URLS of hazard
Aug. 26th, 2004 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWebpage 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'.
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'.