| On life, death and Derek |
[Feb. 20th, 2008|12:36 am] |
I'm lying on my sofa with the laptop on my legs. Derek Jarman's Blue is on TV in the background, washing the room with, well, a wireless glow. I don't think Jarman could have known that the colour tone he chose for the film would be replicated by BskyB and O2 for years to come.
I haven't seen Blue, this exercise in radio-dream as film, before. The aural landscapes are fascinating, and it's made moreso by the documentary, Derek, that screened immediately beforehand. Tilda Swinton made a compelling entry point into this life I could never have known, but some of her writing came off like art school poetry. Of course, some of it was utterly incredible.
"Then, as now, the myth persisted that there was only one mainstream"
How perfectly timed and necessary. Thank You! It's so slight a phrase, but so important, especially with the internet creating a direct conduit for the masses to access the 'underground'. We are all living mainstream lives of our own choosing. My world is popular by default. And in no bad way. How better to recreate the world in our own image than to serve as conduits to share the culture I choose and choose to create.
My sense of realty is a little bit askew thanks to Calprofen and vodka. The room span when I got up, serves me right for drinking and not dancing. Most of these sentences are being spell-checked on the fly. As it should be. As is right.
I have discovered space. Last year, while reading B. S. Johnson, I discovered what the gap could do. It's making its presence felt over on the writing on The Polaroid Press. I'm actually feeling really good about that project. I'm settled into the idea that it's going to take a while and some work t find an audience, if it ever does (hints and tips there much appreciated), so I'm just writing to further myself. I'm writing for everyone, but not excluding anything of myself for the sake of a wider world. Which, ultimately, I feel is the best way to work: people find in it what they can. Some of the feedback has been really wonderful to hear, some people really enjoying the pieces or getting a kick out of them, it's great!
But it's a break from the normal. Which is erratic hours and time in my own head. Which is perfect, too. Sometimes.
Conversation with Kieron in Bath the other week led to me actually thinking about creating art, actually considering where I aim, why I aim, why I stopped wanting so badly to be a critic. And, somehow, it all came out because Kate Nash and Gareth Los Camp! do something that BSS and TVotR don't i.e. see the world immediately around them, not the world as a whole. A theme of the last week or so. Specificity. That's why Jarman works so well tonight.
I have, in my head, the picture of the opening pages of a comic I haven't written: On the Severn Bridge there is stood a man in a trench-coat, who sits somewhere between me and Ian Curtis and the idea of 'It's a Wonderful Life'. For a few panels he's smoking as people and cars pass him, before saying 'Fuck It'. Then you'll turn to page 2, which pulls out to quite some distance so you see his body mid-air, between girders and currents. Page 3 is a page of text, what is yet undecided. That's what I've seen. How many young kids are uninspired in the south of Wales now, looking at the empty pits around them, uninspired, unable to afford aspirations and ideals, just wondering the best way to get the fuck off and stop? How many middle class kids do I know who have, at one time or another, felt that same sensation, but have had money to hand? We don't know sickness, nor do we know poverty. But pain is relative. As is art.
There is not only one mainstream. There are too many cultures and to many dominant ideas. Think on every advertising exec courting a different base, every 'cult' artist and 'indie' hero. Every man's freedom fighter is someone else's terrorist. Terrorism is required by the society in order to justify the Spectacle towards which production works to uphold. Debord talks more sense than News 24, perhaps because News 24 is a side effect of the type of society that Debord discusses. But I still don't understand if I'm supposed to rail against or embrace the Society of the Spectacle. You see, I like that I can create this world in my own image, it just sickens me that there are industries devoted to it. But the only reason I can absorb as much culture as I can is because of that industry. Tough fucking biscuit to bite.
I have a facebook group for The Polaroid Press. Adam has provided the first guest entry for the site now, that's up. My most recent entry is the closest I've come to putting my Sound Gen time into words. I wonder when, or if, I'll manage to actually approach the year in Angel, or how I'm feeling about events over a decade old?
Weird shit. |
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