Spring in Berlin

[imomus]

Nothing too earth-shattering today, just a little slideshow of spring in Berlin (and Oslo).

Explanations are at my Flickr photostream. Now I can get back to restringing my guitar, a surprisingly difficult job (at least the way I do it).

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

tedious cookie-cutter hipster-wank
do you not have an original bone in your body, momus?

[(Anonymous)]

Come on. Nick is not much of a photographer, but no original bone in his body? I present his last four albums as sturdy evidence for the defence. Save your insults for those who deserve them.

[(Anonymous)]

No, you're mistaking innovation for what Clifford Geertz called "involution":

"The basic forms of art have reached finality, the structural features are fixed beyond variation, inventive originality is exhausted. Still, development goes on. Being hemmed in on all sides by crystallized pattern, it takes the function of elaborateness. Expansive creativeness having dried up at source, a special kind of virtuosity takes place, a sort of technical hairsplitting..."

involution and cookie cutters

[(Anonymous)]

erm, hello? He said 'Nothing too earth-shattering today, just a little slideshow'

Not 'here's a radical slew of revolutionary artworks I made earlier'

[viceanglais.livejournal.com]

Stop it, you will shatter Nick's blogger/reader trust, something he'll be forced to spend a lifetime trying to rebuild.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeth, I'll thcweam and I'll thcweam and I'll lock myself in my Fathebook page for ever unleth you thtop!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I keep my signature collection of silver halide prints depicting upside-down plovers in flight on a secret page. They'd go right over your heads.

[(Anonymous)]

Put a bit of effort into it, Momus! The zings are no better than the snaps!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're right, I should have said "They'd go right under your heads."

Damn!

[(Anonymous)]

Since this is clearly an anon Momus-bashing type day, let me put in my two cents. You're going to have to do something about your sartorial style, Momus. You're nearly fifty, and it's no use pretending it ain't so. Your hobo look of the last decade is doing you no favors now, it's merely accentuating the haggardness. And yet the down-with-the-kids hoodie doesn't work either, it's the mutton/lamb effect there. No, you're going to have to swallow your pride and take a small leaf out of Whimsy's book. An aging male can look very good, as long as he smartens up a bit. Get yourself a good suit, go down the dandy route, which allows eccentricity and smartness to sexily coexist and is without doubt the older man's best bet.

[(Anonymous)]

s/he's right, you know. You'd look super-sexy in a well-cut suit.

- anon female admirer (non-asian unfortunately)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There can only be one Lord Whimsy. No, I'm experimenting with donkey blankets, tenuguis and ponchos. It's cheaper, and invites fewer awkward sexual propositions. In fact that's probably my girlfriend's secret motive for telling me these outfits look great.

"These are our failures"

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Despite his arty exterior, Nick has the dandy's temperament. I do not: I'm a mere parody of a cavalier. I fail miserably; I have too much Huck Finn in me to make a Beau Brummell. Suits hide the scratches and bruises I accrue from constant bushwhacking in brambles and swamps.

I applaud Nick's stylish derring-do on his more outre ensembles. He's occasionally pulled together some great looks from very limited resources, turning a liability into a virtue. No small feat that: Wherewithal and nerve trumps money, in my book.

Taste and style are two different things; perhaps Nick is too smart and restless to be consistently tasteful. He leaves it to others to color within the margins. That said, I think he's most successful when flirting with and teasing the margins rather than ignoring them altogether, but that's my own taste/style, not his. De gustibus, etc.

Let a Momus be a Momus: he knows exactly what he's doing.

Re: "These are resemblances"

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Removing a few snaps would bring you closer to Ralph Gibson's early works.

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I wonder if sartorial style has something to do with the uniform of your profession? When you go on your book tours in the future will you be wearing your "samurai" look or something more conventional. Seeing this interview with Leonard Cohen today reminded me of these differences. He has crossed over in the opposite direction, so dresses in a fairly somber conventional look.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I love Leonard Cohen, he's one of the important poets for me, the great singers. But in this interview he reaches a level of abstraction, of elder-statesmanly piety, that prevents him saying anything at all. Home, women, depression, he skirts around them all with dignified, balanced homilies -- there's this, there's that -- and ends up saying almost nothing. Perhaps it's Zen of some sort, perhaps it's simply polite evasion. And he's dressed very well. But I prefer the early, more sardonic, more aggressive Leonard.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

He really has that Grecian island old man look down pat, worry beads and all. It's a good look, and his house has it too. Mediterranean sobriety. Hospitality. Tranquility.

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I live in a Greek neighbourhood and he certainly wouldn't be out of place at the local cafe. You can see that he is really conscious of how he comes across in the media, wearing a hat in his own home, for example. I have a beautiful portrait of him on the wall taken by a friend.

I understand that during the shoot he was very particular about the placement of his hands.

Dear Anonymous 2 Cent guy,

[williamsharkey.livejournal.com]

Dear Anonymous 2 Cent guy,
I think that Nick should continue dress how he likes.
Go to hell,
William

For Heaven's Sake...

[milobusbecq.livejournal.com]

...you people are assholes. Geertz's stupid concept of "involution" is just jargon for the foolish romantic cult of authenticity. I mean, really, "expansive creativeness"? That doesn't even mean anything. Art (and music, and poetry) is a special kind of virtuosity and technical hairsplitting. But I suppose you can't but be impressed that Geertz had the gall to dress up his own taste for the authentic and the wet as if it were a universal critique of decadence in all its historical iterations.

But more importantly, would you describe why restringing your guitar your way is such a difficult job? I know of several ways of doing it, and none of them is too difficult.

Oh, and please, stay forever our dandy hobo.

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's culture shock -- I'm used to the easy ones with the metal blobs on the end, but these new ones need knots tied in them, and I dropped out of Boy Scouts after two weeks! It's like the German bicycle pumps, I can never work out how they're meant to connect with the valve if they don't have the bendy tubes I'm used to.

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[(Anonymous)]

This is a silly misreading of Geertz. The notion of 'involution' has nothing to do with Romantic authenticity, he actually applies it to primitive art, it is about how once cast iron aesthetic laws seem to be laid down, the art then enters a baroque phase where the artistic development takes place within a paradigm, rather than trying to break out of it. Arguably it's the postmodern phase we've been in for the last forty years. And all the more so with a genre like popular music.

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[milobusbecq.livejournal.com]

Alas, not silly in the least. In Geertz's (and now yours, it seems) description of all baroques, whether primitive or popular or not, the dichotomy between iron aesthetic laws and fulsome, boundary-breaking creativity arises out of the romantic sensibility itself, not out of some structural feature of "Art." Geertz, of course, did not self-consciously represent himself as a romantic, but his categories derive from Romantic commonplaces like Coleridge's (in my view quite silly and self-contradictory, if self-serving) distinction between allegory and symbol and Rousseau's tidy opposition of nature and culture. It should not be forgotten that even the term you use, baroque, was borrowed in the Romantic period to describe a particular phase of European art that the Romantics wanted to distinguish themselves from (as you wish to distinguish yourself from pop music). Outside of such a Romantic sensibility (with which the rhetoric of our post-modern period completely identifies, perhaps ironically), the poles of your dichotomy have no meaning. Only someone ignorant of baroque musical practices, for instance, could argue that Bach was more constrained by "cast iron aesthetic laws" than was Berlioz or Wagner, or that the latter were somehow breaking paradigms while the former merely worked over commonplaces. The iron aesthetic laws that govern us now are most likely invisible, and the boundary breaking we favor now will be found in time to have been in fact bounded. To categorize art in like this is not to describe the world, but to rate it and to pick a side. This is obviously a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, I don't see how it amounts to anything more than taste with a bit of ideology thrown in. Both the commenter (on you) and you (on pop music) have used "involution" to criticize and debunk, not describe. If you can find an instance where the iron clad aesthetic laws are happily trotted out to show how wonderfully energetic some art practice is, or someone who would describe their own art in these terms, I will consider myself chastened.

On the subject of Geertz and primitive art, I can't think of anyone more tone deaf to the actual aesthetic preferences and practices of such art than a person who unselfconsciously finds again and again that his own culture's aesthetic imagination happens to coincide with how things actually are, everywhere. The productions of "primitive" cultures do not conform to our current set of aesthetic ideologies, and are not meaningfully described by attributing our failure to comprehend them to the decadence or baroqueness of art in a state of "involution."

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[(Anonymous)]

It's becoming a rather predictable move, this branding anything one doesn't like as "Romantic ideology". Without making aesthetic judgements, it's pretty clear there are periods where there are huge and rapid changes (for example, the early Modernist period) when what we might term "paradigm change" occurs, and other periods where the change is more gradual and more about sophistication of existing models. I hardly see how that description of affairs becomes Romantic ideology, but whatever.

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[milobusbecq.livejournal.com]

Thanks for making the ad hominem oblique, at least. I would like to point out, in any case, that I think you are mistaken for reasons that have a hell of lot to do with modes of thinking that, in the modern period, originated with the Romantics and which still all too often pass as self-evident and natural. I had hoped to engage you in a conversation about it, not to brand you as anything. (By the way, I quite like the results of your aesthetic self-conception, even if I do not find it persuasive. So, there was nothing in need of branding.) And to be honest, I did, if briefly, make the case that the terms you, Geertz, and the original commenter used only make sense within something like a Romantic sensibility. I had no idea that it was so tiresome to notice the genealogy of ideas and the consequences of it.

But of course, if the argument is sufficiently modest, not quite so totalizingly naive, and put the way you have above, then of course there is nothing wrong with identifying periods where practices change, and of course there are times and places where the change happens faster and with greater consequence for future practice than in others. (I would dispute that the early Modernist period represents such huge or rapid change... there were lots of precursors, the changes gradual, and the suddenness something of a self-promotion, but that argument is for another time.) That, however, was not the way the commenter, or Geertz, uses the term "involution." The "Romantic Ideology" comes into when you are not careful to avoid identifying your own aesthetic preferences with eternal verities.

I am sorry to have provoked the "whatever," though.

Re: For Heaven's Sake...

[milobusbecq.livejournal.com]

I forgot. What is it you do with your guitar strings?

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, what are reflections on the performance of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

[(Anonymous)]

I can't imagine that Momus could possibly have anything to say about Britain's Got Talent, why ask?

[(Anonymous)]

I was with Momus at the very moment he clicked on that youtube link and heard la voix angélique de la divine Miss Boyle for the first time. And I can report to his faithful readers that tears were pouring down the Momusian visage, and that he leapt from his Eames chair crying: "This woman is the essence of Hibernia! Her mellifluous tones speak to me like none other! She is the little engine that could! Vive Miss Boyle! Vive L'Ecosse Libre!"

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/516

Though this unrelated item might interest.

transatlantic, frantic

[(Anonymous)]

oh i do miss berlin.
aren't you coming to new york in may?

Re: transatlantic, frantic

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes indeedy.

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNxPAxvhEwE

Was a there a deeper meaning to the eloquent: "every lie creates a parallel world in which it was true"

or were you just really, really excited to be there?

Love the blog Momus, the love the music moar -

New reader~

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Welcome, New Reader!

"Every lie creates the parallel world in which it's true" is the motto of The Book of Scotlands, but it could just as well be the motto of the Unreliable Tour Guide act of which that video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNxPAxvhEwE) is a glimpse.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Nick,
I did an interview with a musician you might be interested in, Suzuki Junzo.

http://ahalf-warmedfish.blogspot.com/2009/04/interview-w-suzuki-junzo.html


Ryan