All Apologies, All Eulogies

So I haven't posted in what, forever. November was not my month. Internet went down. Too cynical and writers' block. Life got in the way. I apologise unreservedly. It shall not happen again this crisp December. Think of it as an early resolution.

Richey Edwards was declared legally dead last week. From a concerned poster on my social networking wall: "I heard about the ruling on Richie, but do try not to act morose and distant. Don't let grief get in the way of being your normal cheerful self." (I believe the word is irony). I'd like to satisfy all wellwishers as to my mental state. I am not down (any more than usual). Life goes on. Although perhaps with more abstract and terse prose.

Okay, that's enough of that. I can't keep writing a post in this style, it's driving me insane. I read a lot of Don DeLillo this week, and it's hit my clauses hardest. Microsoft Word would have a field day - "Fragment- consider revising". That's irony too, isn't it? Is Bill Gates laughably hypocritical when it comes to sentence structure or what? Fragment. Consider. Revising. Where's the grammar in that? Practice what you preach, you unapologetic Creosote cretin. And make your operating system less infuriating while you're at it. And kill that fucking paperclip.

Anyway, Richey. Yes, this news is sad to me, as it will be to all true followers of the Bible (not that papery, leatherbound thing, the real Bible). That the obituary I linked to above was the most read article on the Guardian website for the day it was published indicates some of the level of devotion the man inspired. The thing is, this news doesn't really change anything for me or the legions of acolytes like me. We know Richey is gone, we've had 14 years to accept the fact. But he still lives. No, not on some Goan beach or secluded monastery, but in his words. I know this is corny (how else can one write a eulogy?), but his fierce genius still breathes through those machinegun bursts of lyrical insight that litter the Manics' early songs. I wish you peace, Richey, wherever you may be. A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented. You were stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer. You spat out Plath and Pinter. And you did not burn out, you will never fade away.

Oh oh oh, Sweet Love und Romance

Apologies to anyone who was waiting with bated breath for my musings on XTRMNTR yesterday, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster week and I haven't had time to write it. But I promise it will be coming along shortly, in fact I hereby pledge to post at least a couple more times before this weekend, when halloween commitments mean that I shall be otherwise engaged (If anyone's wondering, I'm going as Richey, of course).

Anyway, to keep your appetite sated in the meantime, here's something I wrote quite a few months ago. I dug it out of my files today, having been reminded of it this weekend at the Brighton festival, where ten-foot chalkboard letters spelled ELL-OH-VEE-EE across the library forecourt. They were daubed in day-glo lines with the loves of the people who, throughout the day, had been invited to grab a paintbrush and colour in their passions. In the dark, crisp night, hundreds of people were standing and looking at the sculpture. Some were holding hands, taking photographs. Everybody was smiling, and I felt a simple warmth inside, that reflected their contented expressions.

So. Romance, then. It seems to me that those everyday faults in logic that make up our existence – our reliance on language, our trust in linear narrative and misplaced sense of finality – are supremely reflected in the fumblings of romance. Love makes bad poets of us all. That’s precisely the reason why it is so captivating.

Sweet nothings, now there’s an interesting concept. Why does romance reduce a statement to the status of a nothing? Maybe in the twenty-first century, we’ll learn to replace nothings with somethings, the performative utterances of love.

I read about some scientific research a long time ago that suggests that the part of our brain concerned with making rational decisions doesn’t come into play until after we act; we act spontaneously, then justify our decisions with logic afterwards. This doesn’t just go for instinct – and just because you give something a name doesn’t mean it has any explanation – but for other, much more critical decisions like speaking, walking, standing up, sitting down, things that directly affect the course of our lives. Ever been on your way somewhere, lost in your own little world, and suddenly realised that your feet have carried you somewhere familiar, of their own accord, without any apparent intervention from your head? That’s what I’m talking about.

If we aren’t even in control of our own actions, what kind of grip do we have on the future, however we may trivialise it with plans and timetables and alarm clocks and shopping lists? The future, even the close future, from one second to the next, from one instant to the next, as universe shifts into universe, forming and collapsing like surf on the shore, is completely out of our control. Accept it. Go outside right now and kiss a complete stranger. It’s the best you can hope for.

That’s as if to say that hope is something that concerns the future. It isn’t. Hope is something that manifests itself only in memory and past. We live, we hope, we hope that it will or will not happen to us again. Hope is important, certainly, but it is important in that it tells us who we are, not where we are going.

Creation is in itself an act of destruction. When you create something, you make a conscious decision to eradicate all the potential forms and guises that idea may have taken. For every act of creation, a million acts of destruction. God is the destroyer of worlds, because in creating existence, he destroyed the infinite potential for existence to exist as something else. To truly create, you must accept that which you destroy. The history of art is filled with drink and drugs and depression because to be a creator is to celebrate destructiveness. This is why people like the idea of a soul. It’s something tangible and permanent. With everything around it decaying, it is indelible. Its half-life is infinite. It cannot be destroyed or tarnished except by an act of will. Which is where fate comes in.

Fate allows us to accept the possibility that inevitable destruction is not complete and perfect. Fate is a tautology. Things happen because they happen, like the needle scratching endlessly through the groove in the record. But what if the self is not inward, but a manifestation of fate? Maybe fate is an outward representation of self, soul, psyche, id, being? That part that says ‘this is me’ isn’t part of our being in a physical sense. You can’t hold it or taste it or see it. It doesn’t have mass, or colour or texture. Why do we have this impression that it exists behind the eyes? Maybe we’re all fooling ourselves, and fate and free will are the same, and we just don’t realise it. Maybe creation and destruction are both just our own affirmation.

Album Review: 'The Holy Bible'

Last week, I posted my introduction to this new album review section. I waxed lyrical (a rather neat choice of cliche there, as you'll soon see) about how, for me, great music is more than just nice words and pretty tunes. It's atmospherics and intricacies, the ultimate dedication to all-consuming mood. I'm now going to be rather irritating, and plunge straight into a review of an album that is truly great, for precisely none of those reasons.

Hey, wait. Come back. Let me explain. Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible is my favourite album. It's been my favourite album pretty much since I first discovered it, three or four years ago, and immersed myself in its lyric booklet. Here was the spirit of Ginsberg, Camus and Plath, distilled into a near perfect hour-long outpouring of intelligent, literate rage. It's the voice of my hero, Richey Edwards.

Richey couldn't play his guitar. He didn't sing. He was an alcoholic, self-harming anorexic. But there was a fiery, poetic intelligence that burned within him, and lyrically, there is no other rockstar that even comes close to the attention to detail, the wealth of information in his songs. Nowhere was that talent so totally addressed as this, his legacy, his statement of intent. It's almost ludicrous, the quality and consistency of the words that make up this dark, intense beast. Songs about the extremes of human existence, about anorexia, prostitution, genocide, delivered with such a perverse, searing beauty that it's impossible to tear yourself away.

Take the couplet from 'Yes' that I quoted back in my very first entry on this blog, a paean to the prostitution of the self in one's art; "In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything/for $200, anyone can conceive a god on video". Or the devastating introspection audible on the autographical 'Faster'; "I am idiot drug hive/The virgin tattered and the torn/Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards/Self disgust is self obsession honey and I do as I please/A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented". These aren't just words to mouth along to, they're complete works of art.

I'm not being completely facetious here, building up some manifesto one week only to tear it down the next. I do reserve the right to contradict myself (as Nicky Wire once said of his occasionally hypocritical TV interview rants), but there is musical genius at work here, too. At every turn, the ugly beauty of Edwards' vision is mirrored by some terrific (in both senses of the word) production. Take the doom-laden bass that crawls under your skin at the start of 'Archives of Pain', for instance, brooding and growling, gradually joined by keening feedback, before unwrapping itself into a scratched, battered and bruised guitar riff. You wouldn't think it possible for a guitar to sound like revenge, bloodlust and capital punishment, but somehow the way it writhes, contorts, it captures the fury of those lyrics.

Samples are scattered throughout these thirteen tracks, disembodied, disenfranchised voices, pulled from myriad sources, yet somehow bound to each other. A salespitching pimp. The anguished mother of a murder victim. A weary, ageing actor. At the midpoint, a snippet of taped interview with the author J.G. Ballard surfaces through the claustrophobic din, Richey's mantra. "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror." Ballard was talking about his novel, Crash, but he cuts to the core of what The Holy Bible is about.

The monolithic, six-minute penultimate song 'The Intense Humming of Evil', hyperbolic though it may sound, condenses all of these elements in a burst of controlled post-punk atmosphere that really does justify that title. Opening with a bed of industrial white noise, the sounds of a death-machinery, it builds unbearable suspense with a minute-long sample of a reporter at the Nuremberg trials; "From the ditch at Kerch, the dead will rise, bringing with them the acrid smoke and the deathly odour of scorched and martyred Europe. And the children, they too will come, stern and merciless. The butchers had no pity on them." Just as the crescendo becomes almost unbearable, it is interrupted by the snap and echo of reverberating snare, the beat itself becoming malevolent and machine-like. The guitars somehow manage the trick of seeming to constantly ascend, up and up, cranking the pressure further and further as Richey's words document with dignified respect the horror of the holocaust; "In block 5 we worship malaria/Lagerstrasse, poplar trees/Beauty lost, dignity gone/Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria". And the dread bass returns once more, still climbing further and further up, slowing and slowing, until finally it echoes quiet and all that remains is the shrill howl of the wind through Birkenau, where the birds no longer sing.

The Holy Bible proved to be Richey's epitaph. Just a few months after its release he vanished, never to be seen again. It is not known whether he is alive or dead, if he committed suicide or went into hiding, but this record remains, a document of his brilliance. It's an unflinching, confrontational, disturbing experience, and it's everything that great art should be. No compromises.

Next week, I'm going to the opposite end of the spectrum, to an album that delivers just as much intensity, almost without the use of any words at all. It's going to be the epitome of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. See you there.

Absence

400 metres up the side of the monolithic tower the two men went about their business, welding, welding, welding. Like houseflies in gas masks they clung to the riveted steel frame, siphoning showers of sparks that died to dust long before falling to meet the heads of the commuters below.

Maintenance was an anonymous occupation. Jody often speculated upon the people and the stories being told far below him, people going about their business, completely unaware of his presence. If you forced a pushpin into a map, he always thought, it would pierce both himself and some complete stranger, someone who would never have cause to acknowledge his existence. Under the mask, his brow would prickle at such thoughts.

When he had first started working on the towers, everyone he met had shown such interest. ‘How exciting’ they had cried as he told them of his life in the clouds. He had been a hit with women, a fearless modern-day hunter-gatherer, scaling cliffs to bring home bison. It had been fun.

Of course, since that morning, times had changed. Now no-one talked anymore, and everyone still stared up into the air whenever a jet went overhead. Suddenly, overnight, the questions had changed from incredulous intrigue to incredulous concern.

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Do you have life insurance?”

“What if it happens again?”

He always explained that nothing had changed, you were just as safe on the outside of a building as you were on the inside, but no-one seemed to be listening. As soon as people heard towers they saw planes. Times had changed.

He thought back to that day, the rolling news and the low roars that had torn through the crisp air. The gaping, smouldering wounds of blackened concrete had reminded him of a time from his childhood, back home in that whitewashed two up, two down in Oklahoma.

He had gone to the cinema that day, with his mother and elder brother, a weekly tradition. They would catch the matinee, and then later, drink sodas and discuss the movie in the polished haven of Huey’s, the best (the only) soda bar in town.

In the early evening they had returned, greeted by a terrible sight. Something, some monster, had punched a hole clean through the thin wooden walls of the lounge, then breathed fire on their home within. The three-piece was a soot-blackened mess, dripping still with water from the fireman’s hose.

His immediate fear was for his father, who spent his Sundays watching the game, beer in hand, from that very couch. Panic gripped him and queasily he ran inside the shell of the front room, his feet treading white steps in the charred ground.
Later they would be told that Herb Ackerman, a farmer from nearby Redbird, drunk on a cocktail of gin and his wife’s presumed infidelity, had sped off the dirt road, through the wall, the couch and the liquor cabinet, a shower of coruscating sparks and then a terrific explosion as it tore apart the kitchen drywall, severing the gas main. Herb had felt nothing, in his last seconds, except perhaps for a desperate loneliness. Jody’s father was unharmed in the back bathroom, feeling only the heat of the devastation upon his bare knees.

The relief at seeing his father again had been all consuming. Although the following months had been difficult, Jody had never forgotten that initial churning in his gut, and was always glad that, for him at least, the worst had not happened.
High above, a plane was coming in to land at Kennedy. Jody, as always, leant out and over, and saw the haunted faces peering up and past him. For a moment all was still. Then the heads went down and he was invisible again.