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.