The record, sporting a homo-erotic Famicon sleeve by Stefan Sadler, appears in November 2008 but really starts in June 2006. Just back from my stint as the Unreliable Tour Guide at the Whitney in New York, I'm in London "showing" an artwork (actually just a series of texts whispered by the staff) at a gallery called Blow de la Barra. Maybe it's the presence of the Ziggy Stardust phonebox right outside the gallery on Heddon Street, but when Kamal Ackarie asks me at the opening to contribute a cover version to a box set he's preparing, I say I'd like to do Bowie's Ashes to Ashes in a collaboration with Joe Howe of Glasgow chipcore group Gay Against You, whose side-project Germlin I namecheck on that same trip during a Resonance FM interview as my favourite new music. Here's how the cover turns out:
For a while that stays in its box -- a one-off for a box set. When I think about the next Momus album, I envision something very different, something "mega-trad". For some reason (maybe because this sort of warm regret is just what being middle-aged feels like, or maybe because somewhere in my heart I'm hurting) I cover another song that haunts me, The Next Time, as sung by Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday:
Then I see Gay Against You live in Berlin, and get -- as Joe would put it -- "pretty stoked" (Hanayo is bopping away in the audience, a constant smile on her face, and the Glasgow boys bound around in white leotards, making a joyous din unto the creator). So the idea comes to me to blend the weary sad old man thing with the joyous boy thing. This is where the bipolar nature of the Joemus album (the quick-slow-quick-slow thing it does) gels. When Joe asks me to contribute vocals to a track he's doing for his Germlin solo album, I splice in a new slow section voiced by a sort of Tony Newley / early Bowie character, and the result is Mr Proctor:
I really like the way the track combines weary heartbroken middle-aged regret and youthful pop pep; gadgetry and balladry. Basically the framing for Joemus is established at this point. It'll be Joe and me, fast and slow, 8-bit-Bolan meets croony-girning Tony Newley, sad and don't-care happy. Electronic processing will give me new voices, new characters to inhabit.
The record makes new riffs the way God made Eve from Adam's ribs: Jahwise Hammer of the Babylon King is the Ashes cover rearranged to make a new song, Strewf is Thatness and Thereness re-spliced, and Widow Twanky is the Cliff Richard cover chopped up and thrown into reverse:
I like this way of writing songs; it balances being-in-control with being-out-of-control, conscious with unconscious, old with new. Birocracy gets born, and the lyrics are just off-the-top-of-the-head nonsense, but it feels happy and positive, a fresh start continuously contradicted by slowies like Thatness and Thereness, a Sakamoto cover I had lying around from the Oskar sessions in Tokyo (to be played together with the silent Heian video below):
The Cooper O' Fife sees the Germlin style turned to folk, and Ichabod Crane bends it in the direction of Manchester post-punk. Strewf! has the feel of The Residents rewriting the Oliver Twist musical, and Dracula (a duet with Kyoka, who's just moved to Berlin at this point) collides New Order riffs with gothic motifs and a touch of Henning Christiansen's horse sacrifice.
Goodiepal and Fade to White are warm and sinister in equal measure, but continue to be drawn from a place just beyond my rational ken; it's as if Click Opera sucks up all the sense, and what's left to songs is to present my secret emotional life, my dreams, the things that tug at the edges of consciousness.
If Joemus seems a bit light on well-made songs, the last few make up for the deficiency. I now regret including The Mouth Organ -- a remake of a song on the 2002 Milky album -- and tend to skip it when playing the album. But The Man You'll Never Be is a nice dark maudlin-but-mocking number about getting older -- Cohen meets Pinter, if you like -- and The Vaudevillian (actually the Joemus song I play most live, along with Widow Twanky) is a funny-tragic and rather magisterial ending in which the Tony Newley character is carted offstage in a coffin, then wakes up dead in a universe in which God has also died and is rotting slowly, accompanied by the pathetic sound of a tap dripping in the distance.
Conclusion: I went through a period of listening to Joemus every day on my computer and loving it -- it sounds particularly good on small speakers, because the cheap strident sounds Joe loves to use just shoot out all vivid and brash (on bigger speakers the bass is doing some weird stuff). I last listened to it driving around West Tokyo in Hisae's friend Satoshi's car, and it still sounded pretty great; innovative and interesting.
The album seems to me the most enjoyable thing I did all decade. Lyrically, some of the songs are clearly fluff, but the interest lies in the organic electronic textures, the personae they encourage me to adopt, the unexpected juxtapositions -- that bipolar thing -- of joy and despair, swagger and creep, bawdy and maudlin. If you could travel back through time to 1968 and ask the eight year-old me what he really liked about pop music, he'd probably say he'd been touched by the old schmaltz of Noel Harrison and Michel Legrand doing The Windmills of Your Mind as well as the lyrically meaningless but sexually kinetic energy of Tommy James and the Shondells doing Mony Mony.
Joemus -- with me as Noel Legrand and Joe as the Shondells -- touches both those bases. Perhaps it's my 1968 album, not my 2008 one.
11:16 am - Yes we are blok heads! Hisae and I will board a bullet train to Osaka on Wednesday and spend three weeks at points south, mostly Kansai, so our Tokyo time is drawing to a close, alas. Most of the precious substance of the last three weeks has barely made it into these pages; the research I've been doing for the Aftergold show, the daily meetings I've had with friends, old and new.
Last night's Unreliable Tour Guide performance at NOW IDeA was shamanic fun; I turned artist Yusuke Mashiba's (very nice, outsider-ish) ink drawings into the gods of a parallel universe, and also interviewed the artist, posing questions like: "Would I find a black carton of black milk in your fridge?" and "Are you jealous of cockroaches?"
Another high point came on Saturday night, when we went to see excellent absurdist theatre group Crack Iron Albatrossoket at SuperDeluxe. Their piece, entitled Yojohan Oasis Rocket, ended with a blistering live performance from Oorutaichi, whose set with choreographer-dancer Masako Yasumoto in the Spectacle in the Farm video projected last week at Vacant was one of the most thrilling and inspiring things I've ever seen.
For me, the filament of life burns more brightly and beautifully in Tokyo than anywhere else; the question almost everybody asks me is: "Why not live here?" I've run out of reasons, so I'll just say (an Albatrossoket motto) BECAUSE WE ARE BLOK HEADS!
10:29 am - Absent without leaving The greater Tokyo area has just under 36 million people living in it; it's still the world's most populous metropolitan area. If this monster of cities runs remarkably smoothly most of the time, and even feels like a rather relaxing place, it's because of the particular, even peculiar, habitus of presence which prevails here. Tokyo people are very good at being absent without leaving.
Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.
A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.
Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.
When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.
The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!
For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!
Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.
A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."
You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.
At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.
Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.
11:17 am - From the most-consumerist will come the post-consumerist! Japan is a great place for a tourist to indulge in visions of alternative societies. Not only is Japan actually different in many ways from the society the tourist was brought up in, but his simple incompetence, incomprehension and sheer delirium, as he walks around Japan, will create all sorts of fertile semantic gaps which -- if no-one is on hand to explain them -- he'll fill using his imagination. His expectation of difference will make him create it.
Yesterday I was queuing for bread at a bakery on the busy plaza that leads up to Ebisu station. Perhaps the fact that it felt more like an airport than a bakery led to the vision that followed. Gazing at a sign showing the prices of different types of bread, I saw two prices. It was probably just two sizes of bread, but for a second I thought it said "WE SELL" for one price and "WE BUY" for another. I imagined, in other words, that this was a bread exchange.
From that simple "mistake" I suddenly extrapolated an alternative society, one which I find rather intriguing: a WE BUY / WE SELL, convenience/exchange, most-consumerist/post-consumerist society in which the ratio between those two prices approaches 1:1.
Clearly, elements of this society are already falling into place, and not just in Japan. Money exchanges at airports buy and sell currency. More and more cash machines will allow you to deposit as well as withdraw cash. People with solar panels on their roofs can increasingly feed excess power they generate back into the grid, and get paid for it by power companies. The technology will soon be cheap enough to make this "total power" profitable to generate at home. Who knows, people's roofs could one day displace power stations the way distributed computing and the web have displaced mainframes.
There are other examples of this eco-efficient "exchange society" taking shape. There are many secondhand clothes shops now (I think of Beacon's Closet in Brooklyn, for instance) where you have a check in counter that receives, appraises and buys clothes customers bring in, and a check out counter where customers buy clothes they didn't bring. And there's the revolution wrought by eBay, of course, and other online buying and selling mechanisms.
It gets particularly interesting when this exchange culture is blended with convenience culture, and we get a 24/7 exchange-convenience culture. For instance, say I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. I have no cash, but I have some aluminium drinks cans I've been collecting in a bag. I take them to the can recycling machine, which gives me enough cash to buy a new drink from the drinks machine nearby. Obviously it's going to take ten or more empty cans to get the price of one full one, but it's nice to imagine ways to get that ratio lower (government subsidy to encourage the IN/OUT society, perhaps?). Achieving 1:1 would be a utopian goal, the eco-economic equivalent of building a perpetual motion machine.
Japan's convenience culture does make it a good place to entertain such visions; one of the premises of the Aftergold show I'm putting together is that the most advanced consumer society is where we're likely to see "the thing after consumerism" taking shape. The combini below my apartment here is open 24/7, 365 days a year. Most shops in Japan seem to be open at incredible times; as a European I don't at all take it for granted that I can get parts for a broken bike late on a Sunday evening, but that's exactly what we did last Sunday at about 8pm, heading to a blazing, crowded bike shop in Nishi-Shinjuku.
Japan is a country with limited natural resources, so it uses materials carefully and recycles conscientiously. Trash is graded and separated very strictly in the home. There's also a flourishing secondhand market. Shimokita has a strong Dorama-based secondhand culture, and the whole of Koenji seems to be selling used goods (including, of course, our good friends the Shiroto No Ran or "amateur revolution" crew). Bigger concerns like Book Off sell secondhand goods too. Even out in the slick Italianate shopping mall Venus Fort in Odaiba, Hisae and I found a huge and excellent secondhand clothes store (Furugi Hypermarket) selling immaculately clean clothes; the Japanese obsession with cleanliness makes secondhand here a much more pleasant -- and much less smelly -- experience than it can be in the West. And something of the same spirit infuses a place like Utrecht, which sells handmade books brought in by the artists themselves.
The unique structure of Japanese business also encourages this "amateur revolution" angle (and the exchange society I'm outlining is clearly one in which the distinction between amateur and professional gets dissolved). Even big companies like Toyota tend to employ hundreds of small household suppliers, who produce components to very high standards in little workshops on the ground floor, often, of family houses. So even companies that look vast and monolithic tend to be comprised, on closer inspection -- like a gigantic halftoned photograph -- of big numbers of small, almost amateur, suppliers.
Obviously, quality control would be a big issue in this convenience/exchange culture, especially when it comes to food (or, you know, piloting jet planes; could you get a cheaper ticket if you flew the plane for a while?). There are overlaps with my idea (most recently referenced in decade's-end music retrospectives in The Guardian by Simon Reynolds and Alexis Petridis) about everyone being famous, in the future, for fifteen people; this is very much a long-tail system of production, one which breaks down not just the distinction between amateur and professional, but also the distinctions between producer and consumer, between new and secondhand, between consuming and recycling, and between big and small-scale production.
Are any economists heralding this sort of production system at the moment? Are any political parties taking steps towards it, or putting it into their manifestos? They should be.
04:08 pm - God Bless Us One An' All Merry Christmas Everyone. 'Scuse the image quality, I'm having far too many yuletide laffs to get to my scanner....
12:35 pm - Hayao Kawai, the self, and the great mother The other day, chatting with Alin Huma, I asked "Who was it who said the Japanese have no pyschoanalysis, and no need for psychoanalysts, because they have no unconscious? Because all the neuroses are on the surface here?"
"It was Lacan, wasn't it?" said Alin.
Actually, there have been Japanese psychoanalysts. Hayao Kawai (1928-2007), for instance. If Freud delved into the Bible and Greek mythology for motifs like Moses and Oedipus, Kawai delved into Buddhism, Japanese folk tales, and even the novels of Haruki Murakami for his motifs and examples. Kawai thought of himself as a Jungian. Much of his work examines the difference between the Eastern and Western mindsets.
1. A tendency to introversion 2. The location of consciousness outside the self 3. The strength of "the great mother inside"
According to Kawai, there's a lack of distinction in the Eastern world between consciousness and unconsciousness (an idea which mirrors Lacan's thought about everything we think of as "deeply buried" being out in the open and up on the surface in Japan). Eastern philosophy seeks the self, historically, in its own unconsciousness. Jung said that when Westerners say the word "mind" it refers to consciousness, but when Easterners say the same word it refers to the unconscious.
Here's a simple diagram Kawai made to show the differences between the Eastern and Western minds, as he saw it. The Eastern self lives in the unconsciousness, which means there's a lack of knowledge of the self. The self in Westerners is put in the centre of consciousness, which means that the self is seen as strong, central and independent -- and yet frail, because this Robinson Crusoe is surrounded by the unknown, able to be overwhelmed and undermined at any moment by powerful "instincts" and "impulses" from somewhere else.
As a result of this basic organisation of the self, Westerners tend to find the meaning of their life in a fight with fate and with their own nature, whereas Easterners tend to find the meaning of life in "tasting their fate"; accepting it, and living in harmony with their own nature. The typical Western dramatic hero struggles against the inevitable, whereas the typical Eastern hero "tastes" and accepts it.
This leads to differences in attitudes to "the great mother" (which relates to my thoughts about the robotic female authority figure in overwhelmed by milk). In the West, thinks Kawai, people have to kill their mother in order to win their independence. In the East, people try to achieve independence without killing the mother.
In Japan, says Kawai, people tend to model any kind of social group on family relationships, in both good and bad ways. When your school and company is a family group, things can sometimes get intolerable, stifling. On the other hand, society as a great universal mother can bind people together and make them less lonely.
Kawai didn't entirely see Japan as an Eastern culture, though; for him it was an important bridge, a place where Western and Eastern conceptions of the self and society could mingle.
09:27 am - Tam O'Kamakura "He came back from Japan looking different, somehow..." I suppose I've always been fascinated by watching someone -- a pop star who's moved up to the international level of success, or a friend who's moved to another country -- being visibly changed by the encounter. It might be someone British and working class who becomes a musician and starts traveling the world, and presently you notice exotic influences rubbing off on them in the way they dress, and the sound of their music. John Lydon discovers Jamaica!
But it's not as simple as that. In most industrialised places you travel to these days, clothes and music have a flattened, globalised feel. A Gap or Uniqlo or Muji t-shirt looks pretty much the same in Tokyo or New York; it's probably made in China, wherever you buy it. (I'm talking about travel within Europe, the Americas, Asia; India, Indonesia and Africa are different in that they still have mainstream regional dress styles, which makes them very interesting. By the same token, though, they don't consume Western pop music, which makes it harder for a Western musician to travel there.)
In this kind of global system, the sort of national identity you could consume by buying clothes on your travels is available only as a quirky niche product for tourists and internal tourists. You encounter a post-national nationalism (a coquettish nationalism primped for the age of globalism) in certain shops. In fact, they're specifically the kind of shops I buy my clothes in, which is why I've ended up looking like some sort of weird parody of a Japanese person from a former age.
The jacket I'm wearing in the photo above comes from Kamawanu, which is a little shop in trad Japanese style up a side street in Daikanyama. Visits to Cosmic Wonder and United Bamboo have left me unimpressed; both these designers seem to have made steps towards the Gap-Uniqlo mainstream by making subtle, clever or conceptual versions of global American-collegiate clothes. Kamawanu, with its rows of gorgeous tenuguis, excites me because its references are entirely Japanese. Here I can indulge my fascination with kabuki, arcane Japanese uniforms, pilgrims and monks, otherness and particularity.
Kamawanu is at the conservative end of the spectrum; their patterns, though gorgeous, are hardly innovative. For a splash of modernity with your tradition, try Sou Sou on Omote Sando. Originally from Kyoto (the mothership for trad-inspired Japanese design), Sou Sou does a great line in bold and flashy tabi shoes and socks. In the photo above I'm let down by my plastic crocs; a pair of Sou Sou tabi trainers is clearly in order.
Their clothes similarly elevate everyday Japan, using stitched motifs (handmade combini logos, cigarette packet motifs, funny faces) to give a local specificity to the generic products churned out by the global clothes mills.
I've also been impressed by Theatre Products, an ambitious and original clothing company with a store in LaForet called Stripe ("Stripe, symbol for eternity... Stripe is continuous and never ending!"). For gm ten gallery's September culture event in the Nasu countryside, Spectacle in the Farm, Theatre Products put on a fashion show in which models pulled (sometimes reluctant) farm animals about. Sure, the herded sheep and paraded alpacas might have brought Marie Antoinette to mind rather than anything specifically Japanese, but there was also something very Terayama, very Art Theatre Guild, about it (as there is about Theatre Products' logo).
Do you want flavours to go global, or one global flavour to go everywhere? Globalisation is clearly a sword with two edges; it has the flattening, monocultural capacity to make everywhere on earth look like exactly the same place, but also the amazing capacity to spread far and wide gloriously odd specificities it took cultures centuries to arrive at. Through tourism and other forms of cultural exchange, globalisation can also make local cultures think more clearly about the value of their own specific differences (actually seeing them as "differences" rather than "errors" is already a huge step).
But there's a paradoxical universalism in this "globalism of flavour"; I actually feel weirdly Scottish dressed in my "Japanese" gear. I feel like Tam O' Shanter having visions on the road to Kamakura.
Momus performs a 45-minute live set tonight at gm ten gallery, Azabu-Juban, at 2100. Entry is 1000 yen (includes free drink).
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The record, sporting a homo-erotic Famicon sleeve by Stefan Sadler, appears in November 2008 but really starts in June 2006. Just back from my stint as the Unreliable Tour Guide at the Whitney in New York, I'm in London "showing" an artwork (actually just a series of texts whispered by the staff) at a gallery called Blow de la Barra. Maybe it's the presence of the Ziggy Stardust phonebox right outside the gallery on Heddon Street, but when Kamal Ackarie asks me 
Goodiepal and Fade to White are warm and sinister in equal measure, but continue to be drawn from a place just beyond my rational ken; it's as if Click Opera sucks up all the sense, and what's left to songs is to present my secret emotional life, my dreams, the things that tug at the edges of consciousness. 
"He came back from Japan looking different, somehow..." I suppose I've always been fascinated by watching someone -- a pop star who's moved up to the international level of success, or a friend who's moved to another country -- being visibly changed by the encounter. It might be someone British and working class who becomes a musician and starts traveling the world, and presently you notice exotic influences rubbing off on them in the way they dress, and the sound of their music. John Lydon discovers Jamaica!
The jacket I'm wearing in the photo above comes from 
Do you want flavours to go global, or one global flavour to go everywhere? Globalisation is clearly a sword with two edges; it has the flattening, monocultural capacity to make everywhere on earth look like exactly the same place, but also the amazing capacity to spread far and wide gloriously odd specificities it took cultures centuries to arrive at. Through tourism and other forms of cultural exchange, globalisation can also make local cultures think more clearly about the value of their own specific differences (actually seeing them as "differences" rather than "errors" is already a huge step).