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Saturday 4 December 2010

transcendence


"Tucked into the breast of this body, where its heart once beat, is the soul of Remedios the Beauty, a young woman from a small village in Colombia. When she was alive, Remedios the Beauty used to drive men mad with the sweetness of her scent, part orange, part cinnamon. Sometimes she wandered her house unclothed and sometimes she shaved her head because deciding which dress to wear or how to comb her hair seemed too much trouble. One day while hanging sheets, Remedios the Beauty began rising into the air. Her feet left the ground and she lifted away from earth. She became smaller and smaller until she was the size of a pearl. Then she disappeared altogether. No one ever saw her again. The chronicler who originally told her tale claimed she had ascended to heaven, but in reality she had ascended into a minute rip in the fabric of space and time that appeared that morning as an unmoving white smear of cloud in the otherwise flawless sky, and she ended up here. When she dreams, as she is doing now, Remedios the Beauty will spend eternity scrambling through a lightless void that, depending on the season, is sometimes too warm and sometimes too cold, believing this is what paradise must feel like."

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey

The below post reminded my of something I bookmarked a while ago with the intention of sharing, the first 2 tracks from the audio version of McLuhan's book 'The Medium Is The Massage'.
For those who aren't familiar with the book, it's a seminal visual treatise on how media delivery affects meaning and blah blah.... I'm sure you've seen a copy carefully placed on someone's coffee table somewhere - have a flick though, it's well worth a look.

To the point... not long after the book came out, an LP was made. It twists the original text through effects,  strange voices and all sorts of other dissonance. It's very much a recording of it's time (in that I can't imagine many prominent cultural theorists making avante-garde albums today), and it's a fascinating listen - especially if you know the material. 
It's become a seminal cut-up record in it's own right, being checked as an influence by several hip-hop, experimental and electronica acts over the years.....  I could witter about it for a while longer, but you should have a listen:




Unfortunately the LP commands fairly high prices now and the CD reissue from '99 is long out of print, but there is another CD reissue in the works apparently, due for release next year.

Sunday 21 November 2010

"Boy, if life were only like this."

Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall', like most of his films, is incredible. This is a favourite scene of mine. An expertly executed cameo by Marshall McLuhan, who is beautifully shoe-horned into this scene about boring intellectual criticism.

"I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture so I think that my insights into Mr McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity"

"Oh do you? Well that's funny because I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here..."


Friday 19 November 2010

#boringprequels

This contributor has, for now, a very boring job. For that reason I contrived to take part in the TRENDING #boringprequels on Twitter today, November 19th 2010.

Most of my contributions were pretty awful and the rest were even worse. Here is ALL OF THEM.

Honey, I took the kids to the park #boringprequels

Indiana Jones and the mid-term examinations #boringprequels

Breakfast at Marks and Spencers #boringprequels

The league of ordinary gentlemen #boringprequels

Day of the living #boringprequels

James and the shop-bought peach #boringprequels

Synecdoche, Milton Keynes #boringprequels

The Visible Man #boringprequels

Sunday Night, Monday Morning #boringprequels

The Eventually Ending Story #boringprequels

Four engagements and a sick man #boringprequels

Talent.

Sunday 7 November 2010

Plot ideas for week commencing 01/11/2010

* Space Bitch

* man comes home to find his wife trapped in a photo in "woman's own", article about abusive husband or sensational peice involving grave physical deformities, danger is closing in? is it too late?

* BOOTY SHAKING IN A GRAVEYARD.. ON TOP OF THE GRAVESTONES

* the antichrist returns to earth... runs blog

* otaku travels back in time to show victorian gentry animé & manga. global cultural revolution within the heart of the british empire but is eventually overthrown due to the phenomenal growth of Japan's economy thru sales of Pocky and plastic figurines

* Space Bitch II: I Know U Ain't Talkin' Bout My Hair

* wise cracking mafia goon goes undercover in children's school as supply teacher to trace the path of lost Inca gold

* baffling drama about a quest to colonize Jupiter ends in tears for all; Tom Hanks, Javier Bardem and Kate Winslet star

* man travels into the future but not possible future - rather an imagining of a possible Future as seen in utopian science fiction of the 70s and 80s. music by Vangelis

* man's dead wife sends messages back from beyond the grave- "did you tape Brookside?" asks spectre, but manifested in the form of an intense psychic attack

* horrific nightmare world where consciousness is self contained and individual but all physicality is an endless, ever-expanding sea of guts, lymph and flesh

Friday 29 October 2010

Think before you Ink or Why I hate tattoos.

At 25, I'm old enough now not to care about what people think about what I think about people and what they think about.

With this in mind, I'd like to launch an attack on tattoos. This is a reaction that has been slowly provoked over many years and it is an issue which I have tormented myself with regarding making a decision about how I feel about them one way or the other. Like a putrid irritable rash, that’s turning all shades of red, yellow and black, I need to medicate and get it off my chest.

But first, a disclaimer.

I like art. I really, really do. I like beautifully arranged and designed images that represent other things and ideas, conceptually and figuratively. I appreciate the natural world and the uncanny way with which it simultaneously reflects and shapes my moods. I suppose that in another, more dignified life, I'd consider myself as an aesthete. However, I'm writing this whilst listening to bad Swedish Indie music and worrying about the overdue electricity bill that’s stuck to fridge with a Butlin’s fridge magnet that was 'bought for me as a gift'. So, right now that term just sounds a bit, you know, unbearably pretentious.

This is exactly how I feel about tattoos.

I have such an aversion to tattoos that when I see them that, at the best, they literally make my skin crawl. At worst my skin runs away from my body screaming in a bloody protest at my eyes and brain that have just readily and so carelessly gazed upon and interpreted such heinous body crime without prejudice.  I genuinely associate tattoos with illness, needles and the mentally infirm. When day dreaming, I imagine that the kind of person that decides that a tattoo is, “oh yes, definitely what I should buy next”, are almost certainly going through a mental breakdown; wayward and spiralling into a jobless, meaningless non-future of depravity and fetid lounging.

I acknowledge that this is a fairly strong reaction to what is essentially just a pretty scar, but it is nonetheless true. However, I do admit that it is perhaps slightly inaccurate. In fact I think that a lot of folk who get tattoos are quite stable and comfortable with their bodies and lives; they’re norms. They are grey and dull people, with normal jobs searching for a way in which to express themselves. So, when the idea of a tattoo presents itself it seems like a perfectly reasonable way in which to enlarge their personality and express an inner creativity that, thus far, hasn’t been nurtured in the accounts department of a company that sells imagined advertising space to media companies that don’t even exist in the real world anyway.

A particular champion of the tattoo is the working man, and by working man I mean the man who works very hard for very little money. Only just enough money in fact to cover a sky sports TV licence, enough lager each week to poison the entire population of a particularly temperate Finnish town and, of course, tattoos. These are the men (and women) that we read about when the interest rate hits a perilous new low or when the price of a Premiership football season ticket reaches a ridiculous new high. Most of the time we don’t believe that they exist but for a while we suspend that disbelief to help us make sense of the world and to, by enlarge, make ourselves feel a little bit better about our own pitiless existence. It’s a bit like believing in fairies when you’re a spoilt child. Those poor, impoverished fairies.
To the working man and the football fan the tattoo is a badge of honour, a statement of tribal belonging and brotherhood. To burn the crest of your most beloved football team into your forearm is seen as the highest form of respect for that fine organisation and of fandom itself. They disregard the fact that this is an entirely arbitrary act in relation to the game of football itself or the club represented by the freshly burnt grooves in their flesh as it really shows that they are passionate about their FOOTBALL TEAM! Not their team of course, the team that they support on Saturdays.

My dislike of tattoos runs deeper than the artifice of cultural expression and engagement with social convention though.
A tattoo’s permanence jars with the very nature of the ever changing human appearance. The fragile, transcendence of the human body is somehow put out of sink with such a thing. Although "tattoos may grow and change with you", when created they are designed and are at their best and will only decline from their peak glory and beauty. Yes, I said it, some tattoos are objects to be admired but they are fathomed and crudely crafted in comparison to their canvas. Opposed to this, for me, entirely is the human body. It is a body that’s schema gains skill and knowledge, yes strength declines over time, but it is a body that retains inert beauty that proffers forth in ever changing ways.

The human experience and the bodies experience is one that retains every image, odour and painful experience that it encounters and it is ever the richer for this.
Do people who have ‘MUM’ or ‘SHARON’ tattooed on their arms have serious memory defects or are they desperately insecure about their own conduct towards the underwritten when they were still alive/living in the same house/talking to them.No. They just, simply haven’t thought it through.

Firstly, we (and I speak for all of us here) don’t care how much you love your wife or mother if they were still alive or tolerating you. This is not information that we need. Secondly, if that person/animal means that much to you then surely you don’t need a septicemic time-bomb as a visual aid to remind you. Finally, do you really want to remember all that painful stuff like when they died/cheated on you/left you for another woman/sold your BMX for beer money?

So, if you really want to turn yourself into a colouring book, then go ahead. Just don’t forget:
Colouring books are for children and nobody understands your pain or even really cares.

Thursday 28 October 2010

your parents are idiots

control-test horns sound from a lonely tower above the electrical department, and the camera pans smoothly 180 degrees to where the houses used to be.

nothing here now but a yawning black crater.