Quotation

[imomus]

Hisae and I will be spending six weeks in Japan soon, from early December until mid-January. We'll probably be staying in one of those rental apartments in Tokyo, but if you have a better idea, drop me a line. The trip this time is subsidised by my curation job; to recap, I've been asked to put a Japanese art / performance / video exhibition together for the Radar Arts Centre at the University of Loughborough. The show, which I'm calling Aftergold, will happen while the Japanese team is in the Midlands training for the Olympics.

Performing as Momus isn't the reason I'll be in Japan this time, but I'm hoping to put some kind of event together in collaboration with the Utrecht reading room in Aoyama. Apartamento magazine last week launched their fourth edition at Utrecht during Tokyo Design Week, and cooked people some free lunches in the reading room. Hisae and I have a feature in the new Apartamento, a study of our neighbour Jan Lindenberg's apartment in Berlin. Jan is also in Japan right now (hello Jan, drop us a postcard!).

The fifth edition of Quotation, the "worldwide creative journal", has just been released in Japan, and features interviews with both me and Hisae; I'm there as Momus, and Hisae as one half of Penquo, her mysterious performance unit with Kyoka. It's available through Amazon Japan here.

There's also a big Momus interview (by Olivier Lamm) in the new edition of french culture mag Chronic'art, which hit the streets yesterday. The magazine's website says:



MOMUS
"Musician, connected journalist, web pioneer: at 50, the American Nick Currie (aka Momus) adds a string to his bow by publishing his first novel, "Le Livre des blagues", a post-modern family chronicle to make you scream with laughter. Encounter with an authentic polycultural mutant. Plus Chrono-Momus: key moments in a career as dense as a novel."

I rather enjoy being represented as "a 50 year-old American"; there's something almost Cindy Shermanesque about the idea that you're a completely different person in every press profile. And speaking of the ghostly morphing of fact into fiction, this week sees the launch in New York of Dexter Sinister's guerilla broadsheet THE FIRST / LAST NEWSPAPER, which will feature my Ghost-Materialist column, an unreliable revisit of the Post-Materialist column I used to write for the New York Times. More details here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, you're having a lot more success as a writer, performance artist or curator than you've had as a recording artist in the past decade or so. On top of that, you seem to see popular music as an atavistic dead end these days. Do you see yourself continuing to record albums, or is that side of you withering on the vine?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My general position is that I won't record any new albums. But I found myself proposing to Hypo (http://www.myspace.com/hypohypohypo) the other day that we make an album together in 2010, because I effin' adore his new album Coco Douleur.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, what do you make of the so-called "hauntology" stuff: The Caretaker, Ghost Box etc.?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I quite like the Broadcast / Focus Group collaboration:

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[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wanted to add a couple of tidbits to this entry: there's a great short story by Marie Darrieussecq, read by the author in this Frieze podcast (http://www.friezeartfair.com/casts/2009/Absence_Brian_and_Marie.mp3). Set in an imaginary apartment in Tokyo, the story really captures the way I feel when I'm in Tokyo: "Tokyo had become so big and so beautiful that living in it really felt like an honour for a European woman like me..."

Also, there's a great six-page feature on Aki Sasamoto in the new edition of Art Asia Pacific magazine (http://www.aapmag.com/) that talks about our collaboration, amongst other things. Aki and I have a new collaboration coming up on Thursday November 12th (me only virtually present, alas) at White Slab Palace (back room), 77 Delancey Street, NY. It's part of the Performa Biennial.

))

[lana-sv.livejournal.com]

to make you scream with laughter

[(Anonymous)]

I love you, Momus!.

[(Anonymous)]

If you are planning to enter Japan on a short-term 90 day visa then I wouldn't talk on the web about adding any paid gigs to your schedule. That requires a different visa and immigration officials have taken delight recenly in turning away musicians who don't have the correct paperwork after confronting them with the incriminating web evidence that they intend to perform. This has affected some quite obscure acts who would normally have expected to fly well under the radar.

Your other work, curating an event to be held in the UK, is fine under the terms of the 90 day visa.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, it wouldn't be a music gig; Utrecht Reading Room is, after all, a bookshop. It could be some sort of reading, and not for money. Anyway, it's all hypothetical at this stage. I haven't even spoken to Hiroshi Eguchi, who runs Utrecht, yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Lévi-Strauss just died. RIP, binary thinker.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wow, and at 100 years old! A perfectly binary number.

[bongo-kong.livejournal.com]

1100100. It wasn't perfect for him, anyway. He died!

edo? what about naniwa?

[(Anonymous)]

aren't you going to spend time in osaka, too?

Re: edo? what about naniwa?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, and in the Inland Sea.

Re: edo? what about naniwa?

[(Anonymous)]

touche. very donald richie of you.

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

How about you ask Click Opera readers to sponsor accommodation in Tokyo: love hotels, upscale hotels, business hotels, minshuku, sento, capsules, saunas, internet cafés, campsites, park benches... Probably couldn't afford Dogenzaka, but Ikebukuro or Okubo might be doable. Sort of Sleeping Stars Forever....