Five easy pieces

[imomus]

1. Last July I visited the Baltic Mill in Gateshead, taken over at the time by Japanese artists (Yoshitomo Nara + Graf and Mariko Mori). Now I have work of my own in the building. In A Spoken Word Exhibition, which opened yesterday and runs until March 15th, you can request staff (Baltic Crew, they're called) anywhere in the building to whisper you a Momus text piece. They'll consult a calendar and whisper in your ear a phrase taken from the headings of past entries in Click Opera. Today's phrase, for instance, is "So, 1998, what are you up to?"



2. I don't know if it's right to call Jordan Fish a perfectionist; every time he makes a new cut of his video for the Momus / Germlin cover of Bowie's Ashes to Ashes it's more glitchy. But the glitches have become, in this new version, a super-saturated thing of beauty. "It's so colourful, pushing towards a kind of digital abstraction," I wrote to Jordan when he alerted me to the new video. "It makes you feel like someone who's watched 56 hours of continuous MTV and just has pop videos melting out of the brain. But that fits Joe's music well, he creates the same kind of feeling with his sound. Somehow the colours are so rich now that it starts to look like a glitch version of Gustav Klimt -- digital mannerism of some kind.... Kandinsky!"

[Error: unknown template video]

I'll embed it here, but the Quicktime version is recommended for those who want to see Jordan's lo-res in the hi-res it deserves. In his blog entry about the new Ashes vid Jordan says it was somewhat inspired by Paperrad's Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake video.

3. My friend (and Star Forever!) Florence Manlik has launched a website featuring her delicately baroque artworks, recommended to commissioning art editors everywhere (but do make sure you don't print them out of register).

4. Without changing my address, I moved the other day from the world's third richest nation to its fourth -- Germany has slipped one place down the economic league table of nations, overtaken, of course, by China. Japan apparently has only three to four years left in the number two spot before China takes it.

5. A meme: What's Your Japanese Name? Mine is:

飯野 Iino (rice plains) 溌春 Hatsuharu (vigorous spring time)
(if I feed in "Nicholas Currie"), or

藤原 Fujiwara (wisteria fields) 真一 Shinichi (one truth)
(if I feed in "Currie Nick").

Can I cheat and combine them? I rather fancy being Shinichi Hatsuhara: one truth: vigorous springtime.

Comments

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

My authentic japanese name is 後藤 Gouto (behind wisteria) 忠義 Tadayoshi (loyal and righteous).
Take your real japanese name generator! today! (http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/969/)
Created with Rum and Monkey (http://rumandmonkey.com/)'s Name Generator Generator (http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/).

[(Anonymous)]

momus, you make me think.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Currie
Habitational name from Currie in Midlothian, first recorded in this form in 1230. It is derived from Gaelic curraigh, dative case of currach ‘wet plain’, ‘marsh’.


ねたくて Netakute
Wetland, marsh

Wiki: "Many Japanese family names derive from features of the rural landscape; for example, Ishikawa (石川) means "stone river," Yamamoto (山本) means "the base of the mountain," and Inoue (井上) means "above the well."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There are two explanations for the name Currie, the East Coast one and the West Coast one. The East Coast one is, as you say, based on the Midlothian town of Currie. The West Coast one says that "Currie" is an anglicization of the Gaelic name Vurich or MacVurich. Since my ancestors are all West Coast Gaelic speakers (my parents moved from Glasgow to Perthshire and then Edinburgh shortly after I was born, in a 44-mile version of "manifest destiny"), the West Coast version explains my name. I've never liked "Currie" -- Vurich is much better.

[(Anonymous)]

Never seen such a vividly unwatchable video, tremendously wanky, and really rather dull, all said and done. The music is very good, however.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

When Jordan does the film festival poster, it's going to say, amongst the endorsements, "Vividly... tremendously... good" -- Anon.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

My authentic japanese name is 山下 Yamashita (under the mountain) 紅野 Kureno (crimson plains).
Take your real japanese name generator! today! (http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/969/)
Created with Rum and Monkey (http://rumandmonkey.com/)'s Name Generator Generator (http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/).

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

The question is, why?

[diesel-pioneer.livejournal.com]

Oh Momus, how you mock those among us not privileged enough to see the Jordan Fish post to which you link :(

[spaglet.livejournal.com]

I'd like to ask that one too. Mine bears no relation to my actual name. (Middle eastern in distant, distant origins, I don't look a thing like it.)

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Well, I kinda looked at Momus' examples and saw that Iino (is it the last name?) is made up of the two most common letters in Nicholas Currie. Hatsuharu comes from the letters in bold: Nich</>olas Currie.

I noticed that, when put in my entire name with both of my middle names I would still get the same last name because my first name and my last name ends with an N.

中島 Nakashima (center of the island) 紫呉 Shigure (giving violet).

Sorry if I ruined the "fun mystery" of the name generator but it just came to me. And the blacksmith does his job while the iron is still hot, right?

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Of course, something was overlooked and made everything collapse.

Hatsuharu comes from the letters Nic h ol as C ur rie.
Yeah.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

6. Hi, would it be at all possible for you to reduce the number of entries on one page? I know it's a lot to ask, but it might well mean that my ragged old pc wouldn't crash rather-more-horrifically-than-that-one-in-thenews-yesterday every time it goes near your website. Cheers!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just arbitrarily set it to 20, maybe I'll try 10 instead.

Pleasure principled

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I wonder if I could take the flaming liberty of adding a sixth 'easy piece'. It's a new website. I think it may be of interest to a significant number of Click Opera readers, if they're not already aware of it:

http://pleasureprincipled.com/

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

my bad! it's open season now.

lava wank

[(Anonymous)]

The video struck me as a tad cheap lava lamp. Gustav Klimt was no where around that I could see. I'm not a fan of your take on this song either, much prefer "The Next Time".

[diesel-pioneer.livejournal.com]

Thankyou, Mr. Fish, for rectifying this "microfascism of the intercosmos".

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

s'my job!

[spaglet.livejournal.com]

You're probably right. But it's still an interesting cultural experience :-)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Fish, you're looking like the white Ike Turner. Can I, um...hang out with you?

Ashes to Ashes

[(Anonymous)]

I would say Jordan Fish is a perfectionist in doing a great job of covering the same arrangement of Lassigue Bendthaus's - Ashes to ashes - 320 on the "La musique de Paris Derniere (Vol 1)" CD released in 2000.

old #rpf

[mongoltrophies.livejournal.com]

No, no, it's six easy pieces. And where are the six not-so-easy pieces?

Re: Ashes to Ashes

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The music isn't by Jordan Fish, it's by Joe Howe, aka Germlin, aka Gay Against You, aka Ben Butler and Mousepad. And kudos to Uwe Schmidt (it is him, isn't it?) for his pop artificielle cover of Ashes to Ashes in 2000 (extract here (http://www.plong.com/page_pid_85_release_81371_lang_2.aspx)), but if you think its musical vocabulary sounds anything like Joe's, you have a tin ear, quite possibly filled with ashes.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Hit me up if your gon be in new York. We drink tea.

Re: lava wank

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

i obviously don't care what you, or any anonymous coward thinks or says about me (please try), but I also don't consider this a final version. All I did was delete the I-frames from Momus's last .mov and boost the colors. if you know what I'm talking about then you can be as talented and visionary of an artist as me. otherwise, you can continue to live in a giant boring lava lamp.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Will do, Jordan! I should arrive early May.

Re: Ashes to Ashes

[(Anonymous)]

My apologies to you and Jordan Fish. I would say Joe Howe, is a perfectionist in doing a great job of covering a 3 degree of separation arrangement of Lassigue Bendthaus' aka Uwe Schmidt's- Ashes to ashes - 320 on the "La musique de Paris Derniere (Vol 1)" CD released in 2000. Did I say Uwe's was better? Of course not! We all know that Momus is:
'The Most Important Man Alive' (not Howard Devoto) ;-)

Re: Ashes to Ashes

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you, that's a kinder tone, and I suppose we can live with "three degrees of separation". I think that apart from the fact that we're covering the same song, though, there's little in common in the arrangement styles. Joe uses what I'd called "through-arrangment" -- in other words, there's no constant beat or constant set of instruments or patterns there throughout the song. Each line has its own unique mini-arrangement. Uwe Schmidt, innovative as he is, tends to have a drum machine and some synths doing the chords all the way through with the same sounds, and a vocodered autotuned voice on top -- again, something we didn't use on this track.