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.
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.
I am SUFFERING right now, creative slump, been reading the same novel since last month (though it's 500 pages instead of the 150 page stuff I normally read), haven't written anything all month, haven't taken any photos all month, thinking, I guess, repositioning what it is I want to do (and how do I want to do it?) not on any level of professionalism or capitalism or anyotherism but on a conceptual level, at the core, breaking it apart HOW.
I have a PLAN that's not really a plan, really just an idea, I will bask in my projected SOLAR LUXURIANCE and forget about trying to get things published/recognized for a while I CAN'T FIXATE RIGHT NOW need to just do, but must get there, must get to the place of do, get to the place where my back does not hurt from sleeping poorly on my so-called 'most uncomfortable bed on the planet,' I'm going slightly insane, I think, chain-smoking more than usual, not really talking with people but talking, drinking habits are sporadic, three weeks off three nights on, no hangovers any more but tired without being tired, you know?
At work right now my boss, his boss (also my boss), my student worker all gone, alone at the desk barely any customers all week (the semester is over but the library is still open), listening to my headphones in public not really supposed to but there's not really anyone here to tell me not to and it's nice it's the first time i've been able to focus all week've read several long articles I've had bookmarked forever (lowercase to uppercase pronoun change there strange how I do that so much), think that I somehow lost track of researching of how I need to be taking things apart while I'm getting them not just amassing think I hit the same part with movies that's happening to books first you just watch a lot (first you just read a lot) then you start realizing you need to be thinking more about what's happening then you start reviewing movies (then today I get an email asking me to review a book for some website & it's a book I like a lot so I said yes) then you start a website about it then you get too obsessed and lose focus of what it is that you were obsessed with in the first place and it loses the magick and you're still not making that THING that will set you apart from everything else: i do not want you to like me I want you to like my work.
An open letter to the women of Japan Dear women of Japan, walking around the streets of your delightful capital, Tokyo, and catching your eye on trains, on escalators, on the street and in stores, I can't help noticing your perplexed reactions to me, Momo. "What the fuck is that?" you seem to be saying to yourselves. "Is it a clown? Will it produce some balls and start juggling? Or is it just an old, ugly, ridiculously-dressed gaijin who thinks he'll score points with us by trying to look 'interesting' in a totally weird way?"
I, Momo, have seen these thoughts passing all-too-obviously through your head, and been slightly saddened, I must confess. Yes, I'm old, and foreign, and a bit eccentric. Sure, I could pass for Momo the Clown, or some kind of walking black flower. But there's something you should know. I am, more or less, Nino.
Nino. Ninomiya from boy band Arashi. He's your favourite current man, isn't he? He's everywhere, with his child-monkey charm and delicate, intelligent, feminine features. Look, there, in the Wii SuperMario Brothers poster! And here in the au by KDDI commercial!
What a fun boyfriend Nino would be! What good children he'd make, and how well he'd help you raise them! You dream of Arashi, you keep them under your pillow and take them out at night, and when anyone asks your favourite you say "Nino!" If you saw him on the street you'd scream. But if you saw Momo on the street... well, you'd scream!
And that's what I'm writing to tell you today. There's actually a lot less difference than you think between Momo and Nino! We both make you scream, that's a start! But it goes so much deeper than that! Let me prove to you that Momo equals Nino, more or less!
Up to 60% of the human body is water, which means that me and Nino are already 60% the same thing. Water! It's not like Nino's water is sexy and Momo's is weird. No, that 60% majority component of Nino and Momo is identical. Water!
It doesn't stop there, either. Nino and Momo both have two eyes, a nose, a mouth on the front of our heads. Okay, Momo has one eye that's shriveled like a grape, so let's give him 75% eyes compared with Nino's 100% eyes, but, you know, 75% ain't bad, girls! Momo has less hair than Nino, but, you know, it's hair!
And look at their jobs! Momo and Nino are both singers! Okay, Arashi might perform at the Yokohama Arena while Momo just sings karaoke over an iPod at a Tokyo art gallery, but what's an audience gap of tens of thousands when the profession is the same?
There are some other striking similarities. Momo's middle name is John, and Nino is managed by Johnny's Entertainment. Nino is hot, Momo is not, but there's only one letter difference between those words, which makes them 66% the same. Nino's sperm is young and healthy, whereas Momo produces slightly damaged old man sperm, but even old man sperm can make a perfectly good baby, if you don't mind the fact that it wouldn't be racially 100% pure (it would, though, be racially 50% pure, which is good enough for anyone except sticklers).
I want to conclude this open letter to you, dear Women of Japan, by saying, in your delightful language, yoroshiku; be nice to me. Next time you see me on the street, say to yourself "There -- but for a few insignificant details and my own blind Darwinian prejudices -- walks Nino from Arashi!" And allow yourself a small scream. A nice, excited scream, not the terrified one you normally do.
It's been a fun couple of years, but it's time to move on. Thanks everyone for following my journal all this time, and I hope you check up for new art and other stories at my new ciber-home: http://www.korenshadmi.com/journal/
Yesterday I had a nice meeting with the charming Hiroshi Eguchi, who runs Utrecht. The art bookstore began as a by-appointment-only operation in his Nakameguro apartment, then opened at Utrecht Reading Room, an understated upstairs hideaway featuring a bookstore, cafe and gallery next door to Yohji Yamamoto, up at the Nezu Museum end of overstated Omote Sando.
Sitting out on his back balcony at the Omote Sando space, Hiroshi told me the lease on the building runs for the next three years at least, and in the meantime he's working on re-opening some kind of bookstore up on the roof of his Nakameguro apartment building. He thanked me for mentioning Utrecht in the New York Times, told me how much he likes Motto in Berlin, then proceeded to set up a Momus event at Utrecht on December 27th.
So, from 6-8pm on Sunday December 27th I'm happy to say I'll be giving an Unreliable Tour of the Yusuke Machiba drawing exhibition in the Utrecht Reading Room gallery, Now Idea. Entry will be 1000 yen, which includes a free drink. Utrecht Reading Room is a two-minute walk from Exit A5 of Omotesando Station on the Ginza, Chiyoda and Hanzomon Lines. Address: 5-3-8-201, Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062.
Before I was a curator I was a singer, you know! Momus: The Singing Curator -- Live! On December 22nd "gm ten" proudly presents a 45-minute live set from Momus, the Scottish singer, songwriter and producer best known in Japan for his work with Kahimi Karie. The Berlin-based Momus, visiting Japan this month in the role of an art curator, has agreed to perform a short set of his songs at "gm ten" Gallery. He'll take a break from preparing Aftergold, a major exhibition of Japanese art to be held in the UK in 2012, to sing songs written over the past twenty years. There will also be a guest appearance from Yukiko Sawabe.
[Date] 2009.12.22(Tue) Open 20:30 / Start 21:00 [Place] gm ten Sanwa 2nd Bldg 3rd Floor, 4-1-7 Azabu-Jyuban, Minato-ku, 106-0045 Tokyo Japan -3mins Walk from Azabu-juban station on the Tokyo Metoro Nanboku line (exit 3 or 4) -6mins Walk from Azabu-juban station on the Toei Oedo line (exit 3 or 4) [Charge] 1,000yen (Music fee + 1Drink) [Live] Momus with Special Guest, Yukiko Sawabe [DJ] Mao Yamazaki (gm projects / AKICHI RECORDS) Ryo Aoyanagi (gm projects / AKICHI RECORDS) [Reservation (not essential, but recommended)] send email to info@gmprojects.jp subject line: MOMUS LIVE (1) your name (2) the number of persons (3) phone number
I did these pretty quickly for a show in which the theme is drawings of hip youths and beloved childhood cultural stuff. It's supposed to go up arch 4th and is being put on by Floating World, in Portland. I thought I might try drawing my friends as Thundercats but my brain wouldn't let my hand do something so stupid for public viewing. To me doing Tintin as a dead punk and Captain Haddock as a biker fag worked better.
The opening will be March 4th, 6-10pm at Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave, Portland.
The other artists are Adrian Riemann: MOTU Corey Lewis: Thundercats Brandon Graham: TMNT ("some Ralph and April O'Neil freaky shit") Matt Furie: ? Chris Taylor: ?
I drew this tour poster for my guys, Cerebral Ballzy. I had to do it pretty fast in order to rush to complete a lot of projects. The tour dates go in that blank area at the bottom.
You know me by now; I'm Momus, the well-known web interpreter from the town of Bzrkyr in Upper Trilesian Osnia. To take a break from -- and freshen myself spiritually for -- my duties (studying the web, facilitating the improvement of my students' moral character, expounding the holy laws), I like to travel, and Japan has become a favourite destination. What I like about Japan is that it's different from Upper Trilesian Osnia, but not too different. Basically, today's Japanese are very much like Upper Trilesian Osnians in the 1950s.
Here I am at the "Hachiko" crossing in front of Shibuya Station. Now, a yokel would probably go crazy and dance around and say "Wow, look at the lights! Such big video screens!" But I take this crossing very much in my stride. We have a similar square in Bzrkyr with even more TV screens -- super-miniature ones the Japanese haven't even invented yet -- and even more people running around. In Bzrkyr you'd have seventeen realistic dogs yapping at your ankles rather than one lumpen statue dog sitting on a pedestal. In fact, compared to the Krsyzicnny Crossing, this place is tame and quiet; ideal for a bit of relaxation. (Give it a decade or so, though, and I expect it'll be indistinguishable from any Trilesian town.)
Ah, here's a cinema! Quaint! In Upper Trilesian Osnia we don't have these fleapits any more. We download joke videos from YouTube, household accidents, that sort of thing. If the Japanese still apparently have the attention span to sit for ninety minutes in a dark hall in a building draped with metal curtains, well, good on them, I say! They should enjoy it while they can, because -- if Upper Trilesian Osnian developments are anything to go by -- it'll soon be "curtains" for this type of entertainment.
A Trilesian also gets a good waft of nostalgia entering a place like Libro Books, in the basement of the Parco department store. Both department stores and magazines long ago disappeared from Upper Trilesian Osnia, replaced by outdoor markets and word of mouth, so this kind of place feels like a museum to us. When I took the picture above the "sales assistant" asked me what I was doing and I just chuckled. I was tempted to say: "Just wait a couple of decades, my friend! Photos like this will be the only evidence that this Libro place ever existed!" But, you know, the first law of time travel is that you're not allowed to influence the past. We have to leave it to the Japanese to discover the future in their own time, and their own way.
What could be nicer after a stressful day not-shopping (we Upper Trilesian Osnians are so over consumerism, though the Japanese are only starting to make the most tentative steps in this direction) than a cup of iced chai in a Jungle Cafe? I can't really say that without blushing a bit inside; back in the day, it's whispered, Upper Trilesian Osnia had dozens of these Jungle Cafes, places where people could escape the icy weather and indulge in fantasies of the tropics while sipping coconut juice. Later, of course, it was considered politically off-colour to talk about "the jungle" or create reductive masquerade versions of "cafes in hot places". Now in Upper Trilesian Osnia the cafes are freezing, as they bloody well ought to be. I expect Japanese cafes will be too, soon enough. In the meantime, relaxing on fantasy wicker furniture surrounded by fake jungle is, I have to confess, a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Might as well enjoy it before the Japanese come to their senses.
So I went to the wildlife sanctuary twice within the past two weeks. Describing one time only. I got the idea while working; go home, make a mix CD for myself, dig out my emergency CD player, drive over to the woods and just hang out for an hour or so. Yes, the emergency CD player..what's that all about? Well at the height of my extra food/stuff buying it I figured I might as well buy a portable, battery-operated CD player. If all the power were to go out or whatever then I'd still be able to listen to music..sensible, right? I didn't buy something top of the line because I was primarily paying with a gift card, a gift card worth a modest amount of store cash. Even with my cynical take on things, I expected this CD player to at least be decent, adequate at worst. But what a piece of shit, really. Every step I took resulted in skipping and that was with the skip-protection button on, the skip-protection button bragged about on the front of the packaging. And even when I just sat down with the CD player in my hands..skip-skip-skip. The volume range on this pathetic thing is also notable; it's for old people. On full blast I could still hear ducks splashing in the water, also a sad testament to the quality of the earphones that were so kindly included. I not so gently tossed the CD player onto a bed of damp leaves and went to go climb some gnarled tree overlooking the water. Much cooler. Of course I went to pick it back up but I was thinking about leaving it..in my unsatisfied customer state of mind. Now I at least won't be as disappointed as I would've been had I waited until an emergency to open it haha. Did I pretty much just review a CD player? I think I did..
Eck..time rolls on. I search feverishly for a "real world" goal while at the same time stretching my mind around abstract concepts that shatter the "real world." Is this counterproductive? I wish I had a guidance counselor on hand. Then again, no. I just want someone or something to push me into goal pursuit or pull me down a pathway. I realize that I am that someone but you do understand how difficult it is to debate with yourself don't you? Because even a well-grounded reason to not pursue a career or area of study ends up looking like an excuse fueled by self-doubt (i.e. "I can't do that..I'm not smart enough"). I have to do something, which is an abstract concept in and of itself as I'm doing lots of somethings every single day. At the most basic level I must do something to change my current situation, pursuing a future goal comes to mind daily but the goal must be worth all the questing, right? For example, if a knight of the legendary Round Table variety finds the entire Holy Grail story to be a load of bullshit and is 95% convinced that the much sought after chalice is but an ordinary and ruddy old cup he will most certainly not embark on a 3 or 4 year quest to find it. I've tried to break down the source of my desire to join the club and quest after the concept of security and material wealth, it's very hard to get to that source and figure it out. At the moment I am leaning towards the vague, mist-cloaked idea that I am kind of stuck, for lack of a better word, on a one-person pathway. A fear arises of having to hedge my bets with my mom and sister forever because I cannot afford to go live on my own somewhere, not completely and totally. I can just barely make it by at the moment, if I had to pay for housing though...forget it. I obviously don't want to live here for years to come and the three close friends I have in the area are most likely not going to be hanging around these parts for as long as I am. I want to be able to move and prosper elsewhere because a second fear, a fear of being glued down, easily creeps up and depresses me at the thought of being financially unable to leave. So I have to make a lot of money. Which means I have to go to school. Which means I have to pick a career. I keep coming back to this conclusion and I imagine that I will continue to do so. Even if I were to go farm for a growing season, I'd come right back here and end up at the same mental spot...I guess. Obviously it's not the best of times to begin pursuing a career ("Pell Grant Faces Shortfall" appeared in the news column on my email homepage, right above "The Weird World of Multiracial Dolls.") Apocalypse may loom on the horizon but how totally stupid to just sit around waiting for it. My thought on this matter must close here because the more I pick apart this whole career thing, the more confusing it will become to you reading, as I tend to debate with myself and one "half" of me attempts to tear the conclusion to shreds from a "big picture" perspective. Future prospects..that's where my head has been lately. Looking at all of these different degrees and etc. I was lost in a thought cloud of future prospects when taking out the trash last Monday. I stepped in an ice cold slush puddle because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. I laughed a bit. It was as if the Universe slapped me upside the head and shouted "The present! Pay attention to NOW!" So we now arrive at this point of decision. If the whole "plan" fails at some point there is no need to spiral downward into depression..who is to say the larger plan isn't fulfilled? Life seems to end up looking like a nightmare only when I try and figure it all out or "make sense" of it, try to figure out how to best take advantage of this dream experience and then to fret over fitting in when I'm already a piece of the Consciousness puzzle. Laughable! I'm fulfilling a role, an organic shell propelled by Consciousness. Onwards we go to the future, I'll walk at a leisurely pace. "Seize the present!" I tell myself. Is the present not the only "real" thing, in a sense? Hmm... At any rate, I am going to try and appreciate the process of achieving a goal over the idea that securing the goal is all that matters..we'll see how that turns out. And no, I haven't really figured out anything:) !!!!!!! *I would wear a noble-looking Freddie Mercury jumpsuit *A perfectly ugly album cover taking my breath away
*Sometimes I think I eat too fast. Not often but it does happen and I usually don't realize it till right after I've finished. I think I ate my entire lunch within the course of one really fast speed metal song the other day. Granted my lunches are tiny, but still.. *Guy came into the small post office drenched in cologne that reminded me of band practice at John Albernez's house circa 1999-2000. I was drenched in his fumes as he passed next to me and all I could think of was horrible music from the past and dying my hair red outside on the cement porch. *I remember 85% of the lyrics (in order) to A Whole New World. Happened while driving. CD had ended and I just began to "sing" this song in my head. Did a lyrical check when I got home and I was just a little bit off at the end, I mixed up some words. Now what prompted this? *I think I am perhaps entering A Whole New World. A lot of things feel very different and new, artwork seems to be taking a real backseat but I can't say that I'm panicking. An upcoming group show was recently cancelled and the lamp shelf that I try to use as a desk is making me feel defeated. But it's truly OK. *Creepy guy at the insurance building had a dream about me. For a fair explanation on why he's creepy please refer back 15 or so posts. Anyways, he had a dream that I was skateboarding near the battleship and I went right off of the docks and into the ice cold water. He ran to tell a few police, frantically trying to get them to fish me out but they ushered him away, "He's alright. He can swim." He was going on about how weird it was that the cops used that excuse. I think he told me the dream twice. Once really fast and a second time elaborating on everything. You know, Zach has had a dream in which I end up accidentally falling into that same area of water. His dream is a lot different but it still involves me and that water near the battleship. Hmm.. In other news, the other guy who works at the insurance building was trying to make conversation with me about kids driving cars and telling me all of these stories about stupid things kids do in their cars during the winter when the roads are slick with snow and ice. Some friend of his son's died while attempting a daring car trick near railroad tracks and this deceased individual was supposedly really good at guitar. "I come back to dah house and I hea Van Halen, Hawt Fuh Teacha, comin' outta mah son's amplifiah. Coulda been friggin Eddie Van Halen on tha guitah!" **I like it when you say something to someone about the fact that we're all individually going to die and they respond with something along the lines of "Don't say that." Is that because such a thought shatters everything at the forefront of the brain and reigns supreme atop the debris for awhile? And that would be bothersome of course because you'd feel weird, weird as if all the things you chase and collect and the trivial things you fret over=bullshit. Well, I often remind myself that I'm going to die. This tends to pause my busy mind and I become more appreciative when glancing at a pine tree outside or of a melody within a song, etc. I never really force myself to think it..it just pops into my head or I ultimately arrive at the thought. A month ago my sister, her boyfriend, my mother and myself were having a heated discussion about something. I felt very anxious and when my sister's boyfriend basically called me a loser I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction (perhaps I was anticipating things turning ugly). I wish I could have just kept totally quiet and responded in my mind, "What have I lost at? Are we in a race? The only real race is the race to physical death and since it's 100% assured that each and every one of us will die, we're all ultimately winners." It could be put into much better words. *I bought a fancy assortment of olives for myself at the store instead of buying water. I almost never do that. I went to Salvation Army to find a replacement flannel shirt but everything there was way too huge. There were only two boy-sized flannel shirts that would've fit and neither to my liking, color-wise. *Had a stranger than usual dream. Zach and myself were heading up this spiral staircase to go practice our one song and I somehow knocked Zach over. He fell hard and upon hitting the floor his body turned into a peach colored, gel-like substance. He squiggled away and I had to call Jackie and explain. She was really pissed off, understandably, and kept telling me how clumsy I had been. Later on, Zach, back in human form, met up with me for a rescheduled practice. I had a weird POV perspective when playing the guitar and I can distinctly remember playing portions of the song correctly..the A-G-F bit especially. But the both of us sounded terrible and were all out of sync and my guitar had this tinny sound to it. *Franz Schubert-Symphonies 8 and 9, Sunday Morning, 7 AM. I hadn't listened to anything of this sort in months. Maybe once during the summertime? I should get into listening to this kind of classical music in the morning, it's good to wake up to over breakfast. I've been doing my classical listening at night for awhile. Organ pieces, early choral stuff, lute tunes...appropriate music to close the a waking day.
Death metal bands that look like this are almost always cooler than bands that look like this. The tough guy look has most definitely steered me away before. I'm more interested when the band looks like metalheads dressed up for job interviews. Chances are, a bunch of dudes in sweaters that play death metal are going to have a unique, and likely melody-heavy, approach to making death metal. They probably like progressive rock. I really hate poofy camo pants in death metal band photos and really fat guys with goatees, their arms crossed..so pissed off, so very pissed off. Every single death metal photo involving bowed heads, faces covered by hair and evil spirit summoning hand gestures excites me. Is this the very late 80's/early 90's European death metal photo template? Quite possibly. There's another death metal band photo template that I like a lot as well. This would be the Pondering Band Template. Best outside, best when wind is blowing long hair around, best when trees and rocks are visible (if not utilized as props in the photo), and absolutely best if the band is staring up at the heavens together. These types of photos are also mostly a thing of the past, at least as far as death metal is concerned. See, I think all the mid to late 90's gothic/doom/progressive metal bands became associated with this style of group photo and therefore death metal, which was getting quite stale by that point in time, almost completely adopted the tough guy image (see* old brutal death metal band photos). And maybe that also had something to do with the Norwegian black metal explosion. Death metal bands perhaps wanting to portray their music, by way of band photos, as unfriendly, aggressive and devoid of wimpiness (no. acoustic guitars, keyboards, female vocals, spoken poetry, etc). At least a few death metal bands probably figured that taking a melancholic looking group photo in a forest would likely lead some viewers to assume their sound 'atmospheric' and therefore they decided to take angry-face photos in front of big pieces of granite or in mangy alleyways. Aren't musical genres typically at their best before they're fully self aware? But of course once it's a big club with rules and regulations there are artists who appear on scene and break the rules and regulations, push the boundaries and etc..and I like that.
I've been to Z & J's twice since updating. Jackie cooked up insanely good dinners on both occasions. Not that our dinners aren't always good but these were award-winning, really. Since the 90's alternative rock radio station on itunes has been repeating itself a bit much, we made a joint decision to try "Hair Bands" radio to keep us entertained during our Lawless Scrabble games. It's pretty much a 50/50 platter of musical styles. There are lots of deplorable blues-rockers with lyrics all about gypsies and street urchins, hard partying, fast women and the like and of course, at the opposite end of the spectrum, tender power ballads that have nothing to do with power and everything to do with acoustic guitars soaked in "chorus" effect, woodblock percussion for verse, giant, gated snare drum, a useless guitar solo somewhere, a post or pre-solo part containing the band singing the chorus in unison with either drums and bass or just drums, a key change that doesn't surprise you and sappy lyrics about how much life on the road sucks or heartbreak or both and the word "baby" or "mama" is probably used once or twice. During out most recent hangout, after finishing up a Lawless Scrabble Session, Zach, Jackie and myself watched an episode of Mtv's "Jersey Shore." My bright idea. None of us watch junk TV, I don't watch TV whatsoever and I don't think Z and J watch much (especially since canceling cable). I'm going to postulate that the three of us truly forget just how extremely fucked-up television programming is. I like how they call it programming by the way. So "Jersey Shore", a bunch of unnaturally orange monkeys sitting around. Veiny orange muscles and orange plastic breasts. Getting wild in the hot tub. Getting ready for the club. Drinking bottled water. Drinking wine cooler. Breakups. Hookups. 40 minutes..nothing really happened. Legions of humans seem to grow stupider with every passing second and every minute or so two of them are making babies. Welcome to our overcrowded planet, can I borrow your inter-dimensional spacecraft? This and something else new over here
a bunch of new stuff going on this month. the new meathaus sketchbook is out now, featuring art by: Andy Ristaino, Arik Roper, Benjamin Marra, Bob Flynn, Dash Shaw, Dave Kiersh, Esao Andrews, Farel Dalrymple, Jason Sacher, Josh Latta, HARVEYJAMES™, Inés Estrada, Jesse Moynihan, Katie Rice, Kevin Fagan, Michaela Zacchilli, Mu Pan, Nathan Fox, Nicholas Gazin, Nick Bertozzi, Peter Chung, Rebecca Sugar, Ron Wimberly, Sam Kim, Thomas Herpich, Victor Cayro, Vincent Giard, Vincent Stall, Zachary Baldus, Tomer Hanuka, James Jean, Brandon Graham, Robertryan Cory, Al Columbia, and Chris McD. one of the contributors to the book, nick gazin did a nice interview for the vide magazine. read the interview here. i also did an original comic for the occasion on vice's website. check it out here. thanks nick. some of the same characters from that strip are in the new MySpace Dark Horse Presents Volume 4 TPB that is just out this month.
if you're in the portland, oregon area stop by floating world comics. this month to see the show: December Rain - FAKE ROCK BAND POSTER EXHIBIT a group show where over a dozen artists have designed flyers, posters and album covers for bands that don't actually exist. The show is co-curated by T. Edward Bak (Service Industry, Mome, D&Q Showcase). WHERE: Floating World Comics 20 NW 5th Ave #101 Portland, OR 97209 (503)241-0227 here is a small version of my piece:
and here are a few other things i did sort of recently a pin up for conan. i will post later when i find out which issue it will be running in. when i was teaching at PNCA i did this portrait of one of my favorite movie directors i did this as a t-shirt design for a hip hop crew in minneapolis called doom tree. i am not sure when the street date is but once that tee becomes available i'll let you all know. thanks.
"It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives: that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, convening our present, which is infinite, unstable and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive."
--Pier Paolo Pasolini, Observations on the Long Take (p87)
"Sometimes we can see that something has happened, sometimes we are left to imagine or project it, or to be informed about it by other means. The images often contain no people, but a lot of remnants of activity. If this type of image was only present in contemporary art it might be overlooked as a passing trend (of all art's media, photography is still the most subject to curatorial whim). But we see it increasingly in new photojournalism, documentary, campaign work and even news, advertising and fashion. One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as an undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened, totting up the effects of the world's activity. This is a kind of photograph that either foregoes or cannot represent events and so cedes them to other media. As a result it is quite different from the spontaneous snapshot and has a different relation to memory and to history."
--David Campany, Safety in Numbness (p186)
"...a 'film' may be encountered through posters, 'blurbs', and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips: it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference work synopses and theoretical articles (with their 'film-strip' assemblages of still images): through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on. Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen. Clearly the 'film' -- a heterogeneous psychical object, constructed from image scraps scattered in space and time -- is a very different object from that encountered in the context of 'film studies'."
--Victor Burgin, Possessive, Pensive, and Possessed (p199)
C.d.P. The architect is precisely someone who has had to learn to manipulate his or her sensations, to think them. What has intrigued me from the time I started working is that space and language, the topos and the logos, the place and the formula, are fields that are rigorously distinct, two parallel environments but with surface contact. They are associated like air and water, they cannot be split apart. It is because of this that I am pre-occupied with the notion of thinking without language.
P.S. You mean that without language as a mean of expression, there is a language of place.
C.d.P. The place or the bridge is not a fragment of language but a space, a visible ensemble. It can be perceived. At a given moment, it is for me like a center or a zone differentiated from others that is emitting toward me. This happens as if it were emitting. That is sensible experience. Afterward, it can be given a name. From there, each thing can be isolated, and that is the experience of rational thought: things exist not only when we perceive them, they have an existence on their own, outside of ourselves. The self is not the center. But it has to remain. It must not dissolve. This is a crucial experience that constitutes us.
P.S. Space and language are exactly on equal footing.
53-54
[C.d.P.] Recently I was reading the text of a 1939 lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright delivered in London to some students. He suddenly told them that he was about to make a revelation. This was that he had once read a sentence by Lao Tzu that influenced him. It was this same sentence about emptiness [Portzamparc's paraphrase: "My house is not the wall, it is not the ground, it is not the roof; it is the emptiness between these things because that is where I am dwelling."]. This got my interest, and all the more so that Wright added in his lecture: "When I read this sentence, I held the book to my heart and told myself: that's my secret; I must not reveal it to anyone. The whole of my life, in my architecture, I have felt the void." And a bit of a ham, he adds: "Today, I am giving you my secret."
69
C.d.P. You wrote about the "visible world": "what each person is prompted to represent to himself or herself under the sway of verbal sexual stimulation is absolutely private. It is never the same for two persons." This is a sentence from an interview you gave about eroticism. I transcribe this by generalizing the erotic pulse to our lives, since this makes me think of films. Al the cinematographic renderings of a novel evidence what you are saying here about sexuality. When reading a narrative, a story, we always visualize it, even in spite of ourselves. We spatialize situations. And we always notice when viewing a film based on a novel that we had a completely different picture of the places and the atmosphere. This "absolutely private" is never the same for two individuals. It comes out of our experience of desire, of space. We imagine a context effortlessly, and we only become aware of it when confronted by someone else's vision. Writing has the extraordinary power to bring up in us a continent of memory, of experience, of sensations. It is absolutely superior to film. As soon as there is a situation, we can't help but visualize, spatialize, the narrative. Fiction is natural to us. This fact is at once banal and extraordinary. When we work in architecture it is on this continent that we are led to dwell, this space and this visible that were brought up by language, by desire, by the order for the project.
83
C.d.P. Planet, screen, image --thousands of images. I am thinking of a text you wrote titled "The Erotic Delay," which ends with the following sentence: "Any image, even the most violent one, is still always a pious image." We can't argue with an image. We can't reason with it.
87
In art, in writing, the opposite of intervening would be what? It would be to always say: I am the first; I am wiping the slate clean; nothing existed before. I am producing an object of the beginning. This is a common attitude today. Many claim to have no roots, no master, no past. The past is crowding; the past frightens. In contrast, when you are talking about a writer or a painter or a mystic who lived three centuries or thirty years ago, it is as actual as when you write a novel or Paradis. You seem to respond and speak within an extremely vast field encompassing several centuries. You are not split into two sides, one the essayist and the other the novelist. Writing, building, involves reenchanting, seeing again, rereading things that are already ancient, as well as inventing things that do not yet exist. It is the same thing today in music. We are playing with time. In the space of the city, what was done two centuries ago speaks to us today. That is, if it is alive, if it hasn't been "museumified," embalmed, visited only by purchasing tickets like some neighborhoods in Europe. We have to fight for things to remain alive, modifiable. Otherwise history is put on the shelf, forgotten, left to specialists. It is no longer any kind of shared breathing space.
Japan is -- continues to be -- the most different society I know. While it may superficially look like any number of other advanced modern cultures, this place has something very, very strange going on just below the surface. I've been fishing about for a word or phrase to describe one important dimension of this strangeness, a thing I pick up here as I move around. The first word that occurs to me is "motherlove". But perhaps a better term would be "ambient impersonal tenderness". Japan is a society shockingly full of ambient impersonal tenderness, overlapping with tender-mindedness, shading into tweeness.
I catch glimpses of this in the difference between what my defensive reflexes tell me reality is like, and what the Japanese reality often turns out to be. For instance, yesterday I caught sight of what looked like a plate of smashed glass in the wall beside me. Reflexively, my brain made a little story, a story that would be plausible in Berlin but not here: "Anti-globalism protesters have smashed the glass to show their resentment against a world system they feel excludes and alienates them." In Berlin it's very common to see smashed glass in bank or office windows, and anarchist or anti-globalist slogans left as a sort of signature.
But on second glance I see that the "smashed" pane is actually covered by a protective plastic sheet, wrinkled in such a way that it makes the glass look shattered. This is Tokyo, not Berlin. My thoughts drift to an exhibition by Yoko Ono of holes shot in sheets of glass, a show called A Hole I saw the other day at Gallery 360. Ono invites viewers to look through the violent hole in the glass (which recalls Lennon's smashed, bloody glasses on the cover of her Season of Glass album) and use it as a way to frame a new view of the world. One reading of this show, seen in Tokyo, is that a Japanese woman is saying to Japanese people: "The society I have adopted as my home is a much more violent one than the one we're used to; look, someone shot my husband. Violence can easily become a way of framing our view of the world."
But daily life in Japan is the opposite of violent. Take the panel discussion I attended at Vacant the other night. The last panel discussion I attended in Berlin turned into a weird attack, by all the other panelists, on a man who goes regularly to Africa to collect ethnic music for his record label. This man -- meek and nervous in manner -- was attacked (subtly, in a devil's-advocatey way) for certain post-colonial contradictions in his stance, for a certain low-level "hypocrisy" or inconsistency, for turning non-property into property, and for participating in the music industry's obsessive "archive fever". The poor man became a symbol of everything we hate about our own system!
Now, I was one of the subtle attackers, and I can only say we did it because we thought the conversation would be boring without some element of conflict, and without the kind of "criticality" we've been taught is good, or at least good form. But the other night at Vacant the dynamic between the panelists was completely different. There was indeed something "vacant" about the conversation, but also something kind, even tender. Two women photographers were questioned by a male photographer, Masafumi Sanai. I was struck by the casually caressing way Sanai asked his questions and the tenderness with which he interjected his "yes I am listening, oh, that's interesting" noises. I'm sure linguists have a name for these sounds -- they're much more important in Japan than in the West, where you'd just tend to listen silently (possibly critically) then respond. Here you interject "uh... oh... ah... so..." syllables in a rhythm and a tone which, to me, makes the conversation sound so empathetic that it's almost like a minor act of lovemaking.
So while Sanai coaxed his guests permissively, caressingly with these rhythmic interjections, the women photographers themselves had a similar relationship with the audience: one, essentially, of coquetry; of casual, relaxed, intimate flirtation. The BBC's Hard Talk -- conversational fisticuffs, or a theatrical approximation of it -- this very much was not. It was more like a very, very light form of group sex. It rode on a clear empathy between clearly-differentiated men and women; the gender element was much more structurally central than it would ever be allowed to be in the West, where the questioner would (in the name of enlightened gender politics) be doing his best to relate to the women "as if they were men" (and of course this careful "non-misogyny" is precisely where I think the West carelessly encodes its misogyny).
Wearing my "Western eyes" I'm perpetually shocked by the sexy shortness of skirt and bareness of leg I see on Tokyo public transport, because of course through Western eyes this betokens a "sexualisation" which will surely lead young women "duped by a male-dominated society" into dangerous situations where they'll be taken advantage of, abused, even raped (though of course associating skirt length too explicitly with rape becomes a reactionary argument). We Westerners extrapolate from short skirts out into a whole series of awkward or dangerous scenarios played out in a low-empathy, low-trust, Western-style environment, a Resident Evil sort of environment where you never know what alienated person or flesh-eating zombie you're going to meet next. But these projections don't match the Japanese context, a situation of almost-twee security, cleanliness, low crime, low-to-no anomie, and familial tenderness between strangers (with occasional disturbing gropings into the territory of incest).
On my travels I've been taking pictures (or sound recordings) of representations of authority figures, and without exception they're ludicrously cute and empathetic. Policemen and construction workers on warning signs look like cute children, they bow and smile and intervene with friendliness. Even when they frown they look like pouty, sulky children. Now, as a British person I'm used to a certain idea of a construction worker, or white van man; he will, I know, leer openly at women who pass his site, make loud judgmental comments about me because I look weird or effeminate, and probably not hold back long if I'm crossing the road in front of his vehicle. But in Japan not only is the illustrated construction worker solicitous and tender in the signs that warn me that work is going on, the real thing is just as respectful, ushering me past with a bow and a shining guidance wand. I actually want to weep with gratitude, because my Western training has led me to expect vitriol, vague menace, and imputations against my masculinity from security staff, police, and construction workers.
There's an extraordinary infantilisation or feminisation of the figures of construction, logistics and policing. A white van (or, more likely, a tiny white truck) rushes past, and certainly a man is driving. But when he signals left, a female voice emits from the truck asking us, tenderly, to take care. Escalators, trains and elevators too come equipped with female voices, solicitous authority figures, and soon the entire city seems to be an automated female authority figure, robotic, gentle and maternal. It's not too far-fetched, I think, to connect this to suggestions that Japan was once a matriarchy. Certainly, the whole society seems to have a mother complex, and a diffuse feminine atmosphere of tenderness mixed with a certain nannying authoritarianism pervades the land.
Yesterday I went with friends to see a studio theatre version of Shuji Terayama's autobiographical 1974 film Den'en ni Shisu. We, the audience, were treated -- kindly but firmly -- like children as we were "boarded" into the tiny Shimokitazawa theatre. We were called up the narrow steps by ticket number, then ushered through into the theatre, where a belted, braced, flat-capped actress on the stage shouted affable instructions and ushers made sure we found seats. To be "mothered" in this way is odd -- the female authority figure is a collective mother, not one you have a personal connection to -- and yet becomes more and more familiar when you're in Japan. Possibly Japanese -- herded around by this primal mother the whole time, treated like children, indulged and spoiled, suckling from the social oppai -- become mollycoddled milksops, the most idiotically sheltered consumer society ever known to man. But possibly it's also massively wise, the secret of their social success, and a huge saving of psychic energy. Why be manly? Why be individualistic? Why struggle, why fight, why criticize? Any revolution here would have to be a revolution against the ambient tenderness of this great primal social mother, but revolution against mother is not in the nature of mammals. We need the milk.
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ape_and_essenceさんの友達ページを閲覧中です
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?
[Date] 2009.12.22(Tue) Open 20:30 / Start 21:00
