Regarding Momus

:D that's an awesome tale! this dude quit ilx within about 3 weeks of me joining :(

passin' the torch

yeah, louis' post about japanese girl bukake was classic

Momus was challopian and slightly scary but tbh lots of interesting shit came out his stupid/insane eastcoaster brain.

i'd say he was certainly intelligent, extravagantly so, and i am always biased in favour of folk like that

tbf lj sometimes he did write, not in a way like yourself where people are hating on the style or whatever, but in a style where he professed quite insane and stupid opinions. I remember reading a post on his blog after he left ILX where he talks about some artists going to North Korea and mentions only positive things about North Korea and mentions that one of the artists was mocked for his pink suit in South Korea. Also remember him praising the 1 child rule in China as a genius of social-engineering. Real willful Pollyanna shit.

extravagantly intelligent?

There's nothing wrong with the one child policy in China. Dude prefers Japanese chicks, you see.

Esteban that wasn't even funny.

I also believe Momus was a believer in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

Manchukuo.

He sounds like someone who enjoys pushing logic to its limits. All fine on a rhetorical or theoretical level; if he actually lived some of his reality-smashing fantasies then I'd mark him down as a troubled man at odds with society.

Something to be said for the process by which ILX bashes ostentatiously bad style out of you

Another thing I remember reading about him that annoyed: a blog about "staying foreign". He believed that by not integrating where you lived you aware actually showing more respect than the imperialist who would learn the language and attempt to mingle among the adopted country. It reads as willful ignorance and an excuse for never having learned Japanese and possible German (he lived in Berlin at the time of the blog).

To be honest reading the ILX archives will give you all the evidence against the man you might want to find, and these might just examples I'm garnishing you with in order to more condemn an effete Scottish artist (because I hate his type).

i used aware instead of were somewhere up there!

also a missing be.

Monsieur Artois is a harsh typemaster.

Yeah, well, if Momus concentrated a bit more on music and less on this moral and cultural and existentialist nonsense, then maybe he could have recorded something half as good as "Kiss This Thing Goodbye".

He probably still thinks I'm too earnest. Ah well. That's a great story from Scott, anyway!

Momus always played, to me at least, like the average American's cartoonish vision of what the avant garde European artist/intellectual is like.

And while we're talking about controversial Momus opinions: the fall of Communism as an ideology was unfortunate - and why? - because it represented one less option on the table. This is so silly because that could be said about every fallen ideology, from Nazism to theocracy.

But his tone is always too playfully decadent to take what he says at face value, anyway.

That's a GREAT story, Scott!!

momus always annoyed the lamers

^^ this

anyone who, on the morning of 9/11/01, thought it would be a good idea to take a picture of himself with the burning world trade center in the background is a shit

http://www.dragcity.com/catalog/records/dc222.jpg

Pic now?

Momus is someone I actually miss.

He talked me out of suicide once, without even realising that he had done so. (Whether my continued existence on the face of this planet is a good thing or not is up to you.)

He had his troll-like tendencies, but in the best possible way. He's one of those people who says outrageous things in order to force one to confront one's own prejudices and one's own thought patterns and beliefs. There was a great deal of playfulness to him which was lacking in other ILX "characters."

I know that he infuriated and frustrated a lot of people (myself included, before I actually met him) - but like many internet personalities, he was kind of a litmus test. One's reaction to him said as much about the reactor as it ever did about him. But hey, I come from a long line of effete Scottish intellectuals, so I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing.

I've even come around to his music. "The Homosexual" is one of the greatest songs ever recorded about the male ego and its discontents.

Click Opera, the short version:

http://twitter.com/Twit_Opera

sub-buttez at best

momus always annoyed the lamers

― velko, Sunday, 24 May 2009 04:33 (3 hours ago)

!!!! Yes!

I miss the guy, I've got to admit.

last week a friend i'd gone to college in japan with emailed me a link to a post on clickopera - the 'i hate japan' april fools one from yearssss back (i do not think they noticed, that it was an april fool)

and so i wrote 'oh momuspaws' and hit send

and then thought: wait.

This as the most otm thing ever posted about Momus...That said, I like reading his blog ...I just wish I liked his music more

If Momus wasn't sexually attracted to Japanese girls two decades younger than him, I doubt if he'd have bothered to work up his latter-day orientalist theorising. If it had been, say, black Americans he was into, no doubt we'd have been bombarded with posts about white American protestant work ethic vs the exotic Other of African American culture bla bla bla.
― Iggy Fop, Thursday, December 30, 2004 3:17 PM (4 years ago)

Yeah but that's every white dude with an asian girl fetish that didn't study IT.

Wait, you mean Momus wrote about things that mattered to him? omg etc

xpost

Have said it before and will say it again: everyone gets the Momus they deserve.

i'm almost sort of impressed dude has managed to blag living like a really "wacky" self-regarding art-foundation course fresher for the last 30-odd years without starving/being beaten to death.

Unfortunately, Wendy Carlos couldn't quite manage to cut his balls off. Which was a surprising turn of events.

The three O records he made in Berlin ("Oskar Tennis Champion", "Otto Spooky", "Ocky Milk") are pretty damn weird and beautiful because of that. He has a real talent for taking found sound/concrete audio collages and arranging them under a nice classically pleasing melody. First time I heard "The Artist Overwhelmed" I was awestruck.

If his old records are like "A Clockwork Orange" his new ones are like the end of "2001".

I'll stan for this record anytime.
http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/03fb57ee6e40d8df0531d59e88d7dfe7/8201.jpg

He's one of those people who says outrageous things in order to force one to confront one's own prejudices and one's own thought patterns and beliefs.

Sadly, many of those who are good at this trick get stuck in a holding pattern, because they stop at the point of discovering the errors of other people's ways and do not continue on to construct a coherent set of ideas and values that are any better than those they spend their lives challenging. As a result, they are totally lacking in humility, when humility is precisely what they need most.

Wait, you mean Momus wrote about things that mattered to him? omg etc

theorizing a sexual fetish might matter to you, but it's also stupid. luv the etc btw

It just seems like a strange criticism. Should he be writing about things he has no experience with? I disagree with a lot of things Momus says but I like that he says them. Even when he's wrong wrong wrong it's like Oliver Wendell Holmes said about friends with strong opinions, they're like rough tree bark you can scratch yourself against.

Sadly, many of those who are good at this trick get stuck in a holding pattern, because they stop at the point of discovering the errors of other people's ways and do not continue on to construct a coherent set of ideas and values that are any better than those they spend their lives challenging. As a result, they are totally lacking in humility, when humility is precisely what they need most.

― Aimless, Sunday, May 24, 2009 4:34 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

But sometimes the point is precisely to make people think about, to challenge the validity of "A" rather than to make a case for an alternative "B", which will inevitably have it's own flaws and contradictions.

I agree with Masonic Boom, Momus may be nothing more than a troll, but at least he's an intelligent and charming one.

More lurker than troll these days. This very thread gets a mention on his blog.

Posting merely to report that I misread this thread title as "Regarding Moms"

Even when he's wrong wrong wrong it's like Oliver Wendell Holmes said about friends with strong opinions, they're like rough tree bark you can scratch yourself against.

What is this quote? I like the sentiment, but can't track it down.

It's in his short book, "The Poet at the Breakfast Table"

He does a good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather like to hear him. He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one can rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as brown and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs).

That's actually as good a description of a "benevolent troll" as I've ever read

Awesome. thanks.