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.