Is evolution a measured progression towards a pre-determined goal (the seamless intergration of agents&enviroment? the complete subjection of the enviroment and all other agents to one all-powerful species?) or simply a desperate attept to maintain the LIFE project in the face of a hostile (or at least indifferent)and changeable enviroment? Does each new mutation represent a step towards our final destination, or are they patches and stopgaps, the panicked flailings of a blindfolded man trying to find his way out of a maze, with as many dead ends and wrong turns encountered as inspired guesswork and blind luck?
Similarly, in the societal sphere, should each innovation be designed to build the foundations for Jerusalem or are we simply trying, as best we can, to prevent society from falling apart at the seams? Those who believe in A Better World, are horrifed by the omnipresence of CCTV, or the anti-immigration laws for example, whereas those who are concerned primarily with protecting the ground we have already made are unable to understand the idealists reaction, seeing such measures as insufficient protection from the forthcoming floods of chaos, the signs & portents of which they see increasing daily.
the bats have left the belfry! the cats have left their scraps!
they bay for higher walls and bigger guns, one prepares for Jerusalem, the other, for apocolypse.
posted by Luke 5:03 PM
haberdasheries. the sound of a pianola on an otherwise quiet street. diaphanous silks of various colours thrown from a window that are found, days later, strewn across the city, tangled in telephone wires and railings and in the bare branches of trees or sitting sadly in puddles and in the gutters.
wooden idols that perform miracles for eager supplicants. birds which fashion nests from urban detritus, cardboard, plastic and tin. heretics and idolaters imprisoned on colossal oil tankers, locked in the hold below deck. arthritic mandarins composing love poetry in imperial palaces. a midwife trying to remember the words of a lullaby. caves in which cats are beheaded in teenage rituals. nail clippings on the floor of a double-decker bus. orange peel in a toilet cubicle. a word scratched into glass with a stone or a sharp piece of metal. a sunburnt woman reading a novel in a hotel bedroom. an office worker cradling a cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup. a man at a job interview wearing a suit that’s slightly too small. children watching a fat man eat dinner. cobblestones and ersatz gas-lighting in a modern shopping mall. a girl absorbed in the act of polishing her spectacles. lonely men throwing disconsolate paper-darts from the roof of a tower-block. vituperative bureaucrats with lizard eyes and tightly clenched buttocks. marauding Vikings pillaging Argos and Woolworths, carrying off sacks of plastic dolls, digital watches and ball-point pens. plastic models of dinosaurs arranged in dramatic poses among the sovereign rings, musical instruments and gold necklaces in the pawnbrokers window. the bloated carcass of a cow meandering down the canal, remarked on by idle fishermen. prominent members of the royal family induced into sponsored bungee-jumps for charity. buses full of prisoners celebrating a successful escape. colourful streamers dangle from the windows. fearsome explosions on the surface of the moon. farmers wives promenading in coats made of cat fur. romantics holding hands in Dixons, looking at cameras and walkman headphones. bridges designed to be slightly submerged under the river so that people crossing get their feet wet. papier-mâché elephants sacrificed to the fire spirits. street-drinkers congregating in churchyards. school children spitting at each other, or snatching the satchel of the weakest one and keeping it from him until they grow bored. sofas and armchairs doused in petrol and ignited. famous sea-battles re-enacted in flooded football stadiums. entrepreneurs reading biographies of Napoleon and Alexander of Macedonia. Japanese teenagers in leather jackets, posing with cigarettes. small rodents in the microwave or washing machine. bored shop-girls wiping bogeys on cashmere sweaters. ennuyees staring lethargically at rush-hour traffic. ambitious buisness-school graduates seducing each other on field trips to banks and corporate headquarters. impromptu picnics in office lobbies, vomiting on the leather armchairs after too much ginger ale and mopping up spills with copies of Time or Cosmopolitan. macho farmers in faded baseball caps and Levis breeding alligators in small towns in Texas. boorish men at dinner parties talking about God or EU subsidies. athletic young narcissists with perfect pectoral muscles strolling through supermarkets, filling their baskets with low-fat yoghurt, designer aftershave, hairgel, toner and moisturiser and watching with admiration as their biceps and forearms bulge in response to the weight. a canary perched on his owners beer-gut. wide-eyed ingenues flinching from compliments. truck-drivers and firemen in drag. cynical comedians beaten up in provincial pubs over local women or a joke which caused offence. bored children poring vegetable oil and shampoo into the goldfish bowl. awkward middle-aged men led from the audience by lithe flamenco dancers to play castanets or learn a few simple steps, volunteers for ritual humiliations.
roast pigeon and venison. sticking plasters floating on the surface of municipal swimming pools. disfigured topiary hedges. botched tattoos. lame-looking dragons and the misspelled names of abandoned lovers. thuggish ravens patrol the cricket pitch. retired boxers and disgraced politicians appearing on mid-morning gameshows, laughing together in spurious bohomonie.
posted by Luke 2:59 PM
burdensome voices. harpies. surging anger. scintillant pustule.
guppies. golems. lumbering claymen. clammy flesh.
flash of sun on fish flank, millions of ‘em, rotting in the black gutters. cordial none the less.
skinned walrus. puppy fat. whale oil. St. Sebastian. sticky oozing blood. congealed and stuck to flesh. skin blood caked. pierced. penetrated. pelican meat.
mucus. the wilting brittle plants. collapse of meaning. mewling like a drowning kitten. injections. needle bites flesh. insects, carriers of diseases that spread as swiftly as forest fires.
finger soldered to thigh, foot soldered to forehead. soot blackened church. concrete crypts. impossible spiders. webs of barbed wire.
shards of glass. fanatical loneliness. despairing albatross. concreted mouth and nostrils. choking. exhaust fumes, motes of noxious dust. drifting particles of razor sharp dust. lacerating lungs. febrile longing. impaled organs. fastidious gentlemen. strangulation. impotent fits and convulsions. ash-pollen. scalding. walls of heavy smog. insects burrowing beneath the skin. pustules. limbs smouldering in copper braziers. plumes of black smoke. spluttering. choking. coughing blood and phlegm. internal bleeding. ruptured heart. delicate poisons. wailing ministrations. formless city. random acts of violence. bloated pigs squealing, stampeding through narrow alleyways. panic of a thousand stampeding pigs. fraying. successful businessmen with mouths full of maggots. gangrenous limbs of entrepreneurs. tongue rot. crushed under heavy machinery. mangled bodies. garbled sermons. bile-choked. bitter fluids. pack-animals beaten with thorny rods. festering sores. infected wounds. visions in the throes of death, diseased hallucinations. a lecherous jesus with a toothless grin. skin ravaged with sores. oily rain. pavements sticky with blood. misshapen hands grab at housewives. photographs of lepers forced to dance. crippled bears. blinded lions shorn of fur. stray dogs with inward looking eyes kicked gleefully by apprentice butcher boys. dragged over fields of sharp stones. epileptic night. pickled suzerain. horse meat. crimson black. stomach fungus. intestines draped over christmas trees like bloody tinsel. overbearing polar bears bow and steal kisses from coy parlour maids. a ballerina imprisoned in a cavernous ballroom, forced to leap and pirouette till she collapses. dismembered mannequins float sadly down dank canals. surrealists decorate their hallways with severed limbs. grotesque swellings. camcorder footage of sobbing children. close-ups of moist cheek and reddened eye. riotous baboons piss from the tops of enormous trees. haberdashery. he opens his clenched fist to reveal the broken body of a butterfly. pedagogues teaching children obscene songs and accompanying them merrily on piano. initials gouged into a dog’s flank. awkward cupolas of corrugated iron. shanty towns swept away on deep tides of green mud. geriatric rag and bone men, carts pulled by emaciated mules. bruises. purple and green blotches on pale skin. small time gamblers with greasy hair and pitted skin. masticated sparrow meat. thuribles that spew plumes of curling nerve gas...
posted by Luke 2:57 PM
there’s two dead wasps on my window sill. They look like decommissioned prototypes
experiments in military bioengineering.
the sleek economy of design containing nothing extraneous. armoured thorax and abodomen with metallic glint. antennae and compound eyes. Information absorbed directly into the body! the way the the wind moves the tiny hairs on their bodies is knowledge. the way the sun warms the antennae is knowledge. no processing time. feeling is knowing.
and armed, sting protruding from backside.
got me thinking about
bodies as technology
as in
baby birds learning to operate their flight technology.
get me?
and athletes and gymnasts as those who dedicate themselves to mastering the technology developing a more intimate understanding of its workings, its abilities and limitations.
and the slightly sullen, vindictive relationship most people have with their bodies. Lugging it around like an embarressed schoolkid with his mother’s shopping.
posted by Luke 1:31 PM
‘There's no truth search, it's not on, it ain't happening. It's in fact frowned upon. Look, we live in a time so indoctrinated right now to believe that the only things we value are fame and money. Those are the only two things this culture values. If you're not famous or rich, what do you really have to say? You lost. We live in a time so odd that a plea for sanity comes off sounding like sour grapes. "Can't we all love each other?"
"Yeah, LOSER! You wouldn't feel that way if you were driving around in this car." KEEP DRINKING BEER. ‘
bill hicks-playa hata
‘yo, light a candle
run laps around the English Channel
Neptunes they got a cocker spaniel’
N.O.R.E.
posted by Luke 1:29 PM
"you can catch me in LA
with a mexican midget"
N.O.R.E
posted by Luke 10:49 AM
de Villepin is a keen fencer, elegant with an epee, a breeder of terrapins and a frequenter of cafes, I know him well, de Villepin, i know his weasel ways
i challenge him to games of chess in weasly cafes
posted by Luke 4:21 PM
de Villepin's argument strikes me as essentially Platonic.
watching Manchester United this season and last has been like watching the fall of the Roman Empire. Their struggle is not with Arsenal and the other top premiership sides, but with the law of entropy itself.
The saga of Beckham's brow made this clear. Alex Ferguson in kicking the boot was railing against fate and against the passage of time.
The question is not whether or not Man Utd can regain their place at the top of English football, they won't, not with this team and not with this manager, but whether they can reach the final of the Champions league and play out one last glorious finale in front of the home fans. That's the narrative we're following. Does this evidently senescent empire have its most famous victory still ahead of it?
posted by Luke 4:14 PM
(this essay is dedicated to my dear friend & godfather of my daughter, Dominique de Villepin, whose use of language is, as ever, a source of inspiration to all who follow the muse)
It was a month or two ago now, a Sunday afternoon with the skies already beginning to darken. Siberian winds were tearing through our benighted islet, making it almost impossible to leave the house when the stately Octavia called to invite me to Tate Britain.
I agreed instantly, perhaps, overeagerly, throwing aside all thoughts of the cold and of my fragile constitution in the excitement of hearing from such a cherished friend.
Having noted the frankly unnerving apartment block being built on the south bank of the river, sitting to the west side of Vauxhall bridge (Mesopotamian ziggurat meets H.R Geiger on postmodernism’s lollipop lane. The apartments are right next to the MI6 building ) and narrowly avoiding being apprehended in the act of taking a piss in the doorway of a barristers chambers by two corpulent Q.Cs emerging from that very door just as I was turning away and zipping up my fly, we cannoned through the revolving doors and into
a temple of art...
filled with more devotees than usual as an assortment of stragglers and idlers, layabouts and parasites, the weak and the walking-wounded sought shelter from the bitter cold. Octavia dropped a laundry token into the donations box. I shot her a glance, which, I believe, affected her more deeply than any spoken reprimand have done. She does have a conscience, despite what some people might say.
One of the rooms contained a series of significantly enlarged photographs, details of paintings from Catholic churches, the uppermost section of the Virgin’s wan, oval face for instance, the usual cast members in their usual poses, but all defaced during the Reformation.
The emotions which animated the hands of the Protestant vandals could still be seen, as clearly as the day they were made, revealed in the marks they left behind them, and which have outlived their creators by several centuries. Long, forceful strokes run diagonally across the length of the paintings, separating arms from shoulders and heads from necks, the surface of the paintings are scarred with other smaller stabs and scratches appearing randomly, and with the very deliberate, spiteful gouging out of eyes and plugging up of mouths.
As well as tracing the fury of the emotions unleashed by fanaticism, the compulsion to blind and to strike dumb the various catholic icons betrays a vestigial, superstitious fear of the image and it’s power to exact retribution. The need to ensure those who are wronged against are unable to bear witness.
This same fear of the image can also be seen in the covering up of a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica in the UN building, when Colin Powell was obliged to give a speech arguing for the bombing of Iraq in front of it recently.
To see the evidence of such ill-feeling, such hate and frenzy, bitterness and spite, long after the force of those emotions has subsided, long after those who felt those emotions have perished, long after those who incited those emotions have perished makes you slightly queasy. It feels like listening to a series of recordings of angry words spoken to loved ones, arguments over things which no longer matter, which never mattered. Seeing all the nasty things you ever said to anyone written down in a leather-bound book. A reliquary of guilt.
The way the scratches captured and took away from time the movement of a living person, in the way a photograph does,. reminded me of a different kind of vandalism. Tags, (highbrow readers may wish to consider jackson pollock & the loose, intuitive brushstrokes of the expressionists instead.) in which letters and words cease being signs, packhorses&porters, mere carriers of information, and become frozen gestures, like the trails sparklers leave behind them in the night sky. What is important is the quality of movement, the grace and spontaneity of hand and eye. Movement reveals the personality more intimately than speech, think of shy besotted boys betrayed by their own body language upon meeting the object of their desire, knotted limbs, muscles tensed, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, twitching, shifty eyed...
Later that week, as I was passing under St. John’s Arch in Clerkenwell, an old Gypsy woman gave me a silver harmonica. Her hands were small, soft and suprisingly strong.
Blowing into it for the first time I heard the sound of my own exhalation of breath. Like watching bacteria under a microscope the harmonica allowed me to listen closely to events which are usually virtually inaudible. I heard the duration, the depth and the vigour of my breath and simultaneously, all the conditions which had affected that breath; my tiredness at the end of a hard week at work, the rattle left in my lungs from a recent asthma attack, my uncertain approach to the instrument itself, my general mood of melancholy and fatigue with the idea of life in general, all could be heard, the immediacy was a revelation, I thought of Buddhists, limbs dutifully folded into the lotus position, minds poised&vigilant, hoping to catch themselves breathe. The effect was the same, a moment’s enlightenment, LIFE making itself heard, if only briefly, over the din of irreality.
The idea is to cast the light of the conscious mind upon that which lies shrouded in darkness, to uncover and to document the workings of systems not governed by the rational intellect. Instruments do not record a musicians intention but what his actual body, his fingers, lungs throat and lips played. Usually musicians aim to make their bodies follow their own, preconceived intentions as closely as possible, which is why we are in favour of amateurism and falling short of your ideal, the mask slips, and the interior life is revealed. Garage is good partly because in a lot of ways its quite crap, you’re not fooled into thinking you’re listening to handsomely paid hustler/rappers, you can hear the boyishness, the front, the nerves...
but what I meant to say, before I got sidetracked, is that computer music is interesting as(and arguably analogous to writing in that...) the body is bypassed altogether in the creation of the sound. It is not filtered through the organic-thought becomes data in a seemingly seamless transition-
I'll come back to this later, one tick..
posted by Luke 2:41 PM
just wait here one moment...
posted by Luke 9:56 AM