OU: The 200th Episode

this is the open University [Music] hi there you find me on a beautiful September Day in Berlin on the friedel-strasse and Nikon uh thinking why is everybody walking backwards and if they can do it why can't I so today's uh open University video which is the 200th in the series is uh about me going backwards and looking at the things I've been talking about in this sequence of videos Vlogs ruminations which began on December the 5th 2016. welcome to the open University I seem to be living increasingly in the past you can see behind me here some of the um the Retro paperback books I've been buying and they're mostly I mean they're uniquely from the 20th century um and they represent my idea of the glamor of European culture and sweaters are more for me than mere warm garments they're um kind of portable semiotics 2016 was an awful year because we lost Bowie we got Trump we got brexit and uh I kind of felt moved to put my perspective as a kind of embattled Cosmopolitan living between Europe and Japan at the time I had an apartment in Osaka and um I was kind of bored cycling around or I mean fascinated buying second-hand books and and clothes and things in Osaka and the the CD arcades the shotgun guy of the run down poor areas and I wanted to share that so some of the earliest videos of me showing my book and sweater finds today there's actually no course unit and there's no topic I just thought it might be interesting to do a piece about nothing I don't know what the point is really doing these you probably thought uh if you watched yesterday's one about nothing it was already touching quite a depressing theme but uh at least that was chipper you know at least I looked happy and just glad to be alive today I just feel desolate resonance it's what musical instruments do they resonate and it's also what artists do in culture they resonate through the culture sometimes sometimes they don't sometimes they're they're notes fall with a dead sound like like tears in rain [Music] like bricks falling onto rubber I don't know how to um had influenced me mostly with his book come Minima moralia which is very um paradoxical philosophical ruminations written during the second World War I never really broke through to the big meme kind of viewership I don't think I was intending to I was intending to put a kind of minority and marginal point of view but um the biggest rated videos I made in the whole career of this series one about Scott Walker reached 7274 views one about being schizoid the schizoid phenomena it was five and five and a half thousand what about microfascism got about 4.6 K and what about moving to Athens for eight months got 3 000 views yeah I'm here with Colin Marshall who um to my mind is one of the most interesting observers of Asia and in fact a public intellectual Japan being something like Switzerland or like Sweden in Asia whereas Korea is more like um turkey sakaku is the term for Japan's closure from the west from the rest of the world in fact so I'm going to look back over the decades and talk about percussion in some instances it would be tasteless to connect somebody's decision to take their own life to current political events but in Mark's case I don't think it is because he very explicitly made that connection himself and discus mentioned by this document I don't declare my true intentions my last will my Testament when I turn up my toes when I rap on the clock when I agonize I want great white weeping slow tearing of hair no ringing of hands no size No Lack of days no worries bees and none of your SATA Jews go go and get the priest and then go get the blues boys death where is thy Victory grave where is lasting when I snuff it bury me quickly then let carousels begin but not to do with a few ham sandwiches a sausage roller too and a small Port Wayne please roll the carpet right back get cracking with your own gay Gordons and your knees up Shake It Up live it up sump it up hell of a kind of time and if the cops come around well tell them party's mine boys [Music] this is my Cube where I sit in Gloom uh likewise it's Gloom but it's not emotionally Gloom it's actually a place of great security a womb really rather than a Gloom um I sit here and I incubate ideas it's my uh incubating space my name is Mr Pink and I speak truth to power zeit Geist it's one word it sounds like two words it's made up of the German words zeit which means time Geist which means spirit so it's the spirit of the times hello class I am cool I am the coolest person one of the coolest people in the world against intensity open University one of the key parts of my strategy as momus as a songwriter has been to be against intensity and I'll explain what I mean by that it's it's essentially an anti-romantic strategy it comes probably a little bit from my personality which is a quiet introverted and yet slightly puckish it was a confident time for the West because they had won a war against an opponent there was another opponent of course the Russians in the Cold War who had a different aesthetic because Stalin was in power at that time and you had um stalinist Kitsch and socialist realism as the prevailing Aesthetics in that block and so the West almost by default had to to go into abstraction formalism minimalism and various kinds of what the Russians caught the Soviets called decadent formalism today I have something to do which is um get my bicycle fixed because the back tire is flat so I'm off to ajithan a bicycle man yeah he's made living my building taking the yellow lift down from the eighth floor and um luckily it's a nice warm day it's actually a really uh welcoming day and um I should also buy some bread when I'm out there this is the lobby of my building and here's the bike I'm gonna have to walk it it's actually a real um a real hassle having to walk even to the local shops seems like a long way when you're used to just doing it in a few seconds on the bike and this is my sweater and uh yeah very nice spring-like day oh my God what's that I see this fire in the distance that's the Shinto Shrine the local Shinto Shrine they seem to be having some kind of Festival let's check it out what happened in the 60s was simply a democratization of an emphasis in the 50s on creativity which actually comes out of sociopolitical realities of the 50s notably the so-called Sputnik shock in which the Americans noticed that the Russians had overtaken them technically and were able to launch a satellite into geostationary orbit above the Earth your old lecturer used to be a folk singer and he used to put one leg up on stools like this in venues around Great Britain in the mid-1980s and sing Sinister songs I have an apology to make there are some things I haven't been telling you Works between that phrase which you really only encounter in the art world you don't really read about Bankers who work between Frankfurt and London or but you know they must exist they are part of this global um porous World which uh everybody now is turning against or if I say everybody a strong minority in several countries has turned against and this kind of global citizen rootless Cosmopolitan idea of the artist which is still very not just represented and be announced but actually the point of many be announced I would say I think that curators actually are trying to Ram this home at a time when they realize that their model of the world is endangered we live in a culture which hates the body and loves language a logocentric culture it's partly Christianity it's Plato it's all the poisons at the base of our culture which make us think this way but as a result the only time we use gestures when we can't actually hear what you're saying we're stuck in a traffic jam we can't be heard in the next car we're going to tell them something and we make a gesture probably one involving a finger and an orifice oh hello I didn't see you there by Carl crawlow between zero and infinity what I do in the evenings is that I turn on my projector and I watch um documentaries about usually dead authors and I get particularly excited if there's some kind of pan across their bookshelves even if it's a little blurry and I can't really see what kind of books they have because um and as you know a collector of 20th century paperbacks a devotee of old and molding paper the smell of it the touch of it the design the layout the um the sense of a vanished culture in which people were indulged me say ending with an E acute is the adjective to be tatamized and in a wider sense to be imbued with Japanese culture to live on the floor to to go native to um to adopt the customs of Japan if anybody else likes it it's a bonus I just do it to please myself this actually influenced um Jill de lures the French philosopher who then he wrote anti-edipus with gwatari Felix cuatari and they have a whole section where they're talking about um vitalism uh and how how Samuel Butler's prediction of these intelligent machines and their danger which is very real to us today we really see this that we just read an article about how the whole the current Trump Administration is based on a this billionaire who's uh into algorithms and influencing people politically by finding out market research information from these social media networks and things that's the beginning of a kind of very Sinister coup based on machine intelligence So I entered my flat in Sterling University to find a couple in the communal sitting room just go ahead I'm very easy going about it because it's an experimental radical University and they do that and when they're cleaning up the sink I tell them my name is Nick but I don't know which is my room and the girl is ugly and the boy is shy there are still these very unincreasingly you could say localized cultures I'm not I'm a citizen of nowhere an artist of nowhere I'm making references my breakfast breakfast brexit references on scobylunches the first thing I reached for was heraje in Brussels Brussels you know of course it would be brexit it's exit from Brussels isn't it so um I'd Scrabble watches uh first track his first brexit track is um Bashi bazooks which is Captain haddock you know what people are showing mostly on design is um private spaces which are as you would say in France um they're sort of sheltered from the public space which is increasingly problematical and increasingly irrational the less I allow myself to talk about the more I may end up talking about how could I have not have spoken about sex in this series if I've been University lectures it is the topic the whole resonator of the of the labor party up until the 1990s was to to win the fruits of his labor for the worker which seems perfectly reasonable you know to to get the worker who is um simply paid a basic living wage usually um to give him profit share you know essentially that was um crossed out because it was seen as two socialists for the British labor party a very sad moment closest tank up to meeting Boeing was meeting Iggy Pop in Paris and was set up on the plaster tattoo in 1996 I lived there my apartment was right there I'd been downtown bought a printer and I was coming back with the printer under my arm and suddenly I saw three of the sketch artists who who work in the Square walking backwards and sketching somebody while walking backwards and I thought that's really unusual who are they sketching and they saw that it was this diminutive figure who was Iggy Pop so I just went up to him normally I'd be too shy but it was just such a surprise and also because we were two anglophones in Paris I thought maybe he'd be Keen to speak English I went up and said hey what are you doing here and he said I come here I have friends here one of the first things Ivo did when he met his okay we met him we saw him who came into the Beggars Banquet shop and our eyes met and uh I think I was I was a very skinny Shy Guy and he was also almost autistically shy himself a very thin-skinned guy who you would say properly is not cut out for the world of business and this book really goes into ivo's kind of personality his rather oblique personality which of course was terribly important for the oblique music that he was going to put out on this label um but also led him to you know personal problems with most of the groups that he worked with um inevitable icings over of those relationships so today has been a good day the sun is shining slightly I got not just one sweater but two and um nobody seems to collect the uh Farrell Bentley Burnett um period for the germano faceti period of the late 60s early 70s this stuff that I'm interested in collecting anyway I wasn't looking for books today I was actually videoing as I went on the train and as I went uh walking through my favorite Mall which is the I think it's called the chuo mall in amagasaki and then Along Comes modernity which is a supposedly a rational system which completely changes the organization according to Scientific principles productive principles the division of labor and a very regimented kind of way of organizing your own life so if you're using a calendar or you're using sort of spreadsheet software on your computer your computer is sort of organizing your life in this modern in the widest possible sense way there's obviously something about me and my concerns which doesn't really touch many people um but that doesn't stop me doing it and certainly wouldn't have stopped me making music either on my music videos I occasionally get a freak uh success like the Beast uh song also from 2016 actually which is racked up 164 000 views for me that's amazing usually my songs also only get a couple of thousand views so but it's not about the views it's really about a way for me to assert my values and my vision of life which is probably why I make records as well so without further Ado as they say on these Vlogs um here are some clips from the last what is it uh seven years of open University videos open University enjoy oh [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: momasu

Views: 1,381

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Id: Qr-7ZMg9cqg

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023