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.

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.