imomus | Ambition and bastions

Ambition and bastions

It seems to me that my life and work have always been tied up with my ambition and my vision of 'the good life', and that in turn has involved the storming of bastions. A bastion is like a treasure house, an idyll, a utopia, a woman. If you actually get inside, you're likely to be disappointed and to stop obsessing over it. The important thing is what you imagine it's like in there, and how you tie all your dreams up with the attempt to topple the walls and lower the drawbridge.

To schematize somewhat, I could lay out my various 'bastions' like this:

1980-85: Poured all my energy into attacking the dreaming spires of university, and also targeted indie labels. A good degree and a record contract: success!
1985-90: Tried to conquer the British weekly music press and then the Top 40. Some good press, but no UK hit single.
1990-95: Concenrated on 'being Serge Gainsbourg'. Got laid, got married, got out of Britain. The big bastion was Japan, and I got all the way inside! Success!
1996-2001: America became the bastion. The America of Clinton and the dot com boom. I ended up moving there. Some limited American fame. Forays into digital art.
2001-2005: Living in Japan became the goal, but I found that it was better to stay an eternal visitor. From my new base in Berlin I tried to establish myself as a more experimental musician, but those bastions at The Wire didn't fall for it. I turned increasingly to visual culture, becoming, bizarrely enough, a design commentator.

So what are the bastions I'll be besieging from 2005 to 2010? China, perhaps? Will I discover a spiritual path and follow it to some mountain in India? Will I concentrate my firepower on the bastions of contemporary dance or theatre? Will I do more stints as an artist in residence and give Scanner a run for his Arts Council money? Will I snipe the 'post' off my 'post-literary' tag and become bookish?

I really have no idea. What I do know is that there's no ambition without appetite. As usual, I'll be paying a lot of attention to glamour and desire, because those are the beacons that'll lead me to the next bastion. But what I'm realising, as I get older, is that glamour and desire are both in the eye of the holder. The bastions are all in the mind. I hope this realisation itself doesn't make them collapse into a heap of boring rubble.

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Not to get all Buddhist on you, but since the bastions are really only in your mind, so is success or failure. To this outsider looking in, it seems you've been pretty successful in both defining your bastions and dealing with them in innovative and unexpected ways.

Incidentally, just heard the old Robert Wyatt song, "We Got an Arts Council Grant." Very funny, and very sad to think about it here in America, where such grants are practically extinct.

Doesn't the British Empire owe you an M.B.E. or lordship or at least something of real monetary value by now?

With a lot of the titles etc in British society, the money flows the other way.

</cynicism>

i found your journal by visiting friends > friends > friends...
i have enjoyed your posts so much!

i am adding you + hope that is ok...

Jeepers, the future. I have all the means anyone needs (confidence, imagination, blah) but often can’t visualise the ends I want for me, which is either (a) just as debilitating or (b) means I’m a born snuffler and experimenter.

Re: Robin Hood, this is a scaldingly good song.

Given the way your music tends to reflect a very special take on the music of the cultures you're observing at the time, the ideal thing for me would be if you moved to a nice island somewhere off the coast of Galway, but it's expensive round those parts, and I think you're a fan of cities, so maybe not.

South America? Very interesting politically at the moment, not sure about the music scene nor your relevant language skills.

Hi Nick,
Happy New Year ! Still catching up on your blog, but today's entry caught my eye.

From what I have been observing of late in the music scene, the bastion for pop music this year is to be successful as a band:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4097433.stm

So you will need to recruit your old "Happy Family" cohorts and return to sound of NME C81. Just joking, but isn't this kind of sad ? ( Actually how was your experience as an autuer in this 'democratic' environment). I guess dance music will go underground now which is probably a good thing. Maybe in 15 years time the return of the DJ will be the next big bastion to conquer.

Incidentally, I've just won the Poison Girlfriend "Shyness" on ebay, a kind of Momus holy grail disc. I also got some Edirol Digital monitors for Xmas and there are whole slew of new lo-frequency sounds noticeable on your tracks ( the G5 has an optical i/o ) !

Richard G

Mid-later life bastions are often about conquering problems you're forced to deal with, like ill health, for instance, or complicated family matters. I'm not saying you can't learn to swim when you're 80, or anything like that, but it's increasingly likely the effects of ageing and that omnipresent, uncomfortable jaded feeling might be more influencial than your fancies, if you know what I mean...

On the other hand - there's always TV! You'll make a good talking head!

Well, they asked me to try out for Newsnight Review, but I haven't followed up. I think I would hate it, actually.

I remember you were quite excited about this a few weeks back. Have you changed your mind about it?

I think knowing the bastions are all in ones head makes it easier and less dangerous to play around with them. I guess it's like loosing a game of monopoly as opposed to gambling the rent money away.

by the way, what ever happened to that old japanese guy that would sleep on people's couches and record music on a small portable system that you wrote about a few years back?
just curious!

I haven't seen him for a while... perhaps he's in Tokyo, but he could be anywhere in the world, knowing him, kipping in someone's guest bedroom, lounging in someone's jacuzzi...

I take it he overstayed his welcome a little?

Oh, he never stayed with me!

Speaking of ambition, and of the old japanese guy, how would you describe his work ethic? Ambitiously lazy? For some reason I thought of him because lately i've been looking for information on Arthur Cravan, who seemed to be ambitiously seeking movement and motion.
Also, can one be ambitious in trying to maintain something? does it always have to be castle and moat?

yes everyone is looking for some 'old japanese guy' for inspiration and reaffirmation of your lazy ways. just as i'm looking for nubile negros to satisfy manifest destiny. cunt.

anyway... momus,i enjoy your blogs. are you confusing artistic bastions with the sexual bastions (which you know too well and have already conquered)? but they are connected, push pull.

at the end of the day, what do you want to do?

please pull.

Thank you.

Your money is on the dresser.

Now was all that really necessary?

don't mix drink with other substances while reading journal entries...

momus' illustrations of bastion is cool, like frames from an animation. the center dot is not moving though... and the bastion is looking more and more phallic. i like this stuff...reminds me of polygonal/nurbs 3d surfaces...

but yeah, happy new bastion year

How old would the old Japanese guy be? I met a guy about 50 years old in Taipei who did some kind of mystic perfomances on the street in the day, and hung out at the Taipei Hostel (think of a Hotel California, but out the back of the biggest marble temple you've ever seen, down an alleyway full of motor scooters and full of every flavour of English teacher and immigrant-deal-maker with a family to support back home.) His voice was perpetually hoarse from the performances he did - I remember him telling me and another guy in English, Chinese and Japanese (I think he was from Okinawa - is that still Japanese?) about how he dropped acid back in the protest era.

I hope I run into him again some day.

may your next bastion continue to provide excellent music and lovely reflections on the world surrounding!

Most dear and wayward Momus,

Never second guess yourself. Whatever "the flow" is, you've got it, you've always had it, as the number and variety of responses elicited from your daily affirmations suggest.

A small Duchampian finger points...

http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/sound/mp3/aspen/mp3/ono1.mp3

Thank you, that's a lovely song! And you're all so affirmative!

Sounds like you've had enough of making music. Would this be the case? I always thought you had some great songs but never fully realised them in production to there full potential. I haven't really bothered much with your stuff since Time Lord (loved it) and what I have heard has pushed me away further. With the exception of Vodka J's(that was great) My question being, what is your own take on your music career from an emotional/artistic perspective? Some might say, realising that "bastions are all in the mind" will lift you out of the heap of boring rubble. I hope that comes across as a positive comment.

Sounds like you've had enough of making music. Would this be the case?

Nope! There's still nothing to touch a song. Nada, babes! Nothing touches me like a song. Nowhere near! Won't give up on dat sing-song a type a ting!

i wish i was in berlin for this,
maybe momus will be...

13 JANUARY 2004,
22.00h @ NBI,
Schonhauser Allee 157, Berlin
live: Pumice (New Zealand)
+ DJ Thibaut de Ruyter (Berlin)
hosts: Staubgold Sound System

from; a pumice fan in nz.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/prog_parse.cgi?FILENAME=20050108/20050108_0545_49700_59944_15

The audio file is here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/rams/sun1740.ram). I found this pretty waffly. It sounds to me like it was made as a piece of 'religious broadcasting', which the BBC has to make a certain amount of under the terms of its license. Over the years the 'religious' content of this sort of rumination has got whittled down to 'philosophising about peace' and the like. Hence this programme's use of an academic from a Christian University and a Hiroshima Memorial official. The BBC used to tell you at the end of these things that they were produced 'by the Religious Broadcasting Unit', but now they just let it slip into the flow of a morning news show without demarcating it. As social analysis, though, it's hardly Ian Buruma.

I very much enjoy reading your LiveJournal, though I rarely comment.

After reading the first paragraph of this post, I cannot stop imagining you living with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal on a self-sufficiency kick. There's a bastion for 2010.

In Denmark we have an author called Gordon Inc. He calls bastions for dromes, you drive around them in loop circles and then get out, into another drome. We also have a word called selviscenesættelse. It means To Make Yourself On A Stage. It's the only choice for the conscious man, to construct the good life around himself. I'm sorry for you, Momus. Had you been prettier you might have gotten alot more glamour than you did, and you might have not felt phony late at night talking to japanese girls saying "i think fischerspooner and sean landers are my contemporaries" because you know, they're really not. they're part of something that requires a bit more of that stuff you realized you lacked while hanging with Gavin McGuiness, i'm sorry momus, but even now, the human soul, will find ways to please you - one option is to find a young apprentice, a youthful energetic charismatic boy or girl who encapsulates everything oyue ver dreamed you were yourself (visually), a Charlotte Gainsbough to pour your intellect into, create an art idol (derivative of popidol), to create a Warholesque factory where you churn out small bunnies (derivative of your new pet) that can take over the culturati, intelligentsia, and music scenes. isn't thhat what you REALLY want, isnt it momus?

Dearest Momus,

I hope your bunny is doing well, it certainly is fucking hilariously cute, in a woodsy curled oak-and-acanthus-leaves sort of way. I haven't been on the internet in months (don't make that disgusted face), nevertheless every few months I'll check your site for your posts, knowing that they'll "uncannily" earmark everything that's been floating around in my cerebrum recently. Its sort of like reading some sort of oracle where my conscience will recognize what should be validated. I guess that must mean that my conscience is design oriented. Because what is beautiful must be useful, correct?

Anyway, I'm terribly sorry for my unmistakeably American, Oxford uneducated grammar and reasoning. I just keep staying here in Ohio, wishing I was in Japan, and you keep traveling all over. It at least comforts me to thing that the climate in Ohio, according to the latitude, may be similar to that of Japan. In the summer I try to wear blue and white. I see fish wind socks and think of boys' day. My Japanese aquaintance Mayu says I like things her grandmother likes, I assume because all Americans think Japan is either Japanimation or in the Edo period, I prefer the latter. My boyfriend tells me it is unlikely I may have been Japanese in a past life, but I'm blood type B-, and apparently that's mostly found in Asians and Jewish people, so...

Nice work, as usual. Keep breaking down your bastions. I'm doing the same, its the only thing. Sometimes it feels really ungrounded, but what else is there anymore? Oh, what am I saying? I'm Philosophy 201, and you're like not even in Philosophy anymore. You're like Post-Post-Graduate. Plus I'm not even an extremely hot Japanese girl. In your lexicon, I'm not even a girl probably, just a Middle American. Especially after my state got the Anti-Christ elected again.

Anyway, once again I just wanted to write you to say that I appreciate what you are doing. I don't even think you care about that, but I do. You always bring a smile to my face.

Manatee.

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Ambition and bastions

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kate bush!

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momus you magnificent bastard