He keeps repeating I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments ... So there’s this dream I used to have: I’m at this concert, some band I'm totally into – Hüsker Dü, or Mekons, or Oysterband, whatever – and for some reason one of the band members singles me out, and hauls me up on stage. And they hand me a guitar – a nice one, a vintage Strat or an ES 295 – & invite me to play along. And I play along, really well: I seem to know the songs, & after a number or two they invite me to take a solo, & it's really hot – you know, Bill Frisell hot, or Marc Ribot hot. Somehow I can hear the music in my head & translate it to my fingers. You know, like a real musician. Then there’s this other dream: Same as the first, up thru the “And I play along” bit. But I don’t play well – I play badly; I'm always a half-beat behind, I forget what key we're in, I'm lost on the bridges, I can't even – for god's sake – remember how to play an E-minor chord. You know, pretty much the way I play every day, but now in front of a whole bunch of people. And then there’s this third dream, in which, just before the very first beat, I remember that I don’t know how to play at all. I suppose you could call this postmodern but I prefer, in Latourian fashion, nonmodern. Basically, this approach would ask, “what happens when we recognize that communication is not fundamentally rational and controllable?” I mean, acting the pallet minus sex lags of autocorrelations included, the unincreasable isoareal pallet plunged in loss, to break on all the unanswerable love I have endured, to answer for alien genitals I have entered, the sonnets share this concern to an extent, as in Sonnet 4, “the volatile relations of production of hairspray, / the erotic arteries dying in my arms,” or Sonnet 2, “Zoophilia is best described as a love of animals / so mystic that neither objects to the physical, / employment law bound in a maché of dental / bills”. It’s late Spring, it’s September, and the spiraling sun leaves a glow across the thriving earth, and eight million reindeer head north loose through dark snow to mate with eight million zombies on ecstasy, zombies of course always standing in for the poor slobs who used to form the proletariat. They are fossilized and belonging. I mean, the shark teeth are fossilized and resemble snowflake obsidian, jasper, magnetite. Coincidences are just things we turn into. I keep them in a plastic tube for coins. An animal. Existence won't carry your hyphenates. Only too well. There is no merely. There is quarry. An ilk. Dying pine tree near the summit of Mount Tamalpais: photo by Hydrogen Iodide, 25 November 2005, is probably dead now. Where is all that sand coming from? The video conjures up an ambiguous dimension between chicken pox and high fashion, disease and design. It elicits thoughts about something we may call pharmaceutical or endogenous fashion: fashion that is swallowed as pills and surfaces to the skin from the inside, exuded, sweated out; fashion that emerges when you get goosebumps, or when you blush; fashion that itches and burns, tickles and swells. As in the time of strike there was quite a bit of garbage loose in the street not like an orangutan in the Rue Morgue but it eddied and whorled at the edge of the seductively weeping stream. So: what’s it going to be: landscapes that appear pristine to the eye, with oil pipes running underneath? Or wind farms, with their stark reminder that we have “chosen” certain ways of life? 2 for £10 on selected shoes; £5 for something beyond the edge of the frame. Some days, The Purple Cloud. Some days, a duet, Serge Gainsbourg & Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer, as quoted in Lars Iyer, “Tears in Rain”, at Spurious, 20 Sept 011; Mark Scroggins, “comfort zone”, at Culture Industry, 20 Sept 011; JBR (I’ve dreamt this dozens of times ...); Alex Reid, “ethos and the reputation economy”, at Alex Reid/Digital Digs, 20 Sept 011; Keston Sutherland, and Anonymous, as quoted in Anonymous’s “The Stats on Infinity”, at HTMLGIANT, 20 Sept 011; JBR; William Keckler, “Shark Teeth”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 20 Sept 011; photo caption in Tom Clark, “Madre (Life Notes)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 20 Sept 011; JBR; JBR, but see Alexander Trevi, “Mapping the Dark Geography of Sand”, at Pruned, 19 Sept 011 (on how Singapore grows, physically); “Endogenous Fashion”, at Organs Everywhere, 19 Sept 011; Joshua Clover, Chreia”, in Charles Altieri, “The Pleasures of Not Merely Circulating: Joshua Clover’s Political Imagination”, in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (eds. Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell); JBR; Timothy Morton, “Wind Farms and Aesthetics”, at Ecology without Nature, 20 Sept 011; JBR; Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horrors of Philosophy Vol. 1 (referencing the M P Shiel novel); Sign on a shop window in Islington, in a photo embedded in Nina Power, “oh yes”, at Infinite ThØught, 20 Sept 011; JBR; Patrick Wensink, “Screamin’ Jay and Serge Gainsbourg, together at last”, at We Who Are About To Die, 19 Sept 011 (a must-see video)]
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