A Burst Water Pipe and Valentines Day as ‘One In The Other – Illustrating a Neobaroque Paradigm

One of the things I try to avoid my Blog becoming, is a diary. Nevertheless, as I sit down to write, trying to clear preconceptions from my head about what I might write today, I can’t help thinking that it is both valentines day and the day on which a pipe has burst in the yard. Water has been pouring out for quite a while, until, that is, the mysterious stopcock was located, and now things are under greater control. As for valentines day, it’s a sweet event, rooted perhaps in the distant European past, to mark a time of couples and couplings as the longer days and sight of crocuses begin to herald Spring; when natural forces within and without us conspire to make hearts swell (at least I certainly feel I have been coming back to life in recent weeks).

Now I have given myself the absurd challenge of creatively linking or intertwining these two apparently unrelated and possibly incongruous events – a burst water pipe and valentines day. So, let me first say that they ARE both events, and that it might be wise to perceive and evaluate life and experience in terms of events rather than, e.g. ‘things’.

I did with, or got done with things a long time ago. In fact I even wrote and gave a lecture, which was subsequently turned into an article in a journal, under the working title ‘I Don’t Believe In Things’ (an editor replaced this, unfortunately, with something slightly less interesting). In that article I referred to that well known French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his vision of late 20th century complexities as ‘neobaroque’. By invoking the 17th century aesthetic of baroque, Deleuze asks us to see our environment according to a pre-modern paradigm. In introductory terms, if you look at baroque painting, architecture, sculpture, music or dance you will see a kind of flaw, as in a misshapen pearl (from which baroque takes its name),; a flaw that is also a movement, a sign of a change, a differentiation, without which we would have stasis or a rigid kind of order (which some of course prefer). Baroque is nothing but complex and Deleuze seemed to believe that modern aesthetics were not complex enough to encompass and describe late 20th century experience.

So, valentines day and a burst pipe in the yard are both events. They don’t exclude each other but each is included in the other. ‘One in the other’ is a phrase that Deleuze sometimes used (it was also the name of a small, independent, London art space for a while), and here you can see differentiation from a ‘thing’-based paradigm, in which one thing excludes another or might not be able to occupy the same space as another. I should add: ‘They don’t exclude each other but each is included in the other’ – and so all is ‘and’: and, and, and (neobaroque paradigm), rather than ‘is, is, is (thing-based paradigm). In fact, somewhere Deleuze wrote that we should never say ‘the tree is green, but rather ‘the tree and green’ (perhaps that is also helpful to painters).

It always charmed me that, in an interview on this subject, Deleuze once said words to the effect that: ‘my favourite sentence is: “There will be a concert tonight” ‘. It’s possible to discern what he means in terms of an event-based paradigm that is always laden with promise and which acknowledges that we are never in a fixed position of knowing but always on the curve, in the baroque turn, or curl, of changing events about which we really ‘know’ little. Knowledge here cedes to experience and we all become surfers of a swirling baroque time.

I was going to write something about altruism being the basis of long-lasting relationships here, but I don’t want my Blog to become a kind of advice column either. Suffice to say that the burst pipe is no-longer gushing; I made my partner a nice card; as well as managing to write my Blog for the day and for this week, and so, these events, which might have seemed incongruous or in conflict might be seen, in neobaroque terms, to include and not exclude each other – ‘one in the other’.

The Difficulty of Locating Ease

Is it always difficult? Does it get more difficult? Or does it get any easier?

Much of the time lately, when so many of our usual escape mechanisms are denied to us, we find ourselves confronted with the difficulties of our lives and careers. We have to face ourselves more existentially than we might. Aches and pains we have to deal with ourselves rather than running to the doctor, our work and workspace is transformed in ways to which we are forced to adapt, and there is a compound sense of difficulty, in us, for us, but also all around us. The radio news and other news feeds remind us hourly of the greater difficulties currently being experienced by others in far more difficulty than ourselves. And yet, all the time that we focus on the difficulties we surely overlook the eases in our lives and our work.

Experience and repetition makes many a task easier than when we first encountered it. And we all-too-easily take for granted all the ‘labour-saving’ gadgets that make modern life easier than it was 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. Ease is also a state, a condition (challenged by ‘dis-ease’), a state or condition of relaxation and well-being. When there are constant demands made upon us, and constant demands that we demand of ourselves, it can be nigh impossible to locate that ease. The tasks we haven’t yet completed seem more tiring and stress-inducing than those we are doing or have done. Whether we are resting, walking, eating, cooking or ‘working’ we seem to always be working and to have work on our minds.

New technologies of course brought work into the home in a new way that has changed all of our lives. The outcome of the pandemic seems to be that home-working will become more of a norm. Hence, yet again, work and difficulty come to conquer ease and well being. It wasn’t always thus however, even if we recall our youth we can reclaim the image of a less anxious way of life in which we generously awarded ourselves fun and pleasure even when we had achieved nothing in order to ‘deserve’ it. The pressures and demands of surviving, and if possible ‘succeeding’ seem to disallow all of that in later life.Nevertheless, some people are certainly better than others at achieving a ‘work/life balance’, and drawing a line between work and play.

Any artist who has made the move in their mind to see that ‘everything is art’, ‘everything can be art’, and ‘everyone is an artist’ etc. nobly liberates themselves, others, and art itself in this mental process. However, at the same time we could be said to imprison ourselves in a life and a world where there is no escape from art and therefore (for an artist) from work, from enquiry, speculations, research, sketching, making, archiving, evaluation, discussing etc.

Even this Blog is a kind of work, a kind of duty, a kind of service, a kind of labour that I have imposed on myself with a resilient weekly structure. When I recall why, at times I have suspended or re-started my Blog, and why I have often worked on something rather than let it lie, it is often because it is easier to do the work than to not do the work, because when not doing the work there s something always demanding that I do the work.

Personally, I think I am driven by insecurities, the fact that I can’t own my own home, and live in fear of falling down (see last week’s ‘Falling Up’ blog) all the time, back down to the ignominious realms I inhabited in my 20s and 30s. I must secretly believe that all my hard work will one day be justly and amply recognised and rewarded, even though there is little evidence of that to date.

There were times in my life when I had to make decisions about taking what seemed to be an easier and a more difficult path. I tended to scrutinise them at length and choose the more difficult-seeming, while never convinced that the more easy-seeming would really turn out be easier.

It’s difficult even to know how to end this week’s Blog post, so I guess I am just in a difficult time. I’ll end at least on an easier note, a little quote about painting that a friend drew my attention to yesterday. Perhaps there is some relief in this:

‘My uncle had left a paintbox in our attic. This object, which I had been forbidden to touch, fascinated me. One day I forced the lid and squeezed the tubes; blues, reds and greens squirted forth. I took a sheet of cardboard on which the vestiges of a landscape were still visible, and added a roof and trees. I was astounded. Was this painting? It was so easy!’
The French fauvist painter Othon Friesz, born 1879.

Falling Up

We all fall, the important thing is to fall up.

Yes, from time to time, we all fall, and often our falling is not of our own making. Something or someone lets us down, doesn’t conform to our own standards, disables us from maintaining our own standards but yes, one way or another we have to find a way and our own way to fall up and not down. By falling up I mean that, despite what has happened we don’t let go of or lose sight of our own standards, and somehow, through and beyond the difficulties we have to undergo and undertake as a result of this interruption of our usual trajectory, our usual ‘gait’ we might say, we have to maintain that trajectory, that gait, which is, of course, a generally optimistic journey that we call our life, our identity, our reality.

I’ve worked on a memoir (or should I day ‘some memoir writing’) from time to time. Whether it will ever be fully formed and published I don’t now.. I hope so, as I particularly enjoy this kind of writing, and it seems to be somehow less pressured than other forms, perhaps because, after all, only I (only you) can tell this story and there is a certain freedom and a special and precious truth in it for that reason. I long ago decided the title of it would be ‘Falling Up’, and here the title refers (or at least referred -the last time I worked on my memoir- ) to class relationships, which are habitually visualised as a vertical phenomenon, i.e. ‘Low’ and ‘Higher’ classes, ‘Upper’ class etc.

It seemed to me, in choosing this title, that I have indeed lived in a close dialogue with this vertical model, and always felt my life, career and identity to be some kind of ‘upward’ journey from once class to another, from unemployment, to unskilled employment, to skilled employment, as well as from a poor diet, housing and dress to better housing, diet and dress, and from poor vocabulary and articulation to better vocabulary and articulation etc.

Nevertheless, all the time I have been apparently ‘ascending’ in this way – and I have to say here, that it has been a whole lifetime of genuine struggles and setbacks, and which are not over yet – it has never felt like simply climbing a mountain or a set of steep steps but just as much a series of crises, disasters, immense challenges, and falls – hence ‘Falling Up’. Sometimes, out of a disaster would come an unexpected ‘silver lining’ a way out, ‘up’ and forwards that could not have been predicted. And yet, as above, I think this might also have been because, at every time I fell (perhaps occasionally pushed as well) something inside me (along with friends, family and other benign forces outside me) insisted on rescuing me, insisted on the continuation (refusing the ruination) of myself, my story, my standards and my reality.

I suspect that this is what most of us do, and that when we don’t, or for those who don’t or can’t, catastrophe ensues. I sometimes think I took this propensity to ‘insist’ upon the continuation of my own narrative, against all odds, from my mother, who would work tirelessly to help each of her five children (well into their adulthood) to right their boat whenever it had ‘turned turtle’; and who, I think, sometimes strategically put her head in the sand, or stuck her fingers in her ears while making noises with her mouth until something unacceptably negative had either gone away or been absorbed into the fabric of her reality in such a way that it was no longer unacceptably salient, no longer intruding on her spinal narrative of a good life and a happy and fair (enough) world. This stubborn insistence on maintaining happiness and well-being of course made my mum radiate goodness, virtue, optimism and promise, like a perfect apple.

As we said at the outset, when we fall it is often caused by external forces that force us to relocate, to take a grip on, and to keep ‘climbing’ the ‘ladder’ of our own reality. Sometimes that is hard to do, and you might even have opponents or assailants trying to prize your fingers off the rungs and to destroy your ‘ladder’ and replace it with their own. In such circumstances you can repeat the mantra, ‘I may have fallen, but I insist upon falling up’.

‘House of Hummingbird’ – movie review

Last night I got to watch an excellent movie. The director is a Korean woman named Bora Kim. I think I might have seen a short movie by her before, the name certainly ‘rings a bell’ as they say in England. The subject matter of the movie was the experiences of a young girl, of about 12- 14 years I guess, growing up in a quite poor, hard-working family, traumatised by its own struggles.

Sharing a small space puts an enormous psychological pressure on people in relative poverty, compared with those who grow up with more ample space in which to negotiate rapidly changing minds and identities. Here at the centre of a huge concrete architectural edifice we find all the vulnerabilities of a young heart in a rapidly growing and changing mind and body.

People can quickly learn to resent and despise one another in cramped and straitened circumstances, and in part this movie documents the ways in which a family reaches a kind of nadir or low point in their negotiations of space, economics and identity, only to find glimpses of new understandings and a promise of happier times by movie’s end.

I was very glad to be watching a movie made by a woman about the experiences of a young girl. Sadly, this is a rare experience. In fact, I suspect the number of such movies I have watched in my life might amount to a mere handful, a sure sign of a terrible and wasteful gender imbalance in our society. Everything about this film is unusually sensitive. Its narratives progress at a subtle and soft, almost unnoticeable pace, and while we certainly witness the brutalities that can encircle a young girl’s development we also encounter various kinds and moments of tenderness. When we do, we see all the more how every human being is, either deep down, or right there on the surface, fragile, vulnerable, sensitive, in need of love, care, understanding and companionship.

I’ve alluded to patriarchy above, regarding the movie-making business and the dominance of male tales and perspectives and power. In this movie the men are often at fault of oppressive violence, misunderstanding love, cheating, presumption and arrogance, all oozing out of outmoded traditions such as male primo-geniture (the promoted importance of the first born male in any family). Eventually though, we see that the men too need to crack, break-open and cry to find the love and tenderness inside them, if and when they are confident enough to ‘let their guard down’ (yes, a boxing metaphor).

As for the young girl’s relationships with other girls and women, these can sometimes be brutal too, at least in the way that children can be competitive, spiteful, and fickle about friendships. Her mother is caught-up at the heart of all the domestic strife, and quietly grieving for a brother who has suddenly and prematurely died (perhaps killed himself?). That brother mysteriously visited his sister, just before his death, seemingly to remind her of all the (overshadowed and wasted) intellectual promise she had shown before getting married, a promise that he, despite being the prioritised first-born son,, never actually had, and thus could never fulfil for the family.

Meanwhile, an influential and redemptive female figure appears in the form of a cram-school teacher, supplying after-school extra Chinese lessons. This elegant, educated, politically left-leaning and independent-minded young woman takes the main character into her confidence and ‘under her wing’, showing her a kind of love, faith and possibility that can’t be found at school or within the family.

Blood, violence, pain, illness and tragedy all help, obliquely and eventually (and again slowly and subtly) to bring the family together and to leave the story ending on an optimistic note. One reviewer claimed this film was a little too long, but I enjoyed it so much (crying much of the way through, as I all-too-easily and often do) that I saw the length of the film as merely a ramification of the directors’ insistence on telling the story her own way, with an appropriate and requisite sense of ease and at a gentle pace (perhaps embodying what the philosopher Julia Kristeva once deemed ‘woman’s time’).

There is also a wider historico-political frame to this movie. It’s set in 1994, and may be autobiographical (I will be watching an interview with the director streamed live this evening -see links below- and hoping to find out more about this). On the way to school the children pass protesting banners that proclaim the plight of people being forced out of their homes to accommodate aggressive redevelopment. Small-space, impoverished and regimented, identical high-rise housing are always part of the political ‘frame’ in which this young life is presented. At one point, during a walk in the dark with her inspiring and enigmatic cram-school teacher friend, the main character asks about these banners: “why would anyone take away someone else’s home?”. It’s a simple and naive sounding question but one which seems to have the whole absurd and bullying structure of capitalism loaded within it.

The ultimate tragedy of the film sees its ‘small’ narratives, on which we have concentrated, caught up with a national disaster when a major bridge crossing Seoul’s Han river collapses during morning rush hour (a real historical event). This, again, implies corrupt, competitive, corrosive and careless forces operating within a society focused and founded on profit and exploitation when it clearly – given the central narrative and meaning of the film – should instead prioritise that very fragility, tenderness, and care promoted so subtly, and I think wonderfully throughout this movie.

BTW, I haven’t yet discovered how and why the title applies to the movie ? ?

If you want to see it live-streamed for free you can do so today until 11pm 24th Jan 2021 – I think using THIS LINK.
Meanwhile there is a live streamed interview with the director at 11pm UK time. Links here:

With many thanks to Philip Gowman of London Korean Links for letting me know about this film and these events.

Feed The Crying Cat

Is there a difference between night and day? Where does one end and the other begin. When the sky grows dark I begin to wind-in my energies and exertions, wind-down my sense of duty, and gradually move towards a state of relaxation and hopefully sound sleep. I wake before the light in the sky has returned, but at at a time that we can call ‘day’.

In the dark I manoeuvre, doing those things that will help me to feel better, more ‘normal’ as sleep seems to have cast a heavy cloak that covers me outside and in. Gradually, I shake it off by eating, drinking, exercising. In my new home, some glass doors open onto a little terrace and yard. Over the wall of the yard I can see a street lamp. I don’t think I have ever seen it switch on, but I see it go off sometimes, heralding the official arrival of daylight.

Inside the yard the neighbours upstairs have roughly hung a stream of coloured light bulbs. Because the switch for their socket is in my terrace I have become responsible for switching them on when it gets dark – they really cheer-up the yard – then I switch them off again before I go to bed, and switch them on again through the dark early morning, brightening things up for that difficult time between waking and the day really beginning. Whenever I go out to switch the lights on or off, I experience a tiny burst of weather, fresh air, sometimes rain and usually cold. It’s a pleasure of a kind. This morning going out to switch on the lights, I felt like a monk, as if my new home is a temple, as if turning the lights on and off is my monastic duty, my contribution to the community of the ‘temple’ – like fetching wood, or water, or sweeping. I suppose the temple life is still an ideal for me and perhaps for many others.

We strive and toil, against all those odds outside us and all those odds inside us, all those odds and obstacles close and far; we strive and toil to achieve worldly success and recognition, and yet, anyone who has witnessed the calm rhythms of temple life might also feel, deep inside, that the apparent absence of desire found there, the humble and noble reconciliation with the relative importance of daily ordinary acts, is something with which worldly achievements simply cannot compete.

Perhaps we are embroiled in Maya to an extent that it is impossible for us to escape or transcend, and we are resigned, more or less ironically to being bound to fail, both in our particular ambitions and as human beings. And yet, the model of the monk or nun and the temple, the attention to small daily, routines and rituals, can, and does, I think, assist us at least, reminding us that, whatever our worldly dreams might dangle before our eyes, creating conflict between our best and worst mind, it is these simple and necessary daily routines and rituals that in the end make us who and what we are. Remembering to create balance by seeing them as of equal importance to any other aspiration in our lives is very important. Simply maintaining them is most important of all. As I write this, one of the neighbours upstairs descends the metal staircase into the yard, and – as they always do at about this time every day – feeds a crying cat.

Working All The Time – Even In My Sleep

Lately I’ve been trying to relax by walking and by listening to the radio and by reading ‘lighter’ materials, and yet, the walks turn into meditations or talks, the radio seems to fill me with thoughts about creativity, and the supposedly ‘lighter’ reading materials seem just as relevant to my work as do philosophical tomes. Even when I do yoga I seem to find it hard to switch my mind off of a certain intense self-reflexivity and internal dialogue. And, unfortunately, I’ve been finding that my sleep is also occupied with some kind of activity or anxiety that makes me wake-up with a tensed stomach, sometimes causing nausea for some or all of the morning. Andre Breton, in his manifesto of 1924 included the following anecdote: “A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: ‘THE POET IS WORKING’ “. However, I don’t think they had in mind here the cramped stomach that has been afflicting my mornings of late.

Working all the time. Yes, that’s true. Sometimes its painful, stressful. At others its joyful, when things are going well, which, in turn means that I know what it is I am doing, have to do, what I am doing feels like my best and, most of all, I can see how it is going to be resolved, published, set before an audience or ‘the public’. That’s when things are going well. But yes, it’s true I think that for decades now I’ve found it near-impossible to separate work from play, personal from professional life. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing, but it probably starts out in not having a professional background, context, and upbringing. I didn’t have ‘professional’ parents, though my mum and dad were both very hard-working and conscientious, I now realise, as parents / breadwinners.

As I’ve often tried to relay, here and in other writings, the first decades of my adult life were marked by a very unprofessional naivety and confusion. ‘Naivety’ because I just had no idea or information about the professional fields in which I tried to find success, how they might unfold, what they required or demanded; and ‘confusion’ because I kept flipping and flopping between different career paths at the same time as approaching them all with the aforementioned naivety. It was somewhere towards the end of this, in my late 30s, that I stated to feel -perhaps as a way of getting beyond that confusion – that absolutely everything in my life was art and/or connected to art and/ or was research for art. I know I’m far from unique in feeling this, and yet sometimes I think or fear that there is something not quite right about the way I conflate it all. Also, as anyone in middle-age or older might recognise, life has a knack of creeping up on you and filling your time and your mind with anxieties, concerns and issues that mean it is harder and harder to locate any freedom to indulge yourself in pleasures, relaxations and recreations that you might have done without thinking when you were younger.

The best kind of work is of course, not only satisfying and rewarding in a creative way but also financially rewarding, or in some other way gives you something tangible back in the way of recognition, status, reputation, promotion etc. Unfortunately, after all these years, decades of working writing, publishing etc. I still find myself working for weeks and months on inspired pieces that, for reasons beyond my control, do not find a home, do not get published, and are not financially rewarded or in any way acknowledged. This is a great frustration for me, and one of the worst things about it is that so many pieces like this, into which I have invested great amounts of time, lots of creative thinking and some valuable ideas, then get lost in my sprawling and amateurish ‘filing system’. Now, even if something changes in the future, and I do find an outlet for a piece, often I will have trouble trying to retrieve the last version I was working on.

I sometimes fantasise about being spun back in time to an age when a lecturer with my experience and qualifications and record of publications might by now have an office provided by the university – but even my managers and managers’ managers don’t have those any more. I also dream about the image of an author who employs both a secretary and an agent, one to organise and the other to ‘place’ their work in the market, and thus – in return for an investment in these helping hands – is able to make a real living and achieve recognition for all that they are capable of doing.

But of course I resign myself to doing the best I can with the situation I have and with my own shortcomings, tight budget, and various lacks. Ultimately, I feel I work all the time not just because I ‘successfully’ blurred the ‘gap between art and life’ in my late 30s but also, in part, because, having made a breakthrough at age 40 into professional work that could sustain a basic living – i.e. pay the rent on a city apartment – I felt, from that moment, that I had to make-up for those lost decades when I couldn’t earn anything at all, had no professional context, fell in and out of low-paid labouring jobs, bounced on and off the dole, and kept trying to work out what kind of artist I thought I was.

I suspect that I have indeed ‘made-up’ now for as much of those semi-wasted years as I can, but still I don’t seem to know where and when and what is ‘not working’. Finally, don’t get me wrong, I’m not proud of this, it’s something I would love to go beyond into a new, perhaps more enjoyable and healthier way of ‘working’ and ‘living’.

Broaching inhibition to inhabit a fait accompli

Concentration, concentration, concentration, that’s what you need. Life is more full that it has ever been before with distractions, with other voices, wills, needing, craving, demanding attention. And yet writing is yours only, in some way, some way that perhaps those who don’t write much or don’t write often, or don’t write ‘seriously’ don’t encounter (sorry, that’s a lot of don’ts).

It may be difficult, even impossible to write in a careless, non-attentive way. To do so would, it seems, require a certain care and attention. To write carelessly would also be to strive to produce something of no value, and, perhaps you can see that this is unlikely to work either. If I consciously write what the English call ‘gibberish’ the consciousness will provide a context for the gibberish by means of which the gibberish becomes valuable, at least ‘interesting’ as something testing the limits of the value of various forms of writing.

I don’t think of this as a diary, and so I try to avoid sentences that begin with the words: ‘This week I …” but this week I, among other things, continued my recent obsessive indulgence with and attention to what seems to me to be a very healthily burgeoning new-punk scene in British Indie music. ‘New Punk’ is not an adequate name, and I would love to be the one who eventually names it, but I am not there yet.

Aside from the music and the particular kind of delivery used by the vocalists in this scene (which seems to revolve around Radio 6 Music DJ Marc Riley) I came to focus on their lyrics, and therefore on their writing. It’s tempting to extract the lyrics and claim that they stand up on their own right as indicative of this vibrantly progressive and experimental subculture, but in fact the music and the particular kind of delivery used by the vocalists is inseparable from the way their lyrics will be read/interpreted/inseparable from what they mean.

This thought seems to plunge me back into the very heart of all I have ever wanted to do as an artist and writer, or artist/writer. This synthesis or fusion of what we mean to say and its dependence upon how we say it (whether you be a writer, painter, video maker, performer, installation artist, sculptor etc.) is the core it seems to me of our mission, our motive and our aspiration.

The great thing about the artists I’ve been listening to on the radio is that they’ve found that synthesis – invariably by working with others – and it’s worth noting that they’ve found it by stepping over a certain edge of inhibition, forcing themselves to fly (or we might say ‘swim’) by removing their own safety harness or going purposefully ‘out of their depth’.

I have experienced this myself, and on occasions in my long and winding career, breached or broached my inhibitions to release my voice and my body from who I supposedly ‘am’ into becoming something or someone other – yes, the artist. On one occasion I even changed my name to mark the fact, and thus made a fait accompli of my metamorphosis.

In more modest ways I can also recall ‘improving’ and progressing as the player of a musical instrument by realising that I had to let my hands do what they were capable of, not trying to make them do what I wanted them to do or thought I could make them do. By releasing my own power over my hands they started to do something that neither I nor they could previously do, and that was a profound lesson. It reminds me of another lesson that a first year undergrad taught me, her teacher, and taught the rest of her peer group. When I asked the group what they or ‘we’ might believe in today, the student I am referring to said: “I believe in my hands!”.

Now, I am not currently planning on changing my name, and I am not regularly gigging, rehearsing or writing in a burgeoning new-punk band, but I hope that some of the lessons I have learned from the above experiences nevertheless feed into my writing on a daily basis; that, in my Blog here and in the many other forms of writing I am involved with, I do somehow, step out of my comfort zone, broach my inhibitions and allow my hands and mind to produce something that I neither intend nor govern.

If you don’t mind, I will partially illustrate this Post by pasting below lyrics from two current songs that really impress me. Perhaps, having read them you might be able to go and listen to the way in which they are performed by the artist in a relevant YouTube video.

‘Scratchcard Lanyard‘
by Dry Cleaning

Many years have passed but you’re still charming
Rose falling and exploding and you can’t save the world on your own
I guess
Don’t send me it
You keep it
You keep it
You keep it
Weak arms can’t open the door, kung fu council
It’ll be okay, I just need to be weird and hide for a bit
And eat an old sandwich from my bag
I’ve come here to make a ceramic shoe
And I’ve come to smash what you made
I’ve come to learn how to mingle
I’ve come to learn how to dance
I’ve come to join your knitting circle
I’ve come to hand weave my own bunk bed ladder in a few short sessions
It’s a Tokyo bouncy ball
It’s an Oslo bouncy ball
It’s a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball
Filter, I love these mighty oaks, don’t you?
Do everything and feel nothing
Wristband, theme park, scratchcard, lanyard
Do everything and feel nothing
Do everything and feel nothing
Pat Dad on the head
Alright, you big loud mouth
Thanks very much for the Twix
I think of myself as a hardy banana with that waxy surface
And small delicate flowers
A woman in aviators firing a bazooka
A woman in aviators firing a bazooka
I’ve come here to make a ceramic shoe
And I’ve come to smash what you made
I’ve come to learn how to mingle
I’ve come to learn how to dance
I’ve come to join the knitting circle
That’s just child chat
Why don’t you want oven chips now?
It’s a Tokyo bouncy ball
It’s an Oslo bouncy ball
It’s a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball
Filter, I love these mighty oaks, don’t you?
Do everything and feel nothing
Wristband, theme park, scratchcard, lanyard
Do everything and feel nothing
Do everything and feel nothingYou seem really together, you’ve got a new coat, new hair
Well, I’ll tell you one thing, you’ve got it coming
One day, you’re gonna get it
Ha

‘SCIENCE FAIR‘
by Black Country, New Road

I met her accidentally
It was at the Cambridge Science FairAnd she was so impressed I could make so many things catch on fire
But I was just covered in bubbles of methane gas
And you ended up burning
I’m sorryI have always been a liar
Just to think I could’ve left the fair with my dignity intact
And fled from the stage with the world’s second-best Slint tribute act
Okay, today, I hide away
But tomorrow, I take the reins
Still living with my mother
As I move from one micro-influencer to another
References, references, references
What are you on tonight?
I love this city, despite the burden of preferences
What a time to be alive, oh I know where I’m going, it’s black country out there

I saw you undressing
It was at the Cirque du Soleil
And it was such an intimate performance
I swear to God you looked right at me
And let a silk red ribbon fall between your hands
But as I slowly sobered
I felt the rubbing of shoulders
I smelled the sweat and the children crying
I was just one among crowded stands
And still with sticky hands
I bolted through the gallery
With cola stains on my best white shirt
And nothing to lose, oh, I was born to run
It’s black country out there
It’s black country out there
It’s black country out there

Travelling Forward, Looking Back, Ready For The Messiah In Everythings

Sometimes you feel better than others. But, in a way, you are always looking to feel good. How do you feel good? It might depend on what you eat, your health, your relationships, your economy, your housing, your environment, the news. I think that Walter Benjamin says somewhere that all our models of happiness are drawn from previous experiences. That might sound obvious, but I think he was getting at something profoundly interesting (as he usually is), i.e. though we appear to live and progress in something like a forward motion what we are fundamentally seeking – well being or happiness – is always based on past experiences, and in this way we might also be living backwards, or perhaps travelling into the future while looking back, or even not seeing new ways to well-being and happiness because they are ‘un-re-cognisable’.

If so, is it possible to change this, to perhaps become more open to, and aware of unprecedented forms of well being and happiness, of kinds we have never experienced, and derived from surprising sources? This seems desirable and advisable. There is a lot of ‘retro’ in our culture right now. The music and cultural critic Simon Reynolds recently published a book called ‘Retromania‘, and David Edgerton another called ‘Shock of the Old‘, while Craig Staff published ‘Retroactivity in Contemporary Art‘, and I have also been publishing my own ‘Technologies of Romance‘ series. All of these publications are interested in the way we might today need to glean values from the past in a society whose future seems to have become newly curtailed or compressed.

Some years ago, the cultural critic Francis Fukuyama published a controversial thesis (largely seen as conservative and later revised) proposing that we have arrived at ‘The End of History‘ – ‘we’ of course being a convenient and largely mythical abstraction or ideal loosely referring to all citizens of the so-called ‘leading nations’. I work with young students all the time and it’s true that = according to the experience of my generation – a certain dynamic narrative of endless innovation and renewal has come to be questioned, dampened, ironicised and itself rendered mythical.

And yet, we could argue that cultural progress is taking different forms, i.e. no-longer obeying, or being perceived as, a linear model but rather – and according to our new relationship with the globe and the global – as a constant, immanent state of volatility, a chaos of constant rejuvenations, explosions of non-linear progress that inform one another but don’t have any clear or geometric form or understandable accumulative effect.

My students seem to have everything contemporary available to them along with everything of the past, in ways that I can’t recall having when I was their age. Out of these multiple ‘everythings’ they create an unprecedented present constantly jolted by events, large and small (9/11, a text message). This way of life has no apparent plan or hope to guide it, rather, its philosophy might be characterised by that millennial buzzword ‘Whatever!’. This might sound resigned, cynical and negative but in fact it is equally vigilant, open to possibility and positive.

After all, Benjamin also wrote that all those who wait for some kind of messiah (this could be Christians, Marxists, Modernists … ) need to be aware that a, or the messiah can and might appear at ANY time and at ANY place. To live in such an enlightened state, prepared for happiness, well-being, fulfilment, as well as form and meaning, at ALL times and in ALL places, may just be the best way for us to live today.

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ – A Guide to Cooking on Gas in a Mature Practice?

Every time I write and every time I write this Blog I am hoping for surprises. To be honest, like most creative people I expect, I am always hoping not only to exceed what I thought were my current abilities as an artist and writer but also ( … oh dear in writing the ‘not only’ I have forgotten what the ‘but also’ was, perhaps a sign of ‘maturity’?. So let me think again … ah yes, that was it …) but also to ‘hit pay dirt’ as they say, to start ‘cooking on gas’ as they also say (though who this ‘they’ is we never seem to know, and I, for one, have never met ‘them’, to my knowledge).

‘Hitting pay dirt’ is slightly different from ‘cooking on gas’ I suppose, and I think both are desirable while the former is perhaps slightly preferable. Though I don’t mean here ‘pay’ necessarily with regard to cash or income, rather I just mean that – and to go back to the start – every time I write and every time I write this Blog I am hoping for, not only surprises in general but also the surprise of finding myself writing, not only better, not only consistently at a heightened level (that might just be ‘cooking on gas’), but writing consistently to a standard that I have occasionally only glimpsed here and there, now and then in my writing, and/or perhaps going beyond that, excelling and excelling-myself is, I suppose, what I mean.

You get older and sometimes you might feel your best work is behind you. You read old articles, essays and sketches and wonder how on earth you could have been so inventive, intense, witty and productive. Then again, aren’t your early works just a little ‘green’ (any reference to Joni Mitchell there was unconscious and unintended), i.e. a little hyperactive and over-stuffed with self-conscious displays of new-found abilities?

Yes, the mature writer (N.B. writing and maturity go together far better than some of my other youthful ambitions, such as football star, astronaut etc.) must appreciate that sooooo much has now been learned, and indeed can be ‘taken for granted’ concerning our abilities, after professionally writing, editing and publishing well over a million of words, that we have to turn our mind to concerning ourselves with other, perhaps ‘larger’ or ‘meta’ matters, e.g. issues of scale and form as well as particular audiences, editors, personal agendas or even ‘markets’. And, while concentrating on these meta matters, the writing itself tends now to take care of itself. Your ‘babies’ are too old now to require constant supervision, you just have to trust them to behave in a manner that you approve of, and hopefully to do well, and perhaps even do better than you expect them to.

Now, the great god of chance, who is one of my only consistent and trusted guides in life, just led us (see above) into an unexpected encounter with the artist Joni Mitchell. I have to confess she has been on my mind (or should I say “in my blood”) this week after pulling my vinyl copy of her classic album ‘Blue’ out of my collection, sitting myself down comfortably and listening to the whole masterpiece from end to end with no interruption other than that necessary to flip the record over to side two (which is not really an interruption but rather a crucial part of the ritual for which the running order was carefully designed).

I have to admit, I cried repeatedly and almost throughout, as I always seem to do when I listen to this album, or just listen to the artist’s voice on this album, a voice which, even if as a non-English speaker I didn’t understand her language, carries a special emotional timbre that I can’t find anywhere else in the world, and not even on any other Joni Mitchell album. I’ve mentioned before in this Blog how the tears that can come in response to a work of art always seem to me to mix the ‘salt’ of pure open-hearted pleasure, affect and admiration with the ‘pepper’ of acknowledging in some deep place that I will never make a work of art as great as the one that I am contemplating. I may be wrong about this mix, and perhaps it needs remixing but I hope you. the reader will concede and concur that there certainly are mixed emotions present in almost all lachrymose events.

Anyway, I’ll sign-off now, hoping that this rapid sortie into speculating once again on my own abilities as a writer, and my own qualities and experiences as a human being might have taken me a little further towards my ultimate goal of creative fulfilment and artistic attainment. Perhaps Joni Mitchell’s Blue can provide some kind of guide or bench-mark when attempting to attain our best work in our maturity … but then again, she was just twenty eight years old when she made it!

Guile-less ‘singing’ – the unadorned sound of truth amid a miasma of Mendacious mediation

I recently shared with friends some examples of what I called ‘guile-less singers’. What I meany by that was singers, of a kind that I have recently heard a lot on my radio, who sing in an unusually natural way, one that has no apparent concern whatsoever with what we might think of as ‘good’, ‘trained’, accurate’ sining. Instead they sing as you would imagine they would chat with you and in this way somehow cut across and cut through something that divides singer from listener, so that each and both share a certain equality.

If progressive DJs are featuring such artists (I’ll list a few later), it might coincide with a combined legacy of rap, punk, and I would claim Bob Dylan circa 1965 that is also apparent in many young bands and their singers (or ‘front persons’). Many of these (again I’ll list a few later) don’t sing at all but deliver slabs of lyric reasoning in as deadpan a way as possible, while usually maintaining some element of rhyme.

Dispensing with the ornament of melody, along with the value of expertise, again, creates a bridge between ‘singer’ and audience, across which whatever emotional, ironic, political or other content the lyrics might contain and convey can be traded, immediately, directly, clearly and without effort – after all, we all know of songs we have loved for years but whose lyrics we have never quite translated, disguised as they are by the melody and its artful performance.

Perhaps, in an age of swirling mass communications, much of which hurts us, bores us, confuses us, or wastes our precious time artist and audience seek something honest and well-meant in these tuneless and guile-less voices I have been noticing recently? Singing/talking/shouting/rapping in this way (often with a pronounced local accent) offers something solid and reliable, as well as unambiguous and unequivocal. We may therefore be looking at a kind of ‘truth claim here.

It’s surely true that what we have been discussing from the outset here is a heightened form of honesty, and that honesty is, it seems, in very short supply in our world full of mediations, fakery and downright lies all spewed-out by the ton and at an ever accelerating rate. Somewhere within this macabre and illicit miasma is the little human heart. We all have one, we each are one, and that is who and what I hear coming through these regional, trembling, dead-pan, shouted or spoken vocalists, who also have no fear in broaching the most ‘unpoetic’ of subjects.

Somehow, it seems, we need this new honesty to survive this monstrous moment. I might even try it myself sometime soon!

BTW some of the artists I was referring to include: Shirley Collins, Kath Bloom, Jessica Pratt, Nico, along with Robert Wyatt, Richard Dawson, Sleaford Mods, Idols, Porridge Radio, The Lovely Eggs, Dry Cleaning, and then yes there’s the whole rich legacy of Punk, plus so many kinds of rapping styles, some more guile-less than others of course, and that proto-punky, slammed-down wit that you find semi-spoke in Bob Dylan’s classic albums circa 1965.