Strange, I've seen that face before
Marks the site of revelation
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Lynch is dead and Blue Velvet is for perverts
Blue Velvet, 1986, Dir. David Lynch
The blue velvet draped over the film’s title sequence isn't pulled back to reveal the opening scene, like curtains at the cinema. Instead, it fades into blue sky as the camera tilts down to find another screening device - a picket fence - and a man having an aneurysm while watering his garden, watched by a small boy.
Here’s where the psychoanalytic critic, awash in the film’s notoriously psychosexual imagery, loses their shit. The father brought low as he wields the spurting phallus over the feminine garden. The boy experiencing the threat of castration yet ready to step in like a good little Oedipus. The extra detail of the family dog, enraged by the phallic master’s collapse, underlines the implicit violence of this oedipal vignette. With all that in mind, I want to draw your attention back to the fading velvet via Freud’s theory of the fetish.
The fetishist dodges castration anxiety by fixating on the moments before the traumatic knowledge that mother has no penis (go read about it). That’s why fabric features so prominently in fetish fantasy. Knickers, tights, or as in Blue Velvet a blue velvet dress are removed to reveal the missing member. Acting as a permanent psychic screen, the fetish object paradoxically conceals and simultaneously marks the site of revelation. Like antagonist monster-pervert Frank Booth, the fetishist is baby and daddy.
Similarly, by fading into elements that echo the velvet (fence, sky), the fabric remains immanent, forever merged with the cumming of age events of this small *logging town*. The implication, compounded by the film’s title, is that the movie itself is a fetish object. The opening - the entire film - marks and yet defers revelation. This fetishisation of the image insists that we don’t get to peek behind the velvet, rather we are willingly lost in its contours.
More next week
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Denim – Job Centre
https://youtu.be/0dAlhBpnNKQ?feature=shared
Oh, I’ve got your slice-of-life, observational pop songs right here. No dewy reminiscences, or Albion-lite yearning though; this is the work of Lawrence, the poet laureate of depression in pop.
After creating the urtext of shambolic, bookish indie in the eighties with Felt (in the jangle-purge, ‘Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow’ will be saved), the nineties saw Lawrence turn his mind to chunkier fare, with the wipe-clean retro-futurism of Denim. Direct darts of pristine novelty rock music, delivered with a guileless, midlands drawl. Brutal hum-drum life framed by music that fizzes with creativity; rinky-dink symphonies to a god who isn’t listening.
Denim’s second album, ‘Denim on Ice’ is one of the great lost records of the period; a glorious, absurd last-gasp folly from Lawrence, squandering the remaining goodwill and budget of a major label deal. It documents the crushing realities of life at the fag-end of nineties British life, via riotous pop hooks. The sonic attention to detail is peerless, Brian Wilson on the dole.
Speaking of which.
‘Job Centre’ is a barrelling pub-rock singalong, fuelled by blasts of crunchy glam guitar. It matter-of-factly details the void of job-hunting with no prospects, with an infectious chorus you could hang your coat on.
“Take the plate away, I can't face food today, I'll just drink my tea.”
No future.
Denim, with one wry eye on the past, depict a grim present of addiction, tedium, failed aspirations, and hellish mundanity. No romanticism here, just the deadpan observations of someone who’s been flattened by life.
And yet. This is joyful music too. Ebullient, imaginative, silly, catchy, and unabashedly pop. So very, very British, but never swerving into patriotic cliché. A career-suicide kiss-off, bursting with riotous ideas. Ridiculously ambitious; doomed to fail. The Lawrence way.
A hopeless hero for all times.
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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Robert Dallas Gray
Guitar/not guitar: Life Without Buildings, Whin, Guisers, Even Sisters. His latest solo album, The Vallum, is released 20th June 2025.
MO: A few years down the line, how do you feel about Life Without Buildings’ ‘The Leanover’ having its TikTok moment?
RDG: Well in part it helped to buy the equipment I used to make the more recent records, so I’m grateful for that! But it was nice, it coincided with the 20th anniversary of the record, so there was a bit of press and stuff. I think the nicest thing was what Sue said about it: at the time Lwb were active, the music press and really the whole scene was very male-dominated. Sue got a fair bit of stick, and we got bored to death with people comparing her to Björk and Clare Grogan, as if the salient feature of what she did was that she had a high voice, you know. But for Sue, who has a teenage daughter, to see young women taking control of a piece of work she’d made and using it as a tool for self-expression was I think really nice for her, maybe even changed how she’d thought about the whole experience.
What’s been the most surprising thing about your more recent collaborations in Whin, Guisers and Even Sisters?
Really just that collaboration can be such an enormous joy. I remember when we were doing the Whin track ‘Kris’, very early on, we thought it needed something else and I asked my friend Fritz Welch, who is a percussionist and improviser, to contribute something and he sent us this absolutely incredible percussion track. I was literally jumping about the room when I heard it. That’s happened a lot with Whin.
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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers
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God Told Me To - (Larry Cohen, 1976)
Violent killings erupt across New York, disconnected and unmotivated beyond one repeated explanation… “God Told Me To”.
Cohen’s films always evoke a casual irreverence for the form and subject of film making norms, whether that’s the guerilla style filming of everyday New Yorkers or making antagonists out of mutant babies and homicidal yogurt.
Here this irreverence strides as actors, playing victims to indiscriminate sniper fire, throw themselves to the concrete before passing pedestrians or how hundreds of cops are cast as unknowing extras alongside SNL regular Andy Kaufman by some audacious filming of a police parade, perhaps tolerated on the off chance of meeting Kaufman’s SNL Co-star, Kermit the Frog.
Of course the story is as reverent of religious sensibilities as its writer was of public-filming permits. The story is initially of a devout catholic detective reconciling his faith and personal guilt with human brutality, but as he uncovers more of what links these disparate crimes his faith is challenged by an invasive extraterrestrial threat that speaks to a cosmic horror perspective of 70s New Ageism. It’s the human insignificance implied in Chariots of the Gods, the comedown of 60s idealism manifesting as UFO cults and rule by the psychic might of Indigo Children. It’s individualisation and detraditionalisation asserting the same matter that constitutes God is in each of us and the sacrilegious conclusion that therefore “I am God”, but what if this god-matter is no demiurgic force of light and harmony but something of malign intent? A progenitor with a dire countenance ‘neath a crown of burning plumes, circled by a thousand eyes spinning behind an ornate filigree of black volcanic glass, like a biblically accurate Micheal Caine, colossal, terrifying and inevitable… but there’s no money for any of that so you have to settle for a glowing yellow hippy… soz.
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Nemitations
You have not been pure.You have not been vigilant.You have not behaved.
The Warlock is before you.
What colour is your Warlock?
Cold silver? Verdant green? Royal blue? Sick orange? Shocking pink?
What form is your Warlock? Sculpted? Metallic? Or does it coil like bramble? Pulse like hydraulic starfish arms?
How is your Warlock dressed? Bone armour? Leathers? Tarred drummer boy brocade? A dirty wife-beater and torn fishnets?Is your Warlock naked?
How does your Warlock smell? Sulphur? Bitumen and amber? Ozone and solder? The sharp damp tang of a neglected stable? Phosphine? Brut 33?
How does your Warlock sound? The scraping of metal on bone? Madge Bishop after 40 B&H, Nico? An avalanche? A gas leak? Does it speak or do their words appear in your head?
Touch your Warlock.Does the Warlock welcome your touch? Is it warm? Is it smooth? Is its skin reptilian, aquatic mammal, or covered in fine barbed hairs? Touch its haunches, caress its beak. Metal under rubber? Cartilage? Touch, if it lets you, the baleen fronds of the neck. Do they yield? Do they resist?
Does the Warlock sweat? Does it drip?
The Warlock is everything they said was wrong. Your parents. Your teachers. The kings and queens of this world. All the things they fear, all the things they despise.
The things they could see in you.
The fear you had to work really hard to unlearn. The Warlock is the things that you haven’t been able to accept yet.Do the strangest things. Love the alien.
Yellowed newsprint - a biroed name? The white snap crack of responsibly sourced? Aluminosilicate and liquid light?
The Warlock is before us.
We are recalcitrant. We are distracted. We are mixed.
Why not print out this image, careful with the scissors, and colour your own Warlock?
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The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf (1842, translated by H.M. Waidson, 1957)
The persistent narrative dialectic of pastoral horror, its need for the urbane sophisticate to penetrate the village, turns it into a knitwear catalogue. The outsiders' perspective is as unnecessary as it is uninvited. Who gives a fuck what the grockles think?
The condemned outsider is already inside. Rural humans live embedded within nature, but always moving out from and struggling against it. This friction, eternal til the city-sanctuary developed its generous offer of anonymity, generates its own drama. The third party perspective of unlucky hikers, virgin cops or academics on sabbatical is not required.
Gotthelf's horror masterpiece is a delicate dissection of the Swiss countryside's social dynamics and political economy. The immigrant who treats with the Odinic devil and opens the idyll to calamity is othered only by her fellow villagers' hypocrisy. More truly them than they are, speaking their desires and doing what needs to be done. Marked out only for not sharing their cowardice, and taking the fatal step they all feared.
The gleaming schwartze spinne that boils and erupts from a spot on her cheek before laying waste to the valley over two generations, is no symbol of nature's sadistic, ever-present threat to withhold the means of survival. Nor the spectre of communism wicking up into the floorboards.
Its malice and stealth express the hideous responsibilities that come with nature's plenty, the bounty that besets the soul of a people cursed with abundance. The instant the lavish terms enforced by nature’s God are revealed to be a trap, the devil’s deal becomes inevitable.
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&
I've been thinking a lot recently about Kristian Hoffman's 2002 album &.
& is a funny, clever, touching album, a set of duets with artists as diverse as Russell Mael from Sparks, Mexican Elvis impersonator El Vez, and Bongwater's Ann Magnuson. While it's not anything as crass as a concept album, it has a series of themes which it keeps coming back to in different forms – ideas about sex, and death, and religion, and the afterlife.
It's an album full of quotable lines -- my favourite is "It's like a hideous chorus by the post-Mary-Wilson Supremes" -- and at first glance it seems to be an album that's "just" funny and clever.
But at the heart of it there's an immense sense of loss, of lost futures. Hoffman is gay, and his former collaborator Klaus Nomi was one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS, and it's a shadow over the album. And that's, I think, what's making me keep circling back to it at the moment. It started because one of the duets is with Stew of The Negro Problem. Stew is now a professor at Harvard, and last year he asked if I would guest-lecture there this year. Obviously, with the US' current descent into outright fascism, that's not happening, and I'm missing that opportunity, but in the grand scheme of things that's not in the top ten million losses people are mourning either in the US or here. Especially queer people.
The song I keep coming back to is "Scarecrow" about the murder of Matthew Shepard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mK3XMZM-EI
"Can it be who you long to kiss/That left you hanging there like this/Or who you'd yet to hold in dreams you left untold?"
If we only had a heart. If we only had a brain. If we only had a chance again…
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Everything’s RUINED
WHY WOULD HE TAKE ‘PABLO’ DOWN OFF DONDA 2, AFTER ONE DAY, OF ALL MR. WEST’S RECENT ANTICS THIS IS PERSONALLY THE MOST TRYING
Sit down and let me rap with you
I thought I could try and illustrate what I am driving at, trying to divine, when I say everything is everything and human culture endlessly malleable and permeable, by saying a poem is a rap is a standup routine - if you can strap on your 97 mentality for a minute folks, watch this
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7JkPx0gk6LE?si=vFwzD5kIuFIERf1n
NEXT THING I KNEW THIS MF WAS SELLING BUMBLEBEE TO THA BEEF
I actually can’t believe I hadn’t seen this before, until comics legend Dan McDaid (World’s Finest Annual 2025 out now folxx!) introduced me to it in the week after our Born Again catch-up, but what struck me was the dynamic is entirely like a concert, and that Chris Rock after a not particularly strong introduction on the Method Man Tical 2000 LP was promoted to, and certainly brought the hype to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s sophomore opener, an album I listened to daily in 2000/1. The hype never relents after ‘Recognize’ either - consider Chappelle discussing Rock’s shows and guys trying to emulate “bars” from the Bring the Pain tour - named ouroborotically, for a Method Man joint.
Even what I am writing is multivalent, it’s diaristic, bloggy, some aspirations of cultural critique, working things out… I think I am doing a spell.