Meta-retro-fest 2: Click Opera hits and misses of 2006

[imomus]

In which we, the anxious editors of Click Opera, continue to analyze your comment numbers as if they were Nielsen ratings, and are dismayed to find that you don't seem to get as excited about art and design as we do, but love to talk about America.

July 2006

1st Meet the Jerpmans - 89 comments
3rd Empires and dance - 52 comments
4th Bamboo feed - 25 comments

5th Was it lunch, or was it "relational design"? - 11 comments
I thought this was quite an interesting piece, speculating on whether Åbäke and other young design groups might be making something like the design equivalent of Nicolas Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics" (explained here in a long quote from Jerry Saltz). The theme related back to an AIGA Voice piece I'd done the previous November, about conceptual design and whether it was developing a social conscience. The pictures were nice, but the comment ratings ranked as the month's lowest.

6th Saga of a sleeve - 29 comments
7th Kindergarten - 61 comments
8th Whispers about ginger and rice - 23 comments
9th Bonjour Trissa-tesse - 37 comments
10th Epigone pop - 55 comments
11th Making cities work - 39 comments
12th Notes on Syd - 103 comments
13th Very shelfish - 31 comments
14th Sonambiente - 15 comments
15th Get political? We already are! - 100 comments
16th Fumiko's playground - 29 comments
18th The news from Paris - 31 comments
19th Being (just a teensy bit less) digital - 23 comments
20th Notes on Potus - 86 comments
21st The quietest (and hottest) club in the world - 21 comments
24th Why do you come here? - 130 comments
25th Europe is the future - 59 comments
26th The art of pop - 35 comments

5th Cracks in Angrael - 149 comments
As another crisis separates Israel, the US and the UK from the rest of world opinion, and an ICM poll finds that 63% of Britons think the UK is too close to the US, I speculate on how much longer the "coalition of the increasingly unwilling" I've baptised "Angrael" can last.

28th So shoot me - 83 comments
29th Transformed by magazines - 53 comments
30th Fresh milk - 51 comments
31st Can 30% of us drag the rest into the post-industrial age? - 66 comments

August 2006

1st Put two and two together - 96 comments
2nd Talking to a picture of Green - 46 comments
3rd Tony Hannibal Blair - 46 comments
4th Think pink - 83 comments
5th News from Anne - 18 comments
6th Oh! Marxy - 80 comments
7th Happy hosting sought for 11 year-old - 55 comments
8th Story got legs - 62 comments
9th The iceberg listens, melts - 44 comments
10th Optimism moves east - 156 comments
11th Dancing between the unspoken and the unspeakable - 46 comments
12th The cosmopolitanism of the poor - 108 comments
13th Berlin's darkest scene - 53 comments
14th Right about Japan - 46 comments
15th Who the hell do you think I want to be? - 87 comments
16th A bathos ape - 35 comments

17th Unrealpolitik - 188 comments
We restage Darwin's 19th century battles on learning that only 14% of adult Americans think the theory of evolution is "definitely true". Alas, far from a reconstruction of a historic battle, it seems this one rages still. As creationist Christianity continues to hold large numbers of influential people in the world's most powerful (if not its most realistic) nation in its sway, it seems the jury on Darwin's theory of evolution is still, officially, out. Possibly just for lunch, or possibly until the clarion blare of the final trump promised us in the Book of Revelation.

18th Good with faces - 55 comments
19th Analog Baroque TV - 62 comments
20th Bitches without britches - 36 comments
21st Museum of Spring - 48 comments
22nd No bra - 54 comments
23rd Screaming meaning machine - 14 comments
24th Anastasia - 30 comments

26th Wissenschaftsakademie tonite! - 12 comments
I advertise a lecture I'm delivering that evening in a design institute on the Torstrasse. Once again, a visual culture topic leaves commenters cold.

27th I love Lacaton and Vassal! - 25 comments
28th Amigurumi: the slime of empathy - 63 comments
29th The zeroes - 44 comments
30th Piscine Josephine Baker - 19 comments
31st Me and a small annoying idiot - 18 comments

September 2006

1st Yokoland just got bigger - 36 comments
2nd Entropy cotton - 51 comments
3rd The century of the self is over - 35 comments
4th He who says Noh - 22 comments
5th Rough notes on Trade - 43 comments
6th A refreshing feeling that reminds us of whatever we believe in - 37 comments
7th L'Ocky nouveau est arrivé! - 47 comments
8th An Ocky concordance - 35 comments
9th Ample for man? - 37 comments
10th 7 Lies About North Korea - 60 comments
11th Starchitects in Venice - 25 comments
12th Last of the pornotopians - 47 comments
13th Street? We're not worthy! - 36 comments
14th The trip inside - 48 comments
15th Geisai, Janken and the Tam Tam Medusa - 17 comments
16th Let there be a record of your, ahem, gorgeous voice - 54 comments
17th Facial beauty index - 90 comments
18th Beuys and me - 32 comments
19th So farewell, then, Lionheart - 41 comments
20th Mukokuseki diasporans - 24 comments

21st It's so nice to be a beautiful girl - 121 comments
In contrast to a piece about Tokion magazine I'd pulished the day before -- a piece which vaunted a melting-pottish "third culture" in which foreigners and Japanese collaborate -- this one looks at "the kind of implicit semantic and philosophical agreements that only parties raised in the same country can really share... a glimpse into a whole way of being, thinking and feeling." In other words, this is a piece that celebrates Japan's irreducible otherness. Many of you are keen to point out that the film I've chosen to illustrate this is porn... something I've somehow failed to notice. But does that change anything?

22nd Queen Midas - 51 comments
23rd Nobody else knows how to do anything - 35 comments

24th Tape shows Bin Laden alive and well - 17 comments
This piece about an amusing Makoto Aida video in which the artist impersonates a Bin Laden gone to ground in Japan and heavily mellowed by sake tied for the month's least-commented entry along with another piece about the Japanese art scene. Philistines!

25th David Bowie turns nasty - 75 comments
26th Hell phone - 46 comments
27th Local man isn't - 43 comments
28th The real Neo-Marxism - 50 comments
29th Young Gordon - 29 comments
30th When will I see you again? - 62 comments

October 2006

2nd John Bock, bockstar - 14 comments
3rd Flagments - 23 comments
4th Art makes me happy - 35 comments
5th Fear of the Matterhorn - 31 comments
6th Money makes free - 37 comments
7th Ego to eco to ero - 12 comments
8th Oyster pearl - 34 comments
9th Land of the rising daughter - 62 comments
10th Murder the Buddha - 40 comments
11th A monstrous tweefest - 24 comments
12th Shoboplasma - 32 comments
15th London bubbles - 29 comments

16th London 2: People as animals - 8 comments
A day of -- for me -- vast excitement on the London art scene provokes a great shoulder-heaving shrug amongst the readers of Click Opera. Come on, how can Edwina Ashton's people dressed up as animals acting like people leave you this indifferent? People?

17th Holler and scream - 50 comments
18th The office of the future - 13 comments
19th Momus live in Barcelona - 28 comments
21st The "It" System - 27 comments
22nd The roof of the city - 11 comments
23rd Gutevolk are good people - 10 comments
24th Popo: the sound of moral goodness - 13 comments
25th Japanowama - 40 comments
26th 2 Thackrays - 30 comments
27th All about wristbands - 32 comments
28th The homosocial - 58 comments
29th Take my eyes and through them see you - 11 comments
30th Potsdam, 2063 - 30 comments

31st How much are you wearing? - 82 comments
Interestingly enough, street fashion is the only aspect of visual culture that doesn't meet with massive apathy in the comments department. This rewrite of a bling-oriented article in Grazia magazine was the biggest story in a quiet month. You all told me what you were wearing and how much -- or how little -- it cost.

November 2006

1st Nod Currie, hidden hero - 38 comments
2nd Ballads of massive acceptance - 23 comments
3rd Two incidences of beauty - 61 comments
4th What, pushed too far, does it reverse into? - 20 comments
5th Fawkes Noose Network - 22 comments

6th Hisae's Top 5 blog picks - 8 comments
Poor Hisae doesn't provoke much interest with her favourite blogs -- even when one of them turns out to be Marxy's wife's page!

7th Trendy freethinking - 22 comments
8th One eyebrow, four names - 22 comments
9th Japan is portable - 14 comments
10th Who's been damned, what's been planted? - 25 comments
11th A big x to your milky hair - 36 comments
12th 60something - 42 comments
13th Clickoperesque! - 9 comments
14th When you were my pervert octopus, and I was your sex sailor - 45 comments
15th Seasonally expressive - 19 comments
16th Apartment exchange / アパート交換 - 16 comments
In Middle England - 16 comments
17th Breakfast in Brum - 49 comments
18th Panspermingham - 43 comments
19th Forest gets funky - 18 comments
20th Love... or "remasturbation"? - 49 comments
21st Are Wii all becoming Marie Antoinette? - 38 comments
22nd Geodemographics put me in my place - 21 comments
23rd A new theory of everything - 32 comments
24th I murdered a pretty little bonsai tree - 74 comments
25th This week in (what's left of) magazines - 24 comments
26th You kill things to look at them - 23 comments
27th A salty egg - 29 comments
28th 21 square metres into the future - 54 comments
29th Inner bitch, meet inner bastard! - 33 comments

30th Perfect Man Play-Off - 80 comments
Marxy thinks Japanese TV is "low resolution". Using a single cluttered freezeframe from a show devised to please bored housewives, we set out to prove him wrong.

December 2006

1st Pecha kucha is dead - 26 comments
2nd Holidays from being human - 29 comments

3rd Gold and Winter - 3 comments
Indifference sweeps like a grim, wintry wind across an entry about my Tokyo friend Zoren Gold's fashion photography, despite the presence of his gorgeous girlfriend Minoru.

4th Winter bathing ship - 46 comments
5th The presentation of self in everyday life - 75 comments
6th In the art world, increased levels of chatter - 35 comments
7th Splash 22 - 32 comments
8th Some digi-splatter nerdcore for the weekend, sir? - 22 comments

9th Design commentary as propaganda - 104 comments
Aha, you want to talk about America! That's what the internet is for! Or, wait, wait, maybe you want to talk about design? How cunningly I've mixed the two topics up! I'm learning!

10th The CIA calls the tune and the tune is called freedom - 38 comments
11th Dumbiedykes versus the net-and-jet people - 20 comments
12th Curly Carl proudly presents... - 39 comments
13th Flyer Scotsman - 10 comments
14th Voyager and Valerie Dore - 20 comments
15th Randomly generated numbers... or national culture? - 77 comments
17th Postcard from Madrid - 27 comments
18th Madrid generics - 48 comments
19th Tokyo-as-highly-viral-third-culture-style-lab - 26 comments
20th Being narsty to carnts - 77 comments
21st Concerning Moomins - 30 comments
22nd The year in (anything but) music - 72 comments
23rd Berger and Eno propose a cultural boycott of Israel - 68 comments
24th Good pots have errors - 22 comments
25th Gay Christmas Mr Lawrence - 39 comments
27th Bring me your mind-children - 48 comments
28th The 'airy foibles of Rambling Syd Rumpo - 33 comments
29th So hip they're Japanese, so Japanese they're square - 45 comments
30th Six films I could actually stand in 2006 - 42 comments
31st Meta-Retro-Fest 1: Click Opera hits and misses of 2006 - 15 comments

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Art is universally about beauty whilst America is the embodiment of ugliness...What??
Perhaps the 'America' issue could be relegated if the sort of polarised dichotomous debate that charactarised an excessive quotient of last year's postings could be tempered with a modicum of reasoned balance. There is plenty wrong with American society and culture but I lived there long enough to realise that there are some aspects of American culture worth celebrating. This issue and the pro/anti singularity of discourse it produces are becoming a bore, it would benefit Click Opera if it were sidelined for more confab on art and culture in general.
Thomas Scott.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

Eh, I didn't mean to imply that it was America vs. beauty. I just mean that the growing presence of the pro-war West, of surveillance, of aggression should inspire people to focus on and appreciate beauty more often.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

It would also be encouraging of Momus focused more on public or web-based art that is accessible to all people with internet access, instead of local art that can only be experienced first-hand if you live wherever he is at the moment.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There is plenty wrong with American society and culture but I lived there long enough to realise that there are some aspects of American culture worth celebrating.

I do think there's a fundemental difference of perception here between people who say "there is much good as well as bad about x" and people who say "if x is dominant, it must be opposed as a kind of moral obligation".

I am clearly the latter type of person. I feel it's a duty to become an official opposition to anything dominant. We must weaken the strong until they're so weak it's time to strengthen them again. We may, at that point, actually praise some of the very same things we currently blame. This is not inconsistency, but strategy.

[(Anonymous)]

Are we not then waging a cultural warfare, rather than trying to encourage self-doubt or reflective self-questioning awareness in that culture?
My concern Nick, is that blanket opposition to a culture will induce reactionary entrenchment.
Thomas.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, so you think that the British parliamentary system is fundamentally flawed, then? With a government and an opposition which constantly questions and criticizes it? Does that, too, just induce reactionary entrenchment? Or does it hold the government to account?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Of course, I have to quote myself from up the page: negation in itself cannot be the basis of a worldview. But opposition is not just negation. It's also the proposal of an alternative.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(The question then becomes whether one ought to hold up something from within the culture as a desireable alternative, or something outside it. In terms of my UK parliamentary metaphor, that would be like David Cameron endorsing Gordon Brown rather than himself. But I think you'll find a huge number of individual Americans -- from John Cage to Matthew Barney to artist-blogger Sean Talley -- namechecked in a highly positive way on Click Opera. There is no "original sin" in being American here. But I do try to focus on things outside and beyond US culture, because it's really over-represented on the internet, as it is in cinema and on TV.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think that is a fundamentally different model and is not immediately analogous- it is a country questioning itself politically from within as distinct to absolutist opposition to a culture from without. Needless to remark I do of course think that such former accountability is positive, if not vital.
Thomas.

[(Anonymous)]

We are crossing over each others postings here Nick, but I think your addendum posting does clarify matters. I have similar problems to you with the endemic, invasiveness of American culture and as regards it's successive governments' record on political interventionalism don't get started. My original concern was with the concept of blanket opposition to all things American- a sentiment that I find in day to day conversations seems to be becoming too much of a norm.

[(Anonymous)]

Above from Thomas.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, this is how opposition movements get fragmented. We go from opposing the norm to opposing the norm of opposition. In Labour terms, it would be the 80s, with Labour fighting itself rather than Thatcher. In indie rock terms, it's me bitching about Sufjan Stevens rather than Robbie Williams. (Not that I do, mind. Neither of them really feature much in my life at all. A far more effective strategy is just not to mention either of them, and talk about how great New Humans or Gutevolk are instead.)

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I know we disagree on this topic, but I wonder if you couldn't try to see this from truly "strategic" standpoint. You make music that people want to listen to, and which influences your listeners. You observe cultures and report on your firsthand findings, which influences your readers (and those in your proximity, in the case of Whitney-type activities). At these things you excel.

But your "duty to become an official opposition to anything dominant" notion seems doomed as a "strategy" in at least three ways: first, because the positions you take are sometimes fallable; people here who are smarter than I are able to point out flaws in your reasoning. Those flaws, I believe, moot a lot of your related message. Second, because you come off as a reactionary generalizer, which is not a position I can respect (and I know I'm not alone among your readers in that). And third, because your on-line audience is suffering pundit-burnout. We hear the same kind of political pontificating from so many sources that we just close our ears to it. It tells us nothing new -- indeed, it could all be taken cobbled together from a random sampling of Lefty feeds and other bloggers (although you're more erudite than most). I'd think that, rather than having the effect you intended, it has the opposite effect; it makes us less likely to read your other views with much attentiveness.

I wish that the whole comments numbers = value equation were put to rest. I greatly enjoy reading your cultural posts, although I seldom comment on them simply because I have nothing worthwhile to add. I do sometimes comment on your more overtly political posts where I think you're mistaken. It seems to me that you're mistaking quantity for quality, heat for illumination, and apathy for quietness.

For whatever my opinion might be worth here, I have to say that my favorite of your entries last year were "Sleeping in Japan", "Expressway", "Through the looking glass", "Finlayesque", "My life as a living sculpture", "Roomtone: indigenous sound", your two "Tokyo Art Beat-off" entries, "Fatal meets vital", "I love Lacaton and Vassal!", "Anastasia", "The trip inside", "Last of the pornotopians", "Ample for man?" and "60something". Not coincidentally, those are the entries that are the least political and polemic, and the ones that most show your personal observations; they couldn't've been written by anyone else. Coincidentally, they all resulted in fewer than 50 responses. But so what?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Flaws in your reasoning" suggests that the issue at hand is one that could be proved or disproved, but how can that be, when we're essentially arguing a cultural, aesthetic and ethical point; how to live?

I'd say that the posts you list as liking are just the other side of the same coin as the posts you're tired of. They're as political as the political posts are textural (by which I mean the revulsion of those political posts is not reasoned but sensed). If the political posts are a sort of fright and flight, these other posts are the destination of that flight.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized that we were arguing "how to live". If that's your intention, then I think your diatribes against subjectively lumped-together groups like "Americans" is even more folly, and against power structures (e.g., the Bush Administration, American corporations, etc.), simply impotent. I'm interested in how you live. I'm not interested in proselytizing others to live like me, nor am I trying to argue how you should live (you seem to be doing a fine job of living already).

I don't accept the relativist, postmodern view that nothing is provable or disprovable, especially since you're so fond of making definite assertions (America=evil/Americans=whatever, China has "tenderheartedness", etc.) And surely you've noticed that I'm not the only one of your regular readers to call you out on some of your generalizations. Is it possible that all of the rest of us are mistaken?

You see things from your own perspective, as I see things from mine. You may not see things from mine, as I may not see things from yours. But to presume that you have the power to illuminate the world's ills seems quixotic, at best. And the posts that you may intend to be just "as political as (your) political posts are textural" may not effectively be communicated to others in that way. The notion that "all art is political" may be a popular (and rather Maoist) idea, but I find it pretty limited in its truth. Oh, I can hear politics in the background in some of your art posts, but no more than in any other intelligent art observer's musings.

Anyway, I'm afraid that I'm still unconvinced that your preoccupation with the number of responses to your political posts as some sort of indication of their validity/resonance/importance/whatever -- isn't predicated upon some conflation of quantity and quality. I think it's more likely that political posts simply provoke arguments; a review of most of your entries with more than 100 responses demonstrates that. If your goal is to drive up the technorati ratings, then I guess that overt political punditry will be the order of the day.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

how come the fella in your icon is looking upwards? what's up there?

[bricology.livejournal.com]

There's a whole world up there.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

you shouldn't have said that. here he is. sir butter.