Monday, November 13, 2006

Steven Fodders his Flicky

he arrives. featured victim.
chair with juice for him. live. mains power.
sit.
follow your nose, Steven says.
pavlov-u-like.
bells.
you can make hay. sunshine, Steven adds.
we help. we push fruit at you. that's life fruit. celebrity-shapes.
the nails go in. easily.
pre-drilling helps this.
we fix you over the workmate. as per regs and agreements.
you pay upfront. food is extra.
we film you. Steven directs.
wishing well by free is heard. followed by comic skull drumming.
with a chicken leg.
head-cheese, by tobe hooper, emits.
crossing-out-red. highlighter red.
kicking legs your end. noises.
but walls are thick. as per regs and agreements.
nails drawn out. more difficult.
claw hammer helps.
nails back in. too easy.
video changed.
skull drumming continues.
this time potato used.
maris piper.
back projection of hill-top.
any.
generic.
for effect.
we cover. we duck and cover. f111.
we write ionesco on your chin. and call you alfred jarry.

10 Comments:

Blogger St. Anthony said...

This reminds me of one of Mark E. Smith's stream of consciousness rants.
Stuff you don't know the literal meaning of but suggestive of all kinds of wonderful and oblique possibilities - "pavlov-u-like" and "we write ionesco on your chin. and call you alfred jarry" ... marvellous stuff.

Monday, November 13, 2006 9:48:00 am  
Blogger murmurists said...

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Monday, November 13, 2006 12:14:00 pm  
Blogger murmurists said...

Again, The Fall I know of course. But I have only limited detailed knowledge. I have several albums, and I do love certain things. I like the thing they did with Michael Clark and Leigh Bowry: I am Curious Orange. I know of course I am missing a lot in not being a close fan of their work. Again, it's choices, isn't it? I perhaps chose to get deeply into Jaco Pastorius or King Crimson instead. I like the literary bent Smith has. He's an artist. I still love Punk/New Wave. I've never lost that attitude. That's what I admire in him. He still has that; when other New Wavers (if you will) have turned their act into Showaddywadyy cabaret and hollow pub rock.

Monday, November 13, 2006 12:16:00 pm  
Blogger St. Anthony said...

Yes, punk still resonates with me (not just for the legacy of the broken nose).
I like to think of it as an attitude as much as a musical template. Burroughs was pure punk, for me. Smith has it completely.
Big fan of Fripp and Crimson.

Monday, November 13, 2006 12:30:00 pm  
Blogger murmurists said...

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Monday, November 13, 2006 12:55:00 pm  
Blogger murmurists said...

I think punk is politics. I used to operate - asan artist - under the rubric, Classwar Karaoke; and I still stand by that, totally. I still have that attitude. Doing the Doctorate was an expression of that. I was never meant to. I was supposed to be, at best (as it were), an electrician, and to drink my wages over the weekend. I wasn't supposed to read Derrida. I wasn't even supposed to know about Derrida. That anger - that Lydon anger, that class anger - drove me through.

Life Story stuff - but hope it makes the point.

Similiarly, Fripp/KC I got into at 13 or 14. Then I got their stuff with Belew and Levin, Discipline onwards, as it came out. From that, ECM jazz, Weather Report, Steve Reich, improv, industrial, Throbbing Gristle, etc. etc. I had an anger about how I claimed these things as my own. That comes from punk for sure. I knew when I heard Holiday in the Sun it was something more than a song. Years later, I saw Debord material at uni, read Marcus, etc.

To me, it is still a matter of arming yourself intellectually for the shit to come.

Monday, November 13, 2006 12:59:00 pm  
Blogger St. Anthony said...

I was working in a university library when it occurred to me that I was a damn sight better read than most of the students I met - thus my decision to go to university.
I blame it all on Joyce.
I was fortunate in having an older brother who was a Bowie fanatic - it was through that that I picked up on Burroughs and the Velvets very early ... and then punk happened, and changed almost everything for me. Burroughs and punk inform so much of the art I admire, no matter the medium. I like to think of retaining that anger - David Thomson writes about Derek Jarman's serene anger, a nice phrase.

Monday, November 13, 2006 2:42:00 pm  
Blogger murmurists said...

Yes: working-class intelligence. Sorry if it is inverted snobbery, but I subscribe to it.

Monday, November 13, 2006 4:21:00 pm  
Blogger St. Anthony said...

As M.E.S. would have it, the Prole Art Threat.

Monday, November 13, 2006 4:30:00 pm  
Blogger murmurists said...

Yes, I knew that phrase, and you brought it back to me. A friend - my best friend, who I met first at Uni in 1991 - used to spit that one out. It became a touchstone. I often had that idea and others like it in my mind and in my mouth when I took my agressive lecturers to task over their weird affections for a purely abstract art. Then, I would grub around for expressions of why such a position stinks of art-fish. Now, I see how clearly and quaintly irrationally they were, peddling that mumbo-jumbo for public money. I'm reminded in turn of Terry Atkinson's crit of Minimalism's own specious vie for a too-categorical visual purity, supposedly devoid of narrative and anything to do with self. Hilarious! Terry said, of minimalist abstraction: '...it's a figuration of non-figuration'. Step away from the polished cube.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 1:19:00 pm  

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