It's very rare that I just post a day of a load of different bands all together for no reason

New ideas 116

I want to be surrounded by old photos of people that I’ve never met. I don’t want the people I care for to have pasts. I don’t want people I’m in love with to have cried before I knew them – I don’t want the people I love to have ever needed me when I wasn’t there. Loving isn’t selfish, I don’t think, unless being selfish is pure or something.

“I had this thing –”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Your face.” Your face///
“You had my face? You’re so ruined.”
L/a/u/g/h/s
“No.”
“What are you talking about?”/those words a hundred times at once.
“My face?”
“Yeah.”
“Start again.”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
“I had this thing about your face.”
“Haha – ” splinters somewhere.
“I kept thinking you and Luke had changed faces.”

Stops. Think about whether I said it or not. Feel shivers. They’re from the cold, they’re nothing to do with what I can’t remember I said.

Not the right time

I think he thought I sounded cold when I said that I already had friends to talk to about this kind of shit. He replied by saying something about blood. I asked how many times in the past had I come to him with problems. Obviously there was silence. I stopped short of saying that he didn’t know me and that most of the time it felt like it was too late to even consider making efforts to change that. I don’t think he could have handled that, and even though my headache was trying to coax me into ending the conversation as quickly as possible for its sake, and to just close the door and lie down, I didn’t want to hurt someone needlessly without any real reason. There were a few pauses and at points I would have to repeat certain parts of our talk to illustrate how this wasn’t an argument and how I wasn’t being antagonistic. I can’t recall how it ended. It was ten minutes ago, maybe more. I was on autopilot. Death death death.

Now that he was dead

Now that he was dead
someone had to sort out
his pornography.

It was one of his friends
that flagged the problem
up one evening,
while a few of them
were sitting round
smoking weed and
talking about
their late friend.

Choices had to be made,
who was going to call
his parents and what
would be the best lie, the
most convincing ...

Maybe something about
finding an old photograph
of them together – him and
his friends.

Then once in, they could rifle
through his drawers and snatch
any Ass To Mouth, or Double
Penetration Ass Whupps Volume 2
that they could.

Let both parties
remember someone they knew.

I kneel before the films of Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin is one of the most innovative young artists working with video today. Trecartin's fantastical video narratives seem to be conjured from a fever dream. Collaborating with an ensemble cast of family and friends, the 26-year-old Trecartin merges sophisticated digital manipulations with uncanny performances and footage drawn from the Internet and other media. While the astonishing A Family Finds Entertainment has drawn comparisons to Jack Smith, early John Waters, and Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Trecartin crafts startling visions that are thoroughly unique.





Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.






Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a Jewish lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with the "real world" locations. The story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages. Engrossed in manic electronic interactions, the characters become increasingly isolated and solipsistic.

Ryan Trecartin’s videos uncannily reflect his generation, which was raised using the Internet, digital television, and interactive video games. He mixes cheap special effects with absurd narratives in which he and his cast of collaborator-friends act out a sort of Lord of the Flies for the 21st Century. He tells sad love stories and bizarre family dramas utilizing technology to heighten the action and reflect the information overload we all experience today. In his latest work I-BE AREA, 2007, Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, life-style options, virtual identities and larger questions of an existential nature.

----------------------------------------------

Watch for yourself:

A Family Finds Entertainment

Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me

I-Be AREA

Trecartin's work has been especially inspiring and informative for me recently, and has definitely helped me to start to navigate my way through certain new ideas that I've had with regards to my own work. So yeah, check out some of this stuff if you fancy. Personally I've found his stuff to be pretty amazing so far.

OK, enjoy

TM x

Her face can only frown

The woman in the passenger seat
Crosses her arms
Her chin points down
Her eyes stay level
So her face can only frown
Spots me looking from the bus window
One second
Then looks away
As the person driving who
May as well
Have been
Invisible
Takes them away from the hospice
They've just pulled out off

LUCKY

***

Watching you establishing a connection still can’t see your face but being patient because there’s a man I know whose opinions and taste I usually often trust and/or pay attention to. I recognize one of those cities, one if I’m lucky – I’m spacing out though so ... y’know ... All these tools and still you’re just staring at the TV, but that’s ok because I think I’m missing something. Virtual reality computer programme, no headset, maybe it’s online. Shit, I saw your arm bathed in this red light from I’m not sure what – lamp? Maybe you’re near your bed. You have to make a choice. This time it was your fingers. Yes. Turn something else on. Your fingers again, tapping this time. Are you impatient or am I? Probably me, I don’t think you even know I’m doing this. Red light flashes. That’s where it came from. Tapping. Yeah, it’s me. Tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Scream. Something aggressive. Shit. I missed you: that was my own fault too. Shut the fuck up, I don’t want to wake anyone.

***

HOSPITAL interview by Chris Goode

The awesomely talented playwrite and poet Chris Goode recently interviewed me about my new book of poetry, HOSPITAL, for a feature on Dennis Cooper's blog. I thought I'd post the interview up here:

I want to start right at the end, way past where the poems (allegedly) stop, in the eerie white space where it's all over, and you say: "Thank you to all of my friends." This is typical you, of course: and I want to use it as a way of starting to talk about one of the most gripping things about Hospital, which is its candour. Some of these pieces are more oblique or circuitous in the way they do it, some are more direct and more overtly raw, but all of them, without exception, exhibit a candour which is both lovely and excruciating (in a way that poets as various as Wieners and Celan are often excruciating). From my perspective in theatre, there's a huge question around the making of the artwork in the absence of the audience who will eventually encounter it: but this is no less true of poetry, though perhaps simultaneously more and less true in that perhaps you will never actually meet or know or share a physical space with most of your audience. And yet I think there's a kind of candour that just feels impossible without some sense of an audience, or a reader, helping to orient you as you write. Is that true for you? Do you think about readers -- particular readers, or a general readership, say -- as you write? Or does that make it impossible? Perhaps you can only be that candid if you don't think about the reader. But your commitment to participating in communal spaces like DC's blog suggests the importance to you of a network of others who are picking up the signals you put out. I wonder what it means to you to write for others, as much as or maybe even more than you write for yourself?


Well I’ve always told myself that I write for me and nobody else. I think that’s pretty much true in as much as when I ask myself ‘would I still write if I knew that nobody was ever going to read it?’ then the answer would be ‘yes’. More recently I have been thinking more about the idea of the audience and who is going to be reading what I’m writing, not particularly with any specific intent. I mean, I post something on my blog every day and I’m regularly getting feedback and feeding back to other people about their work. Through blogging and specifically the community over at DC’s I’ve been able to have access to a network or artists and writers that has been invaluable to me; mainly that’s been through being able to gain access to other people’s work and being able to get inspired by them, correspond with them and talk about ideas, tastes and that sort of thing. I’ve never really known too many writers or anything like that in my day to day life – some of my best friends are visual artists, musicians etc, but there have never been too many writers around me, so it’s been good to be able to find that comradeship. In terms of whether that audience or that potential audience has effected how I write I’m not too sure. Usually I think maybe it doesn’t too much – I mean yeah, like I say I get inspired and crazily excited by what other people are doing, but I dunno - ultimately I think I know when I’ve finished a piece of writing that does what I want it to. I guess I’m saying that I don’t really look to an audience for approval or whatever, but it’s definitely good if people want to read my work. With Hospital though, or at least with some of the poems in there, it was definitely different. I was definitely aware that in some ways there was a lot less fiction (?) to some of the pieces than I usually allow myself. To some people I think that some of the poems will still be able to be read as being fairly abstract, but to anyone who knows me then I guess it’s obvious that these poems are about what happened with my mother’s death and a lot of the stuff surrounding that. And I was aware of the fact that with certain poems I was saying very personal things very openly. In some ways I think I can be a very private person so that was strange. Also, with this collection it was the first time that I really showed it to some friends and actually said “what am I doing here? What do you think of these?” because usually I can detach myself a little from things and view my work from a distance. With some of the stuff in Hospital I was still and I’m probably still am very much in the middle of things. Some of the poems are so close to me still that I can barely see them yet.


Yeah, it's obvious that Hospital is quite exceptional in its directness, its nakedness. I mean this quite precisely: a lot of poetry pretends to a sort of nakedness that actually isn't nakedness but nudity -- in the terms of John Berger's distinction: "nudity is nakedness clothed in art". The loss of the fictional or ironic matrix in Hospital has the effect of burning the artistic clothing off the work, and not only the clothing but some of the skin I guess. The really necessary corollary of this, it seems to me, is exactly the process of exposure -- exposure of the work, and exposure of yourself through it -- that you describe, which has a kind of recklessness embedded in it. I mean, you describe yourself asking questions of friends about the work in Hospital -- "What am I doing here?" -- in a way that indicates you maybe don't know, or can't know, in these instances, whether you've "finished a piece of writing that does what [you] want it to". The ransacking of your own accustomed privacy becomes both a risk -- to the extent that you're left vulnerable by it -- and a compulsion -- because how else can this writing exist? Don't tackle this question too directly if you don't want to, or if you don't recognize yourself inside what it suggests, but I wanted to ask whether you detected in yourself as you were writing these pieces, or whether you detect now in retrospect, an impulse almost to self-harm? That the rawness and necessary recklessness together generate a sensation of pain a significant component of which is the inability (perhaps) of mere literature to contain or express or alleviate the unconscionable larger pain that it's somehow "about"; but that the generation of a kind of exemplary pain is kind of the only rational response, in much the way that to some people I've known who are cutters, say, their self-injury is far more logical and controlled than the chaos of the deeper existential pain to which it somehow refers. I wonder whether the uncharacteristic act of sharing work before you can be sure it's finished or ready is a response, conscious or otherwise, to an onslaught of pain and grief for which you also aren't, and could never be, ready? Is that something that was palpable within your sense of urgency to get the book out as quickly as possible?

One of the things that I love about writing is that I don’t and I don’t think I ever will fully understand it. I just know that I have this compulsion to do it. When I don’t do it I panic, like there’s something missing, and I know that in the stretches when I haven’t wrote I’ve tended to feel a lot worse about things. But it’s strange because it’s not always like writing always makes me feel better so it never seems to fit completely into an idea of catharsis or anything like that – sometimes I think it is, and others I’m not so sure or can’t tell. When I was finishing Hospital, I was talking to a friend and she said to me that she thought it was really great how I’d not stopped writing through all of what was going on, and I told her that it had never even occurred to me to stop, or just to not write. I have to write, and the majority of the time I’d say that I don’t know why and I’m happy existing in that not knowing space. The self harm comparison is ... hmmm ... I don’t know ... Like I say, in a lot of ways I still feel like I’m too close to some of this to make a proper assessment, perhaps with a bit more time I’ll be able to see things a bit more clearly, and perhaps I won’t. That retrospect hasn’t really appeared yet, you know? I do think though that you may have a point about how self harmers’ injuries are more logical than the feelings that have led them to hurt themselves. That notion of doing something painful to make sense of something is perhaps close to what I was doing. I felt numb during my mother’s death and I still do – aside from when I sat next to her hospital bed and watched a doctor turn off her life support machine, I have only cried once. Things haven’t sunk in fully yet, I don’t think. I’ve felt blank and removed a lot of the time. The only times that I have felt certain emotions is while I’ve been writing, and yeah, some of it hurt a lot. I think my wanting to get the collection out quickly was all about wanting to try and achieve some kind of distance, put it away from myself, so I can try and work it out a little bit more.

That sense of numbness that you describe comes through very strongly in Hospital, I think, and one of the things that's scariest about this work is how it shows up the involvement, even the complicity, of language in that numbness: that as someone for whom writing is a primary and almost involuntary response, words are in a sense your tools, your technology, but even language can't help but renege on its implicit promise of precision, say, or the ability to 'capture' and hold on to events or emotional states. So the book is full of language that is participating in untruth, in fact entirely constitutes that untruth -- "words are doing / their best to keep away the / most terrifying thoughts...", or "I keep trying to tell myself..."; language out of focus, "that I would skim and not pronounce correctly", or blurrily remote because "I've not been close enough to read what the / writing says yet" or because the speaker "[can] barely understand what any of / The words say anyway..."; language adrift from image and authority (as with the YouTube Vlogger); language that falls short of the emotion it's reaching for, such that while some "[people] have a way with words", this facility is meaningless because "there was no way / to say stuff properly / so the words / didn't really matter". This deep, somewhat paradoxical disconsolation associated with words, with language, strikes me as one of the most important and most productive features of your writing.

The questions I want to steer these observations towards would be, I guess, about the relation between language on the one hand, and on the other the kind of virtual spaces that fascinate you in your work as much as me in mine (and Dennis in Dennis's, etc.) -- here, for example, the vlogger's space, the celebrity / fantasy space of Cliff Richard, the degraded image-space of old video, and perhaps even the unknowable dream space which you conclude the collection by invoking. Two things come to mind. Firstly, I wonder if you would recognize at all the similarity between experiences of grief or bereavement (and of course the strange liminality of the coma state), and those virtual or heavily ironic media spaces: that there's a concern with what is untouchable (even with language) versus what can be touched; with what, in relation to a person, is lost and unrecoverable, versus what is palpable and permanent. I suppose this question is partly proposing that the pieces in the collection that maybe seem not to relate so directly to your experience with your mum nonetheless are trying to grasp and describe or present exactly the same predicament in a different context, in a way that's almost tantamount to a kind of retrofitting of allegory. And secondly, I wonder, given the kind of failure of language that you return to a lot, where words fit in here? I mean I suspect that for a lot of writers, they are seeking to use language to conjure plausible fictions that counteract, through a sense of intimacy and of proximity, the remoteness of the virtual, summoning a kind of reality that aspires to enact the same kind of contact as touch; whereas for you it seems like language itself might be virtualised, too remote and unstable and illegible or incomprehensible to keep its promise of nearness. I suppose I'm asking partly about your feeling of being, if anything, too close to the writing to be able to see it, and wanting to get the book out quickly in order to create some distance; I wonder whether what that distance ever can confer the opening up of a reliable and clarifying objectivity, or whether the poems themselves actually are formed out of the impossibility of that objectivity and the impossibility -- even the refusal -- of clarity. Does that make any sense to you?

Yeah, well the idea of language being limited is definitely key to a lot of my work. I sometimes think I’ve set myself up to fail – I’m a writer who thinks that words can’t do their job properly. I don’t think that’s such a rare thing though, it’s something that I’ve read a few writers talk about. When I write, what I’m often aiming for isn’t really to do with plot or narrative so much as it is to do with attempting to set up a way of translating various feelings that I find myself plagued by – I have an idea of a feeling or an idea that moves me in some way, but it remains elusive to me, and impossible to articulate. So what I’m trying to get out of myself with writing seems to be something built by words, but simultaneously separate from them. It feels very instinctive most of the time. Despite the discrepancies I’ve never stopped thinking that language and writing can do very special things – I only have to think about the times that other people’s work has just left me feeling devastated, understood or alive, to remember that. With regards to the virtual spaces that I write about, this is very much linked. Just like language, these online spaces are attempting to convey truth through inherently artificial means; they’re trying to pin things down in this weird way that they just can’t do. But the tension between what they’re trying to do and what they actually are is something that fascinates me. I think a good example is something like MySpace and sites like that, which I’ve used in several things that I’ve wrote over the last year or so. People have these artificial tools that make it so easy for themselves to remould an impression of their reality that they would like to display for people as a new version of their truth – they have more control than ever about how they would like people to see them. It’s so easily to use these virtual spaces to manipulate The Self of the representation of that Self. I’m interested in the idea of The Impression, which is something that I think language and a lot of these virtual spaces have in common – they are both used to try and represent something they can’t, they are both just forms of impression. I’m not saying that these impressions are bad, because in their failure or in their limitedness, they do create this friction that itself can be extremely powerful. There seems to be a very definite sense of darkness and sadness layered among these surfaces. There’s a space between the actual intent of interactions in these spaces and the actual end result that just seems huge and that’s what interests me. I guess I’m interested in fakeness, you know? When I was in America last October, I found an art gallery in Austin, Texas that had a great show on called RESET/PLAY which focussed on contemporary art based around computer games and computer interaction. There was one piece by a video artist - Michael Bell-Smith – that was called While We Slept which just blew my mind. He’s used these really basic 1980s computer game graphics – basically just black and white bitmap imagery – to create this sequence that featured a world war, followed by a sunset; you know, he was trying to create these two huge powerful experiences but with totally limited technology, a tiny vocabulary of effects that had no hope of coming anywhere near the real bloodshed of a war or the true beauty of a sunset. But the fact that he tried and that gaping hole between what he was referencing and how he actually chose to reference it was just engulfing to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt a real kinship with that piece. I can definitely get a sense between these kinds of spaces and death, because something is lost. There’s something very cold about the whole thing too. The internet is a corpse.

OK, cool, there are two things I want to pull out from that.

Firstly, I'd like to unpack a bit more the question of fakeness. There's a really interesting conversation going on over here in theatre world at the moment about the way in which fakeness relates or doesn't relate to failure. A whole bunch of practitioners, from the company Forced Entertainment onwards, have been interested in a kind of failure that seems built-in to theatre as a medium: communication failure, inherent triviality, ludicrous conventions, desperate artifice... I swallow some of this and spit out the rest: I agree that in any performance (in which I would include any performative use of language, and by extension most poetry) there is a susceptibility to failure of a kind -- noise as well as signal, in other words -- and I think you have to acknowledge that in your practice (as I've already suggested, and you've agreed, that you do); but I wonder about the fetishization of failure to the extent that one starts to simulate it. Forced Entertainment's sometimes chaotic or ramshackle-looking work has long been full of the signs of failure, but they're as carefully rehearsed and choreographed as any straight prestigious drama. What interests me about failure is not just how it lets serendipity (via noncontrol) flow through a piece, but also how everyone persists despite failure: how we know we will be misunderstood or our words may never reach their targets but still we retain (for the most part) this desire to communicate. My colleague the theatre-maker and blogger Matt Trueman recently encapsulated this as "reach[ing] for the stars with a stepladder", which I think is a great image: and your reference to that video piece really reminds me of it. In a way your discussion of virtual 'impressionism' already answers this question, but do you think of your work, and some of the cultures and spaces it describes or co-opts, as tending towards hope or towards despair in its depiction of the probably-thwarted effort to connect? I mean it feels like your ambivalence about fakeness (if that's an adequate characterisation) could go either way, but they're very different places to reach -- or maybe not?

Secondly, I wanted to use your reference to that art show you mentioned just to cue a little enquiry about how you situate your writing practice in relation to the experience and influence of other art forms. Your blog not least indicates the importance to you of visual art and music, and of course you have, or have had, a parallel practice in music in various different contexts and formats. (And what I've heard of your music / sound work really demonstrates that you're way more than just a hobbyist or a tinkerer.) The tracks of influence can sometimes be hard to discern but I wondered how much you use other artforms as stimulus for your writing -- and I guess in particular I'm asking not just about the way that your other cultural interests are reflected in a certain territory of reference and allusion in the content of your writing (and the community values, for want of a better phrase, that underwrite those), but also whether you borrow from formal or structural ideas, the effects of which might perhaps be less obvious. Oh and, hem hem, I believe you contributed to the writing of a theatre piece recently... Did that experience feel like an area you'd want to explore more? Were there things that you found particularly interesting or challenging about the adaptation of your writing practice to a more explicitly performative context?

Hmmm ... I think I’d definitely distance my work from a fetishism of failure. For me personally I don’t think I always equate the fakeness with a failure. I think that it’s interesting if that gap that can be characterised as failure can be removed or viewed as separate from and not in relation to where it was originally perceived to be aiming. Maybe then it can be observed as something aside from failure, and based on more what it is than what it isn’t. So maybe I’m placing it as a new space entirely, but I really don’t know. But yeah, I definitely find it interesting that people still keep trying, no matter what the results are. Perhaps it’s that huge desire that communication that brings the sadness to some of these places – just the fact that people are desperate to reach out. People are trying. I guess the creative process can sometimes be more interesting than the end results anyway. I know I’m excited to finish something so that I can work on something else. I like the inner silence I get when I’m writing, the weird contentedness and buzz I get. It’s like nothing else I can think of really. As for whether my depiction of these virtual spaces points towards hope or despair I think it’s probably neither. I mean, there is definitely a mixture of both hope and despair in what I do when I write about those sorts of things, but often when I’m working I’m writing about things that make me feel something that I don’t understand or can’t pinpoint. I’m sometimes trying to work things out. I don’t really have an agenda that seeks to say what is right and wrong. With a lot of my work I’m probably an observer trying to work out what I feel. And a lot of the time I don’t work it out! But it’s the search and the process involved that makes it worthwhile. I’d rather try than not.

As for other art forms then yeah – I’m constantly taking inspiration and pointers from other mediums. A lot of the time it’ll be music that sets me off. I try and translate certain moods from certain music into the writing that I’m working on. With Hospital specifically, then I was listening to a few things over and over again, especially Heretic Pride by the Mountain Goats. Some other stuff too – stuff that felt dark, dense, layered. Some Matmos stuff (hence the poem that steals their name), Fuck Buttons, Atlas Sound etc. Mainly I tend to write in silence, but while I’m thinking about a piece or letting my thoughts form a bit, then I’m listening to music constantly. There are a few rare exceptions when I find that I can write to certain bands, a band like Stars of the Lid or whatever, but usually I listen to stuff before I write or if I take a break from a piece to get a drink or a bite to eat. It’s like charging up energy in a video game or something. Heh. The same with visual art. I get a very definite sense from some art, and when I’m writing I can tell if the work I’m doing is giving me the same or a similar work to the art that’s inspired it. It’s still very hard to articulate, which is a good thing. With the novel I’m working on at the moment I’m definitely trying to pick apart music more in terms of its form and structure to see if I can use that to help propel the narrative in certain ways, but I’m still working and experimenting on that so I can’t really talk too much about it at the moment, because I’m still very much throwing shit around and seeing what sticks.

Haha ... yeah I did have a bash at some theatre work. For people reading who aren’t aware, I should probably explain that I collaborated with you and contributed some text for your recent theatre piece Hey Mathew. And yeah it is definitely something that I would be interested in exploring further. Working on Hey Mathew was without a doubt one of the most exciting creative experiences I had last year. It was cool to be doing something different. And the one of the most exciting things about it wasn’t the fact that I was working on a theatre piece, but more so the idea of collaboration. I was working with different people (in this case yourself and Jonny Liron) on something that you had already set in motion and started birthing. To be able to come in blind halfway through a project was such an enlivening prospect for me. I’ve thought a bit about how writing for this changed what I wrote, and I think the main thing was that I knew that these words would be spoken aloud by someone, and physically heard by people. I know some writers - poets especially - do write their work to be read aloud, but I really don’t. I never really imagine the words I’m writing that’s appearing on the page in front of me to be spoken by someone. Hearing my words read out loud when I came to see the show performed was a total trip, too.


Interesting, T. (I have the exact same exemption for Stars of the Lid, btw!)

We should probably start wrapping this up but your fascinating stuff about writing in order to figure something out prompts a question which will perhaps sound a bit trivial or disconnected but I'm interested to ask it anyway. Which is: do you have ambitions for your writing? Not in terms of who's reading it or how many people like it or whether you end up getting your half hour on Bookworm, but simply in terms of the particular movements of the writing itself. Are there things you're wanting to steer yourself towards trying, say formally or in terms of scale or structure? Things that you really want to work on doing "better"? Or is it again much more like feeling your way, seeing where it goes... I suppose I mean, when you're feeling your way, is it nonetheless towards a target or model of some kind?

I guess partly I'm asking, what do you think we'll see next? (I already can't wait, whatever it is...)

I’m somewhere in the middle of that. I’ve definitely been thinking a lot more about form and structure recently, especially with regards to the novel that I’ve been working on, so hopefully some of that will be in there. I’m just approaching the end of my first draft, so when I finish that, I’m definitely going to re-assess certain things and see what I can do with it in relation to the things I’ve been thinking about working with. But that’s tempered by the fact that I think that in a lot of ways I’m a very instinctive writer. I love the idea of feeling my way through work, feeling out and working out what the work is meant to be, like walking in the dark. I was listening to an album of some improvised noise stuff the other night, and I definitely felt a kinship with that, I had this image of the people composing it trying to get rid of all the space around the music, so they could see something more clearly, you know? So yeah, I’m definitely in the middle of working out where to go with formal stuff and how to use that alongside my love of just going for it in a blur and trusting my natural voice, whatever that might be. I feel like I’m learning a lot about my writing at the moment. In terms of what I’m actually doing next: like I say, I want to get my novel finished and I think that I will in the next couple of months hopefully. I would love to do some more collaboration too; working on the theatre piece sparked something in me that I would like to get to a bit more closely this time – that dialogue with another artist or artists. That seems pretty important at the moment.


Visit Chris Goode's blog and keep up to date with his constantly fascinating work.
Buy HOSPITAL here.

because

meet me
it isn't that much to ask
you know where i'll be
the same place as last time
when you didn't show
i could have been holding you in my arms
i could have been watching you fall asleep
it's because i feel alone
i want unreasonable things
because i know what you're capable of

Few bands make me smile in the same way that The Breeders do.

TM x

Knife Party

It’ll all make sense so I wouldn’t worry

Worrying

And it won’t take long so I wouldn’t

Keeping tapping your watch like that

Keep talking about magazines

I quite like hearing your voice

When you’re speaking about things

That I couldn’t give a shit about

The drone is relaxing

And you sound so desperate

I don’t know what for

Because I think

You missed

The point

Some

Time

Back

Vecterior: new work by Hee Chee Way at the NN Gallery

Anyone following my blog for a while should hopefully be familiar with the work of the artist Hee Chee Way (also known as Urniez). I've featured his excellent work on here a few times before (two or three times I think). Chee is a dear friend of mine, we met when he was studying and working over here in the UK for two years and have stayed in touch since he returned to Malaysia. He's one of the kindest, funnest people I know. But add to that - his work constantly excites and inspires me. It's always changing and progressing rapidly, yet still retains a trademark darkness festering under the surface as well as great beauty. He recently put some new work on display at an exhibtion at the NN Gallery and was generous enough to also let me host it on my humble blog. Here it is - VECTERIOR:

Artist biography

Hee Chee Way

Malaysian born Chee Way won the Malaysian Institute of Art Scholarship in 1999. He has been involved in many types of jobs from food display artist to web designing.

After returning from his 2 years stay in the UK, Chee Way became active in local Malaysian groups like notthatbalai and Findars. During his tenure in the UK, he participated in many Art events. He was received the XFUNSer Award and participated in several reputable Art Societies in UK.

Chee Way expresss himself through new techniques and application of media that he has personally devised.

Exhibition

2008

Kecik-Kecik Group Show Annexe, Kuala Lumpur

Find Art Group Show Annexe, Kuala Lumpur

Out of Line Exhibition Annexe, Kuala Lumpur

2007

notthatbalai Art Festival, Kuala Lumpur

2006 The Young Artist Exhibition KLPAC,Kuala Lumpur

XFUNS exhibition Taiwan

Links

More work by Urniez

COLOURS

I thought that since I'm writing this poem in cyberspace
Rather than drafting it on paper like I sometimes do
I might as well use colours
So I decided every line should be a different colour
I thought that maybe this would make me feel better about life
Because colours are meant to mean something
There is a lot of talk about colours in a novel that I've not yet finished writing
Not that that means the novel is important
Just the colours
Of just that the colours might be
I keep seeing people buying different coloured clothes
And wearing them all at once
It makes me think about whether they're trying to make
Life feel better
And bands these days
All the interesting bands
They all have really interesting colours on their record covers
I think maybe this means colours have come to mean something else
Or that people have finally started realising what colours can do
This poem is a lie
I forgot to tell you
And I'm not allowed to tell you
What it's really about

I thought I'd post a quick update on here about how things have been progressing, because it's a while since posted a personal post about how things are going at home, and a number of people have been asking recently. I am sometimes slightly loathe to do these posts as I worry about being self indulgent or anything like that. But I dunno, a couple of times in the past I think it's done me some good to have a place to scream, albeit into cyberspace where my voice is turned into a million little jpegs. or something like that. But anyway.

Unfortunately things are still rough. This whole thing - since my mother died - has been endless. It feels like I'm still in a very lonely place. I hate writing that because I do have a handful or very close friends who have been helping me a lot, asking about stuff, listening to me etc - the kind of stuff that I probably need at the moment, even though I don't find it an easy thing to do - I usually end up apologizing and convincing myself that I'm moaning or something.

My dad's alcoholisn is still raging strong. Over the last month or so after yet another promise that he hasn't drunk in a while I'd been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes he's rambling, confused, incoherent. I tried to let myself think that that could have just been grief exercising itself in a physical way (I know that can happen because I remember him on the day we went to watch my mother's life support machine turned off, when he could barely talk or move without faltering), and I know that it takes him a lot longer to wake up and get with it if he's been asleep; I mean he's a man fast approaching his 70s. But over the last week I've found bottles hidden all over the place - the garage, drawers, the car. I've woken up at 4:30am hearing noises downstairs to find him wandering round, completely out of it, trying to operate stuff in the kitchen with 24 hour news channels blasting as loud as the TV could. I've tried talking to him endless times. This morning I just said that I barely have the energy at the moment. I told him that I've only recently lost one parent, and that I don't want to have to lose another just yet.

If I here him tell me "I'm ok - I'm ok" (his mantra at the moment - only a bit more slurred) then I'm going to go fucking insane.

I think one of the things that really got me the other day was when I was trying to ask him if he realised how much I've been trying to help him and how much I've been worrying about him and his health, physical and mental. He said he did. I then asked him if he'd been worrying about me in the same way. His answer was that he had worried a lot about my brother, but "Not so much about you - because you've got your head screwed on - you know what you're doing." For whatever reason that made me want to explode. Yes - I know that I'm the most capable in this family in terms of keeping things together and understanding the things that I'm feeling - I've definitely changed in a lot of ways that I think about things and people and learnt a lot of things about life and myself in the last few months, but shit - he just doesn't seem to see that this is hard for me, and I'm still postponing my grieving by worrying about him.

The only things that have kept me going of late are, like I say, a handful of friends who are getting in touch and helping me out when I need, that and my writing - which is the most important thing in my life right now - it was important before but now it's just consuming. My novel is very close to being finished (the first draft anyway - I even have a working title that I'm keeping to myself right now - obviously when the draft is finished there needs to be a ton of editing and revisions, but the pace is getting back to what I would like and I'm feeling positive about it). Also had a couple of really interesting offers pop up about projects to work on that sound really exciting to me.

So that's about it at the moment.

x

New ideas 115

There’s a bang that sounds like a door closing. It’s the first time there’s been no music. I thought it had happened before, but now it has. Someone has closed a door and I feel more alone than I did before. I’m definitely alone. But it’s ok because I’m feeling all this shit that seems to make more sense without other people. If someone else was here it would just make it feel like I have to show evidence of what I’m going through.

I get on my knees and put my face on the bed. My body follows. I get this rush and want it to last. My heart feels electronic, like the beat of some terrible trance music. It’s the repetition that gets me though. It starts sounding like something else when it’s lined up next to a million identical things. I think I hear Alex fiddling around with something in the next room.

I think I fall over again. The water from the street soaks into my jeans, so that they feel heavy. It’s like things keep trying to pull me back onto the floor. Alex stumbles at one point and uses my arm to keep him up and falls into a lamppost, laughing, mainly to himself. The two people arguing are further down the street now. We moved and they stayed still.

Every thought feels like it’s coming from a hollowed out place or a metal tube that echoes like a ghost clinking around inside a glass of water.

New ideas 114

I’m definitely inside.

I think the couple that are arguing have turned and stared at us. One is on the street on the opposite side to us. The other is leaning out of a window shouting down at the other person. I think they’re arguing about love. If she fell I don’t think it would hurt. I worry that if we’re staring at them then we’re staring for too long. They’re angry enough. We walk down to a corner of a street where about three others begin – forward, left, and right.

TREM/BLE
TRE/MBLE
T R E M B L E
TREMB/LE

Alex says something about walking to somebody’s house. It must be someone we know but I still can’t believe that we’re out here so I’m having enough trouble trying to work out that.

New ideas 113

I’m still on the floor in Alex’s bedroom. I think he got up and walked out the room. Either that or he’s behind me. My eyes feel like they’re closing again, and the colours on the wall are all nothing but growing around me.

We’re back in the street and I’m worried that someone is going to talk to us or one of us will fall over and need someone to pick us back up again. I think I do fall over. Sludgy mess from the top of a drain. Tiny pieces of gravel imprinted on my palm. It’s probably raining because it wasn’t earlier.

A hand that it turns out is mine touches the poster that’s been flashing and vibrating so much just outside my eyesight. It feels smooth and cold. The colours move somewhere else while I’m trying to touch them. It feels flat. I turn my hand round and stroke with the back of my hand. It makes the poster feel smoother. I try the wall around the poster. When I was younger I would never have imagined that I’d be in this situation. That doesn’t mean that I think the situation I’m in is important. I’m just saying. I wouldn’t have imagined this.

Alex is shouting. Me too. I think my voice is doing the work for both of us. I feel like I can’t speak. I’m trying to scream but nothing is coming out. Someone has turned the volume down or whatever is in my throat has stopped it working. I think it might be because we’re outside and the cold and the rain have frozen whatever is in my throat. It’s too cold to work properly.

I couldn't hold you long enough

Conservatory
“Did you mean what you said about ... ”
“Yes of course I did.”
“I just don’t know what to ... ”
Hug
“I’ve got to go. And you need to get ready.”
“Yeah.”
“But ... what you sai- ... do you promise?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“I love you.”
Gone
Wake
Tears.

Related notes

I want to know how many ghosts are on the internet
I want to search every single website for my own private
Bag of bones and skulls
I want online burial
If you’re cremated online does that mean your
Ash is made out of bitmap

A snowy day in the park

The scene

Miscellaneous creations

Rather than a snow angel, Krystyna stamped a Snow Totoro into the ground.

A couple of dirty, dishevelled snowmen that we found.

An awesome snow seal!

And this guy. His life was short and tragic.

War

Chums

The record I'm listening to reminds you of things that I wasn't meant to know about

make all of this into a square because i’m begging you

stretch things out so that they fit and i can move pieces

around in the same way to that which i’m hearing at the

moment it seems like it must be the

right thing to be doing

and it’ll look great from a distance this is not meant

to be the same as bitmap just

that i want things to stay this cold because

i’m starting to know this part of you

that you always thought was hidden

Paul's birthday meal

It was my friend Paul's birthday recently, so we went for a meal last weekend. The food was gorgeous, but the service was kinda off. Still had a very nice evening. Although for some reason, my camera didn't like being told what to do that night - hence everything ended looking a bit blurry. Nevertheless ... Late happy birthday to Paul! x

Lux Interior RIP

Winter Rates/DJ Larst (who presents the best online radio show ever i.e. the Skullcrushing Hummingbird) just posted the sad news that Lux Interior, legendary frontman of the even more legendary band The Cramps has died. I had a big Cramps poster on my wall when I was 18. RIP Lux.

The Cramps - Surfin' Bird

The Cramps - Human Fly



The Cramps - I Was a Teenage Werewolf



TM x

New ideas 112

I think about asking Alex whether he and Emma slept with each other. I think about what would happen if I asked it and he answered me. I think about what his answers would make me feel like. Things feel almost in order just for a few seconds. Seconds feel longer so that’s fine. Seconds are just ... There’s this part of me that just feels like a snow globe. I’m sort of calm and level, but the smallest thing makes everything shake and it rains all this confused but beautiful stuff. I guess being confused must be beautiful. It’s just complicated trying to see things properly.

Alex stands and flops back onto the bed so his legs are hanging off the edge. Part of me feels like I just told him how madly in love with Emma I am, even though at the moment it feels clear to me that I’m not. I think I just want to be loved more than anything.

“We should go outside.”

Feels like I’m being guided down the street with Alex. He’s holding my arm with his. We’re like bonds of a chain? Everything is so cold. The street’s swirling. I’m lost in this place completely. I’m sure we walk past an arguing couple, just round the corner from where Alex lives.

I open my eyes. I didn’t realise that they were closed.

You always talk about clues

With most of the things
You can tell what’s underneath
But I’m counting now
And there are at least
A handful – no – more,
A lot more
That I just have no idea.
They’re clumps
And
Heaps
That I can’t identify
Which I’m going to
Take as meaning
That there is nothing
Underneath.
That’s how things grow
Maybe
That’s how things can
Start off
Maybe,
But the box shapes are
So easy that it makes the
Others look
Out of place.

The Girl in the Slayer Jacket

Flicks a cigarette in this way
That shows she’s knows
That she’s being watched.
There’s this feline look and her
Face is rounded (that makes it
Delicate, still engrossing).

Her thumbs fit through
Little holes in her sleeves
That now double as
Fingerless gloves.

Too much or too little makeup
And she’s hugging herself warm,
Feet next to slush.
Orange light and morning
Spreading seamlessly.

Shit, I lost

What is The Game?


The Game is an abstract mental game, the goal of which is for players to forget the existence of The Game itself. Play is continuous, consisting of alternating periods of winning (when you are not thinking about The Game) and losing (when you are). Knowledge of The Game is spread to new players primarily via word-of-mouth, and hence there are many variations (Rules 1, 2 & 3). The Game serves as a succinct example of a meme.

What should I do when I think about The Game?


Whenever you think about The Game, you lose, and must tell as many people as possible. Usually this is done by saying something like "I just lost The Game", although different groups of players have established numerous loss phrases.

In situations where speech is not possible or appropriate, some players have developed non-verbal ways of announcing loss, including sign language either for "game" or simply just "G", tracing the letters in the air, passing notes, or subtle actions that have previously had the intended meaning explained, such as rubbing the head or scratching the nose.

Why should I play The Game?

There is no reward for playing The Game. Like most other games, it poses a challenge that players try to achieve. The various mental associations that result in loss are often of interest to players.

Some players believe that you have no choice to play The Game, as stated by the rules. They would argue that anyone who claims not to play The Game, is playing, but merely breaking Rule 3. Participation in a game requires neither consent to play or awareness of its existence. For example, whoever reads these words wins this example game. You have now won this game even though you were unaware you were playing it.

Is The Game a game?

Although some people would argue otherwise, The Game does fit into most definitions of a game. It involves a number of players trying to achieve an objective; to forget its existence.

How do I win The Game?

Whenever you are not thinking about The Game, you are winning. There is no final victory, although some players add an additional element of competition by keeping score. There are a number of strategies for increasing the loss of others.

Are there any penalties for losing?

The only penalty is having to announce your loss to others. Loss is only temporary, as soon as you stop thinking about The Game you start winning again.

Can I draw The Game?

This can happen if two people think about The Game at the same time. This becomes increasingly common as loss and its various causes become more strongly associated within a group.

Can I cheat?

The only rule that can be broken is Rule 3. Many people choose to break this rule in certain situations, some people never announce their loss.

Why are there 3 rules?

The rules of The Game should be as simple and explainable as possible. The Game could actually be compressed into a single rule:

Whenever you think about this game you have to tell everyone about it.

However, there are three rules for a number of reasons:

Rule 1. You are playing The Game - This emphasises the fact that this is game is played continuously and that (players believe) once you start playing you can't stop.

Rule 2. Whenever you think about The Game, you lose - This emphasises how The Game is played and gives its objective: to forget that it exists.

Rule 3. Loss of The Game must be announced - This emphasises the consequence of loss and is an important part of how The Game is spread.

Any other rules over-complicate The Game or reduce the rate at which it is lost (which is fundamental to the nature of The Game). The majority of additional rules are actually variations of these three rules.

Cliched I know, but I thought that if I didn't fill the 666th post on this blog with some evil black metal music, then I'd probably regret it later on

Burzum - Dunkelheit



Sunn 0))) - Berlin, Volksbühne 2006



Bone Awl - "Lifeless And Perfect" & "Death Creeps"



Katharsis - Eden Below



Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas



Merciless-The Awakening!