Heavy and unnecessary restimulation

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CINDY AND BISCUIT: WILD, WILD LIFE by DAN WHITE

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - Chicago, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Chris Ware, 2000)  

It’s hard to attribute an architect’s eye to a story that feels improvised for its first sixty-odd pages, yet here we are. The early stages of Jimmy Corrigan provide baffling mathematical diagrams of workplace ennui and submerged frustrations that occasionally converge in the form of a penis. Not a lavishly veined ACME Novelty Datebook throbber, of course, but a carefully crafted Chris Ware™ cylinder. 

Note that all of this does build into a literature of steel and echoes, the Chicago skyline emerging from the drowned realm of the mind. And so, the introduction of a missing father figure into Jimmy’s life eventually demands the introduction of the grandfather’s story into the narrative, as one well-wrought fold opens to reveal another. 

The sense of connection across the ages, carried by motif rather than plot due to Ware’s baseline of alienated neurosis, becomes almost occult and oppressive. We have tiny horses, crudely imagined, a dream that seems to leap a generation. We have an ache that’s felt when one father is present and when another isn’t. Relationships with women all feel preemptively doomed, the preserve of advertising. 

Presented in Ware’s relentless schematic layouts, it’s as though the cut-out city has formed around the Corrigan family as a curse.

What does this imply? The overall effect is, somehow, startlingly current. All of the tools are there to see everything, but the same artistic and social position that provides this vantage is resistant to a sense of broader connectivity, either emotional or intellectual. 

In later years Ware would make images that dealt more deliberately with the idea of people exploring artificial worlds in the same shared space. With Jimmy Corrigan, he built a showcase city around us while trying to draw a comic about the saddest cock on earth. 

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Lobbying

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Nützligeist

The priest was no help at all.  He couldn't understand the very simple brief, all he could offer was a bloody exorcism.  Our poltergeist had been moving objects back to where they belonged.  Every morning we'd wake up and all of Harry's books and toys would be put away, pillows plumped and the beds would be made.  This was all very good but the bloody thing wouldn't do the washing, cooking or anything else helpful.  We ended up meeting with all these weirdo psychics, witches and even Satanists but none of them were of any use.  Eventually we found a chap called Graham who came over from Guildford.  He explained that what we had wasn't a Poltergeist but a Nützligeist.  We haggled him down to £400 and he possessed the kitchen with a cooking Nützligeist. The food was a bit 70s at first but we'd leave Nigella and Jamie videos on and things started improving. The service was good enough to get Graham back to possess us with a couple of cleaners and a nützligeist to exercise the dog in the garden. If any of the work wasn't up to standard, the nützlugeists responded to being shouted at. Then for no reason they stopped. We found "strike" written in dust and in the condensation on the mirror in the en suite. They'd bloody unionised!  We called Graham and firmly expressed our dissatisfaction. After he possessed us with the spirit of Margaret Thatcher things went a bit mad, mostly dirty protests.  Eventually the spirits got back to work but it was all a bit slapdash. Since then the water's got dirty, the toilet only flushes if you're lucky and everything just feels tatty and doesn't work properly.  Oh and the milk keeps going missing. The whole thing's been a nightmare to be honest.

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SONGS FROM THE BACKSEAT
3: Blur, Tracy Jacks

https://youtu.be/c79ry4EwS5c

There’s a feeling of freedom and potential at the age of 17 that is a pure, uncut drug. It’s easy to romanticise youth, to forget all the neurotic overthinking, the adolescent body-horror, the fear. And yet. There are moments where life suddenly uncurls before you like a cat in a sunbeam, and you’re filled with a tangible, chewy excitement at everything that’s coming.

Sixth form. A time when school unwisely allows free periods for apparent personal study. Perfect, therefore, for driving to a different town to pick up weed. I’m in the back of Rick’s car. I’m lying down looking out the windows at the houses, road signs and trees as they flick past, everything ebulliently aglow from the bright summer day.

Rick is going out with Kate. Kate is my best friend. I am in love with Kate. It’s bittersweet to spend time with them, but I cherish our strange three-way friendship. The pain is deliciously cut with pleasure, and although I want to steal Kate from Rick, I like him. He’s handsome and fun and he drives us to get weed.

Blur’s ‘Parklife’ is playing on the tape player. It’s early days in the summer of Parklife. The record sounds brilliant, fresh and surprising. Crisp, smart, spiky pop songs, Britain askew, but alive. It’s infectious, bold and cocky stuff. 

‘Tracy Jacks’ epitomises the album’s appeal. A hyper-condensation of 30 years of British pop into two-and-a-half minutes. Telling of a quintessential uptight businessman having a Perrin-like breakdown, the song is bouncy, insistent and snotty; cut through with Albarn’s trademark sweet melancholy.

And then it happened on a Tuesday morning

The sunny, sad romanticism of the song is so perfect for our glorious, silly mission. Eyes closed, the car carries me through summer, towards the future.

And getting weed. 

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DOOMED SUMMER: The Invisible Collage 

Doom Patrol is a collage and collage is one of our weapons.  For Max Ernst, one of two visual artists in the Parisian Dada, collage was the freedom the poets found in automatic writing. Dadaist collage rejects the world’s representatives of newspapers and books, slicing them up and reshaping them. Ernst’s collage novels horny hermetic operations to collapse binary oppositions. 

For Eduardo Paolozzi, hermetic Scot sculpting occult technologies from sci-fi novels and cigarette cards, magazines were the dreams money can buy,  sensuality and virility bent to the event of selling tinned peas. Collage a way to ‘go beyond’, an inadequate word for the love of disruptive strategies that damages, erases, destroys, defaces and transforms. 

Collage a tool of marxists and punks. The materials that are available to us. Benjamin saw Dada as annihilating aura, missing that in the age of mechanical reproduction the hand wielding the scissors re-inscribes it with every cut. 

Annihilation and Reification.

Re-commercialised into a world turned day-glo aesthetic. 

The collaged bodies of the Doom Patrol and the architectural entities that intrude. Dream diaries and automatic writing, a conversation with comics, a conversation with the self.  Scissormen cut and paste, scissormen transform, a picture puzzle rebus before you rediscover vanity and paint tattoos on your bandages. 

Collage is an assemblage of higher dimensional objects flattened by technology into the 2d surface of the comics page. The Ant Farm littered with the detritus of the ads.  Flex Mentallo, of perfect physique and agreeable manners, an advert of self-transformation moving up into the story, manifesting graphics as diegetic element. 

When Grant Morrison writes a comic they write a comic, not a story abstracted into a format, they write a comic, with covers, and adverts, and pages that you turn and tear and flick and skim and linger. An object to be used. 

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LISTEN TO ME

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Somnium (Ref 5), Laurent Millet

The craftsman. The cube, transparent and levitating - obeying the rules of a perfect realm. In my Father's study and workshop, where he designs stained glass windows for princes and sultans, I learn that this is the goal of art.

Three dimensional shapes of scaling complexity hang from the ceiling. Approximations of something that can't be captured in the gleaming white card of their construction. A drafting table pinned with paper shows extrapolations of the vesica pisces. The inevitability of form, he assures us, is captured in this ancient Christian symbol. Geometric yantras of my Father’s occult school adorn the walls. Their contrasting colours familiar to a child’s eye, the palette of felt-tip pens. I recite their names: Universe, Ultimate Guardian, Unity. When my twin brother nearly died at birth, our parents imagined him secured within the Adamantine Pyramid blu-tacked to this wall.    

The man, of course, is hunched over his work - never dare suggest a hobby - searching in the angles and symmetry. He is there instead of being with his wife or his children, unless they come and he will take a moment to tell them about his discoveries with fierce vigour, before wishing them away. He will become angry if disturbed again. This is a great task. Searching for years, then decades and still searching as the world smooths into a flat plane angled towards death. This is art’s purpose, he urges to remember, to interface with the divine, the infinitesimal centre around which all form is constructed.

Illustrating with his tools - t-square, compass, ruler - my Father shows me how the comics I read use invisible vanishing points. He tells me that after he is gone, there will be a golden path left for us to walk down. I watch him fade into shadow, still at work, and know the path won’t be laid.

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Three Wizards and a Witch
Four: The witch
Scientologist! by David S. Wills (Beatdom Books, 2013)

There is only one kind of witch story - the hunt. Detective fiction. Piece together the new empire project’s metaphysics by extracting the objects mummifying in its walls.

William Burroughs revealed the generational conflict between representative lodges of competing powers as they pass up and down. He was in Tangiers to hide from the heat in the agreed spook zone while MENA was carved into constituent antagonisms. William learned and stole the cut-up/fold-in technology, seeing its Scientological resonance. He adapted the platform for written language and offered it back to Ron Hubbard for the new church. Recognising its capacity to cut both ways, Ron demurred: on the advice of the Office of Naval Intelligence, shark brain and engine room for the new laws of physics - he threw it into the world.

The decade before he’d outwitted British intelligence’s faltering Order of Thelema* and taken everything they knew. Tipped the intel, a he-goat flung from the mountainside, by Frank Malina, whose treachery was rewarded with a permanent position in Paris, moving volatile material through from Germany to Spain and on. Hanging rocket trajectories in the Centre Culturel, Frank fed Atlanticist hegemony into the left bank with Bob Maxwell, marrying off his son to one of Bob's witch daughters. 

It took time for William, from his inescapable control fugues, to recognise Hubbard’s insult. He distracted himself by sliding grammars along the scissorblade, filling the Nova Trilogy with pulsating resentments he couldn’t see or clear. Not wanting to know, he obsessed over the e-meter, a tool the cops use to measure spasming rectums. Clawing the sensor rods and willing the needle to go flat.

*The English wouldn’t recover for thirty years and their chaotic response, when it finally came, easily run to ground by the Satanic Panic.