The man who fell to Berlin
Jan. 21st, 2010 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI've plummeted back to Berlin amidst some oddities and ironies. Firstly, although there are dirty blankets of snow on the ground here and the temperatures are consistently several degrees below zero, Berlin feels a lot warmer than Osaka. People here heat their houses, and even when you go out you experience the cold only as a dry, sharp pang on your face and some slithery ice and snow underfoot. The Japanese thing of getting cold deep in your bones, of dreading the trip to the bathroom, just doesn't apply here. I'm wearing my samurai chanchanko top purely for the pose factor:
The second irony is that I hurried home from Japan this week to deliver an address entitled "Love of Blogging" to a seminar at the Freie Universität here in Berlin. Organised by Miya Yoshida, the seminar was umbrella-titled Tag the World: Collective Work and the Notion of the Amateur in the Age of the WWW. You can see my half-hour slot in this uStream video (scroll forward to 02:32:00 -- yes, two hours in -- and kill the annoying ads). As I began by pointing out, my love of blogging has largely come to an end, and I'm seeking other forms of expression, including much older, less amateur ones like ink-and-paper.
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My other engagement this week is an interview I'm recording on Friday with BBC Radio 2 about Jacques Brel (it's transmitted later in the year). The irony here is that I've felt increasingly distant from Jacques Brel (who nevertheless helped finance my Japanese trip, God bless him, via the fees for the Brel Barbican concerts) and would feel much more comfortable talking about the new film about Serge Gainsbourg, who sort of replaced Brel in my personal pantheon of heroes circa 1987.
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Gainsbourg: vie héroïque (Being Serge Gainsbourg) is a new biopic by Joann Sfar starring ringer Eric Elmosnino as Serge, Philippe Katerine as Boris Vian and Lucy Gordon (who sadly committed suicide recently) as Jane Birkin. It's great to see Katerine (a friend, fellow Gainsbourg fanatic, and fellow Kahimi Karie collaborator when I lived in Paris in the mid-90s) singing alongside the uncannily-good, spectrally-accurate Elmosnino. Interview me about the hook-nosed tender pervert instead, BBC!
The second irony is that I hurried home from Japan this week to deliver an address entitled "Love of Blogging" to a seminar at the Freie Universität here in Berlin. Organised by Miya Yoshida, the seminar was umbrella-titled Tag the World: Collective Work and the Notion of the Amateur in the Age of the WWW. You can see my half-hour slot in this uStream video (scroll forward to 02:32:00 -- yes, two hours in -- and kill the annoying ads). As I began by pointing out, my love of blogging has largely come to an end, and I'm seeking other forms of expression, including much older, less amateur ones like ink-and-paper.
[Error: unknown template video]
My other engagement this week is an interview I'm recording on Friday with BBC Radio 2 about Jacques Brel (it's transmitted later in the year). The irony here is that I've felt increasingly distant from Jacques Brel (who nevertheless helped finance my Japanese trip, God bless him, via the fees for the Brel Barbican concerts) and would feel much more comfortable talking about the new film about Serge Gainsbourg, who sort of replaced Brel in my personal pantheon of heroes circa 1987.
[Error: unknown template video]
Gainsbourg: vie héroïque (Being Serge Gainsbourg) is a new biopic by Joann Sfar starring ringer Eric Elmosnino as Serge, Philippe Katerine as Boris Vian and Lucy Gordon (who sadly committed suicide recently) as Jane Birkin. It's great to see Katerine (a friend, fellow Gainsbourg fanatic, and fellow Kahimi Karie collaborator when I lived in Paris in the mid-90s) singing alongside the uncannily-good, spectrally-accurate Elmosnino. Interview me about the hook-nosed tender pervert instead, BBC!
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:28 am (UTC)things
Date: 2010-01-21 11:30 am (UTC)Re: things
Date: 2010-01-21 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 11:44 am (UTC)best wishes
yet another anonymous critic you must battle against
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 01:01 pm (UTC)"That'll be a real loss when Momus stops his blog. One of the best blogs there ever has been."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 04:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 12:27 pm (UTC)po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to
Date: 2010-01-21 01:36 pm (UTC)Re: po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to
Date: 2010-01-21 02:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 01:46 pm (UTC)http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/books/15book.html
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 01:47 pm (UTC)Either way - does factual, formulated communication necessarily increase understanding; and does understanding even benefit the world? Perhaps, like the meditating with their mantra, we reach a point where silence benefits us more.
I blogged fiction for while and then stopped. I sometimes look back at missed opportunities. If I had had comments I'd have written more, but that is out of one's hands. I liked the immediacy of being on the spot. Sitting alone with all the time in the world, like self-consciousness, seems to turn it into pain more than a pleasure.
I agree that people comment more when they disagree with something. Maybe the silence is a compliment.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 02:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 04:11 pm (UTC)Free Momus!?!
Date: 2010-01-21 04:11 pm (UTC)Momus… are you moving towards print (and I imagine online paid journalism) for money (to make a living), or to better polish your writing craft? (Maybe both or something else?) Are you tired of working for free… the daily rigor… maybe you’ve accomplished as much as you can outside the money market… but what I may really be getting at… will I still be able to appreciate Momus for free?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 04:20 pm (UTC)I AND MY ANON SADIST COLLEAGUES HAVE MANAGED TO HOUND MOMUS OFF THE NET
VICTORY VICTORY VICTORY VICTORY
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 05:38 pm (UTC)I am -- I stress -- not "leaving the net". I am simply bringing this particular blog to a happy ending on Feb 10th. It's completion of a particular project rather than failure, rejection, despair, disgust or other flouncy, dramatic, tabloidy sentiments.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 06:13 am (UTC)the true brute threat... smashing the anons or all comments in one click...
what a over-confidate repetitive thug... huh.
so, you're leaving the net I hear,,, moving to siberia w Hisae and shacking up with a sexy young eskimo... learnign all 35 words for snow and writing a book about it from the perspective of each of the 35 different words for snow...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 04:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 04:56 pm (UTC)Fan Blog for Gainsbourg
Date: 2010-01-21 05:36 pm (UTC)Adam - http://gainsbourgfilm.blogspot.com
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-21 09:25 pm (UTC)about the internet, as a late genxer i see web 3.0 being about people being offline much much more than they are online. perhaps emailing once a week, or looking up some reference, or something. it's plateaued interpersonally somehow. scaling back now is just the right time too, when it's all becoming so grossly commercial -- more so than it's ever been.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 01:12 am (UTC)So you've been saying that you will stop bloging for a while now. Honestly I've always imagined you as my favourite writer who never wrote a book, and now when you finally have made a book (which I'm yet to read) I don't know what to make of it. Should I consider you as a writer? I'd love to have some continuity in this rather one sided relationship called the internet. If you are going of somewhere, just hint the direction OK?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 01:32 am (UTC)Nothing elitist about giving up a demanding daily blog - it must be exhausting sometimes. It is hard enough to write research papers for publication, which you don't have to work on every single day. I can't imagine having to produce a daily essay for years on end, with photos and humor sufficient to keep people coming back.
One thing about the web though - it allows those of us closer to your own age to keep up. The older you get, the harder it is to know about/locate the small magazines, small press books, and the like. So much of that circulates by word of mouth. Absent good blogs, one might never know.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 05:25 am (UTC)but to buy a copy of The Book of Scotlands in the u.s., should i ask my bookshop to order an import copy for me? or will it be published here at some later date?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 06:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 11:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-22 11:40 pm (UTC)