Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Editorial by JuniperHills.Net correspondent David Woodard
I first heard the music of Momus during the mid-80s. His album Tender Pervert had just come out. While visiting the surviving immediate family of a recently expired companion in Santa Barbara, my hometown, I listened to and recorded a favorite program on the college radio station there. “The Homosexual” (MP3) was the first song to air on this particular installment, and hence the opening song on a cassette tape that I would play repeatedly in my ’70 Lincoln. It is a moving, clever, lofty account of the kind of behavior I had observed and fostered in myself during adolescence (a peculiar affliction, I roundly confess, which leads some adolescent boys, in severe cases, to wear eyeliner, foundation makeup, jodhpurs, pointy shoes, and shirts worn by John Wayne in The Searchers—the kind that feature two rows of buttons in the front). Jockish “whoo whoo”s, combined with the narrator’s well-described conquest of a homophobic adversary’s wife, set to an interesting arrangement featuring acoustic guitar with synthesizers, a drum machine, and primitive samples of somebody’s illicitly pleasured wife, yield a song that mixed impressively well with the otherwise mostly 4AD-ish fare on the program. The song held its own, its jaunty, witty lyrics superior to what seemed pretentious melancholia rung out by Dead Can Dance, for instance, the cool blandness of Chris and Cosey, the spiritually wet-behind-the-ears Andrew Eldritch. I did not hear of Momus again until 2002, when his pensive likeness appeared in LA newspapers with announcements and reviews of a lecture that he gave on digital media at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art). Why the gap? At the time, I was more interested in orchestral music and opera.
“The Homosexual”
It was in 2004, following a visit to the remnants of the Wagner-inspired botched eugenics utopia Nueva Germania, in Paraguay, that I was motoring down Highway RN9 with my travel companion Christian Kracht (PDF). Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric?” played on the radio, and I believe we were, each in his sovereign reverie, entranced by the unlikelihood of receiving a signal of such wise androgyny, co-mingled with doleful, manifest whiteness, deep in the heart of the jungle, where encounters with the deadly yarará (“five-minute”) pitviper, and manly adventures involving Jorge Halke, a hulking product of mixed German and Paraguayan ancestry, who would shortly thereafter be neutralized at the savage hand of a Guaraní mercenary, had just been experienced. Listening to Gary Numan in this context yielded tremendous—nay, overwhelming—pleasure. The pleasure that was derived from listening to the song was matched by pleasurable reflections on Gary Numan’s psychosexual crusade circa its recording. Concomitantly, motoring through the landlocked Guaraní jungle had the effect of isolating and accentuating the twin pleasures, forming a tactile, overarching contour that could be experienced discretely or in tandem with one or both of the other pleasure sources. The blonde hairs on my left forearm stood and flittered, for the arm was perched atop an open window into which midday sun poured. Likewise, many swaying palms and clingy vines were breezed past in the red compact. Following “Are Friends Electric?”, the radio segued into New Romantic and homosexual Latin Disco. A smooth-skin-sounding disc jockey spoke with great rapidity between numbers, in a Guaraní/Spanish hybrid tongue known colloquially as Jopará, his voice gapingly bereft of guttural component.
I love women but I’m thinking of giving in
I love women but what’s the point of arguing
With the men from boarding schools and building sites
Who’ve told me I’m a homosexual all my life
Revisiting my adolescence during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, David Bowie was understood to be a brilliant fake homosexual. Suddenly Gary Numan cropped up, appearing to embody something beyond fake homosexuality. Gary Numan was understood to be something along the lines of a brilliant fake asexual, the tenets of whose ideology were held close to the chest and up the sleeve. He was poised to crush David Bowie. Gary Numan’s partially underwriting father probably did not understand his son’s rarefied quest. His girlfriend at the time may have understood less. It is my view that if Gary Numan had forsaken such persons with nary a wince, fake asexuality might have hardened into a cornerstone of 21st Century Western society.
One stop past Embankment and the coughs begin
Hell hath no fury like an insecure Englishman
You don’t need psychoanalysts to translate this
‘There is an open homosexual in our midst’
Christian, who had recently commissioned Momus to write a short story (“7 Lies About Holger Hiller”: LINK), to be translated and included in his Nepal-based German language quarterly Der Freund, asked if I had heard Momus’ music.
The homosexual they call me it’s all the same to me
That spectre they projected I will now pretend to be
Since their neurosis is what passes for normality
It’s okay with me if I’m queer
Since their tone-deafness is called the love of music
I won’t disabuse them
I’ll make love with their women
I’ll make them sing notes of pleasure
Their husbands will never hear
“Just ‘The Homosexual’.”
I love women but I take them by surprise
Pretending absolute indifference to their breasts and thighs
Like their hairdressers and dressmakers I hear confessionals
Reserved for homosexual professionals
“Momus is my favorite musician. I have his entire catalog on my iPod, to which you are welcome—nay, I urge you—to listen whenever you wish. Just say the word.” In 1991, as a journalist in London, Christian had interviewed Momus for Tempo Magazine, a pimply, obscure Wolfgang Tillmans the assigned shutterbug.
As I put their feet in stirrups with my limp wrist
(A trick I learned from a homosexual gynecologist)
I recall the words my first girlfriend ended our first date with
‘I feel privileged you chose me to go straight with’
I moved to Berlin in 2006. It dawned that Momus’ blog Click Opera is brilliant, its emotional impact heightened by the fact that the entries are for the most part written locally. Moreover, it became clear that Click Opera is the closest thing we have, at the start of the millennium, to a relevant Holy Bible, now that The Warhol Diaries has receded into anachronism. By relevant I mean a developing text that carefully addresses moral and ethical issues within a contemporary value system—one that emcompasses Asian styles, Western aesthetics, and strategies of political reconciliation—recognizable to most 21st Century readers. I met Momus at the beginning of 2008 in front of David Bowie’s former apartment building on Hauptstrasse, in Berlin’s uncharismatically drab Schöneberg district: LINK.
You who called me shirt-lifter in Chemistry class
You who sniggered ‘Look out for your arse’
Now your women wash your shirts, now your kids are born, baby
Look out for your horns
Arriving five minutes early, I stood to wait near the entranceway and noticed Momus carefully jay-walking across hopping Hauptstrasse in my direction. He waved in a quick, whimsically circular, professorial, Orientalist gesture from the center divide, among tallish plants, waiting for the traffic to die. Braving January’s petrifying chill, he crossed safely, and over the next few hours proved to be as kind, charming, articulate, interesting, and stylish in person as on his infectious, highly original pop albums and Click Opera, and then some. My favorite song at the time was his unreleased lo-fi cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Thatness and Thereness” (MP3). As a composer versed in Western classical form
and design, Sakamoto had experienced an atomic catharsis of nucleopatriphobic
anxieties and freeze-locking, thanatotic
armor.
You who called me teapot, who plagued me with your bile
Guess who I’ve got coming to the boil
Why not grab the nettle I’ll settle for being the kettle if you’re the pot
I take my tea like my revenge: sweet and hot
Bowie’s early ‘70s sexual/media experiments preempt the bait-and-switch of “The Homosexual”. In early ‘90s San Francisco, I had a Marxist neighbor friend, affectionately known as King Farouk owing to the obsessive depth of his Arabic and Persian language studies combined with the imperial deportment of his person. Farouk was appalled by what he felt to be Bowie’s unethical claim to bisexuality in the interest of advancing a capitalistic, heterosexual agenda—a career move ventured at the peril of trustful followers’ sexual sophrosyne, bringing potential harm to their lives. He did, though, find the behavior described in “The Homosexual”, being relational and not enhanced by privileged access to the entertainment industry, honorable. Farouk would sometimes pose as a homosexual, and in this way effectively avail himself of some of homosexuality’s perqs.
‘The Homosexual’ they call me
It’s all the same to me
That spectre you projected I will now pretend to be
Since your neurosis is what passes for normality
It’s okay with me if I’m queer
Since your tone-deafness is called the love of music
I won’t disabuse you
I’ll make love with your woman
I’ll make her sing notes of pleasure
That you will never hear
Never in a million years
No fucking fear
After examining the entranceway to David Bowie’s building and visiting the bookshop to one side, we drank green tea in the homosexual café to the other side. It is here that Bowie would take morning cake and coffee, and nightcaps. Momus, betraying a subtle expression of catharsis, mentioned that he had finished writing his first novel earlier in the afternoon. A few months later in Nepal, during Spring, I found myself listening to Momus much more than to old Wagner—both are, each in his own reflection, seasoned Orientalists: LINK.
The Book of Jokes (La Volte / Dalkey Archive Press) is in windows and on shelves: LINK.
Thursday, March 25, 2009
One of Saturday's four neutralized Oakland policemen, John Hege (LINK), was the younger brother of choral composer / Yale scholar Anne Hege, who conducted "Our Jungle Holy Land" in January 2004. Juniper Hills' heart goes out to Anne and family. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a sworn statement issued on Saturday that flags at the capitol would be flown half-staff.
The Antelope Valley Fair Board has tipped its hat to the establishment of a carpetbagger Miss Juniper Hills beauty pageant: PDF, PDF, and PDF.
Dr. Juniper Hill's dissertation, "From Ancient to Avant-Garde to Global: Creative Processes and Institutionalization in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music," is enjoying a spate of e-publication: PDF.
Aims of This Dissertation
This dissertation provides an ethnographic exploration into the processes through
which contemporary folk music is created, focusing specifically on how the ideology,
pedagogy, teaching methods, and institutional setting of the Sibelius Academy Folk
Music Department have shaped contemporary folk music and its performance practices.
In addition to documenting contemporary folk music emerging from the Sibelius Academy
during 2002-2004, and providing the necessary historical, contextual, and musical background
for understanding it, I hope to illuminate five larger socio-musical processes:
1. how the institutionalization of a previously orally and informally transmitted folk
music into a Western-conservatory-style tertiary-level formal educational
institution has transformed the perceptions, performance practices, creative
processes, social position, and sound of folk music;
2. how authenticity, historical continuity, and legitimacy are created through the
identification and enactment of ideals, specifically an ideal process of creating
music and an embodiment of qualities and skills of an ideal folk musician (in
contrast to ideal sounds, styles, or contexts);
3. how the authority of an individual to be creative and innovative with a musical
tradition is determined, constructed, and earned;
4. how ideology and pedagogy can encourage, limit, and shape individuals'
creativity, and how specific teaching methods have changed the way people create
and express themselves through music; and
5. how the performance of music other than one's "own" reifies idealized
relationships with others (especially with other cultures) and reveals the
multilayered, often transnational, identities that these relationships engender.
A review of the relevant theoretical literature and discussion of the implications of
Finnish contemporary folk music on these issues appear in Chapter 3, "Theoretical
Implications."
Вышел новый роман Кристиана Крахта |
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Апокалипсис, швейцарское качество |
Excerpt from Chapter 3
Along with the emphasis on individualism comes a valorization of individual
creativity and a belief that music has progressed, and will continue to progress, through
the contributions and innovations of individuals. In Western art music, the individuals in
question are genius composers such as Bach, Bowie, Cage, Momus, Mozart, Scelsi, and Stravinsky. Jonathan Stock has noted the adoption of these progress-oriented
and composer-glorifying values and beliefs in both Chinese and Balinese
conservatories (Stock 1986 and 2004, respectively). The same inherent belief in and
ambition for artistic progress and development through individual creativity is present in
the Finnish Folk Music Department; however, because they believe that each musician
should be able to fill all musical roles and that folk music should be created anew during
the moment of performance, each musician, and every single student, not only has the
potential and the right, but is expected and required, to develop her or his own artistic
expression and creative contribution. They have both embraced the Western art music
values of individualism and progress, and turned the hierarchical, authoritative
meritocracy on its head. Composing and creative interpretation are not the domain of
only prodigy composers and socio-musically powerful artist-teachers (as Kingsbury
describes [1988:87-94]) but rather are the right of everyone regardless of skill, age,
training, or talent. The rebellion against the hierarchical Western art music socio-cultural
system is intentional; leading Finnish folk music pedagogues, such as Heikki Laitinen and Hannu Saha, have developed teaching methodologies to combat what they see as a
stifling of creativity in Finland's Western music education system. Their ideology and
ambitions, which have been realized in the Folk Music Department, have had a powerful
impact on amateur folk music practices across Finland wherever conservatory influence
has marched.
Апокалипсис, швейцарское качество
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Вышел новый роман Кристиана Крахта
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Monday, December 1, 2008
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Catherine Winkworth |
Last week's visit to Ölbergkirche in Neukölln (where, circa the September 11 incident, an orchestral ensemble called the Joyful Avant Garde—Die fröhliche Wissenschaft—made a live recording on which its album Friedrich Nietzsche for Contemporaries would be based: LINK) proved a rewarding surprise, musically and spiritually. Maestro Nick Currie and his fabled Hisae (LINK), fingering a hymnal, were amongst those rendering a Messiaenized "Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit" ("Dayspring of Eternity," translated by Catherine Winkworth, clickable above, in 1855 and 1863).
Ölbergkirche's website promises that Principal Organist Anon sometimes, during hymn and/or tithing accompaniments, segues into Satie or the lulling ring or soft malleting of a gong, for example, if so moved. On the day at hand, launching into the first of four hymns to be sung by all below, he had obviously determined, from up in his loft, that harmonies bathed in the tongue of ethereal dissonance were in order. What mystifies in the harmonic language of Messiaen is as ineffible as what deeply moves in that of Bach (MP3); each was Principal Organist at a significant church of his day, Bach at Leipzig's Thomaskirche, Messiaen at Paris' Trinity Cathedral until he crossed the Great Divide in the early 1990s. From the Joyful Avant Garde's webpage:
Even though Friedrich Nietzsche has been dead for more than a century, his philosophy continues to exert enormous influence on the aesthetics of music and language. Nietzsche's assessment of music as the most significant art form grew out of his critique of language. Language implies a truth which never coincides with reality. For Nietzsche, the essentially open and associative nature of music provided a way of freeing language from its traditional structures.
"Joyful Avant Garde" picks up from this modern linguistic critique by confronting different levels of language with contemporary music. Speaker and double bassist Matthias Bauer reads aphorisms and extracts from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vocal virtuoso Alex Nowitz reveals the depths of the text using collage techniques, fragmentation and electronic alienation effects. Mezzo-soprano Ute Döring draws on the spirit of the 20th Century to impart the lyrically ambiguous nature of song. The percussion-free ensemble consists otherwise of two string and two wind instruments. Pre-recorded elements are introduced into some of the pieces, blending with the live atmosphere of the concert.
lt is impossible to connect Nietzsche's lifelong fascination with music exclusively to the music of his own time. His early enthusiasm for the music of Richard Wagner was followed by love of a lightness of touch which he found in "the music of the South," and the music of the "Joyful Avant Garde" can also not be defined by a single style.
Thomas Böhm-Christl uses elements of popular music, which he alienates by setting them in unexpected surroundings, while Joachim Gies introduces a creative freedom into contemporary chamber music. The styles range from atonal chamber music to interactive composition, improvisation to sound collages. With an ironic "wink of the ear," the "Joyful Avant Garde" breaks through the usual barriers between genres with a mockery of fairground music (Pious Beppa) juxtaposed with formal chamber music (Joke, Cunning, and Revenge), elements of jazz (The Penultimate Avant Garde) contrasting with musical quotes from the late European Romantics (The Meaning of Metre), and free structures coexisting with careful compositional planning.
"Joyful Avant Garde" reveals the subtle psychological and ironic side to Nietzsche. This most musical of 19th Century philosophers sets everything in motion, standing at the rim of the volcano, laughing.
The experience brought to mind the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, of which Satie was Founder and Pope (and, one guesses, Principal Organist): LINK. Both Messiaen and Satie—and maybe Bach, and our own Anon up in the loft—experienced a mild form of synaesthesia. After service at Ölbergkirche, and following an extensive ceremony at the Jan Lindenberg homestead, where seven distinctive teas were served and savored, some of them sweet, some almost piercingly bitter or astringent, others proteinous-tasting or striking the tongue as an etheric miso, David's non-Japanese stomach grumbled a trifle, and he apologized. Nick replied that, though the grumble wasn't heard, Sihk pastels glowed across the wall.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Although two biographies of Charles Sobhraj exist, neither remains in print and both are written in an overly eager yet limp-with-velleity true crime style popular in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.
In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.—Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Mr. Sobhraj has seen something: LINK and LINK.
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Sunday, October 26, 2008
Christian Kracht with familiar in Kagbeni (Photo 2008 Frauke Finsterwalder) |
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An uncertain cannonball (PDF, VID), Christian Kracht's Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten ("I'll be here in sunshine and in shadow") is not only reminiscent of Ernst Jünger, it is the most beautiful prose to appear this century in the German tongue: LINK.
Momus' "Ashes to Ashes": VID. |
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The desert is the
wellspring of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily
austere, aesthetically abstract, historically inimical. Its forms are boldly
suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of
aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic,
with nary a trace of probable smile. In other habitats, the rim of sky above
the horizon may be broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion,
it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside or forest lands. In
an unobstructed sky the clouds appear larger, sometimes grandly
reflecting Earth's curvature on their concave underbellies. From the
perspective of a solitary gaping cloud, the angularity of
desert landforms surely imparts a nucleopatriphobic architecture.
To the desert go the prophets and hermits; through
deserts roam pilgrims and exiles, billionaires and geniuses. Here the leaders
of all great religions have sought the spiritual pulse of retreat—not to
escape, rather to confirm life in its purest essence.
—Peter Schlepf, Man on Land: The Aesthetics of Nature
On the horizon viewed from Schloss Neuhardenberg's discreet watchtower looms exemplary prequiem subject Ernst Jünger: LINK.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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Lake Zürich |
I have received much love from my parents.
Through my work I show my gratefulness to them.
—Dr. Sheela Birnstiel
In Spring 2008, awarded Switzerland's Eiger Stiftung scholarship (LINK), David Woodard served as Writer in Residence at Schloss Wiesenburg, a 12th Century castle nestled in the frosty GDR-tinged hinterlands between Bach's Leipzig and Eno's Berlin: LINK. His Summer 2008 exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, includes elegant and heartfelt contributions from Ma Anand Sheela and Christian Kracht: LINK. A report on the post-mortem thought processes of Ernst Jünger (PDF) appears in Bunter Staub. Ernst Jünger im Gegenlicht (2008, Matthes & Seitz), a handsome anthology edited by Alexander Pschera and also featuring an essay by bigwig philologist Eckhart Nickel, published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Jünger's passing: LINK. A Max Planck neuropathologist questions Woodard about Jünger, and includes a brief excerpt, at Wall of Time (LINK)—which borrows its name from Jünger's 1959 work of speculative futurism, At the Wall of Time. Through the ashen confines of Solution 9: The Great Pyramid (2008, Sternberg Press) strides a candid report on the conception and composition of "A Cornerstone Cringle": LINK. |
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
David Woodard with bigwig
Swiss graphic designer Chris Eggli and
bigwig German
graphic designer Tom Ising
(Photo Christian Kracht)
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