My noughties 1: Two zeroes and a blank sheet of paper The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.
I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.
Although some of my more conservative fans -- notably Swede John Thelin, once (as "Count V") the mainstay of the alt.fan.momus newsgroup -- characterised the noughties as a time in which "Momus forgot how to write proper songs", others -- notably the Web 2.0 generation, who ranked Nervous Heartbeat and Frilly Military at least as high, in terms of YouTube views, as my old hit Hairstyle of the Devil -- liked my noughties stuff better than what had gone before. With 154,000 views this -- my 2001 collaboration with Montréal group Bran Van 3000, reggaeton vocalist Eek-a-Mouse and actress Liane Balaban -- is the most-viewed Momus-related track on YouTube:
So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape" of a decade, the one we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:
As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:
Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:
I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:
James Blunt Back To Bedlam Dido No Angel Amy Winehouse Back To Black David Gray Wide Ladder Dido Life For Rent The Beatles 1 Leona Lewis Spirit Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head Keane Hopes And Fears Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.
Websites as slideshows I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that allows you to turn any webpage into a slideshow.
Now, turning a website into a slideshow is a bit like turning a bicycle into a record player; it's perverse, against the grain. People put images onto their websites in a certain context. When you pull them up and turn them into a full-screen sequence of three-second images, you de- and re-contextualize them. The intended narrative gets stripped away, replaced by a new narrative which can be surreal, dreamlike, or psychologically revealing. That's the theory, anyway.
It doesn't always work. News sites like the BBC, The Guardian and Google News have done something to their html to make slideshowing impossible. Stil in Berlin works, Face Hunter doesn't. But those street fashion blogs are predominantly visual already, packaged as sequences of images. So is stripes-crazy Stanley Lieber's LiveJournal.
Some blogs frustrate the desire to escape text by bringing it into their images. Hipster Runoff sprinkles its jpegs with bitmapped lettering: "ELECTROMA = POOP", the images say, or "I deserve a better life / career / job". What emerges here is the extent to which American hipsterism simply recycles American strip malls and office cubicles with a tiny justifying sparkle of irony.
Letters of Note shows images of... letters, naturally. That doesn't preclude visual interest, of course; some of them, like the Lucasfilms recruitment ad up the page, are visually pretty arresting.
The slideshow thing works better with Awful Library Books, although, like the blog itself, the interestingness of the books depicted (rooted in their otherness) contradicts the blog's whole premise, which is to encourage librarians to weed out, name and shame inappropriate, absurd or boring books from their libraries. Leave them there, I say! We need those glimpses of otherness more than we need appropriateness.
The slideshow software works well with Japanese sites like Sajiblo (which documents the refurbishment of an old building as an organic cafe) because they tend to publish quite high resolution photos at absurdly small sizes. For non-Japanese-readers the slideshow doesn't change the essential experience of these websites (they're already image sequences), it merely strips out the clutter of text.
It's worth saying that full-screening images, while it does take away the clutter of nested windows most of us have on our screen, doesn't remove the windows metaphor entirely: what, after all, is a computer screen but a proposed "window on the world"? What it does do, though, is replace an ugly, complex collision of frames with a single, apparently-authoritative one. It replaces a messy space-sequence (lots of complicated relationships between frames and text and images) with a single, simple, tidy time-sequence. The fact that that big authoritative time sequence is actually fairly random and decontextualised is what makes it so fascinating: the big images become a sort of oracle, telling us unexpected things.
Click Opera, slideshow-ified, for instance, looks like a trailer for a sexy, didactic, utopian horror film.
Learning from Japan "Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.
The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.
I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...
"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/9/09 sixwordstories Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/9/09 dailyfoodie Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.
An imaginary Manchester Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
Witts then goes on to set the scene much better than the Factory documentary, showing a transition in 70s Manchester from Modernist glass-concrete-and-steel redevelopment to Postmodernist restoration, pedestrianisation and heritage-orientation. He also displaces the cliché about the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall sparking Manchester post-punk, pointing out that the experimentation of Van der Graaf Generator, the "basic" rock of The Worst, and the radical localism of the folk scene also played their part.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
Everything you know isn't a panda A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
Forget the places you've been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
Blogs you check habitually are the wrong ones because they tell you nothing new. Try switching to Letters of Note, correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Certainly, the letters collected here are from the past. But they very readily suggest parallel futures -- for instance, a future in which Andy Warhol isn't famous.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
The everyday contains everything you need for a religion.
Stop expecting new musician Y to be "the new musician X". And stop expecting old musician X to be the new musician X.
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Conspiracy theories waste your time. It's all a big conspiracy.
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
Drums are finished. Except for kettledrums and gongs.
You know too much about LA and not enough about Laos. On the internet and in "the real world" you're consistently looking in the wrong places for inspiration. Why is that? Partly it's because the things that could really change you make you scared.
This is the decade in which you will finally make the switch from quantity to value. One ramification: you will move from an expensive place where you have to do a lot of meaningless work just to exist to a cheap place where you can exist easily and can therefore afford to dedicate yourself to work that really means something to you.
The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but they might be located on the other side of the world.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do. They are hidden next door, but to befriend them you will have to learn a new language.
You will probably be happier amongst people who do not think as you do.
Nothing could be better than a market at 5am, but to experience it you will have to get up earlier and brave the cold.
Learn to make things with wood.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Everything you know is right, but that was then and this is now.
Brel, Seb, Rog Here are three videos of Carousel rehearsals last month at Music Bank in the Tower Bridge Business Complex in which I sang through -- for the first time with real musicians -- three Jacques Brel songs arranged by David Coulter and Mike Smith, and translated by me (you can read my translations, two of which were made specially for this performance, beside the videos as they appear on YouTube). The band of twenty musicians (including Roger Eno on piano, Seb Rochford on drums, Leo Abrahams on guitar, Kate St Clair on oboe and Thomas Bloch on onde martinot) performed these songs with me at The Barbican on October 22nd and the Warwick Arts Centre the next day.
Finally, Jacky, filmed onstage at The Barbican at the end of the first concert.
I was particularly taken with Aberdonian drummer Seb Rochford (of Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland) and his extraordinary afro. Seb exudes a 70s countercultural cool as well as incredible percussive flair, and it was easy to believe Leo's tales of Brian Eno attending recording sessions with Seb, watching all his takes. Here he is doing his stuff:
As for Roger Eno (he crosses the picture at the beginning of the video for The Town Tumbled), the man does this footstomping thing while playing the piano, and grins like Elton John, and loves to laugh, joke and do crosswords. On the tour bus to Warwick I noticed that a lot of the stories he was telling sounded familiar: there was one about the Pepsi campaign that promised "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", one about Picasso undermining representational image-making by asking a man who showed a photo of his wife "But is she really so small and flat?", one about art being a plane you can crash and walk away from, and one (at my request) about his dad the postman. Eventually the coin dropped. I'd heard some or all these tales from the same source he had: his big brother Brian. But Roger had heard them firsthand.
Hey kids, why not make a creepy text-to-movie movie? The nights are drawing in and the weather's crappy, so why don't you settle down in front of a crackling computer screen and direct your own frankly creepy text-to-movie movie? There are hours of fun to be had making wooden-looking 3D characters say rude things in bizarre settings. I know, I've tried it.
Now, it so happens that Dr Woodard and I will both exhibit artworks in Vienna next week in a group show called Verausgabungssymposium ("Expenditure Symposium"), held at Contemporary Concerns (COCO) Gallery. Curated by Christian Kobald and Severin Dünser, the show is about waste. My piece, intended to be displayed on an electronic signboard, is called The Facebook Proverbs. For a while now, I've been using my Facebook page's status updates as a place to put proverbs. By re-cycling these "deep tweets" as an artwork (in a medium pioneered by people like Jenny Holzer and Claude Closky) I want to embody the logic of an old proverb: "Waste not, want not!"
So my second text-to-movie effort is a film of The Facebook Proverbs as -- and not as -- they'll be appearing in Vienna.
In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.
RSS feeds again
If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.
If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.
Enveloped in postcards
Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.
Photos of the week
If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too! ( Read more... )
Welcome to the Hausu Hausu, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1977, is perhaps the most visually exuberant film I've ever seen. The comedy-horror "watch-'em-die" flick was his first feature after a career in TV advertising; according to the film's Wikipedia page Obayashi got the idea from his 7 year-old daughter. It certainly looks like it; the film has a hyperactive pace, saturated colours, unrealistic situations taken to the extreme, storybook backdrops, and absurdly inventive cinematic devices. It's a genre film which uses the strictness of formula to allow itself a wildness of technique which is really quite extraordinary.
I discovered Hausu this Halloween just by typing "Japanese horror film" into YouTube. The clips there were enough to send me to Veoh to download the whole film (for that you need to install the Veoh player, which is free). I was surprised I hadn't heard of the film, but apparently it's been unavailable for a while on DVD and is only now being shown theatrically in the US, in places like the BAM Cinematek, with a view to appearing on DVD shortly via Janus Films. (Sorry, Janus, you probably didn't want people to know it was available on Veoh, did you?)
Generally speaking, I'm not terribly interested in genre films, in OTT horror, in 70s watch-'em-die exploito-formula flicks, in Tarantino Asian fleapit raves (not sure if he's raved about this one, but it wouldn't surprise me) and so on. I could talk about the sweet-sour contrast between the first half of the film and the second, or I could tell you the film's plot and describe how the seven teenage girls are killed one by one via a possessed house and a "seven deadly sins" structure which sees each of them offed in a way appropriate to the virtue or vice which defines their stereotypically flattened characters. Talented musician Melody is swallowed by the piano, pretty Oshare by a mirror, Kung-Fu is felled in a kung-fu fight with a witch, and there are similarly far-fetched deaths for Fantasy, Prof, Mac, and Sweet (which one drowns naked in a rising tide of cat's blood when she falls off a tatami raft? I lost track; they all sound the same when they scream).
But recounting the ludicrous plot would be a waste of time. What's really compelling about this film is all on the formal level, and it's all about excess, exuberance, license and invention. Within the first few minutes the director establishes that he can and will do anything to tell his story. He'll overlap two different musical pieces on the soundtrack, shoot a scene, Cassavetes-like, through a glass door, freeze the frame, billow a silk scarf in a wind machine, zoom suddenly down to a telescopic detail, blackening the rest of the screen, insert an animation, spin the picture upside down, use absurdly unrealistic (and gorgeously beautiful) painted backdrops featuring towering cumulo-nimbus clouds, insert a musical number... And that's even before the inventive murders begin. Here, have a look for yourself:
The sheer absurdity and excess of the film would irritate if it weren't so beautiful and charming, with a gorgeous musical score and seductive Wizard-of-Oz-like colours. It isn't just that Obayashi throws in every cinematic device he can think of, but that he makes them work so well. His next films (Drifting Classroom, Exchange Students and The Girl Who Conquered Time) were apparently quite similar; I'll be seeking them out, interested to see whether he burned out quickly or continued, on a purely visual level, to be as inventive as he was in Hausu.
To my mind -- in this film, at least -- Nobuhiko Obayashi is much better than the over-hyped Dario Argento.
Newspaper stalked and serenaded by a ghost of its true self I spent quite a bit of time yesterday (but it was alright, because here in Berlin it was cold and raining) shuttling back and forth "in New York" between Stuart Bailey, my new "editor" at TF/LN (The First / Last Newspaper) and Jonathan Paul, the editor of The Moment, the New York Times style blog. Basically, TF/LN, a temporary newspaper that art-design group Dexter Sinister are publishing during the Performa Biennial, launched yesterday, and I wrote a spoof column for it, The Ghost-Materialist, which picked up where my real column for The New York Times, The Post-Materialist, left off back in January. You can read the first Ghost-Materialist in a ghostly location here on Click Opera; I've secreted it, spookily, in April 2008, which happens to be the month I started writing the Post-Materialist too. It's entitled Paris Druggery-Pokery and tells a tall tale about Paris fashionistas abandoning select store Colette in favour of an insignificant droguerie-menage store in the 17th arrondissement.
Things got complicated yesterday when the real New York Times got interested in publishing the spoof column as well. It looks as if they'll be running it slash running a piece about it on Thursday. Now, TF/LN is being put together across the road from the New York Times building, in the Port Authority building at BLANK SL8 (corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street), in a continuous piece of what Dexter Sinister like to call "performative publishing". They love ghosts, mirrors, doubles and Pynchonesque-Kafkaesque semi-legitimate parasitical operations (the alternative post office in Crying of Lot 49, the alternative court system in The Trial), and this publishing operation is very much the ghost-double of The New York Times.
So what we have now is the real New York Times sitting up and taking notice of a weird temporary ghost-double across the road. Dexter Sinister's operation is intended to "reflect on the unstable condition of contemporary news and related medias", and this comes at a time when newspapers are, more than ever, questioning themselves existentially. Oddly enough, the first thing I did when I got the NYT job is question the legitimacy of the people offering me the job. I went so far as to construct a paranoid sting spoof in which an entire facade of The New York Times, with its own convincing fake website, had been constructed to entrap and ensnare me. In the end I concluded that it didn't really matter whether this was "fake NYT" or "real NYT"; the logic of the Woody Allen joke about not telling your brother he isn't a chicken "because we need the eggs" applied. I needed the eggs, so I acted as if The Moment really were the New York Times. In a sense, though, this "paranoia" reflected a reality: that "the New York Times" is making itself up from scratch every day. That it, too, is, in a sense, a daily parody of The New York Times. Hence its interest in somebody across the road doing, essentially, the same thing.
Dexter Sinister launched their TF/LN at a party last night in New York during which they screened Farewell, etaoin shrdlu, a 1980 film directed by David Loeb Weiss which documents Linotype operator Carl Schlesinger's last day -- and the New York Times' last day -- of manual hot metal typesetting, which occurred on July 2nd, 1978. As the San Francisco Chronicle explains, "etaoin shrdlu" is the phrase you get when you strike the first twelve keys at the left side of the Linotype keyboard. If a line of type got garbled, you'd write "etaoin shrdlu" just to indicate that it should be removed, but sometimes the error crept into the printed paper, along with the tag (rather like QWERTYUIOP or LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET).
Thirty years after the end of hot metal typesetting, newspapers are in a much deeper crisis. Should they charge a cover fee at all (the Evening Standard in London just went free)? Should they wind up their paper editions and go online-only (The Moment is an online-only feature in The New York Times)? What does "newspaper" mean, in the age of Google News personalisation filters and the Facebook newsfeed? Can "news" mean whatever you want it to mean? Are we all on the same page?
I recently visited The Guardian's shiny new office in London. Rather like The New York Times, the paper moved into amazing and expensive new premises mere months before being pummeled by the twin blow of economic recession and plummeting advertising and circulation figures. The Guardian's new home is a curtain of wavy glass backing onto a tranquil canal. It blends seamlessly into the King's Place arts complex next door, to the extent that you feel that it might be becoming an upmarket culture brand rather than a paper. The New York Times, meanwhile, has reportedly been letting out office space in its new tower on the square named after it.
Something about newspapers in shiny new buildings in the 21st century reminds me of Mies van der Rohe's never-built 1919 design for a glass skyscraper on the Berlin Friedrichstrasse. There's a delicious incongruity, visually, between the essentially 19th century world of the newspaper, with its gothic type and its print works full of (we imagine) artisans slaving over hot type, and the glass-and-numbers, smoke-and-mirrors world of computers and high finance and precarious immateriality newspapers currently inhabit, and seem destined, ultimately, to be undermined by. I wonder if the glassy New York Times, faced with a handmade broadsheet across the road, is being stalked (and serenaded) by the ghost of its true self?
Quotation Hisae and I will be spending six weeks in Japan soon, from early December until mid-January. We'll probably be staying in one of those rental apartments in Tokyo, but if you have a better idea, drop me a line. The trip this time is subsidised by my curation job; to recap, I've been asked to put a Japanese art / performance / video exhibition together for the Radar Arts Centre at the University of Loughborough. The show, which I'm calling Aftergold, will happen while the Japanese team is in the Midlands training for the Olympics.
Performing as Momus isn't the reason I'll be in Japan this time, but I'm hoping to put some kind of event together in collaboration with the Utrecht reading room in Aoyama. Apartamento magazine last week launched their fourth edition at Utrecht during Tokyo Design Week, and cooked people some free lunches in the reading room. Hisae and I have a feature in the new Apartamento, a study of our neighbour Jan Lindenberg's apartment in Berlin. Jan is also in Japan right now (hello Jan, drop us a postcard!).
The fifth edition of Quotation, the "worldwide creative journal", has just been released in Japan, and features interviews with both me and Hisae; I'm there as Momus, and Hisae as one half of Penquo, her mysterious performance unit with Kyoka. It's available through Amazon Japan here.
There's also a big Momus interview (by Olivier Lamm) in the new edition of french culture mag Chronic'art, which hit the streets yesterday. The magazine's website says:
MOMUS "Musician, connected journalist, web pioneer: at 50, the American Nick Currie (aka Momus) adds a string to his bow by publishing his first novel, "Le Livre des blagues", a post-modern family chronicle to make you scream with laughter. Encounter with an authentic polycultural mutant. Plus Chrono-Momus: key moments in a career as dense as a novel."
I rather enjoy being represented as "a 50 year-old American"; there's something almost Cindy Shermanesque about the idea that you're a completely different person in every press profile. And speaking of the ghostly morphing of fact into fiction, this week sees the launch in New York of Dexter Sinister's guerilla broadsheet THE FIRST / LAST NEWSPAPER, which will feature my Ghost-Materialist column, an unreliable revisit of the Post-Materialist column I used to write for the New York Times. More details here.
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/2/09 aiyatheydidnt The Chinese version of ONTD, AIYA is a dynamic international community that welcomes users who share a love of contemporary Chinese pop culture. Dedicated to celebrity gossip and entertainment news, you'll enjoy gorgeous photos and breaking stories featuring the glitterati of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/2/09 wendylady2 Designed to rescue fashion victims everywhere, this Brit-based community reads like a rag-ezine. Published once or twice weekly, you'll view bizarre highlights of the global fashion scene through captivating photos and delightfully snarky editorial. Sit tight for a virtual fashion tour from the runways of New York to Milan to Paris and back home again to London in homage to the adage: you can't buy good taste.
Spotlights: Homepage Spotlight 11/2/09 soldiers_heart A passionate community for veterans of all ages (mostly American), plus families, friends, and supporters. View poignant snapshots detailing life in combat and back on civilian soil in the form of original artwork, personal narratives, poetry, and photos. Be forewarned that members don't shy away from describing their disappointments, disabilities, and struggles.
If one life has been saved by this photography session, it has been worth it On Saturday, following the example of artists who'd reconstructed the Unabomber's library, I made a tentative effort to put together a shelf of the books I'd have had at the age of 18. I suppose the idea of such reconstructions is that books also construct us -- they can be the building blocks of our subsequent personality -- and that by reconstructing a library we're reconstructing a construction, and therefore suggesting that different books could have resulted in a different person.
But it isn't just books. If I think back to the Edinburgh bedroom of the teenaged me, there are posters on the walls, too. They're by David Hamilton, a British photographer living in France who specialises in soft-focus soft porn images of pubescent girls. Did David Hamilton's images "construct" my adolescent sexuality? I think they very possibly did. I was a rather sheltered virgin at a boys-only school. The internet didn't exist then, so I'd never really even seen porn. I would probably believe anything you told me about what girls, what women, "really" were.
Why did I choose to believe David Hamilton? Well, his images reflected me in female form. Like these girls, I was a teenager of slim build. Like them, I was somewhat refined and naive. Like them, I embraced a somewhat late 19th century aesthetic, a Wildean decadence. I was even, at 17, developing a bookish myopia which threw the entire world into the kind of gauzy soft focus Hamilton favoured.
I didn't at that time know the "pagan sensuality" of Pierre Louÿs, nor had I seen David Hamilton's film of his 1894 poetry collection Songs of Bilitis. All I had was Hamilton's poster of a ballerina, and -- I'm pretty sure -- the one of the two girls at the picnic table. Despite the "decadent" label -- and the fact that in a post-Polanski France, a hysterical-about-child-sexuality Britain and a puritan America these images certainly don't read now the way they did in the 1970s -- these are "innocent" images to have grown up with. If I were 17 now, I'm sure I'd be seeing much, much harder stuff.
It was in Japan, though, that I encountered the only other person to have been impressed as much by David Hamilton as I was; Kahimi Karie. The photographer-turned-singer loved Hamilton so much that she put one of his images on an early Kahimi Karie t-shirt. This t-shirt inspired me to go off and write one of my most beautiful songs, the fluid, languid composition which just bears the photographer's name as its title:
Exemplifying the post-feminist guilt of a lot of my Kahimi material, this song gives a humourously jaundiced view of Hamilton's work. Read the lyric and you'll see that the tale of a modeling session is told from the point of view of one of the waif-like nymphs; "bored and slightly chilly", she wonders why the photographer must "gild the lily" with his umbrella flash, his liquid nitrogen, his carbon snow.
Then again, the song's narrator is happy to live in the South of France, in the lap of luxury, at Mr Hamilton's expense, lying in bed until 3pm "with nothing on", and grateful that "he only asks for photos in return". In the end, she's philosophical: "If this lazy suffering can bring erection to the lap of just one man it hasn't been in vain". That's a crib from a line of Howard Devoto's: "If one life has been saved by this photography session it has been worth it."
I'm not sure if any photography session can save a life, but influence a life? Oh yes, photography can do that. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, for harder or softer focus.
The metonymic source of all freshness 1. At any given point I'm paying attention to perhaps just one area of cultural movement, and that one area sums up "the contemporary" sufficiently well to justify the metonymic power I've awarded it. This area becomes an index of indices, the exemplary production of the moment.
2. In the 1970s, for example, this was -- for me -- David Bowie. I exaggerate (but this is the unique privilege of the metonym, to be an omnivore, an omnispore), but in the 70s anything of any creative significance was going to turn up in the work of David Bowie, so all you needed to follow, to be entirely calibrated to your times and their ch-ch-ch-changes, was Bowie's latest album.
3. Records, and perhaps the press that covered them, continued to be the exemplary creative culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. You would go to a record shop like Rough Trade and look at the New Releases section, or flip through a magazine like Zigzag, and that was pretty much all you needed to do to reset your style clock.
4. I still want there to be something like this out there, but records have long since ceased to be it. Perhaps five years ago a trip to a Berlin record store like Dense or Neurotitan would have felt vital and exciting to me, but it no longer does. CDs feel fusty and neglected now, they wilt slowly in fusty racks. If you have some at home and hope to sell them... well, don't set your hopes too high. Nobody wants them.
5. As a creator of culture, you sometimes do "stock-checking", which is an existential activity, not a commercial one. "Where do I exist?" you ask yourself. There needs to be a shop you can go into and find wares you've authored. Recently, stock-checking in Waterstone's on Piccadilly, I looked through various encyclopedias of rock and realised that, as a music artist, I really no longer exist. I could only find a Momus reference in one, titled something like "Off The Beaten Track", which mentioned that I'd worked with medieval instruments in 1999. However, in the bookshop of the Palais de Tokyo it was easy to find evidence that I exist, in magazines like the new 032c, or the paperback edition of the Phaidon Ice Cream book, which has a report on my performance art career.
6. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that if I think the rock world is "fusty", it thinks I'm "fusty" too.
7. The place I currently designate as the metonymic source of all freshness is a certain kind of art and design bookstore. It's a place that's both local and international: although it contains publications from "all over the world", I couldn't really say this kind of bookstore exists outside Berlin. Sure, there are places in Paris, London and New York that resemble it (Ofr, Magma, Printed Matter), but they're not quite there. They ruin things by being too much oriented to fashion, or commercial graphic design, or skateboarding, or character goods. Subtly, somehow, these bookstores only feel right in Berlin. Only here do they have the necessary gravitas and exciting sobriety.
8. There are four such stores in Berlin. Pro-qm, Do You Read Me, Walther König, and Motto. My partner and I -- and this is very much a "my partner and I" thing -- might visit them once every two to three weeks. We buy very little, but draw a huge amount of inspiration from them. They're sufficiently far from our house that they require a dedicated trip "uptown". We're in agreement about the importance of these shops in recalibrating our sense of now, but we're also constantly anxious that these places might stop inspiring us, and become fusty. Hisae will ask me, on leaving one of these stores, "Did you see anything interesting?" In her voice I can detect an edge of anxiety, and the implication: "One day we might get bored with this stuff." Yes, I answer, I saw a few interesting things today.
9. Our visit yesterday took in Pro-qm, Do You Read Me and König. We were put into a very good mood by eating at a new and excellent Korean self-service eatery on Alte Schonhauser Strasse before beginning our browsing. Yam Yam occupies the site of the Best Shop, a former fashion outlet, and is run by the same people, fashion retailers who decided (in a recessionary gesture) to make food instead. You can still read their Look Book magazine files as you eat their delicious Korean canteen food at the white tables. Great!
10. The books that impressed me on our visit to "the places that matter"? Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (seriously would like to have bought this), Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism, a magazine-style publication in the Zak Kyes style (restrained, didactic, sans serif) featuring photos of various SANAA projects, schools, museums and the like. Why does Ryue Nishizawa's architecture fill me with such calm optimism? When a Nishizawa structure sprouts somewhere, all seems right with the world.
11. I just want to interject here that I really, really exist in Pro-qm; at the till they have stacks of both The Book of Scotlands and The Book of Jokes. It's probably the most densely-packed "Momus exists" area in the entire world! So obviously I walk on air as I walk around the store. It's nice to exist!
12. And I just want to interject here that by no means can computers, blogs, Facebook pages or websites supply the thrill that being in one of these bookshops does. The internet is new every day, and yet somehow fusty in a way these print publications aren't, although they're obviously all made on computers. I think the edge the bookshops -- these particular bookshops -- have over the internet is that they're curated by extremely intelligent people. Sure, sure, you can easily move within tight circles of reference and relationship when you get inside them -- Utrecht Nieves AA Casco Dexter Sinister Merve -- but they're intelligent circles. Your Friends List may be talking about Halloween, but these people will be talking about art. (Funny moment at Konig: gibbering shrieks of Halloween zombies passing the door drowned out -- if that's the right phrase -- by quiet, intelligent art conversation amongst shop staff.)
13. Of course it's incestuous. When I'm drawn to a publication it's only a matter of time before I see Stuart Bailey's name, or Zak Kyes' name, or James Goggin's name, in it. This What's Left? book by Dave Hullfish Bailey grabbed my attention for the typeface, the sobriety of the yellow cover, and the heavy-duty plastic material it's wrapped in (like a manual designed to be kicked around by carpenters on a building site). It turns out to be designed by Stuart Bailey, for whom I'm working over the next weeks as contributor of The Ghost Materialist to his free Performa newspaper.
14. Sometimes you'll be pulled up by an art title that grabs your attention. A DVD of a Chris Marker film about Alexander Medvedkin. A book of photographs called Not Niigata by Andrew Phelps, in which you admire the way the old people live, and wish you could move into their wooden houses when they die, without changing a thing. A book of August Sander's portraits, and the impossibly German, wonderfully Weimar-Republic-looking characters within it.
15. And then you do actually go to a shop where you not only marvel at the design, but buy things. The Asia Mekong supermarket.
The Unabomber's library Visiting the Palais de Tokyo in Paris earlier this week, I saw an interesting group show called Chasing Napoleon. The theme was escape from society, the idea of living in self-sufficiency on the margins. There was quite a lot about the Unabomber. The centrepiece of the whole show is Robert Kusmirowski's recreation of the Unabomber's hut.
Kusmirowski also happens to have made an excellent recreation at The Barbican's Curve gallery of a World War II bunker -- really the best and most evocative use of The Curve I've seen in years; you can get lost in the musty rooms. In Paris, you couldn't go into his Unabomber hut, but another installation gave a glimpse of its contents: Dora Winter had put together a shelf of the books the Unabomber had at the time of his arrest. You can see a full list of the books here, but suffice to say the titles were pretty much what you'd expect an asocial, pessimistic misanthrope libertarian to be reading:
The Wasteland The Decline of the West Civilization and Its Discontents The Outsider The Basics of Rifle Shooting To Purge This Land With Blood
I was also intrigued to see Toward a New Psychology of Women in there, as if Theo's outsiderdom had partly been sealed by his failure to understand the fair sex, or make himself attractive to them.
The reassembled library has become a bit of a meme in the art world -- we saw the Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir, for instance, win a prize at the 2007 Venice Biennale for her recreation of assassinated Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter's library, amongst other things, in her installation Material for a Film. I read in some art mag an essay rather critical of that piece, saying that just because Zuaiter had humanistic, pro-European books it didn't mean that he wasn't a Palestinian agent, or murderous, or a terrorist.
Just for fun I started image-googling the books I would have had in my own library at 9 Drummond Place, Edinburgh, at the age of 18. I came up with these before I got bored trying to find the cover of Biorhythms and The David Bowie Songbook. I think it's fairly clear, at least, that I'm not going to grow up to be the kind of person who sends bombs through the mail.
Network Maintenance - Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 04:00-05:00 GMT/UTC EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.
Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.
Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.
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Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.
Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(
Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.
Struggling art magazines These are hard times indeed for the magazine industry, as a quick visit to the cheery reaper who presides over the Magazine Death Pool will confirm. The hooded skeleton (Death lives, obviously, on the far side of the Atlantic) has this month been rattling chains around Urb, Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Ebony, Entertainment Weekly and Fortune.
On my recent travels I did a bit of newsstand browsing and couldn't help noticing a new phenomenon, which is probably not so much a danger sign as a condition of survival in bleak times: the magazine written by a sole contributor. I exaggerate slightly, but it seems to me that i-D magazine is written these days pretty much entirely by editor Ben Reardon, and Chronic'Art magazine by the indefatigable Olivier Lamm (who's written a lengthy Momus feature for the mag, due in a week or so). Meanwhile Modern Painters magazine had its entire editorial team replaced recently by one new editor, apparently a former copywriter from Ralph Lauren. And let's not talk about the other ID, which saw its entire editorial team axed earlier in the year.
Mags I've read over the last couple of weeks: The Wire, Palais (the Palais de Tokyo's magazine, which is more like a handbook to their exhibitions, and whose texts tend toward the zero-degree of curatorial cliché), Chronic'Art (great for a long train journey, if you read french), The New Statesman (because they sent me a copy of the edition my Brel piece appeared in) and, online, The London Review of Books, which is priceless and free (great article on The Spirit Level recently, and a strong article on Rape-Rape by Jenny Diski in the current one). I think I also leafed through Vice, though I'm not really feeling Vice these days, either because I'm getting old or because Vice is; perhaps both. I noticed, though, that The Evening Standard has just gone free in London, and that Vice pioneered that particular pricing model. And I think that Vice did, in some ways, become a, if not the, defining mag of the 00s, in terms of a certain look and sensibility.
The saddest tale I heard recently was of the demise (or is it just cryogenically frozen?) of Art World magazine. Now, I go back decades with the editor of Art World, and remember when she was a Royal College of Art graduate working in the 1980s at Smash Hits, and dreaming of editing a title called Art Hits, which would bring the Smash Hits sensibility (accessible yet cunning culture writing) to art world subjects. This dream was eventually realised thanks to links with another Smash Hits colleague who went to Australia and became a multi-millionaire thanks to successful publishing ventures there. And so Art World magazine was born two years ago, and could afford to give away 250,000 copies at the time of the 2007 Frieze art fair -- at the peak, in other words, of the money-art bubble.
The Guardian has some good art critics, but Jonathan Jones isn't one of them, so when he ran a piece about Art World's closure last month it was completely inaccurate, both factually and contextually. Art World is on hiatus simply because the Australian millionaire's wife has frozen his assets during an acrimonious divorce. It's not because the mag was struggling in terms of subscriptions, or because the art-money-celebrity bubble burst and the mag was all about glitz. It wasn't; other art mags fit that bill much better. And other mags -- I'm thinking of Modern Painters, which clings to life by the merest of threads -- were floundering editorially while Art World had a clear, strong identity.
Basically, Art World told you about artists, showed you their work, and talked to them, as if making art mattered. There was no fluff, no theory or curatorial cant. Just the chance to read about people making visual art. "This is Art World's straightforward aim," said Ben Luke in response to Jones' article, "to talk to artists in depth, explore their work in an entirely un-star-struck way, and to present it meticulously and beautifully. The idea that we might be debasing art by doing so is bizarre."
Despite being so close to the founders of Art World, I somehow never wrote a feature for them. We discussed three, but they were all ill-starred. In the first, I was going to interview a female Japanese artist managed by a well-known stable. I entered negotiations with an American press person-slash-gatekeeper, who so annoyed me with his persistent micro-managing questions about what I was going to ask in the interview, how much Art World would pay for the right to reproduce images of the artist's work, and, again, what I planned to say, that I abandoned the whole thing. Then I proposed an interview with a British artist doing a residency in Gaza, only to discover that the artist didn't want a feature headlined "Artist X in Gaza", presumably for fear of alienating his Jewish gallerist if I said anything too political in the piece. (It later turned out that the artist himself was Jewish too.) The third ill-fated Art World feature was going to be an "in the studio" feature about an artist known for meticulous cardboard reconstructions, until it emerged that the artist in question didn't want any photos taken in his studio, which rather defeated the purpose of the whole piece. Unless, of course, we'd done the whole thing as a cut-out-and-keep, fold-along-the-dotted-line, do-it-yourself 3D construction kit of his studio.
Anyway, I must get back to work. I'm writing a piece -- I kid you not -- about a 100-year-old femininst-communist furniture designer for a Viennese art magazine. Both she and the mag are hale, hearty and as healthy as can be expected in the circumstances.
In response to user comments from last week, we want to let you know that we'll remain LJ cut-free for the next month in order to get more eyeballs on our evolving newsletter. As for product coverage, that continues to be our top priority. For more granular detail, however, we recommend you join lj_releases.
Super-tweak for Yandex search
Some of our beta testers expressed privacy concerns using the Yandex search engine. Here's why: Last week, when you ran a search, you could see the usernames (and only the usernames) of everyone who commented on an entry, even if that entry was switched to Private or Friends Only after it was originally indexed. You could NOT see the actual comments from Friends Only or Private posts. In response to your input, we've implemented a fix to keep all user activity currently marked Friends Only or Private completely hidden. If you'd prefer your public content not to be indexed by Yandex, click here and use the settings labeled Search Inclusion (this covers your entire journal) and/or Comment Search Inclusion (which covers comments only). To test drive Yandex search now, click here.
Postcards from the edge
Several years ago, we asked LiveJournal users to send postcards to help us decorate our dull, white-washed offices. Since a good idea warrants repetition, we're at it again (same issue, new address). We hope you'll surround us with LiveJournal love by sending your postcards to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. We'll post snapshots right here. Be sure to include your username, since we'll randomly pick 10 lucky recipients to win free paid account time.
If a friend or relative makes a racist or homophobic remark, do you tend to confront them or let it slide? Are you more likely to confront them if it offends you directly or someone else who seems reluctant to speak up?
I find it easier to stand up for other people, and i wouldn't let it slide if they made a rude or hurtful comment.
Usually if a friend makes a racist or homophobic remark, I tend to let it slide. I think that while i would not say such things myself, I have no right to censor those around me.
This happens all of the time. I confront some relatives, but I refuse to if they are drunk or watch Fox News.
I'd let it slide if it was just a private remark... As much as I despise bigotry and intolerance, I know that you can't change people-they have to change themselves ...
Confront! confront! confront! Politely, but without equivocation.
SPEAK UP. Always, always, always speak up. Letting something slide lets ignorance win. No matter if it offends me directly, or someone else, I will confront the speaker and let them know that's not ok.
I don't get offended personally. As an immigrant, woman, gay and person of color if I took every single potentially offensive remark seriously I wouldn't get anything done.
I punch them in the balls. With my mind.
I do speak up, but often very timidly because I feel that I'm white and therefore I don't really have any authority to lecture someone on what's racist and what isn't...
Generally speaking, I do not let this shit fly, because it reduces me as a person, to this non-person and it replicates the destructive discourse that makes sure that sexual minorities, racial minorities, women, people with disabilities, trans people and every intersection thereof into something other than human... And sometimes... I'm just too tired to deal with it, so I roll my eyes, make a sarcastic remark and hope the conversation moves on quickly.
For more daily questions and user comments, join writersblock. FYI, we don't want to invade your privacy, so we haven't credited individual users for their responses. We'd appreciate your feedback on this!
Spotlight community of the week
We can't resist making one last midnight trip to the ol' pumpkin patch. If you adore crazy costumes, fiendish festivities, and bottomless candy consumption as much as we do, this community has just what it takes to light up your jack-o-lantern.
We received so many incredible photos, we had to close our eyes and point. We uploaded a selection of awesome images at our new lj_photophile community. Please join and start posting (try to keep the width at around 625 for the sake of consistency)! We'd love for you to tell us more about your photos! You can help us select spotlight photos by commenting on your favorites. Once again, we thank you for making our online world more beautiful!
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rodebrecht's Friends Page
I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that 
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The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group 
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
No previous decades are to be revived this decade. Make a little more effort with the shapes of things, please.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
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Hausu, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1977, is perhaps the most visually exuberant film I've ever seen. The comedy-horror "watch-'em-die" flick was his first feature after a career in TV advertising; according to the film's 
I spent quite a bit of time yesterday (but it was alright, because here in Berlin it was cold and raining) shuttling back and forth "in New York" between Stuart Bailey, my new "editor" at TF/LN (The First / Last Newspaper) and Jonathan Paul, the editor of The Moment, the New York Times style blog. Basically, TF/LN, a temporary newspaper that art-design group Dexter Sinister are publishing during the Performa Biennial, launched yesterday, and I wrote a spoof column for it, The Ghost-Materialist, which picked up where my real column for The New York Times, 
So what we have now is the real New York Times sitting up and taking notice of a weird temporary ghost-double across the road. Dexter Sinister's operation is intended to "reflect on the unstable condition of contemporary news and related medias", and this comes at a time when newspapers are, more than ever, questioning themselves existentially. Oddly enough, the first thing I did when I got the NYT job is 
"newspaper" mean, in the age of Google News personalisation filters and the Facebook newsfeed? Can "news" mean whatever you want it to mean? Are we all on the same page?
Performing as Momus isn't the reason I'll be in Japan this time, but I'm hoping to put some kind of event together in collaboration with the 
5. As a creator of culture, you sometimes do "stock-checking", which is an existential activity, not a commercial one. "Where do I exist?" you ask yourself. There needs to be a shop you can go into and find wares you've authored. Recently, stock-checking in Waterstone's on Piccadilly, I looked through various encyclopedias of rock and realised that, as a music artist, I really no longer exist. I could only find a Momus reference in one, titled something like "Off The Beaten Track", which mentioned that I'd worked with medieval instruments in 1999. However, in the bookshop of the Palais de Tokyo it was easy to find evidence that I exist, in magazines like the new 032c, or the paperback edition of the Phaidon Ice Cream book, which has a report on my performance art career.
12. And I just want to interject here that by no means can computers, blogs, Facebook pages or websites supply the thrill that being in one of these bookshops does. The internet is new every day, and yet somehow fusty in a way these print publications aren't, although they're obviously all made on computers. I think the edge the bookshops -- these particular bookshops -- have over the internet is that they're curated by extremely intelligent people. Sure, sure, you can easily move within tight circles of reference and relationship when you get inside them -- Utrecht Nieves AA Casco Dexter Sinister Merve -- but they're intelligent circles. Your Friends List may be talking about Halloween, but these people will be talking about art. (Funny moment at Konig: gibbering shrieks of Halloween zombies passing the door drowned out -- if that's the right phrase -- by quiet, intelligent art conversation amongst shop staff.)
Mags I've read over the last couple of weeks: The Wire, Palais (the Palais de Tokyo's magazine, which is more like a handbook to their exhibitions, and whose texts tend toward the zero-degree of curatorial cliché), Chronic'Art (great for a long train journey, if you read french), The New Statesman (because they sent me a copy of the edition my Brel piece appeared in) and, online, The London Review of Books, which is priceless and free (great 
Basically, Art World told you about artists, showed you their work, and talked to them, as if making art mattered. There was no fluff, no theory or curatorial cant. Just the chance to read about people making visual art. "This is Art World's straightforward aim," said Ben Luke in response to Jones' article, "to talk to artists in depth, explore their work in an entirely un-star-struck way, and to present it meticulously and beautifully. The idea that we might be debasing art by doing so is bizarre."
