Shall we have a poll? You love polls! I love polls! Everybody loves polls! Even former Premier League referee Graham Poll loves polls! Well, I was guessing the last bit there, but I'm sure it's probably true.

Tomorrow, at approximately lunchtime, it will be Friday lunchtime. This usually signifies my weekly visit to William Hill, where I part with one hundred of my hard earned pence on football bets for the weekend; usually in the form of four lines of homes/aways/draws placed at 25p each. I rarely win, but that's hardly the point. You have to dream, don't you?

However, this coming weekend I have a slight dilemma. You see, due to the traditional British overreaction to the slightest hint of cold weather, I have a horrible feeling that a number of games on the fixture list may be called off. Perhaps something of a precedent was set last weekend, when only about three matches seemed to take place in the whole of Scotland. So now I'm just a little bit concerned... should I refuse to be put off by the weeniest speckle of snow, or would it be more realistic for me to save my money and instead spend it buying my girlfriend two packets of Minstrels or something?

Hmmm, maybe you can help me? Poll!!!

For those of you genuinely neutral on the question, you will notice that I have cunningly inserted a third option which rather evades the question altogether.

Poll #1508570
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

Should I do the decent thing at Bill Hill on Friday lunchtime?

All votes must be cast by 1pm tomorrow please.

Current Mood: Polltastic
Current Music: The Venus Beads: Incision

Here I am sipping a G&T last night with Matsuri-kei star Doddodo in the Misono Building, a strange labyrinth of countercultural bars (there's one for Gothic Lolitas, one for stuffed rabbit enthusiasts, and so on).



Today I'm heading round the coast in the Daihatsu Naked with Yoyo and Hisae. We'll lunch in Kobe then head across various headlands, spits and peninsulas to Shikoku, lodge somewhere near Takamatsu, then take the first ferry on Saturday morning to Naoshima. Here's the SANAA ferry terminal on that island:



Finally, a reminder that I lecture at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto on Tuesday. It's open to the public, and begins at 10.40am:

Momus lecture: My Life in Art
Tuesday, January 12th
10:40 a.m. - 12:10 p.m., including time for questions & discussion w/ students.
Soshikan Conference Room (創思館コンファレンスルーム, next to the clock tower)
Ritsumeikan University, Kinugasa Campus, NW Kyoto, close to Kinkakuji
Some simultaneous translation into Japanese will be provided.
Open to the public.
Map.

Well, all those mentions of the Broad&Market style blog paid off; yesterday I got to reprazent Abeno, Osaka (apologies to all the much cooler Abeno kids who wouldn't have looked as chubby as I do in the lead picture; it's all layering, I swear). The most important part of the interview Maggie includes is the bit where I say: "My policy is probably to evoke some kind of otherness and to refute the global monoculture in some way... I’m struggling against it by using other reductive norms like workwear — that’s a bit of a paradox... So workwear, or like, kabuki clothes or gardener’s clothes or peasant’s clothes, or sportswear like golfing wear."



To that list of othernesses I'd like today to add a new category: pilgrimwear. From Friday to Monday I'll be traveling in Shikoku with Hisae and Yoyo (seen above on Christmas day in the amazing tea pavilion that stands in the garden at her family house in Hinoo). Now, art, friendship, hot water and food are really the goals of our "pilgrimage" (we hope to visit the art island of Naoshima and bathe in Shinro Ohtake's amazing bathhouse), but Shikoku is also famous for its 88-temple pilgrimage. Below you can see the traditional white garb of the Shikoku pilgrim. Dōgyō futari on the sign means "two traveling together".



Pilgrimwear is a good dress lexicon to adopt for various reasons. First, it's an ancient dress style, yet not dodo-dead; it's still worn by pilgrims in Japan today. Secondly, it's leisurewear, not workwear. So it avoids the usual recontextualisation paradox by which the look of other people's unfreedom is shiftily reframed as the look of one's own freedom. (To all those wearing jeans, you do realise that you're voluntarily wearing the clothes cotton-picking slaves were forced to, don't you?)



The otherness quotient of pilgrimwear is fabulously high, and yet the look doesn't stifle itself in piety, as, say, priestwear would (though I must say I have a yen for the conch-playing priest's garb in my Tiger Mountain video). Pilgrims, after all, are secular amateurs merely visiting, in a touristic way, religious sites. And as any reader of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales will tell you, pilgrims can be a rowdy, bawdy lot. A religious trip can be a pretext for carousing and even become arousing; in The Art of Love Ovid sees temples as pick-up joints, and Chaucer's set of scabrous stories begins at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where brothels, palaces and cathedrals stood side-by-side. What could be more natural than following the ingestion of incense with the letting-off of sexual steam?



So, although Japanese pilgrims evoke the same kind of ancient otherness the Hasidim do, you don't have to feel like a hypocrite, anti-semite or satirist walking around dressed up as one. You can just be... human.



But don't you have to be super-ascetic if you're going to be a pilgrim? Not really. Modern Japanese pilgrims take taxis, cars, buses and trains on their 88-temple pilgrimage. They eat hamburgers. Buddhism stresses "the middle way", not total asceticism. There was an interesting action recently by Chim↑Pom touching on this. Hisae and I attended the finissage performance for a show the renegade artist group held at Yamamoto Gendai gallery in Tokyo. Good to be a Mummy saw Chim↑Pom collaborating with friends Yasuyuki Nishio, Sachiko Kazama and Yoshimitsu Umekawa to make an exhibition themed around self-starvation.



Motomu Inaoka, a Chim↑Pom assistant, became a living sculpture for the show, losing so much weight during a fast that his ribcage began to poke uncomfortably through his chest skin. The idea of Sokushinbutsu (or "living body Buddha") was that a monk fasts while meditating then dies to become a mummy. A rather scary sculpture was made of Inaoka at his thinnest, but by the time we caught the show he'd put the weight back on again. Chim↑Pom passed a big heap of McDonalds hamburgers out to the crowd during the blow-out finissage party. Munching on this stereotypically monocultural food, I immediately wanted to embark on a fast (followed, perhaps, by a multi-temple pilgrimage) myself. It smelled and tasted like shit.

I'm doing a little roundup of print-and-paper today, because it's something I'm fond of, in a retro-sentimental sort of way. I'm particularly interested in print's Unique Sales Proposition in the digital age; what it has to offer post-internet, or alongside-but-distinct-from-internet... if anything? When I "make myself scarce" by ending this blog on February 10th 2010, for instance, will I "graduate" from free to paid, purchasable, print-only writing?



That's what Momo Nonaka (right, above) seems to have done. Momo is an old friend, and from the 90s to the mid-noughties her blog Tigerlily made her one of Japan's best-known culture-bloggers. Now Momo is concentrating on print, and specifically zines. Tigerlily has become a paper magazine store called Lilmag. Momo is using the internet to distribute -- and blog about distributing -- her mags, but the products themselves are made of pure post-internet paper.

My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review The Believer. Although The Believer is primarily a print publication, you can read Justin Taylor's review online. The reviews editor has tried an interesting "read-without-prejudice" experiment, sending Taylor my book without its cover or title pages, its spine blacked-out with a sharpie, and a ban on all googling. The result is a review I'm tempted to call "disorienteered", but also a satisfyingly context-free take on a wedge of paper, which is what a book finally is. This review doesn't rewrite the press release, but simply lets the unfolding text lead the reviewer through revulsion, amusement, disorientation, and trains of personal association. It's something I tried myself recently when I wrote a Playground column describing step-by-step my real-time discovery of a band called Hecuba. Taylor links my Book of Jokes to Lynne Tillman, a writer I met a couple of times in London in the 80s, via mutual friends, and who's apparently also written a book based on jokes (1999's No Lease on Life).

Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz mentions me today. Swiss "pop literature" writer Christian Kracht, in an interview with the paper, quotes the whole lyric to my song Germania, which, as I recall, was an attempt to channel a Germanic sensibility I'd found in art by Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, and imagery from the poems of Paul Celan and Rainer Maria Rilke. Kracht is one of my most important print mentors -- he published my debut short story 7 Lies About Holger Hiller in literary review Der Freud in 2004, and he's the executive editor of the German edition of The Book of Jokes, which will appear this autumn on the Blumenbar / Buenos Aires imprint. More paper!

There's less paper in the world thanks to the official closure last month of ID magazine, the American design magazine to which I contributed regularly. I even managed to get a young Norwegian graphic design collective called Yokoland onto the cover. ID was great to write for, because they paid a dollar a word. This time last year I managed to live for about three months on their fees for three or four easy-to-write articles. The magazine's closure seems to reflect the axiom that anything the internet can do better than print, it will do better than print. Designers are well-served now by design blogs, which they expect to read free online.



Japanese magazines are still my favourite form of print (and since I can't read them, that must mean that print has some sort of talismanic-fetishistic quality for me). In the photo above (Tsutaya's "recommended titles" shelf) you can see the camera jyoshi mags called Phat and Snap. A camera jyoshi is a young woman who's obsessed with cameras and photography. She's about 22, possibly an art student. She usually has an elegant retro model of camera (she prefers film to digital) which may or may not be covered with stickers (as Ume Kayo's is). The only thing she likes more than photography is sitting in old cafes eating the tasty lunch set and leafing through old magazines, or traveling in other Asian countries. Hisae -- essentially a camera jyoshi herself (her photos grace the current edition of Apartamento magazine) -- flipped enviously through Phat and Snap and told me that there weren't all these titles for camera jyoshis when she was in her early 20s. Magazines must be doing something right if they're diversifying titles about obscure dead-tech hobbies.

I showed Maggie from street fashion / interview blog Broad&Market a Japanese mag called Tokyo Graffiti, and we both went into raptures over its current edition. "This is the perfect magazine for me," said Maggie, leafing through pages showing people stopped on the street to talk about what they're wearing, or holding up Gillian-Wearingesque signs stating their worries about the world, or sitting in their bedrooms describing their decoration preferences. Tokyo Graffiti -- which features almost no advertising, though it may be doing some subtle product placement, for all I know -- is the ultimate vox pop magazine, and so far no blog can provide enough research, content, context and detail to endanger it. But after flipping through the whole of Tokyo Graffiti in the act of intellectual shoplifting called tachiyomi ("standing and reading"), Maggie and I -- blogger pirates both -- replaced the mag on the recommended shelf unbought, took a snap of the cover, and resolved to blog about it. Paper is doomed.

Mahika Mano is a hammock cafe in Kichijoji, located on a street illuminated by two huge red "Soapland" signs (a soapland offers rather more intimate comforts, I'm told).



Swinging there with Hisae and Karin Komoto was comfortable!



Yesterday in Osaka we discovered another interesting cafe, Yusoshi, in the basement of the Loop Centre at Tennoji. It's the local branch of a Kyoto cafe which has teamed up with our favourite makers of tabi shoes and socks, Sou Sou, and employs the same mixture of retro and futuristic; you sit on beanbags at traditional low tables illuminated from below, Stanley Kubrick-style.



We had a very long lunch there with our new friend, Maggie, maker of the Philly-based Broad&Market style blog.

Ah, El Jay, how have you been?

Well, before we begin, a few words about cinemas... Well, to be more precise, one in particular. I was perhaps a bit harsh in my comments about the Curzon Soho's ticket prices in my review of 2009 posted last week. In fact, today I received a very friendly e-mail from somebody at the cinema pointing out that in fact there are many cheaper ticket options available than paying full price every time; becoming a member, for example, would save you well over £100 on the £624 annual price which I quoted, or attending on a Monday night (when they do still offer reduced admission) would save more than £200 on this. So, in the interests of fairness I think it's only right that I redress the balance slightly and mention this. And I wouldn't want to be putting down the Curzon Soho too much anyway, as it does remain one of my favourite cinemas (and comfortably one of the best in London).

Right, back to business... I've been reading over the festive period about all of your Christmas parties, and I'm glad to hear that you all had so much fun. Personally, I didn't get invited to any Christmas parties myself this season; which is perhaps a tad ironic, given that I'm not a miserable humbug bastard any more. I guess you must all just hate me then. Yeah, whatever. I did attend an extremely enjoyable new year's party though, which of course you weren't invited to because you're not as nice modest as me.

Hmmm, what else... Christmas happened; it was all kinds of predictable. Predictably felt like I was going to freeze to death waiting for a train/wobs on Christmas Eve. Drew with Spurs on Boxing Day which I also predicted, then after that I spent a chunk of the holiday up in The Frozen North. I arrived back in England just in time to see the new year arrive (in Kilburn), on New Year's Day I took The Lovely S for a nice walk by the river, then the following day we progressed in the FA Cup and I went for a drink with the excellent whalefish afterwards. Yesterday I went to the pictures with my girlfriend. All generally unchallenging, but quite nice stuff.

Inspired by a note in a post from hoshuteki earlier today, I thought I'd consult Ye Olde Last.fm to see what I was actually listening to during 2009. The results were, well, marginally predictable. British Sea Power still came in at number three despite only releasing an instrumental soundtrack album in 2009, although with all of the emotion surrounding The Broken Family Band splitting up (not to mention three great pop concerts by them which I attended last year) it's not really a big surprise that they finished at number one. Nice to see Emmy The Great and Luke Haines absolutely neck and neck, especially given that they released the two best albums of the year.



In perhaps controversial and shocking news, I have made a new year's resolution for 2010. Not something as obvious as increasing my modesty or being more bitter, but something far more off-beat. In 2010, I resolve to sell my flat. That's right, after fourteen years I will be not only vacating my homely abode, but actually exiting Shepherd's Bush altogether. Moving out of the best possible place in the world ever to live, to somewhere vastly inferior (i.e. anywhere that is not Shepherd's Bush). I did allude to this in a previous post a few weeks ago, but in such an understated way that you might have missed it... The Lovely S and myself will commence house-hunting in Herney* next month.

This is marginally more difficult that it sounds, as there are things which need to be done. Not least fourteen years worth of “stuff” to sort through, although I've been making a start... Documents shredded (you don't really need bank statements from ten years ago), knackered old computer screens and telephone answering machines taken down to Smugglers Way (look it up), and two large bags of clothes already donated to Oxfam. Most of the stuff in the cupboard under the stairs probably hasn't even seen daylight since the week I moved in, suggesting that I can realistically live without it. But the bigger steps will be getting the plumber in to fix my dripping toilet cistern, climbing a ladder and replacing the bayonet socket on the hallway light (don't worry, I'll turn the electricity off first) and doing some actual hardcore cleaning. All going well, it will feel like real progress is being made when I get an estate agent in to give me a valuation next month.

As it was my first day back at work for nearly a fortnight today, I thought a little treat might be in order tonight. So this post has been brought to you in conjunction with a bottle of Morrisons Chestnut Beer. Mmmm, lovely. Chestnut Beer. Yum.

* Herne Hill of course. Come on, you should have got it by now.

Current Mood: Forward!
Current Music: Wild Beasts: Two Dancers

Relax; if you live outside Japan, once you finish this article you'll never have to hear of Flumpool again. That's one of the nice things about being on holiday in a foreign country; things which are destined to persecute the natives, possibly for years, are merely local curiosities for you, the tourist. You can derive some passing amusement from the marketing around Flumpool -- a new band from the Osaka region, completely without musical interest, currently promoting their debut album -- without having the sinking feeling that you're destined to spend several decades either listening to or resisting them.



I made a decision in 1984 to ignore Madonna, you know. I decided she wasn't interesting. I've been living with that decision for 26 years. But ignoring Madonna is not an option in Western culture. Madonna, her management and her marketing people have made absolutely sure of that. There is no freedom of choice when it comes to attention, though there may be freedom of choice when it comes to purchase. As far as I know, none of my money has ever gone Madonna's way. But I've "paid" attention to Madonna. Look, there she is on the subway wall, modeling for H&M! Look, here's a serious, intellectually-respectable book about Islam that talks about her! And here's that song where she paid a bazillion dollars to ruin Abba's "A Man After Midnight" forever! This song sticks in your brain like charred tar! Can we leave the taxi at the traffic lights?



But Flumpool. Flumpool are big, but they're not as big as Smap or Arashi. If you made a decision in Japan to ignore Smap when they came up in the early 90s, well, I'm sorry for you. Smap are on the cover of almost all the TV magazines in Japan this week, as they seem to have been continuously for the last twenty years. (The ones Smap aren't on, Arashi are. And let me remind you that if you chose to ignore Arashi, well, your girlfriend or your wife didn't. Instant couple conflict, as you are daily revealed to be not-Arashi. Thanks, marketing! Thanks for pissing on me from a great height!)



But to get back to Flumpool. You'd think it would be a no-no for a band with "pool" in their name to refer, on their first album sleeve, to the piss mannekin, the Manneken Pis in Brussels. But why not? There's a successful musical called Urinetown, and a piss manifesto. So this band is a pool of piss, and proud of it! They even pun cunningly on the proximity of "piss" and "peace" -- in April they'll play a "Love and piiiis kids' show".



Musically, as the clip above shows, Flumpool are crushingly banal. Their ultra-formulaic songs sound as if they've been written by a machine, and completely exemplify the super-conformist "aggressive normality" which characterises so much of Japanese -- well, let's face it, of all -- commercial culture these days. But if innovation is banished from the music, it's alive and well in the marketing, and that's how we seem to want things.

I went into a branch of HMV yesterday. In stark contrast to all the other shops in the And& shopping centre in Osaka (clothes shops, Muji, Loft, Chisato Tsumori), HMV was quiet as the grave. And I thought to myself: "Was there really a moment when record shops teemed with people, and when a young Me would come here looking for the newest, most exciting things in the world?" There was, but that moment has passed. There will be no more cakes and ale at HMV.



There was also a moment when I was employed as a songwriter for the Japanese market. I'm reminded of it during a business meeting with Sony Music Japan, my worldwide song publisher, in Tokyo. It's a sort of surreal experience. Books about Bob Dylan lie around reception, and somewhere someone's playing The Beatles' Abbey Road album (Sony Music Japan publishes Lennon and McCartney).

Sony Music Japan signed me in 2001 on the expectation that I'd perform as well commercially in the 00s as I did in the 90s, when I wrote a string of hit records for Kahimi Karie. Of course, fashion is fickle, and the Shibuya-kei movement I was associated with got replaced by... well, nothing special. So the big sum of money Sony gave me has never been earned back, and because I'm on a roll-over contract, I stay signed to them forever. I don't mind at all; I get a worldwide music publisher with an impressive name and Japanese connections. But regularly we have these meetings where Sony nudge me gently about the outstanding debt: "So what are we going to do to recoup this advance we paid you, Nick?"



At this moment I remember all sorts of famous Japanese people I've been told like my songs. That sensitive one from Smap, what's his name, the one who reads novels? He once mentioned me in an interview! And Miki Nakatani, is she still making records? She's got good taste! She likes me! Or what about if I wrote for Arashi? My girlfriend would fucking love that! I could even get revenge on Ninomiya for being so pretty by making him sing something stupid and self-effacing!

Sony tell me, gently, kindly, that sure, they have connections to Arashi's management and could play them anything I wrote for them. But they mostly do rap numbers, in Japanese, with fairly generic music. And the days of Japanese bands being impressed by foreign writers and producers are over. I listen to all that, nodding, then ask if perhaps Aoi Yu doesn't want to make a record at some point? She might, thinks my publisher, but her management would probably want it to be a sure-fire hit. Solid, commercial material. We both know that doesn't mean me. (Intriguingly, Sony Music Japan employ their own full-time songwriter, a kid who's sitting on the sofa beside us wearing headphones, making songs on a laptop as we speak. How very Tin Pan Alley! There in the office, under the strip-lights!)

We end the meeting with a compromise; I'll send in an mp3 of me and Kyoka singing Dracula; MTV have asked for some horror film-type track to be used in an ident and who knows, we may be in with a chance.



But, to get back to Flumpool... well, let's not bother. You and I, since we don't live in Japan and are beyond the reach of even its most inventive marketing, need never hear the name Flumpool again. We can let our definition of Japanese music be encompassed by this fabulous 1985 documentary about Ryuichi Sakamoto instead. That and Akio Suzuki banging on a can, Doddodo screaming, some monks playing conch shells, the enchanting story-chanters at the kabuki theatre, and a gorgeously mournful snatch of gagaku.

On January 2nd 2010 we climbed Mount Shigi in Nara, Japan to celebrate the new astrological year of the tiger and 1300 years of Nara.



It was in another tiger year that "multitasking" Prince Shotoku Taishi (apparently so intelligent he could understand ten conversations at once), was defending Buddhism against the Mononobe family. Prince Taishi called on Bishamonten, the Buddhist god of war, in the Hour of the Tiger, on the Day of the Tiger. It seemed to work; Taishi prevailed over the Mononobes. He built Shigisan Chogosonsiji Temple -- the tiger shrine -- on Mount Shigi in Bishamonten's honour. We climbed and we climbed, my how we climbed...

1. Vanity makes me wise, and narcissism makes me listen. A Google Alert tells me that someone on a blog called Litwack is talking about me (specifically my idea of 1:1 input-output shops), and I find they're also talking about something called Overton Windows, which I know nothing about, but find terribly interesting.



2. The Litwack blog says: "Aaron Schwartz wrote recently on the shifting of the Overton window re: slavery and murder, both of which were perfectly acceptable in American history as long as you were targeting the right ethnic groups." This chimes closely with something I wrote on Thursday: "Did Beatnik Grifter Play On Loathsome Hipster Negro Fetish? begins with an article about the grifter on the Jezebel blog entitled Did "Hipster Grifter" Play On Loathsome Hipster Asian Fetish? then does a thought-experment on it by substituting "Negro" for "Asian", revealing how weirdly acceptable racial prejudice still is the US in 2009 (as long as it's Asians, not blacks)."

3. I turn to the Aaron Schwartz article and read: "Imagine you were an early settler of what is now the United States. It seems likely you would have killed native Americans. After all, your parents killed them, your siblings killed them, your friends killed them, the leaders of the community killed them, the President killed them. Chances are, you would have killed them too, and you probably wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with this." Schwartz doesn't mention the Overton Window in this text, which seems to be covered by the idea of moral relativism; ethics change over time, and from place to place.



4. So what is the Overton Window? Wikipedia says: "The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after its originator, Joe Overton, former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme."

5. Wikipedia continues: "Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. The idea is that priming the public with fringe ideas intended to be and remain unacceptable, will make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison."

6. This makes sense; it's basically what we've seen centre-right politicians in the UK and France do with the National Front over the past fifteen years or so. Wikipedia draws a rough Overton Window with the list: Unthinkable, Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, Policy. The idea seems to be that you can shift the window by re-mapping your own radical ideas by relating them to even-more-radical ones, therefore making your own seem relatively innocuous. So far, so Machiavellian.

7. There's a rather more nuanced description of the idea from an employee of the Mackinac Center here. He says you can't really shift the window without there being a significant groundswell of popular opinion behind you. He also says that "Overton Window" recently shot to the number 2 most-searched term on Google when someone mentioned it on primetime TV in the US.

8. The Wikipedia entry on the Overton Window relates it to the framing effect in Psychology, which states that you can influence answers (in polls, for example) by framing the issue in a particular way.



9. This relates to a theme I think about a lot; it even came up in my Unreliable Tour last week at NOW IDeA. I pointed to the window and said that artists are the only ones who really know the power of frames, who really see them. Because artists are frame-makers, professional attention-drawers and subject-delimiters, expert experience-editors. As I sang in my song The Minus 5, "history remembers the names of those who creep out of the shadows and reposition the frames".

10. It's a subject that's been touched on in several Click Opera entries; The arrow and the frame says that it's not opinion that counts, but rather the way you frame the issue. How long has this been going on? makes fun of experts who tell us things like "the contemporary cult of celebrity begins in the 18th century with Sir Joshua Reynolds". And Ideology is alive and well and living in syntax looks at how cunning journalists and politicians pack their dogma into innocuous-seeming framing words like "whereas", "despite" and "still".

11. A nice example of an Overton Window (and hidden ideology) at work is provided by Misleading breeding stats are the new skull-measurement, a debate in which an American YouTube video called Muslim demographics is fact-checked by a BBC radio show, who post their findings in another YouTube video called Disproving Muslim demographics. An astute Click Opera Anon commenter shows how the really toxic assumption is one they're both implying: "And yet surely the BBC vid is premised on the same fear. Only it's saying: "relax, it's not going to happen." Personally, I couldn't care less if Europe becomes predominantly Muslim. It might be a very good thing for both Europe and Islam."

12. Now, "I couldn't care less if Europe becomes predominantly Muslim" is a position outside the acceptable parts of the Overton Window. It's a radical view you wouldn't normally hear on determinedly-centrist BBC Radio 4. Referring to it would be useful for anyone wishing to reveal -- and perhaps shift -- the invisible framing of the issue implied in both those "opposing" YouTube vids; that it would be terrible if Europe actually did become Muslim.

13. Making formerly-invisible things visible is useful if you want to renegotiate basic terms. If the boss calls you into his office and says: "You've worked for us for two years, and we've never had any problems, have we?" you know that something's probably wrong. Something is probably about to change. Making the context visible is making the context problematical, malleable, renegotiable, even when you're being explicitly reassured that nothing's wrong.

14. A successful context is one we tend to take for granted, and leave in the background, just as (McLuhan would say) a successful medium is one we believe is a window on the world, not one we start to see as a window on the world. The medium desperately tries to prevent us seeing that it, itself, is the message, because its power lies in us pushing that knowledge to the back of our minds and believing that it represents something. Like a politician.

15. It's worth adding that radical views aren't always aired to give people the option that it's legitimate to hold radical views. Rather, they're aired surrounded by a context which labels them clearly unacceptable, and become a spectre designed to scare people back to centrist positions which have, nevertheless, in the meantime, shifted a tiny bit closer to the radical than they were before. When Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time in the UK recently, it probably played into the hands of the Conservatives, allowing them to shift the acceptable part of the Overton Window a notch or two rightwards, yet still make a clear policy distinction between themselves and the British National Party. Even when he's deploring BNP policies, David Cameron is deploying them.

Here's a New Year's Day puzzle I've set myself. I'm not doing very well at it so far. I'm trying to locate the oddly-shaped Osaka building in the userpic you see above. It's a crop from an image Rhodri Marsden took from his hotel window when touring Japan with Scritti Politti in 2006:



Now, finding exact locations from skyline views is something I pride myself on. For instance, I was able to locate the Tokyo apartment I've just spent the last three weeks in before I was given a street address, just based on a view from the balcony and a combination of Google Maps and Google Streetview. But this one has me completely stumped, and it's crazy, because the photo shows lots of distinctive buildings.

Hisae's father thought the skinny-tall building on the right was the Cosmo Tower, housing the World Trade Center, out by the docks in Nanko, to the west of the city. It certainly looks rather like it, but I'm not so sure. What we see in Rhodri's photo is a dense and rather chic central area. The district around the Cosmo Tower is bleak and windswept dockland. What's more, Rhodri was playing at the Quattro Club, and the promoters had probably booked Scritti Politti into a hotel not too far from it, which would make his view more likely to be out over Shinsaibashi. But I can't find any buildings in Shinsaibashi that look like that.



My next theory was that the black building on the left side of Rhodri's view is the same as the black building towards the right of the photo above showing the view north from Osaka Castle over Osaka Business Park.



But since I can't see any of the other buildings in Rhodri's picture when I "walk" around that area in Google Street View, I've abandoned that idea.

My goal is to drop a Google Maps pin right on the spot where the weird wavy building in my user icon is, then drive out in Hisae's mum's Daihatsu Naked and photograph it (as well as find out what it is). I probably have a mild case of Asperger's.