanese release of 'Folktronic', producing a mini-album for a Japanese artist, and just hanging out, riding a folding bicycle, as neat, small and silver as a pair of travelling scissors. I'll be cycling by the river, under the cherry trees, towards the Organic Cafe.... It's a tall order, I know, to expect the world to be reshaped in one tiny trendy Tokyo cafe. But one thing's for sure. The revolution won't be happening at Starbuck's."
2002
Hell's Furnishings
In the month I definitively leave New York for Tokyo, this article appears in Metropolis magazine. I'm both attracted and repelled by the way Japanese video store Tsutaya has put "A Clockwork Orange" into a promo section called "Good Furniture". When I witness 9/11 and a Japanese friend (now dead) says it's "beautiful", I experience the same feeling that something is very wrong.
2003
War as Fiction
Bush Junior has invaded Iraq on pretty fictional pretexts. I'm skeptical and angry. "Might does not make right, and might alone -- without charm, without diplomacy, without willing suspension of disbelief -- cannot turn fiction into fact. Realities have a habit of intervening. Even the war games the US army staged in summer 2002 to model an invasion of Iraq ended in the US losing -- a result so embarrassing that the games were played over again until the desired result -- a win for the US -- was achieved... 'The new American century' is a fiction which has already failed disastrously, alienating and revolting global audiences, who are now interrupting it with cat calls, paint bombs, slow handclaps, civic disturbances, and other, more violent, shows of dissent. If it were just a film, it would probably never have got past the studio heads."
2004
Tatartronic
I'm in Udmurtia, near the Ural Mountains that divide Russia from Siberia. It's enflaming my imagination, making me plan an album called Tatartronic. "What's really making me dream is the ex-Soviet Central Asian Republics. Uzbekistan! Samarkand and Tashkent! The lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian! Border disputes with the Chinese! Those scary Chechens! Old men drinking tea in dusty towns under snow-capped mountains! ...Think of my album as basically Mongol-Tatar in spirit. Think of it arriving in a whirl of beating hooves, stealing what it wants from the places it passes through, and forcing its cherry-picked riffs and tics through new territories until all the memes are spliced with something else, and form some imaginary, unimagineable new culture. Tatartronic is coming!" Some of this stuff -- not much -- ends up on "Otto Spooky".
2005
Uma in Seoul
I channel Uma Thurman, who stares down on Seoul, South Korea, from a Vuitton billboard. I compare her with Kim Jong Il, who stares down at the other Koreans a few hundred miles to the north. And sure, Uma is a woman, but Kim Jong Il is at least a Korean. Two different imperialisms?
2006
Avant Grizzlies and the Great Generation of Downtown
I'm in New York being a performance artist. Visits to the Wooster Group's production of "The Emperor Jones" and a show about the Downtown art scene in the 80s get me reflecting on what happens when experimentalists grow old and grizzly.
1997
On Unsuccess
It's March 1997, I still have two functioning eyes, I live in London in a penthouse overlooking Barbican tube station. Tony Blair is still two months away from election victory. I'm rather angry that Ed Ball has called me a "fucking middle class wanker" for dissing Oasis. But insults aren't the way to hurt me. Being my friend, and getting to number one in the charts, and telling me that I could too -- that hurts. So a friendly "ouch" goes out to Jyoti Mishra of White Town, currently riding at number one in the UK singles chart with Your Woman.
1998
On Transgression
It's a year later. Wearing an eyepatch for the first time in public, I'm talking about free speech on a panel at the ICA. I'm sitting next to Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, and the MC is Tony Wilson of Factory. I describe how I feel I'm morphing between two types of animal; the "national transgressor" is a satirist who finds himself tied to the establishment. The "pluralistic intervidual" is post-national, a web citizen. "In the hyperstimulant rush of this new world (digital TV, internet, pull not push, bits not atoms, moral disintermediation) we are increasingly operating our own 'censorship' by NOT PAYING ATTENTION," I declare. "Transgression is the other side of the medaille d'honneur called Consensus. Transgression is how Consensus, which often is doomed to being merely reactive, gets its dirty work done."1999
I Love My Work
I'm just starting "Stars Forever". "This collaboration is so weird, it's more intimate than sex. It's like borrowing people's souls, remaking 'The Incredible Journey' through their bodies in a tiny space capsule full of musical technology. I have a feeling this album is going to be my best ever... Time goes at a different speed when I'm alone with my recording equipment, it really is an invocation of spirits and my emotions change. Normally cool, restrained, polite, distant and shy, I suddenly overflow with tenderness for people when I'm working."
2000
Electronics in the 18th Century
I've moved to New York and am performing in a webcast cabaret at the Knitting Factory with Torquil Campbell of Stars. I'm the Earl of Amiga, he's the Duke of Atari. Or is it the other way around? Here's a little excerpt: "Everywhere you go in the 18th Century you see John Malkovitch. God knows why, but it gets bloody annoying. Malkovitch in a huge powdered wig, Malkovitch with painted beauty spots, Malkovitch bowing low to a milkmaid and looking up with a dirty twinkle in his eye. I went on the Grand Tour of Italy and there, in Naples, was Malkovitch, sporting with a Countess, wearing baggy britches and buckle shoes. I went to Venice and there he was again, lying back in a gondola, sharing witty thoughts with the Doge. Fuck you, Malkovitch, get back to the century you belong in! You've completely ruined my holiday."
2001Organic Cafe
And now (pay attention at the back, there!) I'm about to move to Tokyo to live with my girlfriend, Shizu, in Meguro. "I'll be playing some shows in support of the Japanese release of 'Folktronic', producing a mini-album for a Japanese artist, and just hanging out, riding a folding bicycle, as neat, small and silver as a pair of travelling scissors. I'll be cycling by the river, under the cherry trees, towards the Organic Cafe.... It's a tall order, I know, to expect the world to be reshaped in one tiny trendy Tokyo cafe. But one thing's for sure. The revolution won't be happening at Starbuck's."
2002
Hell's Furnishings
In the month I definitively leave New York for Tokyo, this article appears in Metropolis magazine. I'm both attracted and repelled by the way Japanese video store Tsutaya has put "A Clockwork Orange" into a promo section called "Good Furniture". When I witness 9/11 and a Japanese friend (now dead) says it's "beautiful", I experience the same feeling that something is very wrong.
2003
War as Fiction
Bush Junior has invaded Iraq on pretty fictional pretexts. I'm skeptical and angry. "Might does not make right, and might alone -- without charm, without diplomacy, without willing suspension of disbelief -- cannot turn fiction into fact. Realities have a habit of intervening. Even the war games the US army staged in summer 2002 to model an invasion of Iraq ended in the US losing -- a result so embarrassing that the games were played over again until the desired result -- a win for the US -- was achieved... 'The new American century' is a fiction which has already failed disastrously, alienating and revolting global audiences, who are now interrupting it with cat calls, paint bombs, slow handclaps, civic disturbances, and other, more violent, shows of dissent. If it were just a film, it would probably never have got past the studio heads."
2004
Tatartronic
I'm in Udmurtia, near the Ural Mountains that divide Russia from Siberia. It's enflaming my imagination, making me plan an album called Tatartronic. "What's really making me dream is the ex-Soviet Central Asian Republics. Uzbekistan! Samarkand and Tashkent! The lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian! Border disputes with the Chinese! Those scary Chechens! Old men drinking tea in dusty towns under snow-capped mountains! ...Think of my album as basically Mongol-Tatar in spirit. Think of it arriving in a whirl of beating hooves, stealing what it wants from the places it passes through, and forcing its cherry-picked riffs and tics through new territories until all the memes are spliced with something else, and form some imaginary, unimagineable new culture. Tatartronic is coming!" Some of this stuff -- not much -- ends up on "Otto Spooky". 2005
Uma in Seoul
I channel Uma Thurman, who stares down on Seoul, South Korea, from a Vuitton billboard. I compare her with Kim Jong Il, who stares down at the other Koreans a few hundred miles to the north. And sure, Uma is a woman, but Kim Jong Il is at least a Korean. Two different imperialisms?
2006
Avant Grizzlies and the Great Generation of Downtown
I'm in New York being a performance artist. Visits to the Wooster Group's production of "The Emperor Jones" and a show about the Downtown art scene in the 80s get me reflecting on what happens when experimentalists grow old and grizzly.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 12:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 12:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 12:39 pm (UTC)Even the war games the US army staged in summer 2002 to model an invasion of Iraq ended in the US losing -- a result so embarrassing that the games were played over again until the desired result -- a win for the US -- was achieved.
Well obviously. That's the whole point of having them. It's not a public spectacle, it's practice.
Aaw, a decade of Momus.
Date: 2007-03-21 12:50 pm (UTC)I remember I was always not sure what to make of you (strangely, it took me a while to warm up to Gainsbourg, too-- crazy), then I sort of accidentally took acid one evening, and by morning I told everyone that Ping Pong was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. You'd unwittingly (?)created great acid rock...
Friends and I still say, "I'm going to hospital today, because I ate too much chocorate"...
I sold you and Shizu a piece of folktronic fluorescent knit fabric on ebay, do you remember?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:19 pm (UTC)There was something cryptic in the old posts--not just how they were written, but the oblique photos and blank design.
Some favorites from the crypt:
http://imomus.com/thought200502.html
http://imomus.com/thought300501.html
http://imomus.com/thought110401.html
http://imomus.com/thought100301.html
http://imomus.com/thought110600.html
http://imomus.com/thought061000.html
http://imomus.com/thought111200.html
http://imomus.com/fakewaysinstitute.html
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:43 pm (UTC)"Please remember at all times that Momus is a game with masks played by Nick Currie and others. Momus is art-play, and even the name-calling and the verbal violence that happen in a Momus column happen without real insult being intended or real blood being shed. I, Nick Currie, have nothing but affection for Mr Ed Ball, the Creation artist, and sometimes in fact listen with pleasure to the songs of Oasis. Momus, however, speaks with a different voice. Momus is an avatar, a political figure, an 18th century man of letters writing a 20th century 'Dunciad'. Momus is shadow play, a piece of art. And art, as Eno said, is where you can crash the plane and walk away. Life is much more precious, but much less free. I love them both, and I don't intend to abandon either just yet."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 04:02 pm (UTC)ps-nice Bruton.
love,
John FF
Oasis
Date: 2007-03-21 04:17 pm (UTC)Momus, I was hooked on from the first line of Tender Pervert, on a tape that was recorded too slowly.
Stephen Parkin.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 04:49 pm (UTC)Is it too late for the karaoke contest?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:19 pm (UTC)At one party someone asked me sarcastically if it was real or fake, so I told him fake. He then became really apologetic and wouldn't accept that it was fake. He kept saying "It's ok if it's real, really! Don't worry, I don't care if it's real!"
Just seeing the wide range of reactions people had towards an eyepatch in one night made me wonder if you still get these sort of reactions from people.
patch me up
Date: 2007-03-21 05:29 pm (UTC)One time walking up to Boalt Hall on the UC Berkeley campus I was wearing an eyepatch and this guy came up to me and asked me if I was in some gang. Turns out there was this Oakland gang that wore patches as their sign to each other. Weird!
One time some other guy walked up to me on the street and asked me if I was a gangbanger. I didn't even know what that meant! I thought he was asking if I did gangbangs. I was like "uh,,," Later found out gangbanger just means someone who runs around with gangs.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 06:02 pm (UTC)k and i are leaving for japan this friday, and have been hoping we'll be able to see some of those during our spring break there, next week.
although, i will most likely not be posting any "sakura gone wild" videos over at the journal upon our return to the states. sorry.
when do you and hisae leave for the island empire, by the way?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 07:23 pm (UTC)I like the way I look now better, to be honest.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 07:29 pm (UTC)You certainly look better now.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 08:43 pm (UTC)Re: Aaw, a decade of Momus.
Date: 2007-03-21 09:02 pm (UTC)Re: patch me up
Date: 2007-03-21 11:29 pm (UTC)Wank it up
Date: 2007-03-22 12:24 am (UTC)97 really sucked.
Whose Oasis?
The following might explain some of what's not around anymore.
Abstract
This article analyzes effects and implications of New Public Management (NPM) when implemented in the civil service systems in New Zealand and Norway, focusing especially on the effects of devolution and contractualism on political control. Using a transformative perspective, we interpret these effects as a result of a melding of environmental factors, polity features and national historical-institutional constraints. Norway scores low on both environmental and internal factors enhancing administrative reform, furthering a soft version of NPM and small changes in political control. In contrast a combination of external pressure, weak countervailing cultural forces and 'elective dictatorship' in New Zealand produces a radical version of NPM, resulting in a weakening of central political control.
http://www.statsvitenskap.uio.no/ansatte/presentasjon/person/stvtc1-eng.xml
Re: Wank it up
Date: 2007-03-22 12:28 am (UTC)http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=312823
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-22 04:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-22 08:24 am (UTC)