THE EGG REPRESENTS YOUR SOUL CHOCOLATE
ITEM
What would you say were your big mistakes?
Jesus Christ Superstar is a hallucinatory film; a group of hippies visit the Holy Land to reenact the Passion but lose themselves, possessed by land and story they commit murder.
My grandad converted to Catholicism to marry my nan. My dad, taught by Christian Brothers, the ones Pat Mills based Torquemada on, embraced atheism pretty quick. My first encounter with the film was his copy of the soundtrack. Double album. Gatefold. Lavishly illustrated booklet. A blasphemous object. Protestant for starters.
I was seven when I first saw the film. Sexy Simon Zealotes and his sexy friends trying to seduce the Neely-Christ into revolution. Judas wanting to act but terrified of reprisal. The sexy friends transforming; terrorists, lepers, believers, sycophants, mob, playing them all while the Neely-Christ vibrates between passive and aggressive. The Christ we want the Bible-thumping-bomb-squads to meet. Dusty, snarling, brandishing a Kalashnikov like a club. ‘JESUS SMASH’.
No resurrection. The only transcendence a pre-death bardo where the Neely-Christ is harangued by his sexy betrayer and his sexy angels.
Most of the kids get to leave, sweating the people they became onto the dust, looking back, afraid of what they did but rationalising it away even as they board the bus.
What happens in Palestine stays in Palestine.
And then they drive off.
This is what freaked me out as a kid. They just leave him there to die.The Neely-Christ up on his cross. Now I’m seven, not an idiot, I’ve read The Making of Doctor Who, I know about crew. But it’s a really wide shot. There’s no one waiting at the side to get him down. In my late 20s I realise that maybe someone could have gone back for him.
But I don’t think they did.
ITEM
Traitor (Alan Bridges, Graeme MacDonald, Dennis Potter, John Le Mesurier, Jack Hedley. 1971.)
In the garden, moles are useful for soil aeration and removing pests. Seen from a cybernetic perspective, as its designers did, they perform a similar regulatory function for the spookshow: trading betrayals so no upper hand is ever too decisive.
Le Mesurier’s Kim Philby cutout Adrian Harris is destroyed by this gathering knowledge, under interrogation by the Anglophone press. Thirty years living inside backchannel winks and whispers that were unconsciously yet purposefully ignored causes psychological devastation that’s no less real upon revelation.
The mole’s impact must still be managed out into appropriate dispersal channels. With Potter’s script the state broadcaster assists the press in the operation, salving institutional humiliation by quieting the Cambridge Five’s bang into a whimper.
The spycatcher industry worked for years to cover England’s spotty arse, demonising the moles not just by diminishing Philby’s decades of knife edge strategy as base treachery, but by depicting his socialism as the pseudo-spiritual cyst that burst and finally drowned him. Even today, online amateurs interpret footage of fellow Trinitarian Guy Burgess on a Moscow bench as a defeated shell: guilty, disappointed and drunk.
Potter’s subversive reputation is belied by this denial of the possibility of principle, preferring to depict existence as the maintenance of deranged equilibrium. BBC contracts never stopped coming his way, after all: the A-roads into the 80s had to be built. Perhaps identification with Harris-Philby influenced his later impressionistic turn, the movement from Traitor’s deliberative, code-heavy thrust into that sticky playroom of music, make-up and ointments.
Maybe he even reached, without putting it in the script, an understanding of Philby’s truest motivation, the one that kept him warmer than vodka through the cold nights and long winters: the knowledge that, despite everything, he’d landed a proper fucking blow on them.
ITEM
MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - K. Briggs
Writer/art-witch, Macbeth (2023), Sycamore (2024), Triskelion (2018). Their New Chapter Tarot is spectacular - creators are struggling to get money from Liminal 11, but you can find readings and more on Briggs’ Patreon!
What power do you find in old stories and archetypes?
Mystery. The power of possibility and unknowability. I find comfort in old stories that were written before things like capitalism took hold of culture. There’s something about an archetype that came about in a world I have no context for, but somehow still speaks to me as a human having a human experience. And thru the process of retelling old stories, the teller leaves a mark; they are shored up by thousands of mends and alterations.
How do you determine what shape your work should take?
Prepare for the most Art School answer possible. I’m making art in collaboration with the materials themselves. This is why I prefer analog methods; absolutely no shade to digital art, it’s just not my cup of tea. The found collage materials, shitty quality markers, bits of detritus I found on my desk all contribute something I can’t control to the work. Which I love. The other thing I think about is “what is this piece really about?” There’s what is said or intellectualized, and then what is felt. The form of the work is trying to express what is felt.
What keeps you going in a world that won’t stop piling EVENTS on EVENTS?
SO MANY EVENTS. After the last US election I decided to focus on building community, and I’m so glad I did. Making meaningful connections with folks in my local community has kept the horrors at bay and given me concrete actions to take. There’s a dash of “fuck you, I’m surviving this” in the mix, as well.
CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT PERFORMING MACBETH AND THE WHIMS OF FAMILIARS!
ITEM
ITEM
Pulp ‘Your Sister’s Clothes’
https://youtu.be/iaRrbqx8mbA?feature=shared
Of course we all enjoyed him becoming a popstar, because he was so good at it. A tarnished national treasure appealing to misshaped teens and nannas alike. Straddling irony and sincerity with a wink and a waggle.
It’s as a bitter outcast peering through the lace curtains, priapic, poised and seething where he really belongs though.
The Sisters EP is the pinnacle of Pulp's Imperial phase, spanning the Gift EPs, His N Hers, and half of Different Class: ‘Your Sister’s Clothes’ is track two, following the titanic kink anthem ‘Babies’, a direct sequel to that song. The sisters, four years later.
This is the ideal form of Pulp, a deeply dark, surging motoric tale of depravity, release, and depression; Teflon coated experimentalism. Russell Senior still holds sway, bringing his swooping string stabs to the front. Candida’s atonal keyboard drone ushers the track in. There’s a Philip Glass classical pummel here, giving it an unusual heaviness.
And Cocker deep in his element here, recounting suburban revenge sex and familial rifts. Pulp function best when being truly dirty, but not the performative sneering of later. This is Jarvis in arch-peeper mode, heavy breathing and whimpering orgasmic frustration. He’s outside, but he’s also inside. Inside the bedroom, inside the mind of angry, horny teenage girls. He should be a monster, but somehow, he slides through into brutal empathy.
“Talking dirt won’t change your life”.
A clever swine.
It’s that perfect moment, where a band knows itself, but is still pushing into new corners. Elasticity with a backbone. Christ, they’re so British too, so specifically coded, and textured; the smell of chips in your mate’s house. Never parochial or twee. Raw, angry, sarcastic. Groovy, weird, shiny and dirty. In and out.
“Try it. You might like it.”
ITEM
I hate the blues.
I mean... I love the actual music, don't get me wrong. I love the music of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the rest as much as any middle-aged white man from England who fetishises old records. They're so *authentic*!
What I hate is "the blues". The romanticised idea of that music (and the bastardised version of it largely made by men who look like me). The way it rewrites history (the blues was not originally a music performed by solo men with guitars -- it was dance music. The foxtrot was invented to be danced to the blues. The first blues record was made by a brass band. The first blues singers were all women) to create an ideal of the lone genius man (who is allowed to be abusive, of course, because he's special -- he's authentic, the real deal).
And the way that ideal (and earlier racialised ideals of the minstrel show, and the segregated nature of the industry) limited and crushed those men who the mythology romanticised. Robert Johnson was described by a friend as "a polka hound, man!" Before making his first record, Muddy Waters' live set consisted of stuff like "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and "I've Got Spurs That Jingle-Jangle-Jingle". Howlin' Wolf sent his guitarist Hubert Sumlin to the Chicago Conservatory of Music. But the record labels wanted them to be "bluesmen". None of that commercial pop crap -- that wouldn't sell from Black men. Give us something authentic.
And knowing that... while I love the music, I can't help mourn for the lost world where we have "Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Polka Singers"; Muddy Waters' 70s comeback album Back In The Saddle Again; Chester Arthur Burnett's Third Symphony.
The music might not have been as good, but it'd definitely have been more authentic.
ITEM
Everything Everything (I’m Invisible)
A BLACK DOT IN WHITE SPACE what lays within
Do you know what an aleph is mate, or a zahir, well a zahir is like when you find “a copper astrolabe constructed in such a way that any man that looked upon it but once could think of nothing else” and you have to command “it be thrown in the sea, in order that men might not forget the universe” - it is too, too much [Borges, The Aleph; stay tuned, there’s going to be a load of South American literature to go with the North America-via-Britain trash media CRAP that is was and always will be Mindless stock in trade]
This is an aleph I drew in orange on an envelope which has since been dripped on by my boiler, you will note the resemblance to the Cool S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S which I am discovering this very moment is its official Wikipedia name. An aleph is “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” A really cool S.
I am working through the Moore & Moore Bumper Serpent Book of Magic; these exercises are part of it, I will let you know how it goes and leave you with this thought; Derrida created the issue of differánce when unable to discern whether Koine Greek meant antidote or poison, yet if you listen to the voice of Travis Scott (on for example ‘Antidote’) there is something which is both the ghosts and the blanket keeping you safe there.
I love synthesised voices because I grew up watching Transformers and my dream right, is an animated film in 2D, with popular music’s most famous vocoder voices as the cast… Charli XCX is Elita-1, Travis is Grimlock, Future is Megatron, Lil Yachty is errrr… Beachcomber and so on. Bon Iver is Starscream?