URLS of hazard

[imomus]

Webpage about Tokyo-ga
Liking Ozu more and more (just saw 'Floating Weeds' at a retrospective here in Osaka), I rented Wim Wenders' 1985 Ozu tribute documentary 'Tokyo-ga'. Underwhelmed. It's really just Wim and Solveig on their first trip to Tokyo, filming whatever. With pretentious ruminations on image-making and some cod-existentialist saxophone music. Totally misses the warmth and humanity of Ozu, and totally misses the brilliant modernity of Tokyo too. The film implies that a sense of Japaneseness has ebbed away, replaced by American lifestyles. But in fact Japan has made its own completely Japanese forms of modernity and post-modernity, and exported them worldwide. Japaneseness has not ebbed away since the time of Ozu, just shifted shape.



Other recent URLs:

24 Hour Party People website
Rented the film on DVD from Tsutaya. Steve Coogan catches Tony Wilson rather well. The scene with Howard Devoto as a toilet cleaner is poignant. I miss the otherness of early Factory, though; there's lots of Vinny Reilly, but where are Section 25 and the Stockholm Monsters?

Icon magazine article on the conservatism of the London visual environment
It's difficult, sitting in the lovely illuminated chaos of a very 21st century Japanese city, not to feel a little smug reading this complaint about the timidity of London's commercial visual environment.

A review in Frieze of Inna Gadda Da Vida at Tate Britain
In which the last nail is driven into the coffin of YBA. 'The show consists of numerous expensive looking vitrines, brightly coloured wallpaper and an outsized Spam sandwich and could conceivably exist as a spoof exhibition scene from an Austin Powers movie.'

Village Voice article on the textural richness of spam
Makes the case for spam and verbal web garbage as a new sort of poetry. Overlaps with my use of Babelfish as disorienteering.

Photo of Audium: a theatre of sound-sculptured space in San Francisco
It looks cool, but has anyone heard it? How was it?

Videos by Wolf Wan Bau and title sequences by Smith and Foulkes
Four Tet strike me as a remarkably boring group with interesting videos. My friend Hisae is in one of them, playing a vomiting businessman.

Franz Ferdinand videos
Franz Ferdinand are a good guitar pop group. But I'd say they're closer to Altered Images than Josef K. And what year is this anyway? Are we just getting better and better at 1978?

Some faux 8 bit computer games on the Home Star Runner site
I like the one where you're a dragon and have to squelch monks. Or the one where you have to hit the seagull with the bouncing tyre.

Michael Beirut on the Graphic Design Olympics
Some good links to the Olympic graphics of the past.

Spermania Vol 4 preview clips
Written on the body, written on the face. Calligraphic. Utterly guttural abandon.

Donald Barthelme stories
I love Donald Barthelme. And now I'm even going to read him too.

American Mavericks: Between a rock and a hard place
Must get Robert Ashley's 'Perfect Lives'.

Comments

[fringebenefits.livejournal.com]

I love your thoughts.

"Are we just getting better and better at 1978?"

[augstone.livejournal.com]

good point. though with interpol, the rapture, etc. i thought we were plateau-ing down the mountain from 1981.

Re: "Are we just getting better and better at 1978?"

[commodorevic.livejournal.com]

I'm getting better at 1994 era SeBADoh.

Re: "Are we just getting better and better at 1978?"

[augstone.livejournal.com]

heh. 1992 era sebadoh was better.

[joopy.livejournal.com]

Oh Franz Ferdinand. My love for them was (re)confirmed when I saw the wannabe-dada music video.

theatre of sound-sculptured space

[dizzyspells.livejournal.com]

I'm in the Bay, I'll have to check this out. Thank you for the link.

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

ocean stole ambrosia calamity trioxide cathy mckeon digitalis
ambulant cautious machination victrola spastic coiffure craggy spica
squashy vendor cling cat claude tumult allusion expository

(I keep meaning to do something with this bit of spam. I was always very taken with the word digitalis, even after I found out what it meant)

[milkyfingers.livejournal.com]

i absolutely adore yasujiro ozu.
tokyo story breaks my heart every time i watch it.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

I was planning on creating a community named spamdada based on the random word generations. It seems also that a lot of it isn't actually random words. There are passages from many 'classic' books and poets. Dickens and Poe and Blake for instance. In my hunt to see if someone else had already begun such a community I came across spam_poetry

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

It's difficult, sitting in the lovely illuminated chaos of a very 21st century Japanese city, not to feel a little smug reading this complaint about the timidity of London's commercial visual environment.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/35390.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But to me Slow Life is not incompatible with Fast Information.

Some Japanese leaving Japan cite 'too much information' as a reason for their flight. Kahimi Karie, for instance, used to say 'Tokyo and New York are too-much-information cities, but Paris is relaxing.' She and Cornelius more or less split up because he preferred the high information environment of Tokyo and didn't want to join her in Paris.

I suppose I divide information into noise, light, speed. My ideal Slow Life society would remove fast traffic and loud noise while increasing the speed of information in the form of high speed internet, neons and 'electrongraphics (http://www.imomus.com/thought221101.html)' -- in the words of Sam Jacob in that Icon article, the architecture of a 'future where architecture isn't built by builders out of stuff, but is taped in a studio, edited on Avid, and beamed via satellite'. Japan manages to combine hectic ludic commerical overstimulation (think pachinko) with shadows, spirituality and stillness (the temple next door). Perhaps because a void is recognised and celebrated at the centre of both.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Speaking of Cornelius, and speaking of this Japanese balancing act between overstimulation and shadows, think of 'Fantasma' as his too-much-information album and 'Point' as his slow life album. Two ways of celebrating the same emptiness.)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Ha ha...a clever analogy.

I am speaking heresies here: I gave 'Fantasma' the benefit of the doubt, but unfortunately even after a long period of time I still found most of it unlistenable. I find his palette in general too 'sharp' and shrill, even "Point". Needs to put his albums in a river for 20 years, then release them, nice and eroded.

Lullatone City would be a nice, cool, rainy place. What band or album would make the ideal city, I wonder? Anyone?

his slow life album

[commodorevic.livejournal.com]

I found Point to be a fairly boring disappointment for this very reason. I was looking for my japanese fix of hyper-genius cross pollination and over-stimulation. But now I will go back and give the full album a proper listen.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

A quiet, slow kaleidoscope? I can see the appeal--as long as the original intent is not perverted (see the International Style). Electrongraphic architecture would have to get much, much more seamless and subtle, because building an urban environment around intrusive, inescapable walls and rivers of 'electrongraphics' is just an updated version of the same misguided thinking that led Robert Moses and his ilk to reconfigure urban environments to cars. Urbanity should be a place where humans are most at home, no?

Like Kahimi Karie, I too prefer Paris because the scale is so human, at least in comparison to Manhattan (I cannot speak for Tokyo's ebb and flow of scale). Paris is also a city that actually savors its past (Gads, a postmodern sin! Don't these Parisians know that history is over, that all we have to look forward to is the next ephermeral distraction?) Perhaps they savor it too much, but I still think that it is to their credit, and it has made Paris one of the most unique cities on Earth, for good or ill. But whatever Paris is, she's not a 'shoddy, harshly-lit soulless bore'.

I think that I should at least be commended for going through this screed without once invoking Jane Jacobs. (Oops...)

Grow the future,
W

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I forget who said that Manhattan was a battleground, but Paris is a ruined garden...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You make some lovely points there, Whimsy. I'd just like to pick up on savors its past.. a postmodern sin. This may be heresy too, but for me postmodernism is all about savouring the past, repackaging the past, plundering, recontextualising, resplicing. The typical postmodern city centre has cleaned up historical buildings in it and seems to aspire to being a Disney version of its former self. You and I, Whimsy, are very much postmodernist dandies, though I can hear you shrieking at the idea. The Icon article was less pomo than we are; it was deploring the postmodern policy of Westminster planners who are determined to keep their part of London in aspic, and contrasting it with the more modernist, futurist attitude of the financial district, the City of London, which allows tall buildings and still looks like something Mies would recognise. It's a contest between a certain Disney-style Post-Modernism versus Miesian Modernism that the article is setting up. The irony is that the writer's self-consciously Modernist attitude is itself Post-Modernist, since he's essentially staging a revival of Modernist ideas that go all the way back to the Futurists.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Au contraire--I am very much aware of that fact, although I wonder if postmodernism just went by other names before it was called 'postmoderism'. An argument could be made that dandies, in a sense, were among the first postmodernists. That said, I admit that I have an ambivalent attitude (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/14404.html#cutid1) towards pomo at times, at least insofar as it's practitioners (and who isn't) use the past merely as a pretext for making the future less interesting and rich than it should be.

I admit that I do tire of everything having quotation marks, sometimes (not to mention that the blasted things itch my shoulders). A more thoughtful version of postmodernism would be preferable to a perverse return to a stringent form of modernism; as you've pointed out: that train has, like, sailed.

True to form, I have yet again taken up entirely too much of your e-space, and so I shall cease my ramblings for the evening. I bid you a good night.

I am utterly,
W

[scottbateman.livejournal.com]

And but so:

• I am a huge Ozu fan; Tokyo Story is so wonderful and devestating. I want to pick up the new Criterion Collection 2-DVD release of Floating Weeds (one disc is his original 1930-something version of the same film) when I get you know, some money again someday.
• Speaking of British bands stuck in 1978, have you heard Bloc Party's song "Banquet"...?

[giggomachine.livejournal.com]

there's something about ozu that seems to inspire tributes.
for this year's cinematexas short film festival, there's 2.
"i was born but..." by roddy bogawa. roddy's biography as a version of the film, and anthony coleman doing a live score to the original. should be good.

cheers

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I agree with your opinion about Tokyo-ga. It is a lame, whiny documentary that turned off from Ozu for ages and also cast a whole new (negative) light on Wenders's films for me. Wim and Tokyo-ga are truly rockists!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's one interesting thought in Wenders' documentary. He says that, in the age of television (and 1985 is still the age of television) the centre of the world is wherever there's a TV. Since Japan makes all the TVs we watch, that puts Japan at the centre of the world. But then he spoils this thought by saying that Japanese TVs serve only to pump American programming throughout the world, illustrating this with a shot of a TV; a John Wayne movie ending and NHK closing down with the national anthem and the Japanese flag.

How things have changed! Not only are there never any American movies on Japanese TV now (it's all Japanese chat, comedy and variety shows, and the networks never shut down), but in 2004 television is no longer at the centre of the world. Now 'the centre of the world' is someone using an American computer to pump Japanese media content throughout the world (well, that's what's happening on my Apple, at the centre of my world).

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

There's quite a good documentary about one of Ashley's performance pieces in the Four American Composers series by Peter Greenaway.

Music With Roots in the Ether (http://www.lovely.com/titles/vhsroots.html) a 14 hour documentary series about "post-serial" and "post-Cage" music also looks promising.

Now you like Ozu?

[(Anonymous)]

When I first discovered your web page around 1997, I read an essay you wrote about how you were not as excited by motion pictures as an art form as opposed to books. In it, you mentioned feeling disappointed after watching Tokyo Monogatari (which happens to be one of my favorite movies). Have you changed your views on Ozu`s work?

Re: Now you like Ozu?

[(Anonymous)]

The Article is still in this site, it`s called Graven Images: Momus on Cinema (origianlly written for sights and sounds magazine in 1993), and you wrote " Entranced by the young Japanese director Kaizo Hayashi, I trekked in the rain to Croydon to see Ozu's Tokyo Story, hoping that the famous 'pillow shots' of traditional Japanese cinema would be a revelation. They weren't. I saw what I always see at the cinema: photographed melodrama. But from a lower angle".

Re: Now you like Ozu?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That piece was a sort of polemical iconoclastic op ed thing. The brief from Sight and Sound magazine was for me to rave about films I absolutely adored, darling. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that no film had had anything like the effect music has had on me, so I took that line and it sort of snowballed.

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this healthy slab of links to digest over the afternoon. You should try Wario Ware for the GBA (I think it's called Made in Wario in Japan) if you want an inspired and reverential take on 8-bit/old school gaming. It's a preposterous series of microgames and well worth grabbing out of the hands of school children should the chance present itself.

As for the bukkake, maybe this is what Greenaway's Pillow Book should really have been like. I have a certain fondness for the prurient use of mosaic. I was in a video shop once and had to translate for an irate Syrian diplomat as he tried to obtain a refund. But I can't see anything, he said. I sort of prefer it that way, but that's probably the Protestant in me talking.

[lucanus-cervus.livejournal.com]

Franz Ferdinand are a good guitar pop group. But I'd say they're closer to Altered Images than Josef K. And what year is this anyway? Are we just getting better and better at 1978?

Altered images, fine. Someone who remixed their new single ("Michael" 7") was born in 1978 and couldn't care less that we are improving on that year. 1978 forever.

SB@simonbookish.com

x x x

[lucanus-cervus.livejournal.com]

...and Vini Reilly! (x x x x x x)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's only the old who

a) know and
b) care

that art isn't new. Only the old really have any motive to demand originality. That motive is their fear of boredom, repetition and diminishing returns.

faux 80s video game

[(Anonymous)]

technology leads to post-modern revivalism because with new technology it is easy to make and imitate the heights of old technology. so, homestar runner celebrates the 8-bit games by going and making them.

we can all relive our childhoods through creative atavistic endeavours.

Audium

[toreadorsf.livejournal.com]

I went to Audium a few years ago. Definitely worth a visit. It has a feeling that is a mix of retro-futurist and Harry Partch. It's a good idea to show up a little early so you can soak in the ambience of the waiting area before going into the auditorium.