the two people above are the members of a musical duo called Lucky Dragons. i saw them play sometime early in 2010 at Auto Italia in Peckham, in South-East London, an art gallery housed in an old car show room. they played in the spacious, dingy back room, the band hunched over equipment on the floor & surrounded by about one hundred youthful bodies who were encircling them with shadows, eager to get in on the action.

after a while i noticed that wires were being passed out from the centre of the room & were stretching into the dark huddle of bodies. the people near the centre were writhing & pressing the wires against themselves, shaking a little in joyful waves & shudders. it was close to evangelism. eventually it dawned on me that everyone holding the wires was actually helping to create the sounds by moving in certain directions.

in fact afterwards i learnt that Lucky Dragons use a computer system which causes sounds to be generated when one person touches the skin of another. so a large part of the ecstasy i observed was the joy to be found in the communion of bodies.

Lucky Dragons don't really sound like any band born before 2005- although their website states that they have been recording and performing for more than ten years now. splicing together many varied sounds, they create weird concoctions which are generally utopian in character, childlike in their gleefulness, clearly urban & computer-generated, yet also intimimately related to folk-art and the natural world.

they use jaggedy electronic noises, slowing & looping & moulding sounds into strange new shapes. often woven into this are acoustic folk elements- banjos & whistles & breathy warm vocal harmonies. they employ tinkly bright melodies which sound as if they have emerged from fragments of remembered 1980s childhoods of cartoons & television programmes.

at the show which i attended last year they first spent a saturday afternoon hosting an edition of their side project Sumi Ink Club- which involves collaborative group drawing sessions. when i arrived at five o'clock the enormous windows at the front of the gallery were entirely covered with black ink drawings which their hipster audience with thick spectacles & exagerrated fringes had been working on for hours. every last inch of glass was host to different tributaries, with long thick drippings & trickles of ink melting from hundreds of strange creatures, odd patterns & lost scenarios.

perhaps they sound like the tropical landscapes of tiny fictional countries. luminous psychedelic food colourings & late night cable TV transmissions may also be apposite points of reference here. it could be argued that they merge together postmodern irony with a certain sensibility of hope & health food shop friendliness.

see what you think:

      
        multi-purpose residential quarters. elegantly furnished. containing new ideas for modern living.

                   have friends over regularly to draw & write messages across the walls!
 

                          hold annual general meetings of a local polygamy club!

         
        encourage a local troupe of delinquents to devise a prolonged series of disruptions!

                 
                     disguise the room as a maze of tunnels & secret compartments!
                                

                 parade around in a pair of maroon-coloured dungarees & play the marimba!

go to sleep with the intention of having a labyrinthine series of dreams about being a bric-a-brac saleswoman!

INSECTS

Going off more towards the west, I saw insects in nine segments with enormous eyes like flies and a body trellised like miners' lamps, others with murmuring antennae; over here some with a score of pairs of paws that were more like clasps; and over there some made of black lacquerwork and mother-of pearl, which were crunching away under their feet like shellfish; others like daddylonglegs high above their paws, with little pin-like eyes as red as those of albino mice, virtually live coals mounted on stems, wearing an expression of unutterable frenzy; others with ivory heads, surprising baldnesses, towards whom one felt suddenly very brotherly and close, whose paws went on ahead of them like connecting rods zigzagging in the air.

Finally there were the transparent ones-- pitchers which were hairy in places; they went forward by the thousands, making a great glassworks, such a show window of light and of sun that after it everything seemed the ashes and end-products of dark night.

HENRI MICHAUX

(1930)


(Translated by Richard Ellmann)







Henri Michaux (1899-1984) was a poet and painter. As a boy he refused to eat for long stretches of time. At the age of 20 he worked as a sailor on a collier bound for South America. He often used icebergs as symbols in his poems. From 1956 onwards he began to experiment with mescalin. Many of his poems are set within imaginary countries where beings called Hacs, Emanglons and Meidosems are resident.
    

                                         (Alice in the Cities, 1974)

Wim Wenders is one of my favourites. I've learnt a lot from him. We share a number of preoccupations, such as the urge to drift in silence across empty spaces for days on end. His films helped me learn how to traverse landscapes.

His characters are permitted delightful liberties. They are allowed to stretch and yawn, to walk slowly down the street, to stare out of windows for long periods. Hurry is unusual.


    (Kings of the Road, 1976)

His people are prone to commence relationships unexpectedly, intuitively. Strangers enjoy each others company and often travel together on important journeys.

I share his love of Cinema and Rock & Roll, of long road trips where very little happens, of the U.S.A being a land of exquisite disappearances.

                                          (The State of Things, 1982)

I'm only interested in one sort of Wenders film and those are the early ones, those made between 1970 and 1987. Preferably they should be shot in black-and-white. His colour films are usually far less compelling. His black-and-white films have a timelessness, a classic quality.

This persistence in continuing to shoot films in monochrome into the 1970s and 80s involves a quiet nostalgia. It is also a major statement of individuality and of sensitivity. These are profound exceptions to the usual fare of the market-place. Today there are very few directors who resemble him at all.

                                         (Wings of Desire, 1987)

In his black-and-white images there is an extraordinary softness. Somehow he suffuses these images with a palpable tenderness. There is a notable absence of aggression. A languorous sensibility prevails, and it feels to me as if the spirit of his characters manages to absorb the textures of the images themselves, so that every last element within each frame is touched with softness, lightness.

this is a photogragh of the person who is writing these words. i'm older than this now- 29 years old in fact. this was taken for some official identificatory purpose about five years ago. at the current time this is one of the very few "recent" photographs of me which is available to anyone.

very few images of me from the previous decade exist. i abandoned photography altogether as a part of my life. in fact i didn't take a single photograph of anyone or anything between 2001 and 2008. i broke that tendency with a photograph of a street in Montmartre, Paris. but since then i've lapsed back into a life without image-making and have barely taken another photograph in the last three years.

                                                               (Montmartre, Paris)

i regret this state of affairs. i wish now that i possessed some kind of photographic record of those vast swathes of time and experience. there is undoubtedly a certain form of solace to be found in the fact that some species of record has been kept of your existence, preserving your life for the sake of the filing cabinets at least.

in fact being caught within the net of photography is potentially one way to become immortal, although photographs are not very adept at breathing or bleeding.

originally i stopped taking photographs because i was wary of the manner in which people so frequently record without thinking, pointing their apparatus at any available surface without ever stopping, even for a moment, to consider what sort of behaviour they are engaged in, and whether it is or is not a worthwhile pursuit.

i now think of my attitude as a somewhat foolish one even if reasonably well-intentioned. the notion that i would exist, within the bounds of Western Civilisation, above and beyond photography, strikes me now as a little lofty and arrogant. photographs are important- that's why most family households in this culture fill extensive collections of albums and hoard them in their living rooms.

initially i embarked upon this as a temporary experiment. i was never sure how long it was going to last for, but wished to discover quite how it would feel to rid myself entirely of images. i was interested in observing the consquences upon me. but i was to discover that you cannot really be a voyeur with regard to your own existence. the sort of detachment which genuine voyeurism requires is not possible when the gaze is turned upon oneself.

                     (Montmartre in "Bob le Flambeur" directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

the paradox here is that i have long been fascinated and obsessed with the domain of images, particularly those of the moving variety. in my late teens and early twenties i watched thousands of films in a great frenzy of viewing. i understood exactly what Susan Sontag was saying in her 1996 essay "The Decay of Cinema":

"Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life."

unfortunately my own devotion ultimately led me into a place of great isolation- perhaps as a direct consequence of the decay of cinema culture which Sontag was lamenting. it took me some years to realise that the experience of watching a film alters greatly depending on the number of people watching in unison. almost every film i watched for years was seen in solitude. and my choice to become an absentee from the realm of still photography was really a part of the outsider stance which i adopted as a consequence of my attitude towards cinema.

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the paintings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust


what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness


SAMUEL BECKETT

aluminium constitutes 8% of the earth's solid surface

aluminium has an atomic weight of 26.9615386

in the mid-19th century, prior to the discovery of the Hall–Héroult process (that happened in 1886) pure aluminium was more valuable than gold because it was so difficult to extract from its various ores.

the staute of Eros in Picadilly Circus, London was the first statue in the world to be cast in aluminium. it was erected in 1893.

powdered aluminium is used in the manufacturing of paint

aluminium can resist corrosion

these men are collecting pots in order to build aeroplanes during World War Two. (U.K., 1940)

these are aluminium igloos, part of The Arctic Hotel in Disko Bay, Greenland. they can accomodate either one person or two people. 

an afternoon thumbing through photographs can resemble a journey around the world.

circumnavigation within a few stretched minutes.

all sights seen.

                 a church in Grytviken, South Georgia. built by Norweigans as a whaling post amidst the South Atlantic seas in 1904, it was a stopover point for Antarctic explorers. Ernest Shackleton is buried here. it remains to this day part of Great Britain- somewhat like The Falkland Islands- although those lie 1,390 miles to the east. no one lives here.

                                         The Day of the Dead, Mexico

                 Hong Kong.                                                                                                                                      

the awful seduction of the order & cleanliness of modernity.

absolute vertical precision. formulae transformed into materials.  

there is perhaps a meditative calmness inherent in the structure of these buildings. a quality which you could claim causes hypnosis, or at the very least passvity of a higher order. the subliminal closing of the mind, the ears, the nose. these buildings barely possess any odour at all.

Oriental Beach, New Zealand (1932)                                                            

                  This man is busy attending a conference in Taiwan (1985). He is from The Netherlands.

Varanasi, India

the oldest city in the world. every Hindu is supposed to be buried here. they are burnt & scattered in the Ganges, a few metres away from people washing themselves & their clothes & cows & motorcycles in the waters of the river. young men are always playing cricket along the riverbanks during the daytime. 

i stayed here 10 years ago. that was in a guesthouse run by a tall skeletal man with no teeth who spent each day lying down in a tiny darkened room continuously breaking into violent fits of coughing. he attempted to appropriate as many of my possessions as he could when i was trying to leave his domain. when the water gushed out from the taps in the rooms it would present itself in a dark brown colour & then perhaps stop altogether for a while.

there were power cuts every night and when this happened all of the shops in the narrow alleyways were lit by oil lamps & candles. 

Seikan Railway Tunnel, Japan

i like journeys to strange places.

                         don't know (quite) where this will lead

in this location you will discover:
                                  jottings & musings
                                  nonsensical outbursts
                                  sober postulations
           
             apertures thru which you can peer into my skull


also to be found in here:

                                         opinions based on worthless abstractions
                                scattered piles of seashells & postcards
                                             rusted ephemera
                                   conjunctions of disparate schemas
        
ah yes.
in time this may become a tottering pyramid of memories & speculations.

                             there will be regular bulletins here for a while.