The office of a wall
Andrew & Steven. Watters. Skulls As Eggs. Doom Patrol. Herman's Hermits. This Happy Breed.
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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS
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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Watters
Makes cool art/music, for example: We Are No Longer Strangers (2024). Official Daredevil enthusiast. Worth keeping an eye on his Instagram, always something going on there.
Who are you and how did you become a man without fear?
My name is Watters and I am what many describe as “cool music guy”. Basically I am an Artist who makes lots of cool things all of which are informed around my lived experience as a disabled person.
However what I feel sets me aside from a lot of what is out there when it comes to representing people like me is that what I make isn’t made to be anything in particular and what I mean by that is a lot of your typical mainstream disability programming tends to fall into two schools, the first being inspiration porn which often consists of infantilising disabled and neurodivergent people and presenting us almost like Zoo animals, a good example of this is Channel 4 producing a show called “The Undateables” and then touting it as inspirational programming and representation, it exists purely to make non-disabled people good about themselves.
The second is the trope of tragedy, that life as a disabled person is miserable, “they can’t do anything” and are often in fiction window dressing/a storytelling object.
What I do and what I make is neither. It is one of the most honest and real representations of disabled life but more specifically my life. Because that's all it is. It is me unabridged.
There’s a lot of your work that carries on beyond the tracks themselves - the polaroid jackets, the promos. What inspires that side of your work?
In an age where artists would rather use AI to make a poster or even a music video it becomes imperative to stand out and to break past what has already been done…
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Skulls As Eggs
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DOOMED SUMMER: Initiation Never Ends
Caulder’s doomsday weapon is a seething liquid mass of nanobots in an odd-shaped swimming pool, an architectural manifestation of a catastrophe curve.
Topology is concerned with the properties of shapes that are preserved under deformation and like Lynch understands coffee cups and donuts are the same. ‘…geometry is successful magic…’ says topologist Rene Thom, mystic mathematician.
Thom’s Catastrophe Theory models the accumulative conditions behind sudden discontinuous change. Caulder’s Thinktank is a machine to do to the world what he did to Cliff, Rita and Larry. Activating it makes the events in Doom Patrol retrospective conditions for the catastrophe of the Candlemaker’s colonisation of the world’s dreams.
Morrison says their ‘science is used as metaphor’. ‘We bring you metaphors for poetry’ say the spirits speaking through Georgina Hyde Lees as she/they draw diagrams of the universe for Yeats. Catastrophe Theory is a ‘theory on analogy’ says Thom the ‘science of metaphors’.
We know the strange mathematical loops and isomorphic systems of Goedel, Escher and Bach directly influenced Doom Patrol but Catastrophe isn’t there. Morrison takes it directly from Pete Carroll’s Psychonaut where it models experiential stimuli necessary to provoke a shift in consciousness between mechanistic and magical world views.
Initiation can be proactively sought, ritualised expression of knowledge, access to community. Initiation can be spontaneous, a retroactive narrative as we process events.
Ordeal is a recognised initiatory practice. Caulder has set in motion non-consensual trauma based magickal initiation for the masses. And he is bastard smug about it.
His secret operation on Cliff has been a roaring success ‘imagine on a global scale.’ But Catastrophe once invoked cannot be controlled, Caulder is just another grotty little man who saw community as weakness, powerful in his knowledge and safe in his bunker.
Initiation is big magic. It can take your head off.
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Tales From 500 Songs: Hellman’s Helmets
It's well-known among aficionados of 60s pop music that Herman’s Hermits released completely different singles in the US than they did in the UK, effectively making them different bands in different countries. In the UK they tended to release fairly normal beat-group records like "No Milk Today", written by Graham Gouldman, later of 10CC who was also writing hits for the Yardbirds and the Hollies.
But in the US they based their career on appealing to American Anglophiles, the kind of people who think they "really love British things" but think Britain's still full of steam trains and bowler-hatted city gents. Peter "Herman" Noone, who was from Manchester, sang in a fake Cockernee accent, and they released old music-hall songs like "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am", the George Formby song "Leaning on a Lamppost", and more modern songs in the same style like the Kinks' "Dandy" and "Mrs Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" (written by Trevor Peacock, later best known for playing Jim in The Vicar of Dibley.
But that’s not where it ends. In Hungary they were synth pop pioneers. In Bolivia they did show tunes. In Luxembourg they were a proto-black-metal band. Not all of this is true.
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This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944)
Maybe it does them too kind to say, or does it reflect well on the mobilised English that the propaganda in 1944 was despatched with so much more professionalism than the actual war? This Happy Breed exudes quality, with Ronald Neame’s frame blocked out in depths that force huge amounts of information from the cast, sets, and Joan Bridge’s colours and clothes.
The technical perfection transmits a mythological blueprint for today’s runaway nationalism. Important clues. It prepares the materials necessary to confect an identity that could become stable and effective enough to pass, eventually, for authenticity. There’s a sway in Coward’s dialogue, puckish and relaxed, hinting at a confidence that would never be realised. After all, London has already been a jazz city for 25 years. It could have given England something to live for.
As if. Remember where you are.
More predictably, but still deniable, the exercise would release these same heavy materials into the already battered postwar social body. Sentimentality and obeisance. Wit with complacency. A gathering swarm of wounds and delusions which, given time and season, will overwhelm the nation and excuse any cruelty. The inescapability of the ground beneath you and the road behind you.
American release was delayed until 1947, year zero of the new world order. Ever thrifty, UKPLC pulled the home front morale booster off the shelf and sold it west as an ad campaign promoting the new boss' clever little ally. Their willing ability to get on the beat.