The Brecht and Cruikshank Schnitzelshanke

[imomus]

Openings at Kunst-Werke always make for a great free party. Last night's was for a new show called 'Now and Ten Years Before'. It's about 'culture production' in squats and other semi-legal spaces in Berlin and New York, and looks at developments like gentrification in Mitte and the East Village over the last ten years. Kunst-Werke is closely tied to New York thanks to director Klaus Biesenbach's role as chief curator at PS1 in Queens, and KW parties always have a strong New York atmosphere which makes me a bit nostalgic. Tonight's was no exception -- videos about squats full of drag queens, OTT performances from bands called Shanke, Teardrop and Hanky who presented the kind of exciting sheets of white noise and screaming I used to hear from local scenesters like Spencer Sweeney's Actress when I lived in NY. I can't tell you which of those three the pink band pictured was, but someone told me they were from Hamburg. (Click the photo to see a little video of their performance.)

The bottom two photos show me sitting next to an artwork called 'Wifi Hobo', part of an installation called 'The Brecht and Cruikshank Schnitzelshanke (Jazz House, Cellar and Spaghetti House)' by Nils Norman and Stephan Dillemuth. The blurb tells us the wifi hobo is sitting outside 'a clandestine club located in London's murky pre-culture-region boho zone, in the outer reaches of East London. The scene is set where the remains of the day mingle and mosh. The audience, slipping into the primordial ooze of art and politics, slowly enter the play...' The other photo, where it looks like I'm caught in a big spiderweb, is in a big blobby wire creche out in the KW courtyard, next to the bamboo garden.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The scene is set where the remains of the day mingle and mosh.

Interesting use of the word mosh. Seeing you use it in a less-than-literal way like that made me wonder if it was actually an old word meaning "mix-up" or "throw together", but it turns out it was birthed directly from the 1980's American hardcore scene. The OED hazards a guess that it's a corruption of "mash".
Moshing is such a well-worn cultural image, I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people started using it to mean mixed together until it transcended all vestiges of its original meaning (violent dancing).
Perhaps future linguists will look back on this post as one of the first uses of mosh in this way. Of course, with such a metaphoric image they could never be sure exactly what you meant by it, but the OED editors often do the same thing with metaphoric word usage from Shakespeare.
However, the most likely scenario is that most digital information will be lost as computers continue to change and advance. Maybe you should be printing these out!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

'Mingle and mosh' is not my phrase, I was quoting the label beside an artwork called 'Wifi Hobo'. The artists were non-English speakers. I'm always interested in the 'mistakes' and eccentricities made by foreign speakers of English, and see them as a source of innovation in the language. Japanese English has become a 'third language', neither English nor Japanese. I also like the mistakes in Euro- and Scanda-pop lyrics (they're one of the pleasures of the genre) and in automatic web translation. I see web translation as a way to glimpse the 'collective machine unconscious' or 'machine id' of Babelfish and other robots, and a fun way to generate lyrics. A couple of songs on my new album contain web mis-translations. For instance, 'Lady Fancy Knickers' contains a line about 'your post office skirt', which is a Babelfish mistranslation of 'post rock'

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, you might enjoy the new book "The Stories of English" by British linguist David Crystal in which he rails against the fixation on Standard English and examines the global permutations of the language.