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".
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Date: 2007-11-11 01:00 pm (UTC)