Red Is A Noun

Not-Writing

2011-02-14T19:36:00.000Z

*****

The most frightening thing is that I have nothing to say. Not even nothing 'left', whatever that means, but that really I have always said 'nothing', I think, and I'd welcome someone leaving something but they won't, will they? No, not likely, no. I haven't written anything here for a long time because it would be too hard, too much work and I don't feel that pang anymore- this is not my voice saying this, not really, here I am, not writing again, not me, not here, clipped by a dash. Something could be dredged up, no? One of those awful bits of pseudo-French theory from a winter or two ago or a brittle little Beckett impression, shivering, dumb, soaked in- no, fuck it. And what happened to the music? That was always the reason for writing to me, in this endlessly friendly, forgiving white space: I, with careful girlish hands, lovesick and stoned, carry records through the night, without the ordinary clumsiness, stuttering or- no, fuck it. That was never the reason for writing. It was only to show off and say very inconsequential things in a very grand way, in this voice acquired by eavesdropping, thieving, assiduously raking over books by dark, haunting the grounds of Beckett's estate, standing at the bottom of Burroughs' stairwell, making sure he's nodded out before I stumble out towards- and put an ellipsis in to show you can't keep this up, break the text apart like... no!- Alice, did the telephone go? No, not tonight. See, I can't keep this up, juggling, dancing, shaking, an agony which is- ended up a dash. So what? A shower of stars.

Charlie, you did all this before, you know? All this self-conscious stopping and starting, shaking and waking, it's not new, not even for you.

*****

Why did I stop writing here when it provided me with an 'outlet', if we want to use the embarrassing term which is not clinical, not even referential, just part of a larger outlet itself, the 'waste product' of a long, long pipe. An outlet this is not, never was, no. I never had anything to say which might be considered, in the confines of this ugly, supposedly open, non-clinical term, part of an 'outlet', my blood letting, my letter writing, my not writing, never an outlet, not, all the things I wanted to let out would not come, I never hit the vein, my exhausted words, my exhausted veins- I said that once- let's forget, put it out. Writing was never an outlet. An agony which is closed, stitch by stitch, by someone else, sealed up inside you, howling, waiting to be murdered, its claws against the interior of your stomach, torn out, soaked in you, yes, and then suffocated and devoured, still shaking, my poor wolf, met by a kiss, buried by an ellipsis... In the margins of everything all the time, someone was writing, I never knew what. Another essay about doubt.

****

I am also trying to stop this whole horrible heap of words from slipping into the dark and I know that even as I hate it, I am still clinging to it, holding the poor monster closer to me than anything else, as it claws (again), bites (afresh), howls (a loud, piteous howl) and placing these parentheses around it, carelessly all over everywhere, yes, like hives full of wasps (or something better: little hutches, houses, tiny moons which keep it howling, turn the tide against it, make it sick and miserable, insane (that's what parentheses are, I allude elusively, so clever: moons, 'lunulae'- crescent-shaped objects or marks (O.E.D.) The hive bursts, the moon goes down, and stung and sunburnt, the monster escapes as usual and I call out, call out, nothing but echo, echo, and marks I don't recognise, not for a second, on the surface of the page like a bruise, coming towards me like (who cares?) No voice in my head to even read them back as if I've had a brain injury, demented, mute, uncertain of where or who I am? 'Everything we write: remains'. Ending everything with a question mark but knowing it's all unfinished in the end anyway, isn't it?

*****

I'd like to slow down, stop saying 'I' so much, in my monomaniacal intensity but dragging, listen, please, 'I' around all the time, an idiot at my ankle, is so tiring, like conversation with a donkey once, so scared by moonlight, pleading with the slow-witted donkey in this barn, idiot talking to ass under the stars, Why are we so tired? Embrace me? My arms around the donkey's neck. 'I'm so tired of sighing, Lord, let it be night'. Take me out to the lake, let me hold onto you, please, with my hands that can't do anything and my ribcage which won't disappear, my eyes that can't look, all broken, and let me be held, please, until it's all gone, all dark, for the first time I am not joking, all mouth, drown, disappear. No, I am still kicking through the waves, stuck in the womb and I am still kicking and I'd like to slow down. Dragging as if ashore, idiot and donkey there, slipping into the dark, slightly feverish, you remember? Ashore, falling all over the place, hold me up, rock me back and forth, I hope no one ever reads this. Later the idiot points towards the night and the donkey names the stars, one by one. You mutter, I'm quiet. This sudden feeling of falling in love is frightening.

* * *

So I had broken out of anti-writing even if I wasn't writing. I'm so sick of reading this writing and writing this writing which is entirely concerned with the impossibility of writing, but soon it becomes the only way to make a mark. I don't think I could ever conjure up a story and I wouldn't be able to sustain it if I did, impossibly, and I'd just have to litter stars about the page to prove the whole thing was full of mistakes, missing bits, exploding as it was written. Writing against itself, sentence by sentence gradually, then vanishing entirely, right at the end in that long white gasp. All the good anti-writing has been done by Derrida, or Blanchot, or Beckett, or- almost all writing is anti-writing in a way, I stutter, I fumble. But I'm explicitly against or for the moment abandoning writing which is 'about myself' in this strict and tedious way because I'd like to be quiet for a while, knowing I've been quiet for a long time. I'm not being clear so I will try again but the whole thing has been so trying, I feel I have tried so hard for nothing, not even ink, but a complete work of not-writing which is still just electronic, imaginary and ridiculous. Trying again, much of the work here is- too much of it feels like a game, insincere or metafictional. And there is that very trying tone of detachment which I do not like, as if I were behind a pane of glass or else a masochistic clown. And I shudder at my pretence, now, when all the intensity is gone, the fire going out, making a monster out of my measly doubt, knowing nothing. Ending here, except there will be more, always the threat of more, coming to light now.

****

2011-01-04T02:06:00.014Z

New Year. Thoughts on Adultery from a loveless man.

The sick feeling of betrayl slipped down his throat like syrup declining down into the stomach, churning and pickling organs. Soon it boiled its way through the stomach wall, hacking a path through his veins like a child with a kitchen knife. Corrupting his blood and blurring his vision. Images of her like a vivid assault of his senses, the smell, the touch, how it felt to have his hand on the small of her back. Confusion gave birth to anger, which in turn grew into dispair. Not so much at the event itself, or even the two particiapting parties; but more the sense of his helplessness. The enduring notion that he could do nothing, like the weightlessness of falling.

The thought of her hazelnut skin drapped over his eyes, turning the world a sepia tone. He listened for the silence, but the quiet buzz of the moniter turned into a scream as a stop motion film of abstractions flicked through his mind. Images of her. Images of them. He was getting ill, the dulling effects of the throat lonzenge he took three hours prior had finally worn off. He could feel himself melting into the bed sheets, soon to be a damp stain of indifference. Evaporating and diffusing through the air, choking people with memories of their youth. Memories of what they could have been. Memories of what they could have changed.

"I should have said something when i was 16" he said to himself. "Before this beast evolved into something I couldn't understand let alone tame." No his own manifestation leered and snarled at him. Baring it's horrible teeth, and gnawing at the synapses in his head. There was no plan, no system of destruction, the match had been lit and subsequently the fuse. All there was left to do was pick through the bone and flesh to piece together some kind of semblance of exsistence. Could there be life in the fall out? Deformed bodies, unaturally twsited and contorted wandering through hallways of mirrors. Only witnessing the reflection they want to see. Thats what life would be like from now on, how could he face them again. How could he face anyone again. Knowing what he knows, like a bloodstained epiphany laughing at him.

photograph by Nigel Tomm

Snow

2010-09-25T16:47:00.018+01:00

The phone woke me. It was winter, I think, and the beginning of the night. I climbed from the bed. I couldn't find the phone, I couldn't find the light. I knocked over an old chair, it banged. Good old wooden floor. I tried to follow the sound. I stalked around the room, upsetting ashtrays and piles of books. It continued to ring for a long time and I started to hate the sound. I pawed and dug, sifted and sorted. I'm probably going through the same things over and over again, I thought, not sifting or sorting at all but making it worse. I'm kneeling in the dark, ruining things. And the phone has been ringing for too long. Is there another phone, and who would call and what can I say? I don't know the things to say and it's probably plugged into the wrong thing. No one is there. It's a joke. It's the company calling to say everything must be torn down, torn out, torn- there! There. I found the phone, growling underneath an old coat. I hit it. I spoke carefully. I don't like speaking on the phone and when this call came I hadn't spoken to anyone for a long time. I can't come to the phone, I'd shout from the top of the stairs down to no one at all.

- Hello? That was the correct word.

- Hello. A girl's voice. I coughed. I walked around the dark again. I fumbled for the light, tapping and striking at the wall. Thuds, buried sounds, hollow groans and hisses from the pipes. She started to speak in a rehearsed voice. I thought of an actress talking to a mirror.

- It's Alice. We need something for the new book.

I found the light. The bulb faltered and then flickered on. Weak yellow light filled the room. My stomach hurt. I wanted to smoke. Alice is a browneyed name. I remember her- partially a bird, soft as a seal pup, smoking in the corridor, sobbing on the phone, sitting on her father's bed.

- But I don't- I shoved some bad work off the desk, looking for cigarettes. I gutted the old coat. I gutted another, found something in a pocket. I don't work anymore, I can't work anymore, I said. I had my cigarettes and my matches. I tilted the phone to strike the match to light my cigarette. It was disgusting.

- That's what Max said. I still don't know who Max is. But please, she said, her voice softening. The mirror disappeared. It can be very, very short. Tiny. A bit of a dream flickered behind my eyeballs: a river, a long black river at night, full of sludge and muck. This is my fallow period. Smoke poured out of me. I rubbed my eyeball into its socket. It began to hurt.

- Shhh.... she said.

I felt the river against my legs. And I think I hung up.

It was snowing. I rummaged through a few bags. No biscuits left. And no drugs left. My shoes will fall off in the snow, I thought, and my coat isn't thick enough. I remembered a film about an orphan dying in the snow and then someone coming and stealing his shoes. The light still worked, glowing happily in the ceiling.

It was freezing outside. Rubbish lined the streets- heaps of swollen black bags that no one can collect. Men with kits and masks came to my room after I refused to remove my rubbish. I was lying down and there was no reason to move. I told them to fuck off. I won't pay the fine, I can't. I'm poor. They took my TV which I didn't care about and wanted to get rid of anyway. When they came for my electricity and gas I moved into another room, which was empty, and stole that tenant's light and heat. Then I started moving all my old work into that room. I left my clothes because the other tenant had kept his there. If I'd moved into a woman's room I'd probably put on her clothes and swan around as a woman for a while, until I was beaten up or raped or bored. I could probably move from room to room forever and no one would know. I like my room so much, though, and I told Alice whenever she rang that all I wanted was another room, more rooms, bigger, smaller, emptier, older.

I walked to and from the supermarket. I only ate biscuits and I only drank milk. I really liked meat but I hated my kitchen. I watched endless sties of bacon sizzling in the pan and then, close to a seizure, hurled it at the window where it would settle, sticking because of all the grease. I like oil, too, I like the way it crackles. One of my shoes came off in the snow but I carried on trudging, holding it in one hand, watching my poor foot turn red and then eventually blue. I had no idea where my post-box was. I muttered like a character in a film, I know it's somewhere around here. I wondered if it was on the other side of the woods but then I started worrying about crows and ravens and wolves. If I walked through there, animals would devour me whole- at least, the little of me that was left. Snow made it impossible to tell where anything was. A blank, dead world, silent and without light, the sky and the earth the same colour: the earth of the sky entirely grey.

I think I was blind for a spell- the snow kept falling and swirling and went in my eyes. When my sight returned I was still struggling along the road. The light was no different and the snow went on swirling and falling. I staggered around, pausing to be sick and then to smoke and then to be sick again. I dragged my black foot through the snow, holding onto my shoe, and then fell down again. This went on for a while. Then the snow began to thin and the light weakened but I could walk again. Soon I found the building where my post was kept, a building exactly like mine. I trudged towards it but there was a hideous white dog blocking my way. It started barking at me, its teeth, all yellow and bared, barking over and over, sounding like the phone, a horrid black fuzz around its mouth and its useless eyes working back and forth. So I kicked it. It snarled and then started to quiver, as if it was plugged into a machine. It crackled. I walked forward and it leapt at me. It held onto my arm, making a very low throbbing sound. I struck it with the shoe until it fell away and then kicked it in the stomach, all the time very sad because I never wanted to wound a dog, even if it was white and hideous. The snow continued to fall. I stood there and smoked.Then slowly, softly the dog came to its feet. It rose like a marionette. It stared me. We entered the building together and fetched my post. I threw the dog a black biscuit and then, under the cold grey light, took a large, delicious dose. I like to feel the drug settling in my stomach, falling on me and slowing me down, wearing me out. Alice sent me a photograph of a chair. I walked back with the dog. I have no idea how long it took.

For the next three days I sat in my room and finished the package, gorging until it was impossible to move. My face and legs were totally numb, the light was dead and I was permanently half-asleep, caught on the narcotic drift. I would walk to and from the window, watch snow settle on the road, see the men work hopelessly at it with shovels, listen to the television talking in other rooms and count the red lights as they glimmered and danced in the dark. I would stroke the dog and let the room slowly fill with ash. The snow didn't stop and soon, the windows were impossible to open. Frost etched on all the glass. Children singing songs would drift past my door and I would climb back into my nest and feel myself floating on the big black broken glass of the sea. I can still hear the waves.

Eventually Alice phoned again. I surfaced, the drugs gone, the biscuits eaten, to that horrid skinny ringing sound. The dog feasted on the stuffing of my old chair as I sifted and sorted again, my feet tarred and sticky from all of his shit. I found the phone.

- Hello? I said, rubbing my foot into the wall which groaned.

- Hello. Do you have any work?

- No, I can't work. I kicked the dog to stop it stuffing itself. I was worried he would eat until his seams split.

- That's what I guessed would happen which is why I sent you the chair.

I muttered something, watching as the dog ate and ate.

- I'll interview you in my building. I can pay you.

- I only want another room, I said, again. A little room, a space, a kennel, because it's impossible for me to work anymore.

- Do you think, that old crackle covering her voice, you'd ever be able to work again?

- No, I'm finished. It's over. I read, I sleep, I eat, and all of that's hard enough, I can fatten up if I want. I can die. I don't want to work.

I hung up.

She still sends me photographs, cuttings and cassettes. They are in a heap next to the dog which ate until it was stuffed. She sent me a photograph of herself and sometimes I think about her, or masturbate, or she's the subject of an uneasy or desperate dream but it passes. We're always by that river, walking quietly, the cold tightening around our bones, our bodies shutting down. I closed the blinds and removed the lightbulb. Now I lie in the dark and smoke. I'm quiet. The snow continues to fall.

Disappearing

2010-07-29T00:33:00.008+01:00

What I'd like to say now, in my angelhood, beautifully-fledged, pearls for teeth, gold dust for breath and absolutely NOTHING between my legs- a void, a hole, an exit, a nothing, sweet nothing at all- is about before, when a sickly slug shrivelled against my cold thighs.

That is the pretty way of saying I am a transsexual, of saying they took my head and made a nose from it, took my miserable thigh muscles and made shy, withered tits and- yes, yes- tore off my cock, cut and shaped the poor servant into a pleat and took all its roots and goo and all the red, foul, filthy shit inside it that I wanted to cut off at birth with the doctor's grinning scissors and then tried to bite off with my milk teeth in the bath with my sister (I had void envy, penis anxiety) and, yes, they disappeared it. It's a decommissioned spy, dead, once lurking in a space above my intestines, incubated in my bloated guts, long abandoned, now gone, gone, gone. Allgone. First thing I ever said but it took forever-ever to happen.

What a grand entrance, oh, flashbulb burnt out, honey. Look how I ended up uglier even than before, a swollen, bleary-eyed beast caged in a high-rise, fucked and drifting down the infinite green gloom of the hallway, hunted by gangs of anaemic skinhead children smoking cigarettes and pretty girls throwing glitter in my face as I sob, poor tormented Tiresias, oh, yes, the tower block's anguished, ancient Orlandon't, expiring, tears echoing down the stairwell. No, but you would've seen seen me on a late night broadcast when you were stoned, nodding out to soft jazz and Ceefax, badly made black n' white freeze-frames of my face (that hideous, miserable couple, before and after) cut and rushed between footage of a riot in Chicago in 1994 or slow motion CCTV shots of kids on methedrine stealing cars. And I would have a pseudonym: become again, another, finally, unfussily extinguished phoenix, I would be Girl A, no, no, Patient A, never Girl A, no. I need a pseudonym, like one of Warhol's girls. Be like Holly Woodlawn, trilling on the big black telephone, snorting speed off silver foil for breakfast as Bobby D. stares at the camera, hollow-headed Dylan scoring horse on the fire escape before walking to the cemetery with Allen- Edie, Edie, babe, you seen my copy of Time? (And one of us crows, 'Yeah, it wounds all heals!') Oh, but we pity Edie, stroke and mother her, our poor androgyne, emaciated speed freak, cooing, coming down, lost on a pillow in the kitchen. Poor little rich girl. Our walking abortion. But all that glory is gone, lost in that terrifying lap dissolve into the '80s, girls clinging to the ghost of an image, disappearing, fading into bad blood, New York winter, taking new names.

I wasn't ghost-written or imagined by a phantom. I'm not hiding, fake, finished like a book. Neon and ink names are nothing against flesh- the skin, bile, tissue and bone in everything. Girls name themselves after birds and famous tigers: no name reaches for the beauty of flesh and its soft, slow decay. What about my condition's name? I reach for the textbook and I shudder. Did I have dysphoria? Oh, yes, a million times yes, a brain in a unfamiliar skull and eventually, a dead shell. But look, look out the window! 'Condition' is inadequate. It was not a particular 'thing', or a singular residue, trauma or bruise that caused me to sob, shriek and tear at the skin which I just bragged about. There was nothing about me, howling, helpless in my hair-shirt, that could be fixed and corrected in a shot. Look out the window, over the car park: see the family in coats, cold, holding each other, walking to their car. And nothing else around at all. I don't know their names, I can barely see them, can't feel them, and if I spoke- I wouldn't, I wouldn't. It is exactly that. I was disconnected from everything: nothing had the right name. Existence is the condition and the root, the home of the disease and the sickness. Nothing else at all- all inside burned and buried. Ashes.

Fourteen Howls

2010-07-05T00:10:00.006+01:00

First howl begin like this: Say I wasn't even tired, but louder like faraway, I wasn't even tired- howl- so skinny, gaunt, a ghost, yes, louder, first howl ends like that.

Second howl is an image: Starlight scarred across the glass. Girl flinches against the light.

Third howl on tenth floor: Miserable juveniles stealing from refrigerators, fucking on freezing floors, still scared of dogs. A howl echoes at that height. Sleet or frost on window. If you fall from the window you become an angel.

Forth howl is American woman howl: 'If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all.'

Fifth howl responds: 'Huh?' The rabbit scratches his head, slumps against the kerb, slurps his milkshake and gives the ground a good thump. The rabbit tells someone his mother died. Listen: the silver crackles around Cassiopeia, the smog groans through the trees, and gradually all the light is exhausted.

Sixth howl is a separate howl, it concerns everywhere I have never been: Borges' house, Auschwitz, a school in a devastated district of Detroit, that abandoned room full of children's things in Bristol, Cemeterie Saint (I forget) in Paris, a television studio, various relations' graves and the woods. Where are the woods exactly? And I have never been to Kent. This list would go on forever.

Seventh howl- the halfway through howl: Two wolves have a conversation near a supermarket.

-Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

- Yes.

- How?

- I know it was tranquillisers but I do not remember so I guess really I do not know but the records say that and when I woke up there was this growling, grumbling low in my stomach that really hurt and the postman came, no, the doctor came, and said, That is because of the pills. I nodded, I did not want to speak, I was sick of words. I'm so anxious about words.

Interference: The wolves didn't say anything, they can't. Well, they can but we don't understand. I saw a wolf at a zoo once and she did not howl at all. Her eyes were pinned like they were marbles. She didn't produce a breath. Perhaps it was a model I stroked and not a wolf at all.

Eighth howl is from a starving body: Not- I don't, I didn't- I practised fasting because it's howling- it's holy. I was never, um, diagnosed an anorexic girl, and I never said anything- but I felt there was a hole there- a big, black hole, and I thought starvation would block it. Plug it. I didn't- it... and now the whole is bigger than it was, before.

Ninth howl tells a lie: Certain swans are richer than the entire Danish royal family because swans have their own economy based on things children forget in the park.

Tenth howl takes MDMA: Look at that light falling. I don't want it to stop. Oh, there's another wave. Yes, yes. Shhh....

Eleventh howl from a mother: Please, come home, come home, come home.

Twelfth howl is silent and allows for peace between the calls and lets us observe the inclination and the glittering of our stars.

Thirteenth howl is from Robert Wyatt, 1990: 'There's a lot of words that don't exist yet and I can't be bothered to wait for them to exist.'

Last howl end like this: Children always play angels. Are we anxious from them to die? So we pretend they're dead, or faraway, archived in the sky, at work in the huge black void, the great, cold night? All angels once were drowned girls, overdosing Ophelias- teenage suicides- miserable, brittle boys who faded out in cold bathrooms or stopped, asleep, and felt their voices disappearing in the dark, or exhausted their veins in flats, leapt from roofs, sick from paint, starved, collapsed, crashed, cracked... yes, last howls late at night. End like that.

Rabbit and Bear on a Rock by Paul McCarthy and frontispiece to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by John Tenniel. No copyright infringement intended.

Failure (of a tree)

2010-04-04T19:59:00.006+01:00

'If I say 'tree' you think of branches, leaves and perhaps, the things which might pause upon a branch or pass through the leaves like pigeons or a torch beam or the breeze and then you might imagine the surface of the trees, their skin, which is normally mutilated by men, with woodsmen, those people that tear open a wolf's stomach in your childhood, cutting cavities into the tree's side or children carving messages with little knives, as if the trees were writing to each other, saying I adore you, I fuck you, you hurt me, and you imagine all the sounds which have drifted through the tree and coiled around each branch- all the sirens, all the shouts, all the sad songs of the rooftop wires and the sobs of the distant ships- and all the animals which bristled against the bark- the stray cats, starving foxes, soaking, startled dogs- and all the trees constructed from the fabric of sleep which contain dead children or strange voices, or aren't trees at all but only smoke, only light, only something slowly exploding, coming out as rain, emerging as a star, emitted as a thought, as a spike, a strike against the black, shutdown sleeping surface of your eyeball, before I mention their territorial purpose, their transformation into fire and their gradual manipulation into a material, like fur or straw, for housing, and ask what voice would a tree have and how its speech would begin and question what exactly it would mean to have roots, what exactly it would mean to have no voice at all. And you might think of night in the space of imaginary trees, our arboretum bordering the city park, stained with light, the sky swollen with smoke, and everyone all around, following the falling sound of the television, hunting through the feverish dark, monitored by owls, fleeing the fire. Nothing at all is lost, trudging through paths and hollows and patches where the branches conduct voices like there is a choir, half-asleep, and as if every branch and voice there were only part of a phone-call, occurring each cold and lonely night.'

What I would call a failure, others never even described.

Beautiful Sheffield by Tacita Dean. No copyright infringement intended.

Ennui and Malaise Episodes 5-8

2010-03-19T21:04:00.008Z

The second series of the programme famously attacked by mainstream media as 'a toxic mix of drugs, drones, deviant sex, anti-social behaviour, pointless hedonism, hopeless 'lefty' politics, leaden symbolism and teenage decadance'.

Continental philosopher, guest star and fan Slavoj Zizek wrote about the series extensively in a monograph called 'Black Milk: Television and Toxicity' published by a small Belgian press.

'Whatever one might like to say about this series- that it is indulgent, that it is pretentious, that nobody does anything but take drugs and have sex and so on, should reconsider their interpretation. The series does not say 'This is the Real', it is against the Real. Everything that happens in Ennui and Malaise is a projection of fantasy so that the person denying these images is immediately disavowing their own fantasies which involve exactly the same exhaustive explorations of sexuality, destructive devotion to libido and stuff like that.'

Episode 5: The famous New Year episode. Alex and Sophie endure the first hour of the New Year at their friend's massive townhouse in Wimbledon. Sophie sits watching hip hop videos with a pair of oversize pigeon wings tied to her back, icicled cocaine and snot hanging from her pretty nose. A gang of underfed art-school girls who talk like they're performing Einstein on the Beach make intimations of boredom throughout. Meanwhile Alex lies in a bath wearing a plastic crown, fucked out of his face on 2-CI and repeatedly touching his hands and the pale surface of the bath while someone with a megaphone recites the lyrics to Respect by Biggie Smalls. Fox, that triumphant homosexual, returns, makes a joke about getting his own spin-off on the annexed tennis courts, does a bit of coke and then gets his 'Alf' sucked by a ataraxic blonde girl who bobs her head to the rhythm of Ivor Cutler's mournful harmonium. Soundtrack: 'Heartbreaker' Maria Carey and Jay Z, 'Heartbroken' by T-2, 'Well Tuned Piano' by La Monte Young and Gruts by Ivor Cutler. Subtitles.

Episode 6: While playing The Game of Death one Saturday afternoon Alex and Sophie decide that they wish to be Situationists. They record an episode of Ren and Stimpy which they then talk over, transforming Stimpy's destruction of the lummox's hang nail into a scene where the sleeping pig of bourgeois territorialism is being slaughtered for his sins. Frequent shots of the skinny couple bathed in cold, ghosty TV light. Soundtrack: 'Broken English' by Marianne Faithfull.

Episode 7: Sophie's sister, Alice, returns from Iceland. The girls flick through magazines, smoke weed, meet Fox at a Kingston underpass where he is snogging a soldier, walk near the sea, go charity shopping, get fuzzy on the kerbs, score some drone shortly before it is illegalised and then try and sleep in the cinema. Fox gets arrested for holding a policeman's cock during an interview while Sophie and Alice climb out a bathroom window, squelch across the winter earth, finish a joint that crackles like glass, steal bikes and sleep in Hyde Park. Alex is in Bristol, shooting heroin, convinced he is dead. Soundtrack: 'Ari's Song' by Nico, 'Too Many Creeps', The Bush Tetras, 'Beat Bop', Rammellzee and K Rob, 'Christmas Time Is Here' by Vince Guraldi. Subtitles.

Episode 8: Reading their dialogue off cue cards held by a skinhead, Alex and Sophie have an argument which often falters or fails entirely. During these frequent silent passages Alex re-enacts Tilda Swinton's breakdown at the end of The Last of England, each time more and more distressed. They conclude the argument eventually, undress, bite, spit, suck and spank each other. Sophie feeds Alex honey until he throws up. She tongues him desperately straightaway afterwards. Soundtrack: Ravi Shankar's work on 'Alice in Wonderland'. Subtitles.

Images: Chloe Sevigny photographed by Terry Richardson and Franny and Zooey poster by Will Holden.

The Screen Test

2010-03-05T16:44:00.005Z

a) Before the screen test comes the test-card...

The projector kicks in. Light flickers onto my eyeballs, at the second kick, I wake up, and I'm in the cinema again, nothing but nothing but dark, dead light. Why would I dream about Charlotte Gainsbourg in an abattoir? A little girl, soft as fox, sleeping in a freezer on a bed of cold meat. Charlotte is grown up now, recording brain-scanners in California, having long abandoned her experiments in Ada-land, stopped fooling and being silly with all her lemons, libidos and 'in-zest' and settled down in the forest with a smart psychoanalyst. The foxes are talking outside, sneaking over the wintry earth in their little white shoes. They are on their way to the train station because that's where all the best rubbish is kept.

'A mistake on video is forever. All the other mistakes can be crossed out...'

I wish I was a Fassbinder-Fox: no sleep ever ever! Awake the whole time with my dick out the whole time, banging against my fat, mottled thigh, this way and that, while I bomb coke in my Munich bathroom and make phone calls to all my lovers, all suicides, all dumber than I am. I forget I am indoors and mistake the toilet for a train station bench and two criminals come and steal the Nikes from my feet. I am on the phone... 'This is not a cry for help. Darling, liebchen, I am desperate. Please, please, come over and let me touch you, only once.' A muddy residue collects around my nostril, my eyes turn into bloodshot puddles and my cock grows, swollen like a supermarket bag, as I stare at a light fitting. 'Listen... fucking listen to me!'

I am no longer Fassbinder, I am myself again and sitting in my bed in the soft and silent dark. The television snores- LIGHT- and emits a low drone, saying I'm awake. Ceefax jazz and pixellated stories about children drowning then that little girl with her blackboard and clown. What kind of lesson would she teach me? Test-tones underneath: we must make sure all the frequencies are fit and ready for consumption. I guess all the day's programming is put together behind that little board. As soon as it disappears the programmes play out from another screen underground in London.

'Just a small fix, I feel, would recreate the strewn ramparts of Jericho'- Trocchi

While we are talking I'd like to show you a picture of Fassbinder. There he is, poor Rainer, talking very eloquently, slightly subdued (he might be numb from medication) and probably bored. He went all beastly, Fassbinder, by the end, and started to look like a wild animal dressed in leather.

OK, I confess, I was never awake or even alive at the time of the test-card. The most I can claim is being drugged and hallucinating that her image was projected against a flat block wall. I think it was a drunk bird. I ache for all the technology I never experienced or only experienced as a consequence of adult nostalgia. The subject of all poetry is being born too late- too early- or not being born at all.

b) Screen tests. (Because you love quotidian things and the test is the most ordinary, unavoidable thing you can imagine. The test hurts the star, makes them quotidian. In my art I'm making beautiful things quotidian and I'm making quotidian things beautiful, but I think this is really because I'm in love with that particular word. I'm in love but it is a very ordinary kind and a very tedious feeling.)

BOB DYLAN SHOT BY ANDY WARHOL IN 1966.

'I asked [Robbie] what ever happened to that Elvis painting that I gave Dylan because every time I run into Dylan's manager Albert Grossman he says he has it and Robbie said that at some point he traded it to Dylan for a couch! (laughs)' Warhol, in his Diaries.

Dylan by electric moonlight....

After copping speed on the Factory fire-escape from Billy Name, Bob is told 'the light is ready' by Gerard, at which he cracks a joke, sounding like a cross between Groucho Marx and the European weasel. Bob finds the experience tedious and, near its end, disquieting. He complains to Edie, later that night, in her dirty, inherited brownstone that 'That whole thing was bad, man, it's just creepy in there anyway. I don't care about being photographed but-' Edie nudges him with her skeletal arm in a sisterly gesture, moving her head against the pillows and asks, 'Where's the rest of Billy's speed?' Bob imagines that gold-clawed mirror is a camera. Cocteau has already written on the glass. 'The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face.' Queer what a camera does.

What I mean

is actually really unimportant.

All you need to know is that I want

you to misunderstand.

DONT LET ME BE UNDERSTOOD

I care deeply about being insincere.

I say, all my life I have suffered from a mental dysphoria-

I always wanted a different mind

But if you read me carefully enough

you'd know I'm a very good liar

and in art that is enough.

KATE MOSS MODELS FOR L'OREAL

You can be beautiful, too. Don't be silly, you're not ugly at all. All great models come from public housing like animals. The dirtier, dumber and scummier you are, the more beautiful a bird you can become.

1. Ikonika- Red Marker Pens

2. Y Pants- Favorite Sweater

3. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss- Morning Interview, 1994

Images of Test Card Girl, Charlotte Gainsbourg aged seventeen, Fassbinder in interview available on Criterion edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Kate Moss auditioning for L'Oreal hair products in the early '90s. All images are used without the desire to hurt anyone and in this case that means really without intending to incur a hefty fine which we couldn't possibly pay anyway because, duh, we don't have any money.

Test 1/ Salvaged

2010-02-18T00:34:00.007Z

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

test two- test two- test two

Poor Rabbit Alice, I crackle in the cold

test one: Poor Rabbit Alice, I'm uncertain in the cold

[dubbed on 1/2 inch tape from original acetate before the fire, started by an arsonist in Chicago, a black separatist.]

test a- reprise: We kissed- delicious- on an iron rust-brown boat.

test d- lovers fleeing the capital under the archived sky/ the similarity of love and drowning.

'I took photographs in college but nothing particularly serious: old trees, dead machines, party wreckage, stray women, lakes where children had drowned and river banks where their raincoats were retrieved.'

intercepted phone call: 'I tell you, you leave pills on the table, they'll get snatched; you leave any substance anywhere and it will go. Weigh it, it'll come up light and then what? Forget it.

test two (attempt six): Can we finish this before we lose the light, please

test 9 (chem. 5) A skinny girl playing the fiddle in a 1956 Hungarian production of Romeo and Juliet. Photograph shows performance's conclusion in Juliet's mausoleum. Exegesis: Tableau alludes to the contemporary situation in Hungary, i.e. a state of not-death/ not-life, a stagnation and still-birth resolved in slaughter. Exegetical failure: Tableau identical to ending of production staged in the 1820s to mollify the King, a die-hard fan of tragedy. Consequent exegesis: Tableau suggests corrected history of Stalinist purges and echoes the alterations of art brought on Stalinist interference.

test 12/ test 12/ test 12: first pressing

I was used.

I was used

I was used to this happening

the familiar tickle and the weird ache

my stomach swirling with the gloomy green sea

fattening and thinning. We kissed, delicious, delicious,

on a brown iron rust boat.

O-, a most stunning oratorio, Kleinman; quite the most magickal Event of this- or Any other- Season.

1. Blur- You're So Great

2. Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg- Lemon Incest (file removed)

3. Cocteau Twins- A Kissed Out Red Floatboat

Arthur Rackham's Alice. No copyright infringement intended.

Discourse On Modern Living

2010-01-24T22:47:00.004Z

1. Fire is not a friend

2. Nightly dose of nitrous oxide, nicely, icily, into my lungs

3. Virginity is lost in a park

4. Nervous in churches

5. Things always already over or ending.

6. Supermarkets are comforting

7. Smog is the new rain

8. The absolute minimum all the time

9. There are too many questions, there are too many sirens, there are too many illnesses

10. I discover, I devour, I desire, I discover, I devour, I desire

11. 'Is it real or is it Memorex?'

12. Matthew Broderick in War Games is the ideal man

13. You kiss like a washing machine

14. The culture of smoke, the culture of water, the culture of mud

15. 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism'

16. There are too many quotations, there are too many sciences, there are too many revisions

17. Discontent, dissent, descent

18. Disc content, assent, ascent

19. Cravings

20. Fridge noises

1. Donna Summer- State of Independence

2. Four Tet- Angel Echoes

3. Cluster- Fur Luise

Witches

2010-01-15T00:32:00.002Z

I asked him, Please remove your straw from my milkshake, your strawberry froth will ruin my fur coat.

He asked if I had carried on acting and playing the violin since we last spoke.

I told him No, no way. Not since I auditioned for Tamora.

Theatre was boring anyway, ever since all those overcast afternoons in primary school, putting together thorny crowns for the prop department. It wasn't a department at all. It was that woman with the terrible neuralgia whose son died in the faraway country. Is she dead now? No one told me what neuralgia was. Someone said it was like the cow illness only longer. I found the condition in a red library encyclopaedia and there was a picture of a neuralgic patient: he had lightning striking his face and he was screaming and he was screaming until the encyclopaedia thudded shut.

A splotch of milkshake kisses fake fur.

Violin? He prompted, rustling through some broken biscuits.

Calluses, I said. Each finger like a winter branch.

I asked about all the afternoons we had spent holding hands by the river, all that tar and fire and sickly sun and nights with sore skin on our lips. He said we wasted them. I didn't say Yes, we did. He was always scared of the river anyway. He was frightened of falling. When we went to the river it never looked particularly strong. The last thing to drown in that river was a witch.

Whatever happened to witches? They probably still exist but we are looking in the wrong places. Where would witches live today?

There, he drew.

Slow afternoon light.

Christian Marclay in 'Ghost (I Don't Live Today)'. No copyright infringement intended.

Fosterchildren

2010-01-04T15:07:00.002Z

A sad midwinter afternoon... frost scrawled all over the windows as we do a dance to a sonata as delicate as children's hands, the gradual oranging of the afternoon, and the slow construction of a sickly moon (that wasn't meant to rhyme).

Once, when we were kittens, me and Hazel were told to paint. The teacher is a ghost now, but she said to paint 'home' What does home look like, she said.

(This is the only way I can write.) What colour is home? And we both drew anonymous buildings like factories, like churches, like prisons, like offices in thick smoggy grey and licked our fingers because that made the clouds more life-like.

Our bodies later found in empty baths. Sophie playing piano in a half-empty room for an asleep audience. Out in the woods in a world full of rain... dense greenery spangling over my eyes like (I don't know how to finish this bit) dense greenery scattered over my eyes exploding here like a dirty heap of stars. When I was younger I thought it was pronounced frosterchild and now I find this very difficult to say. All the other children, like cats, prowling.

My mattress, muddy, on the kerb.

Two accidental orphans and a sonata like water down the plug hole.

(I cut this out, I black this out, I forget this)

1. John Cage- Music for Marcel Duchamp

2. Nico- Ari's Song

3. Hood- In Iron Light

Photograph of Kim Gordon onstange in Holland in 1991. No copyright infringement intended.

The Art/ Act Of Political Listening

2009-12-27T10:51:00.012Z

'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

2009-12-20T20:44:00.004Z

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

2009-12-17T00:42:00.007Z

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

2009-12-16T17:51:00.012Z

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

2009-12-15T16:12:00.008Z

'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

2009-12-13T17:16:00.016Z

'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

2009-11-09T14:39:00.006Z

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

2009-10-24T15:34:00.016+01:00

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

2009-10-14T13:35:00.007+01:00

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

2009-09-24T01:05:00.003+01:00

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?

2009-09-14T20:32:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-13T19:39:00.007+01:00

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)

2009-09-10T12:39:00.014+01:00

'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

2009-09-09T20:32:00.008+01:00

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...

2009-09-08T00:44:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-27T14:52:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-25T21:36:00.014+01:00

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

2009-08-24T19:50:00.001+01:00

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?

2009-08-21T16:39:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-15T00:24:00.000+01:00

'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

2009-08-14T16:04:00.009+01:00

'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?

2009-08-12T19:14:00.002+01:00

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

2009-08-11T13:22:00.000+01:00

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?'

2009-08-07T18:34:00.013+01:00

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

2009-07-30T00:57:00.008+01:00

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

2009-07-29T23:23:00.006+01:00

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...

2009-07-28T20:14:00.005+01:00

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

2009-07-28T01:18:00.002+01:00

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

Discourse On Mercury And Other Chemicals

2009-07-26T20:31:00.013+01:00

My hand whips back on the wax and produces a fat asteroid buzz as I viddy the needle skating and snatches of surface noise sparking and exploding PING! CLANG! FUZZ! like the tiny blips of sci-fi fire in anti-alien arcade games. Should I put on the white-label imported Japananalogue thing? Another burst of video game noise... God, oh, God, my hand is hot, I mean, I can drop anything here and it's fine, it's fine. My hand is made of pixels under this light: a single stuttering bulb is forever overhead. Is that siren on the track or outside? My friends might be kissing pavement or hawking on cars or trying to cop a feel on that thunder-struck tree made out of kitten fur. The sky outside is aching. Look at all that light pollution, all that crackling and crashing in the big, big black clouds. That was a real siren and I can't cut to it now because it's too late and its scream was at the wrong frequency. You know when glass breaks it screams exactly like a siren. I don't dig this one- go, dissolve, cross-fade, switch, sneak that back, cut up... the sky's gone all starry and goldy. My tummy's rumbling: I want some toast but if I go downstairs all that sound will thunder into my face too fast. Probably not toast, probably soup. A nice hot bowl of Jupiter-coloured soup... the TV's sick, it's fuzzing in and out and in out, image up and down and down and down, scanning for signal from different stations. Too many cables! I'm noosed by black spaghetti wires, my headphones making sullen puddles of sulking noise. I correct: a glorious beast of bass shakes his splendid head. Feedback is out, out, out. Woof! All the waves come down over my beaten head. The light in the room is the colour of rust. That girl is asleep. Look, you can see the Lucky Strike target on her tummy getting tight and getting soft. Is she dreaming, am I in it, am I awake? The sky's not like that: it looks like a million bits of black card stuck together, covered in licked silver stars and sequins. The snoozing girl is curled up and a cat oozes over her and slums into a corner and starts darning its black socks with its cold tongue. An ambulance is howling around outside. Bodies coming and going like an airport: everyone X-rayed in the freezing light. Styrofoam snow starts falling. Snow is falling all the time. Someone shouts out in a staticky megaphone voice and everyone goes deaf. I'm OK in here: I'm not as bleary-eyed and broken-tailed as everyone else. I'm an astronaut at the controls, I'm alive, all the sounds, all the data belong to me, I'm awake, like the wolves, like winter, like Superman, Moby Dick... I can come out from the rabbit hole. Bristers, sothers, come up! Curiouser and curiouser, on and on, for we are like angels, for the sky hasn't caved in yet. Next track, next track. Then go to sleep.

1. Delia Derbyshire- The Sea

2. Tangerine Dream- Sequent C

3. Twine- In Through Devices

'Doll' by Ed Ruscha. No copyright infringement intended.

I still dream of Organon.

2009-07-25T02:10:00.002+01:00

She's in the trees, she's coming. Kate, her soft voice, with its slight dulling of sibilants. Dancing to the beat of the drums in her black velvet leotard and a black semi-transparent cloth draped over her face. Bobbing, weaving, thrusting round a double bass. Her crimped hair blasted back by the fan as she runs her hands down her pale shapely breasts. Sexual thoughts arise from the sensual world, her most feminine and fuckable album. She is my Babooshka, My little army dreamer. Don't pan out from that extreme close up of her face, stay there, savor her typically Edwardian features. Kate Bush sends me letters, signed with a kiss. I receive them with a strange delight. Add them to the collage of her in my room. I'd like to tie her up, leave her suspended in Gaffa, then watch. I'd make her go up a couple of octaves. Her deep blue eye shadow exposing the whites of her eyes and the blood red lipstick, my one dream, she's my one and only master. Only she could turn novel into song. That feeling of sticky love inside expanding in my stomach and spurring through my tear ducts making my brain melt through my eyes. My messy and sworded infatuation consuming me quietly and while I sleep she dances softly in my head, whispering in my ear, "You've always been a coward".

Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love
Kate Bush - Cloudbusting
Kate Bush - Babooshka
Kate Bush - Suspended In Gaffa
Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill
Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights (Live Session Version)
Kate Bush - Army Dreamers

Files removed.

Public Service Television

2009-07-22T13:35:00.008+01:00

1. The artist sits in her studio and stares crosseyed at the camera. The television is experiencing medium-level signal interference, meaning the weatherman is suffering and morphing into a well-bred dog that pulls drowsy children from house fires. The weatherman's problems continue until a skinhead assistant jabs the aerial with a plastic fork. The weatherman is covered in patchy, neon bruises. The artist produces a sheet of smoke. 'That's a trick I'm learning to do'. Another shot is set up.

2. 'My wisdom tooth was impacted. Well, you know how long they make you wait for an appointment nowadays- I was in bloody agony for about three days. I got in there drunk- this was on the Wednesday- it took an hour to pull the thing out. It was like a rock. It had five roots! It looked like a hand. (Displays fingers) I only just got back on solids and them painkillers made no fucking difference.'

3. 'The lack of funding we have is the problem, you know? It doesn't matter what choices I might make as a person if the state can't support them monetarily, and then I am failing the service users and-'

'I hear what you're saying, I hear what you're saying.'

4. A sign-language translator motions furiously in a small box in a black margin at the left axis of the screen:

ONE: An exit strategy?

[Counter-shot]

TWO: Can I... can I just-

THREE: Is anyone watching?

[Wide-shot]

ONE: I didn't like the way symbolism was played with.

TWO: A beach in winter at night is just a metaphor. A covering on a blank canvas.

ONE: Yes, nothing to say.

[Close-up]

TWO: I think- I think.

[Counter-shot]

ONE: It failed.

THREE: Gradually.

1. David Byrne- Tree (Today Is An Important Occasion)

2. Fridge- Cutup Piano And Xylophone

3. Steve Reich- Triple Quartet Duet

4. David Lynch- Ghost Of Love

Cold Harbor. June 3rd. I Am Dead.

2009-07-19T19:22:00.010+01:00

A child winds up his clockwork toy. Twisting his fingers round the brass butterfly key and rotating it clockwise causing the cogs and bolts to wake up, flex their arms and legs then creep into motion. He has stains down his shirt, and dirt in his hair. Cross-legged he finishes winding and lets it do. The Toy whizzes and pops. It swirls and cartwheels. Hypnotizing him for a second then boring him. He returns with his father's hammer. He smashes it.
Olaibi - Eisa

Jump into the Orient. Where masked women twirl and shake round you commanding your attention, and your love. Desire boiling your insides and rushing through you like a virus or a fever. Delirium takes over as she slips and slides through the close night air. The sequins that hang from her scarfs sparkle in your eyes. She takes hold of your arm and pludges you into a world of lava lamps and satin sheets where her bronze body is your only god. Rhythm is your only companion, and no one is your enemy.
Omar Khorshid And His Magic Guitar - Raqsed El Fada

And now for something darker. To satisfy your taste. A world of cut glass highways and desert sands mark the road to Calgary. You'll never get there, not with that attitude. The world is vast and bleak, that repeative synsthezed base line echos in the chasms and valleys and the drones of a thousand dissapointed souls cry out for you to join them. The past is forgotten, the present is resented. That headache you've had won't go away, and all you want to do is sleep yourself into a coma.
Oneohtrix Point Never - Laser to Laser

Music For Recluses (A Blank Voice On All Machines)

2009-07-16T22:49:00.009+01:00

a) 'Just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do.' Warhol

b) 'The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved.' Barthelme

c) 'Fame is incomprehension; perhaps the very worst kind.' Borges

d) 'I wish I was not here... Life without him is a grave to me.' Goethe

e) 'It is not I who became addicted but my body.' Cocteau

f) 'People in my country die emotionally at twenty one.' Cassavetes

g) 'Really, words are voices in thin strips. Words wound in wires. Bars of connection.' Gass

1. AFX- Untitled

2. Bochum Welt- GTE

3. Slint- For Dinner...

Siblings

2009-07-14T05:05:00.003+01:00

House is silent apart from the buzz of panel shows on the television and canned laughter. I creep downstairs. Doing my best to tip toe through the tension, that hangs like strings with bells on, tied to every supermarket-bought art print and worthless holiday souvenir. Today was Tesla's birthday, Bowie played him in that film where there are two Bales, if only. Sister is asleep, exhausted from all the fake tears and pseudo-hysteria, now still in her bed of foul language. As I showered, thoughts of what I would had said to her scuttled through my mind, but then became refined and thorny. I rehearsed the words as the scalding water washed over my shaggy head and salty brown back. I always take my showers under thermogenic waters, I like the itchy sensation the heat gives your skin and how it hurts when you breathe. I practised the words over and over, adding facial expression, hand motions. I'll never say them. They stay locked behind the shower curtain. My limbs are heavy.

I warmed up the leftover pasta and pesto from last night's attempt at dinner. I ate in the dark. The gentle clatter of teeth on metal being my only company. Plunge don't paddle, Penny used to say. I don't like to swim, not since two summers past. I went and got a pad and began an illegible scrawl across the page. A messy trail of thought, neatness is for the Autistic and the Japanese. Scathing look from father, he'd rather I play more contact sports. "Got to get out into the working world",

"Got To Stand On Your Own Two Feet"

Charles Mingus - Meditations
Coltrane Motion - The Year Without A Summer
Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart

I Am In Detention Today Because

2009-07-10T20:00:00.012+01:00

I was hungover in homeroom. I puked all over that anorexic girl's wooly mammoth jumper and had to drag myself to the bathroom. I had a smoke afterward, dropped the butt in the cistern and had some sleepy, sloppy thoughts about Molly Ringwald. My pining echoed in the weird, outdoorsy acoustics of the bathroom and the hollow reverberations of the fittings and the silver taps and the smooth curve of the sink sounded like her voice. I had to leave Physics too when I got aroused by a Venn diagram that reminded me of Molly's breasts and how she applies lipstick with them in The Breakfast Club when she's stoned. I wish I could smoke a number and watch Tron. Someone blew my candles out. I'm stuck. There must be some mistake, an error... I don't think I'm meant to be in here.

1. The Smiths- Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want [File Removed]

2. Kate Bush- This Woman's Work

3. Ciccone Youth- Into The Groove(y)

4. Wendy Carlos- Theme From Tron

Photo taken from 'The Breakfast Club' (John Hughes) 1986. No copyright infringement intended.

So Blind You Can See Right Through Me

2009-07-09T22:34:00.003+01:00

I stood there, naked. They didn't even notice. A tricklet of piss crept down my leg and rested on my ankle. My self-adulation swelled and popped. She stood there, a moonlight silhouette laughing. I could hear my hair grow as the thoughts in my head stumbled and tripped. She still stood there, a moonlight silhouette laughing. She was a beautiful mess. The muscles in my legs and arms cramped then relaxed, then cramped again sending me into fits of jolts and convulsions. Trees danced the polka in the distance as the moon held hands with the clouds as they raped the sky. She caught ablaze and it ended me. Filled with absinthian disdain. She was gone and it was final.

Lucky Dragons - Open Melody

The Urxed - Gardening After Dark

Goodnight, Missing Postman

2009-07-08T12:17:00.011+01:00

'I ask that all in our room fall, supplicant to our lost king, our missing postman. Can you transform your skulls, slipping off colourful masks, hiding sloppy and rotting forms of luxury and small hours of youth and yawning months of failing, slumping, growing old and adopt contortions of mourning? Calmly and slowly: cry, sob and wail (and synonyms).

All post is now lost in a labyrinth or burning in thick woods. I ask that you do not try to talk right away but shush. Ruins of car by hospital. I ask for no flash photography. No attacks, bangs, blasts. No man to climb our buildings and jump. You fall. You hit a roof. It hurts.

Goodnight, missing postman, sir. A man of poor construction.

A lot of rain turning first to fog... soon much snow.

Out, out, transmission out.'

1. PiL- Radio 4

2. William Basinski- Variation IV

3. Mogwai- Punk Rock

Dance Till You Are Dead

2009-07-07T12:00:00.001+01:00

Heads will roll. My eyes crystallized, I was seeing through a kaleidoscope. The speakers bounced and reverberated. The light bleached my skin and it peeled off. My bones broke and shattered. I wasn't numb, I felt everything. I watched him cry like a baby. I took off my shoes, my toes curled back onto themselves and my nails grew and snapped, the jagged edges jutting at my insteps. It all started when I lost my mother. My teeth shattered and my gums bled, it hurt when I spoke, so I shouted. This mutilation turned me into a masterpiece, an Adonis of the grotesque. Don't fight the power. Let it wash over you like acid and burn away your non-conformity. Let it ram its penis down your throat and choke you till you like it. Fuck you, I hate you all.

Arch M - 21st Union

Animal Collective - Daily Routine (Phaseone remix)

2009-07-06T21:51:00.001+01:00

Re-word, Sentence, Page 54

‘But any need in a street, the warrens through which the very aim chances, resulted in lengthy sensuous confusions.’ More are saying that of the year but Victorian cathedrals that once transcended on any doubt or shadow, of a simple builder’s paraphrase of a god, arose, long ago, bent in smoke and fright. The improvisation of moments in time could not own any cruel direction, but it’s not actual, so it’s out, not in, of network. What belts, not from leather, were, long ago, about in forests? What be of intentions for whatever. Now of the flies, flowing back toward industrial excrement and to windowless, gothic states, drive existence from god’s zenith, fashioning some to-be suitable, apical locus and approaching rats climb the brick, shrugging, but in a derangement, as they escape mercy of –

David Bowie - I'm Afraid Of Americans

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (Home Demo 1981)

Salem - Skullcrush

Crash And Burn

2009-07-04T18:30:00.006+01:00

Don't go out. It'd be better to stay at home. Pretend to be asleep. Summer Hibernation. The Heat does you no good. Sun is not good for the soul. Sitting on you're own muttering under your breath to a bubblegum synthesizers. Take me back to prison, put me back into my cell. I don't like the freedom, i can't take it. Self-loathing is such an unattractive quality yet it remains a unavoidable one. Melt into a ductile metal like liquid ice cream floating around the bowl when you leave it out. The sun crawls back into its lunar hovel and strange prickly heat pinches at your skin. You pull on some crisp new clothes which soon dampen and heavy from your sweat. It's close. You find yourself sitting under Christmas tree lights crunching your third lolly-pop while drugged pensioners stumble around demanding house music, there wrinkled necks raised towards the sky, "We Own The Night". They jeer and squawk at you as you try to explain that there's no vodka in your lemonade. The situation holds no lucidity as you curl up and die. You crash through the night back into the day a charred frame of your former self. No phoenix rises from this fire. Your eyes melt back into your forehead. At least now your feeling something as you pick at your wounds. Look in the mirror and you see someone else. He hates his life. He is you, and you are dead.

Pandora's Box - It's All Coming Back To Me Now
Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy
ABBA - Dancing Queen
Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Born To Run

Omelette and Tennis and Chores...

2009-07-03T15:34:00.007+01:00

Small men in suits have stolen your time and driven you far from comfort in a haze of old indie, the worst kind of hip-hop and drum and bass. They lead you round farm towns with gab and diesel charm. The sun is closer to the earth than ever but you still can't see it. Of course there's no benefit or winner and only the office god can see why these 'beings of an alternate breed' don't go home at the end of the day, cheap hair wax dripping down their faces and sweat patches bigger than their egos, and hang themselves with the nearest snakeskin belt or pair of braces. Moisture seeps through your skin under your cheap trousers and borrowed tie and you still can't even glimpse the culprit. There's no way. Return to square one. Ultimate year long procrastination.

Animal Collective - Chores
Beastie Boys - Shadrach
Abecedarians - Benway's Carnival

'Do You Remember Your President Nixon?'

2009-06-28T14:32:00.019+01:00

How do we travel?

Peut-etre par avion? (A non-smoking restaurant in an airport in the mid-1980s during a bad winter with toilets that become nests for huddled groups of puffa-jacketed, broken-veined and anaemic transients)

Pick a dance and do it.

Ah, mister wolf!

Come in, check the clock, let me take your coat.

FDR:

Kohl, Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt, Erhard, Kiesinger.

Forty foxes hunting out in Norway in a condemned office block.

Dirge in marriage and mirth in funeral.

The closing montages of Lars Von Trier's Brechtian epics Dogville and Manderlay use Bowie's hit Young Americans to startling effect. To honour this mode of communication and its love of the stochastic and all forms of error and tedious minutiae, here is a list of all the photographers used in the first film: Jacob Holdt, Jim Hubbard, Douglas A Harper, Dan Holmberg, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Jack Collier, A Siegel, Ben Shan, Carl Mydans, J. Vachon, Arthur Rothenstein. (Von Trier's new film Antichrirst looks great, too, featuring death, Willem Dafoe, genital mutilation and the director voicing a hallucinated fox.)

After reflecting the modern love of quotidian trash, shards of sentences and weird juxtaposition in text, the same occurs in song. Lars mixes images of American decline with the sound of its triumph- the coked-out plastic soul of the '70s- and consequently, unnerves a pack of wild cineastes sitting in the dark. We want to induce that sensation here: that everything is great but at the same time inherently wrong and falling apart. Such scrambling of texture and thought is shooting through us all the time. Bowie wears the skin of an artist from the golden-era of Motown while living up to his eyeballs in drugs, X-ray thin and so paranoid he never leaves his blacked-out house. Crystal Castles cut n' paste the squelches and fireworks of video ecstasy to the sound of a narcoleptic drug addict sobbing on the phone. Spacemen 3 reach the feeling with the most clarity, letting Jason Pierce sing about heroin with the same conviction as a torch singer might sing about Jesus. And so the Great Depression continues: we can't go on, we go on. And light Calliope's hair the colour of Roman Candles and cement and stars.

1. David Bowie- Young Americans

2. Crystal Castles- Knights

3. Spacemen 3- Walkin' With Jesus

Retrace Your Steps Back To The Grave You Were Born Into

2009-06-27T02:33:00.017+01:00

Strange serenity, sleepwalking through the dead end streets. It's so late the clocks have fallen asleep and the roads harden and crack under washed-out moonlight. Turning your eyes into monotones. Your ears sharpen and hone in on the whistling and whipping of trees. You walk in the middle of the road, a sense of taboo spurring your actions as you trace the white line markings with your feet. Thoughts dribble through your mind, seeping down into your ankles then back up to your head. Skeleton cars sit motionless and discarded while the soft phosphorescence of towering lamplights highlight the long trail back to your bed. The silence crackles and writhes. Contorting around you, shaping and molding you to the realisation that you're tresspassing on the night. Tip-toeing through the cold air and leaving your footprints in it like it was snow. Strange humbling in the cockles of your heart and glistening in your eyes. The night kisses you even though you're obtruding on it. It craves that sense of violation. It cloaks your body, the slender contours of its female form fitting perfectly against yours. Wrapping itself around you, pressing its cold cheeks against your dry lips. This strange union of body and time sucking you into a vacuum of Love and Hate and Sorrow and Jealousy. Like a room of valuables, hoarded from the nooks and crannies of someones life; a pair of your mother's shoes, a school photo, a Moroccan lamp. Leave them hidden from the night. It will steal them. Strip you bare and leave you when the clocks wake up. Desert you as the day pushes itself onto the sky by the time your key is drawn back out of the door.

Black Meteoric Star - Death Tunnel
90 Day Men - Saint Theresa In Ecstasy

Modernaudiokafka

2009-06-23T22:42:00.009+01:00

If Kafka were alive now and creating the same strange, bullet-proof stories of human despair, animal woe and pitiful cities, or working on his fables and puzzles and morals and cracking the same heroic jokes in his broken voice- always remembering to delay the verb for perfection, obviously- what would he listen to? And in what environment?

Would he follow Pynchon's lead and squirrelishly sit in a tiny room in Mexico blasting avant-jazz in between blots of acid and hits of weed grown high on golden mountains? Or would he work like Borges preferring to sit in monastic silence to allow for the endless whirrings of his skull?

Perhaps he would listen to music fresh from a few lengths at Prague Swimming Centre or after a quick defeat from Max on the tennis courts. Perhaps he would opt for klezmer music following a conversation on Kabbalah in the park out of earshot of the winter-faced local rabbi. Ever the romantic, the lovelorn Kafka might sit in his pyjamas late at night and put on some trip hop to soothe his wounds following another row with his beloved Felice and then cough severely in a little metal bin overflowing with extinct sentences.

Would he stand in the gardens with Julia and watch the falling rain of fireworks, or hide wounds from Father, trudging with typewriter through grey snow to reach a telephone to complain to Nabokov? He would probably watch television most nights trying to find a similar beast to Reagan and failing. And he might purchase exclusively Kompakt compilations and nod off to the coniferous warmth of Wolfgang Voigt. And he might return from work one glum night to discover his burrow brimming with new inhabitants who have snuck soundlessly in and quietly wrecked everything he holds dear. These new inhabitants are the people he hoped would listen; the people influenced by him and they bump, blind as moles, into the walls he has covered with maps of his imagined America.

If Kafka were alive now, we would admire him for what? Well, the terrifying wonder of his prose, but not solely that. He showered at regular intervals with great conviction, aesthetic joy and moral purpose. He was never late. He gardened when confronted with the nausea of artistic struggle.

Would there be as much critical consideration and furious beard-scratching about Kafka now if he was alive? There is a whole house somewhere, falling apart probably, made out of critical approaches to Kafka. My personal favourite of these is Kafka, The Jewish Patient which interprets all of his work through the lens of psychiatric and medical methodology, turning the sickly, woozy workings of his genius into a mimetic device for actual disorders. The chapters themselves would make great stories (but not great Kafka stories- a distinction that has to be made) purely on titular value: 'On Language, Difference and Mice', 'Kafka Weeps' and 'Fin-de-siecle Jewish Readings of Tuberculosis' that invoke images of a Berlin university run by a single antechamber of deranged academics more profoundly influenced by the repeated narcotic drubbings of the German Autumn than the tangled extraction of meaning from the first bit in Of Grammatology. If we had not lost Kafka and fast-forwarded and forced him into contemporary society with its gross contortions of meaning and brutal dissection and destructions of self, would he be collaborating with David Lynch? Would he be working at all? And would he (or any artist) feel more at ease in a society that they helped articulate, an external world that so badly reflects the one they imagined? It is a problem and not really a new one.

1. Gang of Four- Love Like Anthrax

2. Tim Hecker- 100 Years Ago

3. Squarepusher- Tundra

Bursting At The Seams

2009-06-20T16:06:00.001+01:00

This is not your town, you don't own it
You don't control the skies
In with the New
Take your children home
Put them to bed. Put them to sleep
Stay off the streets
Leave everything as your found it
Show a bit of tit
You're pouring petrol on the fire
I'm the one who steals the night
Open your legs
It Burns.
I Love It.

Le Matos - Pray For Death
Tuxedomask - Twin Peaks

Water Flowing Underground...

2009-06-19T16:05:00.007+01:00

It left. Scuttled out and broke tradition. You'll never spot a happier creature but it only had just over an hour. They all looked on as it fled, despondent, envious. Let them. It'd just made the bravest and best move of its existence. The world had never looked so unnatural. The boiling sun polished the pavements, cars took off and burnt up, buildings dripped and melted like they were made of ice cream. He ran, he only had just over an hour...

Populous - Only Hope
Talking Heads - I Zimbra
Jacaszek - Rytm To Niesmiertelnosc II

A Prostitute Becomes A Dog

2009-06-15T11:36:00.014+01:00

A jeremiad of skinny dogs skulk over flyovers with their blood-haunted eyes and beaten fur bleached grey by the low wattage of car headlights. One of the dogs is a transformed prostitute. He breaks from the pack and wanders down to a kitchen in the industrial wasteland to listen to bacon roiling in thick grease and watch the shimmering of lunar light on a pane of glass. Then the factory begins to roar and, in the pre-dawn, pre-warm, heat its machines. They clang and wail and crash, sounding to the cocked and broken ear of our ex-drab and now dog like the mourning songs of whales. It is relatively easy to imagine in this area that the sky is just a ceiling; a swollen roof of ice ending at the level of the satellites and the clouds of tired smog. The dog prowls outside the kitchen. He lives on a diet of Polish meat, melted ice cream and the twisted bones of cigarette ends. When he was a boy- long before his transformation- he was weaned on milk and rum, only ever consuming food cold due to fears of a monster living in the oven. He would sit on the ulcerated shag carpet and slurp at coagulated tomato soup, safely bathed in the womblike light of the television.

Lying on the pavement in a stolen fur coat at the age of nineteen, the last few seasons fast-forwarded and made dizzy in his head, he quickly died. About a second after he began to moult, the outer layer of fur stripping away and leaving his cold photocopy of skin. The night covered him like tar and the other great light in his life, the moon, just disappeared. The money from his last john slowly swirled in his pocket, conjoining with soaked trousers and thieved boots to form a patchy, worn-out pelt that stretched tightly over fractured bones; the leather boots shifting into the leathery pads of paws, bitten and bled nails jagged into crooked, golden claws and all the metal fell from his mouth, leaving first hollow nubs and stubs of teeth until they smushed together and became canine and his tongue was punched with tiny holes. Four dogs roused him with a poking of noses and mucky tongues. He awoke but still felt sleepy and mumbled onto his feet, his head very sore. He tried to bark to greet the other dogs but couldn't. He had thought he was on a higher level, really even this was just a plateau. He starts to yelp as the light ekes through the clouds.

1. RZA- Ghost Dog Theme

2. Sonic Youth- Tremens

3. Vladislav Delay- Lumi

Loaded Like A Pregnant Whore

2009-06-12T14:46:00.017+01:00

While stumbling through a star streamed realm of cyber-infinity I came across "Miss K", a rather alluring Japanese lady-boy. Bleak.

Neon Indian - I Should Have Taken Acid With You
GDFX - Choose Your Emanation
Toro Y Moi - Talamak

Morning Chaos, Midnight Chaos

2009-06-02T20:49:00.015+01:00

'I am a commercial film maker. I am a patriot. I want to adapt Ulysses with Snoop Dogg. I hide in trees.'

Harmony Korine

1. A devilish youth drugs a beautiful HIV+ waif in his lair- the gargantuan discotheque of Tunnel. She's dosed on this bastard miscegenation of dissociative drugs and then wanders around, lost in video game noise, stumbling into the void... It is NASA night when alert youths become glaucoma'd, wasted and hopeless cosmonauts drifting through end-of-the-century New York like the summertime that roasts the pavement and fries the insides of its denizens is just one of the endless cold spells of infinite space.

2. After the narcotic lurch of New York in decline we are thrown by tornado into the ravaged land of Xenia, Ohio, where drunk yokels wrestle chairs, albino sisters fatten their breasts with masking tape (loosely swiped from Nabokov's Laughter In The Dark where the nymphet Margot reddens her nipples with lipstick before art class) and glue-sniffing kids whip cats in the skeletal woods for money. Here a ravishing bleach-blonde Chloe Sevigny swoons to Buddy Holly's perfect Everyday.

3/4. A thought-sick young man raves at the dinner table before being disciplined by his crazed German father with a mangled re-telling of that mythic Dirty Harry scene over Thanksgiving turkey and cranberries. An interlude of Czech mourning music. Then pregnant Chloe and the protagonist go ice-skating; the camera whirls and blurs over the scratchy, beautiful soundtrack of broken CDs. Soon after this, one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema, there is a fire (of sorts) and we recede into a womb of darkness and terror. Ah, sorrow.

1. Folk Implosion- Jenny's Theme

2. Buddy Holly- Everyd ay

3. Antonin Dvorak- 5 Bagatelles, Op. 47, I: Alegretto Scherzando

4. Oval- Meditation

Don't chase beer with cream. It will only make you hurt...

2009-06-01T18:34:00.006+01:00

If you've spent all this weekend lying far too cosily with nature under the merciless sun whilst it boils away all the water and blood in your body leaving only beer, then you will probaly need a few tunes to remind you that, just maybe, all is not lost and that our Tesco-whorshipping, Esso-whoring race haven't pushed our luck just a smidge too far. We probably have. One day we'll all leave the house donning little blue hot pants and a Cliff Richard t-shirt having sprayed one too many puffs of Right Guard and we'll be reduced into piles of steaming ash, Carling scented ash.

Until then, the cure for chronic heat discomfort, in my mind, is an oldish Telefon Tel Aviv tune that makes you feel that you yourself should in fact be a bird, a Kidda tune that causes you to ignore all health warnings, forget the sun cream, keep drinking and ignore any mysterious new moles, and a Wave Machines song that simply makes me happy.

Kidda - Under The Sun
Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds
Wave Machines - Keep The Lights On

That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me

2009-05-31T23:59:00.021+01:00

Yeh, but it still hurts
You ate a lot of acid didn't you, back in the hippy days. when the sun streamed down onto your oiled back, fracturing and seething under the heat. When seas of green left it's imprint on elbows as you lay on family air looms, while baseless distortion crackled from electrocuting speakers. Hyper-masculinity took control as blacked meat never tasted so good. How did it feel when you had no school, when the reclining sun cast it's shadow and you moved to the woodlands, for Promethean temptations. Flames licked the Prussian blue sky while dead wood embers crepitated on melting glass. That southern glow on familiar faces left echos in the cavities on your consciousness, old and decaying now.
Yeh, but it still hurts

Fear - Let's Have A War
Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized
The Circle Jerks - We All Gotta Duck

Songs taken from cult 1984 film, "Repo Man" consists some now classic mid-80's post-punk tracks, that makes you truly feel like your a 1984 Los Angles white trash whore.

Dedication

2009-05-31T00:59:00.010+01:00

Basically someone has stolen a piece of writing off the blog and tried to pass it off as their own work. I apologise to anyone else who has to read this, but hey, you get a Cranberries song out of it. However...
To the steaming vagina that wants to plagirise the words of this blog and pass them off as a "poem" to one his god awful pieces of art that looks like a tracing he had done with crayon in his arse crack, here's a song dedicated to you, a rather aptly named Cranberries song, I hope it becomes somewhat of a soundtrack for your life. You can to listen to while you're living at home, a virgin the age of 46, having your mother tuck you into your waterproofed bed because she thinks you have a medical condition called "nocturnal enuresis" when the real reason you piss the bed because it makes you feel warm on those cold lonley nights in your meaningless life.

Cranberries - Copycat

Oh and the picture is a reference to the mirror scene in which Harpo copies all of Groucho's actions in the film Duck Soup. You probably didn't have to cultural captial to work that out for yourself.

I Only Said I Did It So They'd Take My Bellend Out The Chilli Sauce

2009-05-28T01:26:00.012+01:00

Excessively dark humor and the handling of taboo subjects as if they were nothing more than that broken Transformer that you found behind your cupboard that your estranged father gave you 5 Christmases past. Poking fun at rape and murder, paedophilia and suicide as well as critiquing a late 90s society that had become strangled by its own excessively sycophantic superficiality. Following the sordid exploits of Clive Pringle, trainee Brummie terrorists, foreign call centers and a hapless unemployed voice over actor.

A world of dark alleys and dank streets Monkey Dust was one of those late night BBC3 shows that my dad never let me stay up and watch, thinking that perhaps animated sketches depicting a grotesque internet pervert grooming a 12 year old girl, or the hapless exploits of a desperate first time cottager was not really the choice viewing for his 13 year old son. Nevertheless, despite the fact that at the age of 12 I had no clue what a cottager actually was (despite using at numerous times as a playground insult after), I still snuck downstairs in the dead of a school night to watch it. Nose pressed up against the prickly electronically static screen with volume right down to one bar.

Goldfrapp - Deer Stop
Ilya - Rehab Messiah
Boards Of Canada - Turquoise Hexagon Sun
Goldfrapp - Lovely Head

Closet Music

2009-05-26T16:26:00.004+01:00

I can make you feel like it doesen't matter if your clothes are too feminine, your gait is slightly too bouncy or that you're haunted by that one reckless night. You thought you'd repressed the memory so deeply. You filed it in amongst the images of naked family members and Two Girls, One Cup. Surely no one would ever, could never, find out. But I know... I know.

Blank - Shirt Off
Munk - Down In LA (Shazam Edit)
Mr Flash - Eagle Eyez

Nighttime Noise

2009-05-25T23:56:00.005+01:00

1. Everything is shutting down. Walking home when the sky is a sickly pale blue colour, you imagine you're an astronaut. You jump but stay tethered to the concrete, swaying gently back and forth, as woozy as a balloon. You settle for somnolence so the stars twist into animals and you drift into late night euphoria under the time-lapse clouds. Arthur Russell conjures the lunar landscape of night with his looping, gravityless cello and drowsy voice. A man lost totally in the infinite swirls of cassette he used, he spoke of his work as a 'world of echo' which describes the land of near-sleep perfectly.

2. Most of the sounds you hear are drifting in a lukewarm jelly: softened waves of synthesiser, shushed tickles of drums and disembodied cooing. Technicoloured computer light blips over the concrete, warm and cold at the same time.

3. The Fader is all about David Byrne.

Television ghosts talk slowly and coldly in the dark. A luminous body sneaks into you and makes you ache. A scarf-covered blue light pulses under your eyelids. On the television there are passages of sound and moments of silence. There doesn't have to be dialogue. You forget.

4. When you do sleep you swoon. A huge mountain of loops and explosions of light and space, masses of sirens and narcotic drifts, wailing strobes and smudged, broken sections of swollen black cloud. It's not endless or outside of time but just stops. It ends. You have to wake up to dismal morning and the sound of rain hitting pavement where it sounds like people clapping.

1. Arthur Russell- This Is How We Walk On The Moon

2. Plaid- Buddy

3. David Byrne and Brian Eno- Solo Guitar With Tin Foil

4. My Bloody Valentine- 2

You Might Want To Wash That Bed Of Crimson Joy

2009-05-24T02:56:00.026+01:00

Three fierce kittens read the beginners bible while your ovaries explode
Here's some songs to commit polygamy to.
Panda Bear - Guys Eyes (Live)
Beach House - Gila
Yellow Fever - Hellfire
Fight Bite - Swissex Lover

I tried to put some "Shot By Kern" pictures up to go with these songs, but the Big Brother state has deemed them too subversive for our fragile little innocent minds. And to prevent ourselves from being corrupted with Kern's exploration of the sexual state, has subsequently removed them, forcing me to use more of a latently sexual image. To see the images I posted originally to accompany these songs go on the following links:
Ana Lucia - Shot By Kern
Sasha Grey - Shot By Kern

Something Funky And Haunted....

2009-05-23T13:18:00.018+01:00

I wish for nothing more in this life than to be able to transport myself, through space and time, to the epicentre of each of my favourite hip-hop movements. One day, when we've stopped worrying about the bees, we'll work it out. Then we can holiday to New York in 1981 to rub shoulders with Zorro hat wearing grandmasters.

Ok so you've just got back to your Brooklyn apartment with your friend Lance, new bright blue suit in hand, you tune in to WBLS for Mr Magic's show, Ecstacy, Jalil and Grandmaster Dee are wonderfully courteous and explain to you how rap works in Magic's Wand. The vocoder edit of The Haunted House Of Rock wins because it brings to mind images of robots dressed as zombies doing the thriller dance with Kylie-style face microphones.

Whodini - Haunted House Of Rock (Vocoder Version)

Now we're in LA, early 90s, with Fatlip (before the coke), J Swift (before the crack), because if you're like me, you'd rather smoke joints with Slimkid3 and Bootie Brown then jock bitches and slap hoes with Eazy E and Dr Dre. Like a lot of The Pharcydes material this song is better with motion and sunlight. So when you arrive in LA in 92, after you rent the low-rider, cruise up and down the beach with Passing Me By on full.

The Pharcyde - Passing Me By

It would be way more fun to hang out with Biggie than Tupac. I'd much rather consume excessive amounts of Hennessey, smoke joints rolled proper and fuck many bitches, big booty bitches, than get arrested for sodomy. You only have to watch this to understand. I guess this part of the transchronoteleportation holiday would be pretty short. I'm scared of guns.

Notorious B.I.G. - Friend Of Mine

Now were back in 2009 for some far less threatening tunes by Chicago rapper Vyle. Possible is produced by hot new Shazam who with 80s disco dance finesse has groomed Vyle's Chi-town flow to make Possible sound like a hybrid of The Cool Kids and Chromeo. You soon realise this tune would be most at home at a party in Beverly Hills while everyone sips Cristal and no one likes each other. It's a beautiful kind of hip hop - makes you feel rich.

Vyle - Possible (produced by Shazam)

You'd think on a global hip-hop megatrip you'd probaly finish up in LA, New york or maybe London but not Sweden. MOVITS, music 'for mothers and art directors', are Aryan, gyspy hip-hopsters that make me want to dance in the street, be chased by bulls away from the art I was admiring and have lorry loads of tomatoes thrown at my well-groomed, blonde moustache. they are the reason I like music I can't understand, especially this. Swedish is pretty.

Movits! - Äppelknyckarjazz

The Owls Won't See Us In Here

2009-05-23T12:53:00.009+01:00

'Lynch lost his dog in this darkness, eaten by coyotes, he maintains.'

1- The devil appears at an LA party and performs the impossible before a wasted Bill Pullman. A spaced-out manipulation of Dusty Springfield's 'Spooky' littered with soft-focus sax and ghostly teen girl singing plays on the hi-fi. Pullman stares into the void, haunted by his vision and the music that remains, slinking and oozing like some oily ketamine animal.

Barry Adamson- Something Wicked This Way Comes

2- 'Winter lasts seven or eight months... I like the combination of desolate areas and hi-tech equipment'. The track is taken from Substrata, a record weaved out of samples from Twin Peaks and sounds of Nordic ice drifts and painfully overcast afternoons.

Biosphere- Hyperborea

3- What love is when you can't speak because the treatment for your personality disorder has fucked up and you think your girlfriend's made of glass.

Angelo Badalamenti- Love Theme From Twin Peaks

4. And after or just before you die, depending on critical interpretation of symbols and cinematography, this dead orphan lullaby plays and you're engulfed in an endless static snow.

Peter Ivers- In Heaven Everything Is Fine

The end of Endtroducing features the incantory words of the Giant, the man from another world... 'It is happening again... it is happening again.'

Chasing Buses and supressed Homoeroticism

2009-05-22T19:29:00.011+01:00

Responsible for inspiring God at Earth's inception - if it wasn't for Godspeed there would be no Norway or Luxembourg, and if you live in a world without Norway or Luxembourg: you're probably a fascist.
Blurring the line between orchestrally styled uplifting crescendos with suicide inducing monologues so beautifully bleak that you wouldn't mind asphyxi-wanking yourself to death just to see what hell had to offer. When I'm an overweight, balding divorcee, who works as a bank teller in HSBC's local branch, I can only hope that I have a record or two of theirs to listen to while I cry into my Chicken Kiev dinner for one.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Moya

Fresh Prince, X-Files and Brother Bashing

2009-05-21T19:22:00.015+01:00

I got serious beef with the fact that half way through the Fresh Prince, Will Smiths aunt Vivian changes character to some lame shell suit wearing retard. Why can't they just go back to the good old days where Aunt Viv was a badass sister who didn't take no shit from no one? At least this foul change of actor is counter-balanced with James Avery's giganticism and Ashley's new found puberty induced sexuality but I digress..

I'm watching a bee bite a man's neck on golden-era X Files. A semi-circle of Aryan twins stand around a telephone pole. The man has a seizure. This is basically a direct invocation of the opening scene of Lynch's Blue Velvet- the most sinister and alluring opening of all time. Lynch's contribution to the theoretically-lost- but quickly lifted electronically- DangerMouse record has exactly the same quality... like slowly dying from tranquilisers as an old man and some angels stand at the end of your bed. It's unnerving and weirdly pleasant at the same time. X Files is dope, too. Particularly the titles- 'The Truth Is Out There' etc.- and Duchovny did his final thesis on Samuel Beckett- Duchovny rules, too.

Dangermouse And Sparklehorse - Dark Night Of The Soul

As my friends clamp, pink belly and corrupt my 12 year old brother whilst playing to the Clockwork Orange soundtrack I feel its necessary to introduce Stacey Q's Two Of Hearts to lighten the mood. You know the type of tune that first starts off as a camp novelty among friends, you drive through villages in a vauxhall corsa screaming it at passing upstanding citizens, mostly OAPs, you know.. similar to Like A Virgin or some German power pop, but at some point, after you start skipping NAS and J5 to get to the 80s gem, you realise it's quite possibly the best pop track ever created. Just trust me.

Stacey Q - Two Of Hearts

Now for all you fans of Austrian early 80s techno here's Vienna-born Falco with his 1981 hit "Der Kommissar". If there was ever a song to keep the Anchluss and the heart of polio-crippled Joseph Goebbels still contracting an icy beat, it's this. With all it's lyrics spoken in the tongue of the Father Land, Arnie would be proud. I'm not talking about the new governer Arnie, or the early body builder Predator Arnie, I'm talking about the Austrian God that starred in such family comedies as "Twins" and a personal favourite of mine "Kindergarten Cop". I can imagine him sat at home exclaiming, "I'm not a policeman, I'm a princess!!!" whilst listening to this song.

Falco - Der Kommissar

In the ideal world, one where red wine burst from fire hydrants and Bitches' Brew played in supermarkets and bears roamed untouched through plentiful coniferous trees munching honey, Hecker would be the most popular man of all time. All his 'white-capped white noise' would be blasting out of Tesco's. Imagine if Brian Eno had grown up in the '80s suffering from post-rave paranoia and urban hallucinations instead of sipping champagne and fiddling pianos in art school. The apocalypse, when it eventually comes, will sound exactly like Hecker.

Tim Hecker - Chimeras

Now it has gone too far, the brother is downstairs having left because his balls got stood on. It's about time for some gangsta. Geto Boys, hailing from Texas, will possibly teach my brother to man up. These four are possibly about as G as you can get (watch this space I'm sure much more hip-hop will be plugged in a particular white-boyesque manner) enjoy.

Geto Boys - Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster