Dechets de boulangerie

[imomus]

I'm back in Berlin now, but here's a photo of the patisserie party we had at Kumi Konki's place in Paris on Sunday. Apart from being one third of the brilliant Konki Duet (I know, the math is crazy), Kumi works in a bakery, and at the end of the day there are always unsold cakes to take home. So we assembled to eat them, along with coconut cakes from the Vietnamese bakeries of the 13th arrondissement. From left to right you see Miltos Manetas, Florence Manlik, Jessica, Hisae, cat, Momus, Johann, Miltos' friend (didn't catch her name), Mai Ueda, Mehdi Hercberg, Khanh-Linh La, Kumi Okamoto. Click the picture for a bigger version.



Mehdi runs Shobo Shobo, and Khahn-Linh has documented the eight events they've so far staged in her pictures. If you're in Paris tonight, check out Shobo Shobo 9 at the Glassbox Gallery (13 bis, rue Oberkampf 75011, Métro Parmentier / Ménilmontant, starts 20.30, free) featuring the wonderful Lullatone. I wish I were there myself.

I might not be at the Lullatone show, but I am on Neomarxisme. Marxy is doing Golden Week interviews, and it's my turn today. Explaining why I hadn't been contributing recently to his blog debates, I told Marxy that the recent China-Japan tensions had changed the context of the debates we were having. He came back with "I'm interested in what you mean by that," so I expanded:

Momus: There were points of similarity between what you were saying about Japan and what the Chinese were saying. For instance, you've spoken about the history book issue and so did they. And neither you nor the Chinese looked at your own national records: the Chinese completely fail to mention major famines under Mao in their history books, for instance, that killed millions. And you would never mention the current efforts of the religious right in the US to get biology textbooks rewritten so that "intelligent design" is presented on an equal footing with evolution. So I just began to feel that the whole thing was really distasteful.

Marxy: I think you're right about this, and the more I read and watched, the more it was clear that the Chinese claims are totally hypocritical. (In the past, democratic South Korea has been the ones leading the attack against the textbooks.) That being said, the LDP (or at least, its more right-wing side) was really bad at PR and kept saying things like "Japanese textbooks must support the government line!" The most interesting thing is that Japan went out and apologized very quickly: no one apparently, certainly not the US, can say no to China's market.

Momus: Japan gets beaten up for doing things that everyone else does, and worse.

Marxy: Sure, I agree. But the opposition voices in Japan are so muted that it's hard to get the sense that the Japanese are debating it themselves. I think you know and I know and everyone knows that at least half of Americans wanted Bush out of office, but it's definitely harder to get a sense on the Japanese public's views. I think they're mostly against all this LDP neo-nationalism, but we don't get to hear much in the way of domestic complaints.

Momus: Anyway, I'm glad to see you're taking a slightly different tack these days. And Duckworth seems to have gone full time into charity work.

Marxy: I never aim to be ethnocentric, misleading, chauvinistic, etc. and I've always appreciated you putting me back in line when my outrage overreaches itself.

Isn't he sweet?

If you're in a reading mood -- and, like me, love public transport and its history -- there's a great piece in the new London Review of Books by James Meek. It's about the history of the London underground and it's called Crocodile's Breath. Oh, and if you're in an interview-reading mood there's an interesting interview with The Super Madrigal Brothers here. John Talaga does a word association test and, in response to "Momus", blurts out "Dad!" Hush, John, we don't want everyone to know!

Comments

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

I read your interview on neomarxisme and I was struck by the apparent contradiction between your ostensible aversion towards China in the interview and the fact that you expressed sometime in the past that you were interested in living in China in the future.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that was probably before I went to China! I mean, it's not an aversion. I liked Macau (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2004/09/08/), for instance. But I felt some similarity between Hong Kong and Moscow, in that they both seemed to me like places where there's a kind of turbo-capitalism that impacts negatively on people's lives. Money accumulates and defines everything, but quality of life and relations between people are in poor condition. I mean things like Moscow's street crime, or the way people bump into you on the street in Hong Kong. Now, you may say "But what about all the money in Japan?!" But somehow, for me, Japan is not a place that's fundamentally about money, or politics, or anything like that. I see it as a place dominated by aesthetics, sex, strange obsessions, etc.

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

Isn't Hong Kong a fairly advanced and rich nation with a high quality of living?

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

when is it that you went to china?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Last September, Quimby.

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have noted that from your Macau piece. I know a girl from Macau who lives in my hall.

[inparticolare.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that most Asian localities you enjoy were either former colonies or occupied by Western powers who have, in various ways, shaped the governments, cultures, and economies. Are you really into Eastern culture, or just Westernified Eastern culture?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, that's an interesting observation, but I reject the implication that there is such a thing as an essence of Eastern culture which somehow stands outside of the history of the East, timeless and pure. Contacts with other societies are part of the identity, the cultural DNA, of every society. How to disentangle Japan from the West, how to disentangle it from China or Korea? Is there a pure essence of individuals too, separate from their interactions with other people?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But having said that, how a society negotiates its relationship with dominant cultures is very important. Its ex-colonial feel is undoubtedly the reason I didn't feel comfortable in Hong Kong. But Japan has a genius of passive aggression when it comes to incorporating Western memes, stripping out, for instance, all metaphysics, or turning English words into Japanese ones.

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

Isn't the stripping away of essence a purely postmodern practice? And isn't postmodernism originally a Western concept?
Or is it the product of a new globalist trend as opposed to the perceived cultural consumerist imperialism of the West towards the East?

Re: PM

[(Anonymous)]

"Postmodernism" is a Western concept describing a social condition that can happen anywhere from changes to a post-Fordist re-accumulation of labor/capital and expansion of media technology.

[inparticolare.livejournal.com]

Then how can you at one point be so enthusiastic about Japanese society, culture, and economy and in the next instant lambast the West? Perhaps it would be good to acknowledge both the negative Western aspects as well as the positive Eastern ones instead of engaging in a constant praise of Japan. Still, even this begs the question: what of other Asian societies that have less contact with the West? Why is their role in your worldview so much more obscure? Perhaps what you really enjoy about the East is what the West, that you hate, has done to it.

Just a thought. I don't mean to attack (though I often come off that way).

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

There may not be such a thing as an entirely pure culture per se, but there are historical, cultural, and social definitions for any particular culture. Japan definitely had an ancient culture of its own, but whether the its culture today is Japanese or Westernized is much harder to say from an outside or even inside perspective.

Towards the contrary ...

[(Anonymous)]

If Japan is a place dominated by aesthetics then why is it so ugly?