Fear and Paranoia for Fun

I’ve always been a fan of Radiohead, and recently was given a book created by Stanley Donwood and Dr. Tchock (Thom Yorke) called Dead Children Playing. Besides holding a wide array of visual poetry used for the band’s album art and promotion material, it’s got a lot of Stanley’s drawings and combinations of ephemera and frightening language. One example of the scary nature is the piece where Stanley gives his own directions on how to properly use an inhaler, which ends on him panicking on the floor while out of breath and dreaming of death. I guess we all have bad days.
Other pieces in the book revolve around simple paranoia, like the image of a disappearing family or a small body wandering through an empty, alien and dark landscape. Apocalyptic images of London under water make arguments against the developing world’s quest to control nature and consume resources at our whim, and contrasts between happy smiling consumers and pits of frightful self-immolating slogans make startling statements about our consumer society. It’s difficult for me to discern whether the fear and introspective analysis I underwent while looking at the book was more amusement or fear, and the swelling doubt I have about enjoyment in itself reared its ugly face. Can literature make fear and terror fun for the reader? Humor aside, there is something delightful about having typical morning breakfast material converted into a subvertissment against us. All the hybrid works I’ve been reading are really beginning to make me question whether the object of art is inherent in the message it gives, or if the observer brings it solely within. If I had no experience with parking signs and gasoline I might not have the same reaction to a poster flowered with dead cars and useless metal parts.
His website, slowly downward, contains a selection of his writing that mirrors his visual poetry and other artwork. Scenes of distrust, misaligned emotional bursts, fear and pure loathing soaked in self-doubt, worry and terror. Each section of the site centers on a different topic, but they all circle around the negative as if to pull the reader down or jostle them enough to avoid the mistakes of the narrator. If anything terribly horrible in life is worth enjoying, it’s the work of this Stanley.

The Virevoltant Gully

Whist browsing the internets I came across the blog of one Dylan Hock titled The Velvet Goldmine. Once you get past the banner-ads, you’ll find a sure-shot of nice video-art. He has a documentary video hosted from the C.R.A.B. (fringe) festival. It isn’t what I expect of a literary fest- acoustic guitar, fake priests morphing into NRA patriots, etc. He also hosts a video of a reading from a litmag Watching the Wheels: A Blackbird. This brings up an interesting query I’ve rolled around here on the blog- but not directly into. How, if at all, should I categorize performances too abstract or typical to be considered poetry? If a young man rips off his shirt and begins to urinate on the projector screen, tears paper into bits, bites into florescent marker and glares his teeth, is this considered poetry?

I would like to think that there are little or no boundaries when dealing with artistic expression, but I cannot help thinking that some boundaries are naturally created within an ongoing literary discussion or through debates on theory. Even if ‘boundaries’ are organically created within a community any poet or artist can ambitiously attempt to point out and heckle the elephant in the room. They could also unreasonable constrain themselves to style their writings/expressions after those they admire, which could be considered equally as infantile and ‘anti-progress.’ Is treading this fine line while still innovating the ideal trajectory? Should I consider these performances in a vacuum, or contextualize them as much as possible? Sadly, even by considering this question I naturally create lines to measure and analyze how I should measure analyze works, and it goes on, and on, and . . . I liken this to a conundrum as frustrating as the chicken or the egg- and have to leave it at the discretion of the viewer’/artists’ subjective tastes. Let me know what you think.

Is This What My Eyes Are For?

I was privileged enough to be present for a screening of Abigail Child’s series of 7 films titled Is This What We Were Born For? at a local university. The attendance was slight, but the effects were profound. I was not familiar with Child’s practices, which includes written and performance poetry alongside her idiosyncratic body of film works and film criticism. The entire series of films presented lasted a little over an hour, with pieces ranging from 2 to around 30 minutes in length. Exact descriptions defy me, but here is an attempt: Spastic montages of collected video from the entire gulley of human experience caught on film, some of which was spliced from other works and some of which were originals. Young girls’ emphatic dance moves, violent explosions and an ornery unkempt bearded fellow staring, frightened, with a palatable culpability all flash within seconds. Is there anything meaningful in frames from blockbuster movies conflated with nature, suburbs, couples dining outdoors, too much and too quickly to be absorbed entirely in one sitting? Throughout most of the ongoing spectacle the audio is coarse and widely sampled underneath an audible Child reading her poetry. These epileptic journeys caused a rumbling in my mind—an unsettling series of jolts with references to images and situations typical to any socialized American of the twentieth century.

I felt that the films were at once addressing the constructs I expect in film and attempting to destroy them. They reminded me of some mash-ups I’ve listened to from DJs like Soulwax or DJ Food, a mishmash of pop-culture with occasional moments of solace in upsetting or abstract directions. Part of me wanted to step out of myself and declare the videos to be nothing more than wacky collages of haphazard crud, but another part of me was joyfully revolted and distanced from what I watch on TV every day. Although I can’t deny enjoying the occasional episode of Scrubs or The Office, there was some deep internal disruption I felt during these films that I’m glad I was able to experience. Like most abstract performance poetry I’ve seen, it’s difficult to conjure a blunt synopsis of the work or determine an exact meaning. That being said, I have to say that this series is worth viewing for the few moments where the flashing collages of sight and sound fit into my brain and ruffle things around.