Andrew

domesticmouse @ 12:48 pm: I now have a passport. Again.
So now I have to pay conference fees, book accommodation and flights. Oh, and get the code and presentation done.

Fuck me.

imomus @ 09:51 am: My noughties 6: bilateral, bipolar Joemus
We've had Folktronic in New York, Oskar in Tokyo, and the Berlin "googlepop" of Otto and Ocky. Now, as the decade chugs towards the buffers, let's cast a backward glance at the last Momus album of the decade: Joemus.

The record, sporting a homo-erotic Famicon sleeve by Stefan Sadler, appears in November 2008 but really starts in June 2006. Just back from my stint as the Unreliable Tour Guide at the Whitney in New York, I'm in London "showing" an artwork (actually just a series of texts whispered by the staff) at a gallery called Blow de la Barra. Maybe it's the presence of the Ziggy Stardust phonebox right outside the gallery on Heddon Street, but when Kamal Ackarie asks me at the opening to contribute a cover version to a box set he's preparing, I say I'd like to do Bowie's Ashes to Ashes in a collaboration with Joe Howe of Glasgow chipcore group Gay Against You, whose side-project Germlin I namecheck on that same trip during a Resonance FM interview as my favourite new music. Here's how the cover turns out:



For a while that stays in its box -- a one-off for a box set. When I think about the next Momus album, I envision something very different, something "mega-trad". For some reason (maybe because this sort of warm regret is just what being middle-aged feels like, or maybe because somewhere in my heart I'm hurting) I cover another song that haunts me, The Next Time, as sung by Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday:



Then I see Gay Against You live in Berlin, and get -- as Joe would put it -- "pretty stoked" (Hanayo is bopping away in the audience, a constant smile on her face, and the Glasgow boys bound around in white leotards, making a joyous din unto the creator). So the idea comes to me to blend the weary sad old man thing with the joyous boy thing. This is where the bipolar nature of the Joemus album (the quick-slow-quick-slow thing it does) gels. When Joe asks me to contribute vocals to a track he's doing for his Germlin solo album, I splice in a new slow section voiced by a sort of Tony Newley / early Bowie character, and the result is Mr Proctor:



I really like the way the track combines weary heartbroken middle-aged regret and youthful pop pep; gadgetry and balladry. Basically the framing for Joemus is established at this point. It'll be Joe and me, fast and slow, 8-bit-Bolan meets croony-girning Tony Newley, sad and don't-care happy. Electronic processing will give me new voices, new characters to inhabit.



The record makes new riffs the way God made Eve from Adam's ribs: Jahwise Hammer of the Babylon King is the Ashes cover rearranged to make a new song, Strewf is Thatness and Thereness re-spliced, and Widow Twanky is the Cliff Richard cover chopped up and thrown into reverse:



I like this way of writing songs; it balances being-in-control with being-out-of-control, conscious with unconscious, old with new. Birocracy gets born, and the lyrics are just off-the-top-of-the-head nonsense, but it feels happy and positive, a fresh start continuously contradicted by slowies like Thatness and Thereness, a Sakamoto cover I had lying around from the Oskar sessions in Tokyo (to be played together with the silent Heian video below):




The Cooper O' Fife sees the Germlin style turned to folk, and Ichabod Crane bends it in the direction of Manchester post-punk. Strewf! has the feel of The Residents rewriting the Oliver Twist musical, and Dracula (a duet with Kyoka, who's just moved to Berlin at this point) collides New Order riffs with gothic motifs and a touch of Henning Christiansen's horse sacrifice.

Goodiepal and Fade to White are warm and sinister in equal measure, but continue to be drawn from a place just beyond my rational ken; it's as if Click Opera sucks up all the sense, and what's left to songs is to present my secret emotional life, my dreams, the things that tug at the edges of consciousness.

If Joemus seems a bit light on well-made songs, the last few make up for the deficiency. I now regret including The Mouth Organ -- a remake of a song on the 2002 Milky album -- and tend to skip it when playing the album. But The Man You'll Never Be is a nice dark maudlin-but-mocking number about getting older -- Cohen meets Pinter, if you like -- and The Vaudevillian (actually the Joemus song I play most live, along with Widow Twanky) is a funny-tragic and rather magisterial ending in which the Tony Newley character is carted offstage in a coffin, then wakes up dead in a universe in which God has also died and is rotting slowly, accompanied by the pathetic sound of a tap dripping in the distance.

Conclusion: I went through a period of listening to Joemus every day on my computer and loving it -- it sounds particularly good on small speakers, because the cheap strident sounds Joe loves to use just shoot out all vivid and brash (on bigger speakers the bass is doing some weird stuff). I last listened to it driving around West Tokyo in Hisae's friend Satoshi's car, and it still sounded pretty great; innovative and interesting.



The album seems to me the most enjoyable thing I did all decade. Lyrically, some of the songs are clearly fluff, but the interest lies in the organic electronic textures, the personae they encourage me to adopt, the unexpected juxtapositions -- that bipolar thing -- of joy and despair, swagger and creep, bawdy and maudlin. If you could travel back through time to 1968 and ask the eight year-old me what he really liked about pop music, he'd probably say he'd been touched by the old schmaltz of Noel Harrison and Michel Legrand doing The Windmills of Your Mind as well as the lyrically meaningless but sexually kinetic energy of Tommy James and the Shondells doing Mony Mony.



Joemus -- with me as Noel Legrand and Joe as the Shondells -- touches both those bases. Perhaps it's my 1968 album, not my 2008 one.

imomus @ 10:24 am: 9 ikebana poems

The Obligations of Sleep


Bowie in Fear and Loathing


Let's Discuss Killed Tom


Heads Up, You Slaves of Labour!


Gaius Maecenas, Trusted Friend and Counselor of Octavian


26 Poets Named for Alphabet Letters


Adoxography: Praise of the Worthless


The Pussy is Nothing but a Void


You Have Beautiful Loins / Groins
(like two coins in a fountain, like two grottos in two mountains)

Snapshots of flower arrangements from our friend Izumi's ikebana class

imomus @ 11:16 am: Yes we are blok heads!
Hisae and I will board a bullet train to Osaka on Wednesday and spend three weeks at points south, mostly Kansai, so our Tokyo time is drawing to a close, alas. Most of the precious substance of the last three weeks has barely made it into these pages; the research I've been doing for the Aftergold show, the daily meetings I've had with friends, old and new.



Last night's Unreliable Tour Guide performance at NOW IDeA was shamanic fun; I turned artist Yusuke Mashiba's (very nice, outsider-ish) ink drawings into the gods of a parallel universe, and also interviewed the artist, posing questions like: "Would I find a black carton of black milk in your fridge?" and "Are you jealous of cockroaches?"



Another high point came on Saturday night, when we went to see excellent absurdist theatre group Crack Iron Albatrossoket at SuperDeluxe. Their piece, entitled Yojohan Oasis Rocket, ended with a blistering live performance from Oorutaichi, whose set with choreographer-dancer Masako Yasumoto in the Spectacle in the Farm video projected last week at Vacant was one of the most thrilling and inspiring things I've ever seen.

For me, the filament of life burns more brightly and beautifully in Tokyo than anywhere else; the question almost everybody asks me is: "Why not live here?" I've run out of reasons, so I'll just say (an Albatrossoket motto) BECAUSE WE ARE BLOK HEADS!

imomus @ 10:29 am: Absent without leaving
The greater Tokyo area has just under 36 million people living in it; it's still the world's most populous metropolitan area. If this monster of cities runs remarkably smoothly most of the time, and even feels like a rather relaxing place, it's because of the particular, even peculiar, habitus of presence which prevails here. Tokyo people are very good at being absent without leaving.



Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.

A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.



Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.

When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.



The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!



For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!



Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.

A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."



You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.

At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.

Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.

domesticmouse @ 01:22 pm: Ugh
Just did my cash flow projections for the next month. Not happy Jan. I thinks my tour of brisvegas is out. Furfle.

imomus @ 11:17 am: From the most-consumerist will come the post-consumerist!
Japan is a great place for a tourist to indulge in visions of alternative societies. Not only is Japan actually different in many ways from the society the tourist was brought up in, but his simple incompetence, incomprehension and sheer delirium, as he walks around Japan, will create all sorts of fertile semantic gaps which -- if no-one is on hand to explain them -- he'll fill using his imagination. His expectation of difference will make him create it.



Yesterday I was queuing for bread at a bakery on the busy plaza that leads up to Ebisu station. Perhaps the fact that it felt more like an airport than a bakery led to the vision that followed. Gazing at a sign showing the prices of different types of bread, I saw two prices. It was probably just two sizes of bread, but for a second I thought it said "WE SELL" for one price and "WE BUY" for another. I imagined, in other words, that this was a bread exchange.



From that simple "mistake" I suddenly extrapolated an alternative society, one which I find rather intriguing: a WE BUY / WE SELL, convenience/exchange, most-consumerist/post-consumerist society in which the ratio between those two prices approaches 1:1.

Clearly, elements of this society are already falling into place, and not just in Japan. Money exchanges at airports buy and sell currency. More and more cash machines will allow you to deposit as well as withdraw cash. People with solar panels on their roofs can increasingly feed excess power they generate back into the grid, and get paid for it by power companies. The technology will soon be cheap enough to make this "total power" profitable to generate at home. Who knows, people's roofs could one day displace power stations the way distributed computing and the web have displaced mainframes.



There are other examples of this eco-efficient "exchange society" taking shape. There are many secondhand clothes shops now (I think of Beacon's Closet in Brooklyn, for instance) where you have a check in counter that receives, appraises and buys clothes customers bring in, and a check out counter where customers buy clothes they didn't bring. And there's the revolution wrought by eBay, of course, and other online buying and selling mechanisms.

It gets particularly interesting when this exchange culture is blended with convenience culture, and we get a 24/7 exchange-convenience culture. For instance, say I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. I have no cash, but I have some aluminium drinks cans I've been collecting in a bag. I take them to the can recycling machine, which gives me enough cash to buy a new drink from the drinks machine nearby. Obviously it's going to take ten or more empty cans to get the price of one full one, but it's nice to imagine ways to get that ratio lower (government subsidy to encourage the IN/OUT society, perhaps?). Achieving 1:1 would be a utopian goal, the eco-economic equivalent of building a perpetual motion machine.



Japan's convenience culture does make it a good place to entertain such visions; one of the premises of the Aftergold show I'm putting together is that the most advanced consumer society is where we're likely to see "the thing after consumerism" taking shape. The combini below my apartment here is open 24/7, 365 days a year. Most shops in Japan seem to be open at incredible times; as a European I don't at all take it for granted that I can get parts for a broken bike late on a Sunday evening, but that's exactly what we did last Sunday at about 8pm, heading to a blazing, crowded bike shop in Nishi-Shinjuku.



Japan is a country with limited natural resources, so it uses materials carefully and recycles conscientiously. Trash is graded and separated very strictly in the home. There's also a flourishing secondhand market. Shimokita has a strong Dorama-based secondhand culture, and the whole of Koenji seems to be selling used goods (including, of course, our good friends the Shiroto No Ran or "amateur revolution" crew). Bigger concerns like Book Off sell secondhand goods too. Even out in the slick Italianate shopping mall Venus Fort in Odaiba, Hisae and I found a huge and excellent secondhand clothes store (Furugi Hypermarket) selling immaculately clean clothes; the Japanese obsession with cleanliness makes secondhand here a much more pleasant -- and much less smelly -- experience than it can be in the West. And something of the same spirit infuses a place like Utrecht, which sells handmade books brought in by the artists themselves.



The unique structure of Japanese business also encourages this "amateur revolution" angle (and the exchange society I'm outlining is clearly one in which the distinction between amateur and professional gets dissolved). Even big companies like Toyota tend to employ hundreds of small household suppliers, who produce components to very high standards in little workshops on the ground floor, often, of family houses. So even companies that look vast and monolithic tend to be comprised, on closer inspection -- like a gigantic halftoned photograph -- of big numbers of small, almost amateur, suppliers.



Obviously, quality control would be a big issue in this convenience/exchange culture, especially when it comes to food (or, you know, piloting jet planes; could you get a cheaper ticket if you flew the plane for a while?). There are overlaps with my idea (most recently referenced in decade's-end music retrospectives in The Guardian by Simon Reynolds and Alexis Petridis) about everyone being famous, in the future, for fifteen people; this is very much a long-tail system of production, one which breaks down not just the distinction between amateur and professional, but also the distinctions between producer and consumer, between new and secondhand, between consuming and recycling, and between big and small-scale production.

Are any economists heralding this sort of production system at the moment? Are any political parties taking steps towards it, or putting it into their manifestos? They should be.

imomus @ 12:35 pm: Hayao Kawai, the self, and the great mother
The other day, chatting with Alin Huma, I asked "Who was it who said the Japanese have no pyschoanalysis, and no need for psychoanalysts, because they have no unconscious? Because all the neuroses are on the surface here?"

"It was Lacan, wasn't it?" said Alin.



Actually, there have been Japanese psychoanalysts. Hayao Kawai (1928-2007), for instance. If Freud delved into the Bible and Greek mythology for motifs like Moses and Oedipus, Kawai delved into Buddhism, Japanese folk tales, and even the novels of Haruki Murakami for his motifs and examples. Kawai thought of himself as a Jungian. Much of his work examines the difference between the Eastern and Western mindsets.

In books like Psyche in Japan and Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, Kawai laid out three key points which he saw as distinguishing the Eastern mind:

1. A tendency to introversion
2. The location of consciousness outside the self
3. The strength of "the great mother inside"

According to Kawai, there's a lack of distinction in the Eastern world between consciousness and unconsciousness (an idea which mirrors Lacan's thought about everything we think of as "deeply buried" being out in the open and up on the surface in Japan). Eastern philosophy seeks the self, historically, in its own unconsciousness. Jung said that when Westerners say the word "mind" it refers to consciousness, but when Easterners say the same word it refers to the unconscious.



Here's a simple diagram Kawai made to show the differences between the Eastern and Western minds, as he saw it. The Eastern self lives in the unconsciousness, which means there's a lack of knowledge of the self. The self in Westerners is put in the centre of consciousness, which means that the self is seen as strong, central and independent -- and yet frail, because this Robinson Crusoe is surrounded by the unknown, able to be overwhelmed and undermined at any moment by powerful "instincts" and "impulses" from somewhere else.

As a result of this basic organisation of the self, Westerners tend to find the meaning of their life in a fight with fate and with their own nature, whereas Easterners tend to find the meaning of life in "tasting their fate"; accepting it, and living in harmony with their own nature. The typical Western dramatic hero struggles against the inevitable, whereas the typical Eastern hero "tastes" and accepts it.

This leads to differences in attitudes to "the great mother" (which relates to my thoughts about the robotic female authority figure in overwhelmed by milk). In the West, thinks Kawai, people have to kill their mother in order to win their independence. In the East, people try to achieve independence without killing the mother.

In Japan, says Kawai, people tend to model any kind of social group on family relationships, in both good and bad ways. When your school and company is a family group, things can sometimes get intolerable, stifling. On the other hand, society as a great universal mother can bind people together and make them less lonely.

Kawai didn't entirely see Japan as an Eastern culture, though; for him it was an important bridge, a place where Western and Eastern conceptions of the self and society could mingle.

domesticmouse @ 03:56 pm: A change in world power.
The Guardian: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room

So China has decided to declare war on the US. A war fought in classical cloak and dagger style. This is going to get very interesting.

imomus @ 10:36 am: Twittering the singing curator


icura: 今日の目標はmomusのライブに行くこと。



stsysr: 明日MOMUS来ますよ！大阪グラフから独立した青柳さんのギャラリーgm ten にて　　http://gmprojects.jp/exhibition/2009/1219/



1000DIGIKI: Momus live. The karaoke thing is maybe tired, but the last two songs - covers of Bowie and Brel - were superb.



yam_yam_: @stsysr 　MOMUS好きだった、MOMUS情報はどこに…？MOMUSて今は日本にいないんだ？



stsysr: これ歌詞がいいですよね。フィクション？ http://www.phespirit.info/momus/20080110.htm



aokumaneko: え”ーーーーーーーーーー！！　モーマスってアラファイ？ってか来年50歳？！　若すぎる！　すごい感性！！　大好き！！！　We love you Momus!

Tweets and snaps from last night's event at gm ten. Next Momus performance in Tokyo: Sunday at Utrecht

domesticmouse @ 08:06 am: Gaining overview
I scored a promotion at work yesterday. Well, I volunteered for extra responsibility. Same diff, right? One of the downsides of working in an agile environment is that we only have a two week window on the system. What is the problem we are really solving? No idea, here are the features we want this week. It's dis-orienting. So, as part of the retrospective, I volunteered to help the floundering architect, if only to get an overview of the entire system.

An interesting side note here is the constant stream of communication breakdowns between business and the programmers. Business have a holistic need, the programmers are only willing to talk in individual features. This is best illustrated in a phone interview cheatsheet by Stevey Yegge, where in all the points that Stevey interviews on are detail focus.

It entertains me greatly that the question I blew in my first round phone interview with Google is listed on this cheatsheet as an example question. So, by Stevey's estimation, I'm not a programmer. And you know what? The business reps in my current job agree. They are at pains each time they take programmers to task for inability to communicate to point out that I'm not in that category.

I'm not a programmer. I'm a designer. Lord save us all.

imomus @ 09:27 am: Tam O'Kamakura
"He came back from Japan looking different, somehow..." I suppose I've always been fascinated by watching someone -- a pop star who's moved up to the international level of success, or a friend who's moved to another country -- being visibly changed by the encounter. It might be someone British and working class who becomes a musician and starts traveling the world, and presently you notice exotic influences rubbing off on them in the way they dress, and the sound of their music. John Lydon discovers Jamaica!

But it's not as simple as that. In most industrialised places you travel to these days, clothes and music have a flattened, globalised feel. A Gap or Uniqlo or Muji t-shirt looks pretty much the same in Tokyo or New York; it's probably made in China, wherever you buy it. (I'm talking about travel within Europe, the Americas, Asia; India, Indonesia and Africa are different in that they still have mainstream regional dress styles, which makes them very interesting. By the same token, though, they don't consume Western pop music, which makes it harder for a Western musician to travel there.)

In this kind of global system, the sort of national identity you could consume by buying clothes on your travels is available only as a quirky niche product for tourists and internal tourists. You encounter a post-national nationalism (a coquettish nationalism primped for the age of globalism) in certain shops. In fact, they're specifically the kind of shops I buy my clothes in, which is why I've ended up looking like some sort of weird parody of a Japanese person from a former age.

The jacket I'm wearing in the photo above comes from Kamawanu, which is a little shop in trad Japanese style up a side street in Daikanyama. Visits to Cosmic Wonder and United Bamboo have left me unimpressed; both these designers seem to have made steps towards the Gap-Uniqlo mainstream by making subtle, clever or conceptual versions of global American-collegiate clothes. Kamawanu, with its rows of gorgeous tenuguis, excites me because its references are entirely Japanese. Here I can indulge my fascination with kabuki, arcane Japanese uniforms, pilgrims and monks, otherness and particularity.

Kamawanu is at the conservative end of the spectrum; their patterns, though gorgeous, are hardly innovative. For a splash of modernity with your tradition, try Sou Sou on Omote Sando. Originally from Kyoto (the mothership for trad-inspired Japanese design), Sou Sou does a great line in bold and flashy tabi shoes and socks. In the photo above I'm let down by my plastic crocs; a pair of Sou Sou tabi trainers is clearly in order.



At the Koenji-quirky end of things, the home-stitched clothes made by Trio4 are great. Trio4 are the Shiroto No Ran group led by Hikaru Yamashita who made a gaffer tape-handy JR employee called Mr Sato into a folk hero.



Their clothes similarly elevate everyday Japan, using stitched motifs (handmade combini logos, cigarette packet motifs, funny faces) to give a local specificity to the generic products churned out by the global clothes mills.



I've also been impressed by Theatre Products, an ambitious and original clothing company with a store in LaForet called Stripe ("Stripe, symbol for eternity... Stripe is continuous and never ending!"). For gm ten gallery's September culture event in the Nasu countryside, Spectacle in the Farm, Theatre Products put on a fashion show in which models pulled (sometimes reluctant) farm animals about. Sure, the herded sheep and paraded alpacas might have brought Marie Antoinette to mind rather than anything specifically Japanese, but there was also something very Terayama, very Art Theatre Guild, about it (as there is about Theatre Products' logo).



Do you want flavours to go global, or one global flavour to go everywhere? Globalisation is clearly a sword with two edges; it has the flattening, monocultural capacity to make everywhere on earth look like exactly the same place, but also the amazing capacity to spread far and wide gloriously odd specificities it took cultures centuries to arrive at. Through tourism and other forms of cultural exchange, globalisation can also make local cultures think more clearly about the value of their own specific differences (actually seeing them as "differences" rather than "errors" is already a huge step).

But there's a paradoxical universalism in this "globalism of flavour"; I actually feel weirdly Scottish dressed in my "Japanese" gear. I feel like Tam O' Shanter having visions on the road to Kamakura.

Momus performs a 45-minute live set tonight at gm ten gallery, Azabu-Juban, at 2100. Entry is 1000 yen (includes free drink).

domesticmouse @ 05:22 pm: I can has passport now?
As part of kitting up for my (now officially accepted) talk at the Wave Mini-Conf for LCA in Wellington, I've applied for a passport. According to the gov't, it's now in process. So I should probably start paying for things like conference fees and what not.

Blerk.

imomus @ 09:26 am: Nothing but love compelled them
A lovely Sunday afternoon with our friends Digiki and Haruna, Alin and Meta in Nishi-Shinjuku, where Antonin (Digiki) now has a whole house in the shadow of the skyscraper district. We ate lunch sitting on the sunny roof, then flambéed crepes in Grand Marnier in the washitsu room below while Hisae and Meta batted balloons about.



Alin then fine-tuned a spindly-racy blue bike he's letting me borrow, and we made a trip to the local bike shop to refurbish Antonin's milk-white racer. It was nearly 8pm on a Sunday evening, but the bike shops in Tokyo were all still open -- something that would be unheard of in Berlin.

The bookshops and department stores were all open too, so we headed down (five of us on three bikes) to Shibuya, where Alin and Antonin planned to show me Shibuya Booksellers, a fashionable new (well, new to me, anyway) art and design bookstore. It was open, but there was a presentation of some kind going on. We recognised Nakako Hayashi sitting by the window:



Nakako Hayashi is the editor of Here and There magazine, which is a wonderful and peculiar beast, a self-published magazine featuring Hayashi's small but compelling world, comprised of people like Susan Ciancolo, Elein Fleiss and Yukinori Maeda of Cosmic Wonder. It exists at the spiritual-ethical-aesthetic end of fashion.

In this interesting TAB interview Hayashi tells her story; how she started with Shiseido's magazine Hanatsubaki in the late 80s, then started her own magazine around the turn of the century, getting the brilliant Kazunari Hattori to do the design. The latest edition of Here and There -- launched in tandem with a show at Utrecht in September -- is No. 9, subtitled Her Life. Nakako also keeps a blog.



Alin Huma also showed me an elegant little publication he's made, the catalogue for his nascent bike company Fin de Cycle. Since Alin never does anything with less than impeccable visual standards, both the bicycles he's offering for sale and the catalogue itself are far beyond the call of commercial duty. I think that aestheticism-beyond-the-call-of-duty is one of the things I appreciate most here in Japan, whether it's in Alin's bike-love, Hayashi's magazine, or Shibuya Booksellers' store design. They didn't have to be as great as they are; nothing but love forced them.

imomus @ 09:31 am: Shinro snaps London, Meisa snaps girls
Shinro Ohtake has already popped up in this blog; Hisae and I are hoping to visit his Naoshima Bathhouse -- a fanciful sento featuring a stuffed elephant -- in January. But Shinro has another major achievement, far from the Seto Inland Sea. In a series of massive picture books filled with photographs, drawings and scrap memorabilia (but particularly UK 77) Ohtake has documented seventies London better, to my mind, than any British artist or photographer.



It's not that Ohtake -- aged 22 in 1977, he'd just graduated from Musashino Art University -- avoids the punk rock cliches that now pass for cultural history of the late 70s in the UK. His photos show us that Bozz Scaggs. Elkie Brooks, Elton John and The Enid featured on UK posters in 1977 rather more than The Damned and The Sex Pistols did, but he has plenty of shots of punk rockers, and clippings from the snarky music press and listings magazines. It's rather that Ohtake shows the entire context; views out of the window, tickets from gigs, confectionery wrappers, books of matches with adverts on them.



What comes as a shock is how much of the UK in 1977 was stuck in the 1960s; there are silly little Hillman Imp cars, and ridiculous child-molester hairstyles in the barber windows, trickledown domestications from the wilder shores of 1960s subculture. It's all pretty grim and muddy, but it does show you where punk's disgust came from. And it's telling that it takes a Japanese photographer -- a sort of impartial Martian in this weird and depressing landscape -- to document the UK properly. Sitting in gm ten gallery flipping through Ohtake's back pages, I was completely transported back to the era, with exactly the right combination of repulsion and nostalgia, shudder and swoon.



There was a very different experience waiting for us at the studio of a very different photographer, Meisa Fujishiro, yesterday. Fujishiro is a girly photographer known for his fast, loose, appetising gravure shots of girls, and books like Milky Hips (collections of women showing their bottoms in various locations). Just before vacating his Aoyama studio, Fujishiro has plastered the walls with snapshots and furnished the room with comfy chairs, tables laden with gravure books of pretty girls, and Michael Jackson's greatest hits pumping out of the stereo.



The overall feeling I got from Meisa's photographs was of how much he likes girls, how much girls like being girls, and how I've wasted my life being a singer rather than being Meisa Fujishiro. I mean, seriously, to do this and get paid for it too? How much better could life get?

domesticmouse @ 09:51 am: Charlie Stross on Nexus One
Charlie writes an interesting piece on the upcoming Google Phone. Gadget Patrol: 21st century phone

This is the first chunk of commentary I've seen that states that this is the start of a war between Google and AT&T. I mean, this is a generational war that has been on the books since '04, there has been no doubt it was going to happen. It's just that now is the first time I believe that AT&T has realised that it is in an existential crisis.

In totally unrelated news (hah) I'm noticing the geeks are starting to play opening up network kit. So yeah, i give Cisco five years. And oddly enough, that's about as long as I give AT&T.

domesticmouse @ 09:16 am: I haven't laughed this hard in ages
Seventy minutes of Phantom Menace film critique. Fucking brilliant. Here, have the first installment:

imomus @ 12:43 pm: Boyish GALS one-shot mook
In June of last year I penned an eloquent elegy for the endangered bukkake genre of Japanese porn. So what seems to be replacing that Shinto ritual of repression and release? Since nature -- and porn -- abhors a vacuum, what new fetishes are represented on the combini racks and the DVD shelves of Japan, in the areas designed to get customers a little hot, shifty and breathless?



One answer seems to be provided by a magazine I spotted in my local Family Mart last night, while buying wholesome things like Muji stationery and soup. Boyish GALS is, to be pedantic, a one-shot mook shrink-wrapped with a DVD. I didn't buy it, but as a keen amateur sociologist I couldn't let it go unnoted in these pages.

My analysis of bukkake inevitably raised Shinto's focus on seed -- and agrarian fertility in general -- as a framing device. Using that same frame, what does the rise of "boyish gal" porn tell us about the Japanese sexual psyche in late 2009? Is it a gay development, or a feminist one, or some kind of softcore misogyny, or part of a semi-hikikomori fear of the otherness of the other sex?

One mook doesn't make a winter; I don't think it would be fair to say that a desire for Japanese women to become more boyish represents a step towards sterility and austerity. Certainly you could say that bukkake, invented in 1986 at the height of Japan's profligate economic bubble, represents a certain spendthrift tendency, a gloriously reckless waste of the national seed (something like the necessary lack of necessity Bataille built into his idea of the accursed share). By contrast, a trend for boyish gals would represent mere thrift. A boyish gal won't (in symbolic terms) give birth, which in turn means you won't end up paying money to bring up a child in a difficult world of recession, economic downturn, and so on.



But we should look at this in a wider context. This is an age where pregnancy and giving birth is very highly valued in Japan. The new government is promising wads of extra money to parents, conscious that something needs to be done about Japan's longterm demographic decline. Magazines like Crea (which recently featured a heavily-pregnant Kahimi Karie) and MiLK (Isshiki Sae) have recently fetished female fertility as never before.

It's worth noting the target audiences of these magazines, though. Boyish GALS is aimed at men, whereas Crea and MiLK are women's magazines. Could it be that while Japanese "grass-eating" men (the kind for whom even having a real girlfriend is mendokusai; too much hassle, too costly) dream of ever-less-fertile, ever-more-boyish women, Japanese women fantasize themselves as massive matriarchal baby machines with ever-bigger, ever-more-fruitful bellies?

Bukkake is hardly a fertile genre, if you think about it; sperm delivered to the wrong areas won't make babies. So perhaps it's less a question of fertility falling out of fashion in hard times, and more a question of men liking their sex non-reproductive and women liking it fruitful? We'll continue our penetrating investigations into Japanese fertility when we have more data; watch this space.

domesticmouse @ 03:39 pm: Palm in browser IDE
Palm has released a development environment for WebOS: Project Ares Open Beta

The most amusing part for me is that the code editor is based on Bespin. This means that it works in Safari, Mozilla and Chrome. Notice something missing? Yeah, quite.

imomus @ 12:30 pm: Oldie restaurants
Sure, sure, sure, Tokyo's all steel, plastic and concrete. They don't let anything get old here; they tear it down and rebuild it all bland and sterile the moment anything approaching "charming patina" encroaches. But, but, but there are nooks and niches where old things persist. Oldie restaurants, for instance.



This is Ajitome in Sangenjaya, for instance. We brought Hisae's fried Satoshi to this fugu restaurant last night because we loved it last time we came... despite the presence of "research whale" on the menu.



Ajitome has classic oldie charm; the two obasantatchi who run the place have a Breughel look and a pleasant scatty informality; they heap used plates up on a messy table, and often come and plonk themselves down to chat with the customers. Their headscarves, neckerchiefs, monogrammed aprons and hairstyles impress me much more than anything I see in Harajuku; somehow they remind me of characters in a Miyazaki animation.



Another scatty-charming oldie patina dive we've loved is a little Chinese-influenced place near the JR line Otsuka stop (it's on the way to Misako and Rosen gallery).



The 84 year-old sole operator of this quiet but fascinating place told us he started the restaurant in 1959. His living quarters are directly behind it, divided from the eating space by a step and a sliding door, with a pair of slip-on shoes waiting on the concrete floor of the restaurant.



All the crockery in the little eatery was marked with the restaurant's phone number, presumably so you could report missing items that turned up elsewhere. But the plates must've been made in the 50s; Tokyo's phone numbers have long since acquired a few extra digits.



The Otsuka proprietor was a bit deaf, but friendly. His hobby wasn't hard to guess; the place was littered with fishing magazines.