Why we work

 

Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.

Paris 1213

The Mythiq27 exhibition opened in Paris this week. The art by Invader and Rero and my accompanying text are shown above and there is a short movie of the exhibition in total here.

Mythiq 27 is an anthology of art and texts about 27 musicians who died aged 27. Curator and editor Yann Suty asked me to write about Kurt Cobain; I went into more detail about the project earlier here and here.

You can see more photos of the book launch and the opening night on the project's Facebook page and of course there is a Twitter feed.

Suty's project uses the tensions between obscurity and fame to meditate on the short time we all have here. Viewing its collection of dead celebrities, fragile street art and clipped transmissions from a distance lends it an even greater ephemeral quality.

Re-reading; remembering

INTERVIEWER

I read somewhere that you started writing because you wanted to be a musician.

SHEPARD

Well, I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

INTERVIEWER

Did you start right in?

SHEPARD

Not immediately. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job—all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes—but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

INTERVIEWER

Did you already think of yourself as a writer?

SHEPARD

I'd been messing around with it for a while, but nothing serious. That was the first time I felt writing could actually be useful.

-- Sam Shepard interviewed by Benjamin Ryder Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for The Paris Review.

But who knew?

I thought if you were a singer and went out and performed, that’s how you made your money. Like when I would see Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra on TV, I thought of course you went in the studio and made records—that’s how the public got to like them—and then they’re going to make their money when they go out and perform. So I never thought about royalties. When we toured the UK and US, that’s when we made tons of money. But who knew? It was nothing compared to what the writers and publishers got.

But I don’t care. I’m still out there. I'm still on stage and they're not.

-- Ronnie Spector

The Shibuya phase

The early days of the internet were like ham radio: a few keen operators who communicated with each other more or less alone in the network. The web stage saw newcomers who actively reached out to each other, building networks. The third stage was a general, off-line population who joined the networks out of curiosity and interest, generally seeking fun. The fourth stage was the capitalisation of said networks; the fifth was the commercial trawl for new users. The sixth was about pushing: consolidating the gold rush, locking users into systems that complimented and became essential to their everyday real-world lives. Everything since then has been competition -- first for "eyeballs", then the remainder of the virtual body.

You don't need to go online to find things now. Now, things find you. People look for you, corporations look for you, products want you to work with them. The new frontier has become the crowded mall, the jammed city. The community is a crowd, the group is a mob.

In theory we could avoid this by going off-line, but in reality that's as practical as disconnecting the plumbing.

So the next stage, I propose will be the stranger in the crowd phase. We know we're out there, we know we're in a public space, we know everything we do online is visible to someone at some point in time. So we'll put up the same front that we do when we're crossing a busy street: yes, this is me, but it's not the real me.

And we won't go online to interact. We'll go online just to be online, knowing that we'll be confronted by in-your-face bots and channels and real people, all of them pan-handling -- because going online is as natural as crossing the street.

But we won't be going online to do anything. We'll simply be online because we have to be there. Having an online presence will become as passive as that phrase. We'll just be there in the crowd. And sometimes you'll find money on the sidewalk, and sometimes strangers' eyes will meet. But mostly it will be crowded and noisy and not carry much meaning beyond the space itself.

Welcome to the rush hour: the strangers in the crowd phase. We're all in Shibuya now.

(Pic: Shibuya by prof.dr.cash c/- Panoramio)

Bruce

I still love The Big Boss. The film boasts a perfect mise en scène: an ice factory in Thailand. The weather is hot and the men are trying to stay cool, Bruce Lee most of all. After a brief scuffle at the beginning he holds it in for the better part of the film before erupting into, well, Bruce Lee. He's a slow burner, like Clint's Man With No Name. He's imperfect, tested, and prevails.

This is what heroes used to be: stoic, principled, tested -- always to failure -- but coming back at the end when their true self is realised. The storyline is likewise classically simple: starting quiet and driving to a climax. Now movies start big, flounder, panic and distract with gewgaws until arriving at some legal definition of an ending: boxes ticked, pulses never raised.

The Fast And Furious series is the closest thing to a modern equivalent of the Hong Kong martial arts movies. A gallant camaraderie, tight budgets and cheap locations, a cast that can laugh at itself and shonky set pieces that work in spite of their ludicrousness because you're in the heroes' headspace and you want them to prevail. The female characters are equally noble. Maria Yi is the moral compass in The Big Boss just as Gal Gadot is in Fast 6.

Threat levels

'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'

-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)

'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'

 -- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)

'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)

Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.¹

Those threats which one believes can pass from the fictional world and into reality to do real harm (computer games, pornography, modern art, hate speech, fight scenes in movies, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs) tends to be dictated by personal taste rather than empirical evidence.

I could be wrong. The only way to find out is to keep talking about it which, unfortunately, also requires one to keep listening, no matter how much you don't like what you hear. Or watch, or log into, or subscribe to, or buy to read every day, over and over...

(Pics: Existenz (David Cronenburg), Maitresse, Once Upon A Time In America, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease Reddit for The X-Files 20th anniversary)

  ^{1. I think Eno said this but I can't find the quote just now. I propose a law that after being interviewed for so many years all quotes can be attributed to Brian Eno.↩}

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?

-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

Johnny is a man and he's bigger than you

And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ... The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.

-- Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83 (Sept. 1985)

All of my heart

"Character in any sense that we can get at it is action, and action is plot... We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are." (Henry James) 

(ABC, Cat People, Night Stalker, Maitresse)

The Dark-Haired Girl

'It's like [Eye in the Sky] when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are always asleep like they are in Eye and we must wake up and see past (through) the dream -- the spurious world with its own time -- to the rescue outside -- outside now, not later.' 

 -- Philip K. Dick quoted in Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin (Paladin 1991)

The Excellent Man

'There is only one situation in which the virtue of the good citizen and excellent man are the same, and this is when the citizens are living in a city that is under the ideal regime...'

-- Edward Clayton, Aristotle: Politics (2005)

(REALITi, Mission Impossible, The Prisoner)

California

Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife Jan in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. They have very little money, so it must be pretty hard on them sometimes, but I've never heard them complain.

"Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You should go over to the Guggenheim and see his 'Number Seven', they have it in such a good place. He's probably closer to my music than any of the painters, because it's just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does."

-- Lester Bangs interviews Captain Beefheart for Voice (1980)

In the warm room

Three results from three unrelated image searches. Top to bottom: Beate Bartel of Liaisons Dangereuses (1981), Sex Pistol memorabilia girl Liz Hall by Phil Strongman (1979) and Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie (1965).

Why does it have to be this way?

When I was working at Rip It Up¹ there was no better way to start a fight than to lob in a reference to bands like Propaganda or the Art of Noise. Zang Tumb Tuum packaged them as new and radical but they were straight-up pop. 'Dream Within A Dream' was 'Kashmir' and the Noise's Fairlight samples² were the same ones used by everyone from Peter Gabriel to Yes. Both bands were produced by Trevor Horn, who had already given ABC The Lexicon of Love and their career.

Mid- to late-80s synth pop looks impossibly fertile now. Everyone dressed like Gaga but they had songs as well, and the cross-pollination of indie, electronic and dance music -- let alone songwriters' one-for-them, one-for us attitude to the marketplace -- made for great records.

But those bands did upset people. And not just any people -- the right people. I remember Barry Jenkin introducing Spandau Ballet's 'To Cut A Long Story Short' on the radio and muttering darkly that 'two singles does not an album make.'³ And I remember people in the office hitting the roof when I said I liked, say, Anne Pigalle.⁴ Pop music was not proper music. It was not the Velvet Underground or Leonard Cohen or classic soul or indie. It was pretentious, style-obsessed, fake and so on and it made people very, very angry. Which is ironic⁵, because all pop was ever trying to do was be liked.

Now at a time when music is an accepted commodity -- 'something you consume while you're checking your e-mail,' as Trent Reznor⁶ put it -- pop music is annoying the right people again. Was Miley Cyrus's MTV performance any more ill-advised than the Yesterday and Today cover? What is Lorde's 'Tennis Court' but a direct skip to the good Kate Bush -- not the embarrassing Kate Bush ('Babooshka') or the stoner Kate Bush (Aerial) but the electro, B-side Bush ('Watching You Without Me')? What is Lana Del Rey but Portishead without the image problem? And who are the Naked and Famous but ABC with more songs?

It's upsetting.

---

1 "And avoiding responsibilities at art school" (Chris Knox, Jesus On A Stick #1)
2 'Like a full bottle of milk dropped on a stone doorstep' (anon.)
3 He was right, obv. It takes three. Has Justin Timberlake in his whole life written enough hit tunes to fill Rio? No, he has not. Say it, guys: don't make me point again at Pete.
4 Disclaimer: In London in 2010 I sat behind Anne Pigalle in the audience at a boring book reading and at one point she turned around and looked at me and rolled her eyes. Afterwards I saw her ride off through Soho on a bicycle. This was not a dream.
5 Like 10,000 spoons.
6 Saw NIN at the O2 center in 2009. Trent Reznor bought on Gary Numan as a special guest performer. Think about that.

Paris 2727

The catalogue for the street art and literature project Mythiq27 is published this week in France.
Curated and edited by Jann Suty, Mythiq27 is about the legendary "club" of artists who died aged 27: Dave Alexander, Jean-michel Basquiat, Chris Bell, D.Boon, Arlester Dyke Christian, Kurt Cobain, Peter de Freitas, Richey James Edwards, John Garrighan, Peter Ham, Les Harvey, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Rudy Lewis, Ron "Pigpen" Mckernan, Jacob Miller, Damien Morris, Jim Morrison, Kristen Pfaff, Gary Thain, Jeremy Michael Ward, Denis Wielemans, Alan Wilson, Amy Winehouse and Mia Zapata.

Suty invited 27 authors to each write 27 lines about one of the members. The collected texts would be exhibited alongside commissioned works from 27 street artists and published in a book.

I was asked to write about Kurt Cobain. Not being a poet I was curious about the idea of writing to a 27-line word limit. Moreover I was excited that the artist chosen to illustrate my piece was Invader, whose work I'd seen in London and Paris. Above is his Kurt Cobain piece, in his trademark coloured tile-style.

The full list of authors in order of subject is: Paul Vacca, Oliver Rohe, Arnaud Viviant, Philippe Routier, Marc Durin-Valois, Chad Taylor, Émilie de Turckheim, Yann Suty, Solange Bied-Charreton, Marc Villemain, Claro, Sorj Chalandon, David Fauquemberg, Laurent Binet, Jean-Michel Guenassia, Jean-Philippe Blondel, Harold Cobert, Grégoire delacourt, Laird hunt, Paulverhaeghen, Brian Evenson, Elsa Flageul, Fabrice Colin, Aude Walker, RJ Ellory, Alexis Jenni and Manuel Candré.

The street artists -- again, in corresponding order -- are: Sfief Desmet, Orticanoodles / Bernard Pras / Frank Fischer, Sp 38, Jonone / yz, Sd karoe / Charlotte Charbonnel, lnvader / Rero, Oudhout, Samuel Coisne / Yves Ullens, Seize Happywallmaker / Wen-Jié Yang, David Gouny / Antoine Gamard, Denis Meyers / Mademoiselle Maurice, Osch / lnvader/ Maykel Lima, Sd karoe / Shaka, Autoreverse / Nina Mae Fowler, Frank Fischer / Moolinex, Niark 1, Beb-Deum / kashink, Yoh Nagao / Graphic Surgery, Antoine Gamard / DHM, lnvader / Rero / Blek le Rat, Maykel Lima / Seize Happywallmaker, Ludo, Lana and Js, Oli-B, C 215 - Christian Guemy, Graphic Surgery / Johnnychrist and Mademoiselle Maurice / Lim Si Ping.

There's more information on Mythiq27 on Facebook and you can download a PDF of the press release. The Twitter feed for the publication and exhibition is @Mythiq27. If you do find yourself in Paris, the exhibition is at Espace Cardin in December. Big ups to Jann Suty for putting it all together.