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chavire · 4 years

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We answered a few questions about the band during quarantine, for the spanish fanzine Face The Lie. As we were pretty excited about the questions and thought it could have some interest, here it is in its english version.

(photo : Manon Monjaret)

Hi guys! How are you doing? Before starting maybe we should put ourselves in a situation. Who are Chaviré? In which other bands do you play or have you played? What motivates you to tour, make songs?

Hi, thank you for giving us some space to talk about CHAVIRÉ and what we put behind this band. As a presentation, we could say that the band started at the end of 2013 and that we played our first shows at the end of the next year, in 2014. We previously played — or still play — in A.S.T.R.O., COLD HEART DAYS, DÉDALE, GHOST FRIENDS, HOMESICK and WATERTANK to name some of our other bands. We started to play together as some friends, convinced by our love for the same songs and the desire to bind them with some politics we felt connected with. Six years later, it is still those three main reasons that hold us together, writing songs and play them live.

Last summer you released your new album, titled Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout ("now that flames are everywhere"). What did you wanted to express with this title? And what can you tell us about this album?

We tried to give this record a title that would be the testimony of the era that surrounded its creation. We think it's pretty clear for everyone who looked at the world around us that we couldn't possibly spend three months without seeing the people from a country rising up against their leaders and taking the streets against them. We wanted to dedicate the album to those involved in the increase of those flames all around the world and sing for their constant multiplication.

The lyrics of this album seem to me a bit more convoluted than those of your previous albums, you have to give them more readings to understand them. Did you wanted to change your way of composing the lyrics or was it an involuntary evolution?

As usual, our lyrics are very influenced by the books and authors that go with the writing process. You are right saying that maybe it is a bit different from the previous records. We always said that the lyrics were very influenced by some texts and that we stole a lot to put it in our songs. This time it's still the case but we tried to give some more space to poetry and theater. As time goes by, we were a bit scared to look like those anarchist bands that repeat slogans song after song... We are glad to hear that you noticed this change of things, it is obvious to say that there is politics everywhere but it is better to show it, by using an unexpected extract of a anthropologic book or some lines from a poem. For the first time with this record, we tried to quote most of the references so maybe it will give some ideas and things to dig in.

What is the story or background behind "Alice, 1977"?

Radio Alice is an Italian radio from the end of the 1970s located in Bologna. It's closely linked with the italian autonomous movement from the same era and more precisely the A/Traverso collective. The quotation «Le pouvoir n'est pas seulement là où se prennent des décisions horribles, mais partout où le discours enlève le corps, la rage, le hurlement, le geste de vivre» comes directly from an A/Traverso leaflet. Overall, the song was written in opposition with some of the quirks of the communities that surround us, where it is more valuable to look radical, rather than actively trying to change the world. At some point in the italian movement, there was this turning point where it didn't make sense for some of them to claim their worker identity, their women identity, mostly because all of these categories were those of the power, of this world, and these communities wanted to split up with this world and its categories.

With “Alice, 1977”, the idea was to put this era to the attention of people who perhaps don't know it, allowing them to find some inspiration in it. Most of the questions we're passing through are obviously not new, and it was in our opinion a political sequence where these questions found some interesting treatment.

What does CHAVIRÉ mean?

It could be translated in english as “capsized”, it refers to the moment right after a boat has overturned. We won't lie, this name is at first the result of a joke, more or less.

One of the things that surprised me in a good way when I first knew about you was that you didn't have Facebook, but instead you have a Tumblr page with, in addition to information about the band, a lot of political texts. Do you just don’t care about Facebook and those networks? Why did you chose Tumblr?

We “chose” to make a Tumblr page at first because it seemed to be the easiest thing to put something a bit more “personal” than just a Bandcamp page. Moreover we were so unable to manage a website by ourselves, and none of our close friends seemed able to build one that we could manage easily... In fact, the way we decided to be visible on the Internet has been very determined by our poor capacities and the fact that we decided, since the beginning of the band, that we preferred to make us visible only when we had something to say rather than just be here to be here — it is pointless to try to tackle professional rock bands in this game, doesn't it? And yet, we recently created an instagram account... We also wanted to upset some diehards from the other side!

What do you think of the term emocore? For you, when does a group cross the hardcore barrier to enter emocore? Is it a matter of lyrics, sound, attitude,...?

Well, it's just a subgenre doesn't it? The barrier is just crossed when the one who makes the poster decides to call a band this way. It has been historically a way to gather bands that were playing at the same time from the same area (for the Revolution Summer it basically works like this), but at some point, it is a way to play punk music.

It was said about you that you take music too seriously, belittling those who play only for having a good time without sending a message. Don't you conceive how someone can do it or is it simply not your thing? Do you have friend bands like that?

Well, if music obviously contains a game aspect — who would deny it? —, we would rather play it with smart people. It's not about any kind of content or attitude, it is mostly about having the feeling that we share more with some bands than some chords or shirts. We are still sorry for those who felt judged by us, we couldn't fill the lack of interest they seem to have for themselves, and at some point we still can't understand why they needed our approval so much.

Do you conceive a hardcore scene without politicizing? And a DIY without a political background?

We have to be careful with this sentence that repeats to anyone who would listen that “personal is political”: the recent history proved us that it led us to believe that we just had to buy at organic stores and not to say swear words to become a potential ally for an ongoing revolution, to simplify. But music contains this interesting idea that it can't be undone from its whole production process: its material production obviously (from gear to electricity), but mostly because its production is tied in a network (people who play, who release, who book to make it easy), under technical and aesthetically pleasing considerations (how do we want to sound? do we play well enough? does the interpretation fit to the idea?). At some point, the choices and the answers to those questions imply to get you into some positions that translate political views about the world. Depending on how they fit with others, it can create friendships and even “scenes”. In order to answer your initial question, we could say that obviously we do conceive a scene without politicizing (but it is even more than that, we'd rather say “with views about the world that are radically different from ours”), the question consequently becomes “do we have something to share together then?” and it is immediately easier to answer.

In Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout you included a song about May 68, something that lately interests me a lot. How influential is this and the situationist movement today?

There is a very tenuous link between the uprising of May 68 in French universities and the Situationist International, as you may already know it. It is hard to fully understand why, but a part of this relation seems a bit forgotten today in the official history, one of the main reason is to be found in the fact that Situationists refused to be represented as leaders, as opposed to some figures at this time. Fortunately, Kristin Ross relates this incomplete story in her fascinating book May '68 and Its Afterlives, talking about how this political sequence has been erased and captured by the freshly reshaped neoliberalism to present it as a liberal and individual revolution. As we already said for the autonomous movement that took place in Italy during the second part of the '70s, these moments are very inspiring and rich in lessons. They refer to insurrectionary times when the power could really be overthrown.

In the case of the Situationist International, it's important to understand that since the late '50s the group theorized and wrote about the reconfigurations of the post-war capitalism, and the advent of the consumer society which really arose at this moment. It was a moment of radical artistic avant-gardes: Antonin Artaud just died ten years before, the surrealist and lettrist movements were still recent experiences for the situationists, the Beat Generation was experiencing overseas and this artistic emulation gave them paths to explore and to renew the forms of art without separating it from the revolutionary horizon.

With these months that have passed since the appearance of the Mouvement des gilets jaunes, what balance do you make of it?

We lived something that could be considered as the most unsettling political event of the decade or even more, with the appearance of this gilets jaunes movement last year. Still today, it is hard to gauge the political and existential impact created by the outbreak of these yellow vests on some roundabouts in the November dawn. We're not overplaying it by saying that they helped to re-draw the lines of the political division, in that they opposed the revolutionary action to the revolutionary posture and bliss, and proved us that revolution was a question of desire instead of a rational one. For a part, they were people that never took part in radical politics as we can understand it, that never attended a demonstration or organized a strike, etc. In some areas they created what could be considered as communes, existing as a community in a world — this unbearable fiction — that had always made them existing as individuals.

It seems that in the whole world people are waking up and taking back the streets seriously. Either in Chile, Venezuela, or in France itself. Have we reached the maximum pressure point for people to explode?

We took so long answering this interview that in the meantime Lebanon went up in flames too, and while most of these countries were facing some major representation crisis with the whole institutional politics, a virus sent us back in our respective homes as separated individuals. We're insisting on the concept of “individual” because it's fundamental to understand that this category is a pretty recent one that has emerged with the modern definition of “society”. It's very clear now that both the “individual” and the “society” have emerged in order to defeat communities that were an ungovernable model for the powers, or at least less easily governable in that they were indivisible entities. We have to consider the return of this hypothesis after two hundred years of capitalism, the need of community (this is basically what communism is all about) comes back to the point, by every means, and the people go out, fight the police, and take the streets.

I read that in your first concerts you distributed sheets with the lyrics and explanations. Do you keep doing it? What was the reason, make clear parts that were open to various interpretations, expand information on the subject or try to make people really listen to what you have to say?

We distributed our lyrics for quite a long time, but to be honest we haven't done it for a while. This move was influenced by some bands before us, mostly from this first french emo wave with band that used to do so. The idea was to put the lyrics right in front of the audience, as something we could claimed but also as a starting point to talk about. One of the reason that led us to stop was also the idea that there are other ways to “talk”: gesture, music and intensity that can become languages when we start to take them seriously and make a good use of it, they can convey things that words sometimes cannot.

Do you read / do fanzines? What importance do you give them in the hardcore / anarchist scene? Lately I have heard more than one person saying that it isn’t coherent to continue to make fanzines on paper and contributing to the environmental impact having such powerful networks which reach as many people as the Internet. What do you think of this?

Some of us used to write fanzines back in the days, and we also have to recognize that after have been serious fanzine-readers we're less curious these days. Because of it, we are tempted to say that there are less issues than a few years ago, which is probably wrong and mostly influenced by the fact that we don't really dig in. We talked above of this idea of “network”, and fanzines do participate from this idea that autonomy should be earned everywhere it is possible. At some point, we could say that there is victory everytime a fanzine can bypass the traditional plan established by the music industry.

About the fact that 200 printed zines could possibly contribute to the environmental impact, well... maybe some people should try to think about how “green” their online datas are, in fact it really is a stupid accusation. Once again it mostly lies on the idea that politics is an affair of separated individuals doing their own parts more or less, which is the one of the lies of the liberalism. We can continue to pee while taking a shower and turning the lights off when leaving a room, it's pointless if we don't take seriously the idea of overthrowing economy and industries.

Related to the previous question, what is your opinion of the Internet? Does it make us better or worse?

Do you really think that four guys who have a hell of a job creating a Tumblr page could have any useful opinion on this internet thing?

A few days ago a friend told me that if one day I go to France I must go to Nantes, because it is the best city in the state. What happens in Nantes to have earned such fame? Is it really that cool? Because one of the things that you talk about on your album Interstices is about the feeling of apathy generated by living in a gentrified and clonic city, isn't it? What good things happen in your city?

With Interstices, we wanted to summarize what creates this unified feeling from one metropolis to another, from almost every gentrified city center. This is the fascinating thing with the metropolis paradox: on this captured-by-control-dispositives territory, there are at the same time desertion acts and zones that try to re-think autonomy and rooms of manoeuvre. What makes Nantes pretty specific at some point is this relation between the city center and its countryside. In fact we can't fully understand what makes this city special without talking of the well-known ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes right? Everybody knows it for the resistance against the airport that was supposed to be built there (and that will never be) but the thing is that the ZAD was, and still is, a territory fighting for its material autonomy, which tries to bind metropolitan resistances with the experience of building a form-of-life from the community: an attempt to build a commune for real.

Three of us have lived in Nantes for almost ten years now. Is the city really hype these days? It is hard to tell in our cases, we're living there and cannot really take this stance to measure the impact from elsewhere. Let's just say that this is a city with many secret stories, artistic and political ones, and since we're living in Nantes we felt connected to some of them and tried to take part of. I guess this is what holds us here. In concrete terms, we could talk about La Dérive which is a bar and a community canteen we're involved in. It's a place where you can drink, eat, attend a book presentation or a movie or just come to play chess with a friend. There are places like Les Ateliers de Bitche where you can attend nice shows, and La Commune de Dalby Football Club to play football on Sunday afternoon with some friends.

In your Tumblr you include a very interesting text about the pros and cons of the free price. It attracts me a lot, because besides allowing anyone to feel excluded based on their economy, it empowers you in the process and makes you abandon the role of passive consumer, but I share the opinion that if it becomes institutionalized and becomes something systematic it can lose the critical and anti-capitalist background. Have you set or have you considered putting your albums and merch at free price?

When we first read this text about donation in Maximum Cuvette (a french zine from Grenoble), we thought it was smart enough to practically ask the question of the economy inside a microcosm that tends to get rid of it, to examine the institutional process always contained in economy and at the same time how this “name your price” thing could bypass the rigidity always contained in standard economy. You're absolutely right and the text says so, at some point donations can feed the illusion that we got rid of the economy which is obviously a lie, it is just an attempt to manage with its rigidity but under a re-institutionalized form: this is never enough and it is important to be aware that donations are just a way to make the best of the situation.

Since we started CHAVIRÉ, our merch as always been on donation. It was at first the easiest way to manage with selling merch to us. We talk about it together from time to time, we sometimes evoke the idea to sell merch at a flexible-fixed-price, like “a record costs 10€, if you really can't afford it, well, less is fine too”. For now we keep it this way, also because it became a kind of a habit, but to be honest this donation thing is so ritualized around us that it often works as a disguised fixed price, and does not really empowers anyone at the merch table because almost everyone there can afford what you sale. To be honest, we're more and more lax with our whole merch stuff and barely see the point in having five different shirt models and buttons and patches and so on mostly because we're not really into it anymore...

Many times I feel frustrated in some way by trying to explain the operation and ethics of DIY to people who are not involved in it. How would you explain this?

Well, we would point at the fact that the ethics behind the whole DIY thing in punk community is mostly based on the increase of a practical autonomy. This is mostly about what DIY should be all about, the growth of a network that could exist by itself, for itself without depending on any power or institution. This idea of a proper existence is important, because it implies some requirements with ourselves trying to build something that is not just an “alternative”, a counter-model based on a mirror effect from the cultural institutions, because this just reinforces the legitimacy of it, putting us back to the margins. When this is said, we didn't say much, but let's keep in mind that the operation led by DIY is one of the many attempts where autonomy is experienced (we talked about the ZAD and the late '70s Italy already, there are many examples). These autonomous experiences can be sometimes hard to translate with words, most of the time they are understood when they're lived, when they overtake the words to become perceptible, incarnate. In fact, the words can't describe the mixed feelings of joy, mutual requirement, friendship of these autonomous attempts that hold people together, how can it be explained as something else than the promise of a fast-track life?

You have made some very cool ripoffs of Orchid, Embrace, Portraits Of Past, ... for stickers and merch. Do you have any more in mind?

Let's say we have already done way too much of them for just one band. So everyone knows that we have great tastes and that we're not too bad at Photoshop (s/o to our best ripoff that you did not mentioned which was a Chanel one), but it has to stop now!

In addition your flyers, covers, "logos" like the (A) made of flowers are very worked up and for me they have very good taste. Do you take care of this or do you entrust it to friends? Which graphic artists inspire you the most?

For sure this whole artwork thing is something that matters to us, we wouldn't deny it. But it is pretty clear that it has evolved a lot since the moment we started the band from things more “traditional” — not to say expected, such as the combo of typewriter font and linocut drawings which is the perfect example — to more personal artwork: since the last record, the Atelier McClane duo took care of the whole graphic thing to tie the images with the sound and the words. Some of us have an interest in visual arts and we have friends who consider that any revolutionary act will need to find its own form, which implies to think about its graphic one. Let's just mention the work of the Atelier McClane obviously but the Capital Taboulé collective from Rennes too, the Super Terrain collective from Nantes, Bonjour Grisaille and the Atelier Summercity from Brest, Marine Le Thellec from Marseille to talk about our friends and favourite ones. We couldn't end this list without also mentioning Hugues Pzzl who made the artwork of Interstices and our split with BASTOS, and who contributed a lot to renew the visual forms of the punk scene in France — a renewal that was so much needed.

Which situations, books, movies, people, actions, bands have inspired you the most, both to do things with Chaviré and to do things on your personal life?

This is always a touchy question, fortunately we left as much references as possible in the whole interview that could be used as a part of the answer. And obviously we'll be happy to develop if anyone wants to know more, our mailbox is always open!

What are you most keen on to lately? What do you like to do in your free time? What frees you from everyday boredom?

Since we are, as a large part of the world population, currently cloistered home while answering this interview, we have plenty of this free time you're talking about. Here in France, it's been a month of quarantine and we mostly spent it separated from each other but with friends and families. We tried to take advantage of the situation writing new songs, sharing playlists and movie recommendations, keeping in touch together. We don't know when the zine will be out but this moment is very decisive and we have to be really attentive, in order to act as soon as it will be possible. A few weeks ago, an absolutely incredible text entitled “Monologue du virus” has been published in the French media Lundi Matin and has since been translated in various languages (https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said). Recently we also discovered the Leftove.rs archives (https://leftove.rs) which is an incredible database about autonomy with many leaflets, zines and books from pretty much everywhere around the world.

Future plans?

Improving dad skills.

Doing more muay thai.

Getting degrees.

So far, thank you very much for the patience of answering all this! Anything else to add? See you, hugs!

Thanks again for sending this absolutely fascinating interview, which is hands down one of the most interesting we've ever answered to. Hope we've been precise enough, feel free to write us if it's not the case in these troubled times.

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mybarricades · 7 years

Text

Democracy

Jean-Marie Gleize

There is, in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, a text called “Democracy.” We know little of this text’s composition, as the manuscript is lost. It was published belatedly in a journal (La Vogue, 1889), but we are scarcely surprised to encounter a text of this title from the quill of that democrat Rimbaud, virulently hostile to Napoléon III’s dictatorship, radically aligned with the insurrectionary movement of the Paris Commune — with, one might say, an insurgent, revolutionary democracy. As Bernard Noël has suggested, Rimbaud is a communard “not only in his opinion, but in his being.” Now the particularity of this poem is in being the only one in the collection entirely within quotation marks. It is democracy who speaks. It concerns prosopopoeia. Upon recognizing this, the Rimbaud specialists are perplexed, their opinions contradictory.

To revisit the formulation of one (Pierre Brunel): “Rimbaud’s intention seems particularly difficult to grasp.” In effect, the text expresses imperialist and capitalist violence, announces the massacre of the “logical revolts” … Does Rimbaud affirm and take up the mantle of a conquering warrior for democracy, a manifestation of the people’s power (according to his native, regular scheme: the necessity for destruction/detonation toward a regeneration or a later reconstruction)? Does he take a malign pleasure in transcribing the caricature of democracy delivered by his bourgeois adversaries, evoking the horror and terror it inspires in them? Here we must return to the quotation marks. If Rimbaud expressed himself in his own name, as he does in all of Illuminations’ other poems, he would do so without divagation. In this poem it must be democracy who speaks, saying that which it is and does, its fearsome civilizing program. The result is finally that the reader is led to transfer the quotation marks to the only word in the text which does not bear them: its title.

“Democracy” is by no means the power of the people but the instrument of the people’s domination and oppression; “democracy” is not democracy. This fact allows us to return to the ambiguity of the writer’s gesture, ambiguity that is at once voluntary (the rhetorical work’s deployment of prosopopoeia as concerted device) and inevitable, already having happened: the Illuminations speak at once the unacceptable character of “the rest of the world,” of the world as it is, its violence and the counterviolence necessarily entrained, the more or less utopic visions that it arouses, etc. If something like democracy exists, it doubtless supposes other struggles, other forms of life of which the labor of poetry can make only confused or oblique reports. Exigency, malaise, anxiety, anger, semantic and rhythmic troubles, critical opacity: such are some of the symptoms of this state of discomfiting resistance where one finds the “horrible workers” to whom Rimbaud is brother.

For those who persist “like” Rimbaud, after the flood, in the hive-chaos of big cities, modern industrial and postindustrial societies, those of the western “democratic” empire, the leading sentiment remains that results from the fact that democracy signifies for the moment capitalism, the regime of liberty and liberalism (work, finance, exploitation, profit) — and this democratic capitalism, the polluted air which we breathe, moreover appears as the ultimate and definitive, and for that matter “natural,” form of social life. There is, there will have been, no alternative. Thus the necessity to qualify, to specify: parliamentary, or rather, today, mediatic-parliamentary, democracy, liberal democracy, but also, because quotation marks are there if we try to retrieve, that is to say reappropriate, the word and the thing, “true democracy,” as Marx said, or “wild democracy,” or “radical democracy,” or “insurgent democracy” (as Miguel Abensour suggested, democracy in a permanent state of emergence and constructive critique), or even “democracy without limits” as proposed by Rosa Luxemburg in opposition to “bourgeois democracy.” She subjected “democracy” under quotation marks to an examination of limits and internal contradictions wherein she observed, as did Rimbaud, two closely linked antidemocratic dimensions: militarism and colonialism, the importance of the military apparatus being linked on the one hand to the containment and repression of popular insurrectionary movements, and on the other hand to imposing on the colonized by force of arms the benefits of western economic exploitation and domination.

Thus there is for those, among whom I am one, who continue to read and write within that which we name poetry (that is to say, who situate themselves marginally within the practice of literature itself grown culturally secondary and minor), essentially the consciousness of not being much in phase with democracy as ambient value, as political ideology and as form of government, the feeling of being in no regard represented by the professional politicians and others who themselves are manipulated and ventriloquized by the holds of real power (that of the globalized economy), and with an insuperable sense of paralysis or choking powerlessness. The words slide around, it is enough just to listen. For example this kid from the Maghreb who participated in the 2005 banlieue riots around Paris: he speaks of his parents and the society which would “incarcerate” them. He means to say “integrate” them. This slip understands that such integration might be felt as a process of confinement and violent maintenance of inferior social status. It’s all too evidently symptomatic when some contrarily affirm (against all visible evidence, in situations of extreme material and mental precarity, in the suffocating context of our quote-unquote “democracy”) the actuality of their emancipation. I want to underscore indelibly this phrase in the contemporary poetry journal Nioques from poet Christophe Tarkos, who died prematurely in 2004: “I am not squeezed, I do not choke myself, I am not shattered, I am not buried, I am not surrounded, I am not crushed, I breathe.” He personally supports this affirmation, based on the denial of crushing in its many forms. And if he can support this position, if he can affirm so strongly the negation of the negation, it is because he writes, and because this practice of poetry he understands and lives as insurgent and emancipatory. This incites us to grasp precisely that what initially renders poetry political for Christophe Tarkos is that it is an act, and that this act of language is (or at least may be) singular affirmation, demand for autonomy, form of life and of survival in hostile surroundings.

We must perhaps return swiftly to some naïve distinctions. There has been in our recent history something like a poetry engagé, that of the Resistance, committed to direct communication (simple forms, combat lyricism) with a people awaiting democracy. Before this, when surrealism had wished to articulate itself seriously in the real movement of history, it declared itself “in the service” of Revolution (without retreat, nonetheless, from the ardent necessity of transgression or formal subversion). After the war we see Paul Eluard publishing a book called Political Poems, with a preface by Aragon. The communist poet does not neglect to underline what “politics” means for Eluard, for himself, for his comrades, and the sense of the slogan “from the horizon of one to the horizon of all” (which could equally be the broad slogan for a “democratic poetry”). He does not omit Isidore Ducasse’s encouraging watchword: “poetry must take for its goal the practical truth,” interpreted as enunciating or announcing the passage of eras (a romantic thought) from utopias to that of “human efficiency.” It is patently obvious that the standard poetic ideology, from historical avant-gardes to the neo-avant-gardes of the sixties and seventies, from lyricism engagé to political poetry or the theorization of the “revolution in poetic language” consonant with the desire for Revolution, is one of “efficiency” (to reclaim Aragon’s word) for poetry, more or less immediate or oblique, more or less direct or restrained.

Yet it is no less clear that around the eighties there was what I shall call a sequence of burgeoning euphoria (combinatorial transgression, subversion, experimentation, invention, action), thanks to varied collapses of that to which it would be anyway pointless to return. The field of contemporary poetry then reconstituted itself (as do families) around two principal poles: that of return (what I call re-poetry) to the fundamentals of a poetry restored to itself, and thus restored to the public, to the common reader, after the disfiguration and aggravation of divorce, and that endeavoring not to break with the heritage of research and adventure, recusing itself from the dogmatic stances and political illusions of the night before and the night before that. We note then the emergence of a generation of poets, published in journals such as Java, or Facial, or Quaderno, or even the Revue de littérature générale of Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi, clearly experimental in orientation but also clearly apolitical, practicing criticism (that of social and/or genre conventions) via modes of ironic distance or parody and derision. Poetry or more broadly forms of critical art in effect posed particularly the question of the cultural hierarchy separating the major from the minor or “popular” modes of expression. An “eccentric essay” (as the author himself defined it) titled “Parodic Art” (published in 1996 under the name Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux) tried to describe and theoretically legitimate some of these practices of a systematic reversal of values (or of confounding registers and genres) that spread in this period of a post-avant-gardism that was a bit skeptical, or at least suspicious regarding the high seriousness of previous generations.

It would likely not be mistaken to say that the poets of preceding generations took somewhat for granted (against divergent strategic choices regarding the logic of their practice, their modes of realization, etc.) an adherence to a principle, explicitly formulated or remaining implicit, something like an ideal of real democracy, while accepting as largely inevitable the fate of renouncing a large audience, and the much-hurled accusation of “elitism.” The poets of the generation whereof I speak, those I have just said have taken their distance (and not ordered their work according to the expectations of some given belief), found themselves to be subjects of a sort for a practical “democracy” in the sense that they actively refused to ignore the current modes of expression and mass culture (media, screens, collections of official statements, assemblage, sampling, various détournements, etc.). The great question is whether the apparent ideological “retreat,” which at first glance characterizes this body of text, indicates a neutral stance, an indifference to concerns of content (even an unspoken adherence to what they do convey), or whether to the contrary these poets subscribe to a perspective comprising a form of active “resistance” to these formats, these contents, these modes of circulation and public display, etc. These “after-writings” — after the dissolution of dogmas, after the last wave of avant-garde theorizing and sectarians, with faces both of the “ironic” and of the “serious” (collage-writing, investigative or documentary writing) — can doubtless be read as critical but no less as preserving for the reader their share of ambiguity and constitutive undecidability.

What can be seen, in these writings “after” (and the occasional taking of certain concrete positions on social struggles or alternative movements), is a definite return of the notion of resistance. As all around us gestures of “civil disobedience” develop (from Athens to Tunis and to Cairo, from New York, Occupy Wall Street, from Tarnac to Notre Dame des Landes …) which are like mass protests in the name of democracy without quotes against the decisions or “laws” or official conditions imposed by the police and the court of “democracy,” that Rimbauldian prosopopoeia within which we are always citizens, we notice, in the regime called the poetic, or post-poetic, the fact that the imaginary of resistance continues to resist. It may be necessary here to revisit Francis Ponge’s propositions announced in a number of his “proems” from the thirties — so near us today where we see democratic elections bringing to power religious fanatics, where left governments are anxious to expel foreigners, what is basically a “democratic” progression toward municipal fascism. Ponge, rather than suggesting to his surrealist friends of the time the pseudo-“liberating” whisper (automatic writing) advocated “resistance against words,” that is to say we ought not speak the ideology that speaks us (doxa, stereotypes, clichés conveyed by the mediasphere) but contrarily to work contra-words, on contra-usage, to practice, if needed, “the art of violating [words] and the submission to them.” Such a poetic remains fresh, in the face ofthe “order of things,” which he qualified as “monstrous” and “sordid,” wherein he said that people kill themselves “having been ruined” by these “governments of wheeler-dealers and merchants,” the very “democratic capitalism” that I mentioned earlier.

Resistance against words, therefore, opposes the silence of writing to the noise of words, or even unmaking and remaking the ceaseless superflux of immaterial information to recover if possible the meanings of the words, the meanings of things and situations and events. But resisting just the same images, the ceaseless flow of images, those which “occupy” our space and our eyes, screen-walls that separate us from each other and from reality. Bearing in mind that these images “constitute part” of this reality from which they also separate us. And therefore it is a matter of working with and on and against these images through superimposition, overprinting, decomposition, etc. Finally, the resistance against images means equally — and I revisit here the “position” of dislocation according to diverse variations and stances of commitment — renouncing the narcotizing magic of nationalist visions, those which nurtured and carried our imaginary political utopia. We renounce this so as to confront clearly our lot: the traversal — using for our writing the contingencies of terrain, of context, of circumstance — of the opaque thicket, that of real contradiction, conflictual and violent. This is one meaning of the phrase borrowed from an artist and installation or intermedia poet (Philippe Castellin): “Poetry isn’t a solution.” If we understand the enduring and insistent and even resistant practice of writing poetry (in the context where it has become a socially minor practice) as a critical and restricted contribution, half-blind, to the permanent invention of a democratic space, we know quite well that there is no solution, and that writing has no purpose but to intensify the questions.

This hypothesis makes sense only if we think of democratic space (the possibility of democracy) as outside of political institutions bearing the name, and if we imagine the concrete reality here and now of autonomous, self-managed “communes” where we can experiment freely with new forms of sensory experience, new forms of exchange, expression, communication, collective activity, life. Such islands of life and action, moreover of reflection and struggle, exist already. Experimental politics, at significant distance from political institutions, are or should be in principle like experimental art and poetry, by definition. It is for us to build our own cabins and the paths which connect them (these may be journals, editorial microstructures, alternative circuits of distribution), and if our cabins are destroyed, we rebuild them elsewhere without becoming discouraged.

And since I began this text with Rimbaud, I end within those quotation marks and logical revolts. The question, poetic and political, is that of words’ meanings. Those given them, or those inflicted. And that which we would like to make. It can arise from this long and “ferocious” sequence (that which develops the Rimbauldian prosopopeia) called by the poet the “logical revolts,” those of the colonized, the exploited, the displaced, the oppressed, then, and now, and everywhere.

Logical, that is to say, inescapable.

Logical as well because that names a return, a reversal, an overcoming, in language, in words, in writing, in traces.

Translated from the French by Joshua Clover

#Jean-Marie Gleize #Democracy

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infochores · 7 years

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@luddyke i found the origin text of that photographed page. Ive only skimmed it so far but its some kind of manfesto/pamphlet describing like. the use of algortihmically generated activist-speak. its absolutely amazing and is about like some random US anarchist using a computer program to generate anarchist poetry? i think? except it might be sarcastic. anyway im making this a text post cos i think this document is definitely something that deserves sharing

http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/how-slogans-end-to-acid-words.pdf heres a good chunk of the opening preamble:

###

“1 There is a computer program called the Automatic Insurrectionary Manifesto Generator. AIMG produces this sort of output:

What’s needed is not mobilization, and even far less absence, but a putting-into-practice of inoperative crisis, a rejection in all forms of the temporality of humanism. This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on absence. We must destroy all humanism—without illusions. Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our orgies of negation, we offer neither criticism nor dialogue but only our scorn.

A link labeled “AGAIN” is conveniently centered below the text, inviting us to the pleasures of repetition. It reloads the page and each time generates a three-paragraph manifesto composed of such sentences. AIMG’s output is wholly predictable, in a Mad Libs sort of way. All the titles it produces have the same schema: “Leaving X behind: notes on Y,” where X includes “mobilization,” “activism,” “passivity,” “fossilization,” “humanism,” and so on; and Y includes “crisis,” “rupture,” “insurrection,” or “zones of indistinction which need no justifi cation,” for example. The same goes for the rest of the manifestos...

...There is a list of definitions in which words are classed together under headings such as “things we like,” “things we don’t like,” “things we do,” “things we don’t do”; for the most part, then, they are groups of presumed synonyms. (I note with interest that the longest list is “things we don’t like”.) As I had suspected, the possible outcomes are finite. At first, reading just the code might suggest that the problem with the rhetoric of insurrectionary anarchism is that it is not inventive enough. Its terms are not sufficiently varied or differentiated and therefore they have a tendency to collapse into each other. But is the programmer’s goal to use the code to produce a more artful rhetoric?”

###

so yeah that was a wild trip

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spacemagazine · 6 years

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Small Press Traffic’s Executive Director on Place-Keeping in San Francisco

For decades, San Francisco has illuminated the United States and served as a beacon for artists and radical thinkers. It’s where Joan Didion traveled to document 1960s counterculture, it’s the home of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, activist artist Ruth Asawa’s hometown, and the city where California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Milk, served on the board of supervisors.

San Francisco’s new economy and shifting demographics, as a result of the ballooning tech industry, have elevated real estate costs to the stars – spiraling arts and cultural organizations that once served as the city’s backbone into a state of crisis.

I spoke with Samantha Giles, Executive Director of Small Press Traffic, about the ways that the historic literary arts organization has created and kept space for radical thinkers in an otherwise untenable climate for the arts.

Sara: What is Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: Small Press Traffic is what I normally describe as a literary presentation organization which means that we provide a continuum of support for writers, particularly those who publish with small presses and who consider themselves experimental which generally results in some kind of presentation of that work. That continuum of support includes things like workshops, lectures, and readings and other events to celebrate and promote experimental writing. I’ve been the director of SPT since January 2009.

Sara: Tell me a little bit about Small Press Traffic’s origins.

Samantha: Small Press Traffic started in the mid-seventies, 1974, in the back of a bookstore called Paperback Traffic. The idea was basically to make small press books available for purchase inside the larger bookstore. The main urgency around generating this collection of small press books was that it was the mid-70s and there were lots of people making cool artist books and experimental presses and there wasn’t really a cohesive venue for that, but the economy was such that people had tons of space and tons of time. There was a curated space within this bookstore that was about promoting these small press books. As that community started to coalesce around that curation, there were events in that bookstore around that started to be more of a community. What was then SPT later moved to its own space for a number of years and then did all sorts of things like intergenerational writing workshops and events and also the selling of books. When that bookstore financially became unsustainable, the organization moved entirely to a presentation organization in the early-90s and has been housed at different academic institutions ever since. We were at New College for a while and we’ve been at CCA for a while. That affiliation has moved into primarily about providing an address and a virtual location, although we do still have occasional events. There’s no financial reciprocity in the institution at all, but we have a home there.

Sara: How have changes in the Bay Area effected Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: When the organization first started it was a completely reasonable goal, from what I understand, to work half-time in a bookstore and halftime on your art practice and your art practice might include things like insurrectionary politics and new forms of identity and new forms of community. It’s not an entirely unknown argument that the demography and the economics of the Bay Area have changed drastically since that 40 years ago moment. The tech industry has changed the economy in extraordinary ways and the access to space has been really affected and the time and energy available for insurrectionary politics. What might be considered experimental literature and art has drastically changed as well, and so, I think that the impact that SPT has felt in terms of its access to space has been felt by lots of arts organizations in the Bay Area. Particularly those who are keen to promote arts practices that are not traditional, populist ones. There are lots of organizations who no longer exist, largely because of the access to space and the access to an interested audience, but also the economies around that art, the energy and capacity to fuel the fires of that kind of often anti-capitalist art and that kind of community that generates around those aesthetics and politics, are largely gone.

Sara: Is that change good or bad?

Samantha: Oh it’s horrible. I think it’s really sad. I think art is a necessary survival skill for human beings and for cultures. That’s the point of culture. I think that it’s really sad that the Bay Area has been known for decades and decades as a space for weird, exciting, enriching culture and that culture is really deeply homogenized now in a way that is sad and depressing. The inflated tech industry has descended on the Bay Area and the people can pay a ton of money for their entertainments, but their entertainments are restaurants and fancy apartments not supporting grassroots arts. There just hasn’t been the level of philanthropy and attention to the reason why San Francisco is an interesting place to live and it’s really devastating that so many artists are forced to move out of the Bay Area and/or give up their practices or arts organizations, forced to move or die because there isn’t a healthy ecosystem of economy and culture brewing in its scobi. It’s just economy right now. I mean, all sorts of people are being forced out in ways that are equally or more brutal, but of course, we’re talking about the arts right now.

Sara: How do you think that we can get philanthropists to start putting money there?

Samantha: I think that’s a larger question. I mean, people don’t go to college to become erudite, knowledgeable citizens. They go to college to find a practical skill to finance their lives. And assume an extraordinary amount of debt in the process. The whole system is broken. There’s definitely a push-back in the ways that people craft their DIY spaces and their Pinterest pages or whatever, but, I think that it’s a much larger cultural issue. I don’t know that I have much faith in the individual conversion of one person or one organization to support art. Art is so personal! To say, “Oh Oracle should give a bunch of money to the LAB and SPT and Yerba Buena.” I mean, who’s to say that that’s the right organization to promote or the right ethos to promote? There’s a general deterioration in the understanding and appreciation of arts and culture for arts and culture’s sake. I’m not necessarily sure that I have the right answer for that. Is it… break capitalism? We should break capitalism. Let’s do that.

Sara: Over the last nine years that you’ve been working for SPT, what are the ways that you’ve leveraged the organization’s identity as a space without a space to its advantage?

Samantha: Well, I definitely think that SPT would have died if we’d had to pay rent. And yet, there’s a huge disadvantage in not having a physical space. The sense of building a community and building a cohesive feeling around the organization is deeply compromised by the fact that we don’t have a space where people can just pop in and take communion. We can’t build the sense of hominess like the Poetry Project in New York, where it’s like “Oh! I always know that on Mondays and Wednesdays, there’s a thing.” We’ve been deeply impacted by our inability to negotiate an audience and build an audience because of that lack of consistency. But we are a deeply elastic organization because we don’t have to pay rent. There’s an organization called Artist Television Access, where we’ve been presenting for the last...I want to say five years… It’s astounding that organization still exists in the Mission District of San Francisco because they are a grassroots, almost 99% volunteer-led organization that is dedicated to experimental film and other, mostly experimental visual and performing arts forms. The Lab is another organization devoted to experimental art, also located in the Mission. And both of those organizations have deeply struggled to stay afloat because of gentrification. The Lab’s building was just bought and they don’t even know if they are going to let the Lab and the other organizations who rent that space stay because the real estate is so high. There’s just no way, with the size and the scope of SPT, that we would be able to have events if we had to pay rent. That said, it’s hard to be a place without a place and it’s also really exciting to be a place without a place. We’ve been able to do stuff online that I don’t think we would have done were it not for the lack of a physical location and there’s a way in which we’re able to collaborate with physical spaces, organizations, and entities that we probably wouldn’t seek out if we weren’t forced to do it. There’s an exciting electricity in that.

Sara: What are some of the projects that you’ve done that are examples of Small Press Traffic’s position as an organization that doesn’t have a space?

Samantha: We have a few things that I think are at some level born from the fact that we don’t have a physical space. We do these sporadic online workshops. They allow a teacher, who may be academically affiliated, and may not, to teach a class. I encourage people to bring a syllabus that they wouldn’t be able to teach in their institution. They’re allowed to do these experimental classes and to cull students from all over the world. As a result, we’ve had teachers and students participate from places like Australia and Ohio. We also do an in-person fundraiser, similar to the Poetry Project Marathon, called Endless Summer, and we’ve had people participate virtually in that. We do try as much as we can to have an online presence. We are re-launching an online magazine called Traffic Report and that is an online space. Also collaborating with different organizations but also venue support, for example collaborating with the San Francisco Museum of Art, which was all about poets talking about poetry and poets talking about contemporary art and I’m not sure that we would have done that collaboration if we’d had a physical space. We are able to think outside of that curatorial reliability is what I’m trying to say, and I think that in that mode we’ve done some of our most interesting projects.

For example, this past year, some students from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley collaborated to create a suite of programs acknowledging and celebrating the New Narrative genre of writing. New Narrative was a school of writing that was actually kind born and bred at Small Press Traffic. It was really exciting for that to have that tribute to this school of writing manifest and for SPT to stay involved. Since the programming was somewhat traditional conference fare: it was a conference, there was a symposium and talks, it was born in a physical space of people doing this academic performance of academia around New Narrative writing. Of course, there were performances and readings as well. Because we didn’t have a physical space, but also, because it didn’t feel that energized to replicate that model or at least I guess it felt more energizing to think outside of that model (and the conference coordinators were generous to let us do this experimenting) - we did a walking tour. It lives online but it’s a physical thing that one can do where one walks around San Francisco and at particular points in the map of San Francisco one can stop and press an audio clip and listen to a New Narrative writer talk about something about that space. That sound clip could be writing that they’ve done already about that particular corner of San Francisco or them talking extemporaneously about their writing practice and their New Narrative work in San Francisco. That’s located on our website at smallpresstraffic.org. You don’t have to be in San Francisco in order to enjoy the experience. You can be in the San Francisco of your mind.

Samantha Giles is the author of deadfalls and snares (Futurepoem Books, 2014). She is the director of Small Press Traffic and lives in Oakland, California.

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caveartfair · 7 years

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Vito Acconci Dead at 77—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

01 Vito Acconci, an artist and architect who pushed the boundaries of conceptual art, died on Thursday at age 77.

Acconci leaves behind an influential body of work, including Following Piece (1969), a performance in which he trailed strangers throughout New York City; Seedbed (1972), which saw him masturbate under the floor of a gallery; and Murinsel (2003), a manmade island forged from glass and metal. A true polymath, Acconci began his career in the 1960s, writing fiction and poetry. He spent the 1970s producing radical performance art, and thereafter devoted his practice to experimental architecture. And while he moved deftly between mediums, the motivation behind his shape-shifting work remained constant. Acconci’s poems, artworks, and architectural structures all explore the charged interaction between personal experience (sexuality, spirituality, existential anxiety) and public space.

02 The Metropolitan Museum of Art is considering charging a mandatory admission fee to non-residents of New York for the first time.

(via the New York Times)

An obligatory admission fee would be a landmark aboutface for the institution, which is required to provide free access under the terms of a 1893 New York City law. But Met officials have reportedly begun exploring the potential for fixed admission for non-New York residents with city officials. Currently, it is unclear how the museum would determine residency at the door, or if the charge would be levied against those residing outside New York City or those outside New York State. The rumblings come ahead of the release of the city’s first-ever Cultural Plan. Additional revenue from a mandatory fee would supplement the revenue generated by the current suggested admission fee structure, about $39 million in 2016, or 13% of overall revenue, potentially allowing the city to divert some of the $26 million it now provides the museum to smaller organizations and institutions.

03 A Nazi-looted painting has been pulled from an auction in Vienna just hours before the sale, following criticism and threats.

(via the New York Times)

Seized from a Jewish industrialist by Nazis in 1943, the 17th-century Portrait of a Man by Bartholomeus van der Helst was to go on view in Adolf Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Linz. Though recovered by Allied forces, thieves took advantage of post-war chaos to steal the painting again in 1945. The work’s problematic history was described in a catalogue entry ahead of its sale at Viennese auction house Im Kinsky, which was slated for Wednesday. But roughly 30 critical emails—some allegedly containing threats—sent to the auction house prompted the painting’s owner to yank it from the auction. The Austrian auction house maintains that the current owner purchased the piece in 2003 in good faith, giving them the legal right to sell the work, and that a negotiated cash settlement was rejected by original owner’s heirs. But their lawyer, Antoine Comte, stated that the heirs wanted the work returned, not money. If public pressure forced the work to be withdrawn, Comte said, then it was a “quite positive result.”

04 A new report found significant online art sales growth in 2016, with consolidation expected ahead.

(Artsy)

The total value of online art sales grew by 15% in 2016 against a backdrop of a sleepy market, according to a new report from specialty insurer Hiscox. Released Tuesday and entitled “A market yet to awaken?,” the fifth annual report documents strong annual growth in online sales, but slowing momentum in converting customers to buying art online. The report also forecasts “long-awaited consolidation” in the sector, which today is fragmented across several main players. Hiscox’s report includes survey responses from 758 art buyers (up from 672 respondents in 2016) and 132 galleries and dealers (a slight increase from last year). This year’s edition also includes a new component: 42 interviews with managers and “key staff” at various online art platforms who provided information to Hiscox.

05 The renowned Venezuelan-American artist Marisol bequeathed her entire estate to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

(via the New York Times)

On Tuesday, the museum announced what it described as the largest gift of art in the institution’s history. Marisol, a major pop artist who infused her work with folk imagery, died last year at the age of 85. She left her estate to Albright-Knox, which was the first museum to purchase one of her works. The artist (born María Sol Escobar) trained in Abstract Expressionism under Hans Hofmann in New York, later shifting her practice in the early ’50s to incorporate a combination of pre-Columbian folk influences and assemblage, in part as a response to her mother’s suicide. The estate includes 100 sculptures, over 150 works on paper, thousands of photographs, her archive, and her Tribeca workspace. The gift is a major addition for the Buffalo museum, which will name a gallery in her honor.

06 City workers in armored jackets have begun removing Confederate monuments in New Orleans.

(via the New York Times)

After a December city council decision, disassembly began Monday on an obelisk honoring an insurrectionary, white supremacist group that in 1874 battled New Orleans police and state militia. The obelisk, which the Times reports served as a frequent rallying point for the Ku Klux Klan, was one of four statues slated for removal. Others include monuments to General Robert E. Lee, General P.G.T. Beauregard, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Threats over the removals prompted heavy police presence as workers dressed armored vests, helmets, and scarves disassembled the 15,000-pound work. Opponents of the removal cited what they see as importance of preserving historical and cultural legacies, while critics argue they are symbols of racism and oppression. A candlelight vigil met Monday night to defend the obelisk, which until 1993 bore the inscription, “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers, but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the south and gave us our state.”

07 A tax judge ruled that a Sotheby’s appraiser lowballed estimates for two paintings to help solicit business and lower estate taxes.

(via the New York Times)

The estimates for the more valuable painting, a 17th-century work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, St. George’s Kermis With the Dance Around the Maypole, was set at $500,000 in 2005, a fourth of the $2.1 million it eventually sold for in 2009. George Wachter, chairman of Sotheby’s North America and South America and co-chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department, had been vying for the estate of the painting’s owner, Eva Franzen Kollsman, who died in 2005. In a letter, he valued the other painting at $100,000. The IRS challenged the estimates, and the case went to tax court. This is not uncommon: An analysis of 1,840 artworks showed that “taxpayers tend to underestimate the value of art that was given as gifts or bequeathed and, conversely, tend to overestimate the value of art donated as a charitable contribution,” the Times reported. The tax judge said Wachter had a “significant conflict of interest” when providing the estimates, and found his explanation that Russian buyers drove up the work’s value in the intervening four years unpersuasive. Sotheby’s has announced it will appeal the decision.

08 The Tate is drawing criticism after asking staff to contribute the purchase of a boat for outgoing director Nicholas Serota.

(via The Guardian)

The request to “put money towards a sailing boat” as a “surprise gift” for Serota came in a notice posted in the staff rooms of both the Tate Modern and Tate Britain on Wednesday. One staff member who requested anonymity said the note was met with a mixture of “shock and laughter,” adding that “the chasm that exists between upper management and the staff on the ground is just farcical and this just made it clearer than ever.” While Serota was paid roughly £165,000 in 2015, the museum outsourced jobs to a private firm called Securitas, which pays below the London living wage. Museum staff also lost their canteen discount last week and there have been complaints over low pay. In a statement, the Tate said that employees are under “no obligation for any staff to give towards a leaving gift” and that the institute has “invested considerably in raising salaries over the past three years.”

09 A mural of Michelle Obama in Chicago ignited controversy this week following allegations that it copies a work shared on Instagram without crediting or paying the original artist.

(Artsy)

Unveiled last Friday, the mural shows Obama as an Egyptian queen and is nearly identical to an image posted on social media by artist Gelila Mesfin last fall. To create that work, Mesfin drew on a photograph of the first lady by Collier Schorr for the New York Times, carefully manipulating Schorr’s image with intricate digital brushstrokes and layers of color. To fund the mural, Devins began a GoFundMe campaign, which eventually raised nearly $12,000. While Mesfin says she is supportive of the mural’s inspirational message, she has remained unyielding in asserting that she should have been asked for permission and attributed. Devins has started crediting Mesfin and offered to pay what he likened to the fee attached to a Getty stock image. Mesfin has stated through social media she hopes the issue can be resolved in “in an applicable and professional manner.”

10 A new lawsuit has been filed in the battle for the estate of photographer Vivian Maier.

(via artnet News)

Maier, who worked as a nanny for wealthy Chicago families and died “nearly penniless” and alone, according to the New York Times, posthumously became a cult favorite of photography fans for her street scenes in New York and Chicago. A 2014 film, Finding Vivian Maier, revived interest in her work and generated a debate over who should benefit from her work. Her estate has now sued a dealer for exhibiting and selling her work. The dealer, Jeffrey Goldstein, had purchased about 17,000 negatives and allegedly continued to sell her works even as he was negotiating with the Cook County Public Administrator, which will administer Maier’s estate until a relative is approved by the courts. Goldstein told the Times in fall of 2014 he had terminated agreements with the galleries through which he was selling her work and would stop selling them. The lawsuit said Goldstein was selling half a million dollars’ worth of Maier’s work annually by 2012. A judge ruled Tuesday that Goldstein can’t sell, destroy or move Maier’s work at least temporarily until he can decide on if a permanent injunction should be issued.

—Artsy Editors

Cover image: Vito Acconci, Performance test, 1969. Courtesy of Galleria Fumagalli.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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creativesage · 7 years

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By Grant Faulkner

Grant Faulkner likes big stories and small stories. He lives in the Bay Area and is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including the Southwest Review, Green Mountains Review, and PANK. His essays on creativity have been published in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and the Writer. He recently published a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures (Press 53, 2015), two of which are included in The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queens Ferry Press, 2016). His book of essays on creativity, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Prompts to Boost Your Creative Mojo, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books in the fall of 2017.

When I first came to San Francisco as a young English major during my spring break in 1987, I knew nothing of the Bay Area’s literary history. I didn’t know that the young bootstrapping Jack London had determinedly chiseled himself into a writer in nearby Oakland, or that Allen Ginsberg’s famous “Howl” reading had riled the literary world (and its censors) in San Francisco in the 1950s. I hadn’t yet read Dashiell Hammett’s noir novels, nor Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (Ramparts Press, 1968), nor Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (Harper & Row, 1978). And I had no idea that Gertrude Stein had said, “There’s no there there,” about Oakland (if only she could see the “there there” now).

I didn’t know that so many writers had lived out their insurrectionary impulses and beliefs in San Francisco—that for many authors the Bay Area served as a place of refuge, escape, and even salvation from the rest of America.

I had only one thing on my list. A friend told me that if I did just one thing in San Francisco, I had to go to City Lights (261 Columbus Avenue), a bookstore and publishing house owned by the doyen of the Beats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I’d never be quite the same again. When I walked through the doorway, I didn’t just see rows of bookshelves; I felt drawn in, seduced, by the exotic call of the ideas and stories that seemed as if they were part of the air itself. The wooden floors were creaky and uneven, each room a mysterious cavern, a haven. I picked up books published by presses I’d never heard of, books that felt alluring and dangerous, as if they’d prick me with new thoughts. I greedily bought as many as I could afford, and then went to Vesuvio Cafe, the bar across the alley from City Lights where the Beats themselves had thrashed through ideas over too many drinks, and I immersed myself in the lawless careening of their words, enthralled by an edgy, searching, incandescent expression I didn’t know was possible.

Thus began my love affair with the roguish spirit of the Bay Area and its literary tribes of misfits, dropouts, and seekers. If you haven’t been to San Francisco, ban the popular notion of it as a bastion of tie-dyed hippies with streets full of cute cable cars and postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s much more than that. It’s a place spawned by the raucous boom-and-bust spirit of the Gold Rush, a place where people have always exuberantly and recklessly searched for different kinds of fortunes. It’s a city that disregards the need for stability, resting precariously on a restless fault line, inviting gate crashers who strive to push the limits of being and shake up all forms poetry and prosody.

“It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco,” said Oscar Wilde. It’s a city for those who feel “other,” who feel lost, and then find themselves in the Bay Area.

Literature Born in the Streets

Silicon Valley has moved into San Francisco in many ways—“invaded” or “encroached,” some might say, driving up rents and driving out bohemians—but the rollicking energy of former days is alive and well in literary festivals like Litquake, an annual orgy of readings and discussions that sends literary tremors throughout the city for nine days each October. Events take place in unlikely spaces—chapels, bars, and hair salons—and everything culminates in a bacchanalia called Lit Crawl, a pub crawl of readings that wends through the teeming streets of the Mission District on the final Saturday night.

What’s nice about Litquake is that while it includes a healthy lineup of big-name authors, its fundamentally a celebration of local authors and the maverick spirit of the city. Founded in 1999 by San Francisco writers Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl, Litquake is now the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast, and it’s grown to Austin, Seattle, New York City, Iowa City, Los Angeles, Portland, London, and Helsinki.

Similarly, Oakland has spawned the Oakland Book Festival, a festival that captures the unique character of the quickly evolving East Bay, which has in some ways become the Bay Area’s version of Brooklyn, a haven for artists priced out of San Francisco. It’s not a festival designed around book tours, as many festivals can be, but serves as an exploration of ideas on topics related to Oakland’s past, present, and future, with the goal of encouraging debate. Each year’s festival, which takes place in Oakland’s City Hall in May, has a different theme. This year’s theme is “Equality and Inequality,” following “Labor” and “Cities.”

The Bay Area offers so many literary events and festivals that I can’t list them all. Beast Crawl, a version of Lit Crawl for the East Bay, takes over Uptown Oakland for one night every July with more than one hundred and fifty writers who have roots in the East Bay. The San Francisco Writers Conference brings together best-selling authors, literary agents, editors, and publishers from major publishing houses every President’s Day weekend to help emerging writers launch their professional writing career. And then the Bay Area Book Festival, now in its third year, features notable authors from across the country for a two-day festival in early June in downtown Berkeley. Of note, each year the festival constructs Lacuna, an outdoor library that is assembled with fifty thousand books, all available to take for free, and always empty by the end.

Redefining Readings

You might say the Bay Area itself is an ongoing literary festival, though. Bookstores are crowded with authors on book tours, and there’s a farrago of ongoing series that break the boundaries of conventional readings and invoke a communal spirit that transcends them.

Quiet Lightning, a submission-based reading series, has produced more than a hundred shows over the last seven years—in locations as varied as night clubs, a greenhouse, a mansion, a sporting goods store, and a cave. The series is named Quiet Lightning because it aspires to create “that feeling of what was in the room when someone has stopped talking, but everyone has been listening and paying close attention,” says Evan Karp, founder of the series. Quiet Lightning readings are always bursting with people, yet exist in a hush of focused attention. One person reads, and then the next, with no banter or introductions in between, creating a focus on just the work itself and a feeling that the entire evening is an experience of a single continuous piece of art. Of special note, Quiet Lightning publishes a corresponding book of writings from each show.

Other reading series are less quiet, but pack their own definition of lightning. Porchlight, a monthly storytelling series that takes place at the fabulous Verdi Club (2424 Mariposa Street), features six people telling ten-minute stories without using notes. Like Quiet Lightning, cofounders Beth Lisick and Arline Klatte don’t invite just famous storytellers, but strive to create a space for the voices of all sorts of characters of the city. Storytellers have included school bus drivers, mushroom hunters, politicians, socialites, sex workers, social workers, and even me.

Then there’s the ribald, bawdy Shipwreck, which is billed as “San Francisco’s premier literary erotic fanfiction event,” and takes place on the first Thursday of every month in the Booksmith (1644 Haight Street), one of San Francisco’s best bookstores. Shipwreck thumbs its nose at the sanctimony of conventional literary events by “destroying” classic works. A few weeks before each event, six local authors are selected and assigned to write an erotic story from the point of view of a character from a classic novel. Their pieces are then read aloud to the audience while the authors watch from the stage, trying to show no signs of which piece is theirs before voting begins. In December, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was erotically plumbed, and this January, Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House on the Prairie will be undressed.

Writers With Drinks is a monthly literary variety show with a raucous cross-genre approach held each month at the Make Out Room (3225 22nd Street) in the Mission, which hosts many literary events. Writers With Drinks features six readers from six different genres, but the show isn’t just about readings—it’s one part stand-up comedy, one part erotica, one part rant, and one part something else. I go just to hear the hilarious host, Charlie Jane Anders, spin fictitious biographies of the authors. And then there’s plenty of drinking, of course.

I sometimes sneak out of work for the Lunch Poems series that former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass started at the University of California in Berkeley’s sumptuous Morrison Library (101 Doe Library). When I first heard that the Mechanics’ Institute Library (57 Post Street) was a private library, I imagined it as an elite bibliophile’s country club, but it’s anything but that. It hosts a diverse range of cultural events including author readings and conversations, the CinemaLit Film Series, and the oldest continuously operating chess club in the United States (its plump leather chairs are also perfect for afternoon naps, as I learned when I worked nearby). The San Francisco Poetry Center (1600 Holloway Avenue) was founded in 1954 with a small donation by W. H. Auden, and it now puts on thirty public readings, performances, and lectures each year on the San Francisco State University campus and at various off-campus venues. If you can’t go to a reading, dive into its American Poetry Archives, a collection of five thousand hours of original audio and video recordings documenting its reading series.

Other engaging series include Why There Are Words, a monthly reading series put on by Peg Alford Pursell that fills the Studio 333 gallery in Sausalito every second Thursday. And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the series I cohost with Jane Ciabatarri, Kirstin Chen, and Meg Pokrass, the Flash Fiction Collective series, which showcases writers in San Francisco’s bustling flash fiction scene at the funky Alley Cat Books (3036 24th Street). Many call San Francisco the hub of flash fiction because so many writers in the Bay Area have found a literary home in the shorter side of stories.

[Excerpt — click on the title link to read all three pages of Grant Faulkner’s excellent CITY GUIDE to the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene.]

***

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We also work on workplace culture issues, leadership challenges, handling transitions, and building resilience in organizations and individual clients. You’ll be able to see first-hand how Silicon Valley companies create a culture of creativity and innovation, and you’ll be able to talk with their leaders. We’ll arrange a customized tour for you that addresses your organization’s issues.

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***

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johnadudek248-blog · 7 years

Text

Personality Words - Project 2

Dictionary Definitions:

Busy – adjective, busier, busiest. actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime: busy with her work. not at leisure; otherwise engaged: He couldn't see any visitors because he was busy. full of or characterized by activity: a busy life. 4. (of a telephone line) in use by a party or parties and not immediately accessible. 5. officious; meddlesome; prying. 6. ornate, disparate, or clashing in design or colors; cluttered with small, unharmonious details; fussy: The rug is too busy for this room.

verb (used with object), busied, busying. 7. to keep occupied; make or keep busy: In summer, he busied himself keeping the lawn in order.

Funny – adjective, funnier, funniest. providing fun; causing amusement or laughter; amusing; comical: a funny remark; a funny person. attempting to amuse; facetious: Did you really mean that or were you just being funny? warranting suspicion; deceitful; underhanded: We thought there was something funny about those extra charges. Informal. insolent; impertinent: Don't get funny with me, young man! curious; strange; peculiar; odd: Her speech has a funny twang.

noun, plural funnies. 6. Informal. a funny remark or story; a joke: to make a funny. 7. funnies. A comic strips.Also called funny paper. the section of a newspaper reserved for comic strips, word games, etc.

Night Owl – noun, Informal. a person who often stays up late at night; nighthawk.

Crafty – adjective, craftier, craftiest. 1.skillful in underhand or evil schemes; cunning; deceitful; sly. 2.Obsolete. skillful; ingenious; dexterous.

Esoteric – adjective 1.understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite: poetry full of esoteric allusions.

2.belonging to the select few.

3.private; secret; confidential.

4.(of a philosophical doctrine or the like) intended to be revealed only to the initiates of a group: the esoteric doctrines of Pythagoras.

Rebellious – adjective 1.defying or resisting some established authority, government, or tradition; insubordinate; inclined to rebel.

2.pertaining to or characteristic of rebels or rebellion.

3.(of things) resisting treatment; refractory.

Disorganized - adjective 1.functioning without adequate order, systemization, or planning; uncoordinated: a woefully disorganized enterprise.

2.careless or undisciplined; sloppy: too disorganized a person to be an agreeable roommate.

Team Player – noun 1.a person who willingly works in cooperation with others.

Musical – adjective 1.of, relating to, or producing music : a musical instrument. 2.of the nature of or resembling music; melodious; harmonious.

3.fond of or skilled in music.

4.set to or accompanied by music : a musical entertainment.

noun 5.Also called musical comedy. a play or motion picture in which the story line is interspersed with or developed by songs, dances, and the like.

Laid-Back – adjective, Slang. 1. relaxed or unhurried: laid-back music rhythms. 2. free from stress; easygoing; carefree: a laid-back way of living.

Thesaurus Synonyms

Busy - active, unavailable, working, buried, employed, engaged, engrossed, hustling, occupied, overloaded, persevering, slaving, snowed, swamped, already taken, assiduous, at it, diligent, having a full plate, having enough on one’s, having fish to fry, having many irons in the fire, in a meeting, in conference, in someone else’s possession, in the field, in the laboratory, industrious, on assignment, on duty, on the go, tied up, up to one’s ears, with a customer.

Funny - absurd, amusing, droll, entertaining, hilarious, ludicrous, playful, ridiculous, silly, whimsical, antic, gas, gay, humdinger, jolly, killing, rich, riot, screaming, slapstick, blithe, capricious, clever, diverting, facetious, farcical, for grins, gelastic, good-humored, hysterical, jocose, jocular, joking, knee-slapper, laughable, merry, mirthful, priceless, riotous, risible, side-splitting, sportive, waggish, witty.

Night Owl - abandoned, corrupt, debauched, degenerate, depraved, dissipated, evil, fast, fast and loose, gone bad, high living, in the fast lane, intemperate, lascivious, lax, lecherous, lewd, libertine, licentious, light, loose, nighthawk, on the take, open, player, profligate, raffish, rakish, reprobate, slack, swift, sybaritic, unconstrained, unprincipled, unrestrained, vicious, wanton, wayward, wicked, wild.

Crafty - astute, cagey, canny, devious, insidious, intelligent, shrewd, slick, sly, smart, subtle, wily, adroit, artful, calculating, crazy like fox, cunning, deceitful, deep, designing, disingenuous, duplicitous, foxy, fraudulent, guileful, keen, knowing, sharp, slippery, smooth, street smart, street wise, tricky, vulpine.

Esoteric - abstruse, arcane, mystical, acroamatic, cabalistic, cryptic, deep, Delphic, heavy, hermetic, hidden, inner, inscrutable, mystic, occult, orphic, private, profound, recondite, secret, sibylline.

Rebellious - alienated, disaffected, fractious, recalcitrant, restless, turbulent, unruly, warring, anarchistic, attacking, bellicose, contumacious, defiant, difficult, disloyal, disobedient, disorderly, dissident, factious, iconoclastic, incorrigible, individualistic, insurgent, insurrectionary, intractable, mutinous, obstinate, pugnacious, quarrlesome, radical, rebel, refractory, resistant, revolutionary, rioting, riotous, sabotaging, seditious, threatening, treasonable, ungovernable.

Disorganized - chaotic, confused, haphazard, muddled, disordered, jumbled, shuffled, disorderly, mixed up, screwed up, unsystematic.

Team-Player - assistant, associate, co-worker, colleague, confederate, helper, partner, quisling, teammate, fellow traveller, running dog.

Musical - choral, melodic, operatic, rhythmic, symphonic, vocal, blending, consonant, melodious, pleasing, sweet, agreeable, chiming, dulcet, euphonious, harmonious, lilting, mellow, orchestral, silvery, songful, sweet-sounding, symphonious, tuned, tuneful.

Laid-Back - easy-going, mellow, lax, low-pressure, undemanding, unhurried.

Etymology (Origin)

Busy - Old English bisig "careful, anxious," later "continually employed or occupied," cognate with Old Dutch bezich, Low German besig; no known connection with any other Germanic or Indo-European language. Still pronounced as in Middle English, but for some unclear reason the spelling shifted to -u- in 15c.

The notion of "anxiousness" has drained from the word since Middle English. Often in a bad sense in early Modern English, "prying, meddlesome" (preserved in busybody). The word was a euphemism for "sexually active" in 17c. Of telephone lines, 1893. Of display work, "excessively detailed, visually cluttered," 1903.

Funny - "humorous," 1756, from fun (n.) + -y (2). Meaning "strange, odd, causing perplexity" is by 1806, said to be originally U.S. Southern (marked as colloquial in Century Dictionary). The two senses of the word led to the retort question "funny ha-ha or funny peculiar," which is attested by 1916. Related: Funnier; funniest. Funny farm "mental hospital" is slang from 1962. Funny bone "elbow end of the humerus" (where the ulnar nerve passes relatively unprotected) is from 1826, so called for the tingling sensation when struck. Funny-man was originally (1854) a circus or stage clown.

Night Owl - "owl which flies at night," 1590s; applied since 1846 (American English) to persons who are up or out late at night. Compare night-hawk, also French hirondelle de nuit "prostitute," literally “night-swallow."

Crafty - mid-12c., crafti, from Old English cræftig "strong, powerful," later "skillful, ingenious," degenerating by c. 1200 to "cunning, sly" (but through 15c. also "skillfully done or made; intelligent, learned; artful, scientific") from craft (n.) + -y (2). Related: Craftily; craftiness.

Esoteric - 1650s, from Greek esoterikos "belonging to an inner circle" (Lucian), from esotero "more within," comparative adverb of eso "within," from PIE *ens-o-, suffixed form of *ens, extended form of root *en "in" (see en- (2)). Classically applied to certain popular and non-technical writings of Aristotle, later to doctrines of Pythagoras. In English, first of Pythagorean doctrines.

Rebellious - early 15c., from Latin rebellis (see rebel (adj.)) + -ous. Related: Rebelliously; rebelliousness.

Disorganized - 1793, from French désorganiser, from dés- "not" (see dis-) + organiser "organize" (see organize). This word and related forms were introduced in English in reference to the French Revolution. Related: Disorganized; disorganizing; disorganization.

Team-Player - 1885-90, Americanism

Musical - early 15c., "pertaining to music; tuneful, harmonious; adept at making music," from Middle French musical (14c.) and directly from Medieval Latin musicalis, from Latin musica (see music). Musical box is from 1829. Children's game musical chairs is attested from 1877, hence use of musical as a modifier meaning "changing rapidly from one to another possessor" (1924). Related: Musically.

Laid-Back - 1905-10, for an earlier sense; 1970-75 for current sense

Links to Images

Busy - http://az616578.vo.msecnd.net/files/2016/09/08/6360890219125892001111085486_busy.jpg

Funny - https://www.edutopia.org/sites/default/files/styles/responsive_2880px/public/cover_media/bellace-169hero-tough-istock.jpg?itok=vSvLRVnR&timestamp=1476733326

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61%2B8gqCAkSL._UL1500_.jpg

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/03/30/Production/Daily/Style/Images/bigstock-whoopee-cushion-61337648.jpg

Night Owl - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v5h2qxDB1io/TS1e4jkkaaI/AAAAAAAABT0/MTIl__4IlzA/s1600/Wildlife%20Predator%20(29).jpg

http://s77.photobucket.com/user/serafin65/media/moon2.jpg.html

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71jcBLukJsL._SL1500_.jpg

Crafty - http://threecheers.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/craftyipad.jpg

http://www.holytrinitydartford.co.uk/htwp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/artscrafts.jpg

Esoteric - https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/33/25/bd/3325bdb899460728c79323c6002333a3.jpg

http://img07.deviantart.net/9613/i/2015/287/9/b/sigil_of_azazel_plaque_by_hydramstar-d9d3m2p.jpg

Rebellious - http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p7Gjb18mbdw/T44miqTehZI/AAAAAAAABdk/-2fA2kl1Vrw/s1600/3.jpg

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/spore/images/f/f8/Generic_Rebel_Flag_1.png.png/revision/latest?cb=20121225014342

http://cdn.playbuzz.com/cdn/49bcec9e-1ea1-4834-8c8b-e6769481e79c/109feca1-4196-4203-8a1c-94f9d078fb72.jpg

Disorganized - https://thespacemaster.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/hires.jpg

http://www.news1130.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/9/2015/12/07/iStock_000027368621_Large.jpg

Team Player - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/team-player-rubber-stamp-15760079.jpg

Musical - http://thegraphicsfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/blogger/-ty4nFYoRN7U/T2EFU8DDv-I/AAAAAAAAQ8Y/nDYXeTWiacY/s1600/Printer-Orn-musical-Graphics-Fairy-rd.jpg

http://www.clipartkid.com/images/107/microphone-vector-clipart-panda-free-clipart-images-4mXnFS-clipart.png

Laid-Back - http://www.nomeatathlete.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/HiRes.jpg

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

Text

X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents

Who is Poly Styrene? On January 20, 1979, the BBC endeavored to find out. “I chose the name Poly Styrene because it’s a lightweight, disposable product,” Styrene stated, with an absurd serenity, while scrubbing her teeth on national television during a 40-minute special on her London band, X-Ray Spex. “It sounded alright. It was a send-up of being a pop star—plastic, disposable, that’s what pop stars are meant to mean, so therefore I thought I might as well send it up.” Only two months had passed since the release of X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents, a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. An incisive 1977 interview with the fanzine Jolt, penned by one Lucy Toothpaste, was revealing in other ways. “She’s a girl and she’s half-black,” goes Toothpaste’s introduction. “HOW OPPRESSED CAN YOU GET?” (Caps Lucy’s.) “Doesn’t seem to keep her down though,” Lucy added, before quoting a patch of Poly’s more impressionistic lyrics: “‘Yama yama yama yama yama yama.’”

Poly Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish secretary and a dispossessed Somalian noble, in 1957. While UK punks were screaming about cutting ties with their pasts, Poly spoke of her fascination with her own history, her uniquely multicultural family tree; plenty of punks played Rock Against Racism gigs, but Poly was one of few active participants of color. After working in fashion in her youth, she ran away from home between the ages of 15 and 17 and spent a year touring Britain’s hippie music festivals, including the Trentishoe Earth Fayre—after the fest, she lived with fellow travelers in the countryside, where they brewed dandelion tea and bathed in streams. This wandering all stoked the ecological consciousness that would fuel her ethos in punk. Armed with her itinerant background, Poly Styrene became one of the most original pop stars in music history—trained in opera, acutely anti-authoritarian, braces cemented across her teeth—and she was indeed the sharpest punk lyricist that Britain ever saw.

She rolled her Rs over supercharged riffs with more tenacity than Johnny Rotten. She yabbered gibberish more wildly than the Ramones. She naturally did punk-reggae better than the Clash or the Slits, and she was upending the notion that “cleanliness is next to godliness” when Kurt Cobain was in elementary school. With guttural, soul-cleansing, full-body wails, Poly sang of our sanitized culture’s lethal obsession with sterile perfection long before pop culture had sniffed “Teen Spirit.” Poly Styrene’s prescient lyrics could serve as epigraphs to scholarly books about identity politics, commodified dissent, or consumer society. They are also fun.

On her 19th birthday—July 3, 1976—Poly saw the Sex Pistols at Hastings Pier and was changed. She swiftly put an ad in Melody Maker seeking “young punx who want to stick it together.” X-Ray Spex—name inspired by ads in True Detective mags, and brilliantly evoking punk’s impulse to dissect life below the surface—was managed and produced by one Falcon Stuart. Sixteen years her senior, he was also Poly’s boyfriend and produced her pre-punk reggae single “Silly Billy,” released on GTO—the UK label that put out Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” One of the “young punx” to reply to that ad was 16-year-old Lora Logic, a Bowie-child who wrote and performed the band’s definitive sax arrangements before getting unceremoniously chucked out (allegedly for claiming too much of its spotlight). “Poly just wanted some men that would blur into the background,” Lora once told me, and she got a formidable lot in guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean, drummer BP Hurding, and later sax player Rudi Thompson. They released four singles before EMI put out their only album, Germfree Adolescents, in November ’78.

X-Ray Spex is what I consider capital-P Punk—meaning, of the original movement—more than lowercase-p punk—meaning, by current vernacular, an action. Though raw, strange, and legitimately subversive, the songs of Germfree Adolescents have traditional structures. There are persistent verses and choruses and swaggering solos, steady beats and percussive hip-shaking claps; there are overdubs, candy hooks, chiseled little flourishes in the form of “oh-oh”s and (on “Highly Inflammable”) even some galactic synth shimmer. Germfree Adolescents holds up, in some sense, like pop music, albeit pop that is equally scorched and joyful, liberationist, charged with intellect and insurrectionary zeal. It inspires in ways that transcends genre, which explains why an artist like FKA twigs has called Germfree Adolescents her favorite album ever. Its musicality is honed; the musicians here are obviously amazing players. Its chugging faster-harder chords accelerate by the second, like the culture Poly describes. It is steely, shit-kicking, and bright; like an unbreakable machine, its build reflects the industrialization at hand. Germfree Adolescents’ singular sax-punk sound is, to borrow a word from Poly’s lyrics, “bionic.”

Along with her hippie inklings, Poly devoted much of her teenage years to watching fringe theater groups, and so she was visually inclined. This manifested in her striking and unusual sartorial choices—such as a green tin army helmet or a lipstick-red conductor’s jacket—as much as in X-Ray Spex’s music. The riffs were tonally fluorescent, but Poly’s language also made immediate appeals to the imagination. Her images—of “warriors in Woolworths,” of her mocking desire to turn into a “dehydrated” “frozen pea”—become 3D in your head. And Poly is refreshingly funny. “I am a poseur and I don’t care!” she sneers on the galloping “I Am a Poseur”; sarcasm vivifies “I Am a Cliché”’s pogoing titular chant. On the vibrant, almost-slapstick “I Can’t Do Anything”—“I can’t read and I can’t spell/I can’t even get to hell”—Poly cheerfully fights back against a guy called Freedom who tried to “strangle” her with plastic jewelry. Each word is an embodied exclamation point: “I hit him back!/With my pet rat!”

The prevailing theme of Germfree Adolescents is the inescapable horror of daily life in consumer society. Poly’s voice and the music—always peaking, always cranked to 100%—is persistently in-your-face, just like the most garish excesses of capitalism. “There was so much junk then. The idea was to send it all up,” Poly said in England’s Dreaming. “Screaming about it, saying: ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like her?’” The original tracklist opened with revving drums and Poly roaring “AAARRT-I-FIIICCIAL,” a reverbed rallying cry. “I know I’m artificial/But don’t put the blame on me,” she blazes. “I was reared with appliances/In a consumer society.” There is a scene in Who Is Poly Styrene, set among the modern industrial wasteland of the supermarket aisles, where Poly is pushing a shopping cart beneath the glare of fluorescent lights, grabbing at products: Daz laundry detergent, Special K, Anadin painkillers, Comfort fabric conditioner, Sunlight lemon liquid cleaner. The Raincoats’ Ana da Silva once told me she wrote her 1979 song title “Fairytale in the Supermarket” after watching it and realizing that Poly’s songs were like “fairytales, but in a consumerist society.” In 1978, Joe Strummer was lost in the supermarket; Poly Styrene stared its offerings dead in the eye.

Anthems like the unsparing “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” anticipated the anxieties of a world made of hidden cancerous chemical detritus. “Day-Glo” has an ominous gravity, but it’s catchy, sneaking into you like a sweet, hastily-torn packet of Splenda. Poly explores the toxicity of daily life in excruciating, relentless detail: our homes (“nylon curtains” and “perspex window panes”), our infrastructure (“the acrylic road”), our transport (“my Polypropylene car”), our fake food (“a rubber bun”), irradiated air (“the X-rays were penetrating through the latex breeze”). It culminates with an image of fake plastic trees years before Thom Yorke sang of a “cracked polystyrene man” (“synthetic fiber see-thru leaves fell from the rayon trees”). X-Ray Spex songs are like musical Andy Warhol soup cans; they find a spiritual predecessor in Warhol’s pivotal 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket. Look around, both whisper to you: Everything is plastic.

On “Plastic Bag,” Poly coupled her eco-critique with an incendiary indictment of advertising: “My mind is like a plastic bag/That corresponds to all those ads/It sucks up all the rubbish/That is fed through my ear/I eat Kleenex for breakfast/And I use soft hygienic Weetabix/To dry my tears.” Her sly reversal—Kleenex for eating, Weetabix for crying—underscores the interchangeability of these artificial products. Poly knew advertisements were inescapable, were rewiring brains; look out, they are coming for you right about now. But she was also genius enough to speak their mass language: “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” was an unlikely chart hit in the UK, reaching No. 23 in April ’78.

In an age of burgeoning A.I. and rampant outsourcing, the sci-fi poetry of “Genetic Engineering” is even more prophetic, as Poly declares that “genetic engineering could create the perfect race… could exterminate/introducing worker clones/as our subordinated slave.” Her grim propositions have lost none of their daunting edge. Punks were screaming “NO FUTURE,” and fair enough, but Poly went further, deeper; her songs dared to imagine just how bad hellish normalization could be. And here we are.

Words like “disinfectant,” “Listerine,” and “sterilized” have never sounded so oddly seductive as they do on the postmodern love song “Germfree Adolescents,” the era’s greatest punk-reggae ballad. “I know you’re antiseptic/Your deodorant smells nice/I’d like to get to know you/You’re deep frozen like the ice,” Poly beams through this dubby, surreal waltz. In her futuristic tale of boy-meets-girl, purity reigns; “he’s a germfree adolescent” and “cleanliness is her obsession.” “Cleans her teeth 10 times a day,” Poly sings, “Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away/The S.R. way.” Both “deep frozen like the ice” and “the S.R. way” (sodium ricinoleate) reference a promo for Gibbs S.R. toothpaste, the very first television commercial broadcast in England in 1955. As Poly’s voice cracks out with each repeat of “10 times a day,” the desperation—the casual corner-store apocalypse of unpronounceable additives—pierces through the song’s swirling veneer. “Germfree Adolescents” became X-Ray Spex’s most successful single, reaching No. 19 on the charts in November ’78.

Somehow, Poly’s two most radically feminist statements—debut single “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and a later B-side, “Age”—were left off the original Germfree Adolescents tracklist, only added back to the 1991 reissue. All punch and bounce, “Age” takes on ageism, body dysmorphia, and the beauty myth perpetuated by Hollywood in a fell swoop: “Age/She’s so afraid/Age/She’s not the rage.” (Check the mellow, reggae-tinged version of it on Poly’s lovely, misunderstood 1980 solo album Translucence.) The iconic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was, and is, like dynamite to patriarchy. It is a succession of lightning bolts, dizzied with ideas, as Poly’s profoundly unhinged voice skyrockets into the red to cap each chorus line. “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I want to be a slave to you all,” Poly seethed. It’s the ultimate punk song, and also intersectional feminist scripture: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard/But I say oh bondage, up yours!”

In 2005, excerpts from Poly’s “diary of the seventies” appeared on her website. Poly muses on Superwoman, on vegetarianism, on reading about genetic modification in the glossy pages of Time. But she also reflects on Lucy Toothpaste probing her regarding “Oh Bondage! Up Yours.” “Is it about women’s liberation?” Lucy asks, and Poly replies vaguely, mentioning bondage trousers she saw at Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique. Then her entry continues forth, tracing the DNA of each line. She alludes to The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich, to images of “Suffragettes chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace,” to “pictures of ball-and-chained African slaves stored in my psyche.” Poly Styrene would often deny that her songwriting was autobiographical; six months before Germfree Adolescents came out, she told NME, “You have to be detached from everything in order to write. I have to observe… I can’t get too directly involved.” But you can’t escape yourself. The glimpse into Poly’s inner life shows just how innately distinct her perspective was from all around her in UK punk. Transcending time and place, though, in Shotgun Seamstress—the indispensable zine by and for black punks founded by Osa Toe in 2006—the author repeatedly dubs Poly “Captain of the Brown Underground.”

Poly did not have to try to be this different; she simply was. At the core of Germfree Adolescents is a mantra that could summarize all of popular culture in 2017: “Identity/Is the crisis can’t you see.” Just over a year ago, Wesley Morris in The New York Times Magazine declared 2015 “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” situating our world “in the midst of a great cultural identity migration” where “gender roles are merging” and “races are being shed,” and of course this is felt at the turn of any axis. But a migration has a destination; identity is always fluid. On “Identity,” Poly wisely presents these dilemmas of personhood as perennial question marks: “When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?/Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?/Do you see yourself in the magazine/When you see yourself does it make you scream?” Eviscerating and empathic in equal measure, “Identity” is a most logical anthem for today.

When X-Ray Spex imploded in mid-’79, they cited creative differences, but there was a darkness churning below the gleeful surfaces, which boiled over before Germfree Adolescents was released. The wages of Poly’s exuberance had a cost; she lived, to some degree, within the extremities of the hyperactive mindset she sang from so intimately. (It was not until 1991 that she was diagnosed as bipolar.) In the mid-2000s, Poly referenced a “traumatic experience of a sexual nature” she’d endured in ’78; she had a breakdown, went to John Lydon’s flat, and shaved her head (if she ever became a sex symbol, she promised early on, she’d shave her head). On tour that summer, she claimed to have seen a UFO fly past her hotel window “like a fireball.” (“I wasn’t mad, but I went into the hospital after that,” she said.) Lydon wrote of Poly in his 2014 memoir: “They used to lock her up occasionally… She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house… She was good fun until the ambulance turned up for her.” Poly soon remembered chanting with Hare Krishnas during her teen hippie years, began reading The Bhagavad Gita, and aligned with the movement. One need only look at the muchness of what Poly writes about to understand the potential sources of her struggle. In England’s Dreaming, Poly said she wanted Germfree Adolescents to be like “a diary of 1977.” It is also a diary of survival in a world closing in on us all in ways that can go hauntingly unseen.

Elsewhere in her journal, Poly meditates on her own ascending fame with three quotes:

“We will be famous just for one day.” —David Bowie “Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” —Andy Warhol “I am a cliché.” —Poly Styrene

But clichés do not hold. They dissolve. Poly Styrene is solid; Poly Styrene lasts. With her inclinations towards Eastern spirituality, perhaps she would relish in how the status of Germfree Adolescents now feels sky-like. Poly Styrene is the future, and she is now.

#reviews-albums

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woundgallery · 2 years

Text

Poem about Police Violence

Tell me something

what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby comes back to my mouth and I am quiet like Olympian pools from the running the mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos or the way your ear ensnares the tip of my tongue or signs that I have never seen like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid and repetitive affront as when they tell me cops in order to subdue one man strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don’t you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn street was just a “justifiable accident” again (again)

People been having accidents all over the globe so long like that I reckon that the only suitable insurance is a gun I’m saying war is not to understand or rerun war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby blots it out/the bestial but not too often

tell me something what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?

--June Jordan

#june jordan #racism #police violence #poetry #blm #political poetry #favorite poetry #insurrectionary poetry #queen of the universe human #words

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decorticatedturnip · 7 years

Text

This summer I went swimming...

In the middle of a thunderstorm, I begin setting up. A book had come, deposited without sender on the table that waits without notice most days in my vestibule, or whatever the transitional space the size of two bodies between two doors is called. Severe thunderstorm warnings were permanently placed at the top of every television screen, scrunching the faces below the unending banner into shapes that I traditionally find quite comical. Tonight, I am not laughing or watching television. I am, instead, taping microphones to the ceiling, double-checking all of the recording apparatuses, attempting to achieve something like good spirits. This is all because of Thomas-fucking-Edison, I whisper to myself out loud as if I'm reciting poetry on a walk home from the library. That fucking dirtbag responsible for commercially viable lights, and in some sense to blame for all the neon and halogen intrusions that pepper and pollute the modern capitalist world is ALSO responsible for the ritual I am performing tonight. It's not that he came up with it or anything, but his words, his nudge, lead me to give it a whirl---you know, science and progress, those neon gods I am forced to behold. Sometime shortly after his 70th birthday, Edison began to be preoccupied with creating some sort of receptive machine, an empathic piece of metal and circuitry that might be able to record personalities after they had lifted off and left behind their physical form. He says, and I direct quote from the book mentioned briefly in the beginning of this paragraph, "...if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected or moved or manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument when made available ought to record something."

This summer I might have drowned...

Across the street, workers in highlighter colored t-shirts are throwing pieces of a building into an adult version of the covered plastic slides that I used to crawl up and fall down over and over when I was younger until my tiny little hamstrings couldn't take it anymore. I begin empathizing with the guy closest to the slide mouth. I feel like I can feel his want to hop in there just to see what might happen. But, as it goes with adulthood, he instead has to stare at the opening and deny his impulses, throw pieces of industrial rock down the chute rather than allowing his body to become propulsive play, that ludic body most of us must constantly repudiate to keep things serious enough to earn money and get things done.

But I held my breath and I kicked my feet...

I swear to god the humidity is taunting me. I ready my fists and begin swinging wildly, without reservation. The humidity remains. In fact, I sweat more and think about how fucking stupid I am to think that I could punch away humidity. Where did I get this kind of idiotic idea?

And I moved my arms around...

I'm on a little sliver of sidewalk that hugs one of the busier roads in the city. People who live around here will immediately know the road I am talking about unless they are one of the many that are constantly carbound. Air conditioned apartment to air conditioned car to air conditioned workplace to air conditioned car to air conditioned department store to air conditioned car to air conditioned relationship---you know the type, right? As I said, I am on this little sliver of sidewalk, that part of the sidewalk (I almost typed "diedwalk") where you told me to walk behind you because you were scared I was going to get hit by a car. Up until you're mentioning this possibility it had never even occurred to me that I was in any danger. I can be so oblivious, I know. I keep getting off track here, going offroad about the road, so to speak. I have been trying to say for a few sentences now that at this particular moment during this particular gloaming I was having a real hard time getting a psychic grip. All the objects that constitute a world were seeming more and more like those sneaky smooth rocks in a river, not even the ones that are mossy and blatant, but the ones that you think you can trust until you leap and, as the smallest fiber or particle or electromagnetic wave of your foot becomes or resists or contacts (do things touch in physics? what is our modern understanding of touching within a scientific worldview?) the stone, you know bad things are about to happen. Bad things were happening to me and I didn't know what to do. As I was thinking about what to do, you know getting real invested in rumination, I felt my lips begin to buzz like I was trying to play the tuba so I went with it, gave in, started playing an invisible tuba. I don't really know how to hold a tuba, let alone toot a tuba, but I once tried out for tuba in 5th grade so I know how to make my mouth make those tuba buzz movements. I began pretending that I was in a marching band, a one person marching band and I kind of just started laughing and marching and playing my invisible tuba.

I moved my arms around.

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