When the Serpentine Gallery Pavillion opens on Sunday, it'll be Britain's first exposure to SANAA, the architectural team of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, responsible for New York's wildly successful New Museum.
Every July the Serpentine Gallery -- currently under the direction of the enlightened Hans Ulrich Obrist -- lets an architect erect a temporary pavilion in its Kensington Gardens enclosure. SANAA's, the ninth in the series, is certainly the least bombastic. As the Times' architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff explains in a video on the paper's site, the Japanese team has built a light plane of polished aluminium sloping modestly towards the ground across pillars and bendy plexiglass walls. The inside space, dotted with Nishizawa's white bunny chairs, merges inside and outside. From a distance, the mirrored structure seems to blend with the trees, like a calm sheet of reflective water.
Equally reproachful of bombast is the music of Otomo Yoshihide, the subject of a new documentary called KIKOE. Filmmaker Iwai Chikara (who also runs a club with Yoshihide) filmed the musician over ten years, building up 500 hours of footage of concerts, interviews and sessions, which he's edited down to 99 minutes. Chikara calls it "a document of a system observed from a fixed point" -- the fixed point being Yoshihide himself, and the "system" being collaborators like Sachiko M and Kahimi Karie. The film shows at Shibuya Eurospace later this month before heading out to European film festivals.
Yoshihide is part of the No Input onkyo movement which shares a certain organic minimalism with SANAA's architecture. "I just wanna listen, no playing," as Sachiko M puts it, and I can imagine SANAA saying the same about Kensington Gardens -- their building really seems to want to listen to the park rather than dominate it.
My final example of a Japanese dislike of bombast comes in the form of the documentary Jesus Camp, which we watched last night on the recommendation of Japanese friends. The Christian evangelicals depicted in Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's 2006 film probably won't surprise anyone -- they're a well-explored, even over-familiar subject, and for the moment they've lost their mainstream political capital -- but what I found interesting here were the cut-aways to a Japanese studio discussion in which a short-skirted woman exclaims to an expert how sorry she is for American kids whose ideologically-motivated home-schooling doesn't allow them to study art or music -- let alone Darwinian evolution -- and whose parents are so out of love with the world that they can't wait to die.
"It's truly scary that 25% of Americans think this way!" these Japanese commentators agree. A religion, or a culture, with a little more love for its surroundings -- and a little less bombast -- suits them better.
Sean found a garter snake in our yard. I was so excited, because Sean always sees them and then they slither away before I can see them, let alone take a picture!
My beloved readers! How are you doing? What have you been up to? It's been too long -- almost three months! -- since last we met.
I'm not quite sure how it happened, this gap in communications. It's partly because I went traveling. I spent a month in New York with only an iPod Touch to keep in touch. I imagined I'd have something to tell you about the music scene in New York, something I could tap out on the iPod's tiny keyboard. But in the end I was so busy doing other things that I hardly saw any live music.
The only new band I discovered this time in New York was Twi The Humble Feather, a trio who play acoustic guitars and sing in ways that remind me of the Animal Collective (though they're a bit tired of that comparison). In the video lounge at the back of Monkeytown in Brooklyn I saw the Twi trio play a refreshing, relaxing set accompanied by the quirky projected animations of Nobuko Hori, one half of the Matsuri-kei girlband Groopies.
When I got back to Berlin, a funny thing happened. Kyoka, the other half of Groopies, brought the touring guitarist from the metal band Korn round to my house. It turned into a real-world re-enactment of my last column, in which I attempted to scandalize my own internal "good taste Taliban" by listening to music I wouldn't normally tolerate.
Shane Gibson sat on my sofa and politely watched the Mower videos I cued up for him, before taking control of my bluetooth mouse and showing me songs by (ahem!) "progressive metal" bands Sikth and Meshuggah. I made polite noises, but my inner Taliban hated them.
Metal music out of context doesn't have to be a bad thing, though. I heard a nice example when I attended Dexter Sinister's "documents opera" True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA in London in late June. Hunched at overhead projectors or standing stiffly at podiums, actors and art world personalities performed press releases and read pages of text, interrupted occasionally by a guitarist and drummer who played very short, very loud phrases from a Napalm Death song. The dryly cerebral texts were beautifully counterbalanced by the aggressive spurts of grindcore; the dream collaboration of Apollo and Dionysus.
But the music that's touched me most over the last couple of months hasn't been Western, and hasn't been rock. I heard street musicians in the Athens district of Kerameikos playing the most beautiful Balkan mountain music on accordion and clarinet. I held a pajama party at my flat in which we played only Greek Orthodox church music and the music of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, and it was the most fun party I've ever had; we whirled till our skirts spun high!
Most of all, I was impressed by an American called Jonny Olsen, who's become a big star in Laos and Thailand singing his own version of the local folk music. As the No Age blog explains, Jonny was a skate kid in California who started working in a Thai vegan café and, through it, fell in love with Thai culture.
Jonny Olsen moved to Thailand, mastered the language and several traditional instruments, and began making records. He's now a pop star there and in neighbouring Laos -- an incredible cultural chameleon, and an example to us all. With love and dedication, anything is possible!
I moved to the Neukolln neighbourhood I live in because of the market that happens twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. To give you some idea of the importance of this food and cloth market to me, I'll say that it can totally lift me out of the foulest mood, supply the kind of visual excitement I once got from Tokyo street fashion, and compensate for some of the limitations I run up against in other parts of Berlin. The most important adjective for the Maybachufer market is "Turkish".
Here are the gözleme girls from whom I bought my lunch yesterday at the market. They work at a window facing the street, three of them in a row. I find their pattern-clash muslim workwear style totally admirable. Gözleme is a filled, griddled flap of lavas bread, a recipe from Turkish mountain villages. You can have your pancake with spinach, cheese, lamb, potato or sweet fillings. Here's a video of someone griddle-baking the dough and adding the fillings:
There's a new "designer's market" which runs from time to time on Saturdays at the same Maybachufer location, but I have to say I find it super-lame. It's a product of white gentrification of a predominantly Turkish neighbourhood, and represents the "Boxhagenerification" of the Maybachufer (the Boxhagenerplatz market, like others in Berlin areas where the demographic skews white, focuses on slightly hip, slightly ironic goods). Stalls at this occasional, subtly menacing, designer's market sell vinyl bags with rounded 90s logos on them, models of the Berlin TV tower, twee hamster mousepads, pink t-shirts with "cool" slogans on them, perfumed soaps, and Jarvis Cocker glasses made of wood-effect adhesive. No gözleme are for sale, but sausages sizzle on grills.
The colours, smells, shapes and references of the Saturday designer's market are as "wrong" as the colours, smells, shapes and references of the Tuesday and Friday market are "right". They're "wrong" not because they're a culture I don't understand, but because they're a culture I understand all too well. After all, I'm one of the white people gentrifying this neighbourhood. Turkish people would just look blank if you said "Jarvis Cocker", but I know exactly what the cardboard Jarvis glasses and the cardboard Terry Richardson camera are about. They're references to a culture I'm part of. But it's a culture I wish would widen its horizons a bit, and love itself less.
The Wikipedia entry on Turks in Germany points out the ways in which Turks-in-Germany differ from the Germans -- and therefore, you could say, provide a corrective alternative to the limitations of life in Germany.
First of all, the Turks are younger than the Germans. Whereas 25% of Germans are over 60, only 5% of Turks are. This means that if you're living in a Turkish neighbourhood, it's going to feel a lot more youthful than a German neighbourhood. Secondly, the Turks are more urban than the Germans. They mostly opt to live in high density inner city communities thronging with small-scale commerce. This provides a bustling, lively street life notably missing from other parts of the city.
The Turks are working class, but also bi-cultural; they're likely to travel more, in a year, than the average German, clocking up air miles with cheap flights to and from Turkey. The Turks in Germany vote, massively, for the red-green alliance -- in 2005 90% of them voted for the socialists and greens. A majority of Germans, meanwhile, elected conservatives.
Turks were invited to Germany as "guest workers", and therefore there was no expectation, either from themselves or the Germans, that they would assimilate. Instead, they've integrated -- complementing German culture rather than reproducing it, becoming a syntagmatic element in the German sentence -- a qualifier -- rather than a paradigmatic one.
This is probably Freud's "narcissism of minor differences" at work, but if I hear music floating from a nearby flat into the evening air, I vastly prefer it to be Turkish music than anything from "my own" culture. And -- while it's nice to have art events, organic cafes and ice cream stores and trendy mobile coffee stalls in our hood -- I continue to be much more inspired by the style of the Anatolian gözleme girls on the Maybachufer than by people carrying vinyl bags with logos of the TV tower on them.
1. Every few years I shave my head. The first time I did it was when I was 26, and had just signed to Creation. I wanted to look harder, less bourgeois. The next time I did it was when I was 33. You can see it on the Pierre et Gilles Timelord cover. There was another shave when I was 40 and living in New York, and another four years later. I did it again this weekend.
2. It's not like you suddenly say to yourself "I know, I want to look bald!" or "I want to resemble Namihei, the father in Sazae-San!" But sometimes you get the sudden impulse to do it. To shave it all off! For the way it feels!
3. It was really hot and humid last week. Hisae was out at the dentist. I was shaving my stubble with my American electric shaver as usual, going up my sideburns. I went a little further up, then a little further.
4. At this point I should say that Hisae hates men with shaved heads. In fact, she's often told me that if I shave my head again, she'll leave me. So I was taking a risk. I'd have some explaining to do.
5. Nevertheless, I couldn't help pushing the warm, oiled, buzzing shaver further across the side of my head. The resulting fuzz felt so cool, so smooth! My heavy, hot hair fell to the floor soundlessly. It felt reckless, transgressive!
6. I played around with half-shaved styles for a while. Ha ha ha! Mohican! Bald uncle! Blind nutter!
7. When Hisae got back from the dentist, she was truly appalled. "I'm going to leave you!" she screamed. "That looks horrible! Who are you? Are you a monk?"
8. "Well, at least other girls won't like me now!" I said. "Yes, and neither will I!" retorted Hisae.
9. We eventually negotiated that I would wear Curly Carl, my performance wig, until my hair grew back.
10. We went out that evening to see Ben Butler and Mousepad play at Madame Claude's. I wore the wig. People looked at me very strangely. But they do that anyway.
11. When we got home, Hisae was in a more conciliatory mood. "The wig makes you look like you have cancer. It's okay not to wear it. I'll just wait patiently for your hair to return."
12. I both hate my new shave and love it.
13. Good points: It feels really nice and fresh. I feel streamlined, and I can feel excess heat just evaporating effortlessly away through the top of my head.
14. Bad points: It's really difficult to look good with a shaved head. I don't like how it looks, and I like even less how it's going to look in a couple of months, as it grows out. See the photo above with Kumi Okamoto, for instance. It's at that horrible standy-uppy phase. It'll be doing that in about three months from now.
15. My hair has been thinning for at least the last ten years. It's happening very, very slowly, but every time I shave my head I wonder "Will it grow back?" Each time it does I'm pleasantly surprised, even if it's clearly thicker in some areas than others.
16. I don't really like the hairline or the head shape a shave reveals: I have a pronounced widow's peak and a double crown.
17. Men try to compensate for having no hair by growing a big bead or wearing interesting spectacles (the red "Buggles" ones above belong to Emma Balkind), but they always just look like... men trying to compensate for having no hair.
18. On the other hand, lots of people have a ton of hair and still look crap. Yes!
19. In a sense, waiting for hair to grow back is condemning yourself to months of unhappiness with your own appearance. Was that spontaneous decision to shave really worth those months of pain?
20. At the same time there's something energising and delightful about a shaved head. It feels so good, so prickly, under your palm! People love to touch it! It's -- literally, if not stylistically -- cool!
21. I also notice that the times I've had a shaved head tend to correspond to times I've had a surprising amount of success with women. Even if I thought I looked bad, something seemed to appeal. I think one reason might be that when you have a shaved head you look like a huge, erect, walking penis. That works, you know, subliminally on women. When they look at you, something deep in their subconscious says "Penis!"
22. Despite the obvious compensation of "looking subliminally like a huge erect walking penis", I wish I hadn't shaved off my hair! Oh well, it'll grow back. Possibly.
It's the question our moonwalking grandchildren will ask us: where were you when you were asked by a major media outlet for your reaction to the death of Michael Jackson? And what did you say?
Jarvis Cocker ended what was apparently a lacklustre appearance on BBC TV's Question Time with an attempt at the question he'd obviously been invited there to answer: Had the media over-reacted to Jackson's death? Cocker, of course, had interrupted Jackson's Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards with a weird arse-flapping intervention -- rather feebly choreographed, it has to be said, in comparison with performance artist Michael Portnoy's spastic-electric Soy Bomb dance beside Bob Dylan at the 1998 Grammys:
Jarvis told the Question Time audience that Jackson hadn't made a great record in twenty years, was pretending to be Jesus, and had invented the moonwalk. Fact-checking suggests that tap-dancer Bill Bailey invented the moonwalk and that David Bowie was the first rock performer to use it onstage (Bowie also arguably did the Jesus thing first too, since Ziggy was "a leper messiah").
My own mainstream media reaction to Jackson's death -- you can be my grandchildren now, since I won't have any -- came in the form of an AFP wire article by Shaun Tandon, syndicated yesterday. After 'King of Pop', an Empty Throne wonders -- rather in the way people wondered when Peel died -- whether anyone will be able to fill the void Jackson left. I was probably asked because I'm known for saying, in a 1991 essay entited Pop Stars? Nein Danke!, that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people". That essay ended: "The King is dead. Long live the peoples!"
The AFP article has me saying: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop". The article continues: "Momus pointed to the rise of digital culture, which has fragmented music consumers into small, targeted audiences. "Then there's the question of the sheer rarity of Jackson's combination of talents, his neurotic work drive and his eccentricity. Lightning like that takes a long time to strike twice," Momus told AFP."
Actually, the original quote I supplied said rather more -- spot the bits AFP left out: "Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Three major factors will prevent there ever being another one: digital culture and its fragmentation of the big "we are the world"-type audience into a million tiny, targeted audiences; the demographic decline of the "pigs in the pipe" (the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y, who made pop music's four-decade-long pre-eminence possible); and the decline of the influence of the United States."
The AFP article ends with me in a head-to-head disagreement with Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California. Del Colliano thinks that stars will emerge from social networking software.
"Momus, however, believes that social networking may have the opposite effect. He said the world may be headed back to what celebrated sociologist Pierre Bourdieu found in 1960s France -- white-collar workers preferred high-brow classical music, while manual laborers listened to cheap pop. "A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson 'intelligently,' people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him 'passionately.' But everybody spoke about him," Momus said. But social networking is now limiting interaction among groups with different tastes, Momus said. "I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described," he said."
Since this is my blog, not a syndicated wire service, I'll run the original quote I gave AFP in full:
"I think we're seeing the re-appearance of class and caste. Michael Jackson's fame comes from a cultural period -- postmodern global consumerism -- when the distinction between high and low collapsed. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed French cultural tastes in the 1960s, he found that blue collar and white collar workers had completely different cultures -- classical music for the brain workers, cheap pop for the hand workers. A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson "intelligently", people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him "passionately". But everybody spoke about him. Now that postmodernism is coming to an end, and now that narrowcasting and social networking limit our encounters with "the class other", I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described in "Distinction"."
The King of Pop is dead, long live pithy, battling Kings of Pop Sociology! For fifteen global media minutes, anyway.
The death of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch on Tuesday struck me harder than the death of Michael Jackson. She was someone incredibly cool, beautiful and talented, someone I'd followed and admired over the years.
I never queued for Michael Jackson concert tickets, but I did queue for Pina Bausch returns at the Paris Opera in February 1991, and when a few precious second-row box seats for Iphigenie auf Tauride (a piece she premiered in 1974) became available, Suzy and I sprinted up the baroque hall to the box office to grab them. Here's a glimpse of what we saw, and of Bausch's originality (note the "coughing dance"):
I never wore out VHS tapes of Jackson in concert, but I watched over and over again my tape of a Pina Bausch video, set in Wuppertal, broadcast on Channel 4 at some point in the late 80s. I never made a pilgrimage to Neverland, but I did go to Wuppertal, where Bausch's company was based, and ride the town's monorail, slung over its winding river, because I'd seen it in my Bausch tape, with dancers and a cellist. As far as I was concerned, Wuppertal only existed to give Pina Bausch a theatre. Simple as that.
Where did I first hear about Pina Bausch? It must have been from Lois Keidan, who ran the Live Arts department at the ICA. I was completely in thrall to Lois in the late 80s, and anything she said was good just had to be investigated. Lois had worked with Michael Morris, who said in his tribute in The Guardian the other day:
"Pina was well known for not talking about her work to journalists. She very rarely talked about her work to anyone at all. Whenever I went to Wuppertal, everything under the sun would be discussed around the dinner table but not the work. It wasn't that she didn't want to; she didn't know how to talk about it. She was not an intellectual. She was motivated only by emotional truth and was not frightened to put difficult and paradoxical feelings on stage, almost as a way of evacuating aspects of humanity that she was fearful of."
Fear -- total terror -- dominated my next exposure to Pina's work. It was 1998, and her 1980 piece Café Müller was playing at the Barbican. I had tickets to see it on a Saturday night, but on the Friday my opthalmologist declared that my cornea had perforated and that I'd need a corneal graft immediately. "What's in your stomach?" he demanded, hopeful that if I hadn't eaten he could perform the operation -- removing the front part of my right eye and sewing the front part of a dead woman's eye on instead -- right away.
I'd recently eaten, so we scheduled the operation for Monday, but I was, for the rest of that weekend, living in dread. Somehow, though, Café Müller lifted my terror, calmed and soothed me. The production seemed to understand pain, and time, and life. The dance lifted me completely out of my distress.
Pina's last week must have been rather like that; she'd been diagnosed just five days before she died with terminal cancer, probably caused by the "perennial cigarette in her hand". The 68 year-old went quickly and efficiently, I hope with a sardonic smile on her proud, beautiful face and her favourite Argentinian tango music playing. Tango comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and Pina Bausch certainly touched me.
This is a photographic approximation of my first column for Japanese art magazine ART-iT, which recently migrated from a paper to a web publication. To read this on the ART-iT site you have to go through a rather tedious one-off registration process, but considering it makes the magazine available worldwide for free, it's a small price to pay.
One of the peculiarities of the ART-iT site is that the magazine -- which has been bilingual from the start -- uses mechanical web translation for its contents. So if you click the Japanese / British flag at the top of the page, your English text automatically goes into Japanese, and vice versa. Just for fun, I google-translated the Japanese version of my column back into English, and came up with the following. I've picked out a few "found poems" in bold:
I, slenderly, please give the event a collection of art and MAKARETA Map dilapidated buildings. I am a happy person. Or Not Museum dim pure white cube for me; I like to be dirty but my art venues. I, And peeling wallpaper, the accordion by crush, and prefer to feel a bit damp and wet and that they are. I The Kerameikos in Athens was abandoned as the district office, county amended plots between the two events Perez recently called They are inherited in the same place for the Gallery project, we prefer to be re-occupied.
Event Type Art gives you a map to the art if not bigger - and, in revised county parcel, it marked a significant And elephant - no longer a winner even if the cluster of buildings to explore unfamiliar. Glass display case for a temporary art And over the entrance was converted into apartments or workshops, adventure amazing city break a padlock of a forbidden I want the house.
2006 was a big city adventure biennial Berlin; Maurizio Cattelan and his co-curator, the re-building of the upper and lower. The art was, it was necessary to match the wallpaper a basin and discard them inspire Auguststrasse Residential flat used by the stables, mobile utility shed, a Jewish school for girls and older people. I sense In addition they were inside the two-day, 48 hours Neukolln I held near Berlin, as part of the event called Last weekend to explore as I SHAGAMIKOMI meager.
Tokyo is the closest ever to arrive, the town was building Shokuryo-Saga. "Site of emotion" - former U.S. cooperatives -- Is this for Ishii and KOYAMAGYARARI home earlier than 10 years, to inspire. It was taken in 2002 RI has been paid. However, Omi Biwako bee man as a biennial event, since they use the old movie tradition, the living to hold a sake museum and tea house at a factory.
However, there is a risk. Last year, I collect old streetcar repair shop in the Berlin district of north-filled immigrants to marry I saw the show was first called KYANPUBERURIN. It is a dialog between the artist and from Berlin Been thought, but for me to Hiroshima, it is the tram shed full of atmosphere and it became more store art Like the charisma of the competition. The building won.
We've mentioned Kahimi Karie a few times on Click Opera over the last week or so, showing old pictures of her from 1996 or noting that she's recording a new album. But there may be bigger Kahimi news -- or at least Kahimi gossip -- coming out of Japan. One of Kahimi's oldest friends, Kenji Takimi, boss of Crue-L Records, (the label which released I Am A Kitten), made a very strange blog posting on Monday.
Entitled Life's hard and then you die, this posting lamented the passing of Michael Jackson, but then turned an emotional corner and stated that the same weekend that Michael died, something "blissful and unexpected" had happened. What this event was, readers were left to wonder, but two blurry, dark photographs (click 'em to see 'em bigger) show what looks like a wedding party. Post-rocker Jim O'Rourke is identified in a caption. He's playing a guitar, and beside him is the unmistakable figure of Kahimi Karie, singing and wearing something that looks remarkably like a wedding dress. Kahimi is visible in another photo, still wearing the white confection while others dance. Can it be that Kahimi Karie got married last weekend? Did she marry Jim, or someone else? Is there any substance to Twitter rumours that she married a tap dancer (could it be Kazunori Kumagai, seen tap-dancing below?) and may have a kitten of her own on the way? Only time will tell, but somewhere, to persons unknown, congratulations are clearly due.
The other gossip coming out of Japan is the sad but not unexpected rumour that Studio Voice magazine -- long my favourite cultural review -- is going on "extended hiatus", which is usually a euphemism for harvest by the Grim Magazine Reaper. A recent issue celebrating the 400th edition of the magazine, with thumbnail photos of all 400 covers and capsule descriptions of contents, was suspiciously elegiac. It now seems to have been the "multi-media mix" magazine's swansong. Studio Voice was known for its excitingly exhaustive theme issues on subjects from Acid Psychedelia to Africa Remix. I wrote just one column for it -- about musique concrete -- but bought it regularly. It's probably the mag I'm least able to throw out; there are more back copies of it lying around my house than anything else.
Disappearing from the world of print doesn't have to mean death for a magazine, of course -- you can trans-substantiate webwards, relaunching as an electronic publication with lots of extra features. That's just what Art-It magazine did recently -- and this might be the time to reveal that I'll shortly be joining the Art-It team as an official blogger.
It might also be the moment to declare a suspicion that Roger McDonald, who recommended me for this "job" (it's unpaid), had me well and truly hoaxed with his first post for Art-It, the one about radical Japanese fashion label The Afro Ninja Destiny and the Black Panthers. This time he's blogged about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin hunting in Yamanashi, but his Photoshop skills have slipped -- terrible lasso technique on the layers -- suggesting to me that the whole series is a tendentious farrago of febrile fabrication.
Everything else in today's post, I hasten to add, is solid... well, solid gossip, anyway. Like most things in Japan, the facts are there for all to see -- between the lines.
"In not one but two forthcoming books, artist, critic, and one-time unwitting pop star Momus challenges readers to imagine different worlds," says Interview magazine, pointing its readers towards an interview by Matthew Evans entitled It's Momus' World.
I'm reading in the video here from a finished copy of The Book of Scotlands, which comes out in Europe within the next couple of weeks, and in the US in mid-August. There's a bit in the Interview interview that touches on this Employee's Guide text:
Matthew Evans: The quotation on the front of your new book reads, "Every lie creates a parallel world, the world in which it is true." You like alternatives.
Momus: Well, Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.
Matthew Evans: In what sense?
Momus: Well, in the sense that for every reality there are many parallel, co-existing states.
Matthew Evans: Because the physical world that we're accustomed to is not at all the physical reality discovered in the realm of physics?
Momus: Quantum physics says that there is an infinite number of possibilities and parallels to the one that we know, and every event is also played out in a parallel world. It's kind of a crazy idea, but someone called Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam says that if you could back up your memory in case of a catastrophic event, you could actually revert to that back-up and find an alternative world in which the Earth didn't explode or collide with Mars. In The Book of Scotlands, I present a series of parallel Scotlands that aren't tied to the theories of quantum physics, but instead to the idea of delirious speculation. And if you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence right now, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands—because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities—you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.
Matthew Evans: So part of the book's purpose is to reveal the current efforts towards Scottish independence?
Momus: That's the general context, although I don't really talk about it specifically. I'm more interested in the possibilities that could arise from that context, the crazy peripheral and unlikely scenarios.
Matthew Evans: But some of the content seems to be about places other than Scotland.
Momus: They might be about Japan. They might be about a company working in a Third-World situation bringing a manual to its employees, saying, "Don't trust the Scots, they might be terrorists. They might be trying to infiltrate our company."
Matthew Evans: It reminds me of the Instructions for American Servicemen series that were passed out during WWII to culturally prepare soldiers for France, Britain, or Japan.
Momus: Those types of manuals continued in Japan after the War, only they concentrated on how to do business instead of warfare. And each one presents a conflicting picture of Japanese etiquette, a conflicting idea of what Japan is.
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1. Every few years I shave my head. The first time I did it was when I was 26, and had just signed to Creation. I wanted to look harder, less bourgeois. The next time I did it was when I was 33. You can see it on the Pierre et Gilles 
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Entitled 
The other gossip coming out of Japan is the sad but not unexpected rumour that Studio Voice magazine -- long my favourite cultural review -- 
pleased
Matthew Evans: So part of the book's purpose is to reveal the current efforts towards Scottish independence?
