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.