Not-Writing

*****

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.

****

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

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

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

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)

'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

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

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

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Attali- Noise: The Political Economy of Music

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

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

Each band is structured around an outdated model where the Voice is allowed tremendous power and the remaining sounds are nearly muted.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

It's alright cos the historical pattern has shown

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

Bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery.

Stereolab, Ping Pong

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

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

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

1. Stereolab- Ping Pong

2. Robert Wyatt- At Last I Am Free

3. My Bloody Valentine- Sueisfine

Untitled piece by Hermann Nitsch. No copyright infringement intended.

Only The Good Die Young

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



Rage Against the Machine - Renegades Of Funk

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

Come And Shake Bones

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

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

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

People Of The Sun

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



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

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

Art And Music

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

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

All my pictures are confused

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

Talking Heads- Artists Only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

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

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

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

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

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

2. Philip Glass- Knee Play 5

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

4. Tim Hecker- I'm Transmitting Tonight

5. Daniel Johnston- I Save Cigarette Butts

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

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

'Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.'

T.S. Eliot- Four Quartets

Rock music and Death are very close friends.

They live together now that rock music is dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rock star tests voices in front of the mirror.

Death enters through the mirror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's all I have to say.

1. McCarthy- We Are All Bourgeois Now

2. Autechre- Flutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. All mice, become dogs.

SIGNAL. SIGNAL OUT. SIGNAL.

1. Aidan Baker- Part One

2. Stereolab- Anamorphose

3. Ariel Pink- For Kate I Wait

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

Index Of Failure

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

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

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

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

1. Leyland Kirby- Memories Live Longer Than Dreams

2. Nico- These Days

3. LTJ Bukem- Atlantis

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