A Chronicle of the Current Revolution

Strata

I. Aether
I spent the last two days partaking in a conference on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature at the English Faculty. Incredible discussion, conversations, new ideas and thoughts, critical juggling acts &ct. &ct.: made me want to read and write and work more than ever; mind in its careful spinning drawing everything up to the heights an aery zeppelin drifting up with silver wings.

II. Surface Waters
Coming down from the empyrean after letting good friends out the back gate of King’s, I settled on a wander through the college bar to see if any of my other compatriots were there. There was a jazz jam going on. A trumpet, swagger on the keys and some guitar flourishes; ran into a good friend who finally gave me her new chapbook of poetry ‘London Burning’ for a song. We had a brilliant chat. I rolled home to read her poems, and was looking forward to easing down the day.

III. Hell Muck
While reading up on Battles on Pitchfork, stumbled across the new Pitchfork.tv and the most brutal, violent, raw punk artist I have ever known to exist: GG Allin. On Pitchfork.tv there is a brief film called ‘Hated’ that documents many of GG Allin’s performances over the course of his career and is loosely based around GG’s effort to complete a final tour after being released on probation from jail. It is only available on the site for a week. I will not reccomend this film, as I think it best (and would hope) that one read the summary of the film and warning disclaimer and then decide for yourself whether you would be watching the film out of mere curiosity or are certain you would like to observe a shocking evidencing of what can be called the darker and more wretched parts of life and our existence - unless you are of the latter mind/certainty, forgo.

If you do watch the film, it is helpful to come at it from the perspective of the performance studies critic. I suggest this, as I am of the mind that GG Allin was a performance artist, and definitely might be called the true punk artist. One scene in the movie confirms this for me: GG is at a spoken word reading in Boston. At the time of this reading he has declared to the public that he will kill himself in October of 1990. Someone from the back of the audience asks why he won’t kill himself sooner. Such a comment so incenses GG he asks the speaker to say it to his face. His anger is unusual, in that such commentary from fans would not normally bother him in such a way. The woman comes up and says it right to his face again and he is so incensed he assaults her. I believe this event and GG’s behaviour towards the woman confirms him as a performance artist, for I suspect that the reason the comment made him so angry was that the comment made his entire life of extreme performances entirely irrelevant, and effectively invalidated his entire career; in short, she suggested that nothing he had done in his life - and more importantly - nothing that he had done in any of his performances, mattered; such that it could all be wiped away and forgotten and did not command regard. That he responded as he did to such a dismissive verbal gesture suggests not only that GG wanted to be regarded rather than disregarded, but further that he desired to be made relevant to the world through his unique career of excessive and violent performances, and that he ultimately desired to be recognized as relevant and worthy of regard by the world on account of his performances and career as a punk artist. Follow up research, which shows that GG made efforts to write up his life philosophy and ’mission’ in life, would seem to confirm his search as an artist for relevance, regard, recognition.   

If I was not aware of the above related scene and GG’s associated behaviour I would never suggest the understanding of GG as a performance artist, as I would never seek to critically recover an individual who sought to combat all such attempts at framing identity and all structures that seek to organize identity. Yet, the combination of the way GG responds to the noted verbal riposte and his efforts to codify his life philosophy sanction the view of GG as a performance artist who sought to engage an audience, and thus also sanctions an effort on our part to understand him as such, as a punk artist. This is all I will say about GG Allin at this point in time. If you watch the film, know that a look outside it to some biographical information on GG’s life might be helpful as well; as, like any piece of documentation, the film does not ‘tell the whole tale’. Scumfuc.

IV. Fired Earth
After watching the documentary, I came across and watched a music video of a band I did not know. The following is by a band called Foals, and is entitled ‘Red Socks Pugie’:

The peaceful tone as harness to explosive energy raked me out of the rawness of the documentary, and brought me back up onto solid land, burning with the thought of the incredible stratification of life - the arch regions of intellectualism, to honest cameraderie in the ebb of the publican, then down to some of the most brutal violences and excesses men and women can commit, and finally back to ground with a renewed sense of the energy, dynamism, complexity and profundity of life that a music and associated series of moving images somehow articulated closurally in a perfect if unexpected closure to an equally unexpected reeling freefall, exquisiteness of day.  

Drug Bust

There is a bathroom called: ‘The Research Bathroom’, in the Keynes Lodgings at King’s. I have no idea what type of research goes on in there normally, but today someone appears to have conducted a sociological experiment in the facility, as I was informed by one of my friends Emma, who discovered a certain science project taking place in said loo. No, it was not a hideously mutated dookie. It was what appeared to be a bag of drugs, cunninngly concealed behind a pipe.

What does one do in this situation? One pokes the curio cautiously with a library card, as Emma did. Then one runs back to tell the others (myself and another friend Cillian) about the oddity in the bathroom, and how it is certainly a drop off (the initial stage in a deal). Well, we began to speculate as to what drug it was - due to a brownish colouring we thought perhaps hash, opium, MDMA &tc. - but no conclusions could be reached through the meagre evidence provided by such a cursory prodding of an initial investigation.

Then Cillian goes to investigate after dinner, when he has to wee. Upon returning, he relates that he started to unravel the mysterious package, but got scared and shifty and left it. We began to speculate again, the brownish colouring was confirmed. Remembering the name of the toilet as ’Research Bathroom’, we decided it was probably some enterprising sociologist or criminologist conducting an experiment to see how people would react to what amounted to free drugs of an illegal nature in illicit circumstances, and the whole space was monitored by cctv cameras.

Well, I had had enough and went to hazard the springing of the trap, with a ruler and pair of scissors in hand to deal with the mystery in a direct manner. Cillian and Emma followed. On the way it was noted it looked somewhat like a condom and I remarked: maybe it is someone’s joke and they pooed in a condom and left it for someone to find. We decided that either Cillian or Emma would probably have been able to recognize poo.

We made it to the bathroom, located the bag of drugs, and I proceeded to investigate. I poked at the plastic outer wrapping, started cutting: and lo! what dropped forth from its plastic sheath was: more plastic, and fingers! Sinister intimations, then the mystery divulged itelf: one plastic glove had been folded up inside another and the quadruple layer of latex had made the inner glove, wrapped up in a tight ball inside the outer glove, look like a brownish/grayish ball of hash. A cleaning lady had clearly forgotten her mitts behind the sink when cleaning the shitter.

We walked out amused yet crestfallen, as only a hippy would eat latex to get high.

Experimental Psychology on Children: The Coleridgean Method

Sometimes I laugh myself back into sanity over the things I read. Here is an excerpt that grounded me via hilarity right at the end of a long day of reading; it concerns Coleridge’s investigations into psychological phenomenon in the early 1800s:

 ’The key issue, however, was still the learning of language. Did it not seem to be the case that the growth of linguistic ability was in essence an organic rather than a vital process? On one occasion, when Derwent [one of Coleridge’s sons] was nearly three years old, Coleridge tried to explain to him what his senses were for, and found that he did not as yet associate sense-organs with their respective perceptual functions. In order to teach him about his tongue, Coleridge held it, and found him quite unmoved. A little later Coleridge told him to hold his tongue and try to say, ‘Papa’:

…he did, & finding that he could not speak, he turned pale as death and in the reaction from fear flushed red, & gave me a blow in the face/ (Coleridge’s Collected Notebooks I, 1400)’ (John Beer; Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence; pg. 252)

Not only is the idea of Coleridge causing his son psychological trauma to advance his abstruse researches amusing, the image of his son freaking out and smacking Coleridge in the face because he suddenly can’t talk is just too much. Apparently Coleridge found the whole experience enlightening.  

Gangs of Cambridge/Radical Aesthetics/Chaotic Day

A few things. I am quite fired up from a number of occurences today, some experiential, some cognitive churnings. First, the fun thing that has been on my mind which is both experiential and cerebral.

1. I was in ‘The Copper Kettle’ a great restaurant right across from King’s College. Finished my delicious full English breakfast and got up to go. See a Magdalene College kid sitting at a table close by, scribbling in a book and reading though thick glasses; wearing Magdalene stash and looking aggravatingly clean cut and formica standard boring. King’s and Magdalene College are at exact opposite ends of the political/social/cultural spectrum in terms of Cambridge colleges; King’s being the most left-leaning and liberal (we have a hammer and sickle framed on our bar wall for goodness’ sake) and Magdalene being absolutely arch-conservative. It was definitely a meeting of polar opposites - on King’s turf. I thought: ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if the whole college thing was more like a gang system where if anyone from another college gang stepped on your turf you had the right to challenge them and sort their insolence out with fist and boot?’ Something like the Warriors, to be certain. It would work perfectly in Cambridge where everyone knows the college colours and crests instantly, and there is still enough of an honour system that if you say just fists, or just fists, bricks and bats, everyone would observe protocol without problem. Well, nothing against that kid, but the idea had such novelty I almost went up to him and asked him what the hell he was doing on King’s turf. Anyways, I walked out, and later ran the idea by a New Yorker friend who was definitely into the idea. Since this episode my friend and I have taken to using the term ’We should totally Magdalene that “person”’ if we think someone should get beaten up.

2. Ernst & Young, massive accounting firm I was told, put a small little box of chocolates in every student’s pigeon hole in the mail room at King’s today. I imagine they did this at every other college in Cambridge. The chocolates were quite good, and I simply ate them and didn’t think twice about the firm. Then someone sent this email around:

  …in your pigeonhole.

The cost to the government of abolishing all tuition and top up fees would
be around £1.4 billion
(http://bookshop.universitiesuk.ac.uk/downloads/whatsitworth.pdf).

An unlawful tax-avoidance scheme devised by Ernst & Young deprived the
government of £1.5 billion
(http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1562889,00.html).

Like the chocolates brought home by a husband after being caught screwing
his secretary, this little offering doesn’t really make up for it.

I’m with that cat, but I would settle for 1.5 billion pounds worth of chocolate though. I could probably get the girls around here to take care of it all within a few months - the English birds have quite the gnarly sweet teeth.

3. Sometimes you read things that get you questioning, angry, intrigued, feeling like literary/theoretical studies are actually relevant. Terry Eagleton’s ‘The Ideology of the Aesthetic’ has me worked up into the aforementioned manner. Maybe it’s an old work, or older minds who have studied philosophy for longer thinks it’s flawed - whatever - I am new to it. He suggests so many things that need serious contemplation, such as the idea that a ‘human subject’ could pose ‘an ideological challenge to the ruling order’ by ‘elaborating new dimensions of feeling beyond its narrow scope’. That idea gives the aesthetic and art, and the subject that conceives of and practices those disciplines an incredible power and privilege, and forces you to think about how to practice art or think aesthetics in such a way as to exceed the ideology of the ruling order. I really don’t want to bang on about this, but it is nice to have an epiphany about the relevance to the world of things that you have made your profession, and that your passions are also important and relevant to the world as well.  

4. Shipping company miscarried an important piece of mail. Spent way too long (and eventually 15 pounds for a taxi) getting out to the depot to get the damn thing resent. They resent it for free, lucky for them.

5. Everything closes so early here. It is impossible to get a box of cereal for breakfast at 7:00pm. Now I have to have beans again, or peanut butter on crackers.

Despite these many things, I am in a good place, albeit angsty and edgy. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with that - especially if this place goes ‘Gangs of New York’ on us all. Peace and love,

 Peter Morelli

Strange Beautiful

Every Friday at King’s College we have what is called ‘Grad Drinks’. The King’s Grad society gives the Social Secretary funds to buy lots of drink and put on an affair - there is a lot of university/collegiate sanctioned drinking at Cambridge just so you know. I have been iPod deejaying these grad drink nights which has been additional fun, but I just wanted to formally lodge that last night’s Grad Drinks was absolutely legendary: pitchers of cocktails and dirty lagers, all my crazy people, everything turning into a mad dance party to old school funk and K-os with some upbeat tracks by The Go! Team and others spun in. So that was my Friday night, and it was terrific.

It is just gone Sunday morning here; half twelve as the English would say. So I can officially look back and comment on the strange beautiful Saturday I just had. I woke up late, ate a bagelwich from the fridge which I found free on a platter in the bar on Friday (great find), and had just one cup of delicious coffee. I had planned to read a poem and play a song at ‘Unheard Of’ a poetry and music open mic night being held at the new student-run art space that has just opened up on Jesus Lane, so I started going over the poem I wanted to read, one I have been working on for awhile and thought I would bring to completion by performing; it is called ‘Supplication: To Not Knowing’. Incidentally, if you want to read it just email me and I will send you back a copy of it in a document form of your choosing.

I spent all day working on the poem, bringing it to its final version and working through the rhythms and lines, it was a wonderful way to spend a day. I finished just in time to make it to Evensong at King’s College Chapel; the bell was sounding, calling everyone in just as I had done play. I rushed out and ran into a friend at the entrance to the hostel I stay in, and she held me up talking about a gray cardigan she might have lost for quite some time, as always happens when you are in a rush (bell still sounding). She told me she had a dinner with a whole group of boys and I called her a smart woman, then I took off. I mention her because she reappears later, you understand.

Evensong was amazing last night, a celebration service for the feast of Candlemas. To mark events like this, the choir usually begins the Evensong by starting at the far west end of the chapel, beyond the organ screen so you can’t see them, and then walk to us at the east end in procession, singing as they go. So we can’t see the choir at all, but suddenly we are all standing, waiting for something to happen. Then, in the far west of the Chapel the choir starts to sing, and they start singing Ave Maria, a beautiful beautiful arrangement, and you can’t see anything, just hear these voices far and distant sounding off the fan vaults all airy and golden. I tell you, it seemed angels were on the other side of the organ screen, out of sight but not hearing. Amazing. Ave Maria was sung at my Nonna’s funeral, so the song brought her back as well, and it was a very powerful moment.

Left the chapel, went home, collected my guitar and notebook, walked to The Shop on Jesus Lane. Bought a chicken salad sandwich on the way there, ate it on a bus stop bench beneath a streetlight. Entered The Shop, tonnes of people which is a great sign for the new space, signed down to play, watched a lot of people do great readings and performances. Highlights include: friend playing a concertina with his hands and a tambourine with his foot doing cover of Destiny’s Child and cover of Shakira, cat who played great Nick Drake style folk tunes, friends reading heartfelt and good verses, a T.S. Eliot reading, and the buzz and jitter of performing myself. I read ‘Supplication: To Not Knowing’ like planned, and played a new song called ‘Works and Days’. Had two cups of good tea.

Took off and got a bit of pizza at Gardenia’s Greek Restaurant. Ate it while watching the highlights of Arsenal beating Man City 3-1. Gunners all over City in the end of the game, bloodthirsty and deadly, it was wonderful to watch.

Walked home around 11:00pm and ran into my friend from before right in front of Spalding Hostel, where we both live. She was being escorted by a friend, and was ridiculously lashed (drunk). Her friend was taking care of her, and asked if I would make sure she would be okay from hereon in; I agreed and her friend took off. I walked my drunk comrade up to her room, and she collapsed on the bed. Not really knowing what else to do, I just played her lullabies on the guitar until she seemed to be asleep. Then I put my guitar away and just sat with her until it turned into Sunday, prised my fingers from her hands and slipped out quietly, turning the light off as she continued to sleep peacefully. I feel honoured and lucky that I have friends who trust me as much as she does and are as close as we all are; we really all take care of each other here, as we are the only family we have immediately around us right now.  

‘Cambridge really casts a spell’, someone once said. I remain, my dear friends, your most humble and loving servant,

 Peter Morelli

Basically Amorphous

The monumentality of certain events seems to preclude their being capturable in print media. Such a first sentence is purposefully ungainly in order to emphasize subconsciously the difficulties inherent in transcribing immensities. The first two sentences should indicate I am back in Cambridge, studying, reading, writing, a whole heck of a lot.

Over the holidays, after a brilliant time back home and in Colorado with my brother and his wife, I was in Switzerland for a week playing ice hockey. It is this trip which in a sense is problematically monumental, as I really want to communicate how beautiful and clear it was in Switzerland in this south-east, in a region called the Engadin but understand that it would take quite some time to do so. I will let pictures do most of the work eventually, but will say to begin that it was a brilliant first step onto the continent proper for me, and that touring around the valleys and villages of the Engadin on foot and by train, playing hockey all day and drinking coffee and reading when I wasn’t playing hockey was a wonderful way to get ready for Lent term. Stay posted for pictures.

So back in Cambridge. Wind so strong today, and there was a major ghostbuster sky. Started raining like madness and then hailing alongside the rain, the winds whipping it all into whips and it cleared all the streets right out. I watched from my bay window and it was quite a scene.

My coffee maker is in play again, and I forgot how good the coffee vendor’s houseblend is - especially if you have it ‘black as the devil and sweet as sin’.

For those of you who are avid comic/graphic novel readers, the quoted phrase above might give away that I have now read Alan Moore’s ‘The Watchmen’. Simply amazing. Mike thanks for the Christmas gift - it kept me up till three on a number of nights.

Want to shout out to Louie at the records office. Man put a human face on bureaucracy, renewed my faith in the kindness of people and got me five transcripts within a day. I walked out of the records office stunned and beaming, and am incredibly thankful for his kind gesture. I got him a good bottle of red as a gesture of appreciation and in an effort to pay it forward.

Out playing music in the streets one night, a violinist walked past and I asked her to join me for a few songs. She did, and we dashed off a few great numbers. The combined strings, guitar and vocals called out the homeless people however, and soon we had a madman drunk named Mick hanging out with us, and another homeless busker who heard us playing and wanted to join in. The busker had a really out of tune guitar, but he asked if we knew Bob Dylan and started playing ‘All Along the Watchtower’, so we played along with that while Mick clapped along and drank. It was quite a motley assembly of riot and music, and the cctv cameras noticed: at one point while we were playing I looked up at the street light and the cctv camera that watches the intersection was trained on us, the cold dark eye of the man staring down at us kids, as Dylan might’ve sung it. Anyways, after the song myself and the violinist headed off realizing things were getting a bit dodgy. Walking her home I found out that she is a guerilla gardener, and has been planting flowers and shrubs and things all over Cambridge in the dead hours of the night. It was quite a night.

Crashed my bike. Hit a speedbump in front of Fitzwilliam College that I didn’t see and went over the handlebars. Broke the fall with my hands and then just lay there for a while; when one crashes like this, the feeling of being safe on the pavement and just lying there peaceably while you sting is so comforting. I collected myself and then went to meet my supervisor and a Clare scholar I was meeting for the first time. I think things went well despite my entrance to the College. I then had to get back on my bike to get to a lecture, and found out my brake cable was snapped from the shock of the crash. I rode it ‘cross town anyways, and made it to the lecture on time, which turned out to be well worth the risks involved in biking through British traffic without brakes. A bit of hardcore blood-sport academia here, if I might say so.

Other than the above such things, it is library and library and then a drink at 10:30. I really can’t complain. I will make sure to keep the updates, commentaries and inconsequentia more regular now since I have started this up again. I hope you are all well, and big hugs. I, of course, remain your most humble and obedient servant,

 Peter Morelli