Various positions

[imomus]

A slash-friendly series of tiny photos of me in various places over the last month, today, in images harvested from my Flickr page.

October 2nd, New York City. Taken at the New Museum, near the intersection of Prince Street and the Bowery. The building (which opens in a month or so) is by SANAA, and I've become a sort of "SANAA pilgrim", making treks to see their structures. The last one was the Moriyama House in the Tokyo suburbs.

October 4th, Boston. I'm at the ICA Boston, about to give a tour of their show Design Life Now. In the lobby they're showing a huge wallpaper piece by Chiho Aoshima called "The Divine Wind". The original divine wind brought the kamikaze pilots screaming to their deaths, didn't it? Here, instead, a pretty girl, eyes filled with eco-themed tears, lifts her rump and blows out a divine fart.

October 7th, New York. Can pinkness get any more pink than the pinkness in this photograph gets? Rhetorical question. I'm lying on the ground at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, in someone's sculpture installation. The sequence is that this happens just after visits to PS1 (sticker evident on pink t-shirt) and the Noguchi Museum, and just before the obligatory trip to the Family Mart on Astoria Broadway for green tea and mochi cake. It's worrying how my trips through cities are now often these autopilot revisitings of familiar places, on set routes. Then again, I did see Roosevelt Island for the first time that day. What a weird place!

October 10th, New York. You know, when people ask where you're playing in New York and you say "Joe's Pub", they think "Sad tosser, he's playing smaller and smaller venues each time, career dwindling away. A pub now, is it?" But look, Joe's Pub is the Joseph Papp Public Theater on Lafayette Street, and it's this gigantic building with this amazing history (Shakespeare in the Park and so on). What I like, also, is that my New York shows have mostly happened within a couple of blocks of here: they began ten years ago at Fez, under Time Cafe, just a block down Lafayette Street.

October 20th, Paris. Skipping London and Denver (for no other reason than that I couldn't borrow a camera in those cities -- mine is broken at the moment), we find ourselves in Paris. I've dressed up for Toog's wedding like a 1950s chemistry professor, with a £2 Oxfam Lanvin bow tie, or papillon (butterfly), as they call it in French. Hisae, who has joined me in Paris, is dressed for Scottish Country Dancing. Toog and Flo's wedding doesn't contain that -- instead, we do a lot of Japanese City Eating.

October 21st, Paris. Here I am dressed up as the "Marquis de Wifi" (so-called because under my costume there's an iPod Touch). Toog and I were filming a serenade for and with our friends Joseph and Alton, a gay mixed-race couple from Alabama. My idea was to remake the stiff poses of Fassbinder's film Effi Briest, based on Fontane's 19th century novel of the same name. But at the costume shop, bless 'em, Joseph and Alton picked out this royalist garb, which had Frenchmen on the Passage des Panoramas shouting out "Vive le roi!" at me. I am, needless to say, a staunch republican. Far from militating for France to return to its monarchy, I'd like to see Britain overthrowing its geriatric, toothless royals and becoming a republic itself.

October 22nd, Bruxelles. My friend Aki Onda was playing one of his cassette improvisation shows in Brussels, accompanying the projections of Ken Jacobs. The next evening he came round for dinner at the squat where I was playing my show with Sun OK Papi KO. From the stage I gave a little speech about how we'd both done our best work for women (Aki produced some of Tujiko Noriko's work).

October 23rd, Bruxelles (photo by Pasqualino). This is the second of my Brussels concerts, at clothes shop Le Vestiaire. It was an elegant little space, and I performed a totally different set from the night before, except for the re-occurrence of my cover of Sakamoto's "Thatness and Thereness". Afterwards Hisae and I went to catch the night train to Berlin. At first I thought I'd lost the tickets. I found them, put them somewhere I thought was safe, then found I'd lost them again (they must have slipped to the floor between bag and jacket). We boarded the train without tickets, got chucked off at Liege, had to explain ourselves to the police, stayed overnight in a hotel, and returned to Berlin the next day, expensively but interestingly, via Dusseldorf's Japanese quarter.

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

You never cease to amaze me.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Also: more pictures of your bellybutton, please.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

yeah, and where´s the slash.

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

The original Divine Wind was named in honor of the typhoons which wrecked superior Mongol forces on the eve of their attempted invasions of Japan. Use of the word kamikaze to describe suicide attacks during the 1940'a was probably due to American mistranslation. The Japanese characters describing "Divine Wind" and "Special Attack Unit" were very similar.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you for that, obliterati! (And nice to meet you the other week...)

When I look at the Chiho wall piece, all sorts of things influence my reading:

1. First of all, it's an impudently sexy image.

2. Inevitably, since Chiho is rather a sexy woman herself, I imagine her in the same pose.

3. Seeing the title, I think of kamikaze. Then chortle at the bathos involved in making the divine wind into a girl's fart.

4. I think of this as a cartoon idea, essentially. But what takes it beyond that (if it were a cartoon it would be a bit too risqué for a daily paper, but quite at home in an underground manga of some sort) is the mingling of different registers -- comedy with ethics and tragedy.

5. Because the girl is crying for the Earth, her fart becomes a declaration of human solidarity with nature, and especially woman's solidarity with nature. Or does it become a symbol of the very pollution which is destroying the Earth's atmosphere?

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I wonder if people would've thought of you more as a pirate if that royal outfit had been red rather than blue...

[(Anonymous)]

Where's the photo of you dressed as Fonzie? You know, the one where you're jumping the shark.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I've had the temerity to declare you a friend

[ankh156.livejournal.com]

I'm rapidly becoming a fan. All that remains to do is to expose my senses in detail to your music, but somehow I already know I'll like it. (Do you have any streamable ?)

Enjoy your exploits and travels. I'll be keeping a watchful eye (and ear) on things.

clvi

Re: I've had the temerity to declare you a friend

[imomus.livejournal.com]

For the elderly I'm jumping the shark, for the young a dolphin. Lose some, win some, I suppose.

Welcome, Civi.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Actually the musketeer/pirate outfit is kind of turning me on.

STOP MESSING WITH MY HEAD MOMUS.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I KNOW, REALLY! There's nothing that messes with my vagina more than a well-dressed man with a brain. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY'RE DRESSED UP MEDIEVAL-STYLE!

Who the fuck cares about muscle-y supermodels with no brains, anyway? NOT ME!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

WHY DID YOU HAVE TO CALL IT VARIOUS POSITIONS, TOO.

*runs off to cry in the bathroom*

PIRATEN OTP

[trickseybird.livejournal.com]

lolol do you need some ~tissues~

Knitting in the Place du Concord.

[(Anonymous)]

I love a good anti-monarchist rant.
To the guillotine with them all!
First for the chop being that witless, cocooned, auricular monstrosity whose present priorities - educating the children of the working poor on the origin of edible tubers and preaching his 'Harmony' theology - sit a little at odds with being a Bentley-driven, millionaire investor.
Thomas S.

Re: Knitting in the Place du Concord.

[(Anonymous)]

"Concorde, even" said the peddler of misplaced vowels.
Thomas S.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Joseph and Alton are a mixed-race gay couple who live in Alabama. For a few years now they've been asking their favourite artists to serenade them. This is a "production still" from my serenade, filmed in the arcades of Paris after Gilles and Flo's wedding (Gilles is behind the camera). "

I'm imaginging you serenading them with "Space Jews".

The description is also pretty funny -- if they were white and straight, they'd just be "a couple" but holy FUCK a white man... with a BLACK man? Some clarification on the status of such a bizarre union is required. Do you introduce Hisae to people as your Japanese girlfriend?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know you've been gay in London, Kamakouji, but have you ever been gay in Alabama? It matters there that you're a white man with a black man, as much as it matters that you're a man with a man. Possibly more. The serenade is also a Southern tradition, being subverted by these gentlemen, with my absurd help.

[(Anonymous)]

"Here I am dressed up as the "Marquis de Wifi"

I had an uncle that used to work on nuclear submarines up in Scotland for the M.O.D. He once told me a story about how some of his work-colleagues used to drink radioactive water just for a laugh, to take the piss of all the scare-stories going around about the facility they were working at. They were all later to suffer very slow and painful deaths.

Do you seriously think that Apple, Vodaphone, or Nokia as organisations are any more likely to give a crap about who they kill than the M.O.D, Monsanto, or the U.S. Military?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

drink radioactive water just for a laugh, to take the piss of all the scare-stories going around about the facility they were working at. They were all later to suffer very slow and painful deaths.

It's very tempting to call this natural selection, with the barium silver lining that Nature eliminates the overly-macho as well as the downright foolish.

Since they were fellow Scotsmen, however, I shall observe two minutes' silence for the loss of their half-lives.

that old philosophe feeling

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Far from militating for France to return to its monarchy, I'd like to see Britain overthrowing its geriatric, toothless royals and becoming a republic itself.

I sympathize, Nick, but coming from you I find it somewhat unconvincing. For someone who extols the virtues of egalitarianism, collectivism, socialism, and republican virtues, you don't seem terribly keen on living the lifestyle of someone who lives in such a horizontal society. Like your hero Robespierre, I doubt that you truly want to live in a true egalitarian society, but merely another kind of social hierarchy, albeit one in accordance with your own criteria: Soft Aristocracy, you might call it.

This comment brings to mind that old episode in which you and your friends had expressed discomfort at being served by waitstaff, which to me sounded like the fretful, guilty misgivings of a privileged elite who never took their turn bussing tables, washing dishes or cleaning toilets, as has been the long-established rite of passage in republics (up until recently, sadly). This discomfort seemed to be born not of egalitarianism, but rather the instinctive sense of superiority your party had felt towards the waitstaff and the resulting guilt of those feelings--similar to those who cry racism are often nursing racist feelings themselves, I think the cries of classism in this case exposed your own class prejudices. It was more noblesse oblige than noble.

I know the answer, but I'll ask anyway, because it's godawful outside: How do you reconcile these idealized egalitarian notions with your own somewhat aristocratic leanings and attitudes? My own guess is that there's an exoticism in the collectivist mindset that you find appealing, a kind of orientalism. Is this a synthesis of a new political/cultural model in progress we're witnessing, or are we reconciled to this contradiction?

Re: that old philosophe feeling

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

In other words, what ultimately happens when one's ideals is at odds with one's temperament?

Re: that old philosophe feeling

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Needless to say, Whimsy, the removal of the royals is not by any means the dismantling of all social hierarchy. In fact, the removal of privilege-by-birth is likely to be the beginning of privilege-by-ability.

I think I like societies like the Japanese one, where everyone seems "aristocratic".

[essentialskills.livejournal.com]

it's certainly a small world! my girlfriend lives in brussels - just round the corner from le vestiaire actually! - and when i was there last i took a photo of the giant tintin at the railway station, and we took a wander round the flea market and past that building with the tintin cartoon on it. now i'm here again and i'm finding myself recognising parts of brussels from click opera!

[essentialskills.livejournal.com]

incidentally, i agree with your nomination of mr diagonal as a genius - i saw black light orchestra at la nuit blanche and they were fantastic!