Oser (Teppei Togashi and Amano Takyua) at the Tokyo Wonder Site ‘Sound, Art and Performance’ Festival in Shibuya. 21/2/2011. Teppei plays homemade aluminium guitar with air synth (that’s why he is throwing his hands around) and Amano plays trashed old guitar with an amazing sharp tone. Two of Tokyo’s best young noise musicians invoking beautiful sound states! Total conviction. They played for almost an hour to a crowded room. Above is a video of the first six minutes. By about twenty minutes into it you could see the sweat glistening off their foreheads and arms. Teppei said that what they were playing was “like music, but more like sport.” Around forty minutes the sound had reached its apeothesis; the bulb on the light was switched off, and the sound hovered and held itself; strange guitar licks were raised out of—and collapsed back into—layers and layers of rolling static and whines. One of the best performances i’ve seen in a while, because I know Oser are capable of invoking walls-of-noise but here they were restrained; fighting soupiness, fighting ambience, reaching closer towards the random timbre of heard sound in real life; sounds from a long time ago or far into the future; huge and unknown and a bit bewildering.

doingbird is an art/fashion/literary magazine produced in Sydney and sold internationally. It has been described as “european,” but describing something as “european” these days seems extremely lazy. It’s notable because of its high quality, eccentric restraint, dry aesthetics and because it’s an independent magazine produced by two men outside their full time jobs. The new issue is out, and I was lucky to write for it; an extremely small—sub 100 words—blurb about Tony Oursler, a great contemporary artist who worked with Mike Kelley in the ’90s.

In a recent interview with Sydney curator Joseph Allan Shea (HERE), Malcolm Watt—one of the Doingbird founders—summed up many things which have became essential in publishing (and content generation) over the past ten years. There were three quotes in particular which seemed especially prescient and timely; to me, these three points should be reflected on by anyone going into publishing (or by anyone who doesn’t want to go out of publishing):

1. “In the current economic climate independent magazines need to become braver and more eccentric rather than giving in and becoming more insipid and palatable.”

2. “You want a magazine to be as cross-generational, ambiguous, self-indulgent and as non conformist as possible so people really like or dislike what they see.”

3. “I want to present the content without needing to resort to overt design. If the design is seen as banal that’s fine by me.”

A group of ladies dance each year at an event hall near Tokyo Dome. They’re not famous or well-off, and most are over 50, but they have been dancing together for over twenty years. A friend is one of the dancers; we went to see them last year. I don’t know anything about contemporary dance, but I could tell that it was melodramatic, offset by soundtrack of european techno (after the previous performance some people complained about the free jazz).

Rangiwhahia, a rural New Zealand farming community, just celebrated it’s 125th year. The video above is of the speaker from the centennial celebrations in 1986, Ian (Rawhiti) McKean, relaxing at home. Here he retells stories about the quality of the local bush in the late 1800′s and New Zealand farming lore; which correlates with my family’s history since he is my grandfather (now deceased). I had never heard any of these stories before and none of this is written down; strange to have your family history illuminated by videos uploaded online. At the end you can hear a child asking Mr. McKean to come and see something, but being a deeply pragmatic New Zealand farmer he decides to “see it after dinner, on the way over (to something else).”

Juan Moralejo makes magazines from Buenos Aires, Argentina. First he put together a publication called SEDE. It was pocket sized and put together well but unfortunately it ended a few years ago. It was a magazine made by someone who loves books. Later Juan started an online publication called MOLDE with the same ideology, but this website has also ended. Right now Juan has published the first issue of a new magazine called Correspondencia (HERE). These 160 pages are the finest incarnation of the three; important old texts are republished beside commissioned pieces by younger writers, with romantic and direct photography. For my contribution I told a personal story about those loner drug-damaged christians who made folk music during the 60′s and 70′s. I was very excited to take part and feel extremely humbled (and insecure) about being in a publication which also features work by people who I admire greatly; Susan Sontag, Wolfgang Tillmans, Harsh Patel, Kenneth Anger, Jacques Derrida.

The magazine is dry and straight. Being tired of irredeemable novelty, dryness is something I crave; when I listen to music, read books or magazines. But I can’t help being nervous; at what point does dryness become novelty too? Probably around the same point that minimalism became so minimal it had gone full circle and become spectaculism.

A postscript: Correspondencia is also the name of another publication from Argentina, a literary journal published in 1957 by a group of friends who hung out with Stella, one of J.L. Borges girlfriends, supposedly.

When Fred Schumann was 24 he ran 2,670 kilometre’s across Japan. Raised in Japan, he would settle in Guam following this run. In 2006 Mr. Schumann began a blog called “Fifty-nine days to Wakkanai” (please visit it HERE) where, over three months, he posted recollections from the run. All images in this post are from his blog.

“How much has Japan changed since I completed my run in 1983? So much has changed,” he says, talking about the loss of village style shops and the rise of the conbini. “The drink vending machines are still there on lonely country roads and you never have to worry about dying of thirst as long as you have some yen.”





Some memories: “It was also a very lonely journey. However, this loneliness was not caused by the lack of regular companionship (there were many friends made along the way), but more of a lack of psychological companionship. How many people can relate to someone who is extremely fatigued from pounding the pavement, day after day, covering up to 55 miles a day for almost 2 months? This feeling of being alone from this fact was almost unbearable.”

Why run across Japan? Many reasons. He wanted to see the “real Japan,” not just Tokyo or Osaka—”the real Japan is in the small farming communities far removed from the cities.” This makes sense to me. But what is more interesting is that he also felt this feat was an appropriate and necessary way to say goodbye to his old life in Japan. It seems that he needed some kind of formal closure with Japan as a physical space; the run was a way of interfacing with his environment; of living deliberately in space. To perform some action as a way of meeting higher level psychic needs; like closure. But ostensibly, choosing to run the length of Japan as a farewell action is ridiculous and unnecessary.

My younger brother and his girlfriend were in Tokyo recently. We climbed to the highest point of Enoshima, an island near the city, and shared stories that had been shared with us, about how our families had reacted to our births. One grandfather, hearing he had a new grand-daughter, climbed a high mountain, then sitting on it’s peak projected out in the open space his dreams and desires for his progeny. To me this clearly fits along the same continuum as the run written about above. A man wants his grand-daughter to be blessed, and without really knowing how to begin that process, undertakes a feat. These are the great individual rituals of our age, deliberate actions to meet intangible needs. I feel increasingly drawn to understanding these actions and where the border is between simple daily routines around a house or workplace versus profound interfacing with those spaces as a way of meeting deeper needs. I hope the museums of the future will be filled with the documents of these great deliberate actions.