Don't dumb me down
Don't dumb me down
Niche-r n niche-r and never richer (in spirit), darlings.
Kirsty’s Diary
Indie filmmaking is such a joyous nightmare - at midnight last night I got a message confirming the projector at the indie venue in Dalston was collapsing (maybe because the cinema operates as a charity), so the QnA I’m honoured to host at 8.30 tonight around the Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi, by director Niall Trask - Moonbathing in February, for Doc n Roll is now at Hackney Picturehouse so, like “regeneration” itself, we are forced to shift ever further from the money-ed centres we service. It’s like a mirror back to Dickensian past which we may be ever superior of, like modernity tends to be over history, dominating with ‘Well, we have SO MUCH MORE NOW’ - but watching the classic drama series from the 70s, Children of the Stones (because I did the Groovy Fayre last week for Jonny Trunk, and he’d done a re-release with Buried Treasure of the soundtrack) that I really became aware how much I miss Reithian values of informing and educating. Sure we have Adam Curtis, but there’s so little good quality art that breaks through the barricades - it’s like a classic ‘cost of living crisis’ sign, similar to the cinema being broken, that actually, expenses aren’t rising because there’s a war going on in Ukraine, it’s that the Arts are under attack as boardroom greed leaves nothing for anyone else. A sign that the best art is always political, from Sex Pistols and EMI, or like Britney singing Hit Me Baby One More Time…the aesthetic always reflects the times - whether it’s a wannabe bling-sheen of grime, the VHS of Spike Jonze, a new wave of Godard, or a no-budget iPhone innovation of Tangerine. I don’t know how it worked with Jarman, back getting clearance for films like Jubilee, or whether the hegemonic demonic power is worse now than ever, when bands and filmmakers can't afford to clear their own music for films, as they've had to sell it with their souls, ones that are nomadic largely because rock star mansions don’t happen like they used to - but for the non-compliant majority, will culture itself address the power shift which needs to be re-addressed? Or are we doomed?
The Simon Cowell-generation who live on lease-hire collagen lips, showcasing Lifestyle (because we are demeaned into affording little else) means those with the luxury of concentration to read books leave us at Frankfurt School 2.0. Basic cultural oblivion. The Frankfurt School were in opposition to the decimation of culture used by the Nazis to gain control, and the echoes of right-wing fascism crawling over Europe now, with illegal raves banned in Italy this week, after Brexit, the pandemic, we’re left ever more co-dependent on the technocrats - all we have to connect to the outer world is our screens, feeding data-haulers who will programme AI without ethics, and we will be eaten by the the hand that we groom our audiences with, as OAPs have to wrangle screens they can’t see in systems which have no clear leader (or regular GP) and how do we even find the time to search for a Funkadelic concert on YouTube if we’re scrolling on an air guitar in a dumbass metaverse of computer games building fantasy Sim Cities in NHS services that have been sold to the most unscrupulous providers?
The value of Art is shifting as the Open Source communist-equality dream of the Internet is taken over by billionaire taker-uppers-of-space like Elon Musk who tweets on, seemingly unaware of the irony of being a mega-ego farting out distraction politics. Switch off, switch it up, or switch it out.
Nick Currie and his Momus Open University shared a brilliant video talking about the Arts Council research into culture a few years ago - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEk7kSjByIOIkMWc6S3uYfWBZiojNtO61 do find it from this playlist as it resonates with there being less and less of a place for proper freak-value in a society saturated by the flattening nature of social media which will add the same value to ALL. Ever niche-r and niche-r, and less richer and richer where there’s plenty for the few, and less for the many.
Sure there are interventions, like The Horror Show at Somerset House which acts like a coming of age event for me, charting all the rites of passage bedrooms and offices I’ve ever stuck anything on the wall to, like a zine of rebellion, detonating the ideas Jeremy Deller spoke of in his acid house classroom film,
suggesting teenagers are too scared to take risks now, The Horror Show picks up on that, and presents something which I hope every young person in London, and beyond, visits, to learn why we must keep on kicking against the pricks. I’m proud of Bert Gilbert for creating a massive vagina portal (she designed the artwork for our single, it’s very ltd edition - and we won’t do them again in the same way…) if you’re a paying subscriber, drop me a line, and I’ll send you one if you haven’t bought one. There are a handful left
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https://vagrantlovers.bandcamp.com
The Horror Show is a birthing chamber to where we stand now, with our strangled purses, in Faye Dowling’s brilliant GothShop giftshop (kindly stocking Ambit merch and Psychomachia) - and we martyr ourselves as absolute perverts to accept this financial violence to us, taking it as an unseen Gaian-type force (like Thomas Sharp wrote of the Fairies of the City project) rather than a right wing authoritarian order where we are victims to the direct effect of capitalism where the god of profit delivers increasing cash to shareholders and we’ll be stupid enough to continue to take it BECAUSE WE’RE SO BUSY, accepting that maybe it’s something to do with a war that our government conveniently blame for their greed, as we are scrolling, working, creating - sorry to repeat, but how bright are we as the objectified image of Barbie resonates ever and ever closer, as the audience for quality art withers and emaciates.
VICTIMs, never.
Hence, it was fascinating to watch Bad Victims, a play in development which I hope makes a main run. I hate to use the word trigger - I tend to think the more weight you give something, the more it empowers it, so I’ve fought long and hard to bury emotions like a normal British person, and ignore the rapes. But fuck me, Joanna Pickering’s work is uncomfortable and brilliant. I remember The Vagina Monologues coming to the WestEnd when vagina was an outlawed word - it was embarrassing to have one - let alone give it a voice until that point. Bad Victims does the same to categorically define, through a series of situations, that rape is rape is rape in a post-Me Too universe, it expands the conversation as culture must. Expanding into new worlds (and let us hope for positive results for those stalwart institutions who will be supported by the Arts Council in the UK with the National Portfolio Organisation award announcements tomorrow - because it is they who trickledown with that shade of support, such as my publisher, Wrecking Ball Press, despite any quasi-support agency often being an antagonism to its true function, with the examples of expectation that artists care to add number up like they’re accountants) but the medium is the message, and the dope is the scroll and true indie is dissipating, further and further atomised towards the black holes of starvation (which ACE call Levelling Up priorities, although it is everywhere). So when a play like Bad Victims comes along, it re-engages us to understand that our sexuality is so often commodified into behavioural expectations, it is only through the work of many of us explaining culture through art that we progress. We are batons passing through this mortal coil. I’ve always been freelance, I burn through one project into another, as all we leave behind are traces and fragments for others to perhaps find. Gil thinks his audience will find him when he’s dead. Please do support him when he’s still alive, tho, we could really do with it
Seated by these two goodest guys I’ve ever known at The Courtyard Theatre (where we did the Cold Lips party with Dr JCC), the other being Johny Brown, I found myself concerned for how they tolerate this very theatre likely holding a proportion of hard-cock toting men who have trodden over blurred lines. Gil responded, gentlemanly saying it’s worse for us. I’ve been so busy surviving the damage, what Joanna’s play did was clarify, even if the women’s being a bit of ho, it’s still rape. I believe it takes womxn double the amount of time to get to where we maybe deserve to be, that is not a glass ledge, that we are pushed off, but I was worried for the man’s needs as female empathy does. Pickering tackles the deviousness of guilt and expectations of women on society. The anger it invoked in me is always there, and I try not to engage with it as Hate but I’ve been opening up increasingly about the boundaries of abuse, wellness, and coping as society begins to have more of a dialogue about the stuff that may have always seemed obvious to outsiders, or elders, and maybe it was just youth, and now I’m reflecting, but by not telling anyone what was going on inside my pretty little head, I didn’t really do myself any favours. It took me eons to work through issues in Psychomachia, translating them into being something brutally entertaining. Trauma and damage are the most uncomfortable things to share and read, and god I do not want to moan when the WORLD IS SO BEAUTIFUL - and I appreciate every breath because I am GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE, so clearly, my head is a lot better now, thanks. All around. A good man does have something to do with that. And just as the theatre piece clarified exactly the point that we are not victims, what Phillipa Snow suggests in the Repeater book, Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment
It’s singularly the best essay / intellectual flex on pop culture I’ve read by a woman since Camille Paglia (and possibly “glitch Dideon” Roisin Kiberd - not that I’ve read everything obviously - and I DIG Jackie Chan too, but it suggests the perceived deviant-power doubles if you’re female, and the ‘witch hunt’ of the patriarchy continues, through abortion rights or hijab, cleverly using men that I adore, such as Johnny Knox, Hunter S. Thompson to perpetuate the complexity further towards a solution…
This growing up thing, it’s similar to the film I’m QnAing in Brighton on Friday and back at Hackney on Sunday. Trip by Lilly Creightmore - she’s been making it forever, and I’m proud of how far she’s come, determinedly demonstrating the only choices many women have in society. In her case, following the burgeoning psych scene, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Black Angels, Will Carruthers, bands since around 2006ish who would rather have been alive in the 60s. Come.
x
The damaged are so damaging
Womxn, Woe for men
We weep for the weak
Continuing to be oppressed and fucked
You put your stakes in our ground
But you can’t own a ghost
Anymore than a cat you feed to keep
Dreadlock tarantula
In an indie-sleaze disco
Cleaner of the Halloween afterparty
corrupted, Eat the fly
Greys on greys on metal on the sewers of disregard
You weave eyes, dusting plants, knowing what you want
Pull the cobwebs and the quarantine area down
This is our town
Sanitise the filth spike false commodities
Float down from the penthouse
To re-root our ground
x
THANKS FOR GETTING THIS FAR.
Final words from me: the great Danielle de Picciotto plays the UK tomorrow in Bristol, Saturday at New River Studios in London and 10 November in Manchester at The Peer Hat…she performs with her husband, Alexander Hacke (Einsturzende Neubauten) as hackedepicciotto and they’re brilliant and they’re on Mute Records now.
https://hackedepicciotto.bandcamp.com
AND FINALLY:
A TALK ENJOYED BEING PART OF, MUSIC AND MAGAZINES AT MAGCULTURE
Love x
