Cross Pollination

The email inbox for Awkward Magazine tends, for the most part, to stay relatively static. I get the odd email from industrious artist friends like Carl Gent and Ian Pons Jewell about their exciting new projects and exhibitions, as well the occasional bona fide submission for the zine, but for the most part the communicative landscape remains fairly barren. I have to admit that I rather like it this way, for instance I'm yet to receive one electronic prank call telling me that my bank account has been awarded 7 Million Pounds, a transaction that simply requires an email reply containing the actual details of said account, plus full name, home address and birthdate for completion. The relative inactivity of the account also means that all and any correspondences are met with full care and attention, which makes events like today's all the more joyful.

I received an email this morning containing one simple question; had I heard of AWKWARD: A Detour by Mary Cappello???

I hadn't, but a quick look at the author's website made me glad that I now had.

If you're interested, have a look for yourself at www.awkwardness.org

While admittedly this fanzine's content bears only an abstracted relation to its title, the eloquence Mary Cappello is using to relate her chosen subject can only help to bolster the understanding of what it is that we - Awkward Magazine - are trying to do here. I mean, Awkward (the zine) could have gone in lots of different ways. It could quite easily have turned into a comedy routine; a juxtapositional exercise in the jolt of incongruous collage; an account of its various authors' most self-conscious moments. What I happily think that it has actually become is something far harder to categorize, something like a collection of works that each don't quite fit, but are fitted, together, in some sheets of paper, and delivered to your door, for a reason that none of the involved parties quite understand in its entirety. It's this edge of understanding and comfort that I guess is the most important thing as far as Awkward is concerned. I get the impression that Mary Cappello's effort is something of a tidier, more eloquent, professional affair, being a series of memoirs and historical layers, you know, like a real proper book like wat an aktual orfar as rit, but envy aside, I really hope that there is some kinship somewhere in there somewhere between the two namesakes. 

(You'll notice that I've tried to write this post as if I know how to use language like an adult. This is of course in case she reads it. Think I've pulled it off?)

Anyway, in order to reestablish the status quo here, I think it's time for this week's youtube hit.

Ha!

Pontus Alv

This post is about one of my favourite skateboarders of all time. His name is Pontus Alv and he is a glorious weirdo from Sweden. He's one of those (dare I say it?) neo-mythical human beings with the will, the ability, the passion, the drive and the balls to make his indelible mark on the world and then stand proudly beside it in the full light of the endless daytime that is contemporary media. 

In 2005 he released a skateboard video called The Strongest Of The Strange and I'm going to soliloquize my arse off about it right now, so skip to the end if you're prone to boredom and temporary brain death.

I went to art school and studied video art for three years. I sat through silent 2 hour Stan Brakhage films and I am still deeply in love with many of the things I saw, the experiences I had and the thoughts that I thought I thought during that period of intense revelation, experimentation and aesthetic awakening. It may sound arrogant but the reason I mention that stuff is because to me that's where TSOTS belongs, up there with the best there is. Now I'm not saying I'm right and I'm not saying that Pontus' film has the grace, concentration or esquisitely distilled quality of a Brakhage or of a John Smith or of a Maya Deren piece, but what I am saying is that it is really, really, really good. The Strongest Of The Strange isn't necessarily about process in the same way as much of the great, cannonical video and film work of the recent past. Instead it is a film about being alive and doing what you love. At the end of the day it is 'just' a skateboard video, and as such it also belongs 'down there' with your home movies, with the camera phone clips of drunk adolescent friends jumping into bushes, with the crappy iMovie edits you made at sixth form college. Of course it also belongs alongside the boundlessly beautiful video your parents shot at the hospital the day you came into the world, you know, the one where your Dad furtively wipes a tear from his eye as he gets nudged into frame. This synthesis of relation, or synergy of belonging, or cross pollination of genre, or whatever you choose to call it is part of, but not the whole reason why I feel so enamoured by Pontus' skateboard films. He includes so much of himself in the work that it becomes impossible not to judge him and the video as the same thing. Try emulating that. It's pretty fucking difficult. I think the real trick might be to remain relentlessly naked, honest and aspirational about what it is that you mean to the things, the people and the spaces around you, and to keep on doing that every single day. It's no mean feat and translating it into moving image is a whole other kettle of fish, but I'd venture to say that when you get it right, you'll know, because it feels almost exactly the same as waking up from a dream where all of your best friends were around you. The only major difference with video is that it is drawn from time and posited in potentially infinite different times, and spaces, in lots of different somewhere elses, where it sits waiting in binary form for any old Joe to come along and extract the contents, either whole or piecemeal, from inside its digital capsule, sucking what they please into their day, or their night, whenever, wherever, whyever they choose, setting it apart from the way in which we each experience each other's human times... as people, rather than as representative codes of 1's and 0's... depending on how and why and where and when you look at it... but I'm getting lost.

TSOTS is low brow and high brow. It's got this kind of foetal afterglow. If you're a real intellectual, like I so wish to become sometimes, then you should probably hate it. I mean, Charles Bukowski is just too much for a lot of serious people right? But fuck them. They don't know what they're talking about. They only know what they're going to talk about next. It's different.

This youtube clip is of Bukowski-aholic, questionably talented poet, heavily tattoed antihero type and undeniably forceful skateboarder Scott Bourne. It is his featured section from TSOTS,  a potion of which is set again one of my favourite songs by Leonard Cohen. I personally think that the introductory sequence is among the best moments in the entire film. 

Pontus' new video is called In Search Of The Miraculous. It is in all good skateshops now and can also be bought directly from Pontus himself at insearchofthemiraculous.se 

I haven't seen the new film yet but early accounts are very, very, very good. I suggest you buy it and put some hard earned Euros into the hands of someone who deserves the support, but hey, don't listen to me, I'm just a guy who gives a shit.

Phillip Glass -Geometry of Circles - Sesame Street 1979

Real

Christopher Wallace.

Chavs on pills

When they're not busy calling you a mincer, robbing fivers out of their granny's purse, shoplifting from JD Sports and watching everything on TV, most 'chavs', 'neds', 'townies' or whatever you choose to call them are upholding different, wider stereotypes, like the ones about drugs and 'magic', the bliss of idiocy and the feeling that we've all been helplessly at the mercy of a vast and very confusing universe since the moment we were born.

Aside from all that pretentious shit though I like this video because walking home wasted out of your face in the misty morning is a truly important thing. 

"What happens in the meadow at dawn?"

Corporate murder demonstration in a wipe-clean castle

Don't you just love the crunch of blood-free bones? There's no guilt, no expensive and inconvenient legal proceedings, no mess, no panic and no need to claim self-defense when all you get caught doing is simultaneously hacking in half a couple of drained pig carcasses in a hygienic, sales based environment! You can even take the time to adjust your protective eyewear before plunging the enormous razor sharp phallus like an ornamental knife through warm butter deep into the skull of the large sow you've ergonomically stapled to a brand new wooden post. Luxury incarnate.

"This is why you buy a Great Sword, because you can make those HUGE cuts through flesh and bone like that... you put one of these by your front door and you're going to be a power to reckon with! NO ONE is going to be able to take advantage of you when you have a Great Sword in your house, built by Cold Steel."

The salesman repeatedly spears the disembodied bonnet of a family car with the 4ft long object d'art.

"...and THAT's what the Great Sword is all about... deep penetration..."

The cowboy boots filled with meat, the brutal skull fucking of the bleached horse head and the double swine decapitation are my personal highlights.

What's wrong with these people? 

God bless America.

Decoder

The video embedded in this probably quite laborious post comes from the original soundtrack for the 1984 film Decoder, a low budget cult affair featuring cameo appearances by the late William S. Burroughs and musician/transgenderist Genesis P. Orridge. The film is beautiful in a raw, industrio-psychedelic fashion. Both of the big cameos give pretty weird, awkward performances but it's worth watching all the same... like a decent Ballardian B-movie. It's apparently based around or 'inspired by' Burroughs's ideas about sonic virology, a concept first outlined in his seminal publication on the subversive potentialities of sound and technology, Electronic Revolution (1970). The book contains (amongst other things) ideas about the 'language virus' itself, Burroughs's cut-up method and the use of sound recording and the human voice as weapons. Richard Kirk from industrial avant-garde band Cabaret Voltaire sights Electronic Revolution as "a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd … to promote a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself."

Steve Goodman is variously known as Professor of Musicology at The University of East London, label boss of underground U.K dance music giant Hyperdub, acclaimed electronic music producer Kode9 and as the author of  a fascinating philosophical treatise entitled Sonic Warfare (MIT Press, 2009). As Goodman terms it; we are today dealing with the dynamics and application of 'affective tonalities in the Industrial-Entertainment Complex' and 'the politics of frequency itself'. These are the kinds of ideas that Decoder sets against a backdrop of hyper-capitalist industry, impending spiritual apocalypse and ineffable individual isolation. I liked the film; the textures it deliverd, the mood it created, its lack of compromise and it's luscious low-fi, made-in-a-blacked-out-garage feel. As a student of the more subversive arts however, it disappointed me in a couple of quite important ways. Firstly, I fell asleep at least once. While this may well be 100% my fault and is certainly 100% my problem, it wasn't just my lack of zest that set me to dozing I don't think. The pretentiousness of the narrative sincerity became quite boring after a while, especially as most of the acting was so dismally guarded. The reliance on narrative in and of itself betrays a lack of conviction in the ideas that the narrative here pursues, specifically Burroughs's ideas about cut-up techniques and true deconstruction/reconstruction - to coin a phrase from Doctor T. Leary, 'pyschic imprinting' - which seem better suited to writing, musical production and more formally experimental forms of the still and moving image than to narrative cinema per se. Decoder did make me feel uneasy ; it succeeded in temporarily breaking down some of my preconditioned responses to social taboos, as well as those of my own subjectivity... but I wasn't in a crowd, and I never felt quite uneasy enough. What I think I'm trying to suggest is that the narrative form itself acted as something of a buffer against existential experience proper, keeping psychic activity just beyond arm's reach.

The editing, brutalist aesthetics and hyper-diegetic sound design were all pretty abrasive, satisfying some of the lust for sensory overload the viewer may or may not have been predisposed to. There is a prolonged  Dreammachine sequence for example; a self-hypnosis tool propounded by many a transcendentalist artist, including not insignificantly Burrough's long term partner in crime Brion Gysin, as well as by Genesis P. Orridge and the cohorts of Throbbing Gristle in the U.K in the 1970s and 80s.

The soundtrack is possibly the strongest thing about Decoder, although there are definitely some really "cool" scenes in the film. About twenty minutes in for instance, once the angst and isolation of the weirdo-protagonist have been fertilized and the fruits of rebellion begun to blossom. A mesmerizingly pretentious scene takes place wherein the junky-chic, deadpan beauty, peep show starlet girlfriend of the male lead delivers a soliloquy about the symbolic significance of the frog in the spiritual languages of the ancient world. 

"I read that they're a symbol of fertility or the amniotic fluid. For the Mayans they symbolized the vagina: Mucho."

He yawns. 

Cutting between the two faces, we see the pair each on the phone, one in blue light, one in green. 

"Got a light?" he says. 

A cigarette lighter enters from left of screen and a two-shot reveals the couple in their shared apartment room, situated like pop videos in poised pose. They've both got dark glasses on and there are frogs lolling around all over the floor, the silver futon, and the girl...

Despite my fairly directionless criticisms, it's not hard to imagine some-where, some-time, some suitably weird scenes in and outside of cinema screenings of this film. Ultimately though I'm left wanting to compare Decoder unfavourably to David Cronenberg's superb 1991 adaptation of Burroughs's famous novel Naked Lunch. The key differential is that where Decoder attempts to insert theories of Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism into a risque, cool, dirty movie, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch instead takes the 'Art' of Burroughs and emblazons it in masterfully onto controlled celluloid. Maybe that's an unfair comparison, like pitting a spirited bare-knuckle gypsy against a zen master in a game of chess boxing, but as Oscar Wilde spake through the mouth of Lord Henry, "comparisons are odious".

Sung by Linda McCartney

But mostly I just like the pictures.

Slutty

Awkward lives! Work is commencing on Issue 3.
Expect good things, bad things, good words about bad things, bad photos of good things and bad words about bad things.

Someone asked me earlier this week what clothes I would wear if I was a girl. Unhesitatingly I replied "PVC trousers". It was one of those things you say that elicits a quick giggle but over time reveals itself to have come straight from the heart.

Folk II - Issue 2 Launch Party

Z-Box loved every single second of everything.

There was some seriously high class catering and equally high class arty-farty conversation going on outside

Matt wasn't pissed in the slightest

There were smoking hot, steaming drunk girls everywhere

This guy

And lest we forget, William "DJ Dickie Darkside" Darkin, who pretty much saved the fucking day; providing apparently the only fully functional mixing desk in East London, projecting weird visuals all night, connecting pretty much every cable in the world to some electronic device or other, rolling spliffs, getting drunk out of his face, dancing like the Energiser Bunny, playing a really good dj set and helping to put everything back together again the next day. Thanks Will. 

Here's a picture of some guy swearing and probably playing something loud.

(Available for dinner parties, orgies, barbeques and weddings. Ring Terry Trotter on 0800 Love-Lumps)

(photos by Max Mallen)

This is the last load of photos from the Awkward Issue 2 launch party. I feel like I'm milking it a bit already actually. 

It was a shit load of fun and thanks a million to everyone who helped make it happen and to everyone who came along. Now if you could please buy the bloody zine because I forgot to make them available for sale at the launch party after having gathered probably dozens of potentially interested customers. I regret that. Jack Carr, quite good at writing dialogue, very bad at selling things.  I think the magazine might actually be really really good as well, so there's another reason to at least stay in touch.

See you next time.

x