The Art/ Act Of Political Listening

'Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance [...] The monologue of standardised, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak anymore.'

Jacques Attali- Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Music and politics mix on an illicit frequency. Listener C is a crafty, educated political listener. What concerns her, unlike her disconnected friends A and B, is each track's background noise, its sonic subtext that echoes other systems, structures, functions and types of wiring.

Our musical systems and structures aren't Cagey, formalist or theoretical but they do predetermine certain things. First we remember the capitalist system (and of course, its encoded structure), which creates a strict hierarchy of commodities, exposure and style. It's a monetary system. Every time C, the political listener, hears anything, she's aware of this system, how it determines the shape of the band, the recording studio and the end product.

Each band is structured around an outdated model where the Voice is allowed tremendous power and the remaining sounds are nearly muted. The producer who foregrounds the Voice writes a sonic synecdoche of government, allowing a single person prominence over all others, at their expense, while they silently work within like civil servants. There are echoes of political structure again as patterns of behaviour are enforced. Research indicates particular qualities within the Voice that need to be tapped, amplified and looped. Certain behaviour must be avoided, a selling point (a capitalist necessity) must be located for successful continuation of the product and it must be endorsed by past candidates to achieve the correct level of exposure. The contours of capitalism can grafted onto the artistic process without a slight hiccough.

It's alright cos the historical pattern has shown

How the economical cycle tends to revolve [...]

Bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery.

Stereolab, Ping Pong

The product's function isn't clear. C knows the intention is to plug a void, to provide a Voice for the Voiceless, but usually there are the sensations of multi-tracking, of sampling, looping, performing cover versions. C knows these Voices are familiar, have been heard before, and are only slightly different from their ancestors... perhaps the pitch's shifted a little but who can say? Wiring is the shadowiest element of all. The wires in machines are invisible: they run power back and forth, they maintain power and they lurk behind, within, the other systems and structures. C knows that corporations own the wiring, they control how the machine operates: all wiring leads to a singular power source. But political listening doesn't create transparency. We know that awareness of the machine's deficiencies (solidity in an age of steam) doesn't speed its collapse.

Political listening is a kind of violence. The political listener, our beautiful C, isn't a participant in mass culture and its fake images of togetherness. She knows listening is political, ethical, an act of disquiet. It means attack, escape and rejection. The substance of political music isn't always superficial. The audio-incendiary noise of Rage Against The Machine is, yeah, political but it doesn't represent a disengagement from conventional politics or any alternatives other than the stratified, straitjacketing microcosm of 'alternative' invented by the market place. The political act lies with the listener. It's the heavy-puffing Christian Slater of Pump Up The Volume, secretly transmitting in his bedroom, who can fuck things up, mangle the system and start fires in the miserable Reagan '80s. And perhaps Eisenstein's collaboration with Prokofiev, with its scarcely-hidden attack on Stalin's terror, via his love of musicals, is a great political act, one where all the wiring is viciously made visible.

The political listener takes the noise, the reverberations, the desolation of contemporary sound and reforms them as a violent act or thought. Once the standards and stereotypes are rejected by the individual then she can speak for herself and her listening become political.

1. Stereolab- Ping Pong

2. Robert Wyatt- At Last I Am Free

3. My Bloody Valentine- Sueisfine

Untitled piece by Hermann Nitsch. No copyright infringement intended.

Only The Good Die Young

His aging face hardened and weathered by the unflinching Missouri sun. His old bones wrapped round his 1869 Schofield. A wheezy breath filling his lungs. Coughing on exhale. Eyes brimming with hate and remorse. Weary and tired Jesse Woodson James rots into the dust on which his house is built on.



Rage Against the Machine - Renegades Of Funk

Photo of Vietnamese Buddhist Monk setting himself alight in protest. Photographer unknown. No Copyright infringement intented.

Come And Shake Bones

She looked like a piece of meat. Not in the sexist sense, at least that would could have been taken as a compliment in a twisted misogynistic way. She however looked like a piece of pork, greased up and freshly tied with string ready for the oven. Her uncompromising thighs, bloated under the pressure of a 16 year old burden. He face reddened by a thousand blocked veins. Her sagging breast lay strewn across her chest unsupported like Dali's eggs dripping down her front. I danced with her for a short time, she tried to keep up but the beat to the commercial sound that suffocated the airways was too fast, staccato . Excited by the faintest of sexually charged attention, determined not to put a trotter wrong this time. Her slightly rosy quality was a endearing for a short time, but i soon grew weary of her. Pushed to the back of the room, she now sat alone and there she'll stay, and breathing cliche of repulsion. Sitting alone at the back, an endless monument to the forgotten masses. She soon turned to stone, granite I think it was.

Photograph by Paul Strand Entitled Blind. no copyright infringement intended.

Playboy Tre - Sideways (SALEM Drag Chop remix)
Big Boi - Shine Blockas (feat. Gucci Mane)
Gucci Mane - Dangers Not a Stranger

People Of The Sun

Mud fills your Lungs, with every heavy breath. Lost in a swap of loathing and obsession. I would pay anything just to get in through the doorway, and stand amongst the mess of people, with flailing limbs, elbows to my face and into my side. Sweat dripping down my brow, I don't want to take my coat off. The devil sits on his arm chair in middle England watching Saturday night television, flicking through the endless channels of filth and plastic; nothing really takes his fancy. He just ends up putting on a radio station and falling asleep: there is no greater blasphemy then having the radio on television. What would your mother say? Abstract thoughts scribbled down to fill a page. Dogs eat their own tails and cats shed their skins in the world hazy with fumes and sounds like strange hands forced into to my ears. I pretend to listen, and nod with a vacant smile draped across my face, and a balding woman with cracking skin tells me about her weekend. Perched on my chair with wheel, with my unironed shirt and father's tie burning into my skin. When they say, Jump, I say, Fucking jump yourself, you capitalist swine. That great canyon of silence growing between us, after all this is just a stream of consciousness. Sleep, Wake Up, Sleep Again



Painting Titled Execution by Yue Minjun. No Copyright Infringement Intented.

Pink Priest - Those Paws
Biopolar Bear - Graves
Salem - Frost

Art And Music

'I don't have to prove that I am creative!

'I don't have to prove that I am creative!

All my pictures are confused

And now I'm going to take me to you.'

Talking Heads- Artists Only

Here's 'One Hundred Live And Die' by Bruce Nauman.

Its linguistic permutations play my mind like music. Scanning down, I think of Delia Derbyshire's recordings of ghostly voices discussing horrid dreams as they stumble through glum electronic fog. If I scan across I think of the dizzying incantations of Einstein On The Beach based on the fractured, shape-shifting language of an autistic man.

Remembering Einstein On The Beach means remembering Philip Glass, an old friend of Nauman's- they used to make music together. I remember the cover of the CD: a scary neon tube buzzing with Lynchian nastiness; crackling with the secret life of machines. As I flick around the one hundred statements, I remember the drifting, drugkissed drones of Spiritualized's '200 Bars' and how a tired girl's voice forces them forward, counting 'one, two, three, four' like a frightened child tiptoeing towards Mister Wolf or like an analgesic, slow-motion remix of Glass' choir, who recite digits with amphetamaniac intensity. I see language with the chugging rhythm of a hospital respirator; language with sinister intensity. I think of the shaking German girl in Paths of Glory who gradually silences American soldiers, I think of cattle, war poetry, the words of Wittgenstein, the motorik beat of Neu!, the hellish pulse of industry, tyranny, and what music would look like as a manipulated light source. I think 'One Hundred Live And Die' comes closest to articulating real 'metal machine music' and does this, paradoxically, without making a single sound.

What can we make out of this other Nauman work, Self-Portrait As A Fountain?

Now all that neon has worn off. Here we have a skinny young aesthete. He's presenting himself in a role, as a thing, a fountain, an object which swollen organs of the art world fall upon as meaningful. So here is R. Mutt playing around through Bruce Nauman, a ready-made man producing a recirculated stream of piss? Nope, no way. I cross that out. But Duchamp's contemporaries, the Futurists, who adored speed, metal fusing with flesh, industrial rhythm and fascism, loved noise, too. Luigi Russolo built 'noise machines' which he incorporated into dissonant musical scores. He coined and developed the idea of the 'Art of Noise' in a manifesto. Paul Morley names his anonymous electronic music collective after this text in the 1980s and Nauman later transforms language into pure sound and denatures it into noise with his late installation Raw Materials.

The aesthete spits water playfully, nude, like a figure in Dionysian revelry. As he self-consciously performs a cover version of Duchamp's great work, I wonder about post-punk and its desire to deconstruct, play around with signification, meaning and convention. What's exciting about the piece is how it distorts representation and shuns interpretation. I can force this frozen Nauman through loads of archetypes and there's still a lurking sense of aporia: meaning is blocked and I can't say why. He's a classical figure in Dionysian revelry; or an actual fountain from a terrifying future... a man with metal veins, with a transformed system of pipes; he's a rich postmodern boy constructed and conversant in metalanguage, repeating gender theory, addicted to the sensorily-disordered sex practiced in the toilets of weirdly Dionysian discos. He makes me think of Momus' playful, literate pop. I want to place puns and parentheses around the image, around everything, like a good deconstructionist and accept the inherent failure in my attempts to interrogate its meaning. When I ask the young man questions he spits in my face.

As an interlude, here is Sadie Benning ravenously consuming critical theory in a confined space.

Her films exist on this invisible wavelength in minute static-scarred pieces so we'll have to abandon her video work for the information which orbits it and its key subject, Benning herself. The snatches of her films I've seen are full of self-loathing, fear, despair and a litany of other miserable nouns. It's easy to parallel Benning's adolescent confessional/diaristic impulse with the unceasing self-recording of outsider musicians like Jandek and Daniel Johnston. Much as they record on Dictaphones (or used to anyway), Benning expresses herself with her own lo-fi technology: the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera. These studies of isolation, dominated by deterioration, find sonic analogues in the nihilism of groups like Flipper or the doomsaying of the GZA; the same self-awareness and removal from the masculine in the work of The Slits (where compulsory heterosexuality is the consequence of capatalism, 'just another marketing ploy.') The riot-grrl lineage persists in Benning's own group, Le Tigre with their songs about Minimalist praxis, John Cassavetes ('genius? misogynist?') and ecstatic, electroclash breviaries of feminism.

Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire. 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Then I'll turn the last gasp of focus onto Nam June Paik's Electronic Television and the work of Tim Hecker. I will try to say things simply. I will try to finish quickly. I'm aware as I write of very difficult and confusing noises. I'm also aware of the failure of one of my speakers. My music has lost one dimension: it is flatter, more like an image than ever before.

What I like about Tim Hecker's work (and I don't really think this is an original thing to say) is how it sounds old and new. I like that this is a familiar sensation which other people have. How the white noise crashes, how everything ends, in delirious shortwave, conjures old video footage of the solar system, Brothers Quay ballets and again, slightly Lynchian sensations. Who is Hecker, the listener wonders, working away in the digital wilderness? There he is on television in Canada, deliberately destroying records, stabbing equipment until it malfunctions, just like Christian Marclay used to. And Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus group, had the same desire to deform modern technology and mangle electronic devices. In listening to Hecker we hear the decline of civilization playing out; we move towards the zero... everything eventually shuts down. This is not a particularly Fluxist thing to think. The tenets of play are observed but Hecker's work is not short or comic. He is the ghost in the machine. He sounds like a fridge buzzing on a multiple-substance comedown.

This narcotic bliss he supplies us with is very Fluxist, though. The movement demanded change and progression. This is what Hecker does, his work represents a break in ambient music and minimalism: it doesn't create the sonic environment but repeats it. The sound of Hecker is understood ineffably, hypnagogically, like car alarms, like language down a bad phone, we all recognise the sounds of machines, of industry, of malfunctioning equipment, because these things litter our lives and lurk in our heads. Hecker is performing a kind of mimesis. He is, if you like, electronic television.

I'm asking art and music questions. They always resist, never want to answer. They speak together, sit together in contorted mirrors, joining hands. Here are two sisters on conflicting medications, each mishearing the other's thoughts.

1. Le Tigre- What's Yr Take On Cassavetes?

2. Philip Glass- Knee Play 5

3. Art of Noise- Close (To The Edit)

4. Tim Hecker- I'm Transmitting Tonight

5. Daniel Johnston- I Save Cigarette Butts

'One Hundred Live And Die' and 'Self-Portrait As A Fountain' by Bruce Nauman, photograph of Sadie Benning by Monique Jean and 'Living Inside' by Sadie Benning and 'Electronic Television' by Nam June Paik. No copyright infringement intended.

'On The Lower Frequencies': Rock Music's Gradual, Terrible Death

'Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.'

T.S. Eliot- Four Quartets

Rock music and Death are very close friends.

They live together now that rock music is dead.

That rock music is dead is nothing new. For a long time now it has spoken of Death, desiring his arrival and dancing with his sickly sylphs and weary footmen. Rock music has invoked Death endlessly: on the radio, in the bedroom, in miserable buildings, here, everywhere, rock music has transmitted Death like a virus. We have all seen Death on television. A rock group take along their radio ghost in wires and plastic and perform before the camera.

Here the radio ghost plays. The group don't have to play as their recorded ghost plays for them. Real ghosts have radio ghosts. Jimi Hendrix is dead but I watched him at Woodstock on video. I listened to his performance on my computer. If I do this he isn't really dead. I can resurrect him in fifteen seconds.

Jimi Hendrix is a ghost. We can't call him a corpse.

In the 1960s, Soviet Russia banned rock music. Recordings by The Beatles and other Western subversives were bought on the black market by rebellious youths. The illicit material was often duplicated by holding a radio tuned to a pirate station playing a popular track to the microphone of a recording booth. The low-grade vinyl would then be replicated on X-ray plates stolen from hospitals. As a grim memento mori, the eager youth would ask for 'two Beatles ribs' and then resurrect the group by placing the needle on the cancerous lungs or the busted skeleton of some oppressed Soviet man. The youth listening to rock music is listening to death.

Now all those ribs are rotting; all that music is legal, and that tyrannical government is gone.

Rock music survives on the tyranny of the star, the carefully constructed image of the impossibly sad prince who can't be soothed and so must be gradually drugged.

This drugging, this proximity to death, neutralises the star, nixes their intensity, their creativity. As existence drags on, the threat of silence grows ever greater. The listener has to acknowledge that the star has nothing to say.

The rock star tests voices in front of the mirror.

Death enters through the mirror.

'The source of the depression is not that rock music today is Dead but that it refuses to Die.' Greil Marcus, The Life And Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock N' Roll.

What is different now when we talk about rock music and Death together is that their relationship isn't particularly threatening or even exciting.

Rather than dying or being dead ('being dead' is almost playful. It makes me think about 'being an animal' or 'being miserable', something desired and also a little transient), rock music is now just senile. It dribbles, lives in limbo, not alive but not-quite dead.

So where is Death, we have to ask? Why won't he come? It has to be the worst thing in the world to wait for death.

We're watching the long, drawn-out death of a particular music. As culture loses its centre so does sound. As the world becomes stranger, more confusing, more unnatural, we have to ask not for mirrors and analogues but digital denaturings. What we hear in rock music now is a hollow voice, one which imitates unsure of its sources, singing an uncertain sorrow, enacting a kind of anaemic pastiche. And pastiche, as every good critic of postmodernism knows, is

'The wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language [...] it is a neutral practice of mimicry. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its humour.'

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society

Let's go deep down a hole now, to finish.

The protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been living underground, hibernating after a riot, living in a Deathlike state. At the end he asks

'Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which really frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'

In a world where music is a series of disembodied voices, without substance, endless and invisible, the singularity is less important, it is quickly replaced. It's these 'lower frequencies' away from the mainstream, against convention, that we must locate and lock down to record, repeat and redefine sound.

In writing about Death we must leave pauses, spaces, silences, passages without communication.

Rock music, when singing about Death, must remember these lapses, this static, those cracks; that each signal eventually fails. Rock music must remember each friendship soon ends once the dialogue has finished; once the virus' work is complete.

And that's all I have to say.

1. McCarthy- We Are All Bourgeois Now

2. Autechre- Flutter

3. The Velvet Underground And Nico- The Black Angel's Death Song

'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano, Sonic Youth mid-80s (photographer unknown) and Mick Jagger and Michele Breton in 'Performance' by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell. No copyright infringement intended.

A Manifesto For The End Of The Decade Of Nothing- 2000s

1. We welcome the end of this decade; we kiss winter's face and her frost crackles in our mouths. Here's to death, defeat, lies, war, blood, bombs, money, piracy and pestilence, all the things which have made the first son of this miserable century glow so brightly.

2. We congratulate this decade for ending so many things: the end of analogue, the end of permanence, privacy, the pleasure of wax, of film, of disc, and thus the beginning the misery of the invisible. We hunt triumphantly through the digital wilderness, recording our footfalls in the static fuzz of the mud.

3. We mourn the death of Stockhausen, Ballard, Wallace, John Hughes, Jam Master Jay, J Dilla, Jacques Derrida, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Michael Jackson, Dash Snow, Susan Sontag and so many others. We mourn the drowning of the mighty polar bear in the once-frozen oceans of the Arctic, the execution of the innocent in public and the unending violence of modern existence.

4. We support the extinction of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the slaying of the Griffin, the suffering of government and media. We confess this decade's hidden age, for the 21st Century begins where the Berlin Wall falls and fully awakens when another ideological structure crashes down amid the breeze and chill of autumn.

5. We warm ourselves over the end of rock music, a tyrannical, murderous form which is now only safe speaking the language of the ironic, sitting excluded in the corner, punished for ignoring its source material; its rejection of the electronic as feminine and futuristic and the African as masculine and primitive. We support this formal extinction entirely.

6. We eagerly await the return of dead formats in the mode of irony (the return of the video, the Compact Disc, the LaserDisc, the Betamax, MiniDisc, the cassette, the television et cetra). We anticipate the dissolution of the city, the further blurring of gender and orientation into a great slurry of lust, the ravenous consumption of bedroom chemicals and inner-city narcotics so we may enter into a true politics of 21st Century delirium. We photograph the pollution of our rivers, sing the rhythm of the power station, the scale of acid rain, touch the rime of sickly skin, wear the coats of medication- go on!- let each cochlea fill with the horrid buzz of a thousand malfunctioning modems, cables, wires, connection points. All smog-tongued lovers learn the language of the new century!

7. As the century enters its adolescence we invite the eruption of skin disorders, sexual disease, coldness of feeling, drug abuse, mortality, depression, selfishness and patricide.

8. All mice, become dogs.

SIGNAL. SIGNAL OUT. SIGNAL.

1. Aidan Baker- Part One

2. Stereolab- Anamorphose

3. Ariel Pink- For Kate I Wait

'Seraphim' by Anselm Kiefer. No copyright infringement intended.

Index Of Failure

Acedia, accede, Achilles, AIDS, akrasia, Ali, Muhammed, alienation, (Western, Marxist) Bartleby, banality (in Western culture; in films), Beckett, Samuel, bewilderment, Blanchot, Maurice, boredom, Borges, (and blindness) Bowie, David (and mime, and cocaine, and mid-80s career slump) Burroughs, William Seward (heroin addiction, shooting of wife), Bush, Kate, catalepsis, catastrophe, Chernobyl, Cobain, Kurt (see also: In Utero), collapse, Coppola, Francis Ford (see also: The Conversation), Conversation, The (see also: Coppola, Francis Ford) confusion, Crash (Ballard), crisis, Culkin, Macaulay, Curtis, Ian (see also: Strozsek), derangement, de-map, Deyn, Agynes, Dickinson, Emily, disorder, disaster, Dylan, Bob (pre-motorbike crash, 1966 England tour), dysphoria, eczema, Edwards, Richey (and disappearance, and 4 real incident, and fascism), error, eruption (of boils, of 'moral outrage), explosion (of economy, of packages in North America through primitive devices), The Face, falling, falsity, failure (i.e. in famous examples or 'cases': of the Sinclair C5, of man to inhabit the moon by promised date, of replicating International Klein Blue, of Microsoft computers, of economy, of God, to finish, of Challenger launch, of Face Magazine), Fassbinder (and struggle to find love, and the making of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and cocaine addiction), Faulkner's Quentin, Faust, feigning, folly, forgetting, format extinction, fucking up, Fuck You(r), Buddy. funding problems in the early '80s (for institutions), Generation X, God (death of, failure of, epistemic distance between man and,), Godard, Jean-Luc (Weekend, Soft And Hard), Gogol, Nikolai (starvation, Dead Souls), greed, Gorbachev, Mikhail (see also: glasnost, perestroika), Gordon, Douglas (24 Hour Psycho, Zidane: 21st Century Portrait, see also: Zidane), Gordon, Kim, Gore, Tipper (see also: Zappa, Frank), Groucho Marx, Hearst, Patty, Heaven's Gate, Henson, Jim (Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal), heroin chic, Hirst, Damien (A Thousand Years, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living), Hopper, Dennis (delirium tremens in desert, in Blue Velvet), Hudson Hawk, Hughes, Howard, Hughes, John (and depiction of adolescent angst, use of music, descent of career), illusory humanity, immanence, immersion, inability, inexorable (decline, defeat, loss), Jam, James, Richard D., Jarmusch, Jim (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law), jeremiad (of Ophelia, of Lady Macbeth), Johnston, Daniel, Joyce, James, jungle music, kabbalah, Kafka, Franz (and 'First Sorrow', and 'Hunger Artist', and 'Diaries, see also: 'Kafkaesque' and with relation to failure, Cronenberg's Kafka), Korine, Harmony (Gummo, Kids, drug addiction, see also: Godard, Dylan, The Face), kudzu vine, lack (as theory, of sleep, of sufficient urban renewal in England and US), Levinas, levitation, Liddel, Alice, London (and bombings, and desertion in the 1970s, and anxiety), loss of dignity, loss of memory, Lynch, David (and failure of Dune, and success of Blue Velvet, and owls)

madness (in Nietzsche, historical attitudes, as artistry in Dada), Malkovich, John, Marceau, Marcel, massacres (of the 1990s, of the 1980s, of the 1970s, of the 1960s), masturbation (see also: onanism), Manson, Charles (solo album, television interviews), Meinhof, Ulrike, see also: Red Army Faction, Morrissey (and dislike of videos, and Northern England, and flirtation, and homoeroticism) MTV (initial racism, lack of music, influence on youth), Nauman, Bruce (Run From Fear, No, No, No), Nabokov, Vladimir (and butterflies, and incest), Nag and Nell (see also: Beckett, Samuel), Neue Slowenische Kunst, nihilism, Nietzsche (and master and slave morality, and syphilis, and errant decoding by Nazism in), Northern England (and Morrissey, strike action, unemployment), Nico (The Marble Index), nothingness, numbness, Nyman, Michael (Drowning by Numbers soundtrack, unfinished Shandy opera)

Ol' Dirty Bastard, oral disease, Ophelia (see also: jeremiad), Orly Airport (bomb scare, location in La Jetee), Opium (perfume, substance, text), onanism (see also: masturbation), Ono, Yoko (solo albums, performance art), Only The Lonely, Orphee, Paradise Lost (Milton, heavy metal, Penderecki), Paracetemol (frequency in overdoses, popularity in UK), Phoenix, River (death, performance in My Own Private Idaho), Pop, Iggy (flirtation with Nazi chic, and Berlin), Performance (film, 1970, see also: Roeg, Nicolas), perestroika, postmodernism (and failure, and disillusion, and irony. See also: Warhol, MTV, Manson), Prozac, Pynchon, Thomas (and entropy, and reclusion, and drugs, and death, see also: Rilke, postmodernism), quiescence, Reagan, Ronald, Reagan, Nancy, rhetoric (and Aristotle, and Reagan, Nancy), Remain In Light (Talking Heads), riot grrl movement, Ryder, Winona, Schopenhauer, Arthur, Scorscese, Martin, Self-Portrait (Dylan album), self-mutilation, self-doubt, self-improvement, self-destruction, Sevigny, Chloe (see also: Korine, Harmony, The Face), Sheedy, Ally, Sherman, Cindy (and the pleasure of the gaze, and loathing) Shields, Kevin, Shields, Brooke (anti-depressants and, child pornography controversy and), Situationist International, Slick Rick, Sonic Youth (See also: Gordon Kim, Youth Against Fascism, 1oo%), Stroszek (Herzog film. See also: Curtis, Ian), Sturm und Drang, Sterne, Laurence, Streetwise (film), syphilis

Talking Heads, Tarkovsky, Andrei (and the Zone, and time, and cancer), Tristram Shandy (see: Sterne, Laurence), tumescence, Turner, (see: Performance), Unknown Pleasures (see: Curtis, Ian), In Utero (see also: Kurt Cobain, heroin chic), Ulmer, James 'Blood', Valium, violence (Paris 1968 and, Zizek and), vulnerability (theory, 2000s and), Wallace, David Foster, Wallace, Christopher, We (Zamyatin), What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Chomsky), Wilson, Jane and Louise (Gamma, Trance), Wu-Tang Clan, When Doves Cry (Prince single, 1984), Wonderland (see also: Liddell, Alice), Yes (see also: Edwards, Richey), Young MC, Young Marble Giants, Youth Against Fascism (Sonic Youth single, 1991), Zamyatin, Yevgeny (See also: We), Zidane (and self-destruction. See also: Gordon, Douglas), Zizek, Slavoj (and violence, and Lacan, and cinema theory. See also: Neue Slowenische Kunst, violence), 9/11 (and reporting of, and parody of, and repetition of, and visual quality of), 100% (Sonic Youth single. 1991. See also: Sonic Youth, Youth Against Fascism)

1. Leyland Kirby- Memories Live Longer Than Dreams

2. Nico- These Days

3. LTJ Bukem- Atlantis

A-L photograph by Jane and Louise Wilson, M-S photograph of William Burroughs from the 1980s, N-O photograph of Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny, 1995, photographer unknown, S-100% photograph of Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the 1980s, photographer unknown and addendum photograph of Slavoj Zizek. No copyright infringement intended.

Joggrafi

Amorica, Warshington (Locate your own city on the map and mark with a silver star. Good. Also note the decaying railways of Brokelyn and the remnants of race riots in Correticut, the last Aryan state.)

Errorland, Duhblin (Kiss three spaniels. Named in accordance with Joyce's deathbed wishes, this country enjoys great prosperity through its reformation of the legal system. Litigation is now dependent on the plaintiff's citing of various arcane references. Court rises to the sounds of gunfire and static, soon brought to order by the recitation of 'Well, you know, or don't you ken it or haven't I told you, every telling has a tailing and that's the he and she of it.'

Perish, Franz! (Enrage a sleeping tramp with the poking of a stick. Run by a bicameral government of literary mavens who, following the firebombing of Prug over 'heritage disputes', won the figure and form of Kafka but, after bartering, lost Simone and Jean-Paul in the famous December Couples Treaty. Following political rupture the country is now divided into pro and anti-Kafka factions. Many pro-Kafka cities are inhabited by groups which pass time lying on their backs in stricken insectile anguish, then look to the cement skies and scream. In anti-Kafka cities the work is interpreted by application of Correct Brodism where, as a way of 'correcting' history, poor Franz's work is endlessly burned in public squares.)

Ignoreway, ---- (Nothing. Forgotten. Terribly cold. Represented on all modern maps as a blank traversed by a great groaning smudge of toxic ink.)

Lungdung, Engleland (Fake a cold. Avoid work at the call centre. Rent videos. Eat bad food. Masturbate. Communist and with a strictly enforced smoking policy the city of carcinogenic cold seasons and early oncological autumns continues to raise the fist of Communism, however bad its circulation. This is actually great improvement, brought on by the deposition of Paxman- immortalised in a triptych on loan to the Pompidou in Perish- who became convinced he was king and so inaugurated years of tyranny, great taxation and hunger.

Below: Amorican minimalist Tao Lin's soundscape project 'Jesus Christ' (the indie band) with their breakthrough hit 'Is This Really What You Want?', Engelish techno angels Mike And Rich with their marvellous 'Eggy Toast'- 'a mega-fucking lush choon, yeah?'- and Nouvelle Vague chanson 'Tu M'As Trop Menti' by Chantal Goya sourced from the original celluloid reels of 'Masculin, Feminin'

1. Jesus Christ (the indie band)- Is This Really What You Want?

2. Mike And Rich- Eggy Toast

3. Chantal Goya- Tu M'As Trop Menti

'Stag' by Gerhard Richter. No copyright infringement intended. Please forgive connection problem. Sound will return soon.

I Want The Biggest Horns Money Can Buy

I've been digging a hole for quite a while now, it's now as deep as three men my size, maybe four. Sometime I ask my friends to come over to help me dig it, but in all honesty I prefer to dig alone. I like the satisfaction you get when you accomplished something by yourself, be it a task as menial as digging a hole. Although yesterday Goldie Hawn came over and helped me dig. We talked about the clouds and drank pink lemonade. Then we took off our tops in the heat, and started to dig some more. She tied back her wavy long blonde hair because it kept getting in her face. I let Goldie use the nice shovel that I had bought earlier that week, once I had realised how deep I planned to go. I instead used my father shovel. It had a broken handle and the black paint on the wooden shaft was peeling. I couldn't let Goldie use that could I, what would she have thought of me? By mid afternoon Goldie had left, she had to get home to start dinner. I was left alone once again to carry on digging. Usually I stop by eight thirty at night, but for some reason that day I did not feel tired, and carried on well into the night. I think this will hole will be my grave, it's the right sort of size. I don't want to buried laying on my back, I want to be stood up, in a proud sort of manner. When I'm finished digging, I think it would be best to bury something in my hole. To prove how deep I got. A photo perhaps, or some milk teeth. So everyone knows that it was my hole.

Rick Springfield - Jessie's Girl

Photo of Francis Albert Sinatra taken by Bergen County, New Jersey police force in 1938 on his arrest for seduction of and the act of adultery with a married woman. No Copyright infringement intended.

Do you think they're ready for Bonnie?

I wandered through the hallway into a room full of children, immediately gravitating towards the supposed "adult section" of the room, pushing past the private eyes that watched my entrance. The line between child and adult defined with a line of vomit strewn across the floor. It was Homecoming, or Graduation, I couldn't quite remember. The Nocturnal youth lay under a net of puberty, crawling and scratching at the rope that held them down. I walked over to the caged children, "it's mind over matter". I hoped my words would give them some solace, in their time of sexual confusion. I took a seat by the breakfast bar while people jumped and stomped on the table tops and screamed and kissed. Pouring my £7 wine into a white plastic cup. An older woman approached me. She sat down next to me and we discussed my future; where I thought my life was taking me, what path should I choose. She expressed a obvious worry about the number of youths that had crawled in. I told her to lock the doors at 10:30, after that let no more enter. She calmed her down and we poured more wine into our plastic cups. She talked about Chekhov, I hadn't read any of his work but I promised I would.

Gareth Williams And Mary Currie - The Best Weapon
SALEM - Frost



Photo of Lida Baarova, 7/9/1914 in Prague. No Copyright infringement intended

European Athletics

He wakes up- shrugs the menacing whale away- walks to the kitchen which is full of bleached, cold light- late afternoon- yawn- covered in black and grey duvet- dragged on floor- fridge light- no milk- not black coffee- he'll puke- he aches- more bed- he can't walk to the little food den, no money- too cold- he decides not to walk at all- television- low volume- a leotarded Russian foal curves slowmotionish um over high jumping bar- um, dick won't thaw- icicled scrot- she fails, the foal, the bar wobbles- the shower will be hotter- I hope it snows- he thinks- the roads will close- bed- bed- bed- he finds some bread- into the toaster- he stares at heat- his eyes hurt- cancel, cancel, cancel- toast sucks- black furry toast jumps out- drug fag!- horror outside- outside vet's in car park- men like dogs- paranoid- a question- kiss a puddle- she saves- nothing works- poor Russian girl skinning a rabbit on a frozen lake- she removes ballet slippers- smokes- slips out of tights- I'm tired- tongue out, snowflake, he thinks- cough-cough-cough- her thundering lungs as she phelgms from a tenement into a heap of dead birds- she features in a catalogue for pale, diseased Russian princes- aches- floppy cock- Mister mute unbulged- slug slump- sickly, Prozacked grey hermaphrodite- shhh, toast cold- and the lovely swimming pool girl from ages and ever ago who snogged him in the autumn- sniff- chlorinated hair- tarry Xmas light in car park- three chimes- hour- sad anorexic ballet girl in secondhand fleece- bruised thigh- breasts shushed by jumper- sulking in bed in the blue starry pyjamas waiting for the film to end- it's too long- bad broken bed- no sleep- and that fascist weird Connecticut Aryan girl- he thinks about her pug mum- weekends wasted the whole spring- engorged overture- walrus woman- he shudders- indoor tennis- scrunching and tumbling over fake grass court- commercial lighting- chilly, daughterish hug at party- Madonna video- touching her makes him homesick- he yelps- volume horror- that song sucks with its big horny saxophone howls- sax sucks- sex sucks- he failed- sleep sucks- I miss the tenderness of hands- how they join- no drugs left- avoid- not tough- not male- return to bed- under covers led by hand past all the beasts of the forest- he sleeps- at last the light dies away- turn it over- turn off.

1. The Advisory Circle- Farmland, Freeland

2. Liliput- Die Matrosen

3. Madonna- Lucky Star

'Corporate Leisure' by Rut Blees Luxemburg. No copyright infringement intended.

'Ennui And Malaise' (Episodes 1-4)

'Ennui And Malaise': A late-night, low-budget teen series yoking together the cinema of John Hughes, radical French theory and avant-garde literature in a deranged aesthetic mix while exploring the sexual adventures of two lovestruck teenage waifs- the rich and miserable Alex and his sulking, brittle girlfriend Sophie- as they drag themselves through the wasteland of adolescence by getting intergalactically fucked-up, listening to an impossibly hip soundtrack of European electronica in an obscure format and talking endlessly about forgotten branches of philosophy in the gloomy kitchen of Alex's father's flat in hour-long installments which are televisual analogues to wintery ice-cream headaches induced by frost and bad drugs. A cult hit.

Episode One: Alex and Sophie go to a fancy dress party each wearing masks of the other's face, then drink far too much rum, clumsily fuck in an empty bath and pass out before a roaring fire like dosed kittens while their homosexual friend Fox reads The Story Of The Eye aloud to a mute androgyne on a brown couch. Soundtrack: 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' by James Joyce and 'Louder Than Bombs' by The Smiths. Subtitles.

Episode Two: The legendary 'Kitchen' episode. Sophie and Alex have an argument late one night over who finished the bacon. Throughout a skinny mime holds up cue cards that dictate how the viewer should feel- for example, 'Aroused' card is held aloft when he eats biscuit crumbs from her belly button, 'Culturally Aware' card is held when a knowing reference is made to Godard's 'La Chinoise'. Soundtrack: 'Jennifer' by Faust. Subtitles.

Episode Three: After a brief discourse on the misdefinition of irony at a bowling alley where Alex has to explain to his friend Stephen that having no hands at a wake for someone killed in a car crash is not of itself ironic but merely a bleak image the episode switches to focus on Sophie's trip to Brooklyn. She takes LSD in a bathroom during a thunderstorm ('Pathetic Fallacy'/ 'Foreshadowing' intertitle), hallucinates her transformation into a badger and then into a man, leading to a digression on Nietzschean 'Ubermensch' theory before she begins performing befuddled sexual favours on the L train then gets ditched at Prospect Park where the sky explodes like a massive firework. She wakes up somewhere in Bensonhurst, eating bacon on the kerb with two skinhead fascists and licking their fingers. Soundtrack: 'Threnody For Victims Of Hiroshima' by Pendericki and Fur Alina by Arvo Part. Subtitles.

Episode Four: Sophie and Alex have anal sex one overcast afternoon then go to Paris. Both listen to the new Kompakt compilation with lukewarm joy on the metro and attend a lecture held by Slovenian philosopher and guest star Slavoj Zizek on inherent fallacies in deconstruction and the pleasure of the gaze in Lynch's Blue Velvet. Then Alex gets lost in the Montparnasse Cemetery looking for Beckett's grave and Sophie steals some animal tranquilisers from a Tintin kid. They end up fucking under a denuded tree. Contains a famous re-enactment of Cocteau's Orphee at the end. Soundtracked by 'Tigermilk' by Belle And Sebastian.

1. Herbert- Freeze

2. Belle And Sebastian- Lazy Line Painter Jane

3. De La Soul- Eye Know

Photograph of Chloe Sevigny by Terry Richardson. No copyright infringement intended.

The Erotic Adventures of Charles and Isobel

A wealthy industrialist couple sprawled on a beast-legged futon sob over a new video that came this overcast morning by airplane from the pornography district in working-class Sweden. The film considers the relationship between a 'young fox' and amateur pornographer, Charles, and a 'soft swan', the glorious French literature student, Isobel. The film opens in a riot of tumescence as the young lovers complete their first sexual encounter sitting on a scowling hill, kissing each other with blistered lips, then lying fucked under a duvet that covers the gradual oranging of the afternoon. Charles decides to switch from amateur to mature sexual adventure by arranging a few letters. Following hours of late-night mischief with a laptop stolen from a Dutch architecture student and Isobel's correction and conjugation of a feast of French verbs they publish a bilingual guide to the joys of sexual slumming which receives a tide of lukewarm shrugs from pornography critics and contains a collection of explicit diagrams and instructions using words like 'feather' and 'smother' narrated in a chilly, after-orgasm voice by Charles in English and a nimble, gleeful purr by Isobel en francais in simultaneous audio tracks. Unflustered by the rejection of their guide- This must be another world, one of the industrial couple thinks, such diagram and direction texts are so popular- Charles and Isobel adopt a more cultured aesthetic. In a delirious montage one fuzzy summer of amyl nitrate and animal play transforms into a miserable winter of bored fetishism and Cold War Polish opera attendance. While rubbing Isobel's bum and standing in a puddle on the pavement at intermission Charles has his great idea reflected by a sudden explosion of naughty horns from the orchestra.

'The Erotic Adventures Of Charles And Isobel' is the couple's illegitimate son; a bastard text of exquisitely mangled woodcuts of Nordic children's stories that deforms the scenes of wizards, blizzards, whales and woodsmen into 'delicious dances of smut' that become incredibly popular. Charles thus directs Isobel and himself in a film where their own midwinter meeting is unfussily repeated through the pornography lover's familiar layer of digital fuzz. The industrialists discard this repetition in narrative as an opportunity to make coffee and kiss so they miss: the innocent Isobel cadging a cigarette from the trustfund princeling Charles at a bleak midwinter train station. (A subtle deviation from the original there as that first encounter was faraway from frost, trains and fags and occurred on that hill during a heatwave) and falling into conversation with him and quickly- after Isobel's 'sweet rabbit-feet' thump through the rotten fence- fucking in the tall, sweaty grass of a layby, cars droning past, the sky grey and blue, the moon slobbering over their skin. The juxtaposition of motorways and sex is explained by Charles to Isobel during a re-take as a reference to Ballard's masterful Crash which the real couple later read aloud to each other in bed before nodding off mid-sentence, one of Charles' hands paused over Isobel's left breast as if performing a spell. They walk away from the site of their unhealthy, metallic sex the couple walk through fat dull city drizzle, to flat, to gloomy kitchen, removal of dog-scented coats then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker until legs too tired. moval of dog-scented coats and socks then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker several times until eyes too tired, too much secreted. He dashed out to a toy shop for twenty eight minutes while she fiddled with the television, tried on some fur-trimmed boots and stomped around the kitchen nude pretending to be a Russian spy, then consumed all the milk and biscuits with lightning speed, was struck with hiccoughs and lay on the sofa, massaging her stomach and talking to it in a soothing voice one would use for a rain-soaked kitten. When the timid tummy feline was eased she used the phone to call Alex from the stairwell who sold the drugs. He came by train with a shaggy-coated Swiss girl named C- he met at the needle exchange last week, used the toilet as C- conversed with our girl in half-breed French/ Flemish about her hiccoughs, then sold her a small bag of colourful pearls which thundered through her stomach superfast so that when her boy returned with his stuff from the toy shop (antlers with synthetic snow, a plastic crown, a bag of glow-in-the-dark stars and magic sequins and a duvet which detailed the constellations in adherence with Ptolemy) she was, how do you say, fucked up? They constructed a den in the dark, snogged and fucked, then passed out, waking just as breakfast began. A freezing and delirious Isobel, overcome by Alex's incredible chemicals, had insisted Charles let her sleep clothed as she was, Russian spy hat, snow-dusted antlers and everything, and then said he had to do something about the heater tomorrow and then murmured various French curses before flopping into the bed, aglow in the chilly winter light, slumped across the constellation of Lupus. Charles was frying out of his skull because he had a pearl on the stairwell with Alex which tasted like bacon and crackled in his stomach like thunder. He tried to argue the huge, aggressive cat which hissed at him on the bed but it was much louder and more eloquent than he was. He thought about fetching a broom from that cupboard which the black kids snuck into to huff glue but realised, No, I can't do that walk now, and began barking which would surely spook the cat away, out the window or into the corner, but the cat began hissing and screeching even more and then suddenly turned away from him and curled up on the bed. He realised then at once that the bed was also the sky. He howled, fled the bedroom, smashed his foot against a table and collapsed. The fridge buzz began taunting him and so he returned to the bedroom. He shook the cat awake and climbed into its paws for warmth. The cat rocked him back and forth and held him above the stars. I don't ever want to fall, he thought. Fading stars spiked across the window when he woke up and Isobel lay in a heap, her antlers snapped and fake snow scattered over her cheek, lost in mutter-land. Charles turned on the television and drifted through the waking stations: testcards, voids, ice skating, dead lakes, a cow... but then there was too much light. Charles phoned someone to fix the heater but the man who ordinarily fixed the heater was away of course, because, Duh, said Isobel, drowning in her duvet, They always are. The windows groaned, aching against their frames, all stiffened by frost. Isobel breathed on the window and drew her face, delicately, slowly, softly, her hair glistening against the icy glass. She watches a small girl wearing a cape disappear into the snow. Pigeons scatter. Charles climbs back into the bed. Isobel finishes her face, falls back into sleep. The sleep falls on them like frost. Light rioting overhead.

give a fuck' but was really, at that very second, at exactly the same the Thundercats theme tune roared in lurid 80s ecstasy, its visuals casting a red beam over Isobel's pale, sicklied face, standing, bruised and booted in the car park of a housing block eighteen miles away, barking at his weary wife about money or cleaning the kitchen or remembering to do something which nobody could hear because this shitty silver car was heading straight for a ditch, and he, the man who fixed the heater, shouted, trying to be heard, but his weary wife in her inherited nightie embroidered with a naval insignia said, You're not much of a Romeo, lit a fag and drew the window narrower, to stop the cold air coming in because it was upsetting their daughter, standing bleary-eyed and breathless expecting breakfast and fearing her ringworm medicine, but the cigarette made her cough, underground pool hall.

Remember 'Rejections' file.

Sleep on him like frost.

I Was Only Sleeping...

You get on, hopefully not the man you destroyed last week. No, it isn't. Find yourself a seat and sit down. Quietly. This is not the place for chat unless you are over 60 or insane. Sometimes you read and sometimes you listen and sometimes both. Your mind wanders. Funny how moments of inspiration come to you at the most inconvenient times. There is no pen and paper here and don't you dare ask to borrow some. A glance through a pub window shows a nanosecond's footage of a intimate kiss, they could be married, they could be brother and sister, but in that moment, in that split second, they are stripped of all being and become merely a beautiful image. Often, standing, or sitting, as a bystander is more worthwhile than acting that moment. You're distracted but you're nearly home. Walking on hind legs causes memory loss. You rush but the words are gone. Only the unshakable image remains.

Fever Ray - Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Vibes - Shake It Off
David Byrne and Brian Eno - Qu'ran

Image by Wieslaw Walkuski, King Lear

Because Video Lasts Forever

1. 'Too much speed is comparable to too much light... we see nothing.'

2. 1980s class warfare defeated by the bright redfruit blush of adolescent love in an industrial city.

3. If you liked deconstruction and wanted to firebomb Reagan they were your band of choice.

4. Radical youth shipwrecked in the black hole of the television studio.

5. 'They could go some other place, only they didn't know no other place.'

6. Come, children, gather round the television

1. Deerhunter- Vox Humana

2. Ivor Cutler- A Wooden Tree

3. Delia Derbyshire- Nightwalker

4. Michael Galasso- Baroque (Chungking Express Theme)

Picture from 'Raving '89' by Gavin Watson. No copyright infringement intended.

Mothers

Me and Superman woke at dawn, went out into the forest and shot a very regal moose. We dragged him back to the house by his muddy antlers and yelping, laid him at Kitchen Mother's horned feet. Kitchen Mother said breakfast was not the time for a dead moose and jabbed us out her kingdom with her horrid discipline stick which she made during one of the big wars with her children's tears (twigs, twigs, twigs) So me and Superman went and sat in the lap of Sitting Room Mother who told us a story about a lovely virgin girl seduced by a transvestite wolf and saved by a heroic hunter with a magic axe. Sitting Room Mother smoothed my hair as she explained the story to Superman (because he is slow-witted, dense, a dummy- even the birds say it, safe on their branches, and they're kind about everyone). Her work completed she asked us to go. We went with our sad heads bowed because we both love Sitting Room Mother very much. I got the twinge so me and Superman went to bathroom. Bathroom Mother is the worst of all mothers. The tale the birds tell about her is she took too many drugs before we were born and now can't turn off her nightmares or her daydreams. She was readying something over the roaring sink and her face was turning red alert red. She made a little fire in her hands and the silver mirror started to crunch, crackle and purr with glee. Bathroom Mother scared us so much I had to kill the twinge on the hallway carpet. Me and Superman went and hid in the bedroom where we found Bedroom Mother all warm and half-asleep. We have to gather very close to her- her voice is so quiet, even a mouse wouldn't hear her without a megaphone. Bedroom Mother showed us pictures of all the animals that live in Africa and told us how the hyenas eat the monkeys that gather the fruits that fall from the trees heavier and darker than stars. Superman said we would walk to Africa tomorrow and bring a hyena home. I yawned like a lion. We kissed Bedroom Mother goodbye and she mumbled the same thing with so little breath she wouldn't move a leaf. We shut her door with great care and then hopped down the stairs two at a time. We dragged the moose back to the forest and played football for a while as it rotted in the fuzzy sun. We are going to skin the moose to make a rug to scare away evil. They do the same thing in Africa.

1. cLOUDDEAD- Grey

2. Chris Clark- Pleen 1930s

3. Sly And The Family Stone- Thank You (Falletime Be Mice Elf Again)

'Ectoplasm' by Rachel Goodyear. No copyright infringement intended.

Cheer Up Snork Maiden

Small children standing on table tops, screaming that they don't like Marvin Gaye. Mixing paints to get a muddy brown To decorate their plant pots. A small boy with a limp follows me around, asking how old I am, and if I have an children. his name is Curtis, he has a crooked tooth and is slightly over weight. Curtis struggles to articulate himself into coherent sentences. His greasy hair pushed over clumsily into a side parting, most probably done by his mother. We sat down together and he asked if he could sing me a song, I said yes. Then we talked about his Uncle, who sleeps on the sofa at Curtis' house, he has drinking problem. Curtis' Auntie had kicked his Uncle out, she couldn't take the late nights staying awake, waiting for her bald, grunting, hog of a husband to return from his weekend conferences on "streamlining the company's economic output" in Swindon. It was the same old story. She couldn't take Uncle Kevin's dwindling libido. I stopped Curtis there. In all truth I couldn't give a fuck about his family, or their problems. Although the slightly over weight greasy haired Curtis was endearing, he told me he had been born with his leg bone at the wrong angle, and his foot pointed out to a 45 degree angle, meaning he can't run as fast as the other kids. He also had something wrong with his spine as well , I can't remember the exact details, there only so long you can pay attention to small children. After about 5 minutes their voices just tune out into white noise. I know what I'll do, I'll give them a ball to play with, that'll keep them amused. Like a fucking dogs they are.

Gerry Rafferty - Right Down The Line
Sally Shapiro - Moonlight Shadow


Picture by Tove Jansson from her Moomin Book series. No Copyright infringement intended.

Hey Clarence, how's your mother?

I cut my hair, and brushed my teeth. I am a new man. I am reborn. I cut out the curls and brushed the snipings from my shoulders as I walked down the street wearing my fathers shoes, they are kangaroo leather, he haggled the shop keepers down from sixty pounds to thirty five, a crowning moment and one to assure his authority over the pack. One day it will be my turn. I haven't left the house in a while, I've reverted to living life through the window pane that overlooks my garden. Observing my father cut the grass with his petrol powered lawnmower, and my mother pick up dog crap with a trowel, a disgusting but necessary task. I haven't the will power to write any more. I lose attention easily in the heat. I think I might go out tonight after all I am just a victim of society.


Better Get It In Your Soul - Charles Mingus
Canto De Ossanha - Baden Powell & Vinícius de Moraes


Picture of Uffie. Photographer unknown to me. No Copyright infringement intended

A Season Of Sleeping In A Small Space

'I will sell sections of my abdomen for a profit so you can draw on them. They will put knitting needles into the connective tissues around my knee and small well-bronzed pins into a vague region of my thigh. In praise of anaemia a cluster of weakened children will tug and tear at my hair until I am bald. A child without teeth will try and puncture me like a balloon. A man of a weight (equivalent in gold uncertain) will enter and play a sorrowful tune by slapping the hollows of my cheeks. Will they let me sleep on leopard fur and dalmatian fur nude when it's hot? Girls shed their coats every summer. I won't eat! My mum will be coming and she will be dusting me with goldy magic glass her grandmother found in the forest. I will scream into a deep, dirty hidden hole every so often. My teeth will probably fall out and I won't be able to reach my dentist because no one in the building will let me use a phone. A starving adolescent witch with icy hair will walk in the gloom and put the frozen tit of the lightbulb near my mouth. It will be done gently, gently, and we will call it kissing and then I won't touch anyone at all for months and months and months.'

1. Stars Of The Lid- The Better Angels Of Our Nation

2. James Chance & The Contortions- Contort Yourself

3. Ellen Allien- Sehnsucht

'With No Roots Behind Them III' by Rita Ackermann. No copyright infringement intended.

Include Me Out

'What should be avoided most in the workplace and within interdepartmental documentation also is the linguistic construct of the 'covert masculine'. For example, the common workplace imperative 'If an employee has any concerns he should contact The Central Office on...' is no longer suited for the workplace. After all, it mistakes masculinity for neutrality and therefore asserts the dominance of the male and his superiority over the female. This develops a 'negative narrative' within the workplace as the female becomes invisible and no longer part of the 'body' of the environment: she is invisible, bleached, blacked out- that is she becomes a negative, without identity.

Previously acceptable classifications should be rejected- from 'postman' to 'man hours'- for their outmoded and inaccurate connotations which are the remnants of a stagnant society. Treating language without due delicacy and significance is indeed careless and moreover, damaging. To deny that the very roots of female/ male ideation embed themselves within the surface levels of simple language is, in contemporary society, absurd. To say the relegation of abusive metaphor, 'light uses' of language, to foregeround inferiority and promote such 'negative narratives' is a limitation of language is simply masculine selfishness manifesting itself in discourse. Every workplace and its interior codes is a reflection of our society and its external nature. If we continue such an erasing of the female how do we separate ourselves from the mud huts swept into the sea on primitive islands, or the tyrannies we have spent decades fighting? We have to avoid linguistic submission in all its shapes, cloaks and fogs.'

Anna Mirok- 'Belle Lettriste- Language, Feminine Significance and Masculine Coercion'. University of Michigan Press, 1980.

1. Chicks On Speed- For All The Boys In The World

2. Young Marble Giants- Eating Noddemix

3. Bjork- Desired Constellation

From Cindy Sherman's 'Centerfolds'. No copyright infringement intended.

Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?

Living your life through a haze, spending days lay strewn naked across your hot bed listening to the same song on repeat. The hate pickling inside you, turning your blood to vinegar. Your long hair newly washed, draw back across your forehead still dripping, dampening you pillow. You can't help but pick at the scab on your knee until it bleeds dark thick tricklets of blood. Motionless with only a small wry smile licked across your face, the atompshere jabbing and stinging at your skin. You feel like a wasp trapped under a cup, gasping for your last breath, scrutinizing the world through a magnifine glass. John Hughes died, you just watched The Breakfast Club and now you're ripe in your own social denial and rebellion, you piece of filth. You are not in a good place, but its too much effort to move. "GOOBBLE GOBBLE" This is my Hymn, my mantra, the thing I lay awake at 4 in the morning for, chanting to the beating of silent drums, drinking from the loving cup. While Prince Randian lights his cigarette. I am a false prophet. The living Antichrist but you won't ever notice.

Vibes - Night Court
The XX - FACT mix
Neon Indian - Deadbeat Summer



Picture taken from the 1932 film "Freaks" by Tod Browning. No Copyright infringement intended

He Is Not Here At The Moment

James has worked with furniture for a few months but not in the ordinary way.

He has carved various gnarled forms with knives inherited from his silent father and forced his friends to sit in them in hideous contortions like Cubist sculptures. James shuns all visual and auditory disturbances: the rooms where he does not work are blanks of neutral space. Voids. The studio itself contains a table rent in two by an imaginary comet with its gaps maintained by wires. Around the table are two chairs that flinch and their metal legs twist whispering round each other and James has titled this type of chair 'the mermaid'. It groans under slight weight and produces aches and blisters in the previously well-bodied. James has worked also on a bed which terminates at the waist of a grown man into a series of dot-dot-defeats. The smears of a dead fire lie on the floor and contain (approximately) shards of a failed door, what I thought was a rug but after inspection was definitely a muddy cat carcass punctured by air rifle and a photocopied map of an isolated region in Scotland where hermits perform nocturnal magick to satisfy a god who feigns involvement through casual downpours, so they say. James has no ideal audience in mind and no desire to find a real one. He puts on mittens and burns his post. He uses the speech tool on his computer to consult a medical textbook as he does not care to read. He lifts a plastic sack bulging with rusty leaves and adds them to the fire. A wife stands sulking on a chair. James is becoming thinner, to me, from here.

Grouper- I'm Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

Bobby Beausoleil- Movement The First

Neina- Clairvoyance

Image by Sergei Pankejeff illustrating a childhood nightmare. Pankejeff was a patient of Freud. No copyright infringement intended.

'So, Ahab, Can I Bum My Doobage?'

Molly Ringwald is a total fox in 'Sixteen Candles'. Leaning over her glittering birthday cake to kiss the weird slab-headed jock kid she represents the raw ache of teenage sexuality and the honey-haze of childhood innocence. This um dialectic is a big focus in John Hughes' movies until Home Alone when sex is forgotten in favour of snow and Xmas lights and the princely Culkin shooting the burglar in the face. Culkin later asserted his great lionlike libido in Harmony Korine's spaced-out Sehnsuchty slow-motion Sonic Youth video and art series The Bad Son which plays around with soft-core imagery as Mac sucks his teen wife's face and nods out in junky reverie.

John Hughes is no longer alive and this should will the stars to tears, particularly as Hughes in parallel with modern teen cinema is one of those Hyperion to a satyr situations. Perhaps Molly should have made one more film with him, an adaptation of Nabokov's Ada so she could dye her hair, eat pudding, smoke fags and fall in love with her brother (played by Anthony Michael Hall, duh). After all, Ada is the great teenage novel. They could film it in the kingdom of upper-class Chicago... we mourn John Hughes. Much as the bored and jet-lagged McCallisters watch It's A Wonderful Life (dubbed in French and then in Spanish) for comfort, we watch those great movies that make the yawnsome years of education bearable and keep adolescents warm around the television when so little else can or even wants to.

'We've got seventy dollars and a girl's underpants, we're safe as kittens.'

'Could you describe the ruckus, sir?'

Fade out, I guess.

Momus- Hairstyle Of The Devil

Can- I'm So Green

Le Tigre- Eau D' Bedroom Dancing

Photographs taken from 'Sixteen Candles' and 'The Breakfast Club'. Directed by John Hughes. Watch his films and buy them to benefit yourself and others. No copyright infringement intended.

Images, Loves, Books

IMAGES:

FORTY FAT WOMEN IN SPANDEX

A BOY WHO FALLS FROM A GREAT, GREAT HEIGHT

A GIRL LICKING A FROZEN POLE

THE FOXES FOLLOWING YOU HOME

ALL THE BAD SLEEPS PUT TOGETHER

FATHER FIDDLING WITH THE LIGHTS ON THE TREE

MOTHER PRETENDING TO DROWN IN A PUDDLE

SOMEONE WITH BRACES KISSING THE BELLY OF A MODEL WHALE

WIL E COYOTE ON A FAG BREAK WITH TOM THE CAT

TWO BALLET DANCERS IN A SUPERMARKET CAR PARK

LOVES:

TIGERS, LIONS, WOLVES

STARS

SNOW

SMOKE

CARTOONS

VIDEOS

1983-1990

ALICE AND THE CATERPILLAR

YORICK

TATE DONOVAN

BOOKS:

INDEX OF METALS

PHYSICS 11-15

WARHOL AT SUPPER WITH MILO AND DENNIS

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM: 'THE WHITE IN DARK SPACES'

HEDGEHOG IN THE FOG

THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE

GRAVITY, [HELD WITH COLD HANDS] TOUCHED LIGHTLY

INTIMACY

GHOSTS

SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS ON INNER CITY ROOFS

CLONAZEPAM

John Cale & Lou Reed- Dream

Cocteau Twins- Blind, Dumb, Deaf

Fever Ray- Coconut

'Confrontation 2' by Gerhard Richter from 'Oktober 18, 1977'. No copyright infringement intended.

Phrases, Fears, Ideas

PHRASES:

CAMERA

RABBIT

KASPER HAUSER

SMITHEREENS

PECTORUS EXCAVATUM

MENTAL ILLNESS

PATTY HEARST

CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING AND IDENTITY

FEARS:

OF NOT BEING LIKED

OF FIRE

OF STARTING

OF HAIR

OF ENDING

OF SKIN

OF KNIVES

OF SEX

OF PRETENCE

OF SPEECH

OF TELEVISION

OF THE DEVIL IN FANTASIA

OF NO REAL MEANING OR IDENTITY

IDEAS:

'I SHOT AND IT JINGLED IN HER THROAT LIKE MONEY.'

'RUSSIAN CHAMBER PLAYS RE-ENACTED BY DRUG ADDICTS'

'THE COINAGE OF 'HOUSE WOLF' FOR DOG/ 'ANTIOBIOTICKED' AS A VERB'

'LEARNING TO SWIM. A MEANINGFUL ACTIVITY IN PROXIMITY TO DEATH/ BIRTH'

'PERFORMANCE ART PIECE WHERE THE ARTIST PUNCHES HIMSELF REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE'

'AN ESSAY ON THE SAD SYMMETRY OF TWINS AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THEIR GRAPHS, CHILDHOOD DRAWINGS AND CHEMICAL INTAKE'

Land Of The Loops- Multi-Family Garage Sale

Laurie Anderson- Example 22

John Carpenter- Main Title From Assault On Precinct 13

'Patty Hearst Robbing A Bank on April 15, 1974'. No copyright infringement intended.

Troubled Boys Bounce Like An Ape...

Most rejected shadows, especially him, didn’t really traverse the globe in search of temptations and riches. That was all a fabrication, a justification to himself that he was doing something worthwhile. He had much more fun grumbling to a start, shrugging off scum that, on his skin, appeared to be levitating, at some early afternoon hour In an African brothel. He would wipe his dark, colourless eyes clean and breathe in the stale air that tapped his harem of emotional minor’s depression directly into his veins. The worst they felt the better he felt. Self pity is selfish and productivity falters due to invisible distractions. He could move alongside them without having to give anything away, no ‘good vibes’ or positivity. He could keep those for himself. He thought he was immune but their bitterness wore off on him and the spectresque figure could no longer stand it. He left on his own to spend the rest of his years alone. Maybe he could find himself or someone would come and show him the way. Sit tight. Nothing changed and he just got frustrated. So he went back to the brothel, drank himself stupid and it was the best time of his little translucent life.

The Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies)
Mobb Deep - Up North Trip
Neon Indian - Mind, Drips

I sound like a school book

What's the difference between kissing a boy or a girl? Boys have beards. Otherwise it'd be the same thing. There and back again. Fast at first, but you can't keep the pace up for long, the sinews in your legs cry out for relief, they go strike and your legs stop, no one passes the picket line. A large man in a red jacket shouts for you to go on but your vision has turned hazy as well as your hearing. Like living through a cave, echos and shadows are the only thing you can register. You can't lift your arms and the searing pain in your stomach when you breath in wont go away. You go to lie down but the large man in the red jacket tells you to get on you feet;
"how old are you? you're in your prime"

Koushik - Battle Rhymes For Battle Times
Joy Division - Atmosphere (with soundbite from Control)
Blank Dogs - The Crystal Ladies