My Very Own Take That

I have resisted this sort of fetishism for as long as I possibly could; maybe it is the Vanessa Beecroft aesthetics of Hypnotise, creating a mystique of nihilistic otherworldliness. I mean that's the idea of art is it not, to incite curiosity by presenting an image simultaneously distant and familiar. But is this not my rational veil, masking the more base instincts held within Friedan's The Feminine Mystique . Judging from my being reduced to an awestruck adolescent drunk on the release of A Hard Days Night, my intoxicated speech a Creole smattering of screams and grunts, the subject of the object is never too far from my mind. But to be instantly fascinated by form, to be struck by a flutter of inspiration that momentarily warms the cold grip of cynicism set in after the realisation of the impossibility of the new and the utopian obsession of a revolutionary break with the past.

Ipso Facto's immediate past is a place where I have preferred not to venture. It, in my impressionistic rendering, is a vague setting, filled with authoritarian images of authenticity, order, and a time where the nation was a healthy whole. The aesthetes seem at first to be vintage fetishists, purveyors of empty style. But of course their past too is dark and fragmented.

Of course on a balmy autumn evening in Southeast London, none of us are really that deep. We are all faced with the more immediate concerns of mediated hedonism, further protecting our limbs from the lashing wind and the pissing rain, lowering our inhibitions so that we may interact more comfortably without regard to the intricate complex of mores protecting us from them. In this state it is normal to buy Rosie and Cherish a drink, repeating their names in my head as if they'd long graced the cover of Teen Idol with a young Marc Bolan. It is also my intention to assure them that whilst I am being obsequious, my intentions are intention-less. I am so sure they believe me that I abscond to the stage to watch These New Puritans do their best Gang of Four impressions, though keeping my gaze fixed on the preceding five minutes, ignoring the foolishness of our one and only chance meeting.