Static Disposal

53. A Soar Bottom

2011-04-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

Me on recent pop music & the 'soar' at The Quietus.

With a response from Simon Reynolds at The Guardian Music blog.

Other prominent 'soar' candidates that went unmentioned: Rihanna - 'Only Girl in the World', Alexis Jordan - 'Good Girl', Taio Cruz - 'Dynamite', Black Eyed Peas - 'The Time (Dirty Bit)'. Relistening to Gaga's first album & The Fame Monster 'Telephone', 'Poker Face' and 'Bad Romance', at the very least, are pretty Ibiza-fied, but strangely they never struck me at the time as in the same boat as the Black Eyed Peas and David Guettas of this world, and still don't. Unsure as to why though...

Bit more to add on this, will do so at the other blog when I've got the time.

52. Iain Sinclair

2011-04-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

Originally published in The Boar.

Iain Sinclair – Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (Penguin)

If the hard-boiled, hyperactive, heteroglossic Sinclair of Downriver is now gone, as he settles into retirement as a 'media hack' (as Owen Hatherley has waspishly termed him), Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire comes into its own, distinct virtues: it is, in that awful euphemistic term, his most 'mature' and generous book. And rightly so: in Sinclair's usual twisted way, it's his tribute to the borough that's nurtured him and his writing since moving there in the mid-60s as an amateurishly bohemian film student. The story (or stories) of his 'hood is therefore his own story too, and the passages of memoir here make up perhaps the finest and most poignant writing he's done since Edge of the Orison.

The book luxuriates in its own fractal sprawl, but rarely seems self-indulgent; Hackney becomes a microcosm for the vast matter not only of London but of the whole world, that seems to drift or have drifted through: Sinclair tracks rumour and historic apparition like an addict, reporting on Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles' visits to the borough, Julie Christie leading tours of Abney Park Cemetery, the infamous Hackney Mole Man. Unlike his other non-fiction books on London, he gives a lot of room to other voices of the district, in a series of fascinating interviews: with those involved in filming Godard's notorious British Sounds, with former Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll, acquaintances of the mysterious East End novelist Alexander Baron, residents of the crumbling estates.

It takes the non-linearity, the twisting routes of his London masterpiece Lights Out for the Territory and expands it into an enormous trawl of the side-streets of place and history: we're left with the image of Sinclair aimlessly skirting the catastrophe zone of the Olympics site, running into his son – a strange confrontation that closes this loamy build-up of voices and history, this nose-against-the-brick testament to the particularity of place.

51. Kyle Bobby Dunn

2011-03-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

Me on Kyle Bobby Dunn's new album, Ways of Meaning, at The Liminal.

50. Sunjeev Sahota

2011-03-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Me on Sunjeev Sahota's debut novel at The Cadaverine.

49. Four Poems

2011-02-12T01:45:00.000-08:00

... by me at The Cadaverine.

48. Richard Youngs

2011-01-30T07:35:00.000-08:00

Me on Richard Youngs' new album, Atlas of Hearts, at The Liminal

47. Occupations/"call in question"

2011-01-03T12:39:00.000-08:00

Director's cut of a comment piece I wrote for The Boar the day after Day X and the occupation of Warwick Arts Centre.

"The proletariat today is everyone who has no control over their own lives, and knows it." --Situationist International

The occupation of Warwick Arts Centre's conference room, which ended this morning under pressure from Warwick Security and police, came almost as an anomaly. As news of occupations and walkouts filtered through from around the country over the last couple of days – Birmingham, Leeds, SOAS, Oxford, London South Bank, Manchester, UCL, UEL – I could hardly imagine even the energy that I had seen at the NUS London demonstration earlier in the month bursting into something like this. During my time here, the university has seemed too settled, too sedate to give rise to that kind of thing: Warwick is a place where any classroom discussion gone political – in my case, of English Literature – would be swiftly punctured by the needle of capitalist realism – “Well that's not how it works in real life, is it?”; where the swagger of Business School students provides a permanent reminder of the economic ideology on whose sufferance you're still in education.

Warwick was one of the UK's major hotspots of student activism in what Alain Badiou has called the 'Interregnum' of the late 60s to the mid-70s, but has since become defined by its status as one of the pioneers of the monetisation of the academy, a mission that in Richard Lambert and Nigel Thrift has found its latest and least shakeable champions. It was appropriate that the tactic of the university occupation, following the model of factory occupations, should arrive at the point, at the end of the 60s, when higher education was first being reoriented towards a role of serving the market – a process that the radical historian E.P. Thompson recorded in Warwick University Ltd, written after the 1971 University House sit-in, and that has found its logical conclusion in the Browne Report's proposals: to almost completely axe the teaching block grant, and allow universities to charge triple the current top fees.

One of the significances of the recent student protests has been their showing how much the media has gotten the wrong end of the stick on the Browne Report: as Stefan Collini has pointed out, the coalition's moves are not simply 'cuts' and 'fees rises', but represent an attempt to wholly change the way we conceive of higher education – not as a public good, one of the crucial spheres of civil society, but solely as “a motor of the economy”, a means of improving the value of one's labour-power for sale at a later date. The media misrepresentation of student activists – as “vandals”, as solely and selfishly defending their own interests – are necessary to naturalise the government's own ideological violence, to distract from the possibility that there might be another conception of education – not, in that awful phrase, “learning for its own sake”, but for the sake of a value not posited in terms of the endless accumulation of cash; the notion, difficult to imagine after 30 years of neo-liberalism, that the society we owe to ourselves might be one that doesn't exclude the majority from the fruits of its wealth and knowledge.

The resurgence of student activism at Warwick and elsewhere is testament to a renewal of our political imagination. Against the monotone of 'There is no alternative', the new generation of student and anti-cuts activists are helping, as their predecessors did, to posit the idea that we might one day have some control over our own lives. They've shown the “confidence, courage, humor, cunning and fortitude” that Walter Benjamin called the “refined and spiritual things” to be won in political and historical struggles. We are 'all in it together' now, but not in the way the coalition wants to think.

46. Roberto Bolano (redux)

2010-12-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

Me on Roberto Bolaño's The Skating Rink at The Cadaverine. (Note: the covers of the new Picador editions of Bolaño's works are pretty repulsive.)

45. John Cage

2010-12-24T15:21:00.001-08:00

Me on the retrospective exhibition of John Cage's visual art, Every Day is a Good Day in The Boar.

44. Lydia Davis

2010-12-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

Me on The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in The Boar.

43. This is England '86

2010-11-02T02:57:00.000-07:00

Me on Shane Meadows' This is England '86 on the Boar website.

42. B.o.B.

2010-06-27T02:46:00.000-07:00

Previously unpublished, written originally for The Boar.

B.o.B - ...Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray (Rebel Rock/Grand Hustle/Atlantic)

In which T.I. protegé – read 'deformed auxiliary organ' – B.o.B completes the colonisation of hip-hop by Rock 'n' Rote mediocrity (see: 'Empire State of Mind', Lil' Wayne's Rebirth, the last Akon single, etc.) From the Coldplay-earnest milk-water piano of opener 'Don't Let Me Fall' to the obligatory guest-spots from Rivers Cuomo and Whatsername-from-Paramore – curdling already-flat indie-whines – it reconstructs the hip-hop LP as a frictionless, gurning Jools' Hootenanny, a courting-gift to Respectability, a dead dame hip-hop never cared about. The live instruments that form the basis of most of these songs are deployed as a signifier of Authenticity, the dubious virtue of chaining the form to the sub-standard exertions of Real People – my heart sank and bile rose at the moment when the acoustic guitar and bongoes enter on 'Lovelier Than Thou', the most disciplined, the most inhumanly exciting of genres finally swallowed by the hippy jam.

Rock works as part of hip-hop's omni-tongued sonic language – cf. Public Enemy's 'She Watch Channel Zero' and 'Brothers Gonna Work It Out', Mos Def's The New Danger, Outkast's 'B.O.B.' (ha!) – not as the worn-out body of a halfway-house form that satisfies no-one. The production – clogged and constipated, over-compressed and sluggish in tempo – driven particularly by clumpy rock-kit percussion, and swerving into knuckle-dragging guitar-riffs on 'Magic' – only make it more apparent that B.o.B. has nothing urgent to communicate. The best performances are in fact delivered by guests – a laconic, slithering Lupe Fiasco on 'Past My Shades' (whose subject-matter calls for whomping hyphy production, but receives a soulless boom-bap rhythm only slightly lightened by guitar-squeals) and the master, T.I., relentless and sinuous as ever on 'Bet I'; B.o.B.'s own flow stays stilted, staccato as Big Boi circa Stankonia, but without the ideas. Like most mainstream rappers these days, his idea of affect consists of auto-tuned R&B croons – but even here, he lacks the machine-seduction Prince exhalations of The-Dream, or the alienation-effect auto-tune became on Lil Wayne's 'A Milli'. Once or twice, the fog clears and the production corrects itself – on 'Fame' and 'Fifth Dimensions', where the beats shift into shuffling layers, invested with propulsive energy, and 'Bet I', in which invigoratingly material concerns are matched to airy blasts of electro-texture, wonky synths and a carriage of bare-bone kicks and snares. Otherwise, the entire enterprise is overshadowed by a sense of purposelessness, energy become dead weight – even Janelle Monae, that most pure emanation of the pop Godhead, fails to spark 'The Kids', and Eminem's guest-rap on the closing reprise of 'Airplanes' is self-parodic in its impotent rage. Like the last Kelis album – a.k.a. Disappointment of the Year – this is just the sound of the modern R&B industry furiously eating itself.

41. Ian Jack

2010-06-25T01:32:00.000-07:00

Review of Ian Jack's The Country Formerly Known As Great Britain (Jonathan Cape, 2009) at The Boar.

40. A Question of Consent

2010-06-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Piece on Roman Polanski and his misdeeds, written for my course. See also: Jenny Diski, in the LRB, and Maureen Freely in The Guardian. With thanks to Petra Davis for the pointers in the right direction.

It’s a strange business, all told. For Roman Polanski, exiled from the US and making – until 2004's Oscar-winning The Pianist – decidedly sub-par films for the past thirty-two years, the burden of his past has remained curiously obscure. Friends ask, “What are you writing about?”

“The, um, the whole Roman Polanski thing”, I reply. At which point there's a slight lift of eyebrow, and a brief “Oh” of recognition. This is followed either by the usual change of subject or an enquiry as to “what you think about it”. At which point I think of the details, in all their knottiness, and give a non-committal “Hmm” rather than risk surprising – or worse, boring – my interlocutor. We all, it seems, know what “the Roman Polanski thing” is, until asked to talk specifics. As for what we think of it: everyone seems to have an opinion.

Shortly after his arrest on 26 September last year, in Zurich, where he had arrived to accept a lifetime achievement award from the city's film festival, figures from every part of the media called for his release, commended the Swiss authorities for giving him his comeuppance, or reflected with amusement on how his films – with their themes of sexual brutality and obsession, most notably the Satanic rape-drama Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – had allegedly presaged his downfall. Most prominent on the media agenda was a petition demanding that he be given his liberty, written by the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy and signed by, among others, Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols and Neil Jordan. It outlined the themes Polanski's defenders would continually return to: his respectability, public standing, and his body of work as “an ingenious film-maker”; his unfortunate history as a Polish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalinism; the distance in time from the original infraction for which he'd been apprehended.

Moreover, they suggested that the original conviction was essentially immaterial: the case was, as the petition put it, “a politico-legal imbroglio”, and nothing else. After all, they pointed out, the plaintiff, Samantha Gailey (née Geimer), publicly stated that she didn't want to see his sentence enforced, that she wanted to “put the case behind her”. Whoopi Goldberg, speaking up for Polanski, supplied perhaps the best quote of the whole debacle: “It wasn't rape-rape.” Who then, his defenders ask, has been violated? Now, can we please stop with the handwringing and get back to normal?

***

One absorbed so much contradictory opinion in the days after Polanski's arrest that to make up one's mind seemed not only unfeasible, but unconscionable. Everyone in the case was damaged: Samantha Geimer, at the centre of a high-profile rape case at thirteen, had her person and dignity violated, and her showbusiness ambitions ruined; if Polanski was imprisoned (his original sentence extended for skipping bail in 1978 and fleeing for Paris), it would almost certainly be the end of his career. You heard what seemed reasonable grounds for non-prosecution, mitigating circumstances: one, mentioned by the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein, was the lack of public interest vested in the case – the pursuit of an ageing film-maker for a thirty-year-old crime by the LA County District Attorney's office, at the taxpayer's expense and “at a time when California is shredding the safety net that protects the poor and the unemployed, not to mention the budget of the public school system”, seemed especially petty. Then there was the infamous sex-and-drugs culture of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s: the case was almost parodically typical of “the sort of thing people do in LA”, down to the details of the champagne and Quaalude that Polanski gave Geimer, and the hot-tub, in Jack Nicholson's house of all places, where the offence occurred. These sorts of things, you heard, happened all the time, and people, shielded from the LAPD by the invisible privilege of Hollywood, weren't prosecuted for it. Polanski had already experienced 'Hollywood Babylon' at its sourest, in the death of his wife, Sharon Tate, in the Manson murders of 1969. Perhaps most egregious of all, it was, one heard, a publicity stunt: given the frequency of sex-crime convictions for those who are not internationally famous film-makers, the zeal with which the Swiss and Californian authorities went after Polanski smacked of example-making, of prosecution for the sake of it.

Goldberg’s insistence that Polanski’s act was “not rape-rape” is worth re-examining, and not just for its unintentional hilarity. A number of online and newspaper commentators got into something of a froth over it, suggesting that she was diminishing the seriousness of what he had done. She meant, correctly, that the conviction hanging over Polanski's head was not for statutory rape, but for “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”. But in a sense those who raised their voices against Goldberg hit on the unconscious point of his apologists' arguments. They all admitted – Polanski included, having entered a negotiated guilty plea at the original trial – that yes, he'd had oral, vaginal and anal sex with a thirteen-year-old girl against her will – she had, she testified to the grand jury, shouted “No” – but that it didn't really matter.
The question of selectivity is a curious one. The same reasons his defenders gave for his release – his public profile as a film-maker – were apparently the same as the police and courts' for putting pressure on his case: it was impossible for him to publicly and legally run away from a past misdeed so well-known. In Against Our Will, her historical and social study of rape, published in 1975, two years before Polanski’s misdeed, Susan Brownmiller breaks down the statistics on rape convictions, and describes in stark detail the judicial culture surrounding it at the time. Polanski was, if not exceptional, not part of the largest percentile when it came to the characteristics of rape: most incidents occurred in the lower economic strata of society, victims tended to be of the same social class as their attacker (Geimer, while white and middle-class, wasn’t part of Hollywood’s film-aristocracy), and in fifty-three percent of cases the attacker was a total stranger to the victim. It was also the case that the vast majority of reported rapes did not reach conviction: in studies it was found probably half of all rape complaints were declared “unfounded” by the police; in New York City in 1971, less than ten percent of rape arrests resulted in going before the grand jury, and less than a fifth of these resulted in trial and conviction. The notorious difficulty faced by women suffering rape meant that “four out of five rapes go unreported”. Polanski’s conviction – and, perhaps, his singling-out for enforced conviction – was not evidence of some legal persecutory complex, but an indictment of a justice system essentially at one with the men who commit rape. And it’s a testament to the collective lack of imagination among Polanski’s defenders that they were unable to square his directing abilities with the fact of his being a simple brute.

***

What was most curious about the Henri-Lévy petition was not the fact that its signatories were well-heeled liberals, who would normally be expected to look unkindly on rape (such types look after their own), but that they included a number of women – the French actresses Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert and Arielle Dombasle, French film-maker Danièle Thompson, Belgian fashion-designer Diane von Furstenberg. The business of women – well-educated and modern, bohemian women at that – putting out apologias for rape would have been ironically amusing if it weren’t so abjectly depressing. Edging the complaints aired in the petition was the suggestion that behind the authorities' actions was the need to kowtow to 'political correctness' on the issue of sexual violence – it was the fault of those meddling feminists again.

The generation of Huppert, et al were the first to be affected by the political and social achievements of the American and European women’s movement: their ability to pursue their creative careers, to determine the course of their own lives, were won through years of collective action – action that, amongst other objectives, sought to remake the world into one in which rape would be understood and treated as what it was: a criminal violation of another person's being. Not, of course, that the law and the allegedly civilised didn’t pay lip service to this notion beforehand: as Brownmiller noted, there had been certainly enough tales of female martyrdom involving rape. In the real world this wasn't how it played out. The Californian police manual of the time confidently stated that “[f]orcible rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes. The majority of 'second-day reported' rapes are not legitimate”, while studies undertaken without the intervention of male police-officers found that “only 2 percent of all rape complaints are false – about the same false-report rate that is usual for other kinds of felonies”. Rape trials, in which oath was set against oath, consisted largely of public muck-raking over the 'moral character' of the victim, the law structurally tilted against them.

Brownmiller’s text is studded with excerpts of testimony from rape victims taken at public meetings and conferences held by feminist groups throughout the early 1970s; we find a litany of brush-offs, insults and nonchalant sex-jokes from police-officers – “The cop looked at me and said, 'Aw, who'd want to rape you?'” – and witch-trial assaults in court – “I looked like I was the one on trial”. The result was an official and public silence on rape obscuring the dismal truth of how it was treated, a silence that feminist 'speak-outs' sought to break, airing the reality of rape as experienced by its victims – of legal inaction, of constant, all-enclosing fear, of scars, night-sweats, shattered lives, murder – and the vast extent of the crimes, a silence that was instrumental in perpetuating it. It was for the same reason that, in 1976, Nikki Craft and the Kitty Genovese Women's Group (named after the 28 year-old New Yorker raped and murdered in 1964 while her entire neighbourhood apparently looked on) gained access to and published the name of every man indicted for sex-crimes in Texas since 1960, many of whom had gotten off scot-free to re-offend, and were still in the community. As Seven Days' Jayne Loader reported, “[m]any women saw the names of their own friends or former lovers... Several found that they had been raped by the same man. One particularly grisly incident stood out: the former lover of one woman was alleged to have raped the 10-year-old daughter of another during a burglary.” By identifying known threats, by excavating fact, they sought to place power back in the hands of women, to adjust a system fundamentally designed to protect rapists; as Craft herself put it, “this society has failed to deal with rape, and women must.” By giving voice to the experience hidden within the opaqueness and silence of statistics, feminists hoped that the Samantha Geimers of this world wouldn't have to live at the mercy of what Brownmiller called “effective agents of terror”.

But that, as Polanski's defenders remind us, was then. There is a story to be told about the assault on feminism under neo-liberal capitalism over the past thirty years that has been told, more capaciously, by others – most effectively by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash, and by Nina Power in One-Dimensional Woman. What we can say is that, protestations of artistic genius aside, the women who defend Roman Polanski are on the side of brutality and crime, and, it would appear, congenitally unable to see where their interests, and where the balance of justice, lies – and that they are not the only ones. According to recent research by the sexual assault referral-centre group Haven, seventy-one percent of women believe a rape-victim should accept partial responsibility if she got into bed with her attacker; thirty-one percent consider her to blame if she wore revealing clothing, while twenty-two percent think the same if she had had numerous sexual partners. This cultural regression to the 1950s has been matched by rape-conviction statistics that would appear to have remained static since that decade. Home Office research in 2007 showed that nearly twenty-three percent of women in the UK had been subject to sexual violence and nearly five percent had been raped; an earlier Home Office report stated that only one-third of rape complaints were considered by the Crown Prosecution Service, with twenty percent making it to court, and six percent ending in convictions. If Polanski is being made an example of, it should be to remind us how far we are from achieving even the demands of thirty years ago – for a world in which women's autonomy is recognised, in which Samantha Geimer's “No” finally means no.

39. Chris Petit

2010-06-15T01:31:00.000-07:00

Director's cut of a review of Content/profile of Chris Petit, originally published in The Boar.

A windscreen looking out on a grey sky, the tops of tower-blocks peeping out either side of the seemingly endless road. Wipers slip wearily across the glass. A glance, and we tumble back, momentarily, into black-and-white, grainy celluloid – the same road, towers ghost-white. The voice on the soundtrack, which belongs to director Chris Petit, tells us that London's Westway, the elevated motorway cutting through the west of the metropolis, famously memorialised in J.G. Ballard's Crash, that most extreme of modernist fictions, is “a rare example of the modern city London never became”. Now it is “a memory bank of other journeys” – cue fragments of shots from car windows from all over the globe.

The moment, at the start of Petit's new film Content – shown on More4 last month, with a theatrical release to follow – is not so much nostalgia as a haunting. The earlier footage of the Westway comes from Petit's 1979 film Radio On, following its protagonist's road-trip from London to Bristol. The film was poised on the historical brink of the advent of Thatcherite neo-liberalism, which would convert the rotting modernist housing projects into the post-modernist blocks of 'luxury apartments' that Petit frames with the rail of the neglected flyover and clawing tree-limbs. He describes Content as an “informal coda” to Radio On – which means, among other things, it's an attempt to map the distance from the moment that film captured, with all its youthful sorrows, and its now-foreclosed possibilities.

Where Radio On had a proper, if minimal, narrative, Content is closer to what might be called the 'essay film', an 'ambient road movie', following Petit and his son driving along unidentified roads, spliced with memory-footage of other road-trips – through Germany, Poland, America. Its ostensibly documentary footage is set to Petit's ruminative voiceover and interweaved with a disquisition by music-theorist Ian Penman on the nature of email and the transactions of the internet, delivered by German actor Hanns Zischler. The camera listlessly drifts over roadscapes that seem to run to nowhere; German electronic musician Antye Greie’s soundtrack covers the scenes in a melancholic haze of crackle and glitch. Interpolated into the film are Petit's collection of old postcards, mostly from Germany, where, as he mentions in the film, he spent much of his youth, his father being stationed with the occupying Allied forces – images of 1920s cityscapes, space-age buildings, autobahns. Set against this are the anonymous landscapes Petit drives through, caught in the flat light of a digital camera: container docks, industrial estates, blind warehouses, Barrett Homes developments and Prince Charles’ ‘new town’ of Poundbury, which “render architecture redundant by their anonymity”, the architectural correlate to email, untied to geography – “the apotheosis of non-place”. It brings to mind Patrick Keiller’s groundbreaking ‘Robinson’ films, particularly the static road-movie Robinson in Space (1997), and Chris Marker's cinematic meditations on cultural and personal memory, especially Sans Soleil (1983). Both are obsessed with the legacy of modernity and modernism – the terrors of the Second World War and Cold War, but also cinema, industry, socialism, the promised technological transformation of everyday life. Radio On, with its airwave-whispers of IRA attacks, Baader-Meinhof, endless strikes, and desolate electronic pop, was made in a context where the dream of the 20^th century had not yet, like Petit’s postcards, become obsolete. It’s the persistence of that past, the repressed forcing itself to the surface, which lends the films their melancholia, their spooked edge.

In a certain sense, the British road-movie was always a paradox: the genre belonged with America, its car-culture, frontier myths and vast expanses of road. Radio On was closer to an automotive derive, a back-road drift through the country’s dreams and paranoia. Content takes this further: if the road-movie was the product of modernity – it wasn’t called Fordist capitalism for nothing – then its linearity must be deconstructed, its assurance abandoned. As Petit ruefully notes, “the film-camera and the car both came of age in the 20^th century”, and now both, like Petit himself, feel the burden of age. In the neo-liberal era, the road transforms from an escape-route for the individual, a mobile utopia, to the prime network of capital's agency-less circulation and distribution. The Westway is replaced as the paradigm of the road by the M25: in London Orbital (2002), Petit’s film on the motorway with the novelist and psychogeographical writer Iain Sinclair, the camera grainily watches the passage of lorries and cars from bridges and roadsides like CCTV – passive, impersonal. The endless, raging circle of the orbital motorway matches the pedestrian fugues of the insane in the asylums that lined its passage: as soon as you enter it, you’re trapped.

Two words recur throughout the film: ‘content’ and ‘correspondence’. The former plays on the idea of contentment, of being fulfilled, able to make sense of the world, as one grows older – a hopeless task, the film suggests – and content as in information, the data contained in emails and on postcards, but also the content of everyday life, something which has been depleted in the internet age, as life has been “ironed-out”. The latter plays on the idea of communication between human beings – via the tactile medium of postcards, or email, a medium that leaves us both atomised and strangely more intimate with each other. The internet age has brought with it the condensation of space: landscape, and what traversed it – cars, cards, industry, the whole public sphere – has become obsolete. But it also refers to correspondences in history and memory: the eerie sense that our present lives ‘correspond’ with a past thought vanished, erased – and, in Petit and his son’s case, that he is re-living the life of his own late father. In that sense, the film could be thought of as a more-responsible cinematic version of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: a beautiful, uncompromising refusal of false consolation – and a sombre testament to hope.

38. Field Music

2010-05-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

Previously unpublished, originally written for The Boar.

Field Music – Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries)

The video for 'Them That Do Nothing', the second song on this 72-minute fourth album, is filmed in the Brewis brothers' native Sunderland, a city left behind by post-industrial 'regeneration' even more thoroughly than neighbouring Newcastle: unkempt streets, empty industrial spaces, dank underpasses. Over a spry rhythm threaded with bright and smartly melodic guitar, they trade, in those unmistakable accents, uncannily familiar sentiments: “Well once we were concerned/Then we grew up to be bored... We tried to stand for nothing/Now there's nothing to stand for”. But (handclaps popping) they remind us that the only solution is to “Get your keys and get to work”, the cryptic but adeptly literate wordspill coalescing for a second like clouds forming recognisable shapes.

They know at least how to take their own advice. After a brief hiatus which saw records by the brothers' solo projects, they've returned with their most ambitious work yet. Field Music take their inspiration from the British art-pop tradition of XTC, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush: intelligent, polished, oblique, haunted by ideas of what it is to be English, possibilities whose energy courses through these 20 tracks, animated by a sense of drama, cohesion and emotional weight gold-dust rare in the world of landfill-indie. 'Lights Up', slowly rising and exploding, incandescent with strings. 'Effortlessly's unashamedly complex stomp, the ass-wiggle in its riff. The intertwining of the Brewis brothers' voices throughout in wry, eccentric and smart gestures. The queasy synths on 'Let's Write A Book' blurting upward among wah-wah squalls. The way 'Precious Plans' shifts from mantra moving over hypnotic fingerpicking to violin-threaded requiem: “Where are those futureless precious plans/Where we had a place to get to/A place that lasted?”

This record seems to capture what it feels like to be a thinking person in Britain 2010: the irony and crooked humour that gets us through the days; the sense of betrayal; the dread and fits of darkness. By the time you read this, we might well be living under a Tory government. It keeps me up at night: that we've inherited a world without choice, in which hope is not a given but the hardest of burdens; that the best we can expect is so much less than our hearts demand. The last words, before the string-haunted field-recordings – alley-footsteps, backfiring cars – of 'It's About Time', are those of desperation that hopes – that knows – there is still a world to be won: “I have a lot to learn/But I have clung to you.”

37. Xiu Xiu

2010-03-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

Review of Xiu Xiu's performance at Taylor John's House, Coventry (the last of their European tour), over at The Boar.

36. Roberto Bolaño

2010-03-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

A review of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (Picador, 2010) written for The Boar.

Perhaps it's better to say nothing. Beginning with the English-language publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, Roberto Bolaño has posthumously gathered acclaim unlike any Latin American writer since Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The English translation of his leviathan posthumous work 2666 became the cult book of last year, and new editions of his earlier works have been rushed out – Nazi Literature In The Americas comes with glowing jacket-puff from Colm Tóibín and John Banville. The backlash has already started: in a Guardian review of Nazi Literature..., Alberto Manguel dismissed the majority of Bolaño's oeuvre as “light, playful experiments, not very successful, with little intelligence and less ambition”. This kind of peevish resentment is the rock to the hard place of a Western literary public famously unable to handle more than one popular foreign writer at a time; with Bolaño safely and romantically dead, it becomes, between the hyperbole of the two, difficult to assess his real achievement.

Well, first off: Nazi Literature... is not among Bolaño's best work. The fascinating, murky depths of 2666 or By Night In Chile (2000) aren't to be found here, and the mock-encyclopedic style restrains the astonishing and sustained writing that powered those books. It's his most humorous work, and his most transparent in its conceit – one that has a long and distinguished lineage in Spanish-language literature, beginning with Borges' numerous fake texts, in particular A Universal History of Infamy, his 1935 catalogue of (semi-)fictional criminals. (It even comes with a bibliography of non-existent texts, making cast-iron an authenticity we already know to be fake.) A succession of mini-biographies of Nazi, nationalist, ultra-Catholic and anti-Semitic writers, it is at times riotous and rollicking in its mordant humour – the travails of Ernesto Pérez Masón, silenced by the Castro regime after OuLiPian acrostics (“LONG LIVE HITLER”) are discovered in his books, are but one example to raise a dry guffaw. But it is not – or not just – satire: Bolaño hits his target – the warped absurdity of right-wing ideology – first time, and then keeps hitting it, long after the audience has gotten the apparent joke.

Importantly, this is a guide not to right-wing culture generally, but to literature: this gallery of fanatics, like most of Bolaño's narrators and principal characters, are obsessed with writing. Or perhaps, rather, writing is obsession – excess, desperation, madness. Many of the undertakings described here are riddled with absurdity and insanity: Edelmira Thompson's Poe's Room, mostly a vast description of the room described in Poe's 'Philosophy of Furniture'; Luiz Fontaine Da Souza's five-volume Critique of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (“his siblings and nephews were obliged to have him interned once again in the clinic”); Harry Sibelius' 1333-page-long speculative history of America under Nazism. In spite of the embitterment, alcoholism, destruction and failure (there's a lot of all of them) what keeps them all going is writing – Argentino Schiaffino, on the run, churning out pamphlets and plays; “the widow Mendiluce” producing books, writing prefaces, financing journals and publishing houses into her dotage. It is a thus a powerful tribute both to the therapeutic aspect of literature – the comforts of bibliomania, the way literature, by remaking the world in integrity, makes it liveable – and its shortcomings. Not only does it fail to help its authors – Luz Mendiluce, a not-exactly-stellar poet, alcoholic, overweight, fascist and a thwarted lesbian, who is typical of the lives of these artists, dies in a car crash that is both bang and whimper: “The explosion was considerable” – but it also fails to change the world.

It's impossible not to note the persistent note of darkness running through the work. It is in part an attempt to negotiate, in perhaps the only way possible, with the with the horrific legacy of Latin America's 20th century, a history so absurd as to be almost beyond satire. That reality hangs in the background of these fictions like a suffocating fog: the dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala and, in particular, Bolaño's native Chile, where the democratic socialist Allende government was unseated by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1973; the repression, torture, censorship, poverty, violence, life in a world where civilised values have been utterly rescinded. It intrudes constantly: Edelmira Thompson meets and collaborates with Eva Perón; Masón “figures in the Dictionary of Cuban Authors... which omits Guillermo Cabrera Infante”; two young Colombian poets volunteer for Franco's forces in Spain. In that sense, the book recalls Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch and Infante's View of Dawn in the Tropics – dealing with the horror through transformation into an aesthetic form just as fragmented and skewed.

One can't help but feel that the individual deficiencies of the authors in Nazi Literature... – haunted, like most writers, by the idea of being no good – is a remnant of the vast political tragedy: the foregrounding of this parade of right-wingers calls up their opposite, and absent, numbers – the silenced, the exiled, the disappeared. The appearance of two left-wing poets in the final chapter makes tangible the void that has always been there, and the painful dialectic between hope and defeat literature is enmeshed with. Literature, Bolaño emphasises, always exists in the shadow of death – one thinks of the scene in By Night in Chile where the narrator attends a literary party while torture occurs in the building's basement; “that is how literature is made in Chile”. We become graphically aware of this in 'The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman', the chapter (later the basis of the novella Distant Star) that comes closest to home for Bolaño – it deals with the Pinochet coup and is, in fact, narrated by the author. Hoffman is a young pilot and poet who sky-writes fascistic verse, and then disappears after a scandal over a photographic exhibition. This Kurtzian void – a fugitive existing only in rumour, apparently lacking any motive for his horrific crimes – is the novel's dark heart: a vexed inconclusion, an acknowledgement that literature, for all its weight of pain, is worth cherishing in our desperation. This book's strange pleasures prove again Bolaño's work among that worth saving.

35. Kate Bush

2010-02-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

A re-appreciation of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, first published in The Boar.

Kate Bush Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985)

This isn't about us. The greatest pop reconfigures yr nervous system, implants false memories, but always exceeds you: it gives us other narratives, other untold-of possibilities, other worlds, that remain inside us like ghosts. The expression Kate Bush achieved on Hounds Of Love (1985) is intensely personal, even esoteric, and the listener's response – this listener's, anyway – is no less so, but both still spiral out into constellations of experience; it is precisely the depth of this journey into the personal that allows it to expand into the universal. Its fractured narratives – the two sides, titled 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Ninth Wave' , the latter of which itself forms a kind of conceptual sequence narrated by the half-consciousness of a drowning woman, a gloriously strange counterpart to the hit parade of the first – together form an oblique totality more comparable to a feminist Waste Land than most pop.

It represents, indeed, a point where the language of pop exceeds its prosaic, everyday use and enters the realm of poetry. The syn-drums, throbbing electronics, borderline-OTT guitar solos and soaring vocals that marred so many mid-80s power-ballads reappear throughout – made alien, as if heard for the first time. So it is that opener and No. 1 single 'Running Up That Hill', beginning from a synth-tone like cold dawn breaking and processional drum-machine, spirals into ecstatic throes like the universe opening up overhead, just as does the euphoric 'Big Sky'. The title-track feeds Angela Carter through New Pop, accessing a feminine sexuality at once assertive and naïve, afraid of its own power, seemingly excavated from folk-memory; Bush bursts, at the whiplash of strings and percussion, into glossolalia – “a Dadaist postscript to 'Reynard The Fox'”, as Marcello Carlin puts it. The album plunges further into Freudian psychodrama with the disturbing 'Mother Stands For Comfort' (Joy Division's 'I Remember Nothing' remade as a domestic drama), and the graceful, controlled surge of 'Cloudbusting'.

'The Ninth Wave' follows like a long plunge in icy water, a disappearance into the other world promised by the first side, anticipating all of pop's future potential languages in one glorious conglomeration – and, indeed, outdoing most 'experimental' music of the next twenty years in daring and strangeness. Bush had received, through Peter Gabriel, a Fairlight sampler, then the technological cutting-edge, used the previous year to disorientating effect on Art of Noise's 'Close (To The Edit)' - resulting in the sampled voices, Morse code bleeps, cut-up vocals and breakbeats threaded throughout 'The Ninth Wave', anticipating, by a number of years, the sampledelic hip-hop of Paul's Boutique and the Bomb Squad's Public Enemy productions. 'Waking The Witch' feeds disco and electro through the cut-up of William Burroughs and John Cage; 'Watching You Without Me' presages both the scarred and skipping melodies of Fennesz' Endless Summer and the R&Bollywood trend of the early 00s. But there's nothing drily technical about its jouissance: this purgatorial drama yielding to the undeniable blood-rush of 'Jig of Life' and the summer-morning spryness of 'The Morning Fog' feels like rebirth, like the beginning of a future – for her, for us all.

There is far more here than can be encapsulated in this space – and this is, perhaps, exactly what has allowed the album to stand alone, outstripping all of Bush's progeny in advance. The media has finally opened up to female artists – but only a certain kind, yr Florences and Marinas, 'eccentric', 'passionate', still happy to play the enigmatic (and ultimately subordinate) female Other, all bastardising the language coined here 25 years ago. Michael Bracewell's condescending description of Bush as “pop's... mad girl in the attic” makes clear the problem she presents: a female artist so excessively, effortlessly inventive, so brazenly open and complex in her explorations of dream, memory and sexuality, so ruthlessly ahead of the game, can only make the prissy little boys of critic-land afraid. This album is everything we still need, and so much more.

34. Decade's End

2009-12-14T12:56:00.000-08:00

Director's cut version of a piece written for the final issue of The Boar of 2009, and hence the decade, listing our top ten records of the 00s. It is, as acknowledged, both incomplete and over-complete, for the obvious reasons. To get a little perspective: the main list, devised by Dave Toulson, had Manic Street Preachers' Journal For Plague Lovers as its number one. This list was the only one to include any albums by hip-hop artists, or indeed any non-white artists. Aside from Jess Colman's inclusion of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress in a number one slot, this was the only one to include any work by female musicians. That gives you an idea what students listen to these days.

To get everything upfront: this list is redundant. Not enough dust has settled even since the beginning of the decade to make sense of ten years marked by perhaps the most fevered processes of cultural expansion and proliferation the world has yet seen. The increasingly obvious collapse of Britain's old pop media – radio, newspapers, magazines and the monoliths of the corporate pop industry – in the face of the internet has eroded the old models of how we listen, how we consume and love records. Even the CD format, except for small pockets of bloody-minded opposition, manifested as lavish packaging, seems to have its days numbered. There is now far too much music being released every year for anyone, fan or professional critic, to get a handle on it all. Looking at an entire decade, you can fucking forget it - I haven't even heard the most of the records that made most other critics' top 10s, the readymade elect. Lists, ranking and comprehension are for the Nick Hornbys of this world now. Consensus, in a universe of listeners atomised onto their own islands of taste, must be manufactured.

Perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely popular, zeitgeist-reflecting – and, not coincidentally, avant-garde – music was the astonishing renaissance of hip-hop and R&B that accompanied the end millennium: ruthlessly capitalist, relentlessly neophilic, rhizomatically spawning new and alien forms. There were Timbaland's productions, of which his collaborations with Missy Elliot on 'Get Yr Freak On' and the accompanying album Miss E... So Addictive, were the pinnacle; Outkast's psychedelic masterpiece Stankonia, the most feverishly inventive product of the Dirty South; the stoned high-low art absurdism of Madvillain's Madvillainy (Tristan Tzara in a hustler get-up); Cannibal Ox's book of revelations, The Cold Vein; the long-awaited Hell Hath No Fury, on which The Neptunes' production and Pusha T and Malice's oiled and vicious flows meshed like V8 innards; the genesis of grime in London, bent into extraordinary shapes by the artistic will of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner; the purest flowering of Kanye West's pop talent in the form of Late Registration.

No surprise that indie simply couldn't compete with this overcharged germination, going, for the most part, into an ever-worsening slough of aesthetic conservatism and emotional infantilism. Where it chose to engage with these artificial intoxications, it produced the shimmering, Platonic dream-pop ideal of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, and Richard Youngs' suite of digital incantations The Naive Shaman – ecstatic accesses to the heart of nature, through the dreamworld of technology.

Shadowing this excitement, in a decade riven by disaster – 9/11, the Iraq War, the market crash – has been a sense of grief, dissolution and trauma, exemplified by Burial's Untrue – the rave burnt out into a world of shadows haunted by the memories of love, the spectral jungle of his first album hollowed-out to a translucent perfection. Coil's ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms, recorded at their 2003 ATP performance, shortly before the death of frontman Jhonn Balance, was the aching, haunting, end to one of the most brilliant bodies of work of the 20^th century. Forbidding, but gripping this listener like barbed wire: the apocalyptic wasteland of Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven sprawled over the first half of the decade, while The Drift, Scott Walker's first album in more than 10 years, appeared as the most fully-formed, profound and insurmountable artefact of this decade.

What of all this will last? Try me again in 2020.

33. Evangelista

2009-11-27T09:10:00.000-08:00

Originally published in the university newspaper, The Boar.

Evangelista – Prince of Truth (Constellation)

Carla Bozulich's muse is deadly: with every release since 2006's disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she's since piloted, it's assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year's Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, in ragged structures fringed with noise, finally collapsing into the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich's desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record's production, at the band's Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition, the sense of charged liminality, the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure, and the Gothic light and dark of that band's best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich's own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich's singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on 'I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice' – a ballad that's also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or 'You Are A Jaguar', an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich's vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record's end balances its opening: 10-minute closer 'On The Captain's Side' slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.

32. Flaming Lips

2009-11-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

Published in The Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper, Vol. 33 Iss. 3.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Brothers)

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips' latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, but neither is it a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997's 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open 'Convinced of the Hex', immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs 'Aquarius Sabotage', 'Worm Mountain', like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of 'Evil', 'I Can Be A Frog's whimsical jaunt, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, 'Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast' like a gathering of Eno's Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne's vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) 'The Impulse' might as well be Jeff Lynne on 'Mr. Blue Sky'; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on 'Sagittarius Silver Announcement' is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part-in-the-red studio-jam, part-interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer 'Watch The Planets', you've no choice but to take them at their word: it's cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment the Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on yr tongue.

30. One Poem

2009-10-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

Found Poem

(After R.F. Langley, Journals)

The eleventh tree is the ivy, then

on down through the guelder into the elder,

if Graves is at all to be trusted. Ivy

this morning, in sunlight, at Footherley,

umbels of pale green clubs. Slow wasps crawl there

with folded wings. One

__________________falls backwards and drops

onto a lower leaf. In the track, so

cold that dew is like seawater, and there

is the chilly smell of sweet

____________________rotting.

29. One Poem

2009-10-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Watching Nosferatu

It was the beginning, the purest map
of this cursed land, pock-marked in black-and-white,
scrying-field for a century severed

with gashes, drunk on blood. Schreck, starkly
carved as a hieroglyph, stone death's-head,
face of unnature, fingers teeming stalks.

I know well enough his blasted country:
gnarled passes, huddled villages, wind
whistling with a rattle of Schoenberg,

a land of phantoms, up to the castle
meeting the slate-grey sky alone. The eyes
of the Count, riven with hunger, drawing,

draining, ever-dark singularity.
The gesture - the sleeping flesh beneath him,
a dream-geometry of curves outlined

in linen, of curls framing kohl eyes, sweep,
pulse and yield of a neck, traced with the touch
of an exile. And, waiting to finish

the starved years, stone-hemmed days. Pooling crimson,
obsidian. The final acquisition.
I know
********that cold-sweating wish far too well.

28. Light of Glory

2009-08-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

A 'spiritual autobiography' of Olivier Messiaen's oratorio La Transfiguration Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, written as an assessed piece for my second creative-writing unit last year.

I didn’t know quite what to think, afterwards. It was as if another kind of knowledge – insubstantial, impossible to formulate – barged out what I felt I knew. It all came back, but that feeling, with all the strangeness of a photograph’s caught time, framed and hanging in a corner of my head, remained with me, however much suspicion with which I regarded that moment of emptiness. It was a summer evening much like any other; the curtains were drawn, the radio on, as if I’d returned to the habits of my adolescence, a look of earnest concentration on my face as I listened.

The next morning, as I was cycling the usual route to work, cresting the hill that descends towards the town centre, I was struck, as if lanced, by the sun moving out from behind the church clocktower. I remembered, then, how I should have formulated last night’s thoughts: that I knew, now, what revelation was.

***

On the other end of the broadcast were the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, two further choirs, and seven soloists, at the leviathan carcass of the Albert Hall, playing Olivier Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Given the continued public distrust of funding for ‘experimental’ music, this was a vast mobilisation of forces: the BBC were seemingly prepared to shell out for the public service commitment of celebrating Messiaen’s centenary year. Performances and recordings of La Transfiguration are rare as snow leopards; I was left with only this first, astonished listening, onto which ideas and memories fixed themselves, barnacle-like.

It came, of course, with its own history. By the time it was first performed, at the Coliseu dos Recreios, Lisbon, on 7 June 1969, it had given its composer more trouble than any other work he had written, vastly delayed – taking four years to complete, instead of the initially-agreed nine months – constantly expanding – it was originally intended to run a mere forty-five minutes, consist of nine movements, as opposed to the final fourteen, and utilise smaller forces – and plagued by structural problems. At the premiere, the renowned Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, stricken with fever, had to be firmly coaxed from his hotel room to play his solo part, shivering in a cold sweat, to a crowd who had already been kept waiting. The struggles, it seems, were in proportion to the cumulative power of the final product.

The biblical narrative of the Transfiguration takes place at the peak of a mountain, the disciples looking on, catching their breath, as Jesus ascends into the air to converse with the apparitions of Moses and Elijah. Messiaen, a keen mountaineer, was partially drawn to the subject by the thought of “the awesomeness of the place of Transfiguration”. We can almost hear him, gasping, overwhelmed, on the summit.

***

La Transfiguration is a strange piece of work: though closest in form to oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, it is still not simply ‘Transfiguration: The Musical’. It is framed as a series of ‘meditations’ on the event, an extreme musical gloss on the Latin texts – selected from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, the Old Testament and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica – declaimed by the vast choir, illuminating and extending it into the aural dimension. The structure is cyclical: the opening Récit Évangélique – a cavern of sonorous percussion textures, punctuated by the ping of temple blocks – is followed by two movements from the Gospel narrative, another Récit, two Gospel episodes, and a chorale; this structure of seven movements, or ‘septenary’, is repeated. The number itself is emblematic of Messiaen’s programming of religious symbolism into every aspect of the work, rhyming with the seven Spirits of God seen in Revelation, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Joys of Mary; three, associated with the Trinity, manifests in the triple blasts of the horns. This is an eternal return: just as the text weaves back and forth through the chronology of the Transfiguration, it re-presents variations on the same musical material. In Messiaen’s music time is strange, pliable: the Almighty never stoops to mere linearity. In Quator de la Fin de Temps, the whimsically flitting melodies seem to defy any progress; the vast chromatic blocks of his organ works are like immovable ziggurats. Every sound is no longer a mere pinprick in space-time; it resonates out into the metaphysical. Instead of seeking to explain, it actively amplifies the impenetrable mystery of His transformation, and the appearance of the Trinity – the three distinct beings in one.

Listening, I’m struck by the mounting power and strangeness of the music, as it cycles back, again and again, towards these moments, when the Divine made itself plain: its oscillations between serene plainchant, slowly arcing strings, and the woodwinds’ birdsong cacophonies, the brass’s apocalyptic blurts, the choir’s soaring shouts; its swaying movements between dissonance and collective tonal amalgamation. Then, in the calm of the mountain-peak, resonating with the foggy harmonics of tam-tam and cymbal, a voice, announced by alien chorales on the violins, trilling metallics, and an explosion from the timpani, issues from the cloud. “He is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him”.

There is nothing here without meaning: La Transfiguration is remarkable for the mirroring of its grand arc in the microcosmic details of its sound-world. Messiaen made frequent use of a signature technique: the seemingly random melodies emanating from the soloists are in fact lovingly-notated birdsongs; by now an expert ornithologist, he could pick favourite birds for each occasion. Thus, the ‘Song of the Eternal Church’ is accompanied by birds from Europe, Brazil, Africa and Canada, and the appearance of the Trinity is precipitated by the staccato rasp of the noble peregrine falcon. Now, I stop at intervals whilst walking to catch these details, part of our everyday sonic fabric – wagtails, blackbirds, finches, wrens. They summon with them the air, light and colours of the open field – in abundance in the countryside around his birthplace of Avignon – which Messiaen saw as one with the Light of God.

This is not figurative. Debussy’s influence made Messiaen a primarily chromatic composer. Whilst loving melody, he revelled in the timbre of strings and horns, thickening and layering harmonies, like paint squirted and trowelled onto canvas. In conversation with Claude Samuel, he spoke of the work in synaesthetic terms: “Gold and violet, red and violet purple, bluish-grey studded with gold and deep blue…” Its fabric can be better compared with visual art – Gauguin’s exotic visions, the unearthly radiance of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the light-flooded hallucinations of filmmaker Stan Brakhage – than most music. As the church organist, for sixty years, of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, he thought of the blinding light of revelation in terms of the sonic white-out of its thundering pipes.

He was first drawn to the subject after hearing a sermon, at his summer home of Petichet in the French Alps, on the Transfiguration as the encapsulation of Christ as the True Light – the image of Jesus as “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”, joined in the wholeness of the divine Trinity suddenly invading our world; an illumination of the beyond. The enormous thirteenth-movement climax of La Transfiguration comes with three minor crescendos, announcing the members of the Trinity; with a sudden dip, the music seems to gather like a tidal force, rushing in to a blazing, sustained E-Major – the traditional chord of paradise – the entire ensemble lighting up like a nocturnal city. The final movement, ‘Chorale of the Light of Glory’, entirely defying musical common sense, is one last sighing love song to the Saviour – tender, joyful. As Christopher Dingle puts it, “We are beyond the restrictions of reason and are now in eternity.”

***

I was fifteen when I stopped believing in God. Becoming haltingly aware that the constant, stifling pain my peers spent their days inflicting on me was, in fact, a general condition, I resolved that no God could sanction such an existence. Reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline and listening to the scourging wrath of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, I conceived formulations of God’s essential absence, a sucking void at the heart of life. When, during my last months at secondary school, I slashed my wrists so deeply I left a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, it seemed merely a confirmation.

Three years later, in a cold March classroom, halfway through my second year of Sixth Form, I was reading, under the table, an article about the singer Joanna Newsom. The writer, Frances Morgan, was being almost frighteningly candid about the almost supernatural effect of her work, its dreamlike resonances, vibrating towards – what? The metaphysical?

It was a thought, at first ridiculous, that wouldn’t leave me. Already listening to explicitly religious recordings – John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Beethoven, Buddhist ceremonial music, Qawwali – it was perhaps inevitable that La Transfiguration would leave a mark on me. Before this consideration, of course, were other reasons: its sprawling fecundity of ideas, almost unrivalled in 20^th century music, the eclecticism of one who loves too much of the world; its natural confidence; its total modernism, allied to the most plain and sincere of belief in the truth of a two-thousand year-old religion. Perhaps most of all, the fact that its at-times-overwhelming beauty is not in spite of its religious purpose, but directly because of it. Like the medieval and Renaissance piétas and crucifixions which so fascinated me, its strange transmutations – rendering the most arcane of theological events into the two dimensions of a picture, or the sound of a choir – seemed to radiate something all the more significant for being inexplicable. Whatever else becomes of it – whether the unknowable truths at the heart of La Transfiguration are, in fact, the ‘truth’, whatever that might mean – it will have done what Messiaen purposed: to touch and shake a life.

2009-06-29T03:35:00.000-07:00

Surface Tension
On Derek Southall's Blackwater Recalled - Four Years After (1969) *

And, severance: a dreadful U,
carved from a block of night. Flicker
and swim of country bonfire light,
and past that moving on the face
of the waters. From underneath,

the bleeding. What does this ice-lid
scatter in the fields? Time becomes
the strata resisting footsteps,
the pulse of a camera shutter.
My homes echo with ripples, strokes;

crack with the black puncture of grief.

*This painting, which can be viewed at the Herbert Gallery in Southall's home-town of Coventry, was a reaction to the death of his brother in 1965, who drowned in a frozen lake at Blackwater in Hampshire, my family's home county.

26. Dissolution

2009-06-10T02:30:00.000-07:00

Published in Plan B #45, May 2009. Thanks to Lauren Strain, for the editing, and David Tibet for the fact correction.

Current 93
Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain (Coptic Cat)

"Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience" - Frank Kermode, The Sense Of An Ending: Studies In The Theory Of Fiction

David Tibet, an autodidact prophet in the tradition of Gerrard Winstanley and John Lydon, has been preaching apocalypse for over 25 years. But no longer is he a voice crying in the wilderness: every day, the air now tingles with anxiety – global recession, energy crises, looming environmental disaster. Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain can be seen as a return to the matter of the first, recently reissued Current 93 recordings, whose ravaged soundscapes, a reaction to the Babylon of Thatcherite Britain, seem increasingly pertinent.

Aleph... is probably Tibet's most ambitious project since 1993's The Inmost Light trilogy: an eschatological rock-opera of sorts, acted out in Tibet's own bewildering, syncretic cosmology, the frequent incomprehensibility of which matters no more than it did for Blue Öyster Cult on Imaginos. Its theme - which, as far as I can tell, is that of the war of opposites: flesh and spirit, Rome and Jerusalem, Samael and Monad - isn't that important, except as a justification for Tibet to deliver some of the most overwrought, fire-and-brimstone performances in Current 93's history. Those who accuse him of being campy and OTT will find plenty of fuel here: when he draws the word 'murderer' out over James Blackshaw's Early Music flourishes on 'Poppyskins', or whispers that "my teeth are possessed by demons" - snarls of guitar like lightning in the backdrop - he seems possessed of both utter sincerity and an awareness of how ludicrous he sounds - a Gnostic Vincent Price, rolling his 'R's in his best Abiezer Coppe impression.

The (admittedly impressive) list of players gathered on this album is also unimportant. Except for Alex Neilson's supportive, malleable percussion - which occasionally resembles the eternal propulsion of OM's Chris Hakius - and Blackshaw's guitar filigrees, the ensemble is united in support of Tibet's benevolent demagoguery. In what is largely a continuation and refinement of the direction of 2006's Black Ships Ate The Sky, grinding rock sits alongside becalmed folk. Even the peaks of Tibet's sermonising aggression are balanced out by plateaus of slowly-building tension girded with strings and organ. '26 April 2007' is a narcotic glide shot through with coronae of fuzz; the voices - supplied by Pantaleimon's Andria Degens and Baby Dee, among others - drift like EVP. 'Not Because The Fox Barks' and 'As Real As Rainbows', are frighteningly intense: the former verges on metal, Tibet ventriloquising the final tribulation amid vast electric slabs - his incantations call to mind Ozzy narrating the end of Clash of the Titans. And, after the extinction of Antichrist comes the advent of paradise in the form of a stately guitar and piano. When 'As Real...' drops into a maelstrom of glitch, organ and piano - Sasha Grey multitracked over the top - it's as moving as anything on Sleep Has His House, still C93's peak.

"The deserts will be filled/With the comas of stars": words resonant with the promise of the millenarians who captivated England 360 years ago - that another world is possible, here and now.

"I live in increasing awareness that a Love will come suddenly who will finally tear our skies apart," Tibet wrote in the sleeve notes to Black Ships.... Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the most brilliant, preposterous warning yet of its imminent arrival; a vital reminder that the end, if we choose, will also be the triumph of love.

25. Caroline Weeks

2009-06-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Plan B #44, April 2009.

A classical figure, misted as if the camera had caught something emanating from a pre-Raphaelite otherworld. Compare, perhaps, with a photograph of the bisexual American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: the same classic-Hollywood poise, the same melancholy aura. She seems, though, to resist this framing as ethereal siren. She’s nothing if not real.

Caroline Weeks’ debut, Songs For Edna – its lyrics transposed from Millay’s exquisite, haunting poetry – has the feel of a record from a time-slip, an unplaceable artefact. The atmosphere of records by the likes of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs (Weeks is a fan of both), or Judee Sill, pervades: at once otherworldly and unerringly close, as if “the listener will… feel like I am singing in the same room as them”, cutting surgically to the heart of life. Her unaffected, direct vocal belies the strangeness of the act: over skeletal fingerpicking she reconstitutes the voice of a woman nearly 60 years dead – beautifully. “I was looking through a dusty old book of American poetry and I came across the sonnet ‘I Shall Go Back’, as I read out loud – the words danced off the page into song. Edna's poems struck a chord, deeply resonating with me on a very personal level”. It’s precisely that sense of uncanniness – the revenant past’s ability to shake us to the core – that Songs For Edna captures.

Weeks is very familiar with this sense of connection to the bygone. Her own musical background goes back some generations. “My great-grandad played in a brass-band where every musician was a member of the Weeks family… My grandma Gladys Weeks, who has sadly passed away now, had the most incredible voice, a very high-pitched warble. At a young age, sitting on my grandad's knee I would be mesmerised. I realised then that singing was something special.” Her childhood home was full of music: “my Dad would sing in choirs and listen to Leonard Cohen, my Mum sings around the house non-stop – mostly Carpenters and Joni Mitchell songs. I was always encouraged to sing, to sing from my heart, to sing for pleasure, in quite a spiritual way."

At the heart of folk-song is a dialectic between the experience of the singer, and the singer’s possession by the song. In this, poetry, with its penetrating focus on language, proves the perfect source. “There is a blank sound-canvas, I can colour the words, playing around with the rhythm, harmony and tone… the poems feel their way into music.” Millay is a marginal figure even within histories of American poetry, and the obscurity of source was part of the attraction: “The fact that she is fairly unknown makes her more attractive, or special in some way, like being let in on a secret.” This performative intimacy comes over in her live performances, which often includes “dance, choral pieces… tape recorders hidden under chairs and behind curtains.”

Solo recording is only one branch of the work she has been involved in around her hometown of Brighton, stretching from membership of the live incarnation of Bat For Lashes to “an all-female Bulgarian choir”. Her ex-membership of the experimental folk group Hamilton Yarns perhaps offers a background to her own aesthetic – a kind of futuristic archaism, appropriate to a landscape containing both the modernist incubator of Bexhill and the South Downs’ ancient beauty. “I feel that there are so many beautiful words in the world that have been lost and forgotten…there needs to be a renaissance, a revival of the past. I think we human beings need to slow down and appreciate what has come before us."

Begin here.

24. From 'Nocturnes'

2009-05-12T03:45:00.000-07:00

From a currently dormant project, a sequence of prose-poems. I was considering including these in my end-of-year portfolio, then decided against it for reasons of space.

After John Burnside

I

These avenues are an absolutism. Statements in tarmac, red-brick, pebbledash, we do not want to hear. Webbed with traceries, absorbing the resonance of streetlight, the footsteps’ years. The mapping, above all, remains.

II

The marshes, a ghost-map on tarmac and concrete: fronds, tower-blocks. Congress of the semi-detacheds, sand-brick Barrett estates, mulched in brackish water. Curlews and bitternes ululating in public toilets, nesting in ground-floor offices, stalking between the flooded cubicles. The shopping precincts patrolled by fish, the charity shops flourishing with bulrushes and ferns, weevils devouring old hardcover Hazlitts. And, as evening draws on, the sputtering: sodium communing with marsh-light.

III

The beach sloping, stretching along the curve of God’s dragged finger, the churned-up mica in endless drift. Settling as a conglomeration of loose powder, congealing as the sea feels fit, repository of misbegotten stones, slashing razor-shells, the sea-life expelled. Charcoal petrified, a black, hard memento. And, in the evening, the half-lit swarming of Victorian needle-nuzzlers, parasols to the harsh moon.

23. Excavations

2009-05-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

2nd draft of a story included in my end-of-year portfolio.

I have the photographs before me. They are spread out, like an ornate Japanese fan. Night came on some time ago, and I did not stand and switch on the light. But I can, for my sins, still see.

I do not know where or when I recovered them. They are already coated with dust again from sitting on my desk for weeks. Nonetheless, they do not show any age: the dress of the girl whose photo occupies the centre of my desk is as vividly scarlet, the flowers around its hem as white, as I imagine they were when first taken. She sits in a field, patches of daisies scattered behind, an acoustic guitar by her skirt, which sits placidly on a leg brought up to her body, thin as a switch. Her arms loop around her knee as if she were holding a dog. This is her only photo: there is nothing of her other than that smile, perturbing in its reserved curve, its flash of utterly white teeth, like the opening of a bean pod. I knew her, after then – we talked, sometimes, I’m sure. But the only extant information of her is that rictus. She is with others, whom I knew, also after these first days. In the other photos, they are gathered in twos or threes, the camera sometimes tilted at a crazy angle, the frame perhaps severing away half a face – for some, that is all I have. Some instinct other than that of survival draws them together, touching, clasping. No matter how long I look, it remains unknown. Skin, hands and hair blur into incomprehensible geometries. I pick up one, dust it off, scrutinise: a young man and his lady friend, slightly off-centre, almost compacted into one slithering shape. Their eyes are arrogant and supplicating: they know that the camera makes them, just as without them, there would be no photograph.

I stand, my body cracking out of inertia, and shuffle to the kitchen. Its unlit corners, crowded with black heaps, are a foreign territory. It is the places that come back, again and again: a palm tree, strung with fairy lights, people surrounding it in the background, the lit vectors of the city spilling away over the wall surrounding it. In one of the photographs, a young man plays rough-trade with it, his girl companion half-heartedly joining in. A slash of black hair frames her eyes, lit by the flash like a cat’s. I feel in these photographs, I am always just off-frame – in this one, sipping miserly at a Corona. But of course, I know I am not. If there is one fact they testify to, it is that. Everything else is supposition. Looking through the open kitchen window, down at the city, I know that this tableau of lights will have disappeared by morning. To have it set down in chemicals, unchanging – that is the thing. Everything else is tawdry imitation.

Standing over my desk, I glance down at them. When I try to remember, they come back, frozen and projected from that time, as if through a magic lantern. The geography of a face, certain senses of personality, affection. Where did they go, who were tied to these things? Where did I, to lose them? Of course, these are not my memories. I look at the arc of an arm, the tautening of skin around a cheekbone raised in smiling, the red cavern of a shout, and wonder where I was when all of this was happening. Dead? Dreaming? Some other world may have harboured me, but I do not remember it. The only, ignominious one left me is this, where the only voice is the October wind battering my window. They are the surface traces of everything that was never mine, like the coils of a sea-ammonite in chalk, the strata going down and down. When I try to remember these things – the heat of a hand around a shoulder, breath-explosion in another’s face, the ambience of beings – the only thing that comes is the heather blazing into colour on the scrubland, in the late sunlight, a fieldfare’s song whistling down from the distance.

There are two more photos of them in the fields. In one, three of them – two young men with scraggly hair, and another girl with the guitar – are sat around a fire of dead logs and ivy, more smoke than flame. In the other, the guitar-case lies by it, a copy of Shelley’s The West Wind and Other Poems sitting on its lid. Outside, I can feel already the evening’s coming frost preparing to seep in. They are saints, pasted into the gold frame of an icon. For them, it was the summer.

22. Why I Hate... Youth

2009-05-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

Column, first printed in Plan B #36, August 2008.

“Flagging pursuit of happiness… Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over. [Pause] False ring there.”

--Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape.

In June 2007, the Observer Music Monthly dedicated an entire issue to “the bands and fans kickstarting a youth revolution” – an indication not merely of the OMM’s hubristic zeitgeist-tracking self-image, but of the music press’ singular reverence and hunger for ‘youth’. Since the mid-20^th century pop has been primarily consumed and performed by young people; the glamour of adolescence still forms a significant part of the music and PR industry’s language. Female singers are now accorded publicity and cred according to age – hence Duffy (24) being outclassed by Adele (5 months my senior) and Kate Nash – and are usually out of careers before 27. NME pronounces a new bunch of walking acne patches the Second Coming each week; Artrocker seems to exist to convince people that an unhealthy pallor, tiny legs and sixth-generation post-punk guitars do excitement make. Even the dadrock mags have token ‘hot new bands’ to get sweaty over – witness Mojo handing out 5 star reviews to whichever trad-folk wunderkinds appear.

Neither is Plan B entirely immune: its roots in post-C86 indie music-crit leave its unstinting and commendable neophilia open to moony-eyed sentiment about ‘innocent discovery’ and ‘childlike wonder’ – used, more than is healthy, to justify wilful underachievement and aesthetic conservatism. The insistence of some writers – especially those of a poptimistic bent – that youth’s music should not be subject to critical orthodoxy, only to the blind pleasure principle, is a means of draining ideas from music. As Adorno wrote, “Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were”; it isn’t criticism, but a shutting-down of criticism, of discourse.

The fixation on youth – its supposed ‘excitement’, vigour, etc. – corresponds worryingly with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to deny the more unsavoury realities of human existence: suffering, aging, decay and death are elided from the spectacle. The ruling class obsesses over imitation philosopher’s stones (anti-aging products, alternative medicine), while tabloid readers worry over slippages in the celebrity façade of eternal youth. In music discourse, it maintains the claim that radicalism is reserved for the young, that musicians over a certain age are fit only for the nostalgia circuit, or PR-approved, Rick Rubin-assisted Creative Comebacks. This despite the fact that there are many musicians of middle-and-advancing-age soldiering on – Whitehouse, Richard Youngs, Matthew Bower, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Portishead (average age 43) – and producing music far better than kids half, a third of their age. Some of the most compelling music writers around are in (or past) their forties: Mark Fisher, our own Everett True, Chris Bohn, Simon Reynolds. And look to the margins and the scale shifts: for example, 30 in jazz is young, and the number of musicians still keeping up the good work – Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, etc. – past bus-pass eligibility is inspiring; in classical, if you’re below 50 you’re no-one. The continual emphasis on the cultural production and milieu of youth is a perfect example of late capitalism’s fixation on a newness that isn’t new; a state in which, as Frederic Jameson pointed out, “an unparalleled rate of change” is twinned with “an unparalleled standardisation of everything” – the idea that the young might come up with art to shame their elders is becoming more laughable precisely as it becomes a yet more central focus of marketing rhetoric.

Youth has its tortures, too, among the worst being its ephemerality: it disappears soon enough, and to deny the value of age is to state that the rest of life is not worth living. The extension of adolescence – the impulse at the heart of poptimism and indie/hipster culture – is also the admission that the future is not worth it – the basis of a nihilism unable even to make demands. Observe the young today – their blank eyes, zombie movements – and try telling me these creatures are our be-all-and-end-all, rather than a (literal) dead-end; they seem to have, a priori, as Greil Marcus put it, “bur[ied] their nascent personalities in received images”; to have, in their regression to the boredom, indifference and petulance of childhood, foreswore any “need to explain themselves and explain the world”, any wish to change it, or their futures. These things signify not, as the myth of cool would have you believe, a spirit of adventure, of seizing the prime of life, but a resigned fatalism. The artificial excitement, the sweat and hedonism of adolescence that the press clamour after – the correlative of the hyperspeed production of late capitalism, its bipolar cycles of boom and bust – is merely the obverse to the plague of depression, mental illness and substance abuse among teenagers. The kids aren’t alright – and we should realise it.

21. Pomes

2009-04-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

Found Poem
After Roland Barthes

There are two musics (at least so I have
always thought): the music one listens to,
the music one plays. These two musics are
two totally different arts, each with its
own history, its own sociology,
its own aesthetics, its own erotics.

Found Poem
After David Toop and W.G. Sebald

In Austerlitz, Sebald writes
of hearing a radio programme
about Fred Astaire:
"Astaire's father, who according to this
surprising radio programme came
from Vienna, had worked as
a master brewer in Omaha, Nebraska,
where Astaire was born, and from
the veranda of the Astaire house you
could hear freight trains being shunted
back and forth
in the city's marshalling yard.
Astaire is reported to have said
later that this constant,
uninterrupted shunting sound,
and the ideas it suggested
of going on a long railway journey,
were his only
childhood memories."

20. Two Flash Fictions

2009-03-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

These stories were submitted as an assessed part of the course.

I ♥ The 60s

I most enjoy the montages they begin with: Profumo, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, The Stones, the Technicolor hippies dancing circularly, Cilla Black. An entire decade condensed into perhaps thirty seconds, without any of the boring bits about geopolitical something or other. In fact, when the talking heads come on, I usually mute the set. UKTV History are the best regular source, repeating docs purloined from the BBC, both overviews and focuses on single subjects: Beatlemania, civil rights, the sexual revolution. I know the lines off by heart now, about the teenagers who “suddenly had money in their pockets”, about the “swaying of the old order”. Then, come the end, I’ll go to bed, and dream.

Once a week, walking back from the office, I stop by Borders, and ask the staff for any relevant new titles. If I’m feeling particularly risqué, I will, after tea, pull on my Biba jacket and floral mini-skirt, flare up my eyelashes, and go to the 60s Jive at the bingo hall down the Old Kent Road. Coming home, amid the vodka-struck barbarians of Peckham, hoots of “Wide Load!” sometimes cut the air. Once, wearing my Marianne Faithfull Girl On A Motorcycle catsuit, a lout in pimpled skin and tracksuit bottoms emerged from the shadows and propositioned me. “I like a girl with a bit of meat on ‘er”, he slurred. Given the relative rarity of such occurrences, I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. Walking past the Goldsmiths University union I find myself spotting girls in the same leather jacket, ankle-boots, kohl eyes. They all have Anita Pallenberg’s hair, and a look of hungry ease I can’t manage. They stand on the pavement swirling their drinks, discussing boys, all twenty years younger than me.

On Saturdays, I take my Vespa (first-run F-reg) to Carnaby Street. These days it’s mostly fancy-soap shops for Guardian types, but a handful of boutiques remain, their frontages redressed in pastel tones. I kill the hours stretching towards evening by going through the same three racks. In the changing room, I was putting off my leaving without, as per usual, buying anything. I flicked around to see a man’s eye peeping in at a curtain-crack. There was something rather dashing about its iris, reminding me of David Hemmings. Creeping out later, I could see him better – he had Freewheelin’-era Dylan’s hair, and an expression stolen from Michael Pitt in The Dreamers.

We sat at an outside café table – something I never do, as it always rains – and I squinted at him through big Twiggy sunglasses, eating my éclair in what I hoped was a carefree way. When he came back to my place (“for a drink” – I felt like Elizabeth Ercy in The Sorcerers), his eyes immediately took in the room. I always felt the mess reflected a ditzy Holly Golightly quality onto me – the kind of girl too much in demand to clean, for whom life is one long game. He looked towards my cupboard, and a momentary shock ran through me that he might find my other DVDs. (Well, a girl in my position needs some assistance in that area of enjoyment.) I interrupted him with the question of what he’d like to drink.

Pause. A Coke?

I felt like I should offer him a tab or something, but had nothing to hand. Even asking that had been hard enough. I sipped my highball across from him on the sofa. I prayed the room might become a time-machine, sucking in the essence of that decade, dissolving the space between us. There would be no effort required: all would fall into place, the very air possessed of luminosity, white heat. So many years of devotion, crowding the place with its spirits, and I, I would be now the initiate. I put on a record. He nodded as The Doors’ ‘Five To One’ came on. A potential future, sealed in vinyl, slipped underneath the needle. He gestured to me to stand up, and held me in his arms. He said, with a laconic look, You know, you have eyes like Patty Hearst.

Pneumatic

People give me a strange look when I tell them I’m mostly silicon. Though I never give any indication of joking, they laugh. When I tell them it’s true, their eyes seem to sink back into their heads, their necks retreat, and they nod, Okay…. When they introduce themselves, people give their most salient fact before proceeding onto more constructive territory. I never get beyond my opening gambit, and hence my conversation now leaves something to be desired.

It was my third husband who encouraged me. One day, as I brought him his tea, he began looking me up and down. I could see him, as I bent to put the tray on the floral table-cloth, making a close and enthusiastic study of my cleavage. All through dinner, he would glance at my lips as I took a sip of water, as if appraising the value of a freshly-caught squid. In one of the many lulls, I asked him, When are we going to that new club? You said you’d take me two weeks ago, and we haven’t gone. You know, he replied, some men don’t like showing off their wives in public. Men prefer women to be, y’know… pneumatic. He shovelled up another forkful of peas and steak, and chewed noisily, as if to say he would speak no more. I was wearing my low-cut polka-dot dress. Looking down at my plate, I could see how it caught the outline of my breasts, a gentle curvature down to my ribcage. I tried to calculate what angle they currently sloped at, what the ideal angle would be, or where, on a scale of 1 to 10, my body was, and should be.

One afternoon, when I came home early from work, I found him fucking Sandra on the iffy-smelling sofa in the front room. Though the hairy back of his neck obscured her face, I recognised the grunts and yelps as belonging to the voice I heard over our fortnightly cocktails. Neither of them noticed me in the doorway, but I could see her breasts generously wobbling as if they were independent of her, the curve of her lips, and his decidedly less-than-clean arse straining with effort. She was, I decided, too good for him, though once the divorce proceedings were underway he no doubt still saw a lot of her.

I spent a few months staying home every evening. The house we had lived in together seemed to grow smaller each hour, the walls, their magnolia floral relief wallpaper colouring and peeling, narrowing until I was forced into my room, wanting the night to be done with. The first time, afterwards, I went to a club, I ended the night keeping a look-out for a taxi while my friend Louise satisfied her new companion in an alcove. The next day I booked my first appointment with the surgeon.

I had my secondary-school reunion a couple of weeks ago. I was stood by the punchbowl, speaking to Matt, who had a crush on me in Year 9, and was apparently now a biochemist. His eyes were hidden behind smeared bottle-thick glasses, patchy two-day stubble and acne scars making him instantly recognisable. As he fell silent for the nth time, I mentioned the implants. Breasts, arse, lips, calves, labia, appendix, several areas of sub-dermal fat. The majority of my paycheque went into a savings account, month after month. A different area each time, sometimes not knowing what I was going to get until I had the menu in front of me, cash to hand. A different surgeon each time, rotating around the city, explaining to them each time, Oh no, these are my own. As I spoke, my tits wobbled over the buffet table. Matt reached for another drink, gulped it down like a cat swallowing a fish. Do you mind if I…?, he said after a pause, and started feeling my arms, working his way up to my cheeks, down to my breasts, as if he were testing a steak. I could see from the way he rolled his eyes as he crouched towards my abdomen that he’d had a few more than I’d thought.

So, what are you doing tonight? Well now, that is a question.

19. David Toop Takes An Afternoon Nap

2009-03-04T08:34:00.000-08:00

A 5-minute radio play written to a specific set of sound FX provided by Peter Blegvad. We were given the option of recording it, instead of performing - I did neither, simply because it was simply too rubbish, in comparison to the preceding works. In any case, there wasn't enough time to perform them all...

SOUNDS OF TYPING

DAVID: OK. [groans] God. Why do they send me this shit? Oh, come on, keep it up. Only five more disks to review, and then lunch. Booze. Cat-warmth. Bacon. Mmm. They could at least send me some interesting field recordings, though. Air-conditioning hum, forest clearings, something. Just because I wrote that bloody book, they assume I want to hear their contact-miked farts, or the noises their hard-drives make when they’re asleep. Give me Egyptian Lover any day. Ah, balls to this.

TYPING CEASES

DAVID: I know how the rest of it goes anyway. Let’s see what’s on the wireless.

RADIO STATIC WITH SPOOKY SOUND

DAVID: Hmm, nice. A bit of shape hiding in there somewhere. [Beat] Focusing in on the forms hiding amid amorphousness – picking out the pattern of dust particles in a nebula or whatever Burroughs said. Beats as the manifestation of man’s –

STATIC CUTS OUT

DAVID: – lust for categorisation, maybe… Yeah, that’ll make a chapter by –

CUTS BACK IN

DAVID: – itself, sure. Now, what have we got? Hm. It’s about, as I say – ooh – yes, finding whatever lies out there in here, maybe. And hence, the pleasure of an afternoon drifting the airwaves; the siren lure of signal. Which reminds me, the new Henry Cow boxset, must get. [Beat] Maybe I should head out to the off-licence later. Hmm, the cat needs litter; Albert could do with some air. Ooh, promising. Yes, in this case, it began with the numbers stations, hip-hop broadcasts, jungle pirate radio. The internet, for a while – Napster, streaming audio, Soulseek, the entire audio universe available – but interest soon…

END STATIC & SIGHS; PHONE RINGS

DAVID: Ah, for shit’s sake. Where did I – ? [grunts]

PHONE CEASES RINGING.

DAVID: Hello? [Less than happy] Oh, hi Tony. Yeah, I’m just wrapping up the copy now. Why don’t you email me about this shit? Alright, fine. Bye. [Sighs. Yawns.] Bloody toil. Let’s see what’s we have.

TAP DANCING

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The young Fred Astaire, born in Omaha, Nebraska, 1897, would listen alternately to vaudeville shows on the radio, and the freight trains in the marshalling yard south of their house, marvelling at the sound –

DAVID: [Sleepily] Hmm, interesting…. [Sounds of snoring]

HARP SIGNALLING ENTRANCE TO DREAM. DREAM DRONE

DAVID: Hmm? Oh, Derek, is that you? Was that Will playing? It’s so lovely to see you. And… Hugh? John? Paul?

JOHN STEVENS: Hiya David. God, you’ve let yourself go.

DAVID: What are you all doing here?

DEREK BAILEY: [dry Yorkshire accent] We’re setting up a dream sextet.

PAUL BURWELL: [Yorkshire accent] No limits on instruments. I’ve got the whole shebang – a gamelan orchestra. Bit of a bugger to play, mind.

DAVID: Well… that’s marvellous. Why don’t we get Evan or Eddie, and make it a septet?

SINISTER DRONE

HUGH DAVIES: [Welsh accent] I’m afraid they… can’t play with us. Too lively.

DAVID: You’re one to talk! I never knew anyone livelier than you guys. Well, there was that crack-gang I hung with in NY back in ’82. You remember those days?

DEREK BAILEY: Oh, we remember it all.

JOHN STEVENS: Not so lively these days, Dave. Ears gone, wits going with them. Nothing out there holding the interest, but what they keep behind the bar, and how much they’re planning to pay us. You spend a bloody lifetime trying to get out there, and where does it get you. We’re broken records, dontcha know?

DAVID: [Pause] But… you were all so good with it, we had such good times. [Beat] It… it meant something to me. [Pause] Fucking damnit, I wept for you, you fuckers! And this is what’s fucking left to me?!

JOHN STEVENS: David, would you calm down?! Or am I going to have to administer the Zen slap?

DRONE SLOWLY FADING

DAVID: [starts from sleep] Oh, God! What, where the –

SOUND OF BIRDSONG.

DAVID: [sighs with relief] Jesus… Right, back to work. Has this been on all the time? No, come on, the next disk. Although…

RADIO STATIC, SOON JOINED BY RHYTHMIC CLANGING.

DAVID: Hmm… Einstürzende Neubauten? I always told Blixa they’d make a good ambient listen, as long as he’s on low. See if we can’t get rid of this static…

STATIC CUTS IN AND OUT, WHILST CLANGING AND BIRDSONG CONTINUE

DAVID: Hmm. It was that question – what remains when we remove the input. One hand clapping. And beyond that?

BOINGING NOISE

DAVID: Hugh? [Pause] Hugh? [shouting] Hugh, speak to me! For God’s sake, say something!

BOINGING NOISE ENDS. TWO SECOND SILENCE. RINGTONE

DAVID: Oh, God, I can’t face it. A disk. Anything. Something by Brian.

PIANO

DAVID: Albert. Albert. Albert, my Albert.

CHILD CRYING

DAVID: Sshh, sshh. Come on, calm now. [Beat] We’re still here, aren’t we. Calm, calm.

FADE OUT.

18. Are You Tired of Being Alone?

2009-02-27T07:21:00.000-08:00

A story, designed for performance, written for Peter Blegvad's seminar.

After Kenneth Goldsmith and Jarvis Cocker

I had gone into a bar one night, and met him at the counter. He asked me whether I would like a drink, and I replied, Why yes, I would, a Jim Beam double. He duly obliged.

And so I asked him, as you do, Where are you from? What’s your business in town?

And he replied, I make matches. He asked me whether I wanted another drink, and I did, and drank.

That’s an interesting line of work, I said. What kind of matches do you make.

Big ones, small ones, medium, and every intervening degree, he replied. I make fine matches, coarse matches, loving matches, violent matches, even, dare I say it, football matches, Australian rules or otherwise.

Oh, I said, that’s interesting. Are you paid well?

Very well indeed, he replied, and, lighting a cigarette, laid his hand on my leg. And he said, very precisely –

Are you tired of being alone?

And I supposed I was, I supposed we all were, everyone in that bar, or we wouldn’t have been there. I enviously eyed the one couple crowded in a corner, hands all over each other. The sensation of touch had entirely left me – I had no memory of any texture but the outside of cigarettes and dirty bar-glasses, slick with grease. All those others lined along the counter avoided each other’s gazes, looking far-off at some unattainable woman or other. His hand was still on me, groping its way towards my balls.

We went for a walk, and spoke about his profession. He said, The principles of love are incomprehensible to those who believe they have any connection with reality, rationality, ethics or otherwise. It is always and only a question of alchemy, of divination: one finds two suitable beings and bumps them into each other like particles. He said this in a full, operatic voice, somewhat like Billy Mackenzie. It is, in effect, an occult science, he said. One begins with a single movement, a gesture, an observation, a question –

Are you tired of being alone? –

And one carries on from there. These fucking dating shows, where they try and match people based on quantifiables – interests, similar heights, whether one will fuck anything that moves – are absolute Goddamn nonsense. Cilla Black had it almost right – randomise, cut out all knowledge. I get great pleasure from my work, not least because of the need to mop up the (*cough*) overspill. A perk, if you like.

When I met him again a week later, he told me he’d been busy. I kept running into couples fucking in doorways, on car bonnets at midnight, in the corridor outside my flat. The whole city was dripping with perspiration. His business-like appearance had dissolved, his hair splaying like an anemone of sparking wires, his neck reeking of sweat, face streaked with its trails, tie lapping around his neck like a loose dog’s-tongue. He pinned me against the wall – with his enthusiasm – next to a couple necking by a dustbin.

Are you tired of being alone? He whispered it this time, like air escaping from a tire. He isolated each word – Are. You. Tired. Of. Being. Alone?

And I could feel the warmth of his mouth on me, and could sense the sliding spit of the couple and shouted slipping out of me, And what if I am?

He exhorted me with his question, changing the intonation, as if maxing-out the permutations of a mathematical sum. Lighting a cigarette, he slid his hand down my leg. And his voice began to buck and waver and break, as he spoke about what he could do for this city, what energies there were to be released, of the pulses hiding in concrete and the rhythm of buildings and the secret congress of gases and the architecture that held us apart and the terrors of the raging horses in the tall silos smashing themselves in their fury to consumable pieces and –

that was when I left him, among the bodily fluids and the heat. And I was right, you know, and I know, and what would have become of me if I had done otherwise, and what might I have been.
And still I hear sometimes, walking the streets at night, echoing around corners, the question –

Are you tired of being alone?

17. Dregs

2009-02-27T07:10:00.000-08:00

Seeing as there has been no new work, I shall attempt to post here a few poems I thought not worth damning.

This Is Hardcore

It started with noise - beat of blood, the grain
of electricity, the pleasure of the riff:
my sole belongings. I gathered arcane
details: the arc of sweat, the gloom of pub
backrooms and dusty jewel-cases, sheer
pushed air. The time I've spent with speakers loud
and louder... think, what living I might have
done instead! But no; with an old
confessor's air, I scratched out the skull-map

of an obsessive. Why this mania
for show-and-tell? What? Shock-taxonomy,
unslaked thirst, lust for discord.
Was it a way of unaccepting all
of circumstance's condemnations; or
is it the lure of the blunt instrument's
connection, dead resentment's solace? This,
indeed, is hardcore. The dialectic
knots; life, that Afanc, whispers and then roars.

On a Bookshelf Containing a Copy of Like A Fiery Elephant

You taught, with slashes, life could be feared. Your
memorial, breezeblock in leaves, began
something else: this. The weevil nests and bores
in pulp. The generation never stops.

One (Mud Rain Snow)

The cold ground mutters to itself, the leaves
crackle with winter's impact. Farther than
this glazed hole slows to land-drift pace. One half-
expects the soil to sprout resurgent hands.
The homes become, without an effort, widows.

Foreign Voices

We spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.
I can't say I'm sorry enough for this:
in memory lives what in life cannot.

Control - in anchored homes, loves lasting not
less than a day - is what I'll always miss.
We spoke. Just once. Now it escapes me what.

Madness has owned me once before; it got
inside, never quite budged. It will hiss:
"in memory lives what in life cannot".

I know it's nothing to boast of: a knot
of scars, zero fucks, (I admit) one kiss;
we spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.

Self-pity's never been attractive, not
while real life stays graspable. Well, I missed.
In memory lives what in life cannot.

Redemption never quite gained form. We got
nothing, then. Blood won't cease its raging hiss.
We spoke; I can't remember about what;
in memory lives what in life cannot.

16. ...in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal

2009-02-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

Interview with Brooklyn's Vivian Girls published in Plan B #39, November 2008. Transcript of other Q&As not included in original article below.

There’s a lot to be said for reverb. A veil of mystery, a lacuna in which anything the listener chooses might be written. The cavernous echo of white-hot Sixties pop, the Flying Nun groups, Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine – consciously or not, the Vivian Girls follow in this proud heritage. “Our songwriting is pretty straightforward, so shoegazey production is the only tool we have to make our music more of a struggle for the listener”, says singer/guitarist Cassie Ramone. On their early singles, honey-sweet melody and classic girl-group harmonies bleed through the wall of burning-red guitars, like a vengeful spirit. The initial vinyl run of their debut album sold out its edition of 500 in ten days, to be reissued by In The Red, alongside new seven-inches on their own Brooklyn-based Wild World label.

What is it about girl-group and classic pop that affects you?

“We really like the harmonies and what the songs are about. Girl groups sang about dudes in a way that few girl bands do anymore, nowadays it’s all ‘I’m gonna have sex with him’ or ‘Men are scum’. I personally can’t relate to either the sex vixen or the extreme feminist, but girl groups from the Sixties deal with men in a way that makes sense to me. Burt Bacharach is a huge influence on my songwriting, and I listen to oldies radio a lot, which is also a big influence.”

Since I have it on good authority that your songs are about “Ex boyfriends, new boyfriends”, what’s your worst break-up/first meeting anecdote?

“I can tell you what ‘No’ is about. One time I started going out with a guy that I had been good friends with for a little while, and kinda fell in love with him really quickly. Then he broke up with me – a week before my birthday – and later I heard that he went on a date with another girl the night after we broke up. I had a birthday party and he brought her with him. Then before he left he was like ‘Happy birthday Cassie, I love you’, and left with her. So devastating. It took me a while to get over that one.”

The record is extremely short – what is it about that length of songwriting, for you?

“There is nothing worse than listening to a great song and then towards the end it’s just the chorus going on and on forever with nothing else happening. Short songs get straight to the point – it’s harder to get bored of listening to them.”

Punk modernism and mid-century pop nostalgia aren’t incongruous here, they’re two sides of the same coin. In their world, imbued with some of the magic of the Henry Darger Gesamtkunstwerk they take their name from, postmodern exhaustion, breeding such chimeras, is no excuse; fun and wonder are your only options.

***

There's a large amount of 'buzz' (pardon the term) around your first album, the vinyl of which, as I understand it, sold out in 10 days – how do you feel about that kind of reaction? Do you think all the people who bought those records will remain fans of yours?

We hope so! But I think a lot of people who bought the record in its initial pressing were more indifferent - "yeah, I'm record shopping online, might as well" and then realized how much it was going for on eBay and sold it.

Part of the fuss seems to come from the fact that you live in Brooklyn – it's almost becoming a cliché, this business of interesting bands coming from there. What's it like living there? What's your relationship like with the local community of bands and artists?

It is the best place in the world! I would say that, from even before we started Vivian Girls, we were really involved in the music/art community, which has really helped us out by getting us our first bunch of shows and stuff. It's great like that, we all help each other out and respect each others' endeavors and then go get drunk. I couldn't imagine a better place to live right now.

What do your performances tend to be like? Does the fact that the band is (at the moment) composed of women tend to affect your experience of performance?

We just kinda get up there and rock. One thing we want to avoid is being cheesy on stage; a trap which is really easy for an all-girl band to fall into. So you'll never see us putting on special outfits and dancing around or anything. We just wanna have fun.

What are your plans, beyond re-releasing the debut? I understand you have a tour coming up… And is there anything in particular you'd like the band to achieve?

Yes, relentless touring for the next few months. We are also starting up a record label called Wild World and putting out our own 7" - it's gonna be in a package with a t-shirt, 2 postcards, and a button, all art and silkscreening done by ourselves. And we're gonna sell it through mail order. That's what we're really excited about right now.

Also, how do you cope with the differences between live and studio playing? 'Rocking', in the proper sense, is after all difficult with no audience other than a tape machine... Also (also), do you make any attempts to replicate studio effects (reverb, etc.) on-stage?

Yeah, we use Holy Grail reverb pedals at all our shows. When we play live we aim to sound as close to our record as possible, but we're aware that that isn't always doable so we just try to have a good time.

This is probably going to sound really stupid, but - what I meant with the question about women/men and American punk was: obviously, you are women, and punk fans; how do these two things interact? How did punk affect you (and as women)?

I guess, it started for me when I got into listening to bands like Hole and No Doubt in middle school. I thought it was awesome that there were women fronting rock bands, and that first inspired me to pick up a guitar. Obviously bands like Bikini Kill were influential on all three of us too. But overall, I never discriminated. I liked any punk band that I thought was good whether or not it had women in it or not, and I'm sure Katy and Ali would agree.

OK, to fuck with the serious questions: Who had the idea for the name? You're clearly not shambolic enough to be classed as outsider artists!

Frankie, our old drummer, came up with the name. It was the only name we could think of that wasn't totally outrageous and dumb.

How do you negotiate the hazards of there being numerous bands of Vivian Girls (I've counted 2 or 3 besides yrselves)?

It made for some funny show blurbs at first ("Vivian Girls, a dance-y German electro band, play at Cake Shop") but after the first few months it was never an issue.

15. Stereotype

2009-02-20T07:47:00.000-08:00

In which we were asked to write the scenario of a stereotype of a person being trapped in a hotel room, and seeing what they get up to. This version is... not quite finished...

It was useless. He had been there, according to his chunky imitation Rolex, at least ten hours. There was enough in the mini-bar to keep him going for another half a day, although whether he wanted to survive on them was another matter (he hankered after a Carlsberg.) He had tried the door and windows, tapped the walls and ceiling for air-ducts or other means of egress, like Jack Bauer in 24. After that, he had spent an hour trying every combination of Fuck, Cunt, Bastard and Arsehole to express his frustration, then fell upon the mini-bar gin. Now he lay on the bed, thinking of what he was absent from: his Merc, Laetitia; his bull terrier, Ronnie, who must have been missing him something awful; his mum, who lived in the front room with the filthy curtains close and the central heating turned to full all the time. Oh, and Trace, of course. He thought it was the done thing in this situation to picture her face, and found himself disconcerted when he couldn’t.

He was surprised to find himself waking up. He checked again; he had been asleep three hours without noticing. He prided himself on being the last out of the club, the final man to stop drinking and head home to bed. He hadn’t had an early night since he was 11, except when satisfying Tracy, after which he would soundly doze. Levering himself off the bed, he kicked the door repeatedly and shouted at it, spit flecking onto his Lacoste polo. After his foot became sore, he sat down again, turned and scrutinised the world outside the window. A road, strangely empty, but for a couple of parked cars. Trees – he didn’t know what kind. Georgian townhouses set back from the pavement. When he was 13 he had broken into a similar abode, snatching a DVD player, a laptop, a bottle of Teachers and a Nokia, all of which went towards his first scraper, a Vauxhall Corsa. He had reformed himself – he now listened to Hed Kandi comps instead of Scarface, and wore a shirt and trousers when phone-selling car insurance – but that spunk remained, or so he thought.

He lay back again on the bed, and considered that he might as well conserve his energy. His Motorola – usually buzzing with calls, left out on the table at lunch to make sure the others knew he was in demand – had disappeared; but surely someone would come for him, if he waited long enough. He just had to hold out.

He sat up, tried to laugh it off, cracked a line – No-one to fuckin’ hold onto yer coat-tails now, eh? – but it sounded strange ringing around the depopulated room. Standing up, pulling on his suit-jacket (Burton, but you wouldn’t know it) and smoothing out the creases, he trotted up and down the room, assuming his typical thrusting hands-in-pocket swagger, eyes fixed front. After a few lengths of the window-wall, he found himself stopping. It was like being told magic charms had no real power. Every tool he had was slipping from his grasp. He sat down on the bed again, had a mouthful of peanuts, and looked around the four white-stippled corners of the ceiling. He wondered when the last time was he had seen them. Whilst fucking that blonde bird, Whats’ername, from Essex, at that conference, she on top. Another on the tally. But these had not been; they had not even entered into his calculations.

14. Science Fiction

2009-02-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

In which we were asked to transform the material of an interview with a member of university staff into a science fiction story. Don't ask me why.

It was clear there was a kind of domesticity here: a world whose creatures felt, after however many millennia, somewhat at home with what surrounded them. Cloud like burial shrouds, frozen rivers, somewhere beneath the skin of snow, like a skein of veins, vast piles, beneath, of minerals, here reconstituted, fabricated into everything close at hand: our badly upholstered, chafing seats, the cup in front of me holding cold coffee, the metal walls around us – it was all very familiar to them, even to some of those whose children dashed up and down the aisle, shouting their heads off. Lord alone knows how humans should come to a place like this, or why, when they had left, they would make any kind of homecoming. I squinted out the window, rimmed with ice around the edge – hell, most of the plate – but heated, for convenience, in the centre. Beneath, the undulating crests of snow – mere hillocks in comparison to some of the smaller mountains, and they in turn were mere hillocks to the larger crags – waved onwards, seemingly limitlessly. I had to turn away, as I was warned to, after a few seconds – the sheer expanse of pure, undifferentiated white can make you feel as if falling into a void, pulled out by some awful magnetism. The shipline have had some folk scrabbling at the windows, shrieking to drop through. I looked over the wings – heated, naturally, to some Godforsaken temperature – watching the constant onrush of ice particles blister and burn over the aerofoils, pointillistic designs of sparks popping and vanishing.

We were heading in towards the runway. It was the cold season – if that can be believed – but we knew that the staff were on these things; that, though whipped about by the wind, they had it under control. I pondered idly on how exactly they adapted themselves to their environment. These weren’t just humans with particularly woolly coats; they had been living out here for centuries – no-one, after the loss of their archives, really knew how many – and had acquired bodily accoutrements to suit the place. I had never gotten close enough to see for myself, but I would be forced into doing so pretty soon. Horror stories had reached me, as they are wont to do, about transparent skin-flaps used to shield the eyes from snow-storms, hands grown into the approximate shape of shovels, even extremely thick, downy hair, growing on those parts of the body – the upper throat, the cheeks, around the eyes – where no protection could be afforded. They were hopefully that, just stories. But this turned my mind again to my purpose – scientific, yes, but hardly very important – in coming here. Was I just a freak-show gawker on a planetary scale? How exactly would it matter if I was, given this place’s feeble backwater status? It wasn’t as if it had any dignity to be ruined by my snooping.

I could see, by the GPS on my phone – I didn’t trust the ‘line to be straight on this matter – that we were coming up to the edges of the capital’s airfields. They were located far out on the rim of the vast, low-lying – near-subterranean, in fact – conurbation, an enormous field of metal that differed from the snow only in its colour – gun-metal grey – and the odd jag here and there. Far to the south, literally on the other side of the planet, in what was laughingly referred to as ‘warmer climes’, there were corrugated-iron shanty-towns that tended to get blown away every winter, due to the poverty of their construction, with plenty more jagged edges for the wind to catch. Nothing of that here. My eyes cast about for a sign of the runways’ shimmering grey, the ice constantly being burnt and blown off of it. There was nothing. The plane was banking, but I could discern nothing that it might be heading towards, only more snow. There was a crackle on the tannoy, the sound of the pilot’s wearying voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are coming towards Ixtlan airport now. Due to inclement weather conditions, our arrival will be subject to a short delay. Please seat yourselves, buckle your harnesses.

I was baffled. I searched the landscape below me, twisting, as the plane banked in slowly-descending circles. After a minute of fraught spying, I spotted a long, straight, shallow depression in the snow, looking, from this height, a mere dog-sled track. Good Lord. How the hell had this happened: the runway hidden so thoroughly in snow? I remembered a scene, borderline-farcical, in an Earth moving-image I had seen in the archives years ago: an old-fashioned ‘plane kept up in the air, seemingly perpetually, by ne’er-do-wells on the ground. We would have to wait until the snow had been cleared, the surface blasted clean. I turned for my coffee, panned my eyes to the others. No-one showed even a trace of panic. Calm, waiting for us to land on a land at that moment trapped under they did not know what depths of snow – 6 feet, 10, 12. We would be sat, I reflected, for some time.

13. The Wrong Style

2009-02-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different, in which we were asked to write something in entirely the wrong style. This is an excerpt from a diary entry describing a man's breakfasting, written in the style of a cosmic horror/Weird Fiction story.

15th January 2009 (moon sliding to gibbous – ominous portents).

I resume this account only to provide prudent warning to those foolish enough to be tempted to wander down the same path as myself, who have, for my cares, lost all enduring grip on sanity. I started in bed in the cold sweat that has gripped me each night for an incalculable length of time, the dark visions which will permit me no nourishing rest flashing from before my eyes like bats before a burning phosphorescent lamp. Shrieks impinged on my consciousness from I knew not what kind of creature, lurking outside my locked, shuttered and curtained window; they impressed upon my still part-asleep mind images of horny, stabbing beaks, blackened eldritch forms covered in rippling, waving down, and hollow, inhuman gazes whose depths reveal aeon-ancient mysteries. I flung the covers from me, and closed my dressing-gown – whose embrace I can never dissociate from that which fills my dreams with screaming terror (but a replacement for which remains, as a mere scholar, beyond my slender means) – around me, advancing to the kitchen. An occasional suggestion of some blasphemous, unholy shape treading in my footsteps set my eyes twisting over my shoulder – but nothing revealed itself. As I approached the fridge, considering to have toast for my morning meal, a curious thought suggested itself to me. There was some aspect of the toaster which perturbed me; even the dog, stood in his basket, barked at it vehemently. With trepidation, I crept over slid two slices into the strange, alien orifices of slots, and pressed the pendulous tab down. Whilst turned to make my coffee – the smiling visage of a cat that bedecked the side of the mug had a queer look about him, as if he harboured knowledge of some foul and secret cosmic joke that would set human minds gibbering with madness – I began to detect a slight acrid odour; it reminded me of the must that old Gibbons, a scholar of ancient and secret lore, had told me he had smelt whilst reading a bewormed copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, kept under lock and key after its long journey from the nameless city of Arabia. I felt a curious repugnance, but focused my mind on my task, which I knew would take all my mental powers. Then, I began to notice tendrils of darkness creeping round me. I swung around and saw it rising from that unholy contraption – that accursed, horrible, indescribable machine spewing abyssal dark in every direction. I recoiled instinctively, hardly prepared for such an onslaught of madness. I cannot remember what happened next, although I must have fled – my feet, when I stopped some miles away, were slick with mud, and my dressing-gown still on me.

And thus it carried on. The horror never ends.

12. Two Flash Fictions

2009-02-08T02:41:00.000-08:00

Written for Maureen Freely's Modes of Writing seminars. The first is based on Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' (any resemblance between characters in this story and any persons living or dead is a coincidence, etc.); the second is an attempt to write about an act of cruelty in the manner of Carolyn Forché's 'The Colonel'.

What I Never Did As A Teenager

Well, I certainly never chewed gum, for a start, when I was your age. Wears your teeth to nothing, turns your face to a chimp’s grin. Neither did I carouse all night, as you seem to believe you have the right to, trawling from bar to bar in a manner to bring a sailor shame. I didn’t spend my evenings devising the most efficient method of acquiring rum and vodka when underaged. I was never out of the house after 9PM, nor in it after 7AM. I never neglected to thank my parents for all they did for me – food, clothes, footballs to play with – in spite of its scarcity. My father would have beaten me to a mess of blood if I had taken him for granted, or cocked a snook at the bread he put on the table. And when he told me I needed a job, I didn’t slouch about getting one. I never considered burdening them with any nonsense about a university education for a degree I would never use. I never hung around smoking or gassing with shiftless punks, upsetting shop security and clogging up pavements. Neither did I run up huge phone-bills for my parents talking to such gnats, or wear my eyes out staring at computer screens conversing with them. I didn’t destroy my ears with barbaric music, or worry my parents at rock clubs; I didn’t squander their money on racy records (Les Baxter, etc.) I was never away from the sink when my mother had finished the meal and started the dishes, myself drying and stacking each piece, floral patterns visible through years of wear. My bedroom walls were covered in posters – Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, bands with real men – not books, which you read once and file away. My bed was never defiled by the presence of man or woman. I never dawdled on promenades, garden paths, front-door thresholds or staircases yammering with fucking whores who never cared for me. I never succumbed to the ignominy of love. And you presume to call me less than a father?

Molluscs

It had happened enough times for me to remember. There was nothing very much in it – the press of a sole.

The garden was mostly concrete, unforgiving stone-studded grey yielding to grass and flower-borders. Later, I would kill slugs unfortunate enough to crawl out from the safety of the chlorophyll, with a pair of pliers and bottle of toxic pellets. But this was a different mollusc. The first one was an accident. By the time I looked down there was nothing but a mess of brown, mottled shards of shell, unidentifiable ichor oozing all among them. My bare feet sensed its perturbing texture, as my brain attempted to pin an identity to it. My mother was sat in a garden chair nearby, unconcernedly reading her thriller, and I asked her help. I found her suggested connection between this dismembered pile and what I knew as snails ludicrous. She went back to her reading.

I went to the metal sheet, corroded in places, that leant against the breeze-block garden wall, and pulled it back. I found it strange that snails could stick perfectly to surfaces, happily gliding straight along at 35 degrees to the vertical. It was a trait entirely foreign to a boy who could hardly stay on his feet for more than a minute. And yet it required little effort to pluck them from the surface and squeeze, or drop, or squash. Theirs was a strange crunch, somewhat satisfying, like cracking a walnut shell, mixed with the awful jelly squish of its remainder. And so, I crushed and crushed, shattering houses, pulping bodies, reducing innards to a slick of slime, wiping consciousnesses off my shoes (which I had gone to the house for). Millions of years of evolution were no match for sticky boys’ fingers, leather and board. My mother came over, and told me to stop. So, I did.

11. A Haiku About Foxes

2009-02-07T07:51:00.000-08:00

For near-sighted readers:

***

By the Brush

Look: darkened spark of

memory stares. Sly Reynard,

sans rustle, exits.

***

Situated where I saw a fox on the first night of university.

10. For Shoah

2009-02-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

First published in Plan B #31, March 2008.

Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation)

A question: how long can one keep up despair before choosing death? For how long does one tolerate the law of diminishing returns before abandoning the whole farce? It’s been over a decade since the first Godspeed You Black Emperor! LP, but its members are still making records for crushed souls and thwarted revolutionaries. So, on opener (discounting the 12 tracks and 75 seconds of metallic drone that comes before it) ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’, Efrim Menuck roundly declares all capitalist culture morally abhorrent, and even finds “the pretence of their awful gardens” too much to take: “Give me a goddamn shovel/I’ll dig my own damn hole.” Ho hum.

Menuck’s voice spends much time front and centre of the mix, to the record’s detriment: he slurs, wails and emphasises random syllables, in order to leave the listener in no doubt that he is ‘impassioned’, or whatever. The lyrics when recognisable, pressgang impenetrable symbolism – “There’s ravens in the gun-trees!” goes the title track’s refrain – in the service of Clash-simple protest – they unfortunately stoop to slogans like “I JUST WANT SOME ACTION!” and “NO HEROES ON MY RADIO!” – and killjoy paranoiac misanthropy. The music – well-recorded, churning electric rock grooves of varying intensity, with occasional string embellishments – is a far cry from both the ethereal tenderness and excoriating, heaven-sent noise of their first two albums, or GYBE!’s magnum opus, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. The hazy, heart-breaking drift of their earlier work, and the truly communal singing they patented on 2003’s “Thee Broken Satellites Gather & Sing: This Is Our Punk Rock”, suited Menuck’s vocals – an acquired taste – and the group’s anguished politics much better.

It’s not that it’s actually bad – just… disappointing. When I first came into contact with Godspeed! and SMZ, they immediately became Important Bands – you know, the kind who prescribe and transcribe your entire worldview; their mixture of fragile sorrow, ecstatic intensity, and very personal collectivist politics provided a conduit for my own disgust and rage, and a glimpse of salvation in a world I hated. Maybe it’s simply that I no longer want to punch through glass windows, or tear my own skin off: I’ve become used to the world (and a little numb to its horrors). I can’t be bothered destroying myself and any lingering hope I have for humanity in pursuit of useless protest. SMZ would probably argue that such a direct, angry approach is necessary after “six years of their wars”; but protest and despair are two sides of the same coin, and protest is only made on the assurance it will make no difference. The Gnostic, heavenly light of the first GYBE! records, promising to sweep away the world of exchange like so much bad scenery, is almost entirely buried here.

There are glimpses, though: the enormous coda to the title track – hypnotic riffs, frantically sawing strings, Efrim’s desperate, mechanical shouts straining against the bounds of technology; the raging, electric-storm guitar and manic free percussion that opens ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’; and the spare ‘Blindblindblind’, which builds into a group-sung chant – “Some! Hearts! Are! True!” they sing, over and over, finding new ways around the words, as if this incantation, if uttered with enough conviction, will prove true: the world will live again. As the instruments drop out and the voices continue, ever more emboldened, my heart leaps, my breath goes. This was what I came for: true love, again.

9. Two Flash Fictions

2009-02-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

Written for our final seminar with Maureen Freely. Burial is a rewritten fragment from a longer story, Spiderland. For the other, we were required to take an urban myth, rumour, or piece of apocrypha, and rework it.

Burial

The drops began to spatter the pavement with the usual rhythm, broken and dull; it would soon speed to a barrage. The street forked off, the sign on the left with the word for ‘museum’. It was at the end of the street, towering over the other buildings by virtue of an extra storey. Its only identifiers were the remnants of massive lettering on the whitewashed walls scarred with years of dirt and rain. I repeatedly pushed the door, then pulled it open.

The interior was no better: the cracked white paint was draped with cobwebs in the corners, the floor tiles were stamped with dirt. I dripped over to the booth, bought a ticket from the acne-plastered boy, walked through. The first room was lined with photographs, the captions plastered thick with the local language. There was – what? – some bored girl milking a cow, shoulders hunched resentfully; farms that even then knew what mud was. A field of rubble, a woman in a muddy peasant skirt picking through the demolished cottages, a dog next to her, mid-yap. How bizarre it was, that all these things had not merely come together for the picture, but been. The caption said 1943. I tried to remember whether the place was no smoking as I squinted. Then men swimming in a river, not far from the town, Red Army uniforms piled on the bank in the foreground. My grandfather’s pictures were different only in the insignia. It reminded me of the cover of Spiderland: the rippling, opaque water, the heads popping out of it, smirking like it was a happy coincidence they were in shot; behind them the stony bank, the cliff, the trees, stretching away into a white sky. I remembered wondering what they were like, these people with their bodies out of sight; ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, it looked like someone had simply found it, dredged up from the bottom of a box to be hemmed in by black borders. It was only later I found out Will Oldham, who had made the Palace records, took the photo; he’d grown up with the rest of Slint in Louisville, a backwater like this one, or mine.

The next room contained glass cases, misty with grease in the light. I could only half-glimpse some content: scraps of fabric, some the size of half a pyjama top, their wide stripes still visible, some almost tiny, ripped and muddied. On the shelf below, rusted pick-axe heads or spades without shafts, the caption-cards unreadable. One rag had a cloth triangle sewn on to it. ‘B’ for ‘Britisch’. Red to indicate a POW. I crossed to another case. Skulls, some with bullet holes in the back of the head, some with jaws missing, craniums cracked. Eye after hollow eye. Femurs, ribs, the odd dark mud-spattered beige they have before being boiled for display. On the shelf below, rusted razorwire. Bizarre to think they’d been below the hills and plain where we had driven, below stratum on stratum. I walked on.

Where does the past go? I thought.

Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum

The decision had been made. All of the Vatican procedures were in place, the bureaucracy dealt with: now all we needed was our saint. Being one of the novices handiest with a shovel, I was given the honour of helping with the exhumation.

The snow drove down on the cemetery of the convent; we had not been out to complete our chores for many weeks, as even our habits proved scant protection against the cold. We five trudging down the path were the only thing to be heard, the white landscape quashing any other sound. The grave was in a space off the path, bracketed by two stark naked trees clawing at the white sky. Standing huddled around the marker stone, we drew our cloaks around us as the wind picked up. Whilst Tomas, in the centre of the circle, tried to light the fire, it blew a thick sprinkling of white upon our backs. Setting a saint’s grave aflame is hardly a pious action, but we were in no position to argue with the labourers; if the Vatican saw things in a practical light, this nonsense would not be necessary. Not permitted socks, we crouched to have our skirts protect our ankles whilst we waited for the ground to thaw, the magic circle of the pyre spreading down and out through the powder.

The coffin was buried deeper than we had thought: some ten feet of earth had to be hauled out, the fire relit each time we came on another stratum of icy soil. By the time the coffin was exposed, we were tearing with gloved hands to avoid damaging the submerged casket. Brother Tomas and I demanded a prayer before they set about it with the crowbar; our imprecation to the Saviour was paralleled by the workmen blowing on their hands.

The sight the coffin-lid exposed was the strangest ever met my eyes. Á Kempis’ body was remarkably preserved, its flesh intact save for where the mice had been at it, stripping the skin from what had been the thighs. All else was leathered and shrunken, like something pulled from a bog. I must have been the first to glance down at his arms. They were in a state of disarray on his chest, quite apart from the cross of resignation, in which state, witnesses maintain, he was buried. Lifting the lid from where the workmen had placed, I could see snow clinging to indents streaking the surface. Scratchmarks. Brother Tomas, the most senior clergyman there, dared to lovingly lift the hands that had written The Imitation of Christ, and inspect the fingernails. Wood-fragments.

While he ran back to the convent, I stood over the pall-draped coffin. This was, he had said, No way for a saint to face death. I wondered how long he had been surrounded by that wood before life left him. Quite a while, I suspect. He had, I considered, followed his doctrine to the end. They could at least give him that.

8. Dragging of inertial frames

2009-02-02T12:44:00.000-08:00

Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, week 9. Context: we were challenged to take a topic from a science textbook or periodical, and write a piece on it in the style of popular science writing.

The first thing to do is to picture a bath-mat. Imagine time, the fabric of your life, stretching out into infinity (itself a difficult image to master), and space, your concrete surroundings, extending as if caught in a rapidly zooming-out camera-eyepiece. Take the co-ordinates of these two, plotted together, and you get… a bath-mat.

Bear with me here. This, after all, was Einstein’s view of the nature of reality. Everything that exists in time and space exists on this bath-mat, making in it greater or lesser indents according to their mass. These curvatures in the fabric of space-time were how Einstein pictured gravity – one can imagine Earth, on this infinite suspended bath-mat, as a golf-ball, and perhaps Jupiter as a water-filled Zorb, weighing down one spot so much that it causes everything around it, from the breadcrumbs of asteroids to the peas and sweetcorn of Io and Ganymede, to roll toward it. If we follow this logic, then the nature of time itself changes in tandem with the shape of space: under the crushing force exerted by, say, Jupiter, time will, from moment to moment, be stretched and warped; if we could have watched Europa’s fragmented form rolling languidly in towards Jupiter’s orbit, we would have seen its progress slow further and further. And if, indeed, we could stand on Callisto’s hyperborean desolation of a surface, and look out, we would see the rest of the Solar System whizzing around us like an overcharged children’s mobile, and Earth’s population going grey before our telescope-aided eye.

All this fascinated me when I was younger – poring over encyclopaedias with crumbling spines, absorbing what my parents called “useless facts”, marvelling over illustrations and comparing the rendering of dinosaurs between books – a longer neck on the brontosaurus here, shorter arms on the tyrannosaurus rex there. I must have been relatively old – 12 or 13, perhaps, aged from my vantage point then – when I began to be curious about what Einstein had actually said. It eludes me now where I first read about the theories of general and special relativity; perhaps it’s appropriate that one time can’t access another’s knowledge. But I know what struck me was the sadness inherent in the ‘twins experiment’: a thought experiment in which, with one twin travelling on a space-ship (I imagined it as one of the smaller shuttles from Star Trek, the latest series of which I would watch with my parents) close to the speed of light, and the other left on Earth, the former, for whom time would slow to the most infinitesimally creeping of flows, would return and confront, with unchanged countenance, a brother on the brink of death. Terrified as I was by the constant, lurking thought of death, and of life’s brittle shortness, it was both depressing and liberating – the idea of remaining young appealed to my sense of childhood desperation. I’m not quite so keen on it now.

This was, perhaps comfortingly, just a thought experiment; nothing – as my younger self might have feared – was actually done in the way of concrete testing – although, ominously, second-long time disparities have been found between the previously-synchronised watches of those carried in ultra-sonic aircraft and those left on the ground. But there is something, indeed, in this that affects us everyday. If we assume that time is experienced relatively according to the distribution of Einsteinian mass-energy (keep in mind that energy is related to mass by the figure of the speed of light squared) or our own acceleration, then it is apparent we have our own ‘frames’ of time-experience, local to us. But what, then, about objects undergoing no acceleration at all? Look at any object in the room which is not moving, or, on hearing a likely noise, look outside your window, and see if you can spot a bird or an aircraft moving at a constant speed. Both these things are in a state of ‘inertia’, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they have their own local ‘inertial frames’, systems in which they exist in an inertial state.

Einsteinian physics, of course, can’t just leave things be at that. According to the model of classical physics as formulated by Isaac Newton, all inertial frames exist in relation to ‘absolute space’; you can picture the universe, in this version, as an enormous fish-tank, in which objects sit still, or move at a constant speed, in relation only to the unchanging glass walls. In Einsten’s conception, there are no fish-tank sides, the quality of water, altering in viscosity, changes from place to place, and this character is dependent on the nature of the objects themselves. Once time’s relativity is grasped, it isn’t that difficult to understand.

However, there is a certain implication of this theory which needed to be tested practically. Imagine two satellites, travelling in fixed orbits at identical heights, at a constant speed, around the Earth. Their conditions, theoretically, are the same, so their inertial frames will be identical – a small refuge of stability in Einstein’s flux. Unfortunately not, though. Imagine these two satellites launched and fixed with clocks, travelling in opposite directions with regards to Earth’s spin. When they arrive back in the same place, the clock of the satellite travelling against the axial twirl, will be considerably behind the other – for it, less time has actually passed. The centrifugal force of Earth’s strange circling has carved changes in time and space, has dragged the satellite’s inertial frame. This is, incidentally, known as the Lense-Thirring Effect, which I rather enjoy for its suggestion of boffins with exotic names, spectacles perched on the ends of their noses.

In 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, the astronauts visited the Sea of Tranquility, a region of the Moon with one of the best views of Earth. They left behind an array of retro-reflectors, like a single, mirrored eye, a tiny trace of home, winking at those still trapped on the other planet. From Earth, laser-beams – no longer simply the preserve of clichéd Bond villains – were fired repeatedly at this oasis of glass, and, once returned, used to measure not merely the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, but the degree to which the frame of the Moon’s inertial orbit is itself dragged, subject to the Lense-Thirring Effect, by the spin of the enormous gyroscope of Earth. The same principle has been observed in binary pulsar systems – those stellar conglomerations, unlike our own, with two stars that send out regular light or radio pulses; calculating their distance from us by the inertial travel of light, we can see how that changes from star to star, altered by the effect of their rotation on each other, and measure the frame-dragging involved. Our own lives are warped by these same forces, and, in doing so, connect us with the circling of the stars.

7. An Account

2009-02-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

Written for George Ttoouli's creative non-fiction seminar, term week 8.

What I remember was the quiet. In spite of a tendency, stronger than in most boys my age, to solitary play, games of imagination, my days were still the hubbub of noise typical of children: chattering classrooms, the omnipresent television.

My family wasn’t really religious, except in the wishy-washy Anglican way typical of New Foresters; the place seemed to breed ambivalence. When I asked my parents what exactly happened to us when we die – after my grandfather’s death from cancer; I was three – I received the comforting answer that: We go to Heaven. During the next few years, marked by the constant, poisonous malice and ritual humiliation only children are capable of, I would bring out this answer repeatedly, as if my classmates, cynical beyond their years, should be cowed and swayed by its total obviousness.

It’s perhaps appropriate that the contextual details refuse to slot exactly into place: I must have been somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12, between Years 4 and 6, and it continues to escape me whether my friend Jon had been confirmed, at that point, like his mother, into the Catholic Church. I know that I spoke to him enough times about death, as if he were an expert on the subject. But this must have been earlier, at a moment when Jon wasn’t around to reassure me with erudition inherited from Oxford-educated parents.

The constant psychic violence my peers meted out had begun keeping me awake. It was one night, when my eyes had remained shut in the dark for three hours. Thoughts rattled in my exhausted head like pennies in a shaken jar. I have the impression that the last trail of thought had been about animals. It’s difficult for me now to count the numbers of pets who had died during my lifetime: a ginger tabby, a rapacious golden retriever, perhaps four marbelled goldfish, a mischievous guinea pig, and a rabbit who would be given an identical replacement years later are the only ones that come immediately to mind. I was wondering, I believe, as to whether I could rejoin them in the afterlife I had so vividly pictured (which following the cliché, involved lots of clouds.)

I had already begun to ask what exactly underlay these visions, this belief: exactly what evidence was there for God’s existence? The question recurred to me, developed: if, as it seemed, God left no fingerprints on His Creation, could the believers be wrong? And then, the answer landed like a sneaky blow to the abdomen: in that instance, there was no God. Before I could even formulate it, the train of thought started itself moving, shaking my entire nervous system. I thought, with enormous reluctance, my way through it: logically, in that case, there could be no afterlife. Thus, there was the possibility that, when death came, I would simply cease to exist. The black behind my eyelids seemed to thicken, spread. I puzzled, with the shocked compulsion of a trauma victim, what, then it would feel like. It wouldn’t. There would be no me to feel it.

That sudden vision of not merely total darkness, but total and utter nothingness, seemed to manifest bodily: a vespertine flower of a vaccuum opening up in the depths of my stomach, my mind and nerves reeling, scrabbling to get away from this sensation, but knowing that it was inside me, in the most literal sense. The end, whatever happened, and in whatever form, would come eventually; the body that was carrying me forward in time – the movement I took for granted, even, at times, enjoyed – was also bearing me inexorably toward the grave. I saw, as vividly as any afterlife seen, its own dissolution at the hand of worms, insects, soil-borne microbes; the scattering of my proteins through the dirt.

And what I remember was quiet: the weak streetlight filtering through the curtains, the apparent disappearance even of the uneasy creaks and gurgles of the house. I used to believe that nameless creatures lurked for me in the gloom, and that if I shut my eyes they couldn’t harm me. Now there was nothing but the darkness, waiting to swallow me up.

6. All Ye Unbelievers

2009-02-02T12:18:00.000-08:00

Review/interview of The Mountain Goats. Originally published in Plan B #30, February 2008.

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride (4AD)

A strange tale: after signing with 4AD in 2002, The Mountain Goats – a.k.a. John Darnielle, a prolific purveyor of magical realist narratives, coated in otherworldly tape hiss – began to literally clean up their act, recording with a full band and professional studio set-up. The result was his most satisfying work yet: the claustrophobic Tallahassee, the damaged, heart-breaking We Shall All Be Healed (a concept album about his years as a teenage meth addict), and The Sunset Tree, an album both darker and more defiant in its exploration of his abusive childhood.

You might think that a man so well-exorcised would be running on empty, but Heretic Pride comes up with riches, by mining a seam of vividly-realised fiction. A collection of short stories or character studies – think of the snapshot constellations of Raymond Carver – with perhaps the only thing binding them together being the characters’ status as freaks, misfits, in some cases outcasts from others’ stories (H.P. Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer). ‘San Bernadino’ sees an unmarried couple escaping to a motel with their new son; ‘In The Craters On The Moon’ is populated with recluses haunted by disasters, awaiting their extermination; the title track describes an execution-by-angry-mob, the narrator being beaten and then set alight to the soundtrack of an upbeat, rolling, piano-and-organ-flecked groove.

It’s Darnielle’s way with ambiguity, best evidenced here, that gives much of these songs their magnetic power: the shattering ‘Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident’ sets the discovery of a corpse, the narrator comparing her with his ex-lover, against skeletal acoustic, delicate strings and the cooings of the Bright Mountain Choir; it’s hard to say whether the narrator of ‘Michael Myers Resplendent’ is an actor preparing for the role, or the serial killer himself anticipating finally playing his own part. It’s disappointing that the accompanying press release – drawn by Jeffrey Lewis – so bluntly pins down the songs’ meanings, because their suggestions, questions and lacunae – tales dead-ending, voices guttering out – are so much more powerful. The little details of sound and story – how appropriate Darnielle’s weak, nasal voice sounds in these emotionally strained songs; the melancholic religious speculations of ‘Sept 15 1983’, about the death of Prince Far I – provide the reasons to love these songs.

If what you want is a lump in your throat, a smile on your face, and ideas in your head, there’s literally no-one better around than The Mountain Goats, and Heretic Pride is possibly their best transmission yet. A strange tale, but true.

Interview with John Darnielle

Every Mountain Goats album seems more lush and complex than the last. Are you hoping to attract more fans, or is there some other reason?

You know, I just do whatever seems most interesting and fun to me at the time - I think any other way of doing things would probably be a disaster. I'm sure there are people who're able to say "ok, how can I attract more listeners?" and so on but I follow a pretty instinctive process: write the songs at home, send them to the people I want to play them with, then see what happens when we get into the studio. These songs seemed kind of lively for the most part and we were really enjoying playing as a band so they came out like that.

A lot of these new songs involve other people's fictional creations - Sax Rohmer's spies, Lovecraft's malevolent entities, Michael Myers - how did they end up in there?

Well I partly blame this concrete room I rented to keep as an office since my guitars were sort of colonizing the house - I started going down to the office in the morning and sitting on the floor in there with my guitar, and I felt like I used to feel when I'd spend a few weeks of summer vacation visiting my father in Oregon: he had a full basement at his house and I'd hang out down there, sometimes chopping wood with an axe or reading science fiction paperbacks and wondering whether monsters were real and stuff like that. I think of this record as a sort of indexing of life-long obsessions.

The last few Mountain Goats albums have been largely autobiographical, but they've been written in the same first-person narrative style, and exhibited many of the same feelings - lovelessness, pain, desolation - as these new ones. What, then, is the border between autobiographical and fictional writing?

Well everybody seems to think Get Lonely was autobiographical but it really wasn't - it just sounded like it must be but those were just stories The two before that, yes absolutely, in differing degrees. Anyway, I think whatever border there are tend to err more in favor of fiction - nobody's feeling occur to them in rhyming couplets or notes of the scale or even words, right? The line on writers is that they're only ever telling their life stories in some way or another but I wonder if it's not the other way around - that even people who're trying to tell their stories are in the end only making things up to try and make sense of a lot of disorder.

Did you enjoy making this album as much as the last few?

More! Adding John Wurster on drums was just awesome, and we'd toured with him earlier in the year so it wasn't like adding an unknown quantity - and we had JV back in the studio so it was like a family reunion with this awesome new relative that only some of us had met. Plus these songs were just more fun to play than the last couple of albums - "Get Lonely" was like digging a tunnel and "the Sunset Tree" was this massive catharsis for me, but this one was like getting to hang out in a haunted house or something. Really fun.

What might we expect next from The Mountain Goats?

Touring. Lots of touring. I'm not thinking about the next bunch of songs I'll write next - the one thing I'll say is that the last few albums I've played a little piano (on "Dinu Lipatti's Bones" and "Wild Sage" and here on "Michael Myers Resplendent") and it's really been great for me because that was the first instrument I ever learned how to play, so I've been thinking about doing more with that. The trick to using more classical instruments is not trying to sound like you're trying to write showtunes. Unless you are actually capable of writing showtunes. In which case, fire away, right? For me though anyway I'm thinking about trying to rethink the instrumentation while preserving that sort of gone-slightly-insane feeling that I like.

5. The Empty Page

2009-02-01T01:53:00.000-08:00

First published in Plan B #35

The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (edited by Peter Wild, Serpent’s Tail, 2008)

The video for Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ not only marks out, through its collaged footage, an alternative canon, but insists on an intellectual, extra-musical, element: Bill Burroughs and Harvey Pekar appear alongside Patti Smith, The Stooges and Sun Ra. Literature and theory have always informed SY’s output, from Thurston’s love for the Beats and Kim’s absorption of feminist theory to Lee’s parallel career as poet and diarist. This intellectual fertility, echoing the band’s stylistic breadth, perhaps explains the fascination they exercise for writers, musical and otherwise: they provide a limitless number of jumping-off points, which the authors in this anthology, each taking an SY title for their own, use.

The results, perhaps predictably, are varied. Even by the standards of middlebrow publishing, many of the authors here are less-well-known, which results both in some pleasant surprises and some duds. The majority of the stories seem to be ‘inspired’ by the more exoteric elements of SY, particularly during the Goo/Dirty period: pop-culture refs, nihilistic blankness, psychosexual menace. Some, such as Tom McCarthy’s incendiary fantasy about Marxist icon Patty Hearst, or Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘Snare, Girl’, which perfectly captures the suffocating mental claustrophobia of adolescence, work very successfully; others, including Scott Mebus’ ‘Bull In The Heather’, which grafts an embarrassing pun onto a mundane story, or Kevin Sampsell’s ‘Swimsuit Issue’, where a potentially fascinating theme is ruined by an empty prose style, are less so. A number, such as Katherine Dunn’s ‘That’s All I Know (Right Now)’, wherein a severed hand temporarily fascinates a gentrified community, are amusing in their deadpan oddity, but nothing more.

The best stories seem to follow the melancholy traces in SY’s post-Washing Machine work, peeking at the desolation beneath the poise. The autobiographical, starkly poetic ‘Little Trouble Girl’, by SY’s peer Emily Carter Roiphe, ends with the discovery of a child – the return of rock’s repressed responsibility – reminding us that, for those excluded from the inner sanctum of bohemia, the world still turns. Meanwhile, Jess Walter’s moving ‘Rain On Tin’, ironically commenting on the preceding stories, quietly reveals a despair at its heart to equal that of Murray Street’s ‘Karen Revisited’.

If the fascinating stories here don’t outweigh the number of ones that left me indifferent, that’s not necessarily the writers’ fault: ‘my’ SY and the band many in this anthology seem inspired by seem to be two different outfits. Such are the perils of fandom. There is, however, definitely a lost opportunity here: SY’s greatest legacy was re-introducing the Modernist project to rock music – the formal possibilities opened up by Daydream Nation, where they caused the time and space of rock form to buckle, should serve as more of a lesson to writers than their thematic gewgaws.

4. Winter of Discontent

2009-01-31T02:54:00.000-08:00

First published in Plan B #39.

Angel – Hedonism (Editions Mego)
Aidan Baker/Tim Hecker – Fantasma Parastasie (Alien8)
Aidan Baker – I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed (Important)
Xela – In Bocca Al Lupo (Type)
Nordvagr – Pyrrhula (Cold Spring)

There’s a reason why, when you picture a male noise-fan, they’re always in an overcoat. It has something to do with the onset of winter, lashing rain, lowering skies, skin-abrading wind, darkness at noon, the jouissance of misery. Blog-owning noise-hacks don’t talk about ‘blizzards of guitar scree’ and ‘avalanches of distortion’ for nothing, you know. For those to whom misanthropy comes naturally – setting up, so the cliché goes, exclusion zones for ‘ordinary’ music fans: “Here Be Limited-Edition Lathe-Cuts” – shut-in brooding, reflection on the world’s unrelenting hostility, comes naturally.

Digital noise, as pioneered by the artists associated with Peter Rehberg’s Mego label in the late 90s, with its searingly cold, alien textures, its propensity for fractured forms, would seem the perfect soundtrack to this longest season. And, indeed, the first half of Hedonism, recorded by the duo of Dirk Dresselhaus (a.k.a. Schneider TM, the one behind that Smiths cover) and Pan Sonic’s Ilpo Väisänen, doesn’t disappoint: sudden bursts of sandpaper-on-skin rasp are combined with suppurating weight and slow, dejected sound-currents, machines drained of any analogue warmth purring, growling and droning to themselves, occasionally clawing for the jugular. Then, ‘Dropping The Ego’s splintered construct of weather-system noise and shattered, chirping electronics cuts into enigmatic electroacoustic rattlings, as if a laptop were duetting with a percussionist playing a concrete dungeon floor. The last two tracks, recorded at Väisänen’s Finnish cottage come as a wonderful shock: layering field recordings of streams and birdsong with alternately celebratory and ominous synths and a wealth of small sound-details, their unfolding in time is a drama in itself.

Aidan Baker’s work with Leah Buckareff as Nadja has supplied some of the most powerful listening experiences I’ve had this year; fellow-countryman Tim Hecker’s decayed, sun-blind noise has proved just as addictive, so Fantasma Parastasie makes for a delectable prospect. Divided, bizarrely, into 66 tracks in 7 movements, it focuses on and magnifies the occasional pools of stasis and immaterial, atmospheric swirl in both projects: ‘Hymn To The Idea Of Night’ swells with synthetic winds, girded by Baker’s subtle bass, circling within the same celestial textural pattern; ‘Gallery of the Invisible Woman’s omnipresent shrouds of subdued harmonics radiate mere unease, so the bass frequencies’ viciousness bashes the listener in the head; in ‘Dream of the Nightmare’, shimmers of sun-bright melody are heard only through a gradually thickening blanket of noise. You keep waiting in fear for the skull-smashing beats or eviscerating showers (weather metaphor!) of feedback, but nothing comes; which, in a way, is even more unnerving. Although it matches neither man’s best work, it’s an exquisite torture nonetheless.

The same can’t quite be said for I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed, a 2CD anthology of Baker’s solo work from rare and out-of-print CD-Rs released between 2000 and 2007. The majority of the first disk consists of rather wispy, portentous cloud formations of processed guitars, certainly nothing especially gripping, and the unity of feel, uncharacteristically, makes it samey and long-winded. The second, more purely abstract disk, where processing has usually gone so far as to almost erase any sense of human presence, is better, and makes for marvellous background listening (with a slight tug of unease, in case you feel weird about listening to ‘ambient music’. Freaks.)

Type Records owner John Twells, a.k.a. Xela, is a man who knows a thing or two about ambience, having released work by Grouper, Sylvain Chauveau and Machinefabriek. He also knows his horror: previous releases include a 12” with renderings of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme and Goblin’s ‘Suspiria’, and a H.P. Lovecraft-inspired ambient album. One could imagine him as the estranged Catholic brother to Burial Hex’s occult novitiate: the entire album is wrapped in a quieter, sanctified version of Initiations’ murky dungeon ambience; one can almost feel the dust and incense drifting through the church’s cavernous space. Everything here feels decayed: sound piles up – skeins of vinyl crackle, the echo of long-gone footsteps, bells etched in sonic memory like trauma scars, the sound-cloud, like a miked-up hornet swarm, that dominates ‘In Misericordia’. The entry of ritualistic percussion on the 20-minute closer, amid a pulsing cloud of noise and inhuman shrieks, feels like the aftershock of a sacrificial rite.

If you need anything else with which to while away the long night, there’s always the new Nordvagr release. Subtitled Black Ambient Droneworks, and recorded over the pitch-black Swedish winter of 2007-8, it does exactly what it says on the tin. At low volume, it gives a subtle seeping trickle of darkness to the air; at high, its relentless solemnity is pretty damn forbidding (if a little unintentionally funny.) If dark-as-fuck amorphous textures, freaky ghost-moans, church organs, distended black-metal treble guitars and Satanic choirs are your thing, then this will hit the spot nicely. And whatever you do: don’t go outside.

3. Thank You

2009-01-30T09:10:00.000-08:00

First published in Plan B # 34

The members of Thank You – Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Elke Wardlaw – met whilst working at The Charles, an art house movie theatre in Baltimore. “I think we thought we were 3 reasonable people amongst hilarious jerks and bastard people…probably still do”, Michael says now.

Indeed: Thank You look eminently reasonable – urbane, mature (at least by the juvenile standards of ‘alternative’ culture), intelligent, and certainly not the types responsible for the agitated dynamics and scratchy, broken glass textures of Terrible Two, their new album (and first for veteran indie label Thrill Jockey). Reviews for their first album, last year’s World City, invoked the spirits of No Wave and post-punk, the patron saints of anxiety, death-wish nihilism and musical affront: The Fire Engines, The Contortions, Mars. A perfect example of how narrow the music press’ frames of reference are. City Paper reviewer Jess Harvell’s other suggestions, put in as afterthoughts, lead somewhere closer: the fiercely inclusive Art Ensemble of Chicago, the alien rhythms and colours of non-Western music, the angular, energy-saturated structures of The Ex.

Forming a couple of years after meeting, the band got to know “almost every band or musician in Baltimore”, eventually putting out World City on local label Wildfire Wildfire. They amassed a reputation for live shows that are, in Michael’s words, “completely overwhelming and psychotic in the best way possible”. And though their work might be outwardly anxious and challenging, on stage they have “the most immediate and penetrating rapport possible... not just within the band but with the people watching and listening as well”, something that comes over in the electric-shock urgency, telepathic interplay and deft structural tricks on Terrible Two.

Their polyamorous relationship with music has been the binding force in the band’s friendship since they first met: “We all love music so much...and it grows and changes all the time and there's no limit to what we like… We turn each other on to different things and make CDs and tapes for each other all the time... There's way too much throughout history to fall in love with.” Beginning from the position of music fans, rather than practitioners – “before playing together [we] bought instruments and just went at it” – gave the band the courage to try what they like. Often, not knowing any better is the best route to new sounds, something the splintered timbres and structures – think Minutemen’s turn-on-a-dime segues – of Terrible Two testifies to, but also its “unconventional” approach to lyrics – studiously minimal, delivered in off-mike shouts and chants – and instrumentation, with whistles, organ, sampler and percussion in addition to the standard bass/guitar/drums, and each member playing at least two instruments. “Our mindset is if you want to use an instrument in a song you just buy that instrument and get to work... I didn't have the faintest idea what to do with them before I bought them, but then I had them and just put them in songs...”

Much of the inheritance of the No Wave and noise-rock that soaks into Thank You is a practised sneer of obliquity that cloaks a lack of any real content or emotion; by contrast, the band’s work is welcoming and accessible, just on their own terms. The lyrics, Michael insists, are “not nonsense”, but just “cryptic enough to be interpreted any way the listener sees fit”. He continues, “every part of that album has an emotion behind it and resonates with us personally...Every lyric, guitar, organ and drum part has something of ourselves invested in it.” Listening to a test pressing, he was struck by “how panicked it sounded”, but feels that “there's also some great joy and hope in there too” – and, indeed, there are some moments of real wracked beauty on Terrible Two, from ‘Embryo Imbroglio’, where serrated treble guitars duck nimbly around vocal chants and a rhythm section out of Agharta-era Miles Davis, to the closing title track, which begins with organs that sound as if beamed in from space, and rises through thrashing percussion to a melancholic motorik swirl (“Every time we play it or I hear it I get this incredible sinking feeling”.) The song titles and lyrics are connected by a theme of pregnancy and children (which was “completely subconscious”, apparently); since finishing it, “unusual things have happened in our lives concerning birth”, from Jeff becoming a prospective uncle to label owner Bettina getting pregnant with twins. There’s no tiresome avant-punk misanthropy here, just a celebration of the possibilities of life and sound. Love and reasonableness, in other words.

2. Queer Theories

2009-01-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

First published in Plan B #38.

Various Artists – Dreams Come True: Classic First Wave Electro 1982-87 (Domino)

Jon Savage knows a thing or two about dreams: as the author of England’s Dreaming, he was the foremost chronicler of punk’s utopian moment. As Savage himself has pointed out, disco, punks’ most-hated genre, was, in its own way, a utopian movement: it created a cultural space in which gay and female liberation could be enacted as a norm, in which rock’s patriarchal assumptions held no power. Co-existing in New York with early hip-hop and the downtown avant-garde scene (both Grandmaster Flash and Sonic Youth played the Danceteria, namechecked here in C-Bank’s gloriously OTT ‘Get Wet’), disco’s commercialisation, and the new electropop flooding in from Europe, gave birth to the harder, nastier sound of electro, documented here – with obvious relish – by Savage.

Those European roots show through on the earliest track here, the 12” version of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, matching Alison Moyet’s sexually ambiguous vocals against bubbling synths and stern drum-machine. The transatlantic transformation is enacted with Larry Levan’s extraordinary remix of Class Action’s ‘Weekend’ (originally released on Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records): 8 minutes of alternately skittering and squelching synths, handclaps, a relentless b-line, exploding syn-drums and disco strings backing up an hysterically sassy vocal: “I’LL FIND SOMEONE, SOMEBODY WHO WANTS MY BO-DY, BA-BY!!!” Such forthright carnality is profligate in these tracks, coupled to compulsive danceability and relentless innovation; free as they are of ironic quotation marks, to today’s ears they sound utterly compelling and downright bizarre. In track after track – ‘Love Ride’ by Nuance and Vikki Love, with sledgehammer beats played against hilariously cheesy vocals; Pamela Joy’s ‘Think Fast’, congas, shaker, syn-drum and nagging disco guitar driving home the message that “there’s always someone to take your place”; The Latin Rascals’ ‘Lisa’s Coming’, where, ahem, ‘suggestive’ moaning, relentlessly arpeggiated synths and vocal cut-ups point toward Chicago house – the intent is made patently, almost embarrassingly, clear: “a bit of the old in-out, in-out”, anonymously and without consequences.

This admixture of highly synthetic music and, um, organic concerns may strike the listener as incongruous, but the effect is more interesting than that: the all-pervasive electronics both amplify and mutate sexuality, onomatopoeically mirroring the body’s squelches and slithers, whilst simultaneously pointing toward a vision of a Deleuzo-Guattarian electronic ‘body without organs’ which would be refined by the likes of Mr. Fingers and the second wave of Detroit techno. This is most evident on Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk (European Connection)’, originally released in 1982, where only an occasional disco rhythm guitar disturbs what is otherwise a serene glide that looks back to the austerely lush eroticism of ‘I Feel Love’, and forward to the machine melancholy of ‘Blue Monday’; vocals, the very mark of organic presence, are subject throughout the album to vocoders, filters, machine cut-ups. As Mark Fisher wrote of Giorgio Moroder’s productions, “by suspending rock’s male-derived climax-based libidinal economy”, these songs, in all their pulp vulgarity, construct an “eternal Now”, an alternative model of sexuality that makes the rejection of reproduction – the primary so-called ‘sin’ of homosexuals – its very locus. The heretical question that resounded through England’s Dreaming – “If there’s no future, how can there be sin?” – is taken here for the norm, and the results are rapturous, energising, brilliant.

This collection spans the boom years of New York’s gay culture; by the time closer ‘Silent Morning’ by Noel was released, in 1987 the ravages of AIDS were already common knowledge. Savage, who is openly gay, surely feels the loss, judging by this last selection, which recounts a night of hedonism, and the morning after: “I wake up and you’re not by my side… How could our love have died?”

1. Testing, Testing

2009-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

I've decided to set up a new blog for my writings - I felt uncomfortable posting them up at The End Times. Hopefully no-one will give enough of a fuck to want to read them here, and they can remain in delightful semi-obscurity. Work written for my university course, and director's cuts of old pieces from Plan B will appear here.

Watch, as they say, this space.