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(See that, that’s art..)..that too
27 Thursday Dec 2012
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in27 Thursday Dec 2012
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18 Tuesday Dec 2012
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inAs I’ve said before, I don’t do this very often but when I have the chance to point people in the direction of something I think is important and worthwhile (and involves friends) I’m proud to link to other people’s work.
This is a short, French language documentary from the 360 degres et meme plus collective in Marseille and like all their work is worth taking the time to view. In French..
16 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted Poetry, Uncategorized
in13 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted Stories, Uncategorized
inBelow is an extract from the title story of the book “The Wind-up Radio Chronicle and other stories” which will be released by Hovel Press in 2013
The Wind-up Radio Chronicle
“In desolaten Landschaften ist es leichter, Gedanken anzusiedeln als schon bewohnten Gegenden.”- Headcleaner, Blixa Bargeld
Prologue-
The skies here are big, perhaps they seem even more so in relation to how tiny the island is. Along with the few other people who live here, the dog, the giant malamute, is here with me. I’m not alone but I don ‘t talk much to him. Words don’t mean a great deal to the dog and we do things his way more and more.
They do say that in any relationship one party dominates and the weaker tends to modify their behaviour to mimic that of the stronger. We become increasingly alike. Except in one important way; his teeth are terrifying, beautiful daggers and I am now entirely edentate, more like a sloth or an anteater than a large dog.
I have my room in the one guesthouse on the island of Noil, my wind- up radio to keep me in touch with the world via the magic cord of long wave and tomorrow my final appointment with Dr. Ray, my friendly personal dentist, just to check that everything is safely finished and complete. I have no real idea of what happens from here but I have a reasonably clear idea of the route I took to get here.
1
It started with my teeth and with a certain shift in the aesthetic of the mainstream cinema. Take a breath it does make sense.
These two factors constitute what Jorge Luis Borges might have called ‘The Remote Case’ of my present situation; what Nestor the Chronicler writing in the monastery caves of Kiev would have called the ‘ Povest’ Vremmenykh Let’ or the ‘tale of bygone years’.
Despite my good dental health regime and a phobia of the dentist that ensured I maintained a healthy diet, my teeth consistently darkened and decayed throughout my adult life, my gums retreated and my mouth became increasingly sensitive. My genetics weren’t good. At least one uncle had no teeth left by the age of thirty-five. My mother’s gums had disappeared from view around the base of many of her teeth from early adulthood and she survived that pain by painting on fluoride from time to time.
We all have our weaknesses, we all have to go some way as they say in my father’s family and this appeared to be my route.
Pain, like sex, it occurs to me now, is impossible to describe. You can only ever describe what it looks like not what it is. Perhaps we can best outline the biological basis of both but that does nothing to illuminate the experience, how it enters our lives or how it affects them.
When the constant nagging pain in my own mouth got too much, and when I had developed an abscess that caused me to faint with pain, I took myself to a dentist. We got the abscess fixed with antibiotics so strong they made the skin peel from my hands, the tooth removed after several nasty attempts (it is not easy to numb a ‘hot tooth’), but the general unease in the area of my teeth and gums went on. I used sensitive toothpaste of all the major brands and I used the sensitive mouthwash associated with them all too, sometimes in brand sync and sometimes out in the alternating hope that using the products in sync would double the effect or that using them out of sync would have a greater effect by adding something new.
Nothing helped. I went to several dentists who all said my teeth and gums were basically sound, not perfect, I had damaged them by overly aggressive brushing but basically sound.
I used floss of various kinds, I used interdental brushes which were an innovation from Sweden, I used soft toothbrushes and electric and sonic toothbrushes.
I invested heavily in failure. Nothing worked, or rather everything didn’t work and consistently so.
So I decided to have all my teeth removed.
I was working in an advertising agency/publishing company at the time called Yew Haven Press. I was sick of it. I saved my money as best I could and I came up with a scheme, my own personal dental plan. This plan I have been in the processes of putting into action here on the island of Noil, off the coast of Donegal in the North West of Ireland over the past month.
The other remote cause was a return of the 1970s in the movies.
Having been born in the 70s myself it’s just perfect to think that a lot of things got repressed back then and when I found that the seventies were re-emerging in the cinema in my late thirties, a whole lot resurfaced in me too.
I had always loved movies from the seventies, particularly German ones for some reason. I felt the way that Wim Wenders filmed Hamburg in “The American Friend” was the way that European cities should be filmed. It felt like what I felt like walking up the quays from home in Stoneybatter to the city centre of Dublin. It felt right to film these cities from the river up not to try to copy American films where directors could shoot from the sky down past the skyscrapers.
This has always been the atmosphere in which I feel most at home and yet I found it disturbing when I started to notice this look and feel being copied in movies being made by American director’s like David Fincher. The whole look of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a computer graphics generated attempt to pin the look of European cinema from the seventies over an American set of thoughts and images. I saw it again and again. I couldn’t go to the movies without seeing this pattern repeated in the trailers for coming attractions (I give you “Hanna”, for example) and it disturbed me.
When I was young I lived by the Liffey and I spent so much time walking up and down the quays that I got to know it like a sailor gets to know the sea. Not the ‘wine dark sea’ or the ‘snot green sea’ but some filthy brown delta of refuse.
When the river was low it revealed decades of debris all rotted together, everything melting into one misshapen monster and nothing maintaining its form.
All the psychological junk and debris of my childhood kept coming back with the intrusion of the past into the present of the cinema.
A lot of people might find this hard to understand but watching films was the experience that most formed my thinking. From the first film I went to; which, by the way, was “Watership Down” nothing influenced the formation of my ideas and character with the same degree of strength as the big screen. Nothing influenced how I saw the world and imagined my place in it more than the movies.
A combination of these two things I believe started the panic attacks.
The teeth got worse and worse and the panic attacks kept pace until I found myself regularly waking from dreams of horrific dental surgery in the mornings with my heart already racing and my breathing shallow and rapid to a reality of actual dental pain and a terror of everything and everyone.
So I made the decision to get all of my teeth removed. This is not something dentists like to do these days although forty years ago they would actively recommend it to young people just to avoid the future hassle keeping your teeth would cause. If you go further back in history the removal of all your teeth might be given to you as a wedding present; in a sense it was a symbol that you were an adult. Get your teeth out and get on with your life; it’s a sentiment I can support.
I can also think of several weddings I have been forced to attend after which I would happily have removed the main offenders teeth for them as a present to myself but that is another story.
I made the rounds of the dentists of Dublin but no one would help.
So, even though I had my plan in place it was of little use to me without a willing helper. Even I was not desperate enough to consider, seriously anyway, extracting my own teeth.
Then I found Dr. Ray. He worked from what looked like a tenement completely unchanged from the 1940s near the Black Church.
There is a legend that if you walk around the Black Church backwards saying the Our Father backwards or something like that you will meet the Devil. If that were true and you were foolish enough to do it, you might meet someone who looked very much like Dr. Ray.
Dr. Ray looks only slightly over one hundred years old. He is about six feet three inches tall but if you add the height of his wild grey hair he might be anything up to six feet six. He is extremely thin and his skin is almost as grey as his hair. Sitting still he looks like he might not have long to live but I have seldom seen him sitting still and at all other times he has a strange sense of vitality about him, like a very animated corpse. He is surprisingly strong, as I know from the few times I have accepted his challenges to arm-wrestle, it is his grip which particularly impresses me- grip strength is a good indicator of longevity I’m told. Oh, and he only has one eye. He wears the classic black leather eye patch and it rather suits him. I have never learned his Christian name he has never volunteered it and it has never seemed appropriate to ask. I think of him very much in the way I used to think of my schoolmasters, and I know for a fact they didn’t have first names, they were bred without them.
He told me that he would be more than happy to remove all my teeth but that he was retiring and going to live on a tiny island in the Atlantic not far off the Donegal coast. I told him that I thought we could still make it work…
08 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted Poetry, Uncategorized
inTags
Recently I was lucky to be taken on a trip abroad, by train, to a city on the continent- as we used to say. I won’t name the city (though it’s not that hard to guess) for the same reason I’ve given this poem the title above- because it’s not an attempt to express anything essential about the city in question, just to record the experiences of a happy tourist.
Postcard from ———-
City of no black socks on a Sunday
Push Hands surrounded by poor municipal horticulture
Mopeds, VanVan and Triumph
Children, who can speak French, bundled into cuteness against the cold
Suzanne and Sam’s resting space
Still filthy
And jerky brakes are not powerful
Or it doesn’t translate
Universal centre of the base layer
And camping clothes.
Meticulously polite and definitely
Not
London
Leather and fur and old ladies coiffeurs indistinguishable from fur
Corduroy and cashmere
Dyed hair like straw, matchstick legs a certain, no a fixed, style
A single hill, a single view, a raised collar and perhaps an eyebrow
A taste for Italian pop
And there really are a lot of cinemas
Definitely not a city for crane shots
Of course Bill Burroughes is still here he just made it, hit it-
“El hombre invisible at last ya dig kid”
And the world’s best graffiti for sure
And every exciting foreign place you go there are people there already dreaming of other exciting foreign places
Sau-sel-it-o, say it slow
Like “Calypso is like so”
04 Tuesday Dec 2012
Posted Poetry, Uncategorized
inTags
There is a long history of works of art that could be described as “The things I love and the things I hate” poems or songs. Sometimes they take the form of a love song- the things I offer to you my lover as thanks or as an act of worship or as a token towards seduction. Sometimes they deal with the things that make life worth living or the things I would pass on to my children or the things I believe in.
Most of us who write will come at some time to the idea that it is our time to produce a poem or song in this mode. They are exciting and comforting because of their lyric feeling and because they come with an easy to follow form, they are basically lists.
Also, they let the writer get a lot of personally indulgent stuff off their chests.
This is my contribution to that body of work in the form of a “what I would not destroy utterly if I were a rampaging, fifty-foot tall, mutant Catholic Saint”. There’s a little more to it than that (but we all have that arrogance I guess) as it has been influenced greatly by reading and re-reading an old JG Ballard story called “The Illuminated Man” which is mind-bendingly wonderful on the subjects of science, religion, time and space and an awful lot more and as the title suggests looking too much at a certain painting of St. Francis that you can find in the National Gallery in London. There’s a Nick Ray film that has something to do with it and the occasional moment of low blood pressure and… but there I go with the lists again.
The trouble with looking
What will remain after the fifty-foot man?
After he expands into a painting of a saint
Into a saint surrounded by beasts
Into a beast.
Surrounded by his own expanding flesh
Shoulders twisting in their sockets
Skin like a bicycle wheel inner tube
Teeth liberating from gums and jaws
Speech impossible
Altering the angle of the horizon
with every step
What will remain when he reaches the sea?
Nick Ray’s blind right eye
and the blues and reds it saw,
The shiver of a horse’s hindquarters
Several large oaks
the pile of warm, wet leaves around them
The hips of old men and old dogs met
just after dawn
when they own the world and its rising light
A bear’s lack of affect and
the sorrow bomb it detonates in your gut
Ippon, orgasm
A stream’s technique of breaking light
merging time and space
{Strange that the streams must stop for the fifty-foot man to expand}
Whatever made John Cassevettes feel
that only the old could be beautiful
and Gena Rowlands’ face that proved him wrong.
The making of icons
and the fictions of monks
that write history
The central nervous system
dancing in a box
and the tiny shed from which consciousness
is being created.
The stations of the cross
and the sudden reality of knives
Buildings, collapsed from pure entropy,
that were standing last night when you passed them
drunk and nervous
Ready
WS, Sam, JG, their names cut up
As a charm against evil,
The things seen in childhood
That cannot exist, what would they feed on?
(Then what does mental illness feed on?)…
I’ll keep adding to this I think, as I don’t feel I’ve reached the sea quite yet… and the streams are still flowing.