Sunday, August 24, 2003
The death of the author, the birth of meaning, intention, acceleration, expression and why bears shit in the woods…
“If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If the tree isn’t falling on me, I don’t give a shit. As for the bears man, they don’t leave the forest for bowel movements, do they? They just don’t shit in their own beds.
I don’t mean a single word of it. Some of you are pinning significance to these lines, finding profundity in the colons and the html coding and the occasional bursts of profanity, feeling passion and belief and a definite sense of purpose, and the simple fact is that I’m sitting here, for the most part, with a bottle of Nastro Azzurro or whatever next to me, and I’m just writing, like it’s a job or a chore or a reflex action. This isn’t poetry, this isn’t my deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I don’t have deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I’m not the fire-spitting, intense young man given to bouts of solipsistic existential angst that you might think I am. In real life I’m the most laid-back man in the world. I don’t feel half the sensations I describe; I just know the tricks, the metaphysical hyperlinks that tap directly into the mimetic associations of love, hate, fear, pain, joy, loss of control; I learnt the buttons years ago that I can press to make someone go ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ and make them feel as if I know exactly how they feel. I’m not a tortured soul released to the anarchy of pure expression of sensation. I don’t believe that we’re all linked by some kind of universal thread of energy and super-consciousness. As nice as that sounds. I don’t even believe in the existence of a human soul. Sorry.
Sam gives the impression that music is a totally visceral and occupying force for him at every moment he’s involved with it, dancing in his bedroom, feeling the thrill of arousal playing a show, however small, moonwalking across the kitchen floor to the fridge humming Outkast couplets with desperate, joyous intention, and this is probably largely true. Cozen I imagine beneath oily Scottish skies, dissolved into the mist and rain and The Associates, a seldom tear and a complex rumination noted on the back of a train ticket with a chewed-up pencil. But this is true, if it is true, probably only once in a while. I get the idea that Marcello might sit down with a record and a glass of wine and a furrowed brow, focused like a heron on point for shimmering silver fish beneath the surface of the sound, synapses stretched to the point of receptiveness, ready to pounce on the ontology and capture the meaning of any given piece and cage it in words more beautiful than its previous freedom. But I suspect the reality is far from this. Likewise I’m not raging and sweating and firing off missives loaded with bellyache and sputum.
“Anyone who writes about music the way you do must invest a lot of emotional time and weight in it, whereas for me it’s a distraction at most.” So said Leon the other night in a brief AIM. And what was my reaction? I invest probably a hell of a lot less than you think. “So you’re a fake then?” No. I’m wracked with spiritual catharsis and projected into transcendental arias of azure sublimation much less often than I give the impression of being. And that’s fine with me. Anybody who actually lived the amount of passion and intensity that I project would find themselves quickly going mad. I know because I’ve seen it happen to friends who lost sense of (or were never told about) the difference between art and artist (artisan, for me, I fear), craft and craftsman, people who thought they had to live it like they love it and who ended up on medication, in counselling, or worse. This is something I do because I know how, because I don’t know how to do anything else, because Yes, at times I love it. Not because I think it’s the most important thing in the world, but because sometimes I think it’s the best thing in the world.
A question posed in a philosophy lecture in my second year of university; which of these actions is an act of self-expression; painting a picture, painting a living room wall, or tying a shoelace? Being at a substandard university (although this particular philosophy lecturer, John Gingell, was most definitely not substandard) most of the class except me immediately exclaimed “painting a picture”. To which I say bollocks. It’s still you painting the wall or tying the shoelace, you who chooses the colour, the roller, the way your laces move from eyelet to eyelet, the knot you tie. Emma is beautiful. Everything that you do expresses yourself. Certainly some moments and actions are more obviously invested with time and thought and feeling, but why obliterate the significance of the little things? My choice of watch, socks, glasses, lager and crispy fried duck with honey sauce is just as revealing of my personality as the fact that I’m currently listening to Kelis (and before that Stankonia).
So yes, it is about the passion and the moment and the loss of control or self or whatever, but it’s also about what you’re humming along with when you’re doing the washing up. It’s about banging the steering wheel in time to Lumidee as much as it is lighting candles and lying on the floor to Mogwai. About walking down the cliff with Mouse On Mars distracting me from fretting and cursing about the tourists as it is drowning myself in a solitary bottle of shiraz and a Shack album during lonely weekends at university. It’s about sitting with a copy of Encounters and making notes and then sitting at a PC and working them into some kind of workable, concise and vaguely expressive whole that doesn’t embarrass me. It’s about the now but not just the now; it’s about all the nows past and all the nows yet to come, even if the one right at this instant is pretty dull and shallow and superficial. It’s about giving the impression of the amazing nows that might be potential for you, for me, even if I’m not feeling them right at the moment. And generally I’m not, because it’s impossible. So it’s not just puking up the passion when it’s there; it’s remembering how it feels and getting that across as if the remembered is the current. Plus, sometimes, it’s about thinking about something until you feel you’ve got a better grasp of it and can ascertain a further grain of truth that the passion (current or past) missed noticing because it was too busy dancing or fucking or crying or staring in absent bliss at the vapour trails of France-bound Boeings.
I spent this afternoon dancing solo to Justin and N*E*R*D and Kelis, window thrown open, jiving and popping and twisting until I was a sweaty, happy mess. Fucking damn right. Just so you know.
Taking Sides
Beyonce vs. Justin
I used to fancy Beyonce something rotten, something about the thighs and the stridence and the… oooh… you know. But Marcello’s comment about her “dead, shark eyes” seems startlingly on the money now. There’s something about the video to “Crazy In Love” (which is to r’n’b what “Move Your Feet” is to house, surely?- structurally they’re almost identical, built around a chorus and a hook and a horn riff and precious little else) that I find disconcerting to say the least. Even during the ‘uh-oh’ moments, ass-shaking in the street, Beyonce looks incredibly fucking focussed and professional and serious. This is pop music for heaven’s sake woman, and damn fine pop music at that; you’re meant to enjoy it. But no, there’s a shark-like certainty of purpose, ruthlessness and conviction in her eyes that puts me off. Anyone that serious and determined is surely insecure about something along the line somewhere. Justin (fucking Justin!- a distillation of all I love about Stevie and Jacko and The Neptunes’ delicious southern-fried boom-click) on the other hand, in the video for “Senorita”, is cool, in control, and enjoying himself to an impossible degree. Plus, at the moment he sets up the call-and-response finale, when he first sings the female part and pushes his voice suddenly into serious territory and finds it almost breaking with yearning on the words “really leaving witchoo” (emphasis on those final two delicious syllables) I stop jiving and bend over double in complete emotional torment. Verily, the man-boy is a genius and I am a swooning fanboy. Girls want to fuck him, boys want to be him; I’m not fussed either way.
8/24/2003 11:19:00 pm
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