undercurrent

Beach

Went to the beach for the first time this year. (Even though it's only 15 minutes walk away, you (I, anyway) can get used to, and thus ignore, anything that's familiar. Beaches are sort of boring anyway, unless you're really in the right mood.)

The superlatively clear sunlight here gives everything in the middle-distance a flat, even quality, like images on a lightbox, or a cinema projection, it's as if there's no air between you and the horizon, nothing but crystal clear, pure space.

The overnight passage of the seawater over the sand had created a salt-crust that cracked and crumbled when touched, like a thin sliver of meringue.

All over the beach are immense rocks, some upended so that their geological time-lines read sideways, cryptolithic barcodes describing millenia of slow pressings and foldings, baker transformations encyphering the history of the earth.

Somewhere in here I was born - and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.

The uneven cracks that transect and section the massive hunks of rock recall the thin surfaces of fat in a marbled lump of meat; I imagine them as the butchered remains of a gigantic granite behemoth, waiting to be forked up into Triton's maw.

In the centre of the beach there's the wreck of the Alacrity which foundered on the rocks in 1963 and which the Navy thought it prudent, rather than removing wholesale, to dynamite into smaller fragments upon which one or two swimmers a year forevermore will lacerate their lower limbs. Depending on the weather, large pieces of rusty metal rise up from the sands and then are covered again. Chunks sometimes free themselves from the bed and wash up on the shore, looking fierce. At the moment you can see the shape of the deeply-embedded prow quite clearly, right in the centre of the beach.

Roasted and stupefied by solar superfluity, we retreated toward the cliff in stages before the languorous thrust of the waves. At the other end of the beach, children shrieked in that apparently universally-standardised way they always do on beaches, like one of the comically repetitive sound effects in Mr Hulot's Holiday.

On the way up the steep cliff walk that seems four times as long on the way back, a red lizard scampered off the path in front of me, on the periphery of my vision, before I could properly see it.

Unbelievable

from the Guardian's TV guide:

8.0 The Man Who Paints the Future : Extraordinary People (T) (S) (R)
Can retired art lecturer David Mandell really paint pictures of disasters he's seen in his dreams?

Call me credulous, but it doesn't seem overly improbable - Now if the disasters actually happened after he painted them, that'd be something...

"Win Yourself A Cheap Tray"

- I don't perform. That's not a performance.

A seriousness that means something (even if you don't agree with him), a presence, a resistance. Morrissey, a voice of rational misanthropy, of resolute idiosyncrasy, of the bloodymindedly cerebral. Someone who understands the difference between sensitivity and sentiment. So you still exist - it's a shock to realise it, because I'd vaguely resigned myself to your having disappeared, and somehow it even seemed right that you had. Now it suddenly makes sense that you're there on TV, for a few uncomfortable minutes. Managing to be real, because you've refused to exist in that painfully overlit world of grimacing obsequies for so long, perhaps.

That extraordinary face is ossified into a hard mask, I know you're hiding in there, peeping out through teeth constantly gritted in discomfort, squirming mouth petitioning tirelessly for escape. Body contorted and braced against something you know isn't going to agree with you, and inevitable disappointment.

You sing about England but won't live here, and you now have exactly the same curious facial and elocutionary tics as that other notorious northerner expat-in-LA (David Hockney), crossed with David Lynch, crossed again with one of his films' sinister woozy barroom crooners (the bright red jacket a giveaway); you're impossibility incarnate, so that while you prove that there's someone who's worth it in this murkiness you're a reminder of the necessity of remoteness and prudent solitude; so that whilst you're effortlessly showing what a trivial, coarse, vulgar, bitter, insensitive, braying, insincere, talentless, incontinent, half-dead nobody J*n*th*n R*ss is, you're nevertheless deigning to appear on his show and making me watch it...

Still, though it all attests to the indisputable fact that you - we - lost, and will always lose, you nevertheless still bother to speak, and even to sing, and for that you're forgiven, even if I don't like the new song (yet)....Thanks...

...

There is a place, a place in hell
Reserved for me and my friends
And when we go, we all will go
So you see, I'm never alone

Oh there is a place with a lot more time
And a few more gentler words
And looking back, we will forgive
We had no choice, we always did

Go, Gargett, Go

I'm assured by sphaleotas that further close readings are imminent.

Surveying the Season of Woe

Someone needs to do an epidemiological study of depression in blogland: k-punk makes a start by compiling a 'best of' the great cultural fatigue of 04, whilst the naked maja gives a poignant, personal account of the same (incidentally, do give us your thoughts on Dicks & Rudge, now you've wrote 'em)
Meanwhile, woebot blows a gasket, decides he hates everyone (do they mean us?) and threatens to sell up; would it ameliorate the 'bot's solitude to point out the thematic solidarity with Elidor's why do i bother with this lot period? No, thought not.

Revenge of the Larky

I am way behind the times, but less than may appear, cos I just forgot to complete and post this up weeks ago...

I only ever listen to Radio 1 when I'm driving, so I've only just heard The Streets' new single yesterday. I laughed...I smiled and smiled...I almost wept tears of joy...I loved it. First of all, he's mental - what unfathomable depth of recreational drug use is necessary to result in someone's coming up with this - and actually releasing it...?

Secondly, sonically there's more in there than some are giving him credit for.
i) although by some measures this couldn't be further from Grime, it partakes of similar developments in terms of lyrical rhythm, ie weirdly off-centre yet semi-metronomic delivery rather than the sliding, liquid too-late-too-early delivery of post-WuTang hiphop, making of the MC a comical malfunctioning monosyllabic verbodroid rather than byzantine meterological poesy (pints of carling vs kgs of tikal?).
ii) that sweet melodic vocal interlude (not done by Skinner I think, but by one of his regular mates/collaborators) remind me of nothing so much as Syd Barrett - modal english folk tinged with blues, thick harmonic layers, the sing-song innocence. The last thing you'd expect, and yet perhaps not, because...
iii) the rich historical resonances - the fact that you can not only detect most obviously, the glam stomp/status quo thing, but also chas'n'dave and pg wodehouse is testament to the fact that he's unwittingly picked up a thread that goes all the way back to east-end vaudeville and beyond, and forwards through Barrett, The Two Ronnies, Lennon&McCartney, ahem...Right Said Fred (but seriously, it does, if somewhat knowingly), etc. etc.

I recently heard a radio programme about the Ted Dicks and Mike Rudge, who wrote 'Hole in the Ground' and 'Right Said Fred': intriguingly, George Martin was the producer for these 'novelty' hits, and although by the late sixties such songs had very much gone out of fashion, overtaken by the hard-edged import of American rock'n'roll, there was a fair amount of influence (obvious if you listen) from what Dicks and Rudge called their 'larky' (great word!) songs from the post-war years, and The Beatles whimsical pieces like Yellow Submarine, Octopus's Garden, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, etc; The Beatles reinvigorating rock'n'roll (or injecting it with insipid anglophilia, depending on your pov) with the comical, parochial, narrative style descended from the larky repertoire that they grew up with, and which in turn reflected the turning point where undemanding, simple forms of entertainment rich in the tradition of the working classes met with the emergence of a common, 'classless' media-driven culture, an undecidably cusp of folk/pop form where although the folksy 'authenticity' of the comedy drove the popularity, the converse was also true, cultural currency had begun to emerge from mere popularity (As much as this musical line, Dicks and Rudge belong to the lineage of a certain type of TV comedy, with its characters that become common currency, and its endlessly repeatable catchphrases).

Dicks and Rudge recall that a great moment of vindication, proving the pedigree of this lineage in the opposite direction, came when Noel Coward chose 'Right Said Fred' on Desert Island Discs. (Robin Carmody can probably do a more comprehensive job than I in expanding on these connections...?)

Skinner is showing that this heritage need not be curtailed at the point when 'BBC accents' are consigned to ridicule, country estates are province of business meetings rather than bumbling-parson comedies, and when Hancock's working-class common man is an unrecognisable ghost of another world.
Skinner confidently reclaims the genre as his own, the rightful property of the digitally-scrambled-ex-working-class-loafer - thus rescuing it from cynical heritage-merchants and the Blurs and Hugh Grants of this world. So that however meanly and bitterly these comparisons are meant by scenesters and purists, I can't help seeing them as a compliment.

I remember Skinner being interviewed when the 1st album was released and bemoaning the fact that the 'Garage' community had not 'accepted' him and his album was being picked up by middle-class types instead, for different reasons than he expected. He seems to have lost any such inhibitions now and settled into making songs not tracks (and the album's sounds like some sort of ealing comedy-meets-trainspotting concept piece...) which is probably a good thing. What the world needs is more artists ready to accept that they're not, and they shouldn't try to be, doing the same as a bunch of scenesters (no matter how good said scenesters might be).

It goes back to what I was saying before: the best music comes from people trying to do something (in this case to 'do' garage) and failing in a way that innocently exposes everything that's characteristic about that person. A true scenester would smother this under layers of gloss, try to mute it within the confines of the genre (not to devalue the importance of the hothouse gang-mentality to the development of musics). Skinner doesn't: Let's take things forward is right, even if it sometimes sounds a little backward. It may be a fake mythology of the 'real', but it's also the real production of pop-mythology.

But apart from all this, most important is the sheer joy of it all. It totters on the edge of being a forgettable novelty ('parklife' being the most dangerous reference point, happily Skinner lacks that artschool knowingness) but manages to keep the right side using a precise yet fugitive formula. It's not exactly easy to do 'larky' once as a novelty, but undoubtedly it's more difficult to continue treading the fine line. We'll have to see, but right now, particularly on Radio 1 (for non-uk dwellers, mainstream pop radio), it stands out amongst the po-faced self-aggrandising glossy bullshit. This failure to properly armour-up, sonically or lyrically, is a large part of why The Streets appeal to me.

Anyway, Marcello was so cruel doing that review so far in advance, I can't wait to finally get my hands on the album this week.

Laughter, not the signifier

After following this thread on Beckett at infinite thought, I just happened to read this germane passage in Deleuze's Nomadic Thought:

'Whoever reads Nietzsche without laughing, and laughing heartily and often and sometimes hysterically, is almost not reading Nietzsche at all. This is true not only for Nietzsche, but for all the authors who comprise the same horizon of our counter-culture. What shows us our own decadence and degeneracy is the way we feel the need to read in them anguish, solitude, guilt, the drama of communication, the whole tragedy of interiority...And Beckett, I mean, it is difficult not to laugh when you read him, moving from one joyful moment to the next. Laughter, not the signifier. What springs from great books is schizo-laughter or revolutionary joy, not the anguish of our pathetic narcissism, not the terror of our guilt...There is always an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak of ugly, desperate or terrifying things'

by the way, since he decided not to blog any more, and then changed his mind, heronbone has just got better and better.

target marketing

Am I the only one who's now getting spam blog comments that seem to be attempting a form of contextual camouflage? I'm used to the stuff which appears to be random prose, but below I quote from one which is posing as a treatise on/review of a book by Iain Sinclair, whilst trying to sell the usual crap.

There must be some bit of code that visits a neighborhood of blogs, chops them up, and intersperses the result with links before posting it back out again. Or some vast semantically-vectorised database that can take the content of a blog and make a rudimentary guess as to what subjects and types of writing might linger there, evading detection...

It's actually becoming uncanny now, it's quite easy to mistake genuine human idiots' comments for clever spam, and vice versa ;) Sometimes I think I recognise bits in the spamprose - thinking, haven't I read that before? did I write it?

It must be a fun job continually developing the code to produce this stuff, but given the underlying dumbness of the marketing strategy it's sort of hard to admire them...Now if they were thinking more subtly, it might make sense to take the topical context into account in the advertiser's links themselves, like linking to www.cheappsychogeographicalbooksonline.com instead of all this credit card/penisenlargement crap. No doubt that'll be next.

which in Sinclair's conjuror's mind range from accept credit card Bram Stoker's Dracula (Dracula's English pied à terre green card lottery is located close to the present-day motorway) to cruise Ballardian ideas about consumerist landscapes and hotel the "transcendental boredom" they invoke (Ballard caribbean cruise himself appears in the film) to conspiracy theories las vegas hotel and the omnipresence of camera surveillance on usa visa

UPDATE!!
Of course, I thought....Google on these little phrases, and I'll find out the source of the camouflage text: well, first of all I just got ten or so other blogs afflicted with the same spam...but then I found this on I Feel Love. Now how do you feel about your work being dismembered and used for indiscriminate marketing purposes, Angus?! Still, it proves my theory; the code they're using obviously picks out linked blogs and uses text from one to post to the others; using the structure of the blog network 'against' itself, in fact. Fascinating stuff...

here come the drums

Here it is

On a related note, can anyone help out a good friend of mine, he needs a 'backup copy' of c*b*se for Mac os x. If you can help him get in touch ;)

dread afriq

Been meaning to post some mp3's, and woebot's ethnographic mini-discography prompted me to try to post this particular track if only to challenge the idea that "there aren't the same kind of trans cultural conduits plugging them into other musics"; It was made in one day, entirely (apart from the Amen breaks) from two Folkways LPs borrowed from the library (drums from africa, vocals from mongolian nomads!) It was one of the first tracks I ever made, and probably the best one, since I didn't have much of a clue what I was doing and was influenced only by my largely incorrect assumptions of what jungle was meant to sound like and some vague numero-rhythmical idea of how it might interlock interestingly with the drum patterns.

Some beautiful scans in Woebot's ethnography section (considerably better than the 13-yr-old-copying-out-of-2000AD vibe of the 4Hero sleeve ;) but I'd love to actually hear an entire album of mbira - can't some charity-minded millionaire set up an online digital library of all woebot's obscure vinyl? A much-needed public service, especially since all public libraries, in their systematic conversion into 'one-stop happenin' e-edutainment centers for da yoof' managed by PR consultants and staffed by loud illiterate minimum-wage ex-market traders, sold off all their stock of any interesting/unusual vinyl for 5p a shot long long ago...those that Matt hadn't already stolen, of course...

So I fear Mr Carmody's spirited insistence on returning said stolen items wouldn't do much good, except that Matt could go and buy them back the next day and feel honest. I actually bought a book for 50p from a library sale, it was probably worth £8-£10 secondhand, and I'd borrowed it only a month before - what the hell is the criteria for chucking stuff out, then, if not whether it gets borrowed or not? Do they ask the members of S Club 7 to choose what they consider the kewlest books? Or maybe it's one of those ultra-participatory (except if you live here) BBC Digital things where you get to press the red button. Gahhhh....

footnote: the mp3 file was meant to be 4MB, but after 2 hours and 17,000,000 bytes it's still uploading, so I think I'll try again tomorrow...

worlds of colour

#2 : 'Purposiveness without purpose'

worlds of colour

#1:Photographing old people when they're not looking, because their colours of their coats are consistently drawn from the same superb understated palette; muted natural shades somewhat similar to the colours of japanese art. Do the old people choose them, or are they imposed from above by the inscrutable Marks & Spencers buyers?

I am all the names in the library

An exclusive new report by Sphaleotas sheds light on the extremes to which a truly ubermenschlich theory-warrior can push depersonalised hive-identity, poststructuralist neo-authorial schizophrenia, and literary remixology.

When the first signs of recognition struck me - forcibly - shattering my pathetic molar preconceptions of scholarly 'originality', little did I realise just how far Gargett had gone in systematically demolishing the anthropomorphic prejudices that still, sadly, linger within the gerontocratic wormpit of the academy.

It is to Sphaleotas' credit that, whilst I flagged, faced with the sheer audacious brilliance of Gargett's novel antihumanist praxis, he has had the courage to identify and forensically investigate even the most terrifying of the Master's courageous voyages into 'plagiarism degree zero'.

Trail of electronic evidence speaks volumes, say prosecutors

Is it too much to ask that those responsible at Warwick University Philosophy Department now re-evaluate his PhD thesis in the light of these findings? An honorary professorship in textual studies, at least, is indicated.

I believe in a thing called luurve...

The rearing of love-pygmies

Thanks to The Pill Box's post (ages ago) I got hold of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. This is the one book in a thousand on the subject that isn't written by a total nutter (not that those books are necessarily bad, but when you've read one or two they tend to become a bit wearing). Goodrick-Clarke is a 'proper' scholar, and this is a rewrite of his PhD thesis. For me, the highlight so far is the chapter about Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who wrote Theo-Zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods, a work dedicated to proving that:
...the chief pursuit of antiquity appeared to have been the rearing of love-pygmies (Buhlzwerge) for deviant sexual pleasure. The prime purpose of the Old Testament had been to warn the chosen people (the Aryans!) against the consequences of this bestial idolatry.
Just to connect this to the previous post too:
Lanz...interpreted the Passion as the attempted rape and perversion of Christ by pygmies urged on by the disciples of the satanic bestial cults devoted to interbreeding.
Any laughter this provokes starts to ring hollow when you begin to understand just how deeply the roots of this quasi-religious aristrocratic racism went, and how widespread (albeit in diluted form) apparently outrageous ideas became (amongst the 'intelligentsia' particularly - hello Martin H), simply because they fulfilled the need for comforting ritual, for chiliastic revenge fantasies and for some sort of order. An important book if you know the economic/political story and want to know the other origins, less seriously treated (this is still the main book on the subject, 20 years later) but just as important, of Nazi ideology. And more importantly, the complex relationships between romantic anti-modernism, mysticism, racism and fascism.

Feel the Pain - Celluloid Epiphanies

Random thoughts set off by Glueboot's relishing the cartoonised violence of Kill Bill whilst avoiding watching The Passion of the Christ (when you do, watch it on a big screen, not illegally downloaded on a monitor, for christ's sake (literally)!)

What made The Passion of the Christ such an example of cinema as elemental force, for me? It's not really 'nightmare-inducing' in a scary-violent-gore sense, in fact blow-for-blow it's rather mild, it's more the fact that violence and suffering per se are treated at length and seriously, that makes it remarkable. It resounds with the visceral power of the cult of Christ; watching it, for the first time I actually understood the awesomeness of the suffering and its religious import. I could therefore also understand the logic of there being a stack of church brochures in the cinema foyer (presumably an approved Gibson tie-in since they had stills from the film in them - what about litle plastic bleeding Jesuses in McD's Happy Meals though? The Chapmans would have been up for that I'm sure!).

The exaggerated effect it had on me may be due to the fact that the only Christianity I have ever been exposed to was half-hearted, feeble-minded Protestantism at school - religion was just not mentioned at home at all, and I just never thought about it except to think how stupid and arbitrary it all seemed, and how boring the hymns were. (The Thirst for Annihilation: indifference is the only proper response to god, but Land finds himself incapable of moderating his hatred - I'd wager that this rage isn't generated without (as with Nietzsche) the burden of a religious upbringing). To me, and I accept that in some sense I've really missed out here, it's always been precisely a matter of indifference and mild perplexity which, however much I read about Christianity, I couldn't overcome. Incidentally I don't really believe that many 'christians' really feel that much differently to this either, and all the experiences I've had of the contemporary church have only reinforced the indifference and the sense that the only possible reason for doing this stuff was if you were desperate for comfort and had little enough self-respect to admit it.

But the elemental force of the image doesn't attempt to 'explain' : it's directly neuro-physiological, emotional, violent : in this sense the film is obviously a modernised version of the Stations of the Cross paintings in churches (the only previous occasion on which I've reached any appreciation of what 'the Passion' meant was in the Basilica of the Holy Blood in Bruges, which has a beautiful series). These mediaeval comic-strips are intended likewise to draw the viewer into a meditation on the pain of Christ, to enter into the pain. Compared to this, Tarantino violence is just bad graphic design.

Given this revelatory quality, I've no difficulty in believing (and I look forward to the statistics on this) that it really could turn someone weak and searching for certainty (as we all are at some time) into 'a believer'. It really is seriously evangelical in intent, make no mistake about that.

However, interestingly, it doesn't necessarily assume or generate any metaphysical basis for belief - there are no miracles, the resurrection itself is only barely hinted at before the credits roll. Satan appears in several scenes, an otiose symbolic gesture that does little to modify the grinding, material-political engine of blood and hatred that drives the film, and whose effect would be no less whether or not you professed a belief in a supernatural deity. The power comes only from human suffering, from human empathy, from the barbarity and lack of redemption within the narrative scope of the film. It hints at the fact that the cult of christ is a syncretic appendage of monotheism rather than essentially of it: the cinematic experience unwittingly revives the occulted taproots of the Christ-cult, the mystery religions, sacrifice, the shamanic enlightenment of unbearably attenuated pain. Perhaps in the contemporary world where the cinematic experience has raised the stakes, only film has the power to deliver epiphany (no doubt it simultaneously is responsible for, and holds the keys to, our atrophied imaginations). This would then be a logical homecoming, a return to the most natural habitat for this complex of image, myth, narrative, and transcendence. Perhaps (frightening but unlikely) a sign of christianity, after centuries of retreat into pseudo-rational politicking and feeble sentiment, feeling its way back to where real power dwells. Is this the inverse of a previous movement from the image to the word which made the faith such a dry, mediocre parody of itself? A move away from the quiet, utilitarian capital-friendliness of latter-day christianity towards a new irrationalist immersion in blood, crusade, the heat of untethered sacrificial religiosity that the 'clash of civilizations' tempts us to imagine?

How strange then that cinemagoers, stunned into silence by this unsparing spectacle, are expected to be scooped up on the way out by these leaflets, pathetic invitations to insipid 'modern' sermons, cold half-empty village halls, wheezing electronic organs and tepid cups of tea - the moribund remains of a declawed, emaciated 'faith'. How bizarre that a force that changed the world is reduced to soliciting in cinema foyers. (And how peculiar that I sat for an afternoon with lots of little old ladies watching a man being scourged and it affected me more deeply.)

The film is a glimpse at an energy that's already gone, leaving its negative trace indelibly on the world : a world which still, and perhaps terminally, lacks an alternative source of energy. As naive as the director and his intentions may be, and whatever the historic infelicities (as if it could ever have been possible to satisfy everyone), I'd rather have this depth-charge of an experience than another superficial, ironic reminder of the current state of post-christian (where 'post' signifies the overwhelming power of the negative relation to the past) nonculture .