Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

731

I just caught the tail-end, on the radio, of a report dealing with medical experiments conducted in Britain by the military. The person being interviewed (obviously a military representative of some kind) persistently avoided the question of who was responsible for the records of the experiments that have subsequently been lost. The interviewer, his voice dripping with justified sarcasm, said at one point, "So you poison people, and then you 'lose' the records?"

As I say, I only caught the tail-end, but I imagine the story must be connected with Porton Down, apparently "the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world". We British have so much of which to be proud. I wonder if Porton Down has a plaque outside saying "Est. 1916".

Cunts.

Anyway... one reason amongst many that I was interested in this story was that, just yesterday, digging through episodes of Monkey Dust on Youtube (which I've been getting into again recently), I came across a sketch which looks like a reference to Porton Down. I'll see if I can find it again now. Ah, here it is, in the thing inset below, right after the first sketch about complete wankers:



Well, I could go off on a tangent about synchronicity, but I won't.

I'm not suggesting that the animated sketch above is a realistic depiction of what has gone on or goes on inside Porton Down, or, well, I certainly did not expect it to be, and I don't wish to find out first-hand, either. I noticed that the sketch mentioned the ebola virus, and did a quick search based on 'Porton Down' and 'Ebola'. From this article, we have the following:

[Porton Down] still sits among 7,000 acres of rolling Wiltshire countryside, with scientists working with the deadliest known disease agents - including bubonic plague, anthrax and even the ebola virus.

Opened in 1916 in response to Germany's use of the deadly mustard gas in the French trenches, Porton Down's history is filled with secret projects, whose real scope and intention were rarely explained to those on whom they were tested - which included servicemen and even travellers on the London Underground.

Scientists at Porton Down have always denied that they are engineering deadly new germs and chemicals for use against humans. They say their intention is only to understand how the weapons work, in order to forestall their effects.

But that has not stopped some shocking experiments from taking place. In the 1960s Porton Down scientists released harmless bacteria on the London Underground to simulate a biological attack. At about the same time they tested LSD on soldiers to investigate its "tactical battlefield usefulness".

Now, what I heard of the radio programme and what I have read suggests that the claims made of the exclusively defensive nature of the research at Porton Down are distinctly dubious. I wonder what will come out in years from now - I mean information rather than deadly epidemics, though I suppose it could be either.

The mention of the LSD tests reminds me of a documentary I saw some time back about the genesis and history of LSD. Of course, mention was made of the military experiments. It was hoped that LSD would be effective as a truth drug. I seem to recall some footage from these experiments. I do remember that the drug was finally considered useless (for military purposes, of course) and that in the notes taken from the experiments it was written that LSD causes paranoia in the subject. This is a prime example of what geniuses we're dealing with here. If I'd been administered LSD in a fucking military research base in a brightly lit room, surrounded by men in white coats and armed guards, I can tell you, I'd be pretty fucking paranoid, too.

Anyway, good to know that our future is in such hands.

I actually have a passing interest in military medical experiments, anyway. I've even been considering volunteering for (non-military) medical experiments, for a number of reasons, although, well, there are also plenty of good reasons not to. Probably the most famous of military medical experiments were those conducted by Dr. Mengele. (Incidentally, my favourite part of the Wikipedia article on him is the line, "Not all of Mengele's experiments were of scientific value". It makes him sound like an upstanding pillar of society who happened to get carried away now and then with his hobby. Which is probably similar to how he thought of himself.) However, perhaps the military experiments that most stick in my mind are those conducted in Unit 731, in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo). It always seems like we're never taught the most interesting parts of history at school, don't you think? I mean, I wonder why, at school, I was never taught about the Opium Wars. That would have been illuminating. Our curious and eager young minds, seizing upon this information, would have been able to see the stereotype of the Chinese opium den in a wholly new light after learning it was mainly us that was selling the drug to the Chinese, not to mention all the authoritarian 'drugs war' line of bullshit taken by the British government more recently. Similarly, but even more so, I feel like the existence of Unit 731 is one patch in the patchwork of history that has been unnecessarily and too often passed over.

I first learned of Unit 731 whilst studying East Asian history at university. I believe I came across the story more or less by accident whilst reading up for something else. I won't give a detailed account of that story here. It is a vile and plotless story, not to mention senseless. An exploitation film, called Men Behind the Sun has even been made based on events taking place within Unit 731. I haven't watched it because, despite my interest, and amongst other reasons, I am actually squeamish and don't enjoy the prospect of vomiting. If you're feeling strong of stomach at the moment, you could read a general list of the kind of 'experiments' that were conducted.

Of course, this kind of gruesome detail is 'memorable', and for some reason I have not actually analysed, I find the details (perhaps simple because there seem to be more of them) more memorable here than with the experiments of Dr. Mengele. However, I think the thing that really made me remember this story was the way that it ended. Since I'm lazy, I will quote from the Wikipedia article, which is succint enough:

At the end of the war, MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The U.S. also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.

Labels: Porton Down, Unit 731

The Secret Life of Aphasia

The other day I was listening to a neuroscientist on Radio 4 talking about intuition. The scientist in question, Mark Lythgoe, is decribed as an 'intuition sceptic'. I wonder what it is exactly that he's sceptical about? I certainly didn't find it clear from what he said on the programme. In any case, to me intuition is just something that's self-evident. I would not be able to write without intuition. It is more essential to the writing process than my hand. That's how I know it's there. My interest in the group unconscious also stems from my experience of the creative process, but I'm getting off the point a bit. I feel like denying the intuition is like denying the existence of the unconscious. I have heard people deny the existence of the unconscious. "Well, if I'm not conscious of it, then how can it exist!?" is the usual feeble reasoning. Let's see, hmmm, do you consciously control your heartbeat, your digestion, the growth of your hair? No? And yet it happens. How? Unconsciously - by means of the unconscious. I think we can move on now.

And the intuition and the unconscious are - of course - very much linked. Perhaps it would be enough to say that your intuition is simply your mind doing what Lovecraft hoped human minds never could do - correlating all its contents, or at least a vast amount of them, and considerably faster than the conscious mind can. I'm not sure the explanation stops there, but I don't, at this moment, insist on more to the intuition than that. (Well, I did mention group unconscious, didn't I? That would be part of the 'more' factor of intuition.)

I don't think that intuition is a simple or single thing, anyway, but, whatever it is, I'd like to give here an illustration of my own intuition. What do you make of this? It's twenty minutes long, so don't feel obliged to watch the whole thing:



I first saw this - the whole thing, in fact - some time ago and felt that there was something wrong about it intuitively. Now, I'm sure many people will say that you don't need your intuition to say that there's something wrong with this video, that reason is perfectly adequate to the task, we know that our thought-forms don't create reality, because otherwise there would be no gap between our fantasies and our actual experience. But that is not what I find to be wrong with this. I'm willing to accept that thought can be very powerful in creating our experience, and even see it as a possibility that thought composes the entirety of our experience. That begs the question, then, why we can't control our experience... Well, I'll come to that.

No, the thing that to me felt wrong about this whole thing was that it is offensively cheesy. The urgency of the opening sequence, the whispered voices, the sub-Hollywood/sub-Da Vinci Code mystical-historical imagery. I think I had a similar feeling when a perfectly reasonable (outwardly) person tried to recruit me for a marketing scheme recently. I'd like to stress here that my immediate judgement in the case of this film was aesthetic, and therefore instinctive and intuitive. Afterwards rationalisations came to me, but they were slower. One obvious rationalisation, which is fundamentally linked to the tackiness of the film, is the fact that although the talking heads here speak of positive thinking as a force by which you can be 'anything you want to be', none of them seem to have the imagination to think beyond, "I want to be a person with a flashy new car." Oh dear. How about, "I want to be a saffron, inter-dimensional sea-urchin whose ectoplasmic spines penetrate into different universes enabling me to sup upon the experiences of a myraid different beings at once, converting them into a hybrid dream which I then shoot through a labial blowhole into a higher dimension beyond the ever-collapsing cycles of time, where they are further refined into iridescent droplets of spray, each splashing against the rockface of nothingness in an ecstasy of perdition, at once wholly alien to all that has passed within biological experience, and yet containing a pink, fairy-light tincture of something that was once personality!"? I mean, that would be a start.

But no, it's all "I want a new house with a neat, white fence" and so on.

There's something else. I have, over the years, been accused - it may be difficult for some of you to believe, as it is for me - of being negative. Thinking about it now, 'negative' is a really piss-poor criticism of anything. I think it evinces the same lack of imagination as that to be found in the custodians of the 'secret'. But I have, from habitual doubt, always supposed that those who made such accusations about me, and recommended to me that I should think positively, were right. Recently I come to feel that positive thinking is not something that I have 'failed to acheive', or been too stubborn to adopt. Positive thinking is really the most negative thing of all - to have to screen your thoughts constantly in the fear that you'll think something depressing and lose that happy-clappy momentum that had almost brought you within reach of your brand new conservatory! Yeah, what am I missing out on?

Bollocks to that.

I did say I'd get round to the explanation of why, if life is composed entirely of thought - and, you know, of course, I'm not certain that it is - there is such a gap between fantasy and lived experience. Well, I think there's an explanation here that refutes 'positive thinking' as much as it refutes the reason of Mark Lythgoe. I remember Larkin writing in a letter to a friend - and I believe he was drawing on what he had read of D. H. Lawrence - that whatever systems and explanations psychiatry comes up with to cure everyone, or politics comes up with to build the perfect world, the unconscious will always come up with something new to fuck it up. You can't control your unconscious. You either are it, or it controls you.

Labels: Mark Lythgoe, positive thinking, The Secret

I Was a Teenage Punk Einstein

Well, not really, but close enough.

I was a member of a band called The Dead Bell. Some of you may know of this already, but I am reminding you now (and informing those of you who never knew at all) because the singer, guitarist and general musical maestro of that band has just started to put up a website of his work on the hinterwub. There are already a number of Dead Bell sound files there available for free download. There are also some sound files from Pete's next band after that, Dorothy, though there are some glitches in the recordings here, I notice, that are not present on the Dorothy CDs I have. Perhaps if you send a message to Pete via his site, and offer to make him some sticky toffee pudding, he'll be happy to do you a CD, but don't quote me on that. Do pester him to put up more stuff, though. We await sound files under the category 'current' with pleasure, in the hope that Pete did not intend to write 'currant'.

Here's the info on The Dead Bell from the site:

Music written, performed and recorded with Quentin S. Crisp around 1987-1992 if memory serves. Quentin wrote the vast majority of the lyrics and has a real gift with words ... This was an intense period and I recall feeling quite scared. We recorded on to an old 4 track tape machine in bedrooms of the various houses I was living in at the time.

Hmmm.

Well, I still have my Address to the Nation to finish. Is it worth it, I wonder? I noticed, looking in my old files just now, that I started a review of the biopic of Bettie Page ages and ages back, intending it for this blog, but never finished or posted it. That's what happens when I don't write an entry in one sitting.

Since I've just written a couple of reasonably long posts, I now feel justified in being self-indulgent and ending in a completely unrelated Youtube clip:

Labels: naruse mikio, takamine hideko, The Dead Bell

The Curious Dilemma of the Liberal

Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:39).

This, to me, is the basis of liberalism. Others might claim that the source of liberalism is different, and, since history is vast and complicated, I would not presume to be the authority here. Nonetheless, I do have a notion that Western liberalism stems originally from Christian thought, that it is not fundamentally political, but moral and religious.

Those generally called liberal are, today, often in conflict with religious groups, or at least, with Christian groups. It seems to me, however, that it is Christian values by which we reject dogmatic Christianity as illiberal. We have seen how the church does not love its enemies.

Perhaps all ideologies hold within them the seeds of their own decline. For instance, in the above-quoted verses of the Bible, there is the comparison between the followers of Jesus and other people - the publicans and the Gentiles. You, unlike them, are to be perfect. By loving them, you will become better than them. And so we have, once more the division between people, and perhaps, in a way, a more deadly division than ever, since it is a self-righteous division.

Self-righteousness allowed the Christian West to colonise the world and send missionaries. Now, as a consequence of this imperialism, which brought us wealth, the world is coming back to us, to share that wealth, in the form of immigrants. So, self-righteousness, arising out of Christian liberalism, gives birth to multi-culturalism, which again requires something of the original liberal Christian values.

Yesterday, I listened to Radio 4's Start the Week, which this week featured guests Martin Amis, Quentin Skinner, Jim Al-Khalili and Asmar Jahangir. It was a fascinating programme this week, and you can listen to the podcast here. Asked whether he believed multi-culturalism has caused an "intellectual loss of nerve", Martin Amis replied, "Well, yes, and a moral loss of nerve. The deal with multi-culturalism is the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own."

Amis was speaking specifically with reference to Western relations with the Muslim world. Amis goes on to make remarks such as the following: "The other day I asked an audience at the ICA, I said, 'Hands up those who feel morally superior to the Taliban.' There were about 120 people there and I'd say 40 trembling arms were raised. Now we all know the kind of thing the Taliban does and I think we'd find a lot more clarity if we looked at Islamism, or Jihadism, as a feminist issue. The Taliban, not satisfied with getting women out of public life, actually insisted on blacking up the windows of the houses that they were confined to so that they couldn't be seen, but also to deny them sunlight. Now, the audience at the ICA in there, you know, if they were to tell the truth, would admit to feeling moral superiority, but it wasn't that, it was a statement of principle: You don't feel morally superior to anyone except America, and by extension, Israel."

By the way, I believe he is using the word 'Islamism' to make a distinction between militant movements within Islam and Islam as a whole.

This quote is interesting to me because I have sometimes wondered what the liberal does when confronted with a conflict of loyalties. One has to support Islam, because it's a foreign religion (and really for no other reason than that), but one also has to support equality for women. What, actually, do liberals do in this case? Well, I don't know, because I no longer really consider myself a liberal. I did, for a while, in a lazy kind of way, in the way, for instance, as a boy, knowing nothing about football, I would always say, when asked what team I supported, that I supported Manchester United, just to keep people happy. This particular question is not a dilemma for me, although there may be some dilemmas related to it. For me, women's rights would immediately take the priority over a wish to avoid offending or demonising some fanatical religious group, even if they are foreign. Another interesting question is, did I really have to renounce my liberal credentials in order to support the cause of women's rights?



This is not an entirely hypothetical question for me, although I am not an oppressed woman and have not had any contact with the Taliban. I remember, before the destruction of the Twin Towers, receiving an e-mail petition from a friend of mine, regarding the Taliban. It gave details of the violence towards and oppression of women that was taking place in Afghanistan under the influence of the Taliban, and people were asked to sign in order to voice their disapproval and ask - I believe - for UN or governmental intervention. My friend had written, at the top of the e-mail, something like, "You know I don't usually get involved in politics, but this lot look really nasty." And I agreed.

It was not, in any way, a dilemma for me to sign that petition. Of course, since September the 11th, 2001, any criticism of any aspect of Islam has become a very sensitive issue, and the anti-Taliban petition I received now seems to belong to a different age. In this sense (as well as many others) I would say that George Bush's 'war on terror' has been counter-productive.



After 9/11 (okay, I'll give in and use the abbreviation), I was in a pub talking with a certain party who shall not be named (just because I generally prefer to avoid naming people) but who played his part in the world of horror and whom I hold in high esteem, and he asked me what I knew about Islam. Very little, I had to admit. He then went on to tell me that since 9/11 he had conceived a strong interest in Islam and was reading everything he could on the subject. I understood and felt infected by this interest. I must confess, however, my own determination to read up on the history and so on of the religion has not yet really become reality.

Of course, I was vaguely aware of Islam before this time, but the first occasion on which it really entered my consciousness as something to be cogitated on was in 1990, at the age of 18, when the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei upheld the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing his novel The Satanic Verses. Even at that age (and since some time before that, I'm afraid to say), I was a bit of a writer, and my immediate reaction, as someone who simply couldn't give a toss either way about Islam, was that this was an infringement of free speech, and an unacceptable barbarism. I didn't give it that much thought, however, but it remains among my 'first impressions' of Islam. I also remember Cat Stevens, sorry, Yusuf Islam, at the time, doing his bit by upholding the fatwa, too, and how I thought what a wanker he was. In a way, Cat Stevens is an example of Western liberalism in all its paradoxicality. Hate your own culture (free speech) and fly into the arms of another culture (in this case Islam).

I'm very willing to accept (even sympathetic towards) the idea that the English-speaking press has been more interested in focusing on negative aspects of Islam than positive ones. Nonetheless, I'm afraid that my own limited consciousness of Islam has come to be composed most vividly of negative impressions. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the violent oppression of women by the Taliban, the assassination of Theo van Gogh, and, actually, I'd like to pick up on something here. I distinctly remember, at the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, a number of people - and I don't mean Muslims, now, but, well, British non-Muslims - saying things like, "Well, I can't help thinking that he knew what he was doing and he shouldn't have done it." This is the old, "S/he was asking for it" argument. Really? Was he really asking to have a death threat against him, so that he had to spend the next years of his life in a secret location under police supervision? And now I hear people saying the same thing about Theo van Gogh. "Oh yeah, it's true they killed him, but he was a bit of a loud-mouthed prick." Oh well, that's all right then, I suppose.

I notice that the film, Submission, which Theo van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now on Youtube. I have not watched it yet, but I shall. It has cost someone his life to make it.

Now, Hirsi Ali grew up Muslim. She is not a foreigner attacking Islam from the point of view of ignorant prejudice. And yet, liberalism has reached such a pitch of hypocrisy that that is how some liberals feel the need to treat her. I witnessed an example of this on television. It was the usual, "You were asking for it" treatment. Hirsi Ali was being interviewed about the film Submission and the death of Theo van Gogh. The interviewer, a caucasian woman, showed no concern or compassion for Theo's death, or for the fact that Hirsi Ali had received death threats herself, but only asked how Hirsi Ali could have been involved in such a film, that had upset so many people.



I found this curious. Something very strange was going on in our media. On the one hand, if you were the wrong person (IE, not a politician) or if you criticised Islam in the wrong way (IE actually looked at its theology, the history of abuse of women under Islam etcetera), then you were an Islamophobe and a racist and asking to be assassinated. On the other hand, to murder thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children in Iraq, partially using excuses of a 'war on terror', in the manner of that unctuous and evil shyster, Tony Blair, was perfectly fine and good and not in the least bit racist.

How has this happened?

My guess is that it's a combination of sincere liberalism and those who never had any sincere belief in liberalism manipulating liberal rhetoric, thought, feeling and so on to their own ends.

[Would you believe it, I've just written this whole article, and pressed the wrong button on the computer and lost everything from this point forward and will now have to retype the whole thing. Let us not squabble amongst ourselves. Let us unite against out common enemy, the fucking computer! Oh well, I sigh and carry on.]

I said earlier that I used to consider myself liberal. I haven't really changed since that time, and I suppose that in many ways I actually fit the liberal bill, even in the (possibly) negative sense. I mean, I pretty much hate my own culture. Western civilisation is built on genocide and slavery, and I find it very difficult to be proud of that. But genocide and slavery are also products of liberalism. I think so, anyway. I mean, if we go back to the quotes with which I started this entry, and take them as the basis of liberalism, then they gave rise to the self-righteousness that allowed the expansion of empire and the dispatching of misssionaries to all corners of the globe. To expand on this point, I know George Bush isn't generally considered liberal, but isn't his apparent desire to 'spread democracy' a consequence of liberalism, the missionary zeal of the liberal West? Perhaps I'm way off the mark there, but if I'm on it this is a good illustration of the paradoxical nature of liberalism - the assumption of cultural relativism as a universal value that must be imposed upon others at all costs, unless one flips over to the other side of liberalism and decides to side with the illiberal enemy. Anyway, to return to the point I was trying to make - not only do I hate my own culture, I actively favour other cultures above it, for instance, in my preference of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and so on over my native religion of Christianity. But if self-righteousness and self-hatred are the two sides of the paradoxical liberal coin, then I seem to have both sides, perhaps to be a more complete liberal than many. After all, although I do prefer Buddhism, which, in its emphasis on no-self may be seen as a cause or symptom of groupism and conformity in the East, I also find that Christianity contains something lacking in all Eastern faiths. Jesus, apparently, loves you. He loves you in particular, with all your quirks and foibles and the things that drive everyone else so mad that they declare war on you. He loves you for your self.

This I find admirable. Not only that, it is still not adequately understood or appreciated.

So, maybe if I were to try and tie of these threads together in a glib manner, with some kind of soundbite, I would say something like, it might be best to love your enemy and your self, if you can. Loving your enemy does not mean submission. It can be assertion. There is a quality way of saying 'no', if you are doing it with an understanding of who you are and of who you are saying no to, and without any ill-will. Well, this is just an idea that I'm floating, anyway, a work in progress.

I suppose that I feel towards religion as I feel towards genre. Different genres interest me, have enriched my life and so on, but I'd hate to have to write within the strict limits of one genre for the rest of my life. I even find the need to define and circumscribe genre too closely to be very childish. Genre is our history. We can refer to it and learn things from it, but why limit ourselves by it? And yet, that is what readers and publishers (and even some writers) do; the readers out of egoism and narrow-mindedness, the publishers out of a craven desire for money.

And so with religion.

I don't want to see the eradication of religion, but I do want to see the abolishment of religious borders. We now live in a world where we cannot move without treading on each other's toes. In such a world, religion is a shared heritage. The separate religions are each cultural artefacts. The Japanese, for instance, should not be allowed to go on vandalising the architectural heritage of Kyoto as they do. It doesn't belong to them now. It belongs to the world. In the same way, how can you issue a fatwa against Rushdie for writing about Islam. It is his heritage to write about. And mine. Christianity is mine. Hinduism is mine. Buddhism is mine. Atheism is mine. And yours. And since this is world heritage, we should also take care of it. I don't mean with an exaggerated reverence (which is the tool used by those who say that religion belongs to them alone). I just mean that the books in the human library should be maintained in a legible state with no pages torn out. So, you, Taliban, oi, that means you! No more destroying Buddhist statues! They belong to all of us. Enough of your loutish vandalism! And no more bombing of mosques, either!

I suppose, in this way, I differ from Richard Dawkins. He seems to desire the amputation of religion. I would rather see it integrated or transcended, so that we can live in a world where "all is God and God is just a word". There is one thing I appreciate about Dawkins, however. He is even-handed in attacking all religions, whether they be Judaism, Islam or Christianity. In doing so he is helping to break down the hypocrisy into which liberalism has grown. I don't actually know what the general 'liberal' position is with regard to Dawkins, but I'd be interested to find out.

Labels: Islam, liberalism, Martin Amis, religion

Y O Y O Y

Could this be the greatest album cover of all time?



That is the question next to a picture of the cover from Nirvana's Nevermind album, which confronted me when I signed into my e-mail account today. The question linked to a poll, which, out of curiosity, I took part in myself.

There have been mutterings on this blog recently concerning questions of artistic taste, and I have felt the need to express my feelings of alienation from mainstream, or to use a slightly less cliched phrase, culturally prevalent tastes. Well, there's nothing very original about turning one's nose up at the mainstream, is there? And yet it seems inevitable or necessary for me, unfortunately. This poll is a case in point, not that I was expecting it to be stimulating or challenging. I still, however, managed to be disappointed, even with my low expectations, by the choice of album covers offered (my own choices being limited by the very crap choices someone else had already made for me). It's not that I hated all the albums that had made the selection, but was this really meant to be a vote about the greatest album cover of all time? As I said in the comments section of the entry I linked to above, people are weirded out so easily. I am reminded of one of those crappy '100 greatest' programmes that was on television a little while back, for the 100 greatest albums. By public vote (apparently) U2's The Joshua Tree hit the number one spot. The person with whom I was watching remarked that, by and large, people seem impressed when artists move away from complete blandness towards the edge of something, but any artist who goes over that edge manages to lose the audience completely. U2, with their appropriately named guitarist, probably mark the optimum positioning in terms of the majority of the audience thinking that you're 'far out'. And this is a very sad reflection. I'm trying to think of some sort of cliched phrase (there's a term for these expressions where you use the same formula but change one of two of the words) like 'my dad is further out than U2' to express how near in they actually are, but, the thing is, it already really goes without saying that my dad is considerably further out than U2, and I can't think of anything near enough in that it would hold the element of surprise that it might be further out than U2. If you see what I mean.

Having reached the midway point of my natural life-span, I'm not so likely to be impressed by 'pop stars' anymore, anyway, even the 'alternative' ones, who, I begin to see, are the people I knew at school who were stupider and less talented even than a good-for-nothing such as myself. But, you know, some music has been good for me over the years, so let's humour the musos for a while and look at some of the 'cover art' that they didn't even create themselves anyway, starting with the cover of Nevermind. Actually, out of all the album covers selected for the poll, this is certainly one of the better ones. At least it has some discernible thought behind it. There's a baby, a fishing hook, and a dollar bill on the hook. I get it. Biting satire with a hint of existentialism. Reminds me of Pink Floyd in some ways. Yeah, it works. Not subtle, but it works. It even seems to have some genuine and pointed anger behind it, which is good. The only problem with it, for myself and I suspect for many others, is that it smells a bit like teen spirit. It seems a little too close to the cover art equivalent of saying, "Yeah, smash the system!" A statement that can be lucrative. Remembering one or two annoying parties I attended in my early twenties at which numbers of people were leaping around drunkenly to Smells Like Teen Spirit as if they were being somehow edgy by doing so, and looking at this cover again, I begin to think that, perhaps more than anything, this cover smells of money. "Smash the system!" sells a lot of posters and T-shirts. We all know that. Kurt Cobain undoubtedly knew that, too. But did those who took this 'cover art' seriously and leapt about to Smells Like Teen Spirit? There must be some level of irony to this cover, but what level, exactly? Is it meant to fool people, or is everyone meant to perceive its irony straightaway? The whole thing is in distinct danger of collapsing out of sheer vacuousness. At least, as Momus has commented elsewhere, Kurt Cobain had the integrity to kill himself.

And that's one of the better album covers.

And, actually, it's tired me out analysing even that, so I'm not sure I want to go through a whole stack of these. Let's see...

The cover of Exile on Main Street:



I've never liked The Rolling Stones. I've always preferred Led Zeppelin. Really. Robert Plant has a much better voice, and, if you want rock'n'roll, why not go the whole way and really have rock'n'roll? Jagger's voice is boring. Keith Richards is boring. The pace of the songs is boring. (Am I the only person who prefers the Bowie cover of Let's Spend the Night Together to the Stones version?) The lyrics are boring. When I was doing my A-levels, my teacher for English literature, noticing, I suppose, some unusual enthusiasm in my essays, took me aside and gave me some copies of various works by Jean-Paul Sartre to read. He also related a story of when he was younger. He'd gone into a bar with a friend and some band came on playing very bad blues, and his friend and he looked at each other and said, "Let's go." That band was The Rolling Stones.

Anyway, so, the album cover. This is a montage of various circus freaks and artistes of the ring. This reminds me of one of my favourite films of all time, Freaks. I even suspect (but I haven't done my homework) that some of the people in these photographs might have appeared in Tod Browning's film. Apparently these pictures were not assembled especially for the cover. Instead, the cover is a photograph taken of an existing montage of photographs on the wall of a tattoo parlour. Actually, I like this. It's a nice idea. If I were to be critical I would simply say that photo montages as cover art are overdone and perhaps a bit lazy - a shortcut to appearing arty in a rough-around-the-edges kind of way. But a candidate for the greatest album cover of all time? It would be quite low down my list.

Next, the cover of London Calling by The Clash:



I will say immediately that I like this cover. Instinctively. I think it's great. Damn! We're not getting any covers that I can shoot down in flames. I'm going to have to change the whole tone of this blog entry.

So, why do I like it? Well, it's just a great, great photograph. I'm going to appear to contradict myself now, by raving over a photograph of a rock guitarist (or punk, come on, it's the same thing really, isn't it?) smashing up his instrument, after being cynical (I'm not cynical really, honest) about teenagers wanting to smash the system (and it is, after all, a laudable aspiration). But, despite being a cliche, this photograph works. It was caught at the right moment. The pose is... Babylonian, predicting some great collapse. It is Samson pulling down the pillars around himself. It is Sodom and Gomorrah.

Also, there's a homage to an Elvis album cover in the typography:



Hmmm. After all, these album covers aren't bad. And yet I feel like the overall selection was too safe and lacklustre.

I'd like to suggest, off the top of my head, a few other album covers that could have been introduced to the proceedings to prevent the whole thing from being as utterly suffocating as it is:

Into the Pandemonium by Celtic Frost:



Okay, so, as often happens, they basically just stole something from a greater artist, in this case Heironymus Bosch, but it was a theft well done. I stared at this cover for hours in my youth.

Hunky Dory by David Bowie:



Yes, it's very simple, and yes, Bowie already has at least one other entry in the poll, but if this one has been overlooked, then I'm not sure how. Bowie's made a career out of being enigmatic, but he's seldom looked more enigmatic than this. Some say that they see a resemblance to Greta Garbo. And the colouring is artfully done.

Boys for Pele by Tori Amos.



Tori somehow manages to work up a sense of dreamlike, almost Dali-esque, suggestion in this photograph. Some of the other photographs in the packaging of that album were even better.

Oskar Tennis Champion by Momus:



Delicate and otherworldly. Cut-out silhouettes and so on suggest a puppet theatre that blends into a never-ending backstage of different realities, each giving way to the next.

You know, I'm only just warming up to this, but I'm very tired and I need to adjust my body in various ways to alleviate this situation, so, actually, I'll throw the floor open and ask for the suggestions of readers as to what album covers should have been selected. I'm afraid my choices, too, were slightly staid.

Sado-ga-shima

It looks like my latest story is available now. It's a chapbook containing a stand-alone long-short story called 'Sado-ga-shima'.

You should be able to see the details for the chapbook here, and you can order here.



I'm not very good at writing blurbs, but I wrote the following for this story:

At the ends of the Earth, off the dark side of Japan, lies Sado-ga-shima. The waves that mutter on its shores call you to your ultimate obscurity. You will never go to Sado-ga-shima; you are always there.

I don't know if that will be used.

I think Bret Jordan's done a great job with the cover.

Labels: Quentin S Crisp, Sado-ga-shima

Annette Funicello's Hair

Have I mentioned that I hate my blog?

I did start writing my Address to the Nation, but it's currently in suspended animation (hey, that could be the opening couplet of a song). I think one of my main problems with it is that I have so far - and I don't how I even got onto the subject - called Damien Hirst a cunt in it about three times, and I'm not sure that's really called for. Hmmm. Then again, I'm tired of being nice. Not that I ever have been.

It's much easier to express my current feelings about life the universe and everything exclusively through YouTube clips. For instance, this:



I've noticed recently that, at least if one goes by the images that are left to us, the female half of the human species reached the zenith of beauty in the era of silent films. Witness:



Everything has come downhill since then. But even going back as far as the sixties, you can measure the difference in general classiness.

But, apart from blurting out things that you regret ever saying, another disadvantage of blogs is that it leaves you with less to share in private with the one or two people you actually manage to keep in touch with consistently. No one can say, "Hey, I didn't know you were an admirer of Annette Funicello's hair!" You broach the subject, and they say, "Yeah, I read it on your blog."

And this is exactly what my current life in Wales is like:





Well, when I say exactly like that, what I mean, I suppose, is more like a cross between that and this.

Finally (perhaps really finally), I'm all for having a laugh, but I have come to learn the meaning of a phrase that a friend of mine used in conversation many years back, when he referred to someone as being, "pathologically incapable of taking anything seriously". I saw a headline about the endangerment of Penguins recently that read something like, "Penguins in p-p-p-p-peril."

Is it obligatory to have some naff joke in every single headline ever written?

Labels: annette funicellos

Losing the Plot

Not long ago I listed some pieces of fiction that I have coming out. Two of those pieces have now been mentioned in online reviews, here and here. The two reviews are not entirely unfavourable, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to be churlish about them.

I suppose there can be something a little pathetic about making reply to reviews of your work that you don't happen to like. I do agree with Dazai Osamu that there's really no point in trying to explain one's work to someone who doesn't like it. You can't say, "Well, you should like it." It just doesn't work like that. The two reviewers also seem to be in agreement about the quality of my prose, so I suppose you could say they are being even-handed. However, if I feel justified responding, it's probably for two reasons. The first of these is that I could write better reviews in a coma. And I shall (well, perhaps not while I'm in a coma, but I shall write better reviews). I think that a review should be a good read in itself if we are to take the opinions expressed even vaguely seriously.

The second reason is that both reviews seem to be in agreement that my weakness is a lack of plot. Apart from anything else, in the case of 'The Fairy Killer', I don't actually agree, but, being personally close to that work, I'm not going to argue the point. More importantly, this is something that I've encountered before and wanted to address because it's really beginning to get on my tits. This criticism is the equivalent of saying that Mervyn Peake is not realistic enough, or that Leonard Cohen is okay, but he just doesn't know how to play a kick-ass guitar. If I were trying and failing to write a conventional plot then it might be a valid criticism, but - here's the point - I'M NOT. To quote Lou Reed, if 'plot' is that important to you, then you're still doing things that I gave up years ago. LIFE HAS NO PLOT, or not one that would be recognised as such by a Hollywood scriptwriter. I don't actually think that I have jettisoned plot, any more than an impressionistic painter has jettisoned representation of form, but I'm doing something different with it that probably isn't recognised as plot. Fine, let's not call it plot. In that case, what you call plot bores me. I am not even attempting to play by yours rules. If I am failing according to the rules I have set myself that's a different matter, and perhaps I am. But please don't lazily talk about lack of plot without even questioning - as I have - what plot actually is.

So, just in case anyone who has read my work and found it plotless is reading this too, if you even give a damn (enough of a damn to write a review, for instance), I would suggest you first widen your horizons by reading Nagai Kafu's A Strange Tale from East of the River, the works of Bruno Schulz, Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human, La-Bas by J-K Huysmans, anything by Denton Welch... I could go on. If you read these and find them disappointingly plotless, maybe it will start to dawn on you that some people like it this way, even if you don't, and that losing the plot is not necessarily failure.

Maybe a Train

Labels: Tama