I become a sex object. And it's wonderful.

[imomus]

One of the summer's oddest developments is the emergence of a LiveJournal community in which women in their teens and twenties (some of them raised in Mormon households) celebrate -- both ironically and unironically -- a certain 47 year-old "musician, blogger, columnist, all around Renaissance man" in a spirit defiantly at odds with his own self-mediations. While Momus discusses Uzbek teahouses, the LOLZ girls are busy making stickers saying "I wish I was Asian so I could have his babies!" and "I sometimes wish that he would keep me in his secret death chamber". While Momus delivers a lecture on the Straubs and boringness, the LOLZGIRLZ are showing a Momus pumpkin they made as a church activity, or indoctrinating their little brothers into Momuslove, or writing slash porn in which Momus makes out with the drummer from McFly. Their latest effort is a series of MS Paint pictures which, with the girlz' permission, I'd like to share with you today.



The cribbage joke is a reference to "pegging", a phrase the girlz used. When I looked it up I learned that pegging is "the act of penetrating a person's anus with a strap-on dildo" and "in cribbage, the use of pegs to keep score".

Comments

Cribbage...

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

..."Summer Holiday 1999" now has a far different connotation in the comments than I had originally thought!

[ishinagami.livejournal.com]

You know your popular with the ladies when they write slash fiction about you.

[blackmoth.livejournal.com]

I will never again doubt your blogging prowess. This is the top!

LAAAHHHHVVE!

[womanonfire.livejournal.com]

how did you call it once?

"travestied with love"

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

Is it not just a load of blokes taking the piss?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They'll be along in a minute to answer that, Rhodri.

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

If they answer it by mocking up a picture of me and you trampolining together hand in hand, in a suburban back garden, then I'll be pretty satsified.

Well...

[(Anonymous)]

It was bound to happen!

While I'm here, could you answer a couple of questions about your music: explain briefly the inspiration behind your song 'Dr Cat'. I kind of get the Under Milk Wood characters, but what's an 'enourmous roofagasm'?

Ex Erotomane sounds like a Momus swansong. Is it intended this way?

[loveonice.livejournal.com]

Oh i'm so joining that

Re: Well...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ex Erotomane sounds like a Momus swansong. Is it intended this way?

I like to end all my albums with a swansong, just in case I get run over by a bus. It's the equivalent of wearing clean underpants.

explain briefly the inspiration behind your song 'Dr Cat'

Dr Cat is partly inspired by this page (http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/miscans.html) of hilarious mis-scans of Eno interviews by the maker of Eno web. The Ocky Milk album employs various "disorienteering techniques" to generate a kind of automatic poetry -- poor web translation is one of them, poor OCR scanning another. Both are used in the Dr Cat song.

"Enormous roofgasm", though, is a personal reference. I once had sex on the roof of a building in New York and afterwards me and the party involved talked about our "roofgasm".

Re: Well...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the chorus comes from the Pitchfork album rating system, I'd forgotten that!

10.0: Essential
9.5-9.9: Spectacular
9.0-9.4: Amazing
8.5-8.9: Exceptional; will likely rank among writer's top ten albums of the year
8.0-8.4: Very good
7.5-7.9: Above average; enjoyable
7.0-7.4: Not brilliant, but nice enough
6.0-6.9: Has its moments, but isn't strong
5.0-5.9: Mediocre; not good, but not awful
4.0-4.9: Just below average; bad outweighs good by just a little bit
3.0-3.9: Definitely below average, but a few redeeming qualities
2.0-2.9: Heard worse, but still pretty bad
1.0-1.9: Awful; not a single pleasant track
0.0-0.9: Breaks new ground for terrible

When Pitchfork got around to reviewing Ocky (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/41660-ocky-milk) it got a 6!

Re: Well...

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

I once had sex on the floor of a building in Leeds. Afterwards, me and the party involved talked about how terrible it had been.

Re: Well...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're getting lots of Independent and Daily Mail readers sending your their underwear after seeing you splashed all over their papers this week, anyway, Rhodri!

Re: Well...

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Now Thats What I call Pegging!

Re: Well...

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

The Mail readers' underwear won't fit through the letterbox.

[(Anonymous)]

When I was a teenager, you and your music meant a lot to me, Momus. There was this sense of of mystique and glamour and I used to get terribly excited when you had a new album out. Fifteen years later, I see you've become just another nerd with a blog, probably more invested in momus_lolz than making music. Moral of the tale: you should never meet your heroes or read their blogs.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

That came out a bit nastier than I meant, sorry.

Fact remains, this blog has kind of killed my interest in you as a musician/artist.

[(Anonymous)]

But, to pursue my thoughts on the matter, it strikes me that my loss of interest in you actually reflects some of your own ideas on glamour as "Other". Having not thought of you in years, I google you up, and see you have a blog. I read some entries. Oh. Momus is just another guy on the internet now. Spouting his ideas - some interesting, some not - and telling us all about his day. He had tea with so and so, he doesn't like such and such a blog. It's the accumulation of it all which is so quotidian, so inimical to glamour, to "Other". I think it's just not possible to remain glamorous and have a daily blog at the same time. Unless it's just a picture blog with no words or something. And even then you'd have to choose the pics pretty judiciously.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a fascinating thing, the negotiation of distance / proximity, and the relationship of "stars" to their "fans". I think the vector of disappointment you're describing is as integral to it as the slash-fantasy stuff going on on the LOLZ site. I've been through it plenty of times myself.

Am I disappointed that Howard Devoto (http://youtube.com/user/dutylux) is a photo editor, that Holger Hiller is teaching German, that David Bowie chats on his site with the handle "Sailor"? That they've given up music, or make what I think of as mediocre music? Sure I am, but I'm also glad they didn't die young (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iH1J3ynjjLi1uJ24_EH5FR1-M5JQ).

There's almost a "Last Temptation of Christ" element to aging happily, mellowing like an autumnal sunflower. Yes, the last temptation is simply to wilt slowly, according to the natural cycles. And maybe write a novel, and keep doing your one album a year (record companies won't let you do more), and enjoy having teenage girls dreaming about you when you're old enough to be their dad.

I wrote something to Holger Hiller before meeting him, about the "need to betray":

"I know very well how annoying it can be to be pursued by fans, especially when they say things like "I really can't understand why you aren't better known!", or make themselves unappointed ambassadors for your work. This sort of thing has happened to me, and my natural instinct is to disappoint, evade, exploit, annoy and betray these "ambassadors". Above all, what's awkward is the inequality, the difference in levels. I want to say "I'm really not so admirable"."

This blog is saying both "Hey, unlike most pop stars there really is some substance to me, and I'm actually interested in the world around me, and all the concerns you hear in my music can actually be elaborated daily in a blog". In other words, "hey, I'm admirable". But it's also saying "I'm really not so admirable" in that distant and godlike way that most rock idols cultivate. In that respect, I'd rather be some weird combination of Judas and the non-crucified Christ of Scorsese's film. Hey, there's a song in that! Maybe David Bowie could play Pontius Pilate!

[(Anonymous)]

It must be terrible for you to have your little fantasy destroyed like that. How I feel for you! Bad Momus!

duh

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Momus,

For what it's worth, I love you to pieces, but not in a I-wanna-sleep-with-you kind of way. More in a you're-one-of-my-distant-aesthetic-parents sort of way. Kind of like, well, Joseph Beuys.

I enjoy it immensely. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I hear what you're saying. Of course I know that rock stars or great artists or novelists or whatever aren't really godlike or admirable and can be quite ordinary or petty in their concerns, I think we all know that, but then we suspend disbelief at the same time. And that's the mark of something happening, when we can suspend that disbelief. The easiest way to do that, I guess, is by not knowing very much about the person in the first place, beyond the public mask. The kind of blogging you indulge in doesn't permit that. Obviously you get a lot out of your blogging or you wouldn't be so assiduous about it, but I'm not sure your art gets a lot out of it. I do think it diminishes that side of things. There aren't many artists who we think more of because of their blogging, and if artists are seduced into it, it's by far the best (for their persona as artist) if they do it in a fairly self-effacing way, like David Byrne for instance, where you don't learn anything much about Byrne himself, who he lives with, whether he has kids, what his taste in women is, whether he likes tea or coffee, etc etc. Your blog - you say it tells a contradictory "truth" about you, that you're simultaneously more and less admirable than I think you are. I guess I'm not interested in that kind of truth from an artist. I don't really want to know who you "really" are.

But maybe the work shines through in the end anyway. I've noticed that Bowie, for instance, was desperately unfashionable for the longest of times. But for the past few years he's been fashionable again. Which is interesting, because it's not because he's suddenly making compelling records again. It's because finally, with a bit of distance, we can see that what he did in the seventies was truly marvellous, so it doesn't matter what kind of mediocrity he came up with later. The good stuff wins and defines him. The bad stuff doesn't.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It really is meta week!

I really don't think there's a signficant difference between my songs and my blog entries. Sure, "The Age of Information" (song) gets repeated whereas "The Age of Information" (blog entry) is probably read at breakfast then forgotten. You can whistle one in the bath, the other you read.

Rather than saying one is "art", the other "not art", I'd rather say one is part of an old culture of broadcasting, scarcity, high entry barriers to communication, distance, authority. The other is part of the new culture of immediacy, ubiquity, low-to-no entry barriers, dialogue, social flattening. Disrespect is integral to that, which is why I welcome the Anons even when they flame.

The main difference between my blog and Byrne's is that Byrne disallows comments. Actually, we do learn a lot about his personal life from his blog. He's always going on about how he visited (girlfriend) Cindy Sherman's gallerist and so on.

As for "I don't want to know who you really are", I'm not sure whether to advise you to avoid the blog or avoid the records! Probably the records are more deadly in that respect.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, you're right, Byrne's disallowing of comments is the big difference. Being able to interrogate you here and now, that fundamentally changes the categories of content producer and consumer.

However, I think you're being disingenuous in saying there's no significant difference between songs and blog entries. It may be pompous to use the word "art" - let's just say a good song or a film or a book first and foremost transports us to somewhere different and evokes emotion. I don't think that's true of an incisive blog entry, blogging is more derivative of op-ed commentary.