Mochi events upgraded from hold to buy
Nov. 11th, 2007 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThere's been a certain amount of grumbling this week about my theme that big central things like cars, phones and recorded music might be, in some sense, over. One commenter called what I was doing "obnoxious speculative Wall Street avant gardism", which made me wonder whether I should put a 20 minute delay on Click Opera and charge premium rates for trend-speculators who want news of these deaths in time to make a killing. This may indeed be about the rise and fall of values on a metaphorical stock exchange -- I don't mind the parallel. It's not happening on Wall Street, though. It's happening here in Berlin, "poor but sexy" laboratory-city where the streets are paved with frost and there are small fortunes in cultural capital to be made by those who know how to put the right style elements together.
Last night there was an interesting event which I can't resist fitting into the week's rolling thematic. Le Petit Mignon hosted a performance in its Staalplaat store on the Torstrasse, a Mochi-Print Yatai by El Shopo, a silkscreen laboratory ("Laboratoire D'Etudes Paraserographiques", the Frenchmen call themselves, faux-pompously). Caucasian chefs manned a Japanese stall (yatai) where they pan-heated shoyu mochi (soy sauce rice cakes) then, using a custom machine, silkscreened on Japanese motifs -- Hokusai's wave, for instance -- using soy-based ink. In the background, field recordings music played. Later there was a performance by noise-actionist Seiji Morimoto, who went out into the cold, climbed a ladder and squeejied the Staalplaat windows. The resulting sound -- an ear-skinning feedback squall -- was relayed back into the shop.
A bunch of stuff went through my head as I watched the Mochi Yatai in action. The stall itself looked really good; nice and warm and festive on a snowy winter evening. The little temporary wooden structure (exactly the kind of "fleeting architecture" the Spacecraft book I mentioned the other day celebrates) was festooned with bold, cheerful Japanese banners and bathed, within, in blue light. As the rice cakes began to warm up, the shop filled with a delicious smell. People clustered round as if watching a cookery show on TV, but of course this wasn't TV or the internet. This was exactly the sort of face-to-face gathering (like conferences, concerts, art biennials, sports events) that complements and completes our screen-bound lives. The share price -- and the sharing fun! -- of this kind of event continues to rise in direction proportion to the amount of our day we spend in solitude, facing a computer screen. To be able to smell, to be able to eat -- sugoy!
I was struck by other things. The music, for instance, was very much "post-music music". As the cakes cooked, no corny beats or earwormy songs tugged at the corners of our consciousness. Instead, field recordings played, transforming the store, schizophonically, into a succession of exotic real locations. Rinus Van Alebeek wasn't there (although he's very much part of this group), but Guillaume, who runs Le Petit Mignon, was at many of Rinus' Kleine Field Recordings Festival events. So -- in this laboratory microworld, anyway -- field-recordings-rather-than-music, or field-recordings-as-music, is also a "share value" on the rise. So, incidentally, is the idea of "concerts without musical instruments". The last Seiji Morimoto concert I saw involved him processing the sounds Rinus made with a calligraphic pen. This one used window-cleaning equipment as the musical generator.
At this point there's always someone who jumps in to object that the avant garde has its own cliches ("Not more no-input mixer! It's become the guitar wank of our time!"), or that people breaking with conventional formats are simply brilliant self-promoters. There is something to that last point -- put on your flyer that someone is going to play the bass guitar and you're likely to elicit yawns, no matter how original the bassist is. But announce that someone will play a squeejie as a musical instrument, and there'll be free edible art too, and you'll draw a respectable crowd even on an icy evening. "What's going on here?" asked a young American tourist who'd just wandered in off the street. I took great delight in telling her, feeling like a total insider even though I'd only just heard about the event myself a day or two before. I also had to admire the stall's menu, a list of prices ranging from €0 for the cakes themselves, through €25 for screenprinted t-shirts, to €1250 for a limited boxed edition of the mochi Silkscreen Machine itself -- a "personal production device" for food and art, or food-as-art.
Although the "cute character festival" doesn't start until next weekend, this also felt very much like a Pictoplasma event (watch an interesting interview with the people who started Pictoplasma here). While the cooking went on below, one of the Elshopo men doodled cute-but-sexy drawings (a bunny chopping up a penis as if it were dough, a portrait of our friend Saiko as she worked at the stall, a sexy girl offering her cute clamshell sex as she bent over) high up on the Staalplaat walls. It had the same interdisciplinary approach (design meets art meets commercial art meets PR), and the same "Japanizing" embrace of cuteness as a value. Japanizing because here (as in the Shobo Shobo organization) were Europeans obsessed with Japan, dressed in Japanese clothes, preparing Japanese food, speaking excellent Japanese, and collaborating (live on Skype, in this instance) with colleagues in Japan. Up on the TV monitor a Japanese movie played (a black-and-white trad-costumed epic from the early 60s). In the back room stood a cardboard cut-out of a Japanese air hostess. And yet real live Japanese people were few -- I think there were precisely three in the room, including Seiji. So this represented an event -- and this is very Berlin -- which was Japanized rather than Japanese.
Who knows where events like this are taking us -- into post-Fluxus marketing, perhaps, or post-music music, or post-Japan Japan? Non-digital events you take digital snaps of "to tell your computer about them the next day and make your computer jealous", maybe? But on a freezing Saturday night in Berlin, stuff like this is a compelling reason to go out, mingle, and drink a cheap bottle of white beer. In aggregate, then, Japanizing Mochi Yatai events are upgraded from "hold" to "buy".
Last night there was an interesting event which I can't resist fitting into the week's rolling thematic. Le Petit Mignon hosted a performance in its Staalplaat store on the Torstrasse, a Mochi-Print Yatai by El Shopo, a silkscreen laboratory ("Laboratoire D'Etudes Paraserographiques", the Frenchmen call themselves, faux-pompously). Caucasian chefs manned a Japanese stall (yatai) where they pan-heated shoyu mochi (soy sauce rice cakes) then, using a custom machine, silkscreened on Japanese motifs -- Hokusai's wave, for instance -- using soy-based ink. In the background, field recordings music played. Later there was a performance by noise-actionist Seiji Morimoto, who went out into the cold, climbed a ladder and squeejied the Staalplaat windows. The resulting sound -- an ear-skinning feedback squall -- was relayed back into the shop.
A bunch of stuff went through my head as I watched the Mochi Yatai in action. The stall itself looked really good; nice and warm and festive on a snowy winter evening. The little temporary wooden structure (exactly the kind of "fleeting architecture" the Spacecraft book I mentioned the other day celebrates) was festooned with bold, cheerful Japanese banners and bathed, within, in blue light. As the rice cakes began to warm up, the shop filled with a delicious smell. People clustered round as if watching a cookery show on TV, but of course this wasn't TV or the internet. This was exactly the sort of face-to-face gathering (like conferences, concerts, art biennials, sports events) that complements and completes our screen-bound lives. The share price -- and the sharing fun! -- of this kind of event continues to rise in direction proportion to the amount of our day we spend in solitude, facing a computer screen. To be able to smell, to be able to eat -- sugoy!
I was struck by other things. The music, for instance, was very much "post-music music". As the cakes cooked, no corny beats or earwormy songs tugged at the corners of our consciousness. Instead, field recordings played, transforming the store, schizophonically, into a succession of exotic real locations. Rinus Van Alebeek wasn't there (although he's very much part of this group), but Guillaume, who runs Le Petit Mignon, was at many of Rinus' Kleine Field Recordings Festival events. So -- in this laboratory microworld, anyway -- field-recordings-rather-than-music, or field-recordings-as-music, is also a "share value" on the rise. So, incidentally, is the idea of "concerts without musical instruments". The last Seiji Morimoto concert I saw involved him processing the sounds Rinus made with a calligraphic pen. This one used window-cleaning equipment as the musical generator.
At this point there's always someone who jumps in to object that the avant garde has its own cliches ("Not more no-input mixer! It's become the guitar wank of our time!"), or that people breaking with conventional formats are simply brilliant self-promoters. There is something to that last point -- put on your flyer that someone is going to play the bass guitar and you're likely to elicit yawns, no matter how original the bassist is. But announce that someone will play a squeejie as a musical instrument, and there'll be free edible art too, and you'll draw a respectable crowd even on an icy evening. "What's going on here?" asked a young American tourist who'd just wandered in off the street. I took great delight in telling her, feeling like a total insider even though I'd only just heard about the event myself a day or two before. I also had to admire the stall's menu, a list of prices ranging from €0 for the cakes themselves, through €25 for screenprinted t-shirts, to €1250 for a limited boxed edition of the mochi Silkscreen Machine itself -- a "personal production device" for food and art, or food-as-art.
Although the "cute character festival" doesn't start until next weekend, this also felt very much like a Pictoplasma event (watch an interesting interview with the people who started Pictoplasma here). While the cooking went on below, one of the Elshopo men doodled cute-but-sexy drawings (a bunny chopping up a penis as if it were dough, a portrait of our friend Saiko as she worked at the stall, a sexy girl offering her cute clamshell sex as she bent over) high up on the Staalplaat walls. It had the same interdisciplinary approach (design meets art meets commercial art meets PR), and the same "Japanizing" embrace of cuteness as a value. Japanizing because here (as in the Shobo Shobo organization) were Europeans obsessed with Japan, dressed in Japanese clothes, preparing Japanese food, speaking excellent Japanese, and collaborating (live on Skype, in this instance) with colleagues in Japan. Up on the TV monitor a Japanese movie played (a black-and-white trad-costumed epic from the early 60s). In the back room stood a cardboard cut-out of a Japanese air hostess. And yet real live Japanese people were few -- I think there were precisely three in the room, including Seiji. So this represented an event -- and this is very Berlin -- which was Japanized rather than Japanese.
Who knows where events like this are taking us -- into post-Fluxus marketing, perhaps, or post-music music, or post-Japan Japan? Non-digital events you take digital snaps of "to tell your computer about them the next day and make your computer jealous", maybe? But on a freezing Saturday night in Berlin, stuff like this is a compelling reason to go out, mingle, and drink a cheap bottle of white beer. In aggregate, then, Japanizing Mochi Yatai events are upgraded from "hold" to "buy".
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 12:47 pm (UTC)Seems like the ability to draw one kanji, or pronounce an "r" the way they do in Japan is an instant ticket to 20 minutes of hotness in the new boing boing that the contemporary art world has become.
You used to champion Japaneseness (or perhaps a flavor of japanization) as a legitimate and realizable life style change. Now it's just as much a novelty as nyotaimori or vending machine camo around here.
Summary: your japan cred may be flagging from enjoying the projections of japan-loathing japanese and japan loving white guys too much.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 01:14 pm (UTC)My idea of gimmicky novelty is shit like this:
Boring, hackneyed cliches aimed at people who know absolutely nothing about the culture besides the stereotypes. I dont think Ive ever seen a post by Momus that has that sort of feel to it.
Let's pretend 'Le Petit Mignon' hosted a food stand that was British. If the stand had little unions jacks on it, served little portions of toad in the hole and the cooked dressed as a beefeater or something, I think you could comfortably say "that's horribly gimmicky."
I think screen printing on mochi is pretty unique and fun. Sure, the kanji bandana the cook is wearing and the hokusai's wave as one of the screen prints is bordering on Japanese stereotype naff, but on the whole, I dont think its offensively tacky.
How exactly does someone enjoy aspects of a foreign culture without being accused of treating said culture as a gimmicky novelty? What's the legitimate way to champion Japaneseness?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 01:43 pm (UTC)It's not often I feel better informed or cooler than momus, so it must have been a slow news day.
By the way, about the uniqueness of this, it is true that its not common in japan to have custom printed food. You can pretty much only do that stuff in the tourist traps. It would be hard to be more toad-in-the-hole than this without changing the music.
On the topics of stock market thinking and custom printing: a suit (https://www.scabal.com/index.php?page=specialeditions_Private%20Line)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 02:19 pm (UTC)Horses for courses. Although your post wasnt so much "Meh, this is kinda dull" as much as "You used to champion Japaneseness as a lifestyle!" so I'm just curious -- what is your idea of "living a Japanese lifestyle" as opposed to just being gimmicky?
"about the uniqueness of this, it is true that its not common in japan to have custom printed food. You can pretty much only do that stuff in the tourist traps."
Yeah, I'll give you that. Perhaps it was bordering on the naff, but it wasn't flagrantly so, I thought it seemed cute and fun. Does everything have to be big expression of intellectual outpourings and legitimacy?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 02:57 pm (UTC)though I do still find this post a bit out of character for momus (minus his response to his response to your response to my response). It just doesn't sound far removed from TGIKinyoubi's... but I've always been down on his arty folks entertaining arty folks posts. If they're gonna be arty they could at least be creative.
I like him less insulated perhaps? I was sort of amazed that there was no post on oink's closure, or the chinese decision that in the mid term their money is safer in euros.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 04:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 01:23 pm (UTC)Japanzing events here are part of an emerging third culture (http://imomus.livejournal.com/249096.html), same as an evening at Super-Deluxe or a flip through Tokion magazine or a Lullatone gig might be to those in Japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 01:39 pm (UTC)In a wider way, last night was the place where graphic design MEETS character design, where catering meets limited edition artwork, where cute culture meets Japanophile culture, where field recordings meets noise, where Pictoplasma meets the Kleine Field Recordings Festival, where Berlin meets Tokyo, and so on and so on. A "field of encounter", blah blah blah.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-11 02:20 pm (UTC)MEETS
Date: 2007-11-11 06:18 pm (UTC)the safe, polite, self-congratulatory creativite output plus the equally lame non-critical reply. lowest common denominator. (of course there are exceptions) it will give us stuff like , well, screen-printed mochi. on the big corporate level it gives us stuff that looks like all the other stuff.