As it says on the cover, "An audio documentary by Momus made in New York City, Spring 2000 — featuring Ford Wright, Casey Spooner, Steve Lafreniere and other folk." The other folk include Stephin Merritt, which was why I tracked down this CD-R.
You could only buy it direct from Momus's website. He was living in NYC at the time. Like the younger Brian Eno, he moves round the world to swim in whatever he feels is the most fertile "scene" to nurture his muse (unsurprisingly, he's been in Berlin for the past seven years). But back in 2000, Paypal was a shadow of what it is now — you couldn't use it with your credit card — so I had to write to him to ask if he'd accept a cheque in "GB pounds". "15 pounds would do fine," came the reply.
We're in a transitional period between the age of the fakely authentic and the age of the authentically fake, proposes Momus a.k.a. Nick Currie, during his conversation with Stephin. Fakeways, you see, is a play on Folkways, the original brand of early 20th century American folk. Stephin explains why he's more interested in Harry Smith and Alan Lomax than in the music they collected, and makes a case that Alan Lomax did for the microphone what Andy Warhol did for the camera. He brought a point-and-click aesthetic to sound recording, and successfully fetishised the ordinary.
Seventy minutes of "pomo homo" chat by NYC scenesters may not be your cup of tea. Momus asks, "Do you think there's a danger that it becomes an in-joke for an in-crowd?" and Ford Wright answers that, yes, there is definitely a danger of that, but he's just trying to make work, and making work is so hard that any kind of help is invaluable. Wright is one of the more interesting interviewees. "I try never to make fun of anything," he claims.
It's almost impossible not to make fun of some of the comments. This CD was the first time I'd heard of Fischer Spooner. Here's Casey Spooner of that ensemble:
We could have a whole dissertation at Columbia for about six months on what's kitsch — kitsch, pastiche, parody, irony, whatever… camp… I mean like, you can just… all I can say is we're not thinking like that, you know. We're thinking really what is, what do we want to do. And I think we try to be as stupid as possible… but, you know, sort of, to our demise [sic], we all, you know, have gone to art school… or, you know, we all have studied our disciplines really thoroughly, and have a great knowledge of it. So as hard as we try to just be silly and superficial, but I think that inherently there's something that's related to art history.
See, all I did was write down what he said, minus a couple of "you knows", plus one cheeky [sic]! But Ford Wright makes more sense,
Especially when it comes to a lot of the camp that I've been subjected to, or exposed to, has been within gay culture. And that is enough of a different world that it can be taken as the for-real culture of that world. Like it's not a camp culture, in a way, because that's really what they're doing… I mean, all the time… I take ideas that are too ridiculous to touch. Very often, starting with the song title, like the title, "Unicorn, come to my aid." I mean, are you serious? But I try to give honour to the ridiculous… I try to really mean it, and really write as good a song as I can, within the constraints of having to write a song called "Unicorn, come to my aid." What the fuck.
WTF indeed. Other folk that get a mention in this downtown tour include Gavin Brown (coincidentally an old schoolfriend of D's brother), Harmony Korine and Bobby Conn, who got a passing mention on these pages a few months ago.
The CD-R was never catalogued as an official release and it's no longer available in physical form, but the whole thing is available for free on ubu.com. I'll leave you with this Momus-meme, "America should boast about the fakeness of everything because that's more democratic: everyone can be fake, but only a select few can be authentic."
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