Essay Thought
Zuihitsu
Zuihitsu is Japanese for 'random jottings'.
The trusting make a world you can trust. The paranoid make a world in which you're always worried.
Trust, even when misplaced, creates stability.
Piper to barber: just be you, go crazy. I want a combover.
The artist overwhelmed by the grandeur of ancient ruins. (Henry Fuseli, 1778-9)
Since I've caught syphilis I'm only able to write in italics.
'How are you doing, 80s generation?'
Baroque hardcore adventures of randy servicemen on train.
A river is an exhaust system for water from high places.
Repeat for six months that Britain is a failed state, then invade.
A lonely man had a house with one noisy and one quiet side. He became obsessed with the neighbour responsible for all the noise, and spent more and more time in the noisy room, banging on the wall, shouting threats and logging offenses in a book for a courtcase he planned. Later, when he left the apartment, he discovered that his neighbour on the quiet side had been a very beautiful woman, a widow looking for a husand.
The religion of Borstenanity had ten commandments outlawing various stuff (List them, 1-10). People obeyed, and now those sins are totally forgotten. Nobody thinks about them, let alone commits them. The religion itself has also been forgotten.
Hamletmaschine.
Victory over the sun. First All-Russian Congress of Singers of the Future.
Swaddling folk.
Tomomi Adachi. Vocal performance group. Basic new forms.
Architettura paganism. Narrative film, minimalist music.
Summerisle Public Information Films Council Promotion.
The naked god. A GM evangelist tried to make the naked god buy an 80000 horsepower vehicle, failed and committed suicide. 'The one without objects.'
It really was a house of the new golden age. There were no objects there, and no angry words to be heard. The music was pleasant and continuous. (Superstudio)
The happy ones who build no walls.
A world without music.
Erasure of one's discipline -- the goal of every perfectionist.
'Through a continuous process of reduction, Superstudio eventually arrived at the proposition of a world without architecture or designers and a life without objects.'
AS Neill Summerhill / Summerisle
If you love me, give up smoking
'There'a a ping pong party'.
'A Brief History of Word Processing (Through 1986)'
See the films at Anthology
And a Chinese dragon on Hester
Abject Classicism
Flow onstage -- Gursky meets Gorki
The ignored monster -- people are too busy making money to fear him
Vasari Asleep (breeds monsters)
Preparing to sleep, a whole other book of composers' lives swam before my eyes
Honne -- individual's personal views
Tatemae -- Views demanded by the individual's position within the group
Ninjo -- Human feelings
Giri -- Social obligations
School days as 'glory days'
Choosing school for uniform
Catwalk quality of open subway trains with schoolgirls parading down the carriages
US definition of public space as a place where nothing should happen. (Contrast girl scouts on Ebisubashi 'Nampabashi')
US reserves for itself the right to mainstream culture export. Other cultures can reciprocate with elite culture exports only. (Except: James Bond, Pokemon)
A particular geranium
Lute Score
One reason that I have travelled more than you is that I do not have a car. A car is not a travel machine, it's a repetition machine.
Japanese are cousins. This permits agreement on 'the good life'. (A mix of memories of ancestral feudalism and an imagined tech-topia).
I am Pan / I am NoPan
Seiko Matsuda
The Future of Pleasure (book CD play)
'The good life' -- a common understanding of what should be aspired to. But can it be private only? And if public, what of diversity?
Costume COSPLAY Uniform WORK
My face transmuted into Harold Wilson's.
A ghost tended two moss gardens, one of marshmallow, one of ectoplasm.
Splashy (group name)
Recording (group name)
After a night containing a scare
and no sleep
You made me grow three inches.
You locked me in the bathroom a while ago
I'm still here now
(Yuka Metro song, misheard)
Correct your pleasure.
The London head, X rayed, would resemble a mailbox full of junk mail.
The researchers have been content to interpret the world. The teachers, however, change it.
Just keeping in touch. Just leaving a little message to see if you got my little message about the other little message I left. Call me and we'll arrange something. Maybe not when to meet, but when to call about meeting. (Cell phone phatics.)
Flexiworld, flexitime, flexipeople. Everything can change.
The stories H told of various seductions, cornerings, allurements, intoxications, at the hands of desperate, and famous, old men. This litany one hears regularly, but, as a man, never experiences. A kind of other world beside the one we know.
Now I have seen low tables, tatami mats and baths where you wash before getting into the water, I am questioning everything about my own land, everything.
A woman who tries to shave the beard off her husband's chin, kabuki plot.
Cases tumble off a conveyor belt, people spill through the arrivals doors.
Joyful reunions at arrivals.
A baby is born through the arrivals doors.
All characters wear generic masks. The same three actors play them all.
Musicians unpack instruments from their luggage and sing.
A traveller unrolls a screen and we see a slideshow of his Kenyan holiday.
Striped cones, generic 'hazard' style.
One has an exotic tropical disease. Coloured bubbles rise from him, a drip, electroacoustic burbling.
Fashion show: 'I got these sandals from Crete. These combats have a pocket where cannabis resin can be hidden.
Playworld. A nightmare world where everybody is playing instead of working. You go out to the shops and people mess about, tease, play. 'Shall we fuck now or later?' Everybody is a child, everything is a game. Cities are creches. Nobody can get hurt... or can they? Everything exists just to be interesting, not to be right or useful. It is a creative dystopia. Sugar in all the food. Sex in all the messages. Our world, now. But in play we embody reality in exaggerated form.
The Golden Age of Masturbation
All else may be falling apart, but thanks to the internet this is the golden age of masturbation. And thanks to the warm sand around my head I'm feeling as good as an ostrich can.
Panda
A panda which just wants to be a dog or a cat, although everyone else wants it to be a panda.
Britain and America are incorrect states. Their pleasures are 'incorrect pleasures'.
Our 20s -- a decade in which we love what is toxic and self-destructive -- should come at the end of our lives. Then we'd feel better about dying.
Airport as theatre: Hijackers with scissors 'What better use for an Airbus 320 Than slamming it into the Defence Ministry?' Because hijacking, though rife with practicality, is finally a spiritual activity.
The world's greatest actor
Balbus, the naked man. 'Oh my God, a naked man.'
You cannot change a country, you can just exchange it for another.
Aristocracy live a pleasure-fuelled existence whosevalues may one day trickle down to the general populace.
We oppose the instrumental capitalist lifestyle to a hedonist sensual one. But mightn't the businessman also be the Dionysus, just as it's only instrumental narrative which leads us to the most interesting textures of pure form?
Texture v Text
Sensuality v. Asceticism
Revellling in the Grass
Utopian Fruit Farmers on Fuji
Higher up the mountain the trees are covered with blossom
The power of the union
The comfort of our baggy dungarees
Mount Fuji Fruit Co-operative
Collective Dairy Farm
Utopian Fruit Co-operative
The wonderful electricians
The ship-builders and the chemists
The blast-furnace and brewery workers
The clever architect with his sextant
Coit Tower
Brewers farmers bakers and florists
The cowherd and the poet with his library
The journalist ready with his camera and fact
I don't care whether a farm is collectively or privately owned. Rather, I want to know if it's run in a tender-minded or ruthless way.
The architect's dispute with the project manager
Particularity does not exist, as Romantics insist. All cars are reliably peopled with assholes, and I will reliably get on well with all Japanese women. The software is the important thing. The operating system you run on.
SF as a city with its head in the clouds. California as the flipside of America.
Insects planning a city
A spirit serves a small breakfast
Baroque Portrait (Lord Wig)
Small Winter Landscape with Skiier
Forest Near G
Negroid Beauty
Psychogram with the Foot
What a horse!
Prickle the Clown
Pleasure Gardens of the Young Race
(Klee titles)
Carl Spitzweg and Moritz von Schwind
Goethe Schiller and Fichte murmur Novalis
GermanAfrica
Gardens and plants
Fairy and folk tales
Tragedy on Stilts
Swamp leg
Inner Lightbath
Cathedral of Erotic Misery
(Merzbau) Schwitters
A woman is not edible
(Poster from the Meguro police)
On the fundamental importance of Poon
A mobile phone lost in the sea
Is ringing and singing but never for me
Hot springs bath cure
Put the mountains here
And arrange the sky so
Red-nosed monkeys know
This is how the tuberous growth
Is made to go
Tuberculosis -- no!
Although
A proboscis nose
Tuber - filter - liver
Bath cure of small pharmacist
Alpine farmers and hunters of the pleistocene
Vietname choropodist cholera epidemic
Grillparzer
Restraining a Lion By Land
The Legend of a Shopkeeper and Its Donkey
The Finished Thrust Blank Monument in Vienna
Blank Bank
Casio Seiko Citizen Orient
The hungry feed us
The thirsty quench us
The naked dress us
The homeless house us
The prisoners free us
The patients nurse us
The dead bury us
The place where all the accidents go which have survived human beings.
A chain of flowers from the familiar to the unfamiliar -- Peel of Washington
Bees disapprove of loose women
1. Pins and needles
2. Shoes and stockings
3. Aches and pains
4. Vermin
5. Panthers
They have a feud with the cranes and the storks. They ride on sheep.
280 foot black butterfly in space
La Fontaine
Musa McKim (Philip Guston's wife)
Drunk junk
Horseshoes on a dark flood
Sleeping -- rug -- back view
Be extremely loose and spontaneous, turn around five main themes. Work big.
A big pile of cherries
A half-eaten sandwich
My battered, bandaged head climbing an uphill landscape
A pair of those familiar legs attempting to scale a ladder to which they have been nailed
An eager red-eyed dog licks raw meat in an open ash can
Lamps, chairs, books, lightbulbs and cherries
My less-than-innocent impulses are also innocent
Re-Frazier
Play - Unfinished - Us
(Three-theme essay)
What happens when you act with callous self-interest but explain it to yourself in the most tender-minded terms, because the privilege your callousness has secured brings with it tender-minded sentiments (SUV-view)?
As Kafka said, the day of judgement is not a single, ultimate event so much as a permanent, parallel court of session. We can penetrate through to 'eternity' and 'the infinite' at many points in our humdrum daily lives. So it is with 'the end of history'. It is not literally at the end of history, it is beside us every day, alongside. (This can be something as literal as having babies.)
Hobby: writing with the white ink of life.
Listening List, July - August 2003
Nathan Michel: Dear Bicycle (Tigerbeat 6)
Cornelius: PM By Humans (Polystar)
Steve Reich: The Cave
Takeo Toyama: Hello88 (Karaoke Kalk)
Alan Lomax: Songs of Seduction: Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Rounder)
Kalimba and Kalumbu Songs, Northern Rhodesia 1952 and 1957 (SWP)
Kimya Dawson: My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess (Important Records)
Ekkehard Ehlers: Plays (Staubgold)
Ernst Jandl: 13 Radiophonie Texte & Das Rocheln der Mona Lisa (Intermedium)
Ilhan Mimaroglu: Outstanding Warrants (Southport)
Berio / Maderna: Acousmatrix 7 (BVAHAAST)
Tujiko Noriko: From Tokyo to Naiagara (Tomlab)
E*Rock: Conscious (Audio Dregs)
Heiner Goebbels / Ensemble Modern: Eislermaterial
Henry Jacobs' Music & Folklore: Radio Programme No. 1 Audio Collage (Locust Music)
Dorine Muraille: Mani (Fat Cat)
Summer Thanks
Robert, Hisae, Keiko, Karin, Miho, Rafael, Brian, Eric, Shayla, Erik, Betty, Jo, Jorge, Amy, Shazna. James for driving, Mirko for hosting my boxes, Yuko for sifting, Junko and Ian for housing my musical instruments, the Seahorse Liberation Army for seahorsing around with me, John Fashion Flesh for refashioning, Antonin for digikising, Aya for understanding. Thank you all the Friendsters for befriending, thank you Andrew for the new web space and Daniel for offering. Thanks to Odradek and Erik Kork for setting the tours up, thanks to Edgar, thanks to Jing. Thanks to Star 67 Gallery for putting Rika's work in their show, no matter how spooky it was. Thanks to Vice magazine for running me. Thanks to Hikaru for story-telling. And thank you for coming.
Essays Index
Index