The Three Stigmata of Pacman

My first published poem was called The Phoenix. It was in a children’s anthology called Wah Hey… it was good for my age but used the word suddenly far too many times. It doesn’t bare repeating

I’m not too sure when I started reading poetry… I have thought many times that I’d really like to know where and why I picked up my first ee cummings collection, because I have held his poems as heart and hearth for as long as I can remember enjoying literature, and if i remains the one poem guaranteed to remind me of what happiness can feel like.

**

if i

or anybody don’t
know where it her his

my next meal’s coming from
i say to hell with that
that doesn’t matter (and if

he she it or everybody gets a
bellyful without
lifting my finger i say to hell
with that i

say that doesn’t matter) but
if somebody
or you are beautiful or
deep or generous what
i say is

whistle that
sing that yell that spell
that out big (bigger than cosmic
rays war earthquakes famine or the ex

prince of whoses diving into
a whatses to rescue miss nobody’s
probably handbag) because i say that’s not

swell (get me) babe not (understand me) lousy
kid that’s something else my sweet (i feel that’s

true)

**

I do remember stumbling across Emily Bronte for the first time in my Auntie Dorothy’s house in South Shields before going to bed in the guest room. I remember exploring Simon Armitage’s About His Person in GCSE English and being enthralled by the possibilities poetry suddenly possessed, and the joy I felt as my teacher lent me more poetry, thrilled to find someone who cared in her class. I remember my parents taking me to see the Liverpool Poets, and brother taking me to see Carol Ann Duffy, both at the Warwick Arts Centre. I remember my undergraduate professor lending me his copy of Blaise Cendrars’ work having only bought it the day before. I remember buying a book of Jim Caroll’s poem just off Washington Square in New York…

 …I also remember visiting my older brother at UEA where he was studying English Lit., and attending my first poetry slam. There, I saw a couple of young poets who suddenly made poetry something else. It was exciting, it was loud, it was funny; it was many things. Over the next 7 or 8 years (and up to now), I have watched my brother’s friends become some of the “best”, “most promising” “ones to watch” poets of their generation. And on Wednesday night I saw one of them, Ross Sutherland, ‘s new show: The Three Stigmata of Pacman. It was a treat.

Ross’s style falls untidily somewhere between the meta-comedy of Stewart Lee – with whom he shares an affinity for endlessly repeated motifs and self-degradation – , the “smartarse surrealist” white boy hip hop of cLOUDDEAD and/or their subsequent solo ventures, his forefathers of performance poetry John Cooper Clarke and Martin Newell, and the friend everyone has – “Steve” in Ross’ case – who spouts learned wisdom from the barrel of a hangover IF that friend happened to be versed in French modernist poetics, sci-fi pulp, hip hop history, English literature, and all the subtleties and ingenuities of British comedy.

The show was a marvel. Stringing together a biting satire of contemporary British society through a re-reading of Little Red Riding Hood where every noun was replaced with the noun 23 places below it in the dictionary, an exploration of his being ID’d at his hometown Spar – age 28 – in various voices a la Raymond Queneau’s Exercise in Style, and a reworking of an old favourite, Things to do before you leave town (after which his new book is named)…

before ending with a moving meditation on his realization that in the cyclical, sometimes threatening manoeuvres of life, he had come to resemble Pacman… thus the title of the show.

But the enjoyment I find in Ross’ poems comes equally from a more personal route. In his recent sojourns into the world of the Oulipo alongside fellow poets Joe Dunthorne and Tim Clare, his experiments ran an odd, simultaneous, synchronistic life alongside my Masters degree where I was studying with the modernist/post-modernist scholar Gavin Parkinson. Gavin introduced me to the world of the Oulipo, amongst other authors classifiable in the “post-modern” bracket – authors whose linguistic and poetic sought to re-explore language’s potential – in order to similarly explore the way in which art history might try to remove itself from the same insipid, uni-directional stagnancy that art found itself in before modernism shook things up. The basic premise, modernist theory has failed to fully appreciate modernism by failing to learn from the lessons inherent.

I didn’t want to make the same mistake!

My subsequent thesis attempted to look at a series of etchings by Picasso from the 1921 after the Balzac novella Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu by way of translation theory in an attempt to appreciate the heterogeneity of influences – artistic, nationalistic and linguistic – in this series and indeed, Picasso’s wider oeuvre… I have spent a lot of time trying to place modernism more generally in this context, especially that art which emerged from the Babelian hubbub of metropolises such as Paris… and although I didn’t get too far into actually altering my style, these techniques and ideas sat as background to my working method.

Since finishing my masters, and especially when watching poets like Ross perform, as well as in a number of other settings, I have thought about the old conundrum “How to invigorate art history.” Ross’ presentation in the past of XJ Kennedy’s poem Nude Descending a Staircase, after Duchamp’s work, explored the work itself in a way somehow more suitable to Duchamp’s original intention than any essay would. Gavin’s recent Duchamp book is full of similar approaches to the great man’s legacy, recognizant of the trail of rotten breadcrumbs he left behind.

I would love one day to find a way to approach art history from such a sidewards angle, and know there are avenues waiting for my exploration. Poetry, art, and music all have the capability of invigorating one’s approach..; imagine Jeffrey Lewis doing art history as well as he does the history of punk rock on the lower east side 1959-75.

the demonic and the divine

I couldn’t face the final 5 pages of My Name is Asher Lev last night, so saved them for the tube this morning. It took me five stops in the wrong direction. On more than one occasion, Chaim Potok’s story of a preciously talented artist – a hasid jew from Brooklyn – flawed me. It enunciates a passion for, and belief in, modernism’s project of understanding, realizing and capturing something of the joie de vivre that is normality, removed from the restraints of religion, expectation and even conscious thought. I didn’t want it to end, even knowing there is a sequel for me whenever I am ready. This book recaptured what it is about art history that brings colour to my cheeks and pulls me into books and galleries endlessly.

My auntie told me that on my cousin Judith’s 16^th birthday, she had wanted to go to Vence to see the Asher Levs. Having read it, so do I. The tangibility of the novel breaths from its pages… Brooklyn comes alive, and the Jewish family at the centre of the novel, though inescapably Hasidic, could somehow be any family: an exaggeration of generational confusion, mis- and non-understanding, and the hopes of one generation put upon another. That is my reading as an atheist, but I don’t seek to devalue the importance of this meditation on Judaism and its quirks (for lack of a better, less-patronising word).

Vence also remains for me a pilgrimage-to-come, housing as it does such pilgrimage-worthy sights as the Matisse Chapel.

 

Matisse Chapel, Vence.

I have it in mind to one day hire a classic convertible sports car and DO the French Riviera… my time will come.

For now, what remains of Asher Lev in my mind chimes in with parts of Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, which I read just prior to this book. In both of these books, art takes on a transcendental magnitude. As I seek to quantify art and art history’s importance to me, and why I have decided to pursue a career in their shadows, the following passages filled my heart with genuflections in the direction of art’s wonder.  

**

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine. The solitary vision that put new eyes into gouged-out sockets was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

Asher Lev speaking in My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

It was the overcoming of impermanence. I saw that, from the force + death-dance of human life, something remained and survived – works of art. Even they perish at some point – they decay or are burned or are smashed to pieces. But still they outlast many a human lifetime and, beyond the immediate moment, form a quiet domain of images and sacred objects. To contribute to this with my work seems to me both good and comforting, since it comes close to immortalizing the ephemeral.

Narcissus speaking in Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse

The Asher Lev quote also put me in mind of the famous Charlie Chaplin quote.  

[Beauty is] an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels–an expression of it can be a dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in the gutter.

My Autobiography, Charlie Chaplin

**

My grandfather used to be a walking quote dictionary, and took delight in reciting words which seemed to hold alchemical properties for him. I was always astonished by his capacity for recollection, not only with quotes, but with stories, poems and facts. What’s more, the delight my family still takes in reciting stories about him seems the perfect homage to his linguaphilia. I have realized only in the recent past the extent to which ones capacity to learn and maintain is inextricably linked with ones ability to appreciate and enjoy that being learnt, and that one’s passion for words and images, as with sounds and tastes, grows the more you cave into their demands. Demands to be loved, to be used and to be lived alongside.

Increasingly, I live alongside the arts I enjoy, and in them find something of myself: the demonic, the divine, and everything in between.

fundane

Inspired by my current job, here’s my proposition for a new word.

In the midst of an “interesting fact competition” this morning, I found myself wondering how long does it take for a call centre to consume the part of one’s mind which distinguishes fun from mundanity. Thus arose: 

adjective
ordinary to the point of nausea, and fun only in the most ironic sense.

Fundane matters such as office japes and forced-upon group activities make me want to grate my eyeballs.

identifiable by a profusion of obese women cackling, and temporary workers looking to the skies.

 

 

The crumbling core of Britain’s pout.

Jericho, Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy Courtyard, 2007

 Some artworks stay with me indelibly. Experiencing Anselm Kiefer’s Annenberg courtyard commission “Jericho” (above) is one of the most prominent memories of my few years in London, yet one I have rethought and re-understood time and time again.

Now, as I am contemplating my future in our nation’s capital, it strikes me as a disturbingly appropriate commentary on the things about London I find most problematic, both within the “art world” and as a place to call home.

(NB: I hate the words art and world put together like that).

Kiefer’s works have puzzled and enthralled me for years now, and I often feel somehow ill-prepared for the full weight they exert, both in meaning and in materiality. Nowhere was this truer than when I was standing in the royal academy courtyard before these two monoliths. My reaction to the work at the time understood some sort of apt and historical linkage between the empirical prowess and pomp of the RA and the rotten, shanty-builds of Kiefer’s towers, unashamedly delivering a treatise on social divides, class divides; non-sequential historical narratives crossing borders and centuries. The towers appeared a public meditation on their immediate vicinity, whilst also leaving shadows as far as the British Empire once stretched. They appeared like totemic exemplars of 3^rd world living conditions, but also of the crumbling core of Britain’s pout. A smile swept off.

The image above is crowned with a sorry St. George’s cross more appropriate than any metaphor could muster.

Now, however, all of these thoughts ring somehow hollow, or at least superficial. London has taken on a particular shape for me, in my conscious. It lies somewhere between the metropolis of my childhood excitement, sidling up alongside New York, Paris, Chicago… (the battlefields of my dreamt desires)… and the twisted archaic monstrosity as presented beligerently by J. G. Ballard in his 1997 essay Airports.

London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. Its hundreds of miles of gentrified stucco are an aching hangover from the nineteenth century that should have been bulldozed decades ago. London may well be the only world capital – with the possible exception of Moscow – that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way. Visiting London, I always have the sense of a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.   

I’ve come to know my place, and London’s place. After three years, its enchantment alongside New York, Paris, Chicago is on the wain… it is failing to hold sway even next to the (sent to) Coventry of my childhood. The municipal pride is lacking that any great city should harbor in abundance, even in my friends born here and bred here or hereabouts. It is a sham of a capital dressed up as a frivolous parlour game. In the setting of the royal academy, Jericho shames London into submission if only for a second, condemning everything corrupt and moribund about this flailing home of elitism.

The snootiness of such institutions as Christies resembles a club I’ll never be allowed in… I would only want to be in a club that would have me as a member… and it is that club mentality which I constantly fit out of here… I don’t sit well amongst “gentrified stucco”, and the contorted concrete and twisted steel of Jericho appears closer to the Coventry of my childhood, my comfort zone and my understanding. Coventry is both the fragmented sorrow and the toneless concrete personified. London is the colonial oppressor. Coventry is my retarded younger brother.

Coventry Cathedral after the Blitz, 1940.

Coventry’s Mercia House

I was recently thinking about what I consider to be London’s poor musical lineage in comparison to places like LA and New York, only to come across Paul de Noyer’s new book In the City: A Celebration of London Music. It got me thinking about what London might sound like, and the disquieting, threatening rumble of dub-step and grime seems more apt to the London I’ve experienced than any cheeky chappy mod or ska group. I don’t want to descend into Ballardian crises, but this city isn’t all waterloo sunset. It is strikingly akin to what I have found looking back at Jericho.

All this interpretation is for us to find… Kiefer offers us little, and resists interpretation. He only offers us up the ability to process our own thoughts.

Listen to Erik Satie

A month or so back, whilst killing my brain cells in a data entry temp job, I wrote in my moleskin,

 “Thought of the week: they didn’t have data entry in the 1900s when things were good and pure. Listen to erik satie.”

 I am now working again for the same company before, and so decided to ramble along with this thought as a starting point.

 **

 When I call myself a Modernist (with all the appropriate levels of irony and facetiousness) I am never quite sure if my interest should be manifest as a desire to have lived in the early twentieth century, to recreate the values and hopes of that era (be it in writing or in method), or simply an appreciation of /SLASH/ kinship with a purer time. Probably somewhere in the middle of all of these. Recently, I have experienced a notable slowing down in my life – some might call it growing up – and my current way of thinking is underpinned by the aforementioned appreciation of, and kinship with, a purer time. That is, a slower, less hectic, less demanding, less box-ticking-orientated approach to life. i want out.

 There is something about modernism which seemed to grasp and celebrated the death knell of simplicity, reveling both in the new excitement of a globalizING, technologizING world, and an inseperable appreciation of reality through eyes opened by the new order. Before a success- and commerce-driven experience of the every day kicked into gear, Picasso’s analytical still lives and Kandinsky’s exuberant portrayals of the Russian landscape briefly saw the world as it could have been.

 Something tried to destroy that in the 1940s.

 These works remain for me mementos of a non-day-glo, no-instant-gratification, non-merchandised and, most of all, artisanal rather than theoretical approach to art (let’s just stick with the arts for now, or this subject will get out of hand!). Even the most existential, searing portrayal of life such a Soutine’s poultry, or Giacometti’s Orange on a sideboard are rooted in representation… without wanting to sound old fashioned, I like that. The end of representation seems to me parallel to the end of reality as a lived experience.. Theory’s dominance came in tandem with the rolling out of vicarious living: tv, computer games, internet etc.

 I want out.

 But when I consider the purity of day-to-day life back then, before the internet, pandemic advertising and 24-hour customer service, I feel pangs of jealousy and longing. Currently caught up in the trappings of customer service, a 21^st century buzz-word for Joe-Job aimed at the temporarily unemployed, I continue to ponder the original question. If they didn’t have data entry in the 1900s, what did the multitudes do… well for a start, the world population was significantly smaller, and social stratification was clearer (I won’t touch the ramifications of current population levels here…too big and way out of my point of reference). Now, we are encouraged to pursue our dreams only to find at too late a stage we have gone too far without thinking about the openings available to us. Here I am, a postgraduate from the Courtauld Institute of Art, working in a call centre.

Erik Satie’s piano works remove me from 2009. They place me squarely in the Lapin Agile, or some other such Parisian drinking den crowded with delirium tremens of the highest order. Even Tom Wait’s piano ballads of the 70s feel soothing, sitting me squarely amongst imaginary boho savants and drunken revelers in the Troubadour, LA, CA. Debauchery in both of these cases as a removal from life. What I seem to be desiring is pure removal: pure escapism. This is certainly better than this electric-lit, chalk infused, pinboard- partitioned, break-prohibited cell, alone with my thoughts and my telesale prompts.

 I WANT OUT.

 More recently, a few wonderful bands have sprung up from American backwaters, desperate to escape all of these trappings. Bon iver and Bowerbirds are only the most notable, existing for themselves self-sufficiently as life once was. We’re probably going back further than Modernism now. My point remains intact. I was born at the wrong end of the 20^th century.  

Two works that I have seen in the last few years stand out for me as exemplifications of artistic purity. Monet’s Les Nymphéas at Paris’ Orangerie, and James Turrell’s Deer Shelter at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park… The latter proves that all is not lost, and that conceptual works can still stand up to scrutiny and resemble a real human experience: one looks through a skylight in absentia towards the shifting sky… that’s it. Abstracted reality. Pure form. Pure experience.

Deer Shelter, James Turrell

Les Nymphéas, Claude Monet

 This is how Erik Satie’s music makes me feel, as do such bands/ composers as Susuma Yokota, Christian Fennesz, and the unimpeachable Stars of the Lid. These pure feelings having nothing to do with data entry. They also probably having nothing to do with Modernism… I just want out.