Five years in a Graniph t-shirt
Jun. 18th, 2006 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt's one hell of a "fashion shoot" -- a grotesque collision of the trivial and the tragic -- but I happened to be wearing Graniph t-shirts before and during 9/11. If you buy two, you see, you get a reduction. Just before leaving Japan to return to my apartment in New York, in early September 2001, I'd bought two shirts at Graniph's store in Shimokitazawa. So you can see me here wearing a brown mushroom-themed shirt four days before the planes hit the towers, and here wearing a pink "macrophage graphics" shirt right between plane one and plane two.
My life in the early 21st century is measured out in Graniph shirts: here I am, a year later, having left paranoid, scary, flag-waving New York and settled in Tokyo, wearing a red Helvetica t-shirt boasting one of Graniph's trademark lunatic linguistic borrowings, a German phrase which begins "It is our occupation to give form to language" but then starts disorienteering, google-talking and babbling. It's no accident that I'm talking about this shirt, on that page, as an important part of the preparations for my "Oskar Tennis Champion" album; nostalgia for the rationality of Modernism is evident in the shirt's evocation of Helvetica (Swiss grid graphics), and on the album's evocation of 9/11 (in its title track) as the ultimate silent slapstick bananaskin, played out in a Bauhaus landscape of collapsing Mies and Gropius towers. But you can also see the album's German references gathering in the t-shirt, as well as my extensive use, in the Oskar-Otto-Ocky trilogy, of surreally inept translation, inspired in equal parts by Jinglish and Google's beta language tools. The little t-shirt that could write a whole album!
Graniph used to be called Graphis. It was just one store in Shimo-kitazawa, as far as I know. Now it's a chain. There are Graniph stores in Daikanyama, Ikebukuro, and no doubt elsewhere in Tokyo -- and in Japan. There's also a website, which I believe accepts international orders.
What makes Graniph unique is its amazing fertility. The store has totally different designs every time you go in. You can see the designers jamming constantly, taking their fetishes and themes to new places, but keeping some kind of continuity, too. They like bright colours, but they like cute sobriety too, and to achieve the effect of sobriety they'll raid Swiss design, German philosophy, whatever. Yesterday I was wearing a Graniph shirt with a white-on-grey view of traffic lights and a text (in poorly-copied French) reading "vandoesurg raises here the political dimension of the problem. and he explains that this is incompatible with the principal moments..." You know, really n'importe quoi. Text as texture. Appropriated images spliced with appropriated texts (pakura of startling originality!), in an endless parade which is nevertheless recognizable as the work of one creator.
But what makes Graniph unique also makes it readily copied. Just before I left New York I saw a store on Greene Street in SoHo advertising Uniqlo "graphic" t-shirts which looked remarkably like Graniph's current range. Uniqlo, the low-end, mass market "Gap of Japan"! Sure, they're preparing for a high-end, upmarket launch in the US. And sure, Graniph itself has diluted its original flavor, delegating its shirt patterns to a series of guest designers from all over the world.
But it struck me that this was a convergence too far, another example of how "ubiquity is the abyss". Like iPod pop, or like Superflat, things die not because of obscurity, but because of mainstream acceptance. Spreading yourself so thin that you're available everywhere paradoxically means that you're lost, and nowhere. And Graniph, a little thread that joins up five years of my 21st century life, from Shimokita through 9/11 and right into my records (vain attempts to reconcile irreconcilables by mad splicing) may just have lost itself in the abyss of ubiquity.
Hey, that would make a good text on a t-shirt, maybe spliced with a splashy crow.
My life in the early 21st century is measured out in Graniph shirts: here I am, a year later, having left paranoid, scary, flag-waving New York and settled in Tokyo, wearing a red Helvetica t-shirt boasting one of Graniph's trademark lunatic linguistic borrowings, a German phrase which begins "It is our occupation to give form to language" but then starts disorienteering, google-talking and babbling. It's no accident that I'm talking about this shirt, on that page, as an important part of the preparations for my "Oskar Tennis Champion" album; nostalgia for the rationality of Modernism is evident in the shirt's evocation of Helvetica (Swiss grid graphics), and on the album's evocation of 9/11 (in its title track) as the ultimate silent slapstick bananaskin, played out in a Bauhaus landscape of collapsing Mies and Gropius towers. But you can also see the album's German references gathering in the t-shirt, as well as my extensive use, in the Oskar-Otto-Ocky trilogy, of surreally inept translation, inspired in equal parts by Jinglish and Google's beta language tools. The little t-shirt that could write a whole album!
Graniph used to be called Graphis. It was just one store in Shimo-kitazawa, as far as I know. Now it's a chain. There are Graniph stores in Daikanyama, Ikebukuro, and no doubt elsewhere in Tokyo -- and in Japan. There's also a website, which I believe accepts international orders.
What makes Graniph unique is its amazing fertility. The store has totally different designs every time you go in. You can see the designers jamming constantly, taking their fetishes and themes to new places, but keeping some kind of continuity, too. They like bright colours, but they like cute sobriety too, and to achieve the effect of sobriety they'll raid Swiss design, German philosophy, whatever. Yesterday I was wearing a Graniph shirt with a white-on-grey view of traffic lights and a text (in poorly-copied French) reading "vandoesurg raises here the political dimension of the problem. and he explains that this is incompatible with the principal moments..." You know, really n'importe quoi. Text as texture. Appropriated images spliced with appropriated texts (pakura of startling originality!), in an endless parade which is nevertheless recognizable as the work of one creator.
But what makes Graniph unique also makes it readily copied. Just before I left New York I saw a store on Greene Street in SoHo advertising Uniqlo "graphic" t-shirts which looked remarkably like Graniph's current range. Uniqlo, the low-end, mass market "Gap of Japan"! Sure, they're preparing for a high-end, upmarket launch in the US. And sure, Graniph itself has diluted its original flavor, delegating its shirt patterns to a series of guest designers from all over the world.
But it struck me that this was a convergence too far, another example of how "ubiquity is the abyss". Like iPod pop, or like Superflat, things die not because of obscurity, but because of mainstream acceptance. Spreading yourself so thin that you're available everywhere paradoxically means that you're lost, and nowhere. And Graniph, a little thread that joins up five years of my 21st century life, from Shimokita through 9/11 and right into my records (vain attempts to reconcile irreconcilables by mad splicing) may just have lost itself in the abyss of ubiquity.
Hey, that would make a good text on a t-shirt, maybe spliced with a splashy crow.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 08:25 am (UTC)i love the shirts i bought in japan at tiny little stores around osaka--i only wish i'd bought more. i rarely buy anything here, but on occasion i'll buy one or two on the internet. a lot of the shirts i see anymore remind me of greeting cards--a few major "companies" abusing the same jokes and ideas over and over, complete with spelling errors.
that's the main reason why i started stenciling shirts and clothing: i know that what i make is original since i work from my own ideas. now to start screen printing!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 08:36 am (UTC)I think the problem with the seemingly strange german is caused by using OCR-software (Optical Character Recognition), which can sometimes lead to results like the ones you can see on the Graniph shirts. Or they just don't know the letter 'ß' (which is always replaced with a 'b' on their shirts).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 08:59 am (UTC)Also, on a somewhat-unrelated note, I was listening to an interview of yours from 1993 or so on your website and was particularly amazed by the excerpt from "Pop Stars? Nein, Danke!" in which you state that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people". Although the friendsters and myspaces of the world make one's information terribly out in the open, the musical components of such social network devices have essentially accomplished exactly what you predicted. Thumbs up!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 10:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 01:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 06:08 pm (UTC)you mentioned the inequality in the U.S. thing awhile back
from the WSJ I think. Anyway, the cover of the economist
this week about it. Both Germany and England have similar
inequality (and Japan's inequality has been increasing for
the last 10 years apparently), but the facts can be a bit shocking.
Parental income is a good way of predicting the income of the next generation in the U.S. according to the economist and about 1/2 of children go on to make more than their parents did, the other 1/2 fair less well. Comparitvely in Canada 1/5 of children go on to make less their parents. Hence 80% of Canadains move up the socio-economic ladder while only 50% of Americans do. And of course when measured by other standards the rich in the U.S. are gaining on the middle class rather quickly (according to an old NYT ED the top 1% have seen 256% growth in their income while the middle class have seen about 1% this figure is a bit sensationalist seeing as how the top 1% went from 0.7% to 2.7% gains) Anyway, I don't have your e-mail so sorry for posting in an unrelated thread.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 02:06 pm (UTC)What I found which made me laugh
Date: 2006-06-18 04:17 pm (UTC)http://www.goats.com/store/item/tshirt_donoteat-1.html
I would wear it, but I'm probably the only one.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 05:14 pm (UTC)perhaps you've already discovered the unabashed Japanese-ness of cozygen, but if not, take a look. it'll make you giggle.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 05:18 pm (UTC)in what ways did you use the google language beta tools to produce your lyrics?
from what you say i gather that you did not simply reproduce the google-translated bits as they were, but manipulated them. could you give some examples?
i'm also interested in knowing whether there is an esthetic rationale behind your linguistic experimentation.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 05:48 pm (UTC)umberto eco starts his book "experiences in translation" (http://www.tinet.org/~apym/on-line/reviews/eco.html) by feeding the first lines from the book of genesis (in english) into an online translation tool, and looks at the strange resulting text in spanish "and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters"= "y el alcohol del dios se movio sobre la cara de las aguas"... "and god called the light day"="y el dios llamo el dia ligero" [sorry about the lack of accents]. then he has the translation tool back-translate the spanish text into english, producing: "and the alcohol of the god moved on the face of waters" - "and the god called the slight day".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 08:40 pm (UTC)I basically beta-translated lots of Japanese blogs with Google Language Tools, pasting them into a document then pruning the phrases down to shorter ones, just the bits that struck me as interesting. So what you hear in the final song is a sort of "greatest hits of Google errors". I also mixed in some errors which were OCR-generated.
Just because of the naming of your topic today
Date: 2006-06-18 05:23 pm (UTC)no real reason, just the your title provoked me..
Jinglish
Date: 2006-06-18 05:32 pm (UTC)http://www.engrish.com/ (http://www.engrish.com/)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-18 06:19 pm (UTC)Back home in Berlin now, I'm too embarassed to actually wear it. (Or too protective: I don't actually want to prompt that "oh those crazy Japanese" jibe.)
der.
graniph et moi
Date: 2006-06-18 08:19 pm (UTC)graniph just baught some drawings of mine one month ago! quelle coincidence!
nicku did you get the diary page1 i sent you the other day? you're featured on it,
at your fantastic withney performance
encore bravo!
florence (de gilles et florence)
Re: graniph et moi / Neu Momus track
Date: 2006-06-19 03:54 am (UTC)Shameless plug but still perfect (?) while wearing a Graniph T:
my new Polypunk podcast/radio show is up on my blog with a WORLD EXCLUSIVE (yeah yeah) new track ('The birdcatcher') from Momus forthcoming album ! :)
Antonin / Digiki
www.hellodigiki.com
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-19 06:49 am (UTC)for the record
Date: 2006-06-20 09:40 pm (UTC)"Beauty manifests itself in secret natural laws; the Golden Cut and (lo and behold) Ludolfyahl".
So who or what is Ludolfyahl?
And it even made some sense, for a while...