Friday, August 27, 2010
ONE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS WRITES.....
"porntology already exists!
jonny trunk has been on this for ages
the slogan at the Trunk website is Music, Nostaglia, Sex
and he is totally into this retro-saucy vibe check this
http://www.trunkrecords.com/index.htm
here's a post on his latest venture at A Sound Awareness, one of the key h-ological blogs
http://fingersports.blogspot.com/2010/08/mr-trunk-presents-atomage.html
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/dressing_for_pleasure.shtml
unusually kinky for Mr Trunk cf. his previous efforts
flexi sex (flexisingles from old porn mags)
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/flexi_sex.shtml
mary millington talks dirty
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/come_play_me.shtml
project called dirty fan male, based on letters to his sister who was a softcore starlet
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/dfm.shtml
the ladies bras
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/ladies_bras.shtml
he almost had a hit with that song, there was some DJ campaign (danny baker?) to get it to into the charts
i did an interview with Trunk and he was totally talking about vintage porn in the same way as library music -- the artistry of the old magazines, the unusual shoots, whimsical humour, cf. the modern stuff which he hates."
yeah...alright....that one WAS Reynolds....
"porntology already exists!
jonny trunk has been on this for ages
the slogan at the Trunk website is Music, Nostaglia, Sex
and he is totally into this retro-saucy vibe check this
http://www.trunkrecords.com/index.htm
here's a post on his latest venture at A Sound Awareness, one of the key h-ological blogs
http://fingersports.blogspot.com/2010/08/mr-trunk-presents-atomage.html
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/dressing_for_pleasure.shtml
unusually kinky for Mr Trunk cf. his previous efforts
flexi sex (flexisingles from old porn mags)
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/flexi_sex.shtml
mary millington talks dirty
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/come_play_me.shtml
project called dirty fan male, based on letters to his sister who was a softcore starlet
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/dfm.shtml
the ladies bras
http://www.trunkrecords.com/turntable/ladies_bras.shtml
he almost had a hit with that song, there was some DJ campaign (danny baker?) to get it to into the charts
i did an interview with Trunk and he was totally talking about vintage porn in the same way as library music -- the artistry of the old magazines, the unusual shoots, whimsical humour, cf. the modern stuff which he hates."
yeah...alright....that one WAS Reynolds....
Philip Larkin - Love Again
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he's taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.
Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,
And me supposed to be ignorant,
Or find it funny, or not to care,
Even ... but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he's taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.
Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,
And me supposed to be ignorant,
Or find it funny, or not to care,
Even ... but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
One name kept popping up in my mind as I read Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter.
Heidegger? Spinoza? Latour? Adorno? Well, they’re all copiously referenced in the text, but nope.
Amelie. Yeah, the winsome Parisian magic-realist poppet.
Now there is undoubtedly much subtlety of argument and observation in the book that sailed over my half-educated head, maybe I have no right to comment on it at all, but then, given it’s a plea for new forms of political engagement I guess it does concern me, being a member of the “public” (along with diphtheria, lint, halitosis and chalk) that any politics needs, and having been interested enough in her general project to seek her work out anyway.
So why did Amelie pop into my head every ten pages or so? To crudely summarize Bennett’s message, I got this out of it: Any number of factors both human and non-human (actants) combine (assemblages) to contribute to/cause any given situation. To say that only humans “act” is to misjudge the situation, a kind of “folk agency” as humans themselves are not closed and hermetically sealed off from any outside but in a constant relationship with it: ergo we need to pay more attention to the role which non-human agents play in events. For example, thinking of metal as an “actant”: spending on elderly care in a given state consumes a huge part of the budget, leaving less to invest in education due to the high number of Alzheimer’s sufferers in that region, something attributable to the rates of exposure to aluminium in pans during the seventies. The wave of unemployed teens who commit suicide later is a consequence in many ways of the aluminium.* We can’t say at that aluminium is “alive” as such but it has “a life”, it interacts and creates new potentialities, new situations. Hence everything is really “living” (to the extent I suppose that it enters into a dynamic relation, perhaps not, some undiscovered mineral contains “life” latently, I suppose) and it is the typical post-Cartesian chutzpah to suppose we can especially privilege the “human” in this network**.
Like most general readers I tend to power through the bits where she’s obviously just justifying herself to other philosophers in terms of age-old arguments ( the chapter on Vitalism, the stuff on Adorno) accepting that I’ll half understand it. The consequence here at least is that the book is a not untypical combination of the recondite and the bleeding obvious. Apparently the stuff you eat makes a big difference to how you feel. You don’t say? Ask the guys down my local Gym, they’ll tell you all about the peculiar human/non human assemblage that’s called lifting weights: you eat a load of protein, you break down muscle fibre allowing it to overcompensate through rest, you become stronger, you feel more confident in the street, you have more fights, the hospitals are crowded on Friday night. Hey, ask a drug addict! You mean that people who work in power plants ought to consider the extent to which the physical properties of the plants components are important, especially under pressure from other non human sources? Like they don’t do that already?
Early on Bennet spots some detritus in a local drain ( a bag, a cup, a dead rat, a used condom.. or something… I finished it last Sunday I can’t remember everything,) and is lead on to reflect on the kind of unique, vibrant power of this particular assemblage. This is where my incredulity kicked in and Amelie popped up. I can’t seriously disentangle Bennett’s project from an aesthetic argument or a liberal “rights” based argument. First up the book is a plea to look around us and see the world in more magical terms, as a kind of holistic, living/non-living source of speculative wonder, and secondly this leads on to a tweeness, never far below the surface, in which, by extending consideration and purpose to everything we kind of “enfranchise” salt, lice and strep throat. Hello trees, hello sky, hello quartz! It’s all about human non-human respect and recognition.
The final chapter, in which this new, more radical ecology, a political ecology no less, is to be systematized is revealingly confused and partial, it’s kind of a plea for open-mindedness against common sense, which is odd as the argument is basically common sense re-mystified. So much time is spent trying to justify the basic proposition that any possible political applications are lost. Once again we’re being asked to start thinking about the world in a new way in the hope that something good will eventually spontaneously arise from our re-conceiving the role of the human. Why are philosophers, especially political philosophers, so reluctant to give us a 10 point plan that needs immediate effect? Ah, because that would be oppressing us in a way and not nurturing us in our difference.
I am all for new age shorn of the mysticism: Let’s take yoga: is yoga some kind of encounter with a great beyond? Nope, it’s basically just an excellent system for balancing hormonal levels. I’m not sure you need to invoke Heidegger to get that point across: go ask Gillian McKeith. Ecology shorn of the pathetic fallacy, sure, why not, but this just seems like the pathetic fallacy extended, hence all the garbled pleading for a qualified anthropomorphism at the end. So Vibrant Matter basically commits the same sin, it is way too respectful of the thing, it approaches it with a kind of creeping liberal handwringing, too desperate to abase itself for all the nasty years of human-centeredness that dead fish, leaves and cadmium have had to suffer. From tree-hugging to kind of embracing matter in a big cosmic hug.
It’s an old lesson and you’d think I’d have learned it by now: never trust a hippy.
Heidegger? Spinoza? Latour? Adorno? Well, they’re all copiously referenced in the text, but nope.
Amelie. Yeah, the winsome Parisian magic-realist poppet.
Now there is undoubtedly much subtlety of argument and observation in the book that sailed over my half-educated head, maybe I have no right to comment on it at all, but then, given it’s a plea for new forms of political engagement I guess it does concern me, being a member of the “public” (along with diphtheria, lint, halitosis and chalk) that any politics needs, and having been interested enough in her general project to seek her work out anyway.
So why did Amelie pop into my head every ten pages or so? To crudely summarize Bennett’s message, I got this out of it: Any number of factors both human and non-human (actants) combine (assemblages) to contribute to/cause any given situation. To say that only humans “act” is to misjudge the situation, a kind of “folk agency” as humans themselves are not closed and hermetically sealed off from any outside but in a constant relationship with it: ergo we need to pay more attention to the role which non-human agents play in events. For example, thinking of metal as an “actant”: spending on elderly care in a given state consumes a huge part of the budget, leaving less to invest in education due to the high number of Alzheimer’s sufferers in that region, something attributable to the rates of exposure to aluminium in pans during the seventies. The wave of unemployed teens who commit suicide later is a consequence in many ways of the aluminium.* We can’t say at that aluminium is “alive” as such but it has “a life”, it interacts and creates new potentialities, new situations. Hence everything is really “living” (to the extent I suppose that it enters into a dynamic relation, perhaps not, some undiscovered mineral contains “life” latently, I suppose) and it is the typical post-Cartesian chutzpah to suppose we can especially privilege the “human” in this network**.
Like most general readers I tend to power through the bits where she’s obviously just justifying herself to other philosophers in terms of age-old arguments ( the chapter on Vitalism, the stuff on Adorno) accepting that I’ll half understand it. The consequence here at least is that the book is a not untypical combination of the recondite and the bleeding obvious. Apparently the stuff you eat makes a big difference to how you feel. You don’t say? Ask the guys down my local Gym, they’ll tell you all about the peculiar human/non human assemblage that’s called lifting weights: you eat a load of protein, you break down muscle fibre allowing it to overcompensate through rest, you become stronger, you feel more confident in the street, you have more fights, the hospitals are crowded on Friday night. Hey, ask a drug addict! You mean that people who work in power plants ought to consider the extent to which the physical properties of the plants components are important, especially under pressure from other non human sources? Like they don’t do that already?
Early on Bennet spots some detritus in a local drain ( a bag, a cup, a dead rat, a used condom.. or something… I finished it last Sunday I can’t remember everything,) and is lead on to reflect on the kind of unique, vibrant power of this particular assemblage. This is where my incredulity kicked in and Amelie popped up. I can’t seriously disentangle Bennett’s project from an aesthetic argument or a liberal “rights” based argument. First up the book is a plea to look around us and see the world in more magical terms, as a kind of holistic, living/non-living source of speculative wonder, and secondly this leads on to a tweeness, never far below the surface, in which, by extending consideration and purpose to everything we kind of “enfranchise” salt, lice and strep throat. Hello trees, hello sky, hello quartz! It’s all about human non-human respect and recognition.
The final chapter, in which this new, more radical ecology, a political ecology no less, is to be systematized is revealingly confused and partial, it’s kind of a plea for open-mindedness against common sense, which is odd as the argument is basically common sense re-mystified. So much time is spent trying to justify the basic proposition that any possible political applications are lost. Once again we’re being asked to start thinking about the world in a new way in the hope that something good will eventually spontaneously arise from our re-conceiving the role of the human. Why are philosophers, especially political philosophers, so reluctant to give us a 10 point plan that needs immediate effect? Ah, because that would be oppressing us in a way and not nurturing us in our difference.
I am all for new age shorn of the mysticism: Let’s take yoga: is yoga some kind of encounter with a great beyond? Nope, it’s basically just an excellent system for balancing hormonal levels. I’m not sure you need to invoke Heidegger to get that point across: go ask Gillian McKeith. Ecology shorn of the pathetic fallacy, sure, why not, but this just seems like the pathetic fallacy extended, hence all the garbled pleading for a qualified anthropomorphism at the end. So Vibrant Matter basically commits the same sin, it is way too respectful of the thing, it approaches it with a kind of creeping liberal handwringing, too desperate to abase itself for all the nasty years of human-centeredness that dead fish, leaves and cadmium have had to suffer. From tree-hugging to kind of embracing matter in a big cosmic hug.
It’s an old lesson and you’d think I’d have learned it by now: never trust a hippy.
* I’m not suggesting aluminium does cause Alzheimer’s it’s just an example.
**plus, why is there no mention of Graham Harman in this book?
Thursday, August 26, 2010
What!? Poster boys for Neo-Liberalism the USA and the UK, get a single city in this list between them?
Hang on, of the world's three biggest economies only three cities are represented and they're all in Japan?
So the two biggest economies in the world have one city that gets into the top 25.
3 countries out of the G7 aren't represented at all: UK, USA, Italy.
Hang on, of the world's three biggest economies only three cities are represented and they're all in Japan?
So the two biggest economies in the world have one city that gets into the top 25.
3 countries out of the G7 aren't represented at all: UK, USA, Italy.
But at least we're IN the G7! Yeah! "punching above our weight" in the world, being an important international player, enjoying the "special relationship" and standing at the cutting edge of innovation and reform, not like those Old Europe losers in Finland or Austria or Denmark or errr... Germany or errr.....France....
ONE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS WRITES:
echoing several others...
"Funnily enough being online most of the day I rarely look at porn, I've got a bit bored of it, I guess this fits in with the naughtiness thing, I'd probably find a shot of Cleo Rocos's cleavage more erotic than a video of some oiled-up silicon tit riding a massive cock. I do now and then check out a bit of vintage 70s-80s porn to remind me of the first pornos I saw, but even that doesn't have the effect it used to."
What can I say, but, Porntology.
echoing several others...
"Funnily enough being online most of the day I rarely look at porn, I've got a bit bored of it, I guess this fits in with the naughtiness thing, I'd probably find a shot of Cleo Rocos's cleavage more erotic than a video of some oiled-up silicon tit riding a massive cock. I do now and then check out a bit of vintage 70s-80s porn to remind me of the first pornos I saw, but even that doesn't have the effect it used to."
What can I say, but, Porntology.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
In the Pantheon of the Punchable, Christopher Nolan must rank pretty high.
He has, let’s be frank, an impeccably Tory face.* With perhaps just a soupcon of New Lab thrown in.
I can’t look at it
But fundamentally…
He has, let’s be frank, an impeccably Tory face.* With perhaps just a soupcon of New Lab thrown in.
I can’t look at it
without seeing it as a nightmare compound of the following:
But fundamentally…
*I’d certainly be interested in thinking about how particularly British Inception is.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Deep Purple-Hard Lovin' Man
I hadn't heard this until last week. It sounds a bit like Neu, Steppenwolf and The Young Gods got together and formed a supergroup. In 1971.
Should we just quietly draw a veil over that porn post below?
Actually there’s a good comment in the box which I’ll reproduce here, as typically its better than my initial post.
"Well I can confess that between all the left-wing news, music downloads, youtube, emails, high theory and shopping for books/CDs that have been banished from the high st. (but NOT the highly alienating, panopticon-with-a-smiley-face Facebook!) I've probably used about 95% of my internet time looking at/waiting for porn.
The bogus horror (of MEN) when I admit to this is shocking. It points to a general wave of denial, bullshit and hypocrisy among western manhood. Funny how those who claim to have nothing but healthy, equal, sexually fulfilling relationships still manage to understand whatever crude sexual terms the porn industry throws up every few years. Funny how no-ones Facebook 'status' never says: "...has been wanking furiously over the degradation of Hungarian ladies since sunrise".
The lack of comments on this matter belies the 'wall of silence' around the whole issue. Yeah 'everyone' is talking about 'Inception' - in the few minutes between thinking about the vast marketplace of fetishes, frustrations and ugly desires that arguably feed into the rage, hate, vanity and childish feuding that the internet thrives on (I'd be interested to see any correlation between online porn and the level of masturbatory resentment that passes for 'comment' on 'news' sites these days).
An other interesting aspect of online porn is how, just over a decade ago, most of us only ventured out to buy 'grumble' during times of stress, extreme boredom, rejection, loneliness or drunk confusion. Now we can accelerate our sense of the above 24/7 without the fear that our ex-girlfriend's mother will walk into the newsagent during our 'moment of truth'. Or indeed, avoid the teenage rite of passage of watching it in groups, laughing a bit too loudly at the bad dialogue while desperate to depart to privacy as soon as the video's over."
Internet Porn is perfect for not having to publically/personally own your actions though, innit? i mean back in the pre-Internet days I never bought a porn mag or rented a video because effectively I was standing in front my local newsagent/store owner saying " hello.... in about twenty minutes, I'll be drinking a can of special brew in my bedsit and knocking one out over this". I could never do it, I was just too embarrassed, even when drunk. I remember being repeatedly amazed too by that long vanished British institution the be-suited businessman who violently scans jazz mags in the W.H. Smiths on provincial stations with his right eye while also somehow managing to look testily around the entire store with his left.
So it has several advantages, specifically for those of us who always lacked the nerve to face up to the guy in the All-night garage with a pint of milk and a copy of Razzle. Primarily though because it's free, it's completely secret, it’s in your home, there’s a certain amount of comforting disavowal. It’s all just THERE anyway, you yourself are not the consumer or the audience for/of this stuff, it’s all there for the other (you may even experience a kind of wearily amused and pleasurable contempt for its “real” consumers as you click through) and you can dismiss your own involvement as just a kind of browsing/surfing. This I would assume is the legitimating strategy for the “educated” porn consumer. It’s a spot of dabbling, a bit of research: this is the distancing effect, the raising of a slightly sanctimonious shield. Rather as I imagine there’s a comforting sense of alloof dismay around exactly this kind of conversation: isn’t it all just so obvious and commonplace that it doesn’t really get us anywhere talking about it. This thinking is an attempt to appeal to your own “sophistication”, to conjure away discomfort by adopting a blasé posture. It’s so banal it’s not even worth thinking about, darling.
Maybe not, but I’m in the mood to and if it is all banal I’m sure you, dearest blogreader, will patiently indulge me.
There’s always someone who likes to trot out the statistic that men think about sex every 13.7 seconds or some such. I don’t know about anyone else but most of my adult life post-puberty seems to have been one long, sustained, speculative sexual reverie punctuated by occasional moments of focus and engagement. This has tailed off as I’ve got older, and its generally been dissipated in the early honeymoon phases of a new relationship, but still…there must surely be a massive degree to which the internet intervenes in this, takes control of it. I have friends who are/have been effectively addicted to porn. Its kind of like the introduction of a naturally occurring hormone through external means in one way, once the imagination shuts down because its function ( to provide a semi-continuous stream of sexual fantasies, among other things) can be replaced by a “prosthesis” then the tendency is instead to click through every 6.2 seconds or whatever. If you’re telling me that consciousness isn’t (a.o.t) a battleground, a war of attrition, between focus and (primarily sexual) fantasy then I’ll have to believe you, I suppose.
One odd thing about conversations about masturbation that always struck me was that men would happily give you all the details of their sexual conquests and successes in graphic detail, but almost no-one (with the notable and noble exception of Bonsai Silverback, who was possibly over-keen at times ) wants to talk about their masturbatory habits /fantasies, yet it always seemed in much poorer taste/much more obviously a part of male mutually aggrandizing bullshit to talk about the sex you’d just had.
I’ve definitely adopted the strategy of knocking a quick one out in the bathroom (don’t go near that computer in any kind of libidinal torment, you may tell yourself it’ll be a perfunctory affair, it won’t be) before settling down to get some serious work done.
Which is how I managed to write this response so quickly.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Now I’m as interested in all this stuff as anyone.
But isn’t there a big, pink, dripping elephant in the room here somewhere?
The typical article likes to get a bit meta, dunnit, with a bit of “While I’ve been writing this article on my internet connected P.C. I’ve also browsed the book section in Foyles, listened to Stockhausen on youtube, got tickets to Stockholm, checked my emails and…..”
…..and looked at loads of Porn.
I don’t know about anyone else but one of the biggest factors that interrupts my long, boring hours sitting on my own in front of a computer is my compulsive desire to look at any kind of sexual activity every thirty two seconds, along with the infinite variety and combination of good looking women doing exciting things in numerous combinations.
Porn, in all its infinite variety and the low level, humid, faintly pleasurable, warm zone of furtive and protracted masturbation it induces is the big attention monkey rubbing its nasty glands all over my frontal lobes during my writing time. Why bother struggling with this essay on Proust when you could be trawling through Redtube to find just exactly the right Bubble Butt Latina Blowjob (xxxhot!!) Video to expend several gobbets of your precious seed on. There’s absolutely no way that the immediate availability of quality grot and the highly stimulating nature of its content is a significant factor in all of this, is there?
Statistically 97% of users will have clicked away to watch a bukkake video while reading this very post. Don’t worry though; we all know that you, specifically, are in the other 3%.
But isn’t there a big, pink, dripping elephant in the room here somewhere?
The typical article likes to get a bit meta, dunnit, with a bit of “While I’ve been writing this article on my internet connected P.C. I’ve also browsed the book section in Foyles, listened to Stockhausen on youtube, got tickets to Stockholm, checked my emails and…..”
…..and looked at loads of Porn.
I don’t know about anyone else but one of the biggest factors that interrupts my long, boring hours sitting on my own in front of a computer is my compulsive desire to look at any kind of sexual activity every thirty two seconds, along with the infinite variety and combination of good looking women doing exciting things in numerous combinations.
Porn, in all its infinite variety and the low level, humid, faintly pleasurable, warm zone of furtive and protracted masturbation it induces is the big attention monkey rubbing its nasty glands all over my frontal lobes during my writing time. Why bother struggling with this essay on Proust when you could be trawling through Redtube to find just exactly the right Bubble Butt Latina Blowjob (xxxhot!!) Video to expend several gobbets of your precious seed on. There’s absolutely no way that the immediate availability of quality grot and the highly stimulating nature of its content is a significant factor in all of this, is there?
Maybe it’s just me. I’m sure you’re all too well-adjusted to be doing any of that. We know Guardian readers (and writers!) don’t Google porn, they are either too enlightened or somehow too elevated. You know those lies you like to tell your other half: it’s just never really interested me, the men/ women are so unnatural, actually I just find it kind of depressing and degrading. I’m kind of interested in it intellectually, but, I mean, it doesn’t turn me on. Is there now a single person under fifty in the developed world who hasn’t flung one over his thumb/ tickled the tuna with one hand on the mouse, anxiously hovering the little arrow over the reduce button in case the other -half gets back from the shops quicker than expected? Surely the death of the sexual imagination is worth considering, the co-option of interior fantasy space by the insanely unregulated porn free-for-all that is the world wide web. Ahhh, the global levels of porn addiction! A true human universal cutting across all classes and cultures! A prosthesis for our collective memory! A usurper of our individual capacity for fantasy too, eh?
Statistically 97% of users will have clicked away to watch a bukkake video while reading this very post. Don’t worry though; we all know that you, specifically, are in the other 3%.
It‘s back.
I imagined it had gone away for good this time, but no.
I mean, I welcomed the idea that it had gone. I’m living, I’m fully integrated into the world, all my energy is focused outward, I’m in love.
I only wrote anyway to hide from the world, to give myself an excuse to escape, a place to run to.
And after all, everything I ever wrote was a kind of attack upon writing anyway, an attack upon what was writerly within myself, which I associated with a kind of impotent dreaminess, a second order of existence compared to those who lived fully, who acted on their desires, who claimed a stake in the world.
But my desire was impossible and so I had to write.
Desire fulfilled, it should be banished, overcome, eclipsed.
And yet it’s back. The need to write fiction.
Oh yes, fiction. Nothing will satisfy like fiction. Nothing will exhilarate like the start of a novel, nothing frustrate you more than the middle, nothing release you more than the end.
I always thought it was despair that drove me to it, but it was love.
And like love it turns up at unexpected moments, at inconvenient times. But its call is undeniable.
You can love on many levels, then, it seems.
It seems life is rich in love.
I'm going inside now. I may be some time.
Friday, August 20, 2010
It was clear that at any moment the attack was to begin.
Out there in the night, rushing towards us, there were hordes of them, breathless, teeth bared, feet moving rapidly and silently over the grass, coming through the empty streets, falling into formation, waiting for the signal to strike.
We peeped through the curtain, sensed the darkness thickening and shifting.
This is your country, I said to her. What should we do? I was confident that she would have an answer.
The night turned inside out, was jettisoned and yanked back in again with a colossal shrieking, the sound of the earth grinding suddenly to halt. Then there was a great, concussive roar. The bombardment had begun.
We ran out through the garden, plunged into the woods. Already they were at our heels. I knew they were in the house now, her parent’s house, passed down for four, five generations, murdering the spirits of her ancestors. Those mild, humble spirits, ripped to shreds.
We ran for a long time. I had my arms up over my face for protection as all around us the bombs fell in such quantities that at times I felt more that I was swimming or gliding than running, the earth a shifting, liquid medium the air semi-solid with soil and debris. As we ran, shreds and flecks of spirit stuff clung me, damp and pale. The whole fabric of the world, the seen and unseen, the invisible support and the surface, the timeless depth and the rich, immediate moment, all of this was what they sought to destroy.
But these are a simple people! I cried out. I myself am a simple man!
The whole world churned around us. The dead bouncing up from their graves to caper through the air, rivers soaring skyward as trees drove down underground and the rocks boiled.
Then it stopped. Now, even more fearful still, the soldiers were coming. Men. The bombs were terrifying, but still, an abstraction of a kind. What I feared more than anything was man. The face of a man who had no pity for me, whose highest pleasure was to destroy what I loved.
They were fast, inhumanly so, coming through the forest it had taken us hours to cross in a matter of minutes, the sound of their panting rising, the air growing tighter and tighter.
We were in a clearing, the moon full and bright above us. Here, in here, she said pointing to the well at its centre. We have always hidden here.
We climbed down, lowering ourselves on the rope, the sky growing more distant, the darkness pressing in around us. My feet touched something cold and viscous, I had lost my shoes somewhere, and I recoiled. Water, just water, but there was a smell of something, salty and ancient.
It’s ok, it’s ok she said, it’s just blood. I remembered now that one of their rites was to fill a dry well with menstrual blood, an old superstition. They would use it to irrigate the land, believing it made the ground more fertile.
I lowered myself into it. It was thick and resistant. My feet touched a layer of sediment at the bottom of the well and sank slightly, the blood came up around my crotch, warm and grasping and I found I had an erection.
This was not surprising. I had read that during wartime many children were conceived, that in the face of death the urge to reproduce became an imperative. The light from the moon angled in against one wall of the well, and so we pressed against the shadowed side, close to each other. I could feel that she too was aroused, shivering slightly, just as I discovered now my own teeth were chattering almost uncontrollably.
I am traumatised. I said to myself. This is understandable.
She wrapped her legs around me. She was naked from the waist down. My feet sunk a little deeper, up to my ankles now. Something brushed against my calf. The blood was full of bodies I hadn’t noticed at first, most of them in advanced states of decay, more and more rising up through the slowly loosening mud I was standing in. Fingers plucked at me. Old, soft teeth took a nip at my thighs.
Make love to me she said.
I pushed up into her, put my head back and saw a soldier silhouetted against the mouth of the well, faceless but somehow intensely searching, completely motionless.
She pressed her face close to mine. I took the lobe of her right ear between my teeth and sucked it.
Up to my chest now in the blood with the dead clawing at me and the soldier, in all his endless patience, looking down.
Oh yes, yes I said. Yes, I’ll make love to you.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
More thinking out loud.
How is the hipster sublime distinct ( if we’re gonna run with this semi–concept. Might turn out to be a herring-red dead-end but so what… ) from the bog standard po-mo?
Firstly I think there are a couple of elements to pomo that aren’t important to the hip-sub. First up and fundamentally I think po-mo is founded on a rejection of the sublime. This doesn’t mean its neither vastly smart nor compendious, but it is based on foregrounding the formal qualities of the work, there’s a conspiratorial compact between producer/consumer to mutually acknowledge the mediation/formal devices and so on in the piece, the aim is not transport or rapture, but the satisfaction of knowing, pomo seeks not to overwhelm but to flatter. Po-mo’s desire to break down high/low cultural divides is also more generally in the nature of the collage than the possibilities of the hipster sublime, it requires surprising juxtapositions for its effects and as such the boundaries between elements need to remain fairly sharp, or the contrast is lost. Then there is, of course, irony.
The hipster sublime is perhaps just a point of super-saturation within po-mo, po-mo overflowing , eroding its own constraints, shifting to a molecular level, a kind of atomized and diffuse hyper referentiallity, timeless and placeless, that in somehow stretching back and out begins to oscillate into the future.
This is the current nominee for exemplar of the Hip-sub.
Actually I was struck by similarish effects watching Position Normal (Po-No) last night. First up I should confess to slight fatigue around the whole Exotic Pylon thing. It’s Goth and Industrial innit, really? Plus, I mean if we're beaming more than just dubstep back in time as a litmus test to what extent would Po-No sound like the future to anyone who was listening to Nurse With Wound’s “The Sylvie and Bab’s High Thigh Companion” in 1984? (I should point out that I hate that record). I suppose what’s engaging in Po-No at least for me (as it is to some degree in the Ghost Box stuff*) is the extent to which it actually sounds like an attempt to assert a kind of deep Englishness, rescue it even ( all those bathetic sampled voices) without lapsing back outright into folk traditions, a kind of claiming of the technological, the modern as a vehicle for Englishness/Britishness (“Mum’s gone to Grundig’s”) (in this sense it reminds me of Grime) in the face of globalization and Americanization. This is I suppose why, apart from NWW, PO-NO’s stuff reminds me most of Robert Wyatt and Utramarine ( who, of course, collaborated). But this, is, I guess, the arguably regressive/reactionary element in the work. The points at which it gets most interesting is when that conflict seems to be most intensely played out within the structure of the “songs”, the ways in which the song’s ambit seems to enclose this battle, alternating between defeat and resignation and then surges of reiteration and reassertion.
There’s a tension within Po No then that I don’t think there is within Vampire Weekend, a querulous, troubled dialectical quality as opposed to a kind of voluptuous, polysemic infuseness**. This may be generational, it may be an Anglo-American*** split, it may be a question of class, or even just that notorious old bit of flim-flam “sensibility”.
Still too wildly incoherent? Don’t worry I really am going to write those posts on OPN and The Office and clear all your misgivings up in two fell swoops.
*Though I have a feeling Hauntology is in danger of becoming rather diffuse itself, presumably anything made before 1978 is now “hauntological”, look at my grandad’s hauntological slippers, check out my hauntological Jackie annual, feel the nap on that bit of bri-nylon hauntological shag-pile my parents used to clad the loft, and risks a hipsterish Hauntological crate-digging one-upmanship developing, I’ll see your obscure, black and white 1970’s BBC2 children’s pagan horror-sci-fi series and raise you William Hartnell reading Lovecraft on Jackanory backed by the Sheffield Electronic Music Kollective etc…. Do I know my hauntological shit or WHAT???!!! Right, what’s next?
** yeah, I just made that word up. So pseud me.
*** I have to say last year I was taken with Wolves in the Throne Room and Kralice largely because they were the forefront of what I guess get’s called errrr… “Positive” Black Metal.
How is the hipster sublime distinct ( if we’re gonna run with this semi–concept. Might turn out to be a herring-red dead-end but so what… ) from the bog standard po-mo?
Firstly I think there are a couple of elements to pomo that aren’t important to the hip-sub. First up and fundamentally I think po-mo is founded on a rejection of the sublime. This doesn’t mean its neither vastly smart nor compendious, but it is based on foregrounding the formal qualities of the work, there’s a conspiratorial compact between producer/consumer to mutually acknowledge the mediation/formal devices and so on in the piece, the aim is not transport or rapture, but the satisfaction of knowing, pomo seeks not to overwhelm but to flatter. Po-mo’s desire to break down high/low cultural divides is also more generally in the nature of the collage than the possibilities of the hipster sublime, it requires surprising juxtapositions for its effects and as such the boundaries between elements need to remain fairly sharp, or the contrast is lost. Then there is, of course, irony.
The hipster sublime is perhaps just a point of super-saturation within po-mo, po-mo overflowing , eroding its own constraints, shifting to a molecular level, a kind of atomized and diffuse hyper referentiallity, timeless and placeless, that in somehow stretching back and out begins to oscillate into the future.
This is the current nominee for exemplar of the Hip-sub.
Actually I was struck by similarish effects watching Position Normal (Po-No) last night. First up I should confess to slight fatigue around the whole Exotic Pylon thing. It’s Goth and Industrial innit, really? Plus, I mean if we're beaming more than just dubstep back in time as a litmus test to what extent would Po-No sound like the future to anyone who was listening to Nurse With Wound’s “The Sylvie and Bab’s High Thigh Companion” in 1984? (I should point out that I hate that record). I suppose what’s engaging in Po-No at least for me (as it is to some degree in the Ghost Box stuff*) is the extent to which it actually sounds like an attempt to assert a kind of deep Englishness, rescue it even ( all those bathetic sampled voices) without lapsing back outright into folk traditions, a kind of claiming of the technological, the modern as a vehicle for Englishness/Britishness (“Mum’s gone to Grundig’s”) (in this sense it reminds me of Grime) in the face of globalization and Americanization. This is I suppose why, apart from NWW, PO-NO’s stuff reminds me most of Robert Wyatt and Utramarine ( who, of course, collaborated). But this, is, I guess, the arguably regressive/reactionary element in the work. The points at which it gets most interesting is when that conflict seems to be most intensely played out within the structure of the “songs”, the ways in which the song’s ambit seems to enclose this battle, alternating between defeat and resignation and then surges of reiteration and reassertion.
There’s a tension within Po No then that I don’t think there is within Vampire Weekend, a querulous, troubled dialectical quality as opposed to a kind of voluptuous, polysemic infuseness**. This may be generational, it may be an Anglo-American*** split, it may be a question of class, or even just that notorious old bit of flim-flam “sensibility”.
Still too wildly incoherent? Don’t worry I really am going to write those posts on OPN and The Office and clear all your misgivings up in two fell swoops.
*Though I have a feeling Hauntology is in danger of becoming rather diffuse itself, presumably anything made before 1978 is now “hauntological”, look at my grandad’s hauntological slippers, check out my hauntological Jackie annual, feel the nap on that bit of bri-nylon hauntological shag-pile my parents used to clad the loft, and risks a hipsterish Hauntological crate-digging one-upmanship developing, I’ll see your obscure, black and white 1970’s BBC2 children’s pagan horror-sci-fi series and raise you William Hartnell reading Lovecraft on Jackanory backed by the Sheffield Electronic Music Kollective etc…. Do I know my hauntological shit or WHAT???!!! Right, what’s next?
** yeah, I just made that word up. So pseud me.
*** I have to say last year I was taken with Wolves in the Throne Room and Kralice largely because they were the forefront of what I guess get’s called errrr… “Positive” Black Metal.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Saturday, August 07, 2010
I've enjoyed Mark's last couple of posts on work and non-work. "The begging letter", currently, like its protagonist, in limbo, dealt with similar themes. It was a biography that veered off into fiction, designed as a kind of thriller-pastiche of the the miserable-confessional books that were so popular a few years ago (Angela's Ashes etc). So I've stuck the first three "chapters" below.
I was born in Barrow-in-Furness on the Twentieth of March 1970 in the Roosecoat hospital, the son of Brian, a plumber in the local shipyard and Elizabeth, a housewife.
I had a happy childhood and with regard to my mum and dad, I have no complaints. I was their second child. I have a sister older than me by six years. The four of us lived in a terraced house, in housing built for the shipyard workers, until I was eleven.
My parents wanted a garden after years of nothing but a backyard and back streets and eventually we moved to a semi-detached house on the outskirts of the town. “It lifts the spirits, a garden,” my dad used to say, looking out at it. At that point he would have been twenty years into his thirty-three year working life in the shipyard, in his early fifties.
There had never been much money around, and it was even scarcer now, with the new mortgage, my sister in her second year of A-levels, me starting senior school and needing a new uniform. In order to help out with the family finances my mum took up various jobs, cleaning, working as a dinner lady and finally taking on a long stint as a Home-Help, a job she kept up until she retired. She was the oldest of nine children and hadn’t really had a childhood herself, helping her own mother to look after them all. Looking after people was what she knew.
.My dad wasn’t demonstrative, but he was involved with us and cared for us in lots of ways that other dads didn’t, especially when it came to us getting an education. What he wanted more than anything was for us not to have the kind of life he had had, a life of manual work, the shop floor, or clerking. He wanted something better for his kids. Though he couldn’t identify exactly what that better thing was, the way to get there, to be in a position at least where you had some choices, was education. My dad was naturally intelligent, naturally curious, keen on words and what they could do, but no-one had encouraged him when he was a boy and because of that he pushed us to do well in school. As a child and as a teenager I was a daydreamer and so his success was limited, there was disappointment and there were battles.
Like most bright teenagers from small towns, by the age of sixteen all I wanted to do was to escape. Even so, I failed all my O-Levels and had to take them again the next year under the threat of a job in the Shipyard. The second time I got through enough to go on to take A levels and eventually went to University in Leeds to study English and Philosophy.
At Nineteen, going off to University a year later than everyone else, having smoked a bit of dope and crashed on friend’s floors after gigs in Manchester and Birmingham, grown my hair and built up a collection of the right records, I thought I’d seen it all, and it was a shock to me to suddenly be among that many intelligent and articulate young people from a wide variety of backgrounds. I was conscious of my own background, my class, my accent, how narrow, really, my experience of life had been and how unsophisticated I was, in a way that I hadn’t been before. I was loud and opinionated back home, especially when I was drunk, and while I could get away with it in the gang of small town punks that I gravitated toward, at University it was a different situation. There I was run-of-the-mill. Provincial.
Like a lot of outwardly confident people I had a fragile ego and it was badly bruised. My sense of who I was and how the world worked became more tentative. I was already in the habit of drinking and I wasted my time, talking, reading everything but the books that I was supposed to be looking into, listening to music, getting stoned, hanging out with all the other guys too smart to do any work, the guys in bands, the ones who were going to write or make films, whose unconventional ideas were going to blow everyone away, but who somehow never quite got round to finishing anything, who were always about to, or in the middle of, or abandoning one brilliant project for another even more certain to win them the acclaim they insisted they didn’t really desire.
I was waiting for things to happen to me, waiting for The Big Thing, for my indeterminate but evident genius to be recognized, for my prized outsider status to be embraced, my parents scrimping and saving, working nights and overtime to keep me there, the prodigal, wasteful son they had their hopes invested in.
Then, toward the end of my degree, at the age of twenty-two, I fell in love.
I have been in love twice in my life. The first time it lasted for five years and ended badly, as these things seem to.
She was called Rachael. She was beautiful, highly-intelligent, witty, artistic, middle-class, black and lost, and she seemed to me, at the age of twenty-one, to be everything I could possibly want. We fell in love immediately. For the eight months or so until University ended, while we were still cushioned by student life, it was rapturous.
Love can make you ridiculous, especially if you have a tendency toward grandiosity. I pitied people who weren't us. I felt that no-one had ever overflowed with exalted feeling as passionately as we did. That we were among history's elect, in the pantheon of great lovers. Love lifted me up out of the mundane, and more than ever the future felt that it was mine for the taking, that some kind of glory was on the horizon.
After we left University everything went wrong and we spent the next three years slowly dragging each other down. We were in a spiral of self-doubt and self-destruction. I drank almost constantly, we rowed furiously, we blamed each other for being trapped, for our own lack of courage, our own hatred of the world, of “real-life” and our fear of what it would do to us, how it wanted our souls in exchange for a few miserable, material things. My self was all I had. It was the thing I'd invested all my energy and all my hope in. I couldn't stand to just give it away, see it smashed up. That was like suicide.
But what we did was like suicide, anyway. We took low-pay, low-skill jobs, that asked nothing of us in terms of attitude or commitment, that didn't require us to give up too much of ourselves. Even so, my ability to stay in a job was poor. I started in DSS offices, got sacked for being late too frequently, for being hung-over and reeking of beer, for spending too long in the smoking room, or the toilets, reading the book that never left my back pocket.
I had a happy childhood and with regard to my mum and dad, I have no complaints. I was their second child. I have a sister older than me by six years. The four of us lived in a terraced house, in housing built for the shipyard workers, until I was eleven.
My parents wanted a garden after years of nothing but a backyard and back streets and eventually we moved to a semi-detached house on the outskirts of the town. “It lifts the spirits, a garden,” my dad used to say, looking out at it. At that point he would have been twenty years into his thirty-three year working life in the shipyard, in his early fifties.
There had never been much money around, and it was even scarcer now, with the new mortgage, my sister in her second year of A-levels, me starting senior school and needing a new uniform. In order to help out with the family finances my mum took up various jobs, cleaning, working as a dinner lady and finally taking on a long stint as a Home-Help, a job she kept up until she retired. She was the oldest of nine children and hadn’t really had a childhood herself, helping her own mother to look after them all. Looking after people was what she knew.
.My dad wasn’t demonstrative, but he was involved with us and cared for us in lots of ways that other dads didn’t, especially when it came to us getting an education. What he wanted more than anything was for us not to have the kind of life he had had, a life of manual work, the shop floor, or clerking. He wanted something better for his kids. Though he couldn’t identify exactly what that better thing was, the way to get there, to be in a position at least where you had some choices, was education. My dad was naturally intelligent, naturally curious, keen on words and what they could do, but no-one had encouraged him when he was a boy and because of that he pushed us to do well in school. As a child and as a teenager I was a daydreamer and so his success was limited, there was disappointment and there were battles.
Like most bright teenagers from small towns, by the age of sixteen all I wanted to do was to escape. Even so, I failed all my O-Levels and had to take them again the next year under the threat of a job in the Shipyard. The second time I got through enough to go on to take A levels and eventually went to University in Leeds to study English and Philosophy.
At Nineteen, going off to University a year later than everyone else, having smoked a bit of dope and crashed on friend’s floors after gigs in Manchester and Birmingham, grown my hair and built up a collection of the right records, I thought I’d seen it all, and it was a shock to me to suddenly be among that many intelligent and articulate young people from a wide variety of backgrounds. I was conscious of my own background, my class, my accent, how narrow, really, my experience of life had been and how unsophisticated I was, in a way that I hadn’t been before. I was loud and opinionated back home, especially when I was drunk, and while I could get away with it in the gang of small town punks that I gravitated toward, at University it was a different situation. There I was run-of-the-mill. Provincial.
Like a lot of outwardly confident people I had a fragile ego and it was badly bruised. My sense of who I was and how the world worked became more tentative. I was already in the habit of drinking and I wasted my time, talking, reading everything but the books that I was supposed to be looking into, listening to music, getting stoned, hanging out with all the other guys too smart to do any work, the guys in bands, the ones who were going to write or make films, whose unconventional ideas were going to blow everyone away, but who somehow never quite got round to finishing anything, who were always about to, or in the middle of, or abandoning one brilliant project for another even more certain to win them the acclaim they insisted they didn’t really desire.
I was waiting for things to happen to me, waiting for The Big Thing, for my indeterminate but evident genius to be recognized, for my prized outsider status to be embraced, my parents scrimping and saving, working nights and overtime to keep me there, the prodigal, wasteful son they had their hopes invested in.
Then, toward the end of my degree, at the age of twenty-two, I fell in love.
I have been in love twice in my life. The first time it lasted for five years and ended badly, as these things seem to.
She was called Rachael. She was beautiful, highly-intelligent, witty, artistic, middle-class, black and lost, and she seemed to me, at the age of twenty-one, to be everything I could possibly want. We fell in love immediately. For the eight months or so until University ended, while we were still cushioned by student life, it was rapturous.
Love can make you ridiculous, especially if you have a tendency toward grandiosity. I pitied people who weren't us. I felt that no-one had ever overflowed with exalted feeling as passionately as we did. That we were among history's elect, in the pantheon of great lovers. Love lifted me up out of the mundane, and more than ever the future felt that it was mine for the taking, that some kind of glory was on the horizon.
After we left University everything went wrong and we spent the next three years slowly dragging each other down. We were in a spiral of self-doubt and self-destruction. I drank almost constantly, we rowed furiously, we blamed each other for being trapped, for our own lack of courage, our own hatred of the world, of “real-life” and our fear of what it would do to us, how it wanted our souls in exchange for a few miserable, material things. My self was all I had. It was the thing I'd invested all my energy and all my hope in. I couldn't stand to just give it away, see it smashed up. That was like suicide.
But what we did was like suicide, anyway. We took low-pay, low-skill jobs, that asked nothing of us in terms of attitude or commitment, that didn't require us to give up too much of ourselves. Even so, my ability to stay in a job was poor. I started in DSS offices, got sacked for being late too frequently, for being hung-over and reeking of beer, for spending too long in the smoking room, or the toilets, reading the book that never left my back pocket.
I took temporary work in a bank stuffing envelopes, got sacked again, even more quickly and for the same reasons, couldn't face another office and slowly slipped down the ladder into factory and warehouse jobs, not even the skilled work my dad had managed. We hung onto the student life long past the point that most people had wised-up, going out every night, forming a clique with all the others who refused to participate.
Drugs, books, theories, music, these were the only things I cared about, the only things that seemed meaningful, and the more extreme, the more unpalatable or offensive, the more anti the way things were, the better.
We slid into an edgy, grey world of eternal hangovers and come downs, hours of tedious menial work, horrendous fights, wild fantasizing.
The last year we lived together she was systematically unfaithful to me and I, having nowhere else to go, having no resources, nothing but debts, lived with her in a stupor of depression and denial before I cracked, one cold day in February and left for good.
Had I been stronger or less easily angered, less defensive, more certain of what I wanted things might have been different. But we were drowning, clawing at each other, dragging each other under. During the last year of our lives together I used to lie drunk on the floor of our living
room, in the tiny back-to-back we shared behind the Royal Park pub in Leeds, lighting cigarettes from the one functioning grill on the gas fire, waiting for her to come home, knowing deep-down that she wouldn't be. I used to wish that she would die. I wished for it truly and wholeheartedly.
We slid into an edgy, grey world of eternal hangovers and come downs, hours of tedious menial work, horrendous fights, wild fantasizing.
The last year we lived together she was systematically unfaithful to me and I, having nowhere else to go, having no resources, nothing but debts, lived with her in a stupor of depression and denial before I cracked, one cold day in February and left for good.
Had I been stronger or less easily angered, less defensive, more certain of what I wanted things might have been different. But we were drowning, clawing at each other, dragging each other under. During the last year of our lives together I used to lie drunk on the floor of our living
room, in the tiny back-to-back we shared behind the Royal Park pub in Leeds, lighting cigarettes from the one functioning grill on the gas fire, waiting for her to come home, knowing deep-down that she wouldn't be. I used to wish that she would die. I wished for it truly and wholeheartedly.
I prayed that she would be killed in a car accident, any way that would relieve me of the responsibility of leaving her.
I dreamed that some impersonal force, the hand of God, would save me from her, in the same way I needed it to save me from myself.
I was at a dead end. There was always my parents house to return to but I was such a mess, physically and emotionally that I was ashamed to go back there. I hadn't been home in three years and couldn't stand the idea that they would see just what their hopes had come to. Two days after I left her, on February the twentieth 1996 I ended up in Castleford.
I spent two weeks sleeping in the spare room of a man I worked with, who was good enough to take me in, then another five months as a lodger in his brother's house.
The first man was called Andrew Hanson. His brother was, of course, Robert Hanson.
After two nights crashing my friend Nick’s sofa, I got on a National Express coach down at Leeds bus station and got off a few hours later in Castleford.
Andy met me there, roll up in his mouth, sipping from a can of Tenants, his thick, grey hair plastered to his head with the rain. He had another three cans hidden in his jacket pockets. He immediately offered me one and I opened it and drank it down quickly. I needed it. I was starting out on my new life.
Andy had been my boss for two years, from March 1993 to December 1995. While most of the people I had graduated with had slowly drifted off into respectable positions, I had ended up working in the warehouse of a jewelry factory in Leeds. There were just the two of us in there and we were responsible for offloading the supplies from the HGVs that pulled into the loading bay every day, stacking and storing them and taking them across to the main factory as required, through a complicated series of coded security doors and checks designed to make sure that no one could steal anything.
The warehouse was big and draughty, and the unsealed concrete floor meant that the air was permanently filled with concrete dust, something which played havoc with my colds in Winter and my hay fever in Summer. I had a cold more or less permanently during those years. The pay was poor, there were no benefits, no sick pay, no job security at all. The only thing that redeemed it were the long stretches of inactivity in which I could read, our lunchtime visits to the pub and our secret, afternoon drinking sessions in the upstairs part of the warehouse where we squatted amongst cardboard boxes filled with files and drank bottles of extra-strength cider, ears always on the alert for the main door at the other end of the warehouse slamming closed behind a manager come to make sure we weren't slacking off.
I went home drunk every day for two years, all my meager wage spent in a pub on the industrial estate, two minutes from the place I earned it.
Despite the nearly twenty years difference in our ages, Andy and I got along well, we identified with each other immediately. Even if he was suspicious of students, my long hair and scruffy clothes reminded him of how he'd been at my age. He was an older version of the type I had always gravitated toward. Neither of us wanted any responsibility, neither of us wanted to be the boss. Andy had been one for a while at a mattress-recycling factory and then left the job for this one, taking a big pay cut on the way, finding the disciplining and sacking people, the middle-management attitude he was supposed to display and the values of his work colleagues alien to him.
I respected him for that. And even if I had the advantage of more formal education than he did, what difference did that make? I was clearly cut from the same cloth, filled with animosity, averse on a deep level to everything in the world of work, its triviality, its responsibility, the politics, the personas.
I was at a dead end. There was always my parents house to return to but I was such a mess, physically and emotionally that I was ashamed to go back there. I hadn't been home in three years and couldn't stand the idea that they would see just what their hopes had come to. Two days after I left her, on February the twentieth 1996 I ended up in Castleford.
I spent two weeks sleeping in the spare room of a man I worked with, who was good enough to take me in, then another five months as a lodger in his brother's house.
The first man was called Andrew Hanson. His brother was, of course, Robert Hanson.
After two nights crashing my friend Nick’s sofa, I got on a National Express coach down at Leeds bus station and got off a few hours later in Castleford.
Andy met me there, roll up in his mouth, sipping from a can of Tenants, his thick, grey hair plastered to his head with the rain. He had another three cans hidden in his jacket pockets. He immediately offered me one and I opened it and drank it down quickly. I needed it. I was starting out on my new life.
Andy had been my boss for two years, from March 1993 to December 1995. While most of the people I had graduated with had slowly drifted off into respectable positions, I had ended up working in the warehouse of a jewelry factory in Leeds. There were just the two of us in there and we were responsible for offloading the supplies from the HGVs that pulled into the loading bay every day, stacking and storing them and taking them across to the main factory as required, through a complicated series of coded security doors and checks designed to make sure that no one could steal anything.
The warehouse was big and draughty, and the unsealed concrete floor meant that the air was permanently filled with concrete dust, something which played havoc with my colds in Winter and my hay fever in Summer. I had a cold more or less permanently during those years. The pay was poor, there were no benefits, no sick pay, no job security at all. The only thing that redeemed it were the long stretches of inactivity in which I could read, our lunchtime visits to the pub and our secret, afternoon drinking sessions in the upstairs part of the warehouse where we squatted amongst cardboard boxes filled with files and drank bottles of extra-strength cider, ears always on the alert for the main door at the other end of the warehouse slamming closed behind a manager come to make sure we weren't slacking off.
I went home drunk every day for two years, all my meager wage spent in a pub on the industrial estate, two minutes from the place I earned it.
Despite the nearly twenty years difference in our ages, Andy and I got along well, we identified with each other immediately. Even if he was suspicious of students, my long hair and scruffy clothes reminded him of how he'd been at my age. He was an older version of the type I had always gravitated toward. Neither of us wanted any responsibility, neither of us wanted to be the boss. Andy had been one for a while at a mattress-recycling factory and then left the job for this one, taking a big pay cut on the way, finding the disciplining and sacking people, the middle-management attitude he was supposed to display and the values of his work colleagues alien to him.
I respected him for that. And even if I had the advantage of more formal education than he did, what difference did that make? I was clearly cut from the same cloth, filled with animosity, averse on a deep level to everything in the world of work, its triviality, its responsibility, the politics, the personas.
It was work itself I objected to, not the type of work. The obligation to work had always hung over me like a prison sentence. There was no job I wanted to do, no work that could ever have gratified me.
On cold winter mornings the two of us would sit close to the gas heater smoking roll ups, swilling down mugs of Nescafe, trying to fight off our hangovers until lunchtime arrived. We were always immersed in a book, hoping that the first lorry wouldn't turn up just yet. Give me ten more minutes of this, just let me finish this chapter, it's raining, sleeting out there.
At those moments I almost felt as though I was at home, the two of us in a little bubble, united in rejection of it all. It was almost cozy, and somehow it allowed me to continue my education, perhaps even compensate for all the time I wasted during the years I was supposed to be studying. I read everything, history, politics, philosophy.
I was on fire with reading in those years, though how much of it all I really understood is a good question. It all seemed essential to me. It was vital to know as much as possible. A survival strategy, good armour.
We were going nowhere, but then, where was there to go? He was stuck in the middle of his life, nostalgic, bitter about how his generation had wasted all that they'd been given, all the education and idealism that had ended up in money grubbing and self interest, I was stalled at the start of mine, couldn't imagine any way of getting it off the ground alone.
We did what anyone would do in that situation, we drank. We drank first and foremost because it got rid of our hangovers and restored us to the state of well-being non-drinkers wake up to. That first pint felt like a homecoming, a restoration. It made our minds sharper, freed up our tongues for the scorn and criticism we wanted to heap upon the world, sitting up there in our little room among the boxes. It felt good to get drunk in work, not just drunk but pissed, and then go straight back to the pub for a post-work pint or two to keep on putting the world to rights, indulging in fantasies about how in a year or so we would escape, how all this drinking was temporary, the prelude, the necessary preparation somehow for the triumphs, for the daring to come.
We were going nowhere, but then, where was there to go? He was stuck in the middle of his life, nostalgic, bitter about how his generation had wasted all that they'd been given, all the education and idealism that had ended up in money grubbing and self interest, I was stalled at the start of mine, couldn't imagine any way of getting it off the ground alone.
We did what anyone would do in that situation, we drank. We drank first and foremost because it got rid of our hangovers and restored us to the state of well-being non-drinkers wake up to. That first pint felt like a homecoming, a restoration. It made our minds sharper, freed up our tongues for the scorn and criticism we wanted to heap upon the world, sitting up there in our little room among the boxes. It felt good to get drunk in work, not just drunk but pissed, and then go straight back to the pub for a post-work pint or two to keep on putting the world to rights, indulging in fantasies about how in a year or so we would escape, how all this drinking was temporary, the prelude, the necessary preparation somehow for the triumphs, for the daring to come.
I was going to form a band. Though I couldn't play any instruments or sing I had friends who were skilled musicians and I imagined hooking up with them, bending them to my will, producing something epochal. Perhaps I would go into films, making subversive underground shorts that would excoriate the film-making world with such brilliance that although they would be shocked and chastened they wouldn't be able to deny me.
I wanted the only thing that could satisfy my ego, my indolence, my desire, to be an enfant terrible. Andy for his part would write a lucrative series of detective novels or pulp horror of the kind he bought for twenty-pence a go from second-hand shops and raced through in the grim, enclosed hours in the Warehouse, tossing them aside disdainfully at the end with a snort, certain that he could do better.
We would show them that they had underestimated us. That we weren't where they were, with the money, the cars, the weekend breaks, the dinner parties, not because we weren't smart enough but because we spurned those things, because we had our sights set on something higher. It was just a question of deciding when and where exactly to start, of taking the decisive step. It was always there, the possibility of something greater, sweetening the present, keeping us trapped in our lives, a consolation and a cage. And when we were drunk we made fervent promises to ourselves that we would start tomorrow, no more talk, the moment is here, this is how I'll begin, this is how everything will change. And then the next day, too hungover to do anything but drink to take the edge of it we would grow passionate and certain again, our eyes shining, supporting each other's flights of fantasy, always just on the edge of success.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
thinking out loud (again)
I’m on a break between lessons here so this will be incoherent but mercifully brief. I’ll return to these ideas and elaborate on them at some point but for the moment suffice to say that some of the things in Reynold’s current essay on the Nuum overlap with some of the stuff I’ve been puzzling over myself recently.
I’m on a break between lessons here so this will be incoherent but mercifully brief. I’ll return to these ideas and elaborate on them at some point but for the moment suffice to say that some of the things in Reynold’s current essay on the Nuum overlap with some of the stuff I’ve been puzzling over myself recently.
I should also make it clear first up that I’m a non Nuum lover, never participated and still don’t have any real interest in the music as a listening experience. Jungle is boring, two step and garage largely horrible etc. That doesn’t however mean that Energy Flash isn’t a tremendous read or that discussions around the music aren’t stimulating. I get why it’s so important, it just doesn’t move me. Well, I liked Grime. And early Chicago house.
The part that particularly piques my interest here is the first couple of point in the historisizing of the debate, especially the third part, the sense in which historical thinking has become “foreign to the way they relate to music”.
I’m not necessarily quibbling with Simon’s point here but I am wondering whether this could be fruitfully unpacked a little further. A while ago as a joke I slagged of Woebot for being so old that he literally wasn’t able to hear what was great about Ikonika ( neither can I frankly). Further reflection lead me to consider that perhaps this actually was the case.
If we're getting generational about it, let's consider the split between anyone under and over thirty. As Reynolds obliquely suggests, those over thirty are wedded to a teleological view of history: the excitement of new forms emerging through a Nuum dialectic is the excitement of a progressive history, a yearning for the future, the process pushed forward by esoteric groups and underground collectives: a Nuum millienarianism of a kind ( hence the love for the Lumpen in nuumology, the diggers and ranters of the Ardkore scene). Here the sublime is the arrival of the next stage in the unfolding of the journey. This is why largely there was felt to be an interrelation between politics and musical advances.
The question then must be, how accessible is this affect to anyone under thirty who has lived through a period in which progressive political notions have withered away, temporality has been flattened, as have hierarchies of “taste”, and access to culture become borderless? A few months ago Reynolds coined the term Hyperstasis and questioned how Ikonika could move people to tears, assuming that it was by releasing pent-up emotion, to which Zone Styx Sam countered that the tears flowed as a result of an access to the sublime.
But what kind of sublime? Here I think we can put a positive spin on Reynolds hyperstasis and posit a “recombinant sublime” derived not from linearity, hybridisation and the new but instead on a kind of infinite play without any realization, a laterally extended work that is sublime precisely because it never settles into genre but marshals an enormous range of influences: this is not the oceanic or immersive in the sense of the gaseous billows of MBV etc but more akin to a shifting and mutating plasma in which many forms are visible simultaneously with no one ever taking precedence, a culturally flat ontology: in other words an affect, a sublime developed out of a new situation, that of the boundless ocean of information, the World Wide Web, from lives that have been mediated in a way incomprehensible to any prior generation: this is not purely an intellectual matter (suspicion of grand narratives/eclecticism/po-mo) but something related deeply to the structure of experience. In this generational split immanence is the key to the sublime, the great artists are those precisely who never settle into genre but whose expertise is demonstrated in a marshalling of the enormous range and reach of musical culture. Probably, before, I’ve termed this the hipster sublime, but trying to think about generational issues more generously, can’t it be the case that there really are two split sensibilities here. Between a generation that had nothing available to it and spent all its time looking to the future and waiting for something to happen and a generation for whom everything had already happened, to whom everything was present and who had to look around in all directions at once?
Yes, yes, I know. But I’ll try to refine these points shortly when I write something about Onehotrix Point Never
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