In the film Bamboozled, satirist Pierre Delacroix creates a modern day minstrel show envisioning the delight aroused in white America as a forum is given for them to revel in their own latent stereotypes. The main protagonists Mantan and Sleep n Eat, fumble and guffaw over their perpetual misfortune, insouciantly pausing to devour watermelon and fried chicken as house band the Alabama Porch Monkeys close the show with a rousing coda. The audience actively engages in the spectacle, grinning like ingenuous children unaccustomed to the world of meaning. It is on the surface, pure farce.
Yet in the theatre of America, her protagonists lay claim to a similar innocence imbibing the satire below as a comical reflection of reality. And innocence is always the most powerful defence. It is our dearest claim. Our exceptional right to absurdity.
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.
I always knew Bobby Cox was really a Cock, a descendant from that great line of Cornish Cocks. Unfortunately for the champion of the downtrodden ethnic minority in all of us, the British Jacobins seem to be wiping out any trace of the once great nation.
At least their brethren in Canada can keep the flame of displaced peoples alight.
The Frank-drenched essence of my luck with flying could only end with Tom Hanks. Fortunately my recent clash with the dizzying heights of aerophobia did not finish with a slip out of a Quantas-sized hole to meet my end in barbate solitude. While the past few days have only reinforced my terminally challenged tendencies, flying standby has wrought a new twist in this psychological skein. On the bright side, at least the airline industry's rapine policy of overbooking has delayed the inevitable leaky bowels brought on by my recurring dreams of dismemberment. Though when I first imagined the interminable distance between London and Atlanta, it did not include a ten-plus hour journey to and from the first great outpost of English and Scottish assimilation, Edinburgh. Add to that the hundreds of pounds spent travelling around the country in order to return to the wintry English summer a slightly broken man when I should have been drowning in the Georgian humidity, devouring hot wings and suffocating on the spectacle of American democracy in that all too progressive town of Bethlehem, Georgia, then you do indeed have a man born on bitter alienation.
Desert island.
Airport terminal.
It really doesn’t make much difference Mr. Hanks – save for the incessant banter of a few lowland Scots lamenting the downfall of Hibernian Football Club; the red-faced defeat worn on the face of a week long strandee, a beautiful Geordie girl with a tooth wrought of gold, and a dissertation critically engaging the lack of a levelling spirit in the Harry Potter series. For now all I can hope for is a respite from the nine month bout of pneumonia presently dormant in my tattered lungs. I guess I’ll be watching The Future is Unwritten on repeat this week, living vicariously through Joe Strummer's humanism, trying to convince myself that the Absolute has not inscribed my fate on the license plate of the Stunticon, Dead End. Otherwise I might succumb to this utter alienation and resign myself to the certitude of calamity.
"Wu-Tang again?" I benumbingly ask my musical friend, my brain awash in streams of visceral ultra-violence. "Again and again!" it responds, the skeletal loneliness of Syl Johnson ricocheting off my hollow bones. Yet I find it quite easy to relent to these circumstances. Maybe it's my nihilistic impulses, a fetishisation of escape, or my inabiliy, despite my best efforts, to recover the true ends of an artist's intent. Either way, my fingers form outlines of vengence and my lips curl in masculine braggadocio, my limbs colluding to express a personal rebirth. It becomes ever more apparent that my days are a ruse. And every intellectual pursuit a guise to mask my tendancy towards to the senseless. A truth only exposed by the Wu. For Rza and I share a love of Machiavelli's Wild West. And thus the sociopath is born.
I just cannot figure where on this diverse spectrum of objective quality Wolf Parade's At Mount Zoomer rests. I mean I can't figure out if the record is really good or if it's Rick Springfield's lost prog-pop masterpiece. The vocals hold little promise of daring or danger, unless an adult alternative Isaac Brock is your idea of this era's GG Allin. And the keyboardist filling every inch of space with his zany sounds of the universe plug-ins, might as well be the drummer in your adolescent Venom cover band. Yet despite all this and the threads of Phil Collins this record wraps around my neck, I think I'll risk choking and give it a Good.
Bad?
Flying Lotus Los Angeles
Another one of those is this bad or is this bad-ass? I'll label it smooth electronica and give it a Bad.
Phil Collins
Nas Untitled
Nas should be thinking immolation rather than apotheosis.
