Life in Balance and Credit

There's something dispiriting -- but also something exhilarating -- about being 18, leaving home, and moving north, far north, into a grim little unit in a student hall of residence. In Aberdeen it felt like being a battery hen machine-cooped in an Arctic research station. But the exciting thing was that you got a blank space, a fresh start, a chance to define who to be, to choose some values, develop some interests, assert some styles -- the more extreme, the better. One of the first things I did was personalise the door of my room in Esslemont House with this image:



It's a still from Tadeuz Kantor's production of his play The Dead Class, and I cut it out of a copy of the John Calder theatre magazine Gambit, which I'd subscribed to along with a fiction magazine called Bananas. That was my image of myself, that I was a serious young man with literary ambitions, and these magazines proved it.

I also liked the zany, grainy, artily neurotic quality the pictures had. The human actors were frenzied, but the dummies were implacable, spookily calm, frozen-faced. The images, taped to my door, projected something alien yet familiar, expressing my secret wish to be new, and yet the same. God knows, Edinburgh had enough arty stuff from Poland (Kantor was a Pole) going on at the Festival -- soon, in fact, I'd get a chance to see a Kantor production at the Murray House Gymnasium, a reminiscence of his youth entitled Wielopole, Wielopole. I'd witness his hysterical style, in which actors clutching doubles of themselves run in circles in a series of gestures influenced by the ideas of Artaud, Grotowski and Gordon Craig.



For now, though, it was enough that the images looked odd, avant garde and continental. This one reminded me of David Bowie's Lodger sleeve, in which he'd depicted himself grotesquely splatted on the ground, perhaps in allusion to Polanski's 1976 film The Tenant, in which a tranny (played by Polanski himself) jumps out of the window of his Paris apartment, repeating the gesture of the previous lodger. (It was a quotation Bowie would repeat in Jump They Say, where he also lies splatted at the foot of a building.)



The aesthetic of these grainy black and white (but spirited and zany) photos I was so recklessly pinning to my door was one I'd later recognize in Quay Brothers films. It was an atmosphere I imagined must reside, with the greatest concentration, in dim ateliers in Warsaw. And yet, even when I came to live in Berlin, and Poland lay next door, I never went to Warsaw. So far, I've just made one brief visit to Poznan, the closest city inside Poland.

That will change this weekend, though. On Sunday November 22nd I play an experimental music festival in the Polish capital entitled The Song Is You. I'll arrive there on Saturday night, in time to catch Justin Bond's performance:

The Song Is You Festival 09
Powiększenie
Nowy Świat 27
00-029 Warszawa, Warsaw
Poland

I certainly hope I'll find Warsaw full of half-lit ateliers in which people clutch at dummy doubles, but I'm ready to be educated out of my shadowy stereotypes too.

Meanwhile, if you're in Berlin there's a show this Wednesday evening (starting 8pm) at Staalplaat Working Space featuring me, Tomoko Miyata and Seiji Morimoto. It's one of the last shows Staalplaat Working Space (Flughafenstrasse 38, Neukolln, U8 Boddinstrasse) will stage, so do come down.

And while I'm mentioning Berlin gigs, don't miss Oorutaichi (plus a certain Joe Howe in his Ben Butler guise) performing at Madame Claude on November 27th. The man is the future of music.

I meant to post these yesterday... Before the first clinic, I wandered off and discovered this guy. He was feral, but not unfriendly. Just shy and curious... he walked away when I got too close, but didn't go far, turning around to stare at me.

( Two more, one closeup )
I've been wanting a blue-eyed lynx point for quite some time. :/ It's a shame I saw him in a town that's about two hours from where I live. His ear has been clipped by a group probably like the one here -- they trap feral kitties and spay/neuter them, then release them. (Mostly because it would be incredibly hard to find homes for them all, especially since they're all wild and wouldn't make good pets for someone without a lot of time and patience.)

givesushope
It's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love.

veggieslackers
Despite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast.

fashin
Just in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.

To get totally into the themes on my 2000-recorded, 2001-released Folktronic album I should really be an urban ethnomusicologist with a robot assistant like the one you hear in my hour-long audio documentary Fakeways: Manhattan Folk, made just before the album and still the best piece of scene-setting for it. This Alan Lomax figure would probably have to start with the basic facts: Folktronic is an album made by a 40 year-old Scottish musician who moved to New York in March 2000. He records the album at 38 Orchard Street, at the Chinatown end of the Lower East Side. He's been in New York just a couple of months when he starts, but already he's absorbing a lot of the local zeitgeist, and particularly the idea that America is a nation with plastic roots where you can be whatever you want to be -- as long as it isn't authentic. He lives with his Japanese girlfriend.



Books and people influence this record. The people are new New York friends like Steve Lafreniere, a journalist who interviews me for Index magazine, the singer Stephin Merritt, or the multimedia designer (and friend of Fischerspooner) John-Robert Howell. As for the books, just as the prog-medieval direction of the Kahimi record I'd made in 1999 (most of which is glommed onto the end of Folktronic) was influenced by Paul Stump's book The Music's All That Matters, the "Fake Americana" material that comprises two thirds of Folktronic is influenced by Nicholas Dawidoff's book In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. But a much more important source is a copy of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis I buy at the New Museum bookshop.



In a website thought published in April 2000 I have "a great idea": "Why not make an album of folk songs about sexual fetishes, set to synthesisers? Folk songs are usually about mining disasters or clipper mutinies, but why shouldn't they be about archaic hysterical sex fetishes too? The songs should have a childish gaiety, be light and celebratory... They would play with the associations of the words Folk, Fake and Fuck. The Folk (ballads, reels, laments, shanties, forebitters) would be Fake Folk, of course, played on early monophonic synthesisers. But the Fuck would also be Fake Fuck, because that's what fetish is. It's an evasion of the 'real thing', which is fucking. It's a fake fuck... A world in which the authentic was not prioritised over the fake, and 'healthy' fucking had no precedence over fetish, would be a rather splendid one, it seems to me."



And so I set to home-recording, alone in my tiny apartment, and often naked. In proposing inauthenticity as America's authenticity, I was making Manhattan -- a city of Jews, gays, Chinese and the art world -- the centre of all authentic inauthenticity, and in proposing deviance as the most universal sexuality I was merging Alan Lomax with Alfred Kinsey. Steve Lafreniere -- who heard most of these songs before anyone else did, and was in a sense their ideal listener -- started referring to me as "the Heliogabalus of Orchard Street". Other people influenced the album: Gavin Brown, whose art gallery in the Meatpacking District featured Jeremy Deller-like garage sales and a great scenester bar called Passerby. Spencer Sweeney's distortion-noise band Actress, which I heard at Passerby, blasting over the speakers. A conceptual folk band called Centuries, who came in from Coney Island to play weird gigs in tribute to Bruce Haack and Klaus Nomi. The records of Raymond Scott, which I'd buy from Other Music or Kim's. The bizarre school operas of Ford Wright. The scene around Fischerspooner, Bobby Conn, Ukrainian and Polish folk rituals in the East Village and Williamsburg. Thrift stores and painted Easter eggs.



( So let's take a quick canter through the tracks. )

Folktronic is available on CD from this page and in the US via iTunes. John-Robert Howell's Flash console featuring some of the tracks is online here.

The Goddess Guide by Priestess Brandi Auset
Reviewed by Steel Witch.
Just posted on Copper Moon E-zine!

I'm fascinated by ideas, and how they change the lives of the people who come up with them. It seems to be an interest that runs in the family; my mother once had a flirtatious correspondence with Cyril Parkinson, a man made famous by the simple observation that work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion.



The other day I came across another such idea, one I hadn't heard before. It's called The Peter Principle, was first described by Dr Laurence Peter in 1969, and states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, the principle states that people get rewarded for things they can do well by being promoted to the point at which they're doing something they can't do well. At that point the promotion stops, and there they stay.

There are some corollaries:

1. In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties.
2. Work is carried out by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
3. Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.



This has mind-boggling ramifications; it could account for a world in which everyone is basically incompetent, because they've all been promoted to "the position of first failure", and left there to keep failing.

As often happens when you encounter a new idea like this, I immediately started applying the Peter Principle to real world situations. I happened to watch a documentary called Kublai Khan's Lost Fleet, which examines how a Mongol navy with superior weaponry and 4500 ships was destroyed while attempting to invade Japan in August 1281, with the loss of 130,500 Mongol soldiers and sailors.



Now, the main reason was that, just as had happened the last time the Mongols attempted to invade Japan, a kamikaze or "divine wind", in the form of a massive typhoon, whipped up and destroyed the invading navy.

But there were other factors. Kublai Khan promoted a general called Arakhan to lead the naval invasion. He'd distinguished himself in great on-land campaigns, but on the sea he was... all at sea. In terms of the Peter Principle, as a nautical commander Arakhan had reached his "position of first failure". Not just because former successes had led to his promotion to a post he was incompetent for, but because geographically Japan was the Mongol Empire's "position of first failure".



For Arakhan, though, "failure was not an option". He couldn't head home, having failed to crack Japan, and report his failure to Kublai Khan. He'd have been killed. So the biggest single maritime loss of life in the history of the world unfolded off the coast of Takashima, produced by a timely typhoon, samurai bravery, poor boat design (in their impatience the Mongols had seized flat-bottomed river boats to supplement their navy; their indentured Chinese boat-builders had also done deliberately shoddy work on the sea boats)... and the Peter Principle.

"The typical Bless shopper," reports Unlike Berlin, "is usually from Japan, subtly dressed in avant-garde from top to bottom and thrilled to spend about 500 Euros for a handbag that can also be turned into a sweater." I've been looking into the Bless store on Berlin's Mulackstrasse for six years and, yes, usually with a Japanese person. I even know Japanese Berliners (like jeweler Naoko Ogawa) who've interned with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag's conceptual clothes company.



What I've never done -- not until yesterday, anyway -- is bought an item of clothing at Bless. As the Unlike text suggests, it's absurdly expensive. You tend to go in there as you'd go to an art gallery, to admire the ideas. Bless is a master of eccentricity. Here you'll find outrageous combinations of things: a graph-paper shirt with a hood tucked into a little packet under the collar, another one with a sari-like scarf sewn onto the back, an enormously heavy chunky-knit sweater, a sort of toddler's garment with a huge middle-section that you have to scrunch up, accordion-style, by lacing braces around tabs. They also do decorated USB cables (a big influence on Hisae's Mizutani Cable Knit Company cottage industry, now discontinued because it was taking her a month to produce each cover), stools made of hollowed-out wood, and other curiosities. It's basically all stuff you've never seen anywhere else, though once you glom onto the ideas, you could probably go and do your own knock-off for a fraction of the price.



Yesterday, six years after starting to visit Bless regularly, I actually bought my first garment from them, the... well, the thing you can see in the photo (not the shaggy hood, which would have doubled the price). It's a pair of very wide felt trousers which dangle at the bottom of a tight woolen boob tube thing. Instead of being held up by a belt of some kind, the trousers are kept in place by the boob tube clinging to your chest.

I was only able to purchase this weird garment with the justification that I'll wear it on stage when I play my first-ever gig in Warsaw next weekend at the Song Is You Festival (my gig is on Sunday evening). And because it was in the Bless Workshop sale, where prices are deeply slashed. The sale is held in a different location, up in a wilderness of housing estates at the top end of Ackerstrasse, a place usually used to construct the clothes.



It was lots of fun trying improbable outfits on there yesterday with Emma and Joe and various strangers (we all shared one big dressing room). The thing about Bless clothes is that they're so bloody peculiar that putting them on is also dressing yourself in the permission to look that odd -- Bless' blessing, if you like. It's this legitimation of complete visual eccentricity, this implicit license to deviate, that interests me. It suggests a parallel world in which we're all allowed to look like kindly monsters on the street, like characters from Maurice Sendak.

Has anyone dealt with United Recovery Systems before?

I am having some major issues with them, and actually filed a complaint with the FTC today.

And we're back! Editing photos now... Made a post to deadphotos about the skeletal remains of an armadillo I found a day or two before we left. But that's kinda unrelated. Whatever. I thought it was cool...

Still kinda sick with a sore throat, but at least those godawful fever chills are gone. That was miserable. I'm glad I'll be able to work this weekend... I need the money and all.

I did manage to find one tiny, curled-up trilobite! It's about the size of a bean, but I love it. It's the first one I've ever found.

I love its little pissed-off face. Like it's angry that I disturbed its 200+ million year sleep. Wow, now that I think about it, it's kinda insane that I own something that old. Then again, I've been collecting fossils for years now and that amazement should have worn off by now. But no. I'm still like a little kid over these things. Also, WTF, my fingers look weird in that picture... But I couldn't get the light right without holding it up at that angle. :/

I'll be posting more pics of scenery and other fossils Jeff and I found. The place we were hunting was WAAAY out in the country, mostly farmland. It was gorgeous. And I'll be making another deadphotos post about a snake I found as well. I might wait until tomorrow for the latter, though... I don't wanna spam people.

По детской площадке бродили неприкаянно мальчик и девочка шести-семи лет, за ними присматривала маленькая пожилая женщина, увешанная пакетами. Было холодно и скучно.
Котенок убедился, что эти люди с ним играть не станут, и решительно направился к песочнице. Пожилая женщина ободряюще улыбнулась ему.
- Хочу писать! - громко сказала девочка.
- Ну и пойдем домой. Я так замерзла... - женщина направилась было к выходу.
- Нет! Я всегда здесь хожу. Подержи, - девочка выпуталась из куртки и направилась к большому тополю, на ходу стаскивая с себя лямки комбинезона. Скрылась за толстым стволом. Это дерево, традиционно являющееся детским туалетом, многократно превзошло своих собратьев по всем параметрам, кроме, пожалуй, химического состава.
Подошел мальчик.
- Где булки? Я помню, мы брали булки. Галина Ильинична, дай мне булку.
Из пакетов женщины были извлечены булки и сок, мальчик принялся закусывать, вскоре к нему присоединилась и сестра.
- Галина Ильинична, ты тоже ешь!
- Спасибо, я не хочу.
- Ешь! Чего она? Чего она? - мальчик захныкал и повис на рукаве сестры.
- Ешь тоже. - серьезно сказала девочка.
Галина Ильинична медленно вытянула из пакета третью булку и неприязненно отщипнула кусочек.
Покончив с трапезой, девочка уселась на качели и застыла на них со скучающим видом.
- Галина Ильинична, покачай меня!
Женщина в это время страховала мальчика, висящего вниз головой на шведской стенке. Мальчик извивался и с трудом удерживал в себе съеденное, но слезать не желал.
- Галина Ильинична! Сюда иди! Покачай меня! Сейчас! - голос девочки неприятно окреп и я вдруг явственно представила себе ее маму, таким же безразлично-брезгливым тоном отчитывающую секретаршу за нерасторопность.
Женщина спустила краснолицего мальчика на землю и приступила к раскачиванию девочки. Девочка сидела на качелях, как мертвая.
- А сколько вашему? - вдруг обратилась ко мне Галина Ильинична, не прерывая качания. - Моей девять месяцев, и уже все-все знает, и как коровка, и как собачка, и как ворона говорит. Ваш знает?
-Бууу! - сказал Котенок, имея в виду корову.
- Какой молодец! Моя тоже знает. И мама, и дай-дай, все знает. А это - не мои, - с удовольствием сказала Галина Ильинична, качнув девочку как следует. Девочка презрительно фыркнула.
А вот подрастут, подумала я, и начнется, "вы знаете, у нас была няня, голубка дряхлая и все такое. Как же мы ее любили - и не пересказать". Тут даже "пей, я сказал!" превратится в "где же кружка?". Спасительные времени покровы.

Excerpt from a recent letter from me to the Gameshelf crew:

If I may offer an aside, take a look at this:
http://putthison.com/post/231001982/episode-1-denim

It's an example of something I've been looking for for a while - a television-quality, web-based series on some nonfiction topic that isn't straight-up comedy (or games), but uses comedy to ease the topic along. In this case, it's a show about men's clothing. Seeing it makes me very happy.

The fundraising and sponsorship stuff evidenced is quite interesting, but it's the format that has me really on the edge of my seat. I watched the whole thing, and felt full - smarter _and_ entertained - and only ten minutes had gone by. And indeed, I'm not sure I would have sat and ate through the whole thing if the timer at the start had read, say, 30:00 rather than 10:00.

This show, and my experience of approaching it as audience, is the first hard evidence I've encountered for an argument I haven't properly had with myself: whether Gameshelf episodes should be shorter - a _lot_ shorter. I never really revisited the question of show length, even though I started considering the Gameshelf more of an internet-based TV show than a literal watch-it-on-a-television TV show. Seeing an excellent show like "Put This On", which aims way higher than typical YouTube fare, and yet still keeps to a YouTube-friendly length, is a strong argument in the make-it-shorter column.

I'm going to experiment with this for the next episode.

Saw and enjoyed A Serious Man today. It's a puzzling film that I recommend. Spoilery, thoughts below cut.

( A dybbuk, a nebbish, and Shroedinger's Cat. )

Did I ever appear in one of your dreams?



If so, today's your chance to tell the world about it.