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

[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