Decline when aloof from nature

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SONGS FROM THE BACKSEAT

5:  David Bowie, Sound and Vision

Sound and Vision (2017 Remaster)

Sat in the back of the car, driving back from my grandparents house. Autumn. My brother and I, both teenagers. With all the joy that brings. It’s likely I am recovering from an evening of psychedelics at Jim’s the night before. Pissed off that the rest of my friends are recuperating together. Everyone is tense, in that low key, but enveloping way that only a family dynamic can produce. A complex latticework of resentments and frustrations. I am at the stage where I view any time spent with them as a huge drag, a void of ordinariness that stymies how I conceitedly view myself; an aspirant cosmic adventurer waiting to erupt from this chrysalis into a life of spectacle and excitement. My brother, gearing up for university, politically revved up, looks for semantic arguments with my dad at any point. Dad, middle-aged, stormy and distant. My mum, thoroughly sick of the male posturing energy from her boy-heavy family. Things erupt in a messy, angry way. It’s Sunday, with the blue feelings that brings. I sink into myself, stewing in resentment. Radio 2 plays. Normally it’s my Dad’s classical music. Suddenly my ears detect a familiar swooning tune.

“This is a great song” I interject, suddenly.

David Bowie’s ‘Sound and Vision’ is a unifying song. Its swooping, gently urgent instrumental opening could stall a crying baby, interrupt sex, stop a fight. If it looped forever no-one would mind. The drums bounce, snares hiss, the guitar riff keens, knotted together with a rubbery bass groove. After a glorious minute and half, Bowie’s sighing vocals enter the fray, a playground chant meditation on the transportive power of art.

The song silences us, miraculously. We all listen, until it drifts away.

It’s never as bad as you think. You miss it when it’s gone. 

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Lisa

Everyone seemed to love Lisa. Everyday people came to look at her. Thousands of them! You'd think this would make her happy, everyone loves attention, right? Thing is, when she looked at the faces in the crowd, she couldn't tell what most of them were thinking. Their enigmatic expressions looked as if they were trying to express wonder but behind the eyes were thoughts such as, 

"Is that it?"

"She's a bit small." 

"Why am I here?"

"What’s for lunch?"

In latter years she couldn’t see the faces quite as well because they were covered by phones, taking photos. This way everyone was free to wonder what the fuss was about anytime, anywhere yet still they came to see her. For a while, anyway. Eventually they stopped because most people never went anywhere.  What was the point?  Going places was for the rich.  So the time came for Lisa to leave.  She went on sale for billions but no one bought her.  Everyone was surprised that no one wanted the world's most celebrated and photographed Lisa. This shock and surprise was her last big indent on the world before the memory of her faded. She was eventually bought for £50 and went to live with a nice family who seemed to really enjoy her. Last week, she was taken off the wall for redecorating and the youngest scribbled on her head a bit with a crayon. Lisa had never felt so alive.

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Scottish Friction 4 - intermission: Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, 2022); 1982, Janine (Alasdair Gray, 1984)

Pause the tape. Resist the urge to rewind to your favourite moment. Eyes fixed on the breaks. Why does so much of this story have to do with loss? With the people who can no longer hold us or hate us or talk the shite of the day with us? What does any of this have to do with the state of a nation?

Contra the first and only TV show to parody older modes of production, for me grief usually has more to do with anger than love. It feels like my whole body lashing out at the removal of familiarity and possibility. If love’s involved at all it’s a scunnered thing, waiting for an echo to bounce back off a wall that’s not there anymore.

This feeling, if indulged as a worldview, becomes one form of conservatism. A panic against entropy, a fool’s attempt to revive that one Woolworths by making a wickerman of the now. Out in the world, we see over and over again that this bonfire tends to use anyone and anything that feels different as kindling.

Too easy to accidentally do the soft version of this. To make idols out of deid colleagues or parents or authors or political moments, dulling the rage by increasing the amount of fiction in our memories. Inasmuch as there was ever any difference between these things, of course. “The spirit of 45, revived!”

Better to read 1982, Janine with today’s eyes and confront the way that Alasdair Gray dealt with lust and power and his relation to these as a man who grew mighty in the “second city of the empire.” There’s no true accounting with the debts of the past, but fuck me, a bit of fucking ambition here, for the love of fuck! 

Press play. 

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DOOMED SUMMER: Yes, I’m a Witch 

Morrison’s work problematises fixed identities. They’ve spoken about their Committee, the Justice League of their own head. Regulation is when you can bring the one you need to be to the fore. 

‘Crazy Jane’ named after Richard Dadd’s painting. Dadd was in Bedlam for murdering his father, the model in the picture another inmate. 

Crazy Jane based on Truddi Case, perhaps cleaving too close to that life in the manifestation.  

Inside the Clive Barker horror of proto-Vertigo there is an actual tragedy at the heart of Jane’s story but Jane is never tragic. She is who she needs to be when she needs to be it. Adapting to every level of story, cutting up From Hell to rescue Rhea, becoming the Sin Eater in the Tearoom of Despair.

Jane knows that Doom Patrol isn’t real, it’s a fiction that’s been boosted into reality ‘haven’t you noticed all the coincidences’ says Mama Pentecost. She is made vulnerable when the Candlemaker sends her to ‘hell’ - a story plane closer to our own reality -  where imagination is subjugated to utility. 

64 personalities.64 in Gematria - the final liberation that realises full individuality, natural forces in unison. 64 the magic square of Mercury – god of communication. 6 + 4 = 10. 

Where Cliff is passive Jane is active. She seeks the Ordeal of the Abyss. She goes down to the well. Da’at, the invisible sephira, unity and division, gateway to the world of husks and inversions. Jane faces everything her story is and comes out as themselves. Integration would be a mistake. She is balanced. A kaleidoscope where all the parts of her love and trust the other. 

The repeated images of tumbling jigsaw pieces linked to Jane’s abuse, metaphor for her fragmentation. But jigsaw pieces fit together perfectly to make their picture. 

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That’s William Blake’s house, that is. 

The one he was born in. And because I’m such a nerd, I went back and redrew some of it when I realised that the ‘fake windows’ on the upper floors, which I had presumed were filled in later to avoid Pitt’s window tax, were actually like that from the beginning. 

This may give you some idea of the levels of obsessive detail that I’m bringing to my current project, LOS, a graphic novel about William Blake. 

It’s not just pedantry though. ‘God’ is going to look in at the window in a few pages, and you’ve got to make sure that it’s the right window, yeah? There will also be visions of angels in trees and Old Testament prophets eating dung, as well as riots, revolution, sex and violence. I want to join up the visionary realm with 18th century urban grime, showing how Blake’s weird life and work emerged from a tumultuous time for politics, religion, art and science.

I love Blake for the same reason that I love comics - the magic that happens when you combine words with pictures! Though he’s probably best known as a poet, Blake was equally a visual artist. And, though his influence is visible in all sorts of comics, it seems completely mad that no-one (as far as I’m aware) has given the man himself the full sequential graphic treatment. It might be because it turns out to be bloody hard!

Ah well, I’m all in now. If this sounds like your kind of thing, you can follow my progress, and if you really want to, help me fund the damn thing, at https://loshighway.substack.com 

I’ll be doing this for a while : )

‘I labour upwards into futurity’

Yes, yes, William, don’t we all?

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Scarfolk Horror

Scarfolk Horror is defined by a childhood encounter rather than straightforward media consumption. It arises in contexts that explicitly promise safety, education, and appropriate entertainment. The horror isn't so much in the content itself, but in the structural betrayal of medium expectations: Children's television that reveals disturbing adult realities, public information films that undermine rather than reinforced security, educational programming that opens doorways to cosmic dread. The paradigm Scarfolk encounter took place in the late 70s to mid 80s, an era of limited choice (3 TV channels, later 4), at a time in life where media exposure was controlled by responsible adults and authority was held in much higher esteem. The horror, then, emerged from the everyday spaces of home and school - from sites of order.  

Richard Littler's Scarfolk distills these elements: a town trapped in an eternal 1970s, forever on the cusp of the mass media explosion of the 1980s but never quite arriving there. Scarfolk's council communications possess a haunted, senile quality—the voice of authority rendered unreliable, even dangerous. The suggestion is that Nanny didn't just fail to save us; she led us by the hand into a chaotic, cacophonous world of tabloids and hyper-capitalism, then abandoned us there.

What makes the SFH encounter particularly unsettling is its suggestion that the weird was never an intrusion into normal reality. Instead, "normal" was perhaps always the illusion. If rational authority does not lead to betterment but instead ushers in decay, apocalypse, or the return of the repressed, then our ideals are revealed as handmaidens to dark truths about the incompatibility of our forms of life and the nature of reality itself. 

The sense-making of the world becomes, at best, a veneer over incomprehensible forces, or at worst, the mechanism of its own unraveling. 

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What I tell you three times is true

To get back to the stuff I was writing about a few weeks ago, before being so unavoidably interrupted by my own indolence (and by the weather, which turns off my brain for the three hottest months every year), there is a very dangerous thing that can come from trying to construct a piece of narrative nonfiction, and that is that you can convince yourself that the implicit argument you're making is true. Not the *explicit* argument - not the thing you're saying - but the assumptions within the very structure of the narrative about how the world works. And yet you find yourself compelled to structure the narrative that way.

One annoying thing one finds out as one writes more is that there are certain tricks to writing that are ridiculously easy but which work anyway. I know a myriad techniques for emotionally manipulating an audience - and manipulating is the right word. Using them makes me feel sleazy and creepy, but I use them anyway because emotionally manipulating an audience is to a large extent what writing *is*. 

But anyone who has read up at all on the way the human brain works knows that if you repeat something you start to believe it yourself. What is it doing to *my* brain that I am telling these neat, tidy, stories in a few thousand words about the lives of real people who were not heroes or villains, just human beings with the normal flaws that come with that? What am I training my brain to expect about the way the world actually works? And what happens when it comes into conflict with actual reality?

To be continued…

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WALTER THE SOFTY IS JACKED NOW AND OWNS AN IT CONSULTANCY, MEANWHILE DENNIS HAS TO PICK UP A LOAD OF DOGSHIT… JUST GOES TO SHOW EH

Raps first this week, the week that the Daily Mail called Lochee “Britain’s Bronx”; I know that shit is not supposed to be complimentary but I have written to NYPL to correspond because I am absolutely choosing to take it that way. Even the Mail piece in its own way acknowledges that addiction and not multiculturalism is the major underlying issue, as it is in most impoverished built up areas… anyway look, Kool Herc invented hip-hop in the Bronx 52 years ago, fuck your ghastly home county sneer. Link is here but it’s paywalled and scabby touch https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15047841/Britains-Bronx-addicts-migrants-crack-poverty-prostitution-murders-graham-grant.html

ICK

The rap form is only now reaching a point - tragic little Eddie Piskor notwithstanding - where it is legacied and can be storied and apprehended thereby; three generations plus have been at it, there are standards, classics, forms and so forth - it’s really a book my favourite music writer Neil Kulkarni should have written if he hadn’t had the absolute temerity to die. I do wish he hadn’t.

Ehh so yeah, new Earl Sweatshirt is unbelievably sunny and upbeat - Static an incredibly short ditty but my highlight particularly for the moment it references Future’s DS2 opener over what I can only describe as a stormy Ghibli climax… I am reminded that his verse on this old old Boldy James joint basically made me want to get a contract in an American college specifically to teach it… “Pantera records and bodies stuffed in a damp cellar” ucchh so evocative, it’s bad and exciting and I am *present*

Also rinsing Westside Gunn Heels Have Eyes 2 - I have taken a lot of convincing about WSG, I bought into his brother Conway a lot more mainly because of Shoot Sideways if I am 100% honest but for someone who seems to spend 70% of his time ad-libbing Gunn is incredibly effective, the main percussion on MANDELA here… Amira Kitchen is an astonishing track, goats do have horns.

WALTER THE SOFTY IS PARTYING WITH GIRLS, THAT NEVER DIE, NOW… HE’S SHOWING THEM A PAUL LAFFOLEY PAINTING THAT PROVES ZOMBIES AND HIGH FASHION ARE THE SAME SPECTRUM

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Make haste

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Derek and John

Donne the unlovable love poet, staggering and intricate constructions always for reflecting glory on himself, not sun, lover or even his own muse. Or Donne the preacher, whose contribution to English metaphysics was to insist coin is the earthly condensate of angelic will, and material wealth the truest sign of god’s favour. Telling them what they want to hear.

Jarman’s alchemical vision is opposite: gold is freely abundant in nature if revealed through the exploration - via art or activism - of material and spiritual darkness. So Donne’s solar song on the south facing wall of Jarman's saint-maker machine is a bit of a mystery. 

The cult is establishing in real time. A monastic community of bitumen slats and rapeseed windowframes. The cell sanctified by his relics and talismans, culture-makers in residence, friends and acolytes busy about the space, sharing stories of death, change and charity til they sublime into legends. Spelling out the founding myth of a new space.

Fresh earth on an old country where the future is banned from looking different to the past, Dungeness is the defiant fifth corner, gathering shingle extending by the yards into the channel, the shape of tomorrow’s maps. The nuclear ziggurat blocking the horizon, an impossible hyper-object the Prospect Cottage plot seeks to mediate, subsidises nature by voiding hot water into the current, feeding local spirit, fish and bird populations, and producing the dolphin carcass we find on the beach. Jarman’s imprint here is a half-life deep strategy of mass redemption, a long game whose outcome no-one reading this will see. 

Confidence has value as a multiplier. It endows the sun’s gaze with power to claim new worlds of spice and mine. Derek and John come together in daring us to hope the solar empire’s compass loses to the poet’s projected imagination in the future’s realisation.