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Momus recognizes the EXCELLENT usage of shiseido as a verb from Erik, someone who posts regularly on the Momus blog. Erik says, "I was distracted at times by an amazing androgyne japanese boy, shiseido-ing at the back, while momus mimicked his way through a selection of his back catalogue." I'm so using this all the time now.
Someone who eloquently talks about the importance of human rights, the beauty of different cultures, people who take pride in who they are and where they're from. And he's running for president.
Of course he'll never win...
In his foreword to the Verso edition of Adorno's In Search Of Wagner, Zizek has a lovely paragraph on love, in relation to the works of Wagner. I'll paraphrase it here:
The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the lover to test the other's love is thus to betray him at the crucial moment of his career - only if he can survive the ordeal, and successfully accomplish his task although deeply traumatized, will he deserve love. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal - it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace.
The latest release from Nobuko Hori on Music Related is some of the most exciting music I've hard in a while. I love how free it is, and that strange metallic lead that threads so many of the songs is perfect, just great.
I so want to see Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz. I just missed it in Berlin, and now I see it's going to be at PS1.
...the album Vintermusik by Dag Rosenqvist & Rutger Zuydervelt. It's from last year but it feels just as perfect with fall setting in now.
My friend Nick, with whom I had the pleasure of hanging out in Berlin, has posted an excellent entry on his participation brainstorming the future of the book along with the likes of Bob Stein and Cory Doctorow among others. I don't have much to say today, but his thoughts are completely in line with my thinking about our strange relationship to computers. Being a musician who uses a computer as my instrument, I worry about the fact that my body has so little to do with the sounds I make.
My friend Nathan in Berlin, a dancer, mover, and leader of an ensemble called Demonshaker just shakes his head in bewilderment at my strangely disassociated relationship to my body when making music. When it comes down to it, music for me is something that happens between the ears, and I can tickle that spot the best by making electronic sounds.
Alvin Curran once told me that I make literary music. I think it's a blessing and a curse.
Some of the difficulty I've had in finding labels and support for my music stems from the fact that I am not really working in a well-defined lineage and I'm also not particularly interested in breaking new ground. I'm simultaneously not avant-garde nor genre-defined.
If anything, I would call what I do radical pastiche, a kind of play with form, sound, and references. The fact that I am equally happy conjuring Squarepusher, Luc Ferrari and Patsy Cline is probably offensive to people who take the work of each of those artists very seriously, I guess anyway. But I'm not interested in a ham-fisted academic postmodernism, am much more interested in play, and finding similarities in disparate elements rather than pointing out differences.
I make sonic allusions in a literary style, four-on-the-floor booty bass, fall-to-pieces squeal and thump noise with heart.
Last night Jano and I went to see Filthy Gorgeous: The Trannyshack Story. For those who don't know, Trannyshack is a weekly drag performance show at The Stud. Bjork has DJ'd there on occasion, and Matmos makes regular appearances, usually with records in hand to trade with DJ's.
The movie reminded me of all the things that I do like (gasp!) about San Francisco, for example, the fact that somehow it enables totally freaky weird performers to find a voice and an outlet for their passions. And the thing is, a lot of the shows are actually really good, with amazing costumes and highly developed stage presence and humor.
Even though San Francisco might not be able to offer up fresh smart art on every corner and really striking new electronic music the way, say, Berlin does, at least I know Trannyshack is still here, every Tuesday night. You could set your clock to it. If nothing else, San Francisco is reliable.
It's the Monk birthday broadcast (as of about half an hour ago!). 24 hours of nonstop Thelonius Monk music.
So. Yesterday I went to the acupuncture clinic.
This was a first, I've never had acupuncture done before. I went because of a pain in my jaw. A mysterious pain that my doctor said could be caused by "stress." She said it would just go away naturally, but that was a month ago. So I thought I'd go try acupuncture. Where the pain comes from, nobody seems to know. Odd, I guess these are things that start happening after turning thirty. Well, damn, at least I have that health insurance I've been trying to get for years! But now I wonder if it's not a kind of self-fulfilling cycle where the fact that I have health insurance means I'll start putting it to use. Oh well, worrying about that will just add to my "stress."
Actually I was very surprised at the suggestion that I might be stressy about things. I've never really had a problem with it, have always been able to just kind of let things happen as they would naturally, must be from all those years of doing Zen when I was a teenager into my early 20's.
In fact, people who say they "suffer" from "stress" strike me as self-indulgent and annoying. I will never be one of them, I've always said to myself! But now I have a doctor and an acupuncturist telling me this could be caused by stress? What stress do I have in my life? The only stress I am aware of comes from finding a too long line at my favorite coffee place, or the Japanese grocery store being out of my favorite miso. But other than that, there's not too much to complain about, other than my favorite target: the dullness of San Francisco.
But maybe that's the cause of my stress, actually. Just the lack of surprise, the lack of stimulation in San Francisco, it's causing a build up of, um... unreleased excitement, making my jaw hurt.
The acupuncture actually made me feel much better, and they gave me a huge bag of herbs that I have to spend a couple of hours reducing to a potent tea, which makes me feel great as well. Beginning of an adventure I guess.
Great! Supercollider + iPhone!!
from Takeko Akamatsu
After Berlin I'm reminded like a splash of cold water in the face just how vacuous San Francisco can sometimes feel.
Beautiful weather, lovely people, but I'm not quite sure where to find surprise. Everything that is here that I enjoy, I know exactly where to find. But that's all known quantities. Where are the unknowns?
Here's a short film from Alfonso Cuaron, based on Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
via thought kitchen