The titular reference is, in particular, to "Johnny's So Long" by
Furious Pig (scariest. band. ever.), which my locally overexposed iPod just blurted into my appalled and gratified ear'oles in the supermarket, causing my
philtrum to quiver and my basket of highly processed groceries suddenly to take on the appearance of the props list for a
Paul McCarthy video. But I'm also using it as a vaguely elegiac summary of my own prolonged absence from these pages, wherein I, your hopeless and neglectful Controlling Thompson, am Johnny, and there was no fair as such, just a lurching maelstrom of colour-saturated chaos and out-of-kilter barrel-organ dreadfulness.
Anyway, hi honeys, I'm home.
The long silence can partly be attributed to the massive amounts of time I now seem to spend hanging out at
Dennis's blog. The regulars over there are a truly revivifying bunch of diverse and almost universally attractive voices, and I learn a lot (especially from DC himself) and enjoy myself hugely; I've been on various listservs and in all manner of virtual groupuscules in recent years but the freedom over there to just chat and gossip and wisecrack and to talk excitedly about high art and low behaviour with equal unguardedness is brilliantly heartening and creative and, as I'm finding out, not a little addictive. One day everyone's going crazy for Perec or getting the lowdown on French politics or discussing great lost American architecture, the next is devoted to slash fiction or guro or the undersung heroes of European porn. It seems obvious that such meeting-spaces should exist: after all, it does nothing more than resemble how I actually live, how I think, how I use the internet... But it's pretty unusual, in fact, in my experience, and I would say that in itself it constitutes one of Dennis's most important and provocative artworks: which is saying something. So you can see why I'm a bit hooked. But equally, I should be working harder to make Thompson's a place more like that. I think it nearly is, sometimes, but DC posts six days a week and from the get-go the rhythm here has been different. I suppose that's perhaps because I like writing about the connections I'm making between stuff I see or hear or am involved in, which means (or has so far meant) saving up a week's or a fortnight's life and then writing a superlong essay that tries to account for it all and gather it together. But of course Dennis's place is just as good, even better really, at disclosing those connections, it just does it cumulatively and with less strenuous commentary. ...Oh, well, I dunno. Maybe Thompson's is always going to be a sporadic, text-heavy, wordy affair. Judging by most of the external links to this place, that seems to be my USP. Having said that, my sideline (private) blog for
The Goodman Portraits is a very different ballpark, a mix of creative stuff and commentary and a lot more images and borrowed writings and so on, and although it's in temporary suspension at the moment it feels like a really nice set-up. Well Thompson's will be a year old in May -- maybe at that point I could redecorate, and start pushing the boat out a bit... What do you think?
The other reason I haven't been around of late is pretty obviously connected with the hysterical pitch of my last post. As will have been clearer to many readers than it was at the time to me, I was barely riding a
hypomanic episode, of a kind that I only very rarely have. I suspect most bipolar people would probably agree that hypomania is (at least potentially) way more destructive than depression, which at least has the advantage of making you withdraw into yourself and disengage from everything. This has the effect of tending to protect other people from the worst of what you're feeling, and, equally, to insulate you from their vulnerability. Whereas the out-of-control surges in hypomania take you out into the world and makes you want to get in other people's faces, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes not. So all of that precarious stuff last time about the precipice I feel my professional life to be was pretty much the hypomania talking. (It doesn't mean the underlying sentiment isn't true, but such a bald and aggressive statement of it is so misrepresentative of my usual feelings as to make it effectively
untrue in that setting.) Within twenty-four hours of making that post, I had gone off the edge of the flipchart -- that's the chart marked FLIP as in
I think Chris just flipped all the way out -- and, among other silly and destructive things, taken an accidental overdose of painkillers. (Hypomania plus toothache plus a drawer full of codeine-based analgesics is definitely the recipe for a lost weekend.) At least that brought me down to earth with a satisfying bump. Most of the following week was a childish scribble of post-manic weirdness, a huge amount of erratic anger coming out, much of which led to a pretty ghastly meltdown in my working relationship -- and by inevitable extension my personal friendship -- with Theron, predicated on but not I think entirely provoked by our planned work on
An Apparently Closed Room, which was to be the first of
The Goodman Portraits. It was temporary, I think it's mostly mended, I have a feeling it might be the most productive series of conversations he and I have had in a
lo-o-o-ong time. But while it lasted it was just miserable and bleak.
Anyway. Blah. I think I'm back on the rails again, a little tired and out-of-focus and starting to feel pretty daunted and excited about the work ahead, and not just the work, the
being in and around the work. But that's fine. It's time to get real. And get busy.
I'm going to try and blast pretty quickly through some notes on what I've been up to in the world. All of this stuff, but
all of it, deserves more thought and more attention. But you can do that, right? You don't need me telling you.
Probably the big cultural excitement since I was last here is that
The Secret Public opened at the ICA. I was talking about looking forward to this show a few posts back, and the time went by pretty quickly, and suddenly it was there. The day it opened was the day my ICA membership card arrived (
serendipity doo dah, says Mr Bluebird on my shoulder) and also the day everything went most horribly awry with Theron, so
The Secret Public was the perfect bolthole.
First thing to say is that it's smaller than I expected. The list of featured artists is long and droolworthy but of course most of them are represented by being on tv. So in the end room on the ground floor there are these ten or twelve monitors and that's half the work in the show right there. Unfortunately two of the videos were out of action (I suspect the technician hadn't set them to loop, so they'd played once and gone blank -- well we've all done that at times) and as it's one-spectator-one-screen it wasn't possible in that first visit to sit in front of the two works I was most excited about: Charles Atlas's
Because We Must, the fantastically inventive and funny and lurid video with Michael Clark & Co. (which featured in the wonderful Atlas season at Tate Modern last year); and a document of Mark E. Smith's play/performance
Hey Luciani at the Riverside in 1980something. So I'll have to go back and do those. Out of what I did see, the most impressive video work was, perhaps surprisingly, Derek Jarman's
Glitterbug -- I say surprising because I've seen quite a bit of it before, and I certainly know that Super-8 home movie strain in his work pretty well, and it doesn't always manage to transcend its arguable parochialism. But I found it very moving, quite unexpectedly: as a portrait (and that's a concept that's been on my mind a lot of late) of that milieu at that time -- a particularly heart-tugging appearance of a young and astonishingly fresh-faced Genesis P-Orridge, for example -- and in what look like outtakes (sort-of) from
The Last of England; but also as an unusually direct encounter with Jarman as an artist and activist. In a sense, everything he was and is is in there somewhere. I know it was an emotional day anyway and my head was a fullscale pitch invasion but the tears I shed for
Glitterbug were specific and dependable. Jarman's so exemplary. I couldn't help feeling my own shortfall. And even that self-doubt was feeding back.
Auto-thwackery aside, there's some priceless stuff in
The Secret Public, not all of it on telly. The first room you go into, Eno's
On Land is playing, there's a large and successful Victor Burgin piece on the wall, a selection of sensational
Linder photomontages (in a way, nobody summarizes the dissident visual culture of the late 70s like Linder), and in a central display case, Peter Saville's original plates for 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' -- which, as I said over at DC's, is better than an old phial of Jesus tears any day for relic value. Richard Hamilton's
Treatment Room (from 1982) is the best of the installed art, a devastating one-take demolition of Falklands-era Thatcherism. There are some poised and oddly troubling photos by Jon Savage; some fun documentation of the Neo-Naturists (whom I couldn't quite place, though Michael Clark cropped up and in one photo I thought I recognized Rachel Auburn, but I might be wrong); a confusing but lively piece by Stephen Willats; a far-from-exciting Gilbert & George (not sure that they fit here, at least not with a 1987 piece -- the late 70s / early 80s stuff is much more in tune, I'd have thought). Upstairs, just three pieces: a startling room-sized installation by Marc Camille Chaimowicz called 'Enough Tyranny Recalled', which looks like Leigh Bowery walked in and exploded; Bowery himself at the
Anthony D'Offay show, posing his bloody heart out (the ideal piece for the show, though overfamiliar perhaps to devotees); and perhaps most striking and poignant of all,
a wall-mounted piece by
Trojan, whose distinct artistic sensibility --
in its own right as it were -- has tended to be drowned out.
So: oh, I dunno. It was exciting, disappointing, partial in good ways and partial in bad. A Pompidou-sized survey of this stuff must surely be a necessity before long; having each of the featured artists represented by a single work or series of works tends to underplay the urgent forward motion of the era, you end up with a lot of discrete moments and vertical movements. The sense of an artistic community and of the support and cross-pollination within it is strongish, as is the feeling of disciplinary boundaries disregarded in the productive heat of a unifying discursive aesthetic: but the clinching argument is missing. The overreliance on video art to get the big points across is perhaps inevitable but bathetic -- or at least the huddling together of monitors in one big bank, rather than allowing each work to claim its own space, has the effect of underestimating the authority of these artists and the strength of their imagery. If I was convinced that that was a curatorial principle, I might see the value in it, but I'd be interested to know how it was arranged when it opened in Munchen, whether the ICA is simply too small to accommodate the psychic scope of the show -- and the potency of the collated expressions -- even if all of the artwork itself will just about fit.
At any rate, I'll certainly be going back a time or two before it ends, and it's anyway clearly one of those things (I know most things are one of those things) where the more interestingly you can attend to it, the more interesting it turns out to be.
What else? Well the other big deal was
David Lynch's
Inland Empire -- which honestly I'd have to say I was dreading. I haven't really loved a Lynch movie since
Lost Highway and I'm really not that interested in that side of his work which always gets described as 'dreamlike' or 'surreal' -- which was what most critical accounts (favourable and otherwise) seemed to be saying about this new film (along with more-or-less disparaging remarks about the dreariness of the DV image and the sense of longeur that seemed to go along with it).
So, what this tells us (I think) is something about the poverty of critical language outside of the academy for talking about film of this kind. I'm not sure what I mean by 'this kind' -- there's not a great deal around that's very like
Inland Empire: normally when iconic filmmakers are refining their art (
as art) to this degree, their status ensures a certain level of production values which I suppose serve in turn to underwrite their distinctive value(s) as artists. If Tarkovsky had shot
Sacrifice on DV, in other words... -- Or you have some truly challenging outburst of sumptuous, disdainful fury like
Ilya Khrjanovsky's 4 (which I picked up cheap on DVD this week) and the amount of money that's been spent on it seems
itself to prevent the film from being classed as 'garbage'. The stigma of DV is not about image quality, in other words, or not just that; it's the (truly) mental image of
Ken Russell's backyard home movies, the self-assured genius who can't get arrested in the industry any more.
What was I saying? Oh, yes, well it would have been an immense pity if foolish critics using inapt words like 'dreamlike' and 'nightmarish' had put me off seeing
Inland Empire. (Just as the 'Poetry and Dream' display at Tate Modern continues to get my goat for completely mis-establishing a whole slew of artists -- as well as 99.9% of all known poets.) I don't know if I can do any better, though. I can only say that I was gripped in a way I've hardly ever experienced in the cinema: on the edge of my seat through some of the slowest and dingiest and most puzzling episodes. If I say I think it's a masterpiece, I've said next to nothing: but what impresses me above all is the refinement and the complexity of Lynch's operations. I perhaps
disagree with his choices at some moments, but that's his privilege (and mine). Which privilege, let me say, is not to do with some specious construction of eccentric genius, but with a refinement whose propriety is entirely bound up with the particular and fundamental possibilities of cinema. In
Inland Empire, Lynch has created a perfect
cinematic fiction, in exactly the way that Borges, say, creates perfect
literary fictions. The fiction is about the medium; the medium is entirely and thoroughly described and expressed through the arguments of the fiction. I've only ever seen Robert Wilson do that in theatre: in Wilson's case, of course, his first principle is utterly, irretrievably wrong, which is not true of Lynch; but everything that folds out from that first principle is, on its own terms, irrefutable and complete and itself a picture of the system in which it participates. This is something you may as well use the idiot word 'masterpiece' to describe, no?
A good thing worth mentioning in passing: I've only just caught up with
liveartwork DVD, which seems to come about three or four times a year (issue 5 is quite newly released). Each issue comprises six or so substantial excerpts from video documentation of international live art performances, and/or made-for-video pieces. In the three issues I picked up (by mail order -- they came quickly and unfussily) there are extremely worthwhile documents of work by Brian Catling, Stuart Brisley, Goat Island (whose live work seems to transfer quite brilliantly to video, though I dare say it helps that they're making quite brilliant work in the first place -- I'm not sure if we have to start saying R.I.P. about them yet, do we?), the stunning
Esther Ferrer, the irrepressible
Robin Deacon, and so on and so on. Issue 1 has a wonderful piece by the German artist Eva Meyer-Keller, inflicting barely-imaginable cruelties on a succession of strawberries; on issue 5, my mate Emma Benson turns up (unexpectedly -- or at least, unexpectedly the first time I watched it) the best part of ten years ago, twitching and jerking in various corners of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in a Gary Stevens piece. Lots and lots for us to do; lots and lots for us to see, me and you, you and me, doo doo, doo doo. ...Where am I?
A depressing thing worth mentioning in passing: I think I have to confess I've finally reached my elastic limit with
Salt. If you don't know Salt, it's been for the past few years an incredibly busy independent press, based in Cambridge, mostly producing poetry, about half of which I suppose falls within the ambit of my particular interests (in late modernist work and its close allies). They've harnessed print-on-demand technology to enable them to be more active and in some respects more daring than any publisher in this area has ever been before. Their list is huge and growing and, when they finally get
The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk out, I'll be (in a very small way) on it. The books themselves are not that robust as objects, but more and more attention is obviously being lavished on the cosmetics and that's probably not a bad thing. Perhaps the most contentious aspect to Salt's operations is that Chris Emery, who's the prime mover behind the press -- and, whatever I'm about to say, is an excellent bloke doing what he takes to be the right thing -- has from the get-go been boldly pragmatic about trying to get the work to new audiences by borrowing techniques, particularly around marketing and merchandising, from other (bigger) players and sectors, and allowing Salt to conform as far as possible to those pressures and assumptions that shape the literary publishing industry.
So a few days ago I get their newest print catalogue and at this point, with the best will, I have to hold up my hands and say I no longer recognize my own aspirations and commitments in this material. This really is the ugliest motherhugging brochure I've ever seen for poetry, possibly for anything. Salt is describing itself as "the UK's hottest independent literary press", as if any meaningful reconciliation could ever be made between the words 'literary' and 'hottest'; a block of text on both covers insist that I should "HURRY!" to claim an online discount -- in other words, I should HURRY to concede that poetry is a kind of material that need not be categorically distinguished from, say, cut-price carpets. Across two dozen pages, huge photos loom of these indescribably unprepossessing poets' faces -- I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen (and three ladies) in question, some of whom are friends, I'm just wondering at what point we decided to agree that promoting poetry on the basis of what its authors look like was a decent or honourable trade-off with a personality-obsessed literary culture. Substantial but entirely uncontextualised samples from each text are dumped on every page in a wretchedly outmoded and barely legible grunge typewriter font. Seeing writers of the stature and integrity of John Wilkinson and Alan Halsey peering out of this mess like nervous animals in a deregulated Russian zoo is, honestly, painful.
It's like that moment a few years ago when J.H. Prynne was suddenly the object of a media spasm due to some survey of British literary activity being published which suggested that he was, you know, a good poet: and suddenly Iain Sinclair's popping up on the
Today porgramme with one brilliant pre-worked line (that trying to settle the precedency between Prynne and Philip Larkin was "like comparing electricity to nougat") and a lot of mischievous and strenuously disingenuous playing-down of the difficulties by which a novice reader is confronted in reading Prynne for the first time. As a dissenting friend wrote to me then: "It's good that people are talking about him, but there's no point pretending he's
Patience Strong."
I'm sorry to say I think (on this evidence) Salt has now reached a place in its development where it is quite cynically and grossly misrepresenting some of the work on its list. To place Wilkinson's work, or D.S. Marriott's, under a banner that says 'sensational' and 'hot' is to distort that work and the kinds of relations it's interested in establishing with readers. I'm the first to agree that seeking a wider readership for difficult poetry in these modes is a necessity. I also think the breadth of Salt's list may help with that task. (I can imagine, for example, a reader taking a chance on Anthony Joseph's
genuinely sensational -- and very finely made --
The African Origins of UFOs, and taking the leap from there to Marriott or to Bruce Andrews even, and all of that being OK.) But in its promotions and some of the language it uses to talk about the work it represents, it is plainly and quite actively aping a broader culture that seeks to soothe or airbrush or neutralize difficulty as if it were an embarrassing but remediable fault in self-presentation rather than an index of certain deep engagements that are integral to the original positioning of the work, not a reducible feature of its surfaces. There is no clue anywhere here that the work is not simply challenging but actually
demanding -- it requires a kind of bravery and attentiveness on the part of the reader (I think attentiveness is becoming a kind of bravery in itself, actually) without which the standard contracts simply fall into a sort of disconsoled nullity. And this is the urgent problem with Salt's strategy: it is making promises that the work cannot, must not, endorse or hope to honour, and the result of this, downstream, is bruised and disenchanted readers who will not be able to understand -- and why should they? -- why it is that non-mainstream poetry has let them down in a way that the dull gestures of the mainstream never have.
The odd thing is that I'm pretty sure Chris Emery would say all the same things about the poetry that I'm concerned about here. Perhaps he'd say it's just a matter of degree -- presumably there are some lines he wouldn't cross because they'd seem disrespectful to the work and to its audiences, and he and I just draw the lines in a different place. But I'm not sure about that. Last week I did a reading gig for the literary society at my old school in Bristol and had a fascinating discussion afterwards with an extremely bright young woman who's working on Kafka and who rejected, pretty much out of hand, my 'two streams' account of recent mainstream vs. modernist poetic practice: she was insisting (not without strong argument) that the differences in approach to language-use and, for example, pictorialism were simply matters of degree. What I didn't quite manage to articulate at the time was that, in so far as she's correct, nonetheless such matters of degree are determined in part by the priorities that individuals and groups of writers establish for themselves, and these priorities may exert quite absolutely contrary pressures on writing activity that may in some other respects seem broadly continuous across the spectrum. On this newest evidence, Salt's foremost priority is selling books, not supporting and promoting poetry. Perhaps that's fair enough -- "supporting and promoting" is the kind of phrase that normally crops up in the mission statements of charitable organizations, and that's not what Salt is. I'd be interested to know, though -- in the week, incidentally, when the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts scheme is cut back by 35% (as part of the current push to ensure that in 2013 this country has absolutely nothing going on of any artistic or cultural merit or importance whatsoever) -- how much the significant recent ACE award to Salt has had a bearing on, or was from the outset dependent on this kind of lurid promotional crap. Or whether, as has recently been the case with a project of mine, it's simply a case of putting out the advert that generates the largest number of sales, with no particular regard for the sensitive management of the audience's expectations or a scrupulous fidelity to the ambitions of the artwork at -- or perhaps no longer quite at -- the centre of the activity.
Well, OK, rant over. At the other end of the spectrum from Salt's frantic dancing for chicken tikka, the vital and concentrated journal
Plantarchy, out of Ohio from the offices of jUStin!katKO's Critical Documents, has published a new book from the restlessly exploratory
cris cheek -- still, after all this time, the only poet on whom I've ever cut my lip.
The Church The School The Beer takes its title from "a phrase used by some Inuit people to describe a tawdry journey that they feel is mapped out for them to make into modernity, from a child to an adult:
the church - the school - the beer." The texts collected together here arise out of a complex interplay between live writing (talking while walking), transcription, surveillance and public or civic speech-acts. As so often with cheek, it's the slippage between these acts that is more productive (in a hermeneutic sense) than the barely plausible integrity of their momentary significations; therefore -- and this is usually true of cris cheek's work wherever I have encountered it on the page -- the book feels like a partial account, a problem, in some ways almost a betrayal or a reneging. But I suspect most books feel like that to him, most of the time: that they capture the image of the impulse, the record of the motion, the end of the beginning. So this is not a satisfactory book, really, but all the more engaging and provoking for that.
I've also been reading
Userlands, the collection of short fictions which arose out of the early (or, at any rate, earlier) days of Dennis's blog, and the
ad hoc community of writers who were gathering there at that time -- pretty various stuff but there's nothing I've found yet that isn't interesting, at least on its own terms, except perhaps for those one or two authors who are still in the early stages of digesting Dennis's influence on their own practice, and whose work here serves best as a reminder of how incredibly artful and poised his own writing has been all this time.
And another lovely book I picked up this past week is the (long-awaited -- by me, anyway) catalogue of the
Robert Ryman show at Inverleith House in Edinburgh that was my visual arts highlight of 2006. Lovely but I must say it's not at all what I was expecting -- in contrast to the spacious and resounding show itself, the book is wordy and overpopulated, with each of the paintings given its own little essay, and plenty of artist/curator dialogues which you can re-enact in your own parlour of a Sunday teatime. It seems churlish to refuse this discourse, and already I can see that some of it is genuinely useful and extrovert, but I'm sorry the pictures don't get a little space just to themselves. It's sort of like a DVD where you can't turn off the director's commentary and the extras are interpolated with the scenes of the main feature. Odd choices but nonetheless a rewarding publication and a happy memento.
Probably most of my reading attention in the past few days however has been turned on Terry Eagleton's
After Theory, which I must admit I never really knuckled down to when I first bought it last summer. I was reminded of it having been watching the new BFI issue on DVD of Jarman's
Wittgenstein -- I really think one of my two or three favourite of his films, despite its sitting so oddly with much of the rest of his oeuvre. Of course the origin of the
Wittgenstein project was Tariq Ali approaching DJ to direct a screenplay that Eagleton had already written (and which all sides seem to agree was not a fully or lavishly
cinematic work on paper, though I guess why would it be?); Jarman of course couldn't reconcile himself with the reverence and literariness of Eagleton's script and made a movie that's full of his usual subversive
esprit but seemed to Eagleton crassly incongruent with his principal intentions. It was obviously quite a spat, and not much to either's credit; but having watched Jarman's
Wittgenstein I was wondering what of Eagleton remained in it, and how I (knowing very little of Eagleton's writing) might detect those traces. (I believe the two screenplays were published in one volume, in a funny, rather British, move to oil the waters: but I haven't ever seen that book and I'm not sure the idleness of my speculations really merits trying to track it down...)
Anyway, all of that led me back to
After Theory, and though much of it is disputable and, underneath its amiable, slightly rollicking surface, ever-so-slightly prim (a similar feeling to reading Tony Harrison's poetry, say), it is a good and consistently interesting read, with whose underlying argument I think I am largely in sympathy. What I feel particularly at home with is the extent to which it is, for Eagleton, perhaps above all the body that persists
after (just as of course it preceded)
theory. This comes excitingly close to the route of the train of thought I was describing recently in my 'Incorporative dissidence' paper: which is to say, it seems to suggest that theatre can do something politically right now that no other artform is so well-placed to do.
I was thinking that all the more fervently earlier when I read the excellent
Maxie Szalwinska's post to the Guardian theatre blog a couple of days ago on the topic of the silly micro-furore that seems (apparently -- it passed me by completely, I must admit) to have greeted the news that Sir Ian McKellen appears nude in the new RSC
King Lear. I can't quite bring myself to post there, it's not an adequate forum for serious discussion (though Alison Croggon gamely has a go), but regular Thompson's readers will know how often my thoughts turn to naked actors...
I mean, yes, tee hee, but the more I try to think through this stuff, the more crucially important it seems to become. I'm currently trying to write on it, to clarify my thinking in respect of
The Goodman Portraits, which I suspect will use nudity quite extensively. So, I imagine, to a lesser degree, will
Speed Death of the Radiant Child: as, indeed, quite a bit of my work has right from the start. That nudity has only rarely been about eroticism (though it was in
The Consolations and -- had I had the consent of the actors concerned -- would have been in the first version of
Napoleon in Exile) but it was often about a kind of sensual tonality that eventually, in
his horses, in 2003, became interesting to me in its own right. At that point, I started to want to think more carefully about something I'd up till then been doing really only instinctively. (All of my theorizing on theatre, such as it is, starts like that, I think: taking something I've been doing a lot and trying to slow down the instinctual impulses or reflex responses beneath it.)
On second thoughts, you know, I'm not going to try and precis that writing now, but perhaps when it's finished (which should be in the next week or so) I can upload the piece somewhere so that if you're interested, you can take a look and perhaps let me know what you think.
At any rate, for now, I'm excited about where Eagleton leaves it, and the agenda that that implies. It makes me all the more convinced that the question of how, and why, you put unclothed actors on stage -- and which actors and in what contexts -- is critically fundamental. (And all the fuss about McKellen -- and, to some degree, Daniel Radcliffe, though I think that's a much more interesting phenomenon -- no reflection
ad hominem intended on either gentleman, naturally... -- completely and blessedly irrelevant.)
It's exciting not least because once again the really interesting stuff in town all feels in accord with the same basic commitments. It's as true of Jarman and Michael Clark as it is of cris cheek and the
Userlands writers. Privacy (like its retarded and impoverished cousin, individual genius) is capitalism's Mini-Me; the body, before and after theory, is public first. This is the key to a door that's already ajar. Jump-cut to the exterior scene? All right, here we go with today's overheated peroration. The future -- by which I mean not the drab slanging match between implacably opposed but basically identical fundamentalists, conducted largely underwater, that is presumably our actual destiny; but the ideal, widescreen future, a vivid and equable future, hospitable to the body and fit for living in -- I know this for sure: that future does not belong to the coolly narcissistic, privately insured instincts of inhibition and self-denial.
Rant ends (a bit weakly). Four people applaud. Someone passes around a note that says "I think Chris needs to get laid more." Time passes. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold. You can see: the round green door.
