![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThis weekend I'm being flown into Luxembourg to do my job. What is my job? I think basically it's to learn a little bit about something, then use that as the basis for making something up, something that surprises and in some way refreshes people. In Luxembourg on Saturday evening this will involve looking at the art in MUDAM and making up some tall tales about it. "Acting as an official Mudam guide," says the museum, "his unorthodox tour through the exhibitions has no intention to inform visitors about the art works and their content... his mission is clearly that of misinformation. His intent is to challenge art-world pieties and unsettle museumgoer expectations.” Nice work if you can get it! So how did I get it?
[Error: unknown template video]
Watching the instant portraits Matt Jacobson at Le Grand Magistery continues to post on his YouTube channel (see Sunday's entry for others), it seems to me that I began writing my own job description about ten years ago, and the job I created for myself was this sort of unreliable guide role, this spur-of-the-moment liar-who-tells-the-truth. Having failed at the pre-existing social roles I'd previously been trying for ("pop star" or whatever), I came up with this one-off role, a sort of mockumentarist, an honest quack, a turner of nothings into somethings. It's a sort of showy-offy highwire act, and not something just anyone can do.
[Error: unknown template video]
Watching these clips now, I grin but also squirm in embarrassment. There's every chance that these improvised portrait songs will go horribly wrong; insult their sitters, bore the audience, make me look bereft of inspiration. Mostly, though, they don't. They're saved by the high stakes, the inherent drama of risk, and the final triumph of sense over nonsense. Because actually -- and this is the secret behind this act -- nonsense is harder to achieve than we believe, and sense comes easy. Sense is "the sentence of every sentence", the fate of all semantic units like words, chords and melodies. They can't not signify something.
[Error: unknown template video]
Chords and rhymes and songwriting conventions coax the few biographical facts I select to work with in directions I can't even know about until I'm actually singing the stuff, but what emerges -- sort of amazingly, like a rabbit coming out of a magician's hat (and Matt of LGM, filming all this and undoubtedly influencing it too, is a magician himself) -- is relatively coherent, and surprisingly relevant.
[Error: unknown template video]
The reason it works as entertainment is that the listener, in on the discovery and hearing it at pretty much the same moment I do, almost feels as if he's up on the guitar string high wire with me. Somehow something songlike emerges, to everyone's relief. Yet it stays scrappy and silly and imperfect enough -- awkward as a stumbling, kicking new-born calf -- to make you laugh.
[Error: unknown template video]
Sometimes a song will express unexpected violence, like this one, in which I imagine a psychiatrist giving electric shocks to a colleague. (How did Michael feel about that, I wonder?) Or like the Kahimi Karie song, where I take her favourite colour (red) and find it soon enough on the tip of a breadknife, recalling the Pygmalism song I recorded with her that same year, which sees the Kahimi character "plant my dagger in your breast" to get even with that paternalistic Pygmalion, her creator (in the song it's an explicit reference to Blade Runner, and the scene where Roy Batty kills his creator Tyrell):
[Error: unknown template video]
Even if, as in A User's Guide to Layna, the chords go all awry, the song can still work if the concept is strong. Here it's Layna's job as a technical writer which becomes the hook, as I imagine writing a manual for the writer of manuals (and again it's this theme of the tables turning):
[Error: unknown template video]
The artist Justin Lieberman once staged an advertising agency in Zach Feuer's gallery. That's very much what I was doing onstage on the Stars Forever tour; making adverts for people after hasty meetings hashing out the kind of things they wanted said about their "products"; their lives and selves. Sometimes the slogan surprised its copywriter, as in this song in which I tell Carrie -- who's not having much luck dating men -- "why not swing the other way?":
[Error: unknown template video]
What I like about these videos is that they show something eccentric and excessive. After all, you're really just supposed to stand on the stage and sing your songs, not do this kind of thing. But what you see here is a man a bit bored with his role, determined to write another one for himself. What he's writing, apart from songs, is a new job description for himself, one that leads directly to Saturday's little stint as an Unreliable Tour Guide.
[Error: unknown template video]
Watching the instant portraits Matt Jacobson at Le Grand Magistery continues to post on his YouTube channel (see Sunday's entry for others), it seems to me that I began writing my own job description about ten years ago, and the job I created for myself was this sort of unreliable guide role, this spur-of-the-moment liar-who-tells-the-truth. Having failed at the pre-existing social roles I'd previously been trying for ("pop star" or whatever), I came up with this one-off role, a sort of mockumentarist, an honest quack, a turner of nothings into somethings. It's a sort of showy-offy highwire act, and not something just anyone can do.
[Error: unknown template video]
Watching these clips now, I grin but also squirm in embarrassment. There's every chance that these improvised portrait songs will go horribly wrong; insult their sitters, bore the audience, make me look bereft of inspiration. Mostly, though, they don't. They're saved by the high stakes, the inherent drama of risk, and the final triumph of sense over nonsense. Because actually -- and this is the secret behind this act -- nonsense is harder to achieve than we believe, and sense comes easy. Sense is "the sentence of every sentence", the fate of all semantic units like words, chords and melodies. They can't not signify something.
[Error: unknown template video]
Chords and rhymes and songwriting conventions coax the few biographical facts I select to work with in directions I can't even know about until I'm actually singing the stuff, but what emerges -- sort of amazingly, like a rabbit coming out of a magician's hat (and Matt of LGM, filming all this and undoubtedly influencing it too, is a magician himself) -- is relatively coherent, and surprisingly relevant.
[Error: unknown template video]
The reason it works as entertainment is that the listener, in on the discovery and hearing it at pretty much the same moment I do, almost feels as if he's up on the guitar string high wire with me. Somehow something songlike emerges, to everyone's relief. Yet it stays scrappy and silly and imperfect enough -- awkward as a stumbling, kicking new-born calf -- to make you laugh.
[Error: unknown template video]
Sometimes a song will express unexpected violence, like this one, in which I imagine a psychiatrist giving electric shocks to a colleague. (How did Michael feel about that, I wonder?) Or like the Kahimi Karie song, where I take her favourite colour (red) and find it soon enough on the tip of a breadknife, recalling the Pygmalism song I recorded with her that same year, which sees the Kahimi character "plant my dagger in your breast" to get even with that paternalistic Pygmalion, her creator (in the song it's an explicit reference to Blade Runner, and the scene where Roy Batty kills his creator Tyrell):
[Error: unknown template video]
Even if, as in A User's Guide to Layna, the chords go all awry, the song can still work if the concept is strong. Here it's Layna's job as a technical writer which becomes the hook, as I imagine writing a manual for the writer of manuals (and again it's this theme of the tables turning):
[Error: unknown template video]
The artist Justin Lieberman once staged an advertising agency in Zach Feuer's gallery. That's very much what I was doing onstage on the Stars Forever tour; making adverts for people after hasty meetings hashing out the kind of things they wanted said about their "products"; their lives and selves. Sometimes the slogan surprised its copywriter, as in this song in which I tell Carrie -- who's not having much luck dating men -- "why not swing the other way?":
[Error: unknown template video]
What I like about these videos is that they show something eccentric and excessive. After all, you're really just supposed to stand on the stage and sing your songs, not do this kind of thing. But what you see here is a man a bit bored with his role, determined to write another one for himself. What he's writing, apart from songs, is a new job description for himself, one that leads directly to Saturday's little stint as an Unreliable Tour Guide.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 12:58 am (UTC)artist-song subject-audience.
And yes, nonsense is far , far harder to produce than we think. Often the best nonsense is by damaged minds - take the likes of Syd Barrett who was undergoing mental trauma, schizophrenia and the legacy of LSD. Or take those 'spamland' videos I think i posted on an entry earlier this year - based on computer generated texts. It seems that meaning and sense are so deeply ingrained in us, we have to become almost superhuman - or lose our rational minds - to short-circuit it effectively, and break free from the order it imposes. 'Man is something that must be overcome', said Nietzsche - Wonder if he had this in mind!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 01:08 am (UTC)The story of my subsequent songwriting career is all about moving away from glibness and hackery -- of which these instant portraits are perhaps the ultimate, though not uncharming, example -- towards things that take longer to make sense, things that are more mysterious and textural and sphinxlike. I had ten years of "adventures with form" ahead of me, but I did shed some of my audience in the process. And in a sense I retreated somewhat to the ivory tower of the art world.
Astrology Typos
Date: 2009-10-07 08:24 pm (UTC)Astrology was a way of making sense of the scattered stars: but the meaning seemed to be a projection of our own minds! (btw2: Momus is an Aquarius… who are typically eccentric, socially oriented, and scientific).
isn't it also called a...
Date: 2009-10-07 01:23 am (UTC)a magician?
Re: isn't it also called a...
Date: 2009-10-07 01:40 am (UTC):)
but true isnt it? and what a grand wank it is...
anyways... my golly, momus, quite the stunning bit of history. And lucky it was recorded so well.
I like how your 3 last posts work:
bowie (and company) slightly scary fascism, to kewpie flavored cute fascism, to momus one-on-one weird/funny fascism...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 02:50 am (UTC)Nonsense is harder to achieve
Date: 2009-10-07 03:50 am (UTC)“The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash.”
Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve
Date: 2009-10-07 05:03 am (UTC)basquiat... really took a lot from Twombly... and is one of the few artists I feel met it where it was and took it further... and where Twombly faltered... I think he prevailed...
what blows me away is how Basquiat is (was) able to do both so well... charge a surface with so much energy... or leave it... empty...
Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve
Date: 2009-10-07 05:51 am (UTC)Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve
Date: 2009-10-07 06:01 am (UTC)moreover, i'm afraid i see the two the other way around: basquiat is the classicist and humanist (which you term "political") deeply interested in myth and ritual, whereas twombly is the earthy romantic, lascaux-like and primordial.
Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve + Basquiat, Barthes and Bebop
Date: 2009-10-07 05:51 am (UTC)also, related to basquiat is the idea of jazz music; these impromptu creations of momus' are like a kind of post-structuralism--in terms of the free floating signification of language--crossed with the ethos of jazz itself--the democratic creation of something which only exists that one time (theoretically, that is).
momus, are you fond of (any kind of) jazz by chance?
Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve + Basquiat, Barthes and Bebop
Date: 2009-10-07 06:03 am (UTC)I'm even performing a concert of the stuff at Staalplaat Working Space (http://staalplaat.wordpress.com/programme/) on November 18th. I'm on voice, Tomoko Miyata is on water bowls, and Seiji Morimoto is on piezo / trestle / other.
Re: Nonsense is harder to achieve + Basquiat, Barthes and Bebop
Date: 2009-10-07 06:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 08:24 am (UTC)so difficult to hear sometimes... all the noise
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 06:11 pm (UTC)http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06mind.html?ref=science
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-07 08:44 pm (UTC)Whenever I mention Momus and people ask me who he is, I'm at a loss of words. They don't really expect me to go into great detail as to all the things that you do, but somehow "a pop musician" does not cut it at all.
I recently came up with the term "culture designer" to describe what you do. I guess any artist could be called a culture designer, but I think the term fits you especially because of the way you take elements that are there and rearrange them in different patterns. It reminds me of how a graphic designer thinks.