"Learning from Japan" is a theme I keep coming back to, a sermon I keep preaching. Opposed to the crude view I call "Japan Original Sin" (people who harp on about research whaling, war criminal shrines and textbook lacunae, and with whom one eventually, inevitably, ends up playing a futile game of Atrocity Snap), the "Learning from Japan" meme simply suggests that Japan's difference from Western practice is valuable, precisely, to the West. We can't learn anything from people who think as we do. For the same reason, men can learn more from women than they can from other men.
The architecture world will get a chance to learn from Japan -- and from a woman -- in 2010; SANAA's Kazuo Sejima has been chosen as the curator of The Venice Architecture Biennial. I'm pretty sure she's the first Japanese to get this job; she's certainly the first woman to do so. A clue to her focus comes in a brief statement she's released saying that "a significant point of departure could be the concept of boundaries and the adaptation of space... it could be argued that contemporary architecture is an afterthought and perhaps an easing of borders themselves." That's a fresh thought already; architecture as an easing of borders in a time when they're generally stiffening.
I blogged last week about a new book from Lars Müller, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Learning from Japan: Single-Story Urbanism. My title today comes from there. The blurb explains: "During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan...
"As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA?" Browsing the book at Pro-qm, I got the strong impression that what we can learn from SANAA is something to do with a relaxing, elegant lightness and understatement, something to do with minimalism and gentleness, and something to do with a feeling of calm that permeates Japan very noticeably whenever you spend time there. Iwan Baan's photographs of SANAA buildings filled with schoolchildren or middle-aged culture tourists made me think of Alasdair Gray's excellent maxim: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
Witts then goes on to set the scene much better than the Factory documentary, showing a transition in 70s Manchester from Modernist glass-concrete-and-steel redevelopment to Postmodernist restoration, pedestrianisation and heritage-orientation. He also displaces the cliché about the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall sparking Manchester post-punk, pointing out that the experimentation of Van der Graaf Generator, the "basic" rock of The Worst, and the radical localism of the folk scene also played their part.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
Forget the places you've been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
Blogs you check habitually are the wrong ones because they tell you nothing new. Try switching to Letters of Note, correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Certainly, the letters collected here are from the past. But they very readily suggest parallel futures -- for instance, a future in which Andy Warhol isn't famous.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
The everyday contains everything you need for a religion.
Stop expecting new musician Y to be "the new musician X". And stop expecting old musician X to be the new musician X.
You have been underestimating the colour yellow.
Conspiracy theories waste your time. It's all a big conspiracy.
Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.
The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
Drums are finished. Except for kettledrums and gongs.
You know too much about LA and not enough about Laos. On the internet and in "the real world" you're consistently looking in the wrong places for inspiration. Why is that? Partly it's because the things that could really change you make you scared.
This is the decade in which you will finally make the switch from quantity to value. One ramification: you will move from an expensive place where you have to do a lot of meaningless work just to exist to a cheap place where you can exist easily and can therefore afford to dedicate yourself to work that really means something to you.
The penny finally drops: people who drive cars just end up seeing a lot of roads.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but they might be located on the other side of the world.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do. They are hidden next door, but to befriend them you will have to learn a new language.
You will probably be happier amongst people who do not think as you do.
Nothing could be better than a market at 5am, but to experience it you will have to get up earlier and brave the cold.
Learn to make things with wood.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
Everything you know is right, but that was then and this is now.
UGH I have been on a ridiculous schedule. I go to bed in the morning and sleep all day. Or else, I go to work on 2 or fewer hours of sleep, and come home exhausted, and then sleep the rest of the day away. We've been staying out/up all night. It's good, but bad. We hung out with Ray's friend Tom twice. I LOVE Tom. And we've been going to bars. But I can't help feeling like drinking is a waste of money for me. I only have one or two drinks, but they are expensive, and they never even give me a buzz, really. It's just more to get myself more comfortable with going out places..
In other news, I did something I have been meaning to do for literally months. Maybe longer. I rejoined Curves. Now, please, I know the founder and his wife are horrible religious anti-choice assholes. I hate that. But I've tried other gyms, and I like this one, like the employees, and can handle the routine. It works for me. So, yeah, I'm doing somethingthat puts money in the pocket of people with views I disagree with. Sue me. My health is more important.
I was dreading the Refresher workout. Yknow, actually working out the entire circuit again, for the first time in years. I remember how it made me feel when I used to do it regularly. It never got much easier. It made me feel like I was going to fall over. You don't get a break. You do a machine, then a recovery board, but the recovery board is where you have to jog or whatever to keep your heart rate up. So it's intense, for a sedentary lump like me. Either you're using a machine, or you're jogging on a board. No breaks. And then they added this stretching machine to use at the end, which I had to learn to use, cos they didn't have it when I was a member before. Anyway. The entire time, my guide was standing there like watching me to make sure I used the machines right, and I felt soo embarrassed at how sweaty and heavy-breath-y I was..especially since she is like 5'1 and 82 pounds. Whatever. Anyway, I felt so triumphant afterwards. It can only get easier from now on. It's only a half hour plus stretching, but it feels like an eternity. I just hvae to tell myself it's worth it.
Here are three videos of Carousel rehearsals last month at Music Bank in the Tower Bridge Business Complex in which I sang through -- for the first time with real musicians -- three Jacques Brel songs arranged by David Coulter and Mike Smith, and translated by me (you can read my translations, two of which were made specially for this performance, beside the videos as they appear on YouTube). The band of twenty musicians (including Roger Eno on piano, Seb Rochford on drums, Leo Abrahams on guitar, Kate St Clair on oboe and Thomas Bloch on onde martinot) performed these songs with me at The Barbican on October 22nd and the Warwick Arts Centre the next day.
Finally, Jacky, filmed onstage at The Barbican at the end of the first concert.
I was particularly taken with Aberdonian drummer Seb Rochford (of Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland) and his extraordinary afro. Seb exudes a 70s countercultural cool as well as incredible percussive flair, and it was easy to believe Leo's tales of Brian Eno attending recording sessions with Seb, watching all his takes. Here he is doing his stuff:
As for Roger Eno (he crosses the picture at the beginning of the video for The Town Tumbled), the man does this footstomping thing while playing the piano, and grins like Elton John, and loves to laugh, joke and do crosswords. On the tour bus to Warwick I noticed that a lot of the stories he was telling sounded familiar: there was one about the Pepsi campaign that promised "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", one about Picasso undermining representational image-making by asking a man who showed a photo of his wife "But is she really so small and flat?", one about art being a plane you can crash and walk away from, and one (at my request) about his dad the postman. Eventually the coin dropped. I'd heard some or all these tales from the same source he had: his big brother Brian. But Roger had heard them firsthand.
and while we are looking at maps, this interactive map of the spread of swine flu is pretty useful, if not frightening. Here in the heart of europe we remain somewhat isolated from the spread of the flu, for some reason, but I expect it will be on us soon enough, we are surrounded by outbreaks ...
Seeing these boys tonight at Record Collector in Bordentown, NJ. My grandmother used to play spoons and thimbles/washboard in a jug band. I'm a sucker for the stuff. Anyone who can't tap a toe to this stuff needs a fun transplant.
Big US banks have been issued swine flu vaccines that were meant for priority groups.
The banks, already been bailed out by US taxpayers as they teetered on the brink in the wake of the global financial crisis, were issued with the H1N1 vaccines after a decision by local officials in New York, according to Business Week.
The Obama administration is contacting state and local officials to reinforce that H1N1 vaccine should be used for high-risk groups first following a report that some of New York's biggest companies got supplies, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
The nights are drawing in and the weather's crappy, so why don't you settle down in front of a crackling computer screen and direct your own frankly creepy text-to-movie movie? There are hours of fun to be had making wooden-looking 3D characters say rude things in bizarre settings. I know, I've tried it.
Now, it so happens that Dr Woodard and I will both exhibit artworks in Vienna next week in a group show called Verausgabungssymposium ("Expenditure Symposium"), held at Contemporary Concerns (COCO) Gallery. Curated by Christian Kobald and Severin Dünser, the show is about waste. My piece, intended to be displayed on an electronic signboard, is called The Facebook Proverbs. For a while now, I've been using my Facebook page's status updates as a place to put proverbs. By re-cycling these "deep tweets" as an artwork (in a medium pioneered by people like Jenny Holzer and Claude Closky) I want to embody the logic of an old proverb: "Waste not, want not!"
So my second text-to-movie effort is a film of The Facebook Proverbs as -- and not as -- they'll be appearing in Vienna.
Depending on when you asked, his family had either died in a cult suicide or had been poisoned by exposure to radioactive material. On another occasion, they had been murdered by an angry milkman.
Whatever happened to Bladders' family, he now lived with his uncle in a damp-smelling semi-detached house. They lived in squalor. I once saw a pint glass filled with Branton Pickle on the side of the bathtub. When I asked him about it he denied that it was Branston Pickle. Apparently it was sweetcorn niblets and Marmite.
On another occasion, I was confronted by a perfectly intact turd the size of a swamp adder in the toilet bowl. As the toilet didn't seem to be working and I had to pee pretty bad, I was forced to hold my breath and close my eyes and tell myself that I wasn't urinating onto some dark god from H. P. Lovecraft.
I once noticed that a panel was missing from the window by the front door and that there was dried blood on the sill. Bladders explained that a passing carnival freak had broken the window in the night, but it was plain even to my eleven-year-old self that his uncle had come home drunk, without a key and had punched a hole in the glass to open the door from the inside.
By most social conventions, I shouldn't really have spent so much time with Bladders. He was unkempt, was probably abused by his alcoholic uncle, was two years older than me, smelled like something from Jeffrey Dahmer's kitchenette and would concoct increasingly bizarre legends about his possibly-dead/possibly-living-in-Wolverhampton family. One Sunday morning, I found him drinking fortified wine from an egg cup. Laughing.
Given all this, why were we friends? I think our initial bond had happened when he asked me in the school playground if I liked football. I'd never been asked before: at the Dudley School for Young Cannonfodder, it was taken for granted that all boys liked football and that they would support either the Wolverhampton Wonderers or West Bromwich Albion. I told Bladders that I did not like football. "Good," he said conspiratorially, "Me neither".
We also shared superficial but locally unusual tastes. And so our relationship mostly revolved around quoting Monty Python ("Run Away! Run Away!"), The Fast Show ("A little bit whoooa, a little bit weeee!") and Winding up Nathan ("You call that an Omelet?").
He was a huge Star Trek fan and his bedroom was a shrine to his favourite television show. He didn't have any money so he didn't have much in the way of the videos or toys (though I do remember a cool transporter unit, in which you could place a character's action figure and "beam him up" using a light-and-mirrors mechanism) so instead, he had covered the walls and ceiling of his room with Star Trek-related cuttings from the Radio Times.
I realise now that such behaviour is borderline psychotic. It is even akin to the behaviour of Eugene Tooms on The X Files, who would make nests out of newspaper and bile: a practice I believe is still popular with members of the Conservative Party.
At the time, however, I found such creativity the very height of it all and it wasn't long until I'd made my own bedroom nest of TV-related cuttings and junk. In fact, I'm still finding bits of stuff around my parents' house, almost fifteen years later.
I'm writing about Bladders because today, I found a photograph of me and Bladders, arms around each other and grinning like loons. We were wearing his homemade Starfleet uniforms (red ones, for Engineering and Security guys) and on the reverse of the photo, my handwriting says, "Best of Friends! 1995".
We truly were the best of friends! I scanned my memory for suggestions of why we ever fell out. There was the time Bladders got carried away in a tickling match and I'd fallen halfway down the stairs. But that wasn't it. There was also a time when he said he "kept me around" because I was "funny looking", which I remember being hurt by but had not mulched our friendship.
About two years after the "Best of friends! 1995" photograph was taken, Bladders made a move on one of my girlfriends. In return, I gave him a fat lip and we never spoke again. Dick.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group 
A new decade is a time in which to declare "everything you know is wrong". A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let's start groping now.
You've been trained to talk about "sexualisation" without paying due attention to the fact that God and Freud (possibly the same person, long grey beard, knows everything) made us sexual from birth.
You thought a new decade was a blank slate. It's not; it's a rebellion.
No previous decades are to be revived this decade. Make a little more effort with the shapes of things, please.
You will probably be happier amongst people who think as you do, but you might have to make them with your body.
The person who perfects seawater desalination will become rich beyond the dreams of kings. Why not make that person you?
