Inspiration

HELLO MY DEAR FRIEND. →15 contributors, 90 pages.

ALEX MICHAEL Funes the Memorious DAN BASSETT Wenger calls Mourinho “stupid” EUGENE NOBLE Without people you’re nothing FLORENCE MOON Stoner (An extract from page 40) HENRIK HJORTH AUSTED Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death JAI VELLALA WILSON Lisa Jones, girlfriend of undercover policemen Mark Kennedy: ‘I thought I knew him better than anyone’ JOSH EPSTEIN-RICHARDS Don’t LAUREN MACCABEE Helsinki Bus Station Theory MARIA KILLICK La Belle Dame Sans Merci REECE WYKES Balance RUFUS NEWELL The All Blacks HAKA SAM BOXER Vision, Interrupted TILLY SLEVEN On the Difference between a Work and a Project TOMMY SPITTERS Big Sur (Chapter 38) WILLIAM LYALL “Inga’s” was the only opinion that mattered”

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INTRODUCTION 8 —15

ALEX MICHAEL Funes the Memorious Written by Jorge Luis Borges 16 -17

DAN BASSETT Wenger calls Mourinho “stupid” A quote by Arsène Wenger 18-19

EUGENE NOBLE Without people you’re nothing A statement by Joe Strummer 20-21

FLORENCE MOON Stoner (An extract from page 40) Written by John Williams 22-37

HENRIK HJORTH AUSTED Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death Written by Douglas Coupland 38- 47

JAI VELLALA WILSON Lisa Jones, girlfriend of undercover policemen Mark Kennedy: ‘I thought I knew him better than anyone’ Written by Rob Evans 48- 49

JOSH EPSTEIN-RICHARDS Don’t Poem by Michael Ronen 2

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LAUREN MACCABEE Helsinki Bus Station Theory Written by Oliver Burkeman 54- 57

MARIA KILLICK La Belle Dame Sans Merci Written by John Keats 58-59

REECE WYKES Balance Lyrics from the band Future Islands 60-63

RUFUS NEWELL The All Blacks HAKA Composed by Te Rauparaha 64-71

SAM BOXER Vision, Interrupted Written by Ryan Gerald Nelson 75-75

TILLY SLEVEN On the Difference between a Work and a Project Written by Paul Chan 76- 81

TOMMY SPITTERS Big Sur (Chapter 38) Written by Jack Kerouac 82-89

WILLIAM LYALL “Inga’s” was the only opinion that mattered” An audience with the elusive Dean Blunt 3

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INTRODUCTION

This is the first issue in a creative writing series; a selection of young artists and designers have been challenged with my strange request of sending me a piece of writing that has inspired them; subsequently in this series you have Essays, Articles, Extracts and Lyrics.

Inspirational and stimulating these fifteen essays invite you the reader to an insight into the minds of these creatives.

Swerve your mind away from the concerns of everyday for a brief interval of simple and enjoyable reading.

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ALEX MICHAEL

Funes the Memorious The tale of one Ireneo Funes, who after falling off his horse acquired the amazing talent, or curse of remembering absolutely everything.

→Written by Jorge Luis Borges

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I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, tough he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime. I remember him, with his face taciturn and Indian-like and singularly remote behind the cigarette. I remember (I think) his angular, leather braiding hands.

I remember near those hands a mate gourd bearing the Uruguayan coat of arms; I remember a yellow screen with a vague lake landscape in the window of his house. I clearly remember his Voice: the slow, resentful, nasal voice of the old time dweller of the suburbs with out the Italian sibilants we have today. I never saw him more than three times; the last was in 1887 I find it very satisfactory that all those who knew him should write about him; my testimony will perhaps be the shortest and no doubt the poorest, but not the most impartial in the volume you will edit. My deplorable status as an Argentine will prevent me from indulging in a dithyramb, an obligatory genre in Uruguay whenever the subject is an Uruguayan. Highbrow, city slicker, dude: Funes never spoke these injurious words, but I am sufficiently certain I represented for him those misfortunes. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the supermen, “a vernacular and rustic Zarathustra” I shall not debate the point, but one should not forget that he was also a kid from Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.

My first memory of Funes is very perspicuous. I can see him on an afternoon in March or February of the year 1884 my father that year had taken me to spend the summer in Fray Bentos. I was returning from the San Francisco ranch with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We were singing as we rode along and being on horseback was not the only circumstance determining my happiness. After a sultry day, an enormous slate colored storm had hidden the sky. It was urged on by a southern wind, the trees were already going wild; I was afraid (I was hopeful) that the elemental rain would take us by surprise in the open. We were running a kind of race with the storm. We entered an alleyway that sank down between two very high brick sidewalks. It had suddenly got dark; I heard some rapid and almost secret footsteps up above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow and broken path as if it were a narrow and broken wall. I remember his baggy gaucho trousers, his rope-soled shoes, I remember the cigarette in his hard face, against the now limitless storm cloud. Bernardo cried to him unexpectedly: “What time is it, Ireneo?” Without consulting the sky, without stopping, he replied: “It’s fourminutes to eight young Bernardo Juan Francisco.” His voice was sharp, mocking.

I am so unperceptive that the dialogue I have just related would not have attracted my attention had it not been stressed by my cousin who (I believe) was prompted by a certain local pride and the desire to show that he was indifferent to the other’s tripartite reply.

He told me the fellow in the alleyway was one Ireneo Funes known for certain peculiarities such as avoiding contact with people and always knowing what time it was, like a clock. He added that he was

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the son of the ironing woman in town, Marla Clementina Funes, and that some people said his father was a doctor at the meat packers, an Englishman by the name of O’Connor, and others that he was a horse tamer or scout from the SaIto district. He lived with his mother, around the corner from the Laure1es house.

During the years eighty-five and eighty-six we spent the summer in Montevideo. In eighty-seven I returned to Fray Bentos. I asked, as was natural, about all my acquaintances and, finally, about the “chronometrical” Funes. I was told he had been thrown by a half tamed horse on the San Francisco ranch and was left hopelessly paralyzed. I remember the sensation of uneasy magic the news produced in me: the only time I had seen him, we were returning from San Francisco on horseback and he was running along a high place; this fact told me by my cousin Bernardo had much of the quality of a dream made up of previous elements. I was told he never moved from his cot, with his eyes fixed on the fig tree in the back or on a spider web. In the afternoons, he would let himself be brought out to the window. He carried his pride to the point of acting as if the blow that had felled him were beneficial Twice I saw him behind the iron grating of the window, which harshly emphasized his condition as a perpetual prisoner: once motionless with his eyes closed; another time again motionless, absorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant sprig of santonica.

Not without a certain vaingloriousness, I had begun at that time my methodical study of Latin. My valise contained De viris illustribus of Lhomond, Quicherat’s Thesaurus the commentaries of Julius Caesar and an odd volume of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, which then exceeded (and still exceeds) my moderate virtues as a Latinist. Everything becomes public in a small town; lrenee, in his house on the outskirts did not take long to learn of the arrival of these anomalous books. He sent me a flowery and ceremonious letter in which he recalled our encounter, unfortu­nately brief, “on the seventh day of February of the year 1884,” praised the glorious services my uncle Gregorio Haedo, deceased that same year, had rendered to our two nations in the valiant battle of ltuzaing” and requested the loan of anyone of my volumes, accompanied by a dictionary “for the proper intelligence o f the original text, for I am as yet ignorant of Latin.” He promised to return them to me in good condition, almost immediately. His handwriting was perfect, very sharply outlined; his orthography, of the type favored

by Andres Bello: i for y, i for g. At first I naturally feared a joke. My cousins assured me that was not the case, that these were peculiarities of lreneo. I did not know whether to attribute to insolence, ignorance or stupidity the idea that the arduous Latin tongue should require no other instrument than a dictionary; to disillusion him fully, I sent him the Gradus ad Pamassum of Quicherat and the work by Pliny.

On the fourteenth of February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires saying I should return immediately, because my father was “not at all well.” May God forgive me; the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all Fray Bentos

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the contradiction between the negative form of the message and the peremptory adverb the temptation to dramatize my suffering affecting a virile stoicism, perhaps distracted me from all possibility of real sorrow. When I packed my valise, I noticed the Gradus and the first volume of the Naturalis historia were missing. The Saturn was sailing the next day, in the morning; that night, after supper, I headed toward Funes’ house. I was astonished to find the evening no less oppressive than the day had been.

At the respectable little house, Funes’ mother opened the door frame. She told me Ireneo was in the back room and I should not be surprised to find him in the dark, because he knew how to pass the idle hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the tile patio, the little passageway; I reached the second patio. There was a grape arbor; the darkness seemed complete to me. I suddenly heard Ireneo’s high pitched, mocking voice. His voice was speaking in Latin; his voice which came from the darkness was articulating with morose delight a speech or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my fear took them to be indecipherable and intenninable; afterward, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned they formed the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Naturalis historia. The subject of that chapter is memory; the last words were ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum. Without the slightest change of voice, Ireneo told me to come in. He was on his cot, smoking. It seems to me I did not see his face until dawn; I believe I recall the intermittent glow of his cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down; I repeated the story about the telegram and my father’s illness. I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (It is well the reader know it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place” half a century ago.

One shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable.

I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me.

The indirect style is remote and weak; I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night.

Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and in Spanish the cases of prodigious memory recorded in the Naturalis historia: Cyrus, king of the Persians who could can every soldier in his armies by name Mithridates Eupator, who administered the law in the twentytwo languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of the Science of mnemonics; Metrodorus, who practiced the art of faithfully repeating what he had heard only once. In obvious good faith, lreneo was amazed that such cases be considered amazing. He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue-gray horse threw him, he had been what all humans are blind, deaf, addlebrained, absent-minded. (I tried to remind him of his exact perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious;

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when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was paralyzed. The fact scarcely interested him.

He reasoned (he felt) that his immobility was a minimum price to pay.

Now his perception and his memory were infallible.

We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations thermal sensations.

He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: “I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.” And again: “My dreams are like you people’s waking hours. H and again, toward dawn: “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don’t know how many stars he could see in the sky.

These things he told me; neither then nor later have I ever placed them in doubt. In those days there were no cinemas or phonographs; nevertheless, it is odd and even incredible that no one ever performed an experiment with Funes. The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Out of the darkness, Funes’ voice went on talking to me. He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark.

He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers.

In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated. I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers. I told him that saying 365 meant saying three hundreds, six tens, five ones, an analysis which is not

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found in the “numbers” The Negro Timoteo or meat blanket. Funes did not understand me or refused to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone each bird and each branch, would have its own name; Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous. In fact Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood but also everyone of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories which would then be defined by means of ciphers. He was dissuaded from this by two considerations: his awareness that the task was interminable, his awareness that it was useless. He thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) .are senseless, but they betray a certain stammering grandeur. They permit us to glimpse or infer the nature of Funes’ vertiginous world. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. Babylon, London and New York have overwhelmed with their ferocious splendor the imaginations of men; no one, in their populous towers or their urgent avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo, in his poor South American suburb. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows could imagine every crevice and every molding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.) Towards the east, along a stretch not yet divided into blocks, there were new houses unknown to Funes. He imagined them to be black, compact made of, homogeneous darkness; in that direction he would tum his face in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, rocked and annihilated by the current. With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget

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HE WAS NOT VERY CAPABLE OF THOUGHT. TO THINK IS TO FORGET DIFFERENCES, GENERALIZE, MAKE ABSTRACTIONS.

differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

The wary light of dawn entered the earthen patio. Then I saw the face belonging to the voice that had spoken all night long. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868; he seemed to me as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I thought that each of my words that each of my movements would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.

Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs.

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DAN BASSETT

Arsène Wenger VS Jose Mourinho Wenger calls Mourinho “stupid” (November 2005)

→A quote by Arsène Wenger

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“He’s out of order, disconnected with reality and disrespectful.

When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid and not more intelligent.”

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EUGENE NOBLE

Without people you’re nothing.

I had it written on the back of my guitar as a kid, and it still makes me weep with happiness for humankind”

→A statement by Joe Strummer

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I’d like to say, people can change anything they want. That means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks, I am one of them. But we’ve all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything this is something that I’m beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That’s because they’ve been dehumanised. It’s time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time, you now think on that, without people your nothing.”

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FLORENCE MOON

Stoner (An extract from page 40 in the novel by the American writer John Williams)

→Written by John Williams

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A premature sense of loss gripped him, and he turned away. His thoughts were much upon death that summer of 1918. The death of Masters had shocked him more than he wished to admit; and the first American casualty lists from Europe were beginning to be released. When he had thought of death before, he had though of it either as a literary event or as the slow attrition if time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion if violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat.

He wondered at the difference between the two kinds of dying and what the difference meant; and he found growing in him some of that bitterness he had glimpsed once in the living heart of his friend David Masters.

His dissertation topic had been ‘The Influence of the Classical a Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric.’ He spent much of the summer rereading classical and Medieval Latin poets and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again, at the easy graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror and the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.

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HENRIK HJORTH AUSTED

Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death

→Written by Douglas Coupland

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One of comedian George Carlin’s (1937–2008) seminal monologues was his 1986 riff on stuff: “That’s all the meaning of life is: trying to find a place to put your stuff. That’s all your house is, is a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” And to paraphrase: “Someone else’s stuff is actually shit, whereas your own shit isn’t shit at all, it’s stuff.” I’m made aware of this every time family members visit my house and see the art I collect. I see those very words etched onto their retinas, and I can imagine the conversations they’re having in the car driving away: “Do you think maybe all that art stuff he collects is a cry for help?”

Fig. 1

“That art stuff of his? It’s not stuff; it’s shit.”

“But it’s art shit. I think it might be worth something.

It’s the art world. They have no rules. They can turn a piece of air into a million dollars if they want to.”

“So, maybe it’s not shit after all.”

“Nah. Let’s not get too cosmic. It’s shit. Art shit.”

Ahhh, families.

In April I wrote about links between hoarding and collecting in the FT Weekend magazine. The piece recoded art collecting and art fair behavior as possibly being subdued forms of hoarding.

Basically where does collecting end and hoarding begin? One thing the piece didn’t ask was: What are the clinical roots of obsessive hoarding? (Which is now a recognized condition in the DSM-5.) One thing psychologists agree on is that hoarding is grounded in deep loss. First there needs to be a preexisting hoarding proclivity (not uncommon with our hunter gatherer heritage.) If someone with a proclivity experiences a quick and catastrophic loss, often the death of a close relative frequently in car accidents, one need wait approximately eighteen to twenty four months before hoarding kicks in. Reality TV shows on hoarding (A&E’s Hoarders; TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive) would have us believe that given dozens of helpers and a trained therapist, hoarders are often cured by the end of the TV episode.

The truth, though is that there’s really no cure for hoarding. Once it’s there, it’s pretty much there to stay.

On these same TV shows, a voiceover regularly tells us that hoarding behavior is unsanitary and unsafe. This is correct. A few years back, a family friend—a big-game taxidermist who ended up making more money renting out mounted animals to TV and film shoots than he did with his trade—was killed in an electrical fire that began in his basement. He ran into his basement trying to put it out, got trapped, and quickly died of smoke inhalation. His retail storefront had always been immensely dense with hides, heads, and antlers. Nobody was surprised to learn his house had been equally as dense, but it was odd to think of his pack ratting as being possibly medical.

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Fig. 1 Duane Hanson, Supermarket Lady, 1969–70.

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One of the borderline ghoulish (and best) parts of watching TV shows about hoarding is seeing the expressions on the faces of hoarders once they realize that the intervention is for real. Your relatives are everywhere poking out from behind mounds of pizza boxes and mildewed second hand Raggedy Ann dolls. There’s a huge empty blue skiff in the driveway waiting to feast on all of your stuff, and it’s surrounded by a dozen gym-toned refuse movers. There’s a blond woman who looks like J K Rowling (1965 ) asking you how you feel about an oil-stained Velveeta box you ate on the morning the Challenger exploded.

This is actually happening to me, everyone is watching me.

Until then it’s usually quite friendly, and in some cases hours can pass, and some deaccessioning progress is made, but then comes something usually something utterly useless (Jif peanut butter jar, circa 1988, contents used but jar not cleaned or rinsed) and the hoarder chokes—it’s in the eyes: a) I may need that jar at some point down the road, and b) This intervention is over. From there it’s only a matter of how much of a meltdown it’s going to be, and how ornery the hoarder needs to be to eject everyone from his or her house.

Needless to say, one feels a tingle of superiority knowing that one would never ever have one’s inner life come to a grinding halt over throwing out a twenty-seven-year-old unrinsed jar of peanut butter. But if it wasn’t that jar of Jif, what would it be that made someone you choke? Losing the nineteenth-century rocking chair? That small David Salle canvas? And wait, how did a jar of Jif ever become the shorthand for life and its losses? Is that what the Brillo boxes were all about? How does a Christie’s evening postwar contemporary art sale become a magic-wanding spectacle where, instead of peanut butter jars bits of wood and paint are converted from shit into stuff? How do objects triumph and become surrogates for life?

I think it was Bruno Bischofberger who said that the problem with the way Andy Warhol (1928–1987) collected art was that he always went for lots of medium-good stuff instead of getting the one or two truly good works. Warhol (the hoarder’s hoarder) would probably have agreed, but I doubt this insight would have affected his accumulation strategies. A publisher I worked with in the 1990s has a living room wall twelve deep with Gerhard Richter (1932– ) canvases. God knows how many he has now, but however many it is, it will never be enough.

A few years back I visited a friend of a friend in Portland with a pretty amazing collection of post-1960 American work. He went to the kitchen, and when he came back he saw me staring into the center of a really good crushed John Chamberlain (1927–2011).

“What are you staring at?”

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“The dust.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inside this piece, there’s no dust on the outside bits, but it’s really thick in the middle.”

He looked. “I think that’s as far in as the housekeeper’s arms can reach.”

“Your housekeeper Windexes your art?”

I saw his face collapse. Thousands of dollars later I believe the piece was professionally cleaned with carbon tetrachloride drycleaning solution at immense cost. It reminded me of reading about Leo Castelli (1907–1999), who wasn’t allowed to have regular housekeeping staff in his apartment. In order to keep his insurance he had to have MFA students work as his housekeepers.

I wonder if they’re now making MFA Roombas.

I think it’s perhaps also important to note that most curators almost never collect anything—yes, all those magazine spreads with the large empty white apartments—and if you ever ask a minimalist curator what they collect, they often make that pained face which is actually quite similar to the Jif jar lover upon the moment of possible surrender. But you don’t understand, I have no choice in this matter. You merely see an empty apartment, but for me this apartment is full of nothingness. That’s correct: I hoard space. A friend of mine is a manufacturer and seller of modernist furniture. Five years ago he built a new showroom, and he was so in love with how empty it was, he kept it unused for a year as a private meditation space.

Most writers I’ve met, especially during the embryonic phase of writing a novel, stop reading other writers’ books because it’s so easy for someone else’s style to osmotically leak into your own. I wonder if that’s why curators are so often minimalists: there’s nothing to leak into maintain a supernatural power to be part of the process that turns air into millions of dollars. On the other hand, most art dealers are deeply into all forms of collecting, as if our world is just a perpetual Wild West of shopping. I once visited a collector specializing in nineteenth-century North American West Coast works who had an almost parodically dull house in a suburb at what he called “street level.” But beneath this boring tract home were, at the very least, thousands of works arranged as though in a natural history museum.

Designer Jonathan Adler says your house should be an antidepressant. I agree. And so does the art world. When a curator comes home and finds nothingness, they get a minimalist high. When a dealer comes home and finds five Ellsworth Kellys leaning against a wall, they’re also high in much the same way. Wikipedia tells us that “hoarding behavior is often severe because hoarders do not recognize it as a problem. It is much 24

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 2 Klaus Biesenbach poses for German GQ in his New York apartment.

Photo: Floto + Warner.

Fig. 3 Andy Warhol shops at Gristedes supermarket near his 47th street Silver Factory in New York City in 1965. Photo: Bob Adelman/ Magnum Photos

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harder for behavioral therapy to successfully treat compulsive hoarders with poor insight about the disorder.” Art collectors, on the other hand are seen as admirable and sexy. There’s little chance of them seeing themselves as in need of an intervention.

Perhaps the art collecting equivalent of voluntarily getting rid of the Jif jar is flipping a few works.

I have a friend named Larry who collects beer cans, but his wife has a dictum: no beer cans may cross the doorsill of his collecting room. Larry then made a beer can holder that attaches itself to any surface, ceilings included. He then patented his holder and started selling them commercially. His is a capitalism feel-good story which highlights another dark side of hoarding and collecting: our failures and successes in regards to how we accumulate things are viewed almost entirely through a capitalist lens. How much did you get for it? I’m uncertain what Marx said about art collectors (if anything), but it probably wasn’t kind.

Some people collect art that’s purely political or purely conflict based, or highly pedigreed by theory but I wonder if they’re just trying to sidestep out of the spotlight of the art economy’s vulgarity. But wait did they magically win their collection in a card game? Did their collection arrive for free at their doorstep from Santa Claus? No it had to be purchased with money, and it’s at this level where the dance between academia, museums, and collectors turns into a beyond awkward junior high school prom.

I tried explaining a Tom Friedman work to my brother. Its title is A Curse, and the work consists of a plinth over which a witch has placed a curse. I told my brother it might easily be worth a million dollars, whereupon his eyes became the collective eyes of the Paris Commune, aching to sharpen the guillotine’s blades and then invade, conquer, and slay Frieze.

The collecting of stuff—slightly out-of-the-ordinary stuff—is different now than it was in the twentieth century. eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy have gutted thrift and antique stores across North America of all their good stuff, and in Paris the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen is but a shadow of its former self. eBay itself, once groaning with low-hanging fruit being sold by the clueless, is now a suburban shopping center with the occasional semi-okay vintage thingy still floating around. This same sense of sparseness is felt in the museum world where the slashing of programming budgets remains the norm. In addition, too much globalized money and not enough places to stash it has made pretty much anything that is genuinely good far too pricey for the 99 percent. The good stuff is always gone and all the stuff that’s left is shit. You don’t stand a chance against moneyed, technologically advanced collectors who have some magic software that allows them to buy that Jean Prouvé stool threemillionths of a second ahead of you. Thank you, internet.

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Fig. 4

On YouTube, you’ll find anti-hoarding videos that coach over collectors to get rid of any object that doesn’t bring them joy. But perhaps this is contrary to human nature. In Australia last month I asked if I could visit that secret stone alcove where the last three remaining specimens of the world’s rarest tree are kept hidden.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I want to get one before someone else gets it.”

That’s human collecting behavior.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a way to collect stuff without tapping into collecting’s dark, hoardy side. I got to thinking that if visual art is largely about space, then writing is largely about time, so then maybe people collect books differently than they do art.

Do they?

No, they don’t. Book hoarding tends to be just as intense as art hoarding, if not worse. It’s called “bibliomania,” and like generic hoarding, it is a recognized psychological problem. Enter Wikipedia once again: “Bibliomania is a disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. It is one of several psychological disorders associated with books, such as ‘bibliophagy’ (book eating) or ‘bibliokleptomania’ (book thievery.)”

Bibliomania, though, is almost universally viewed as quirky and cute, the way “kunstmania” (my coinage) is seen as glamorous and cool in a Bond villain kind of way. Oh those booksellers sure are nutty! And they are nutty—pretty much all bookstore owners recognize that the profession brings with it a unique form of squirreliness. The best booksellers, the antiquarian sellers especially, are those sellers who genuinely don’t actually want to sell you the book. You have to audition for its ownership, and should they sell you the book, you can see the pain on their face as the cash machine bleeps.

I once worked weekends in a bookstore. There was this guy who’d been coming in for years and all the other sellers made cooing noises whenever he showed up for three hours every Sunday for some passionate browsing. “Now there’s someone who really loves books a real book lover.” And then one Sunday afternoon a New York Times Atlas fell out of his raincoat as he was exiting the store. Police later found thousands of stolen books in this bibliokleptomaniac’s apartment.

Fig. 5

As for bibliophagy, I chuckled when I learned of the term while writing this and then was chilled when I realized I’m a bibliophagist myself. Back in the early 2000s, my then agent, Eric 27

in New York, was one of the first people I knew to overharvest music into an iTunes playlist. In 2002 it seemed amazing that a person could have 1.92 days (!) of music on their playlist. These days it’s not uncommon to find people with almost a solid year’s worth of playlisted music, if not far more.

In high school everybody used plastic Dairyland milk crates to store their records. They were just the right size for 33 1/3 LPs, and Dairyland was able to have their logo inside everyone’s house in the most wonderful way—attached to the music loved by the owner. And then Dairyland changed the dimensions of the crates so that they’d no longer hold vinyl. I’m still mad at them, not because I wanted crates for myself (I’ve never been a big vinyl aficionado), but rather because they took such a major plus and turned it into a big minus. Idiots. Vinyl collectors are among the most reverent of all collecting communities. Those milk crates would have lasted peoples’ entire lives. Music is weird because it’s not really space, but it’s not quite time either. This got me thinking that okay, yes, visual art is mostly about space, whereas writing is largely about time. But what would a hybrid time/space creative form be? The answer is: film. Do people hoard film?

Actually, they do. My sister-in-law’s cousin is a movie hoarder who has possibly millions of hours of torrented movies snoozing on his hard drives, movies he could never watch in ten lifetimes.

“Don, let me get this straight: You speak no German and yet you have five German-language screening versions of Sister Act Two starring Whoopi Goldberg?”.

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

I think the human relationship with time perception has altered quite a bit since 2000, and film seems to be one venue where this is fully evidenced. The internet has a tendency to shred attention spans while it fire-hoses insane amounts of film on humanity, making film hoarding as easy as newspaper hoarding was back in the 1950s. Even easier.

In the art world, our collectively morphing sense of time perception became truly noticeable back in 2010 with The Clock

by Christian Marclay, which in many peoples’ minds deserved the Best Picture Oscar for that year. At the 2015 Oscars, the only two real contenders for Best Picture were Boyhood by Richard Linklater (1960) and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) by Alejandro González Iñárritu (1963–). In both films the star was, as Linklater put it, time. In Boyhood we saw the magic of a dozen years of continuous time. In Birdman we saw the magic of one continuous take. As a species we seem to have now fetishized continuity. We’re nostalgic for real time’s flow, and we hoard movies and videos and GIFs and clips and anything 28

Fig. 6

else that moves and has sound, knowing it’s never ever going to be touched. In a weird way, it’s like the minimalist apartment of, say, curator Klaus Biesenbach, where no objects are visible and what is present is virtual in the case of Biesenbach, ideas; in the case of my sister-in-law’s cousin Don, twenty-nine million hours of crap film.

In Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones learns of an alien technology and says, “Great. Now I’m going to have to buy The White Album again.” In my case, it’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I’ve now bought twice on vinyl once on cassette, once on CD, and twice on iTunes. There’s surely some geek in California dreaming up some new way of making me buy it all over again. By now don’t I get some kind of metadata tag attached to me saying, “This guy’s already paid his dues on this one”? Other than actually dying, there is one thing that genuinely stops hoarding: the than atophobia one feels at the thought of death approaching.

One is forced to contemplate what will be written on one’s gravestone: born accumulated a bunch of cool stuff died This epitaph isn’t creepy, it’s just boring. So how do you manipulate your loot meaningfully while the clock ticks and ticks and ticks? With artists, dealing with stuff at the end of life becomes complicated. I find it interesting that, say, Constantin Brâncuşi (1876–1957) didn’t want to sell his work in his final years. He could afford not to, and he wanted to be surrounded by his own stuff. He wanted to live inside it, and it’s no coincidence that when he died he wanted his studio kept frozen in time at that moment.

Reece Mews, the studio of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), with its tens of thousands of paint tubes, was the world’s most glamorous toxic heavy metals waste dump. And one can’t help but wonder about Andy Warhol, with his townhouse stuffed with unopened bags of candy, cookie jars, jewels, and Duane Reade concealer.

Did he ever open up the doors of the rooms in his townhouse once they were full? Did he stop and stare at the doors, shiver, and then walk away?

In December of 2013 I saw a magnificent show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, “Turner, Monet Twombly: Later Paintings.” It featured works done in the final decade of the lives of John Turner (1873 –1938), Claude Monet (1840–1926), and Cy Twombly (1928–2011). To quote the museum’s website the show focused on these artists’ “later work, examining not only the art historical links and affinities between them, but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style.”

29

Fig. 4 An example of religious hoarding, The Chapel of Bones, Alcantarilha, in Portugal, is ornamented with more than 1,500 human skeletons, the only exception being a sculpture with the figure of a crucified Christ dated from the 16th century.

Fig. 5 Douglas Coupland, School Spirit, 2006. Each hornet’s nest form is made from one French-language and one English-language copy of the Douglas Coupland/ Pierre Huyghe collaborative book School Spirit (Editions Disvoir, 2005) that has been chewed by Coupland. Center: Douglas Coupland (1961– ), The Soviet Union, 2014.

Hornet and wasps nests with branches cryogenically frozen for forty-eight hours and then bound together with stovewire Right:Douglas Coupland (1961– ), Generation X, 2005. Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X, chewed up

by Coupland and spun into a hornets nest form.

30

The paintings in the show were remarkable in and of themselves, yet what they collectively foregrounded was a sense of whiteness, a sense of glowing — an undeniable sense of the light that comes at the end of the tunnel. Overt content became less important and the act of cognitive disassociation from the everyday world was very palpable. As the museum catalog further states, “Their late work has a looseness and an intensity that comes from the confidence of age when notions of finish and completion are modified.” A delicate method of phrasing things.

The works at the Museet depicted in their way anti-hoarding a surrendering of life’s material trappings. It was a liberating show that gave the viewer peace. It let you know that maybe you should let go of many things in your life before it’s nearly over when suddenly your stuff isn’t as important as it was cracked up to be. (If you ask anyone over fifty what they’d rather have more of, time or money, they’ll almost always say time.)

An obvious question here at the end: Is it that art super collectors as well as bibliomaniacs, have experienced losses of a scope so great that they defy processing? Are these collectors merely sublimating misfiring grief via over collecting? A reasonable enough question, but why limit it to collecting art or books? People collect anything and everything. And look at Darwin. Back in the days of caves, if someone close to you died or got killed, chances are your life was going to be much more difficult for the foreseeable future, so you’d better start gathering as many roots and berries as you can. Collecting as a response to sudden loss makes total sense. But also back then if you somehow lived to thirty-five, you were the grand old man or dame of the cave, with very little time left on the clock. Divvying up your arrowheads and pelts made a lot of sense—and you best do it before your cave mate descendants plop you onto an iceberg and send you out into the floes.

Fig. 7

I get the impression that collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and deaccessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)

Maybe collecting isn’t a sickness, and maybe hoarding is actually a valid impulse that, when viewed differently might be fixable through redirection tactics. Humanity must be doing something right because we’re still here which means there’s obviously a sensible way to collect berries and roots; there’s probably also a sensible way to collect art and books (and owl figurines and unicycles and dildos and Beanie Babies) The people who freak me out the most are the people who don’t collect anything at all. Huh? I don’t mean minimalists. I mean people who simply don’t collect anything. You go to their houses or apartments and they have furniture and so forth but there’s 31

nothing visible in aggregate: no bookshelves, no wall of framed family photos. There’s just one of everything. It’s shocking.

“You mean you don’t collect anything?”

“No.” “There must be something. Sugar packets? Hotel soaps?

Fridge magnets? Pipe cleaners?”

“No.” “… Internet porn? Kitten videos?”

“No.” “What the hell is wrong with you!”

“What do you mean?”

“If this was ten thousand years ago and we all lived in a cave you’d be an absolutely terrible cave mate. You’d be useless at foraging for roots and berries, and if you went hunting you’d only have one arrowhead, so if you lost it, you’d starve.”

“Where is this coming from, Doug?”

“Forget it. Let’s go gallery hopping right now.”

X

32

Fig. 6 In Hoarding: Behind Closed Doors, Disney Claire poses by her collection of Disney toys.

Fig. 7 Karsten Bott, One of Each, 1993, Installation at the Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz, Austria, 1993, 10 x 30 m.

33

JAI VELLALA WILSON

‘I thought I knew him better than anyone’ Lisa Jones, girlfriend of undercover policemen Mark Kennedy.

→Written by Rob Evans

34

The most traumatising time of Lisa Jones’s life began when she agonised for months over the true identity of her boyfriend.

They had been together for six years and she loved him “totally, completely and more than anyone”.

“He was the closest person in the world to me,” she says. “The person who knew me better than anybody else. I thought I knew him better than anyone else knew him.” But she had begun to suspect that he was lying about who he really was.

This is the first interview “Lisa”, who wants to retain her anonymity, has given to the media. Only now, five years later, does she feel ready to describe how she has been devastated by the deception. She speaks eloquently, though the pain is still evident. Her boyfriend, Mark, always had a slightly mysterious side to him. In their last few months together his behavior was, at times, erratic; but at other times, their relationship was blissful.

In what she describes as a “constant see-saw from one state to another”, she oscillated between “desperately” wanting to believe the story he had told her about himself, and wondering whether he had completely deceived her about a fundamental part of his life. Reduced to a “very fragile” state, she struggled with her dilemma: Fig. 9

The truth was not disclosed to her by him. Alternatively she and her friends found out through their own detective work and a chance discovery.

They established that he was Mark Kennedy, an undercover policeman who had been sent to spy on her circle of activist friends. For seven years, he had adopted a fake persona to infiltrate environmental groups. Their unmasking of him five years ago kickstarted a chain of events that has exposed one of the state’s most deeply concealed secrets. Back then the public knew little about a covert operation that had been running since 1968. Only a limited number of senior police officers knew about it. Kennedy was one of more than 100 undercover officers who over the previous four decades, had transformed themselves into fake campaigners for years at a time, assimilating themselves into political groups and hoovering up information about protests that they had helped to organise. More than10 women have discovered that they had relationships with undercover policemen, some lasting years, without being told their true identity. On Friday it was announced that police had agreed to give a full apology and pay compensation to Lisa and six other women for the trauma they suffered after being deceived into forming intimate relationships with police spies. Lisa, for her part, welcomed the apology. But it comes more than a decade after Kennedy’s mission began.

“No amount of money or ‘sorry’ will make up for the lack of answers about the extent to which I was spied upon in every aspect of my most personal and intimate moments,” she says.

35

Kennedy first infiltrated a group of environmental campaigners in Nottingham in 2003. The fake persona he chose was that of a long haired, tattooed professional climber by the name of Mark Stone. Among campaigners he earned the nickname “Flash” as he always seemed to have a lot of money.

In the autumn of 2003, Lisa met Kennedy when he visited Leeds, where she was living. Then in her early 30s, she had for some years been active in environmental, anti-capitalist, and anti-nuclear campaigns. Her first impressions were that he was “very charming, very friendly and familiar in a way that was quite disarming”.

Kennedy had a number of sexual relationships while undercover. The longest was with Lisa. “During his deployment, he spent more time with me than anybody else, and probably more time than everyone else together,” she says. He “slotted very easily” into her group of friends who went climbing in their spare time. He got to know her family. When her father died, Kennedy was in the mourners’ car with her. “He was the one who held me as I cried through the night, and helped me pick myself up again after that,” Lisa says. He would go away every few weeks, the longest time was three months working, but kept in regular contact through phone calls, emails and texts. They went abroad together, sometimes just the two of them, cycling or climbing, and sometimes for protests. Over time he gained a reputation as a committed environmental activist. But secretly, he was passing back to his police handlers information about the protesters and their political activities.

His covert mission was terminated in October 2009 when he was summoned by his handlers to a meeting at an anonymous truck stop. That month, he disappeared abruptly from his house in Nottingham. In the weeks before his disappearance, he had been agitated and distant with his friends. Lisa recalls: “He had quite an emotional crash, it seems. Some days he would not get out of bed – that was very, very out of character. He was usually quite bright and chirpy, an early riser type, an energetic person, but he was upset quite a lot of the time. I would comfort him. It really felt to me that I was seeing him through a difficult time, and a breakdown. He lent on me very heavily.” He appeared to be very paranoid. The police had raided his house after he was arrested at a protest, and he said he was worried they were delving into his background and income. He said he wanted a break and was going to go to the US to stay with his brother for a while. Lisa says that the day before he flew, he “was behaving, very strangely”, claiming that he was being followed.

“When he went, I was really worried about his sanity. I thought he had properly lost it. I kept saying to him that this looks to me as if you are not coming back. He had sold his car, apparently left his job and half-cleared out his house. The other half I had to do.”

36

In January 2010, he mysteriously reappeared. What Lisa and the other campaigners did not know at that time was that Kennedy was quitting the police to avoid being assigned to a humdrum desk job. But he had not discarded his fictional persona of “Mark Stone”, and continued to be involved in political campaigns.

He has admitted that he was employed by a clandestine private security firm that was paid by commercial firms to monitor protesters. To Lisa, however, he was “different, volatile, up and down a lot of the time. Obviously he was being much less supervised, much less directed, and I just don’t think he knew what he was doing at that time. He was rudderless. I was still so bruised from him losing his marbles and disappearing that I was in some ways waiting for an explanation, somehow trying to figure out what was going on with him, and whether he was alright.

The key discovery that eventually led to Kennedy’s exposure was made by Lisa when the two of them were on holiday in a van in July 2010. “We were having this really blissful holiday in Italy. We were up in the mountains just the two of us. He had gone off for a cycle ride and I was looking in the glove box for some sunglasses. I guess that there was maybe a bit of me that was a little unsure about what was going on with him. I was rooting around and I saw his passport.

The old passport was in the unfamiliar name of Mark Kennedy.

But there was something even more chilling in there: “The thing that made my stomach come into my mouth was seeing that he had a child. The character of Mark Stone wasn’t one that would have had a child. That’s such a big thing to have happened, and to have known somebody that long and have them not mention that they had a child, that’s enormous.”

She found a mobile phone that he did not seem to use much, and found emails from two children, calling him dad. “I did not know what to think. I remember feeling that the world was suddenly a really long way away. Remembering when the mountains were pulsating and swimming around me.” It was the first time she considered that he might be an undercover cop, but quickly dismissed it as something she thought only existed in films.

When Kennedy came back from his cycle ride, “I really did not know what to say to him. I was terrified about what the answer would be and what it would mean. I just did not say anything for about two days. He knew there was something wrong. He was trying to be very nice to me and figure out what was upsetting me. I did not sleep. He slept and I paced. I remember watching the sunrise and being sick.” She confronted him in a bar on what was his actual birthday. She demanded to know about his son.

“He visibly crumpled. He said, ‘I can tell you, but not here’, and 37

“AM I FIGHTING TO SAVE THIS RELATIONSHIP OR AM I TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO HE IS? I AM EITHER PUTTING MY ENERGIES INTO THIS RELATIONSHIP OR I AM INVESTIGATING HIM – I CAN’T DO BOTH.” Fig. 9

38

Fig. 11 Lisa Jones with Mark Kennedy in Italy in 2010.

It was on this trip that she began to discover his deceptions.

39

we went off.” Back in their van, he recounted a story it seems he had tucked away for years, to be used if his fictional persona was ever challenged. He said he had been a drug runner, that his close associate had been shot in front of him, and that he had promised to look after the dead man’s children, who had come to think Kennedy was their real father.

“I was desperate for an explanation that sounded plausible.

Fantastical as it now sounds in the retelling, one of the reasons it seemed plausible was the amount of emotion that poured out of him when he told me,” Lisa says. It seemed as if he had finally opened up, after all the hints of a dodgy past. “I held him as he cried for about eight hours, through the night. We sat up and talked. He cried and I cried. It felt like we had really shared something so I really did not analyses the facts at that point particularly strongly.”

But for the rest of the summer, she had nagging feelings that his story did not add up. She challenged him but he always had an answer. She swung between believing their relationship was “better than ever and thinking something still is not right”.

In September, they had another happy holiday in Italy. “I was floating on air when we came back.” A week later, she was visiting a friend who was, by chance, doing ancestry research online. She did not know what came over her, but she asked the friend to look up Mark Stone’s birth certificate. Nothing came back. With her friends’ help, she started to dig into his life. She still could not believe he was a policeman thinking: “He has been with me for so long there’s absolutely no way they would put a cop in for that long.” She yearned to find some new piece of information that would provide an explanation and clear her suspicions about him. For a few weeks, she went about her life, talking regularly on the phone to Kennedy but feeling she was “in this little bubble where nothing was real”. Eventually they found a birth certificate for Kennedy’s son which recorded Kennedy’s occupation as being a police officer.

Now she wanted him to explain. He was pretending to be in the US, but she had found out that he was actually in Ireland with his children and estranged wife. At her insistence, he returned late one night to a house in Nottingham, where she and a group of friends began to question him. For what felt like hours, he refused to admit anything. Then one of the group asked him directly when he had joined the police. He confessed, and later cried.

The others left Lisa alone with him. She was shocked. “I wanted him to stay. I knew that the moment he left, the whole world was going to change. I was just trying to delay the moment”.

Kennedy went on to sell his story to the media and to work for a US security firm after he was unmasked in October 2010. Lisa set about trying to put her life back together. Her experience with 40

Kennedy “made her feel very small”, but the other women in the legal action have been a valuable source of support.

Lisa, who comes across as warm-hearted and thoughtful rejects suggestions that she could have unmasked Kennedy earlier or that his deception was no different from those of many other cheating husbands. The difference, she says, is that his deception was supported by the resources of the state. Undercover officers who infiltrated political groups were issued with fake documents, such as passports, driving licenses and bank records that would help to fortify their fabricated alter egos. “I had no chance of seeing through that kind of training and infrastructure.”

But he was rumbled, she points out, after he quit the police and no longer had their support. He had to hand back the paperwork including the passport bearing his fake identity of Mark Stone.

Lisa has found it difficult to come to terms with the feeling that she had no free will during her relationship with Kennedy. A “faceless back room of cops” controlled his movements, deciding when he could go away with her, or which demonstrations they could go on. “I just have this feeling that someone else made all the decisions, and it was not me, and it was not even him.”A series of revelations has persuaded the home secretary Theresa May to order a public inquiry into the conduct of the police spies.

This inquiry could reveal far more of the police’s secrets when it starts to hear evidence in public next year. It is expected to examine how, for example, the undercover officers spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and stole the identities of dead children.

Lisa does not want to pin too much hope on the inquiry uncovering the truth of Kennedy’s espionage and his relationship with her. “There are so many more questions than answers in this whole thing that I don’t think I am ever going to be in a position where I feel like I know what went on and what it all meant and that there’s nothing more to wonder about.” She asks herself how much he genuinely loved her. “It is an endless, endless question that I will always be wondering about. That will always keep me awake at night.”

She has been left with a “crushing disappointment and sadness” feeling that her ability to trust others and form relationships has been shattered. “I have lost a lot of optimism about all kinds of things,” she says. “Just the idea that the world is a good place, that love exists, that love is possible for me.”

41

JOSH EPSTEIN-RICHARDS

Don’t This poem is part of a series titled ‘Poems And Stories About My Family’.

→Poem by Michael Rosen

42

Don’t do, Don’t do Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t

Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t And don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t And don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t

that. pull faces, tease the cat. pick your ears, be rude at school.

Who do they think I am?

Some kind of fool?

One day, They’ll say put toffee in my coffee pour gravy on the baby put beer in his ear stick your toes up his nose put confetti on the spaghetti squash peas on your knees. put ants in your pants put mustard in the custard chuck jelly at the telly throw fruit at the computer throw fruit at the computer. what? throw fruit at the computer. what? throw fruit at the computer.

Who do they think I am?

Some kind of fool?

43

LAUREN MACCABEE

Helsinki Bus Station Theory ‘ The theory claims the secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station’

→Written by Oliver Burkeman

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I’ve never visited Finland. Actually, I probably never should, since it’s a place I love so much on paper – dazzling, snow-blanketed landscapes, best education in the world, first country to give full suffrage to women, home of the Moomins – that reality could only disappoint. Even the staunchest Finnophile, though, might be sceptical on encountering the Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

First outlined in a 2004 graduation speech by Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, the theory claims, in short, that the secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station. It has circulated among photographers for years but it deserves (pardon the pun) greater exposure. So I invite you to imagine the scene. It’s a bus station like any big bus station – except, presumably, cleaner, and with environmentally friendly buses driven by strikingly attractive blonds.

There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. “Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off. Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. “You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.” Penn’s bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform”. Three years later, something similar happens. “This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.”

What’s the answer? “It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

A little way farther on, the way Minkkinen tells it, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off on idiosyncratic journeys to very different destinations. That’s when the photographer finds a unique “vision”, or if you’d rather skip the mystificatory art talk – the satisfying sense that he or she is doing their own thing.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling – apart from the sheer fact that it’s Finland-related, I mean. One is how vividly it illustrates a critical insight about persistence: that in the first weeks or years of any worthwhile project, feedback – whether from your own emotions or from other people – isn’t a reliable indication of how you’re doing. This shouldn’t be confused with the dodgy dictum that triggering hostile reactions means you must be doing the right thing; it just doesn’t prove you’re doing the wrong one. The second point concerns the perils of a world that fetishises originality. A hundred self-help books urge you to have the guts to be “different”: the kid who drops 45

out of university to launch a crazy-sounding startup becomes a cultural hero, yet the Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pretrodden path, to the originality beyond. “Stay on the fucking bus�: there are worse fridge-magnet slogans to live by. Just make sure you take it off the fridge when your prudish relatives visit.

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Fig. 12 Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni Photograph: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian Francesco Bongiorni/Guardian

47

MARIA KILLICK

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Original)

→Written by John Keats

48

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful a faery’s child,

Her hair was long,

her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, 49

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all

day long, For sidelong

would she bend,

and sing a faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew, And sure in language strange she said ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elfin

grot, And there she wept

and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her

wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep And there I dreamed Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill’s side.

I saw pale kings and princes too, 50

Pale warriors,

death-pale were they all; They cried

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn

here Alone and palely

loitering, Though the sedge is withered

from the lake,

And no birds sing.

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REECE WYKES

Balance

→Lyrics from the song balance by the band Future Islands

52

THE SUN WILL LEAVE THE ROOM LEAVE YOU TO THE NIGHT AND THAT'S ALRIGHT BECAUSE BEFORE THE MORNING COMES, THERE'S A CERTAIN CALM AND THEN THERE'S LIGHT. 53

RUFUS NEWELL

The All Blacks HAKA

→Te Rauparaha (composer and war leader of the Ngāti Toa tribe of the North Island of New Zealand)

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Ringa pakia Uma tiraha Turi whatia Hope whai ake Waewae takahia kia kino Ka mate! Ka mate!

Ka ora! Ka ora!

Ka mate! Ka mate!

Ka ora! Ka ora!

Tenei Te Tangata Puhuru huru Nana nei tiki mai Whakawhiti te ra A upa ne ka up ane Upane, Kaupane Whiti te ra

Slap the hands against the thighs Puff out the chest Bend the knees Let the hip follow Stamp the feet as hard as you can It is death!, It is death!

It is life!, It is life!

It is death! It is death!

It is life! It is life!

This is the hairy man Who fetched the sun And caused to shine again One upward step, another upward step An upward step The sun shines!

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SAM BOXER

Vision, Interrupted

→Written by Ryan Gerald Nelson

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Collected texts: on obstructed vision, blindness, perception, darkness, speculation, adaptation, and various other excerpted ruminations surrounding said subject matters; presented in parallel with a collection of images depicting certain avant-garde individuals whom, for reasons yet unknown (fashion statement? spiritual experience? an attempt to more intimately connect with their surroundings?), have obstructed their own vision. Motives of pursuing ideals of trend and fashion aside, one might ask to what end are the individuals presented throughout this publication blinding themselves? Is it, as Denis Diderot asserts, an attempt to perceive their surroundings more abstractly and thus without deception? Or as with Oedipus Rex before them, have they willfully blinded themselves out of the shame brought forth by some terrible revelation that has exposed their own ignorance and inability to realize their true identity? the nature of clouds presents a wide array of hypotheses of this nature, intended to examine the motives of and experiences behind obstructing one’s own vision.

— Preface (excerpt) the nature of clouds.

The nature of clouds, a project I’ve recently published through Edition MK, is a 236-page book which is accompanied by a series of 3 offset-printed posters (each of which I apply a unique, ultramarine-blue-chalk mark to).

With a selection of 27 excerpted texts that I’ve presented alongside the collection of images that reveal a particular contemporary visual phenomenon that is widely-seen yet seldom given a name, I edited together the nature of clouds with the intent of presenting the otherwise disparate collection of texts and images in a way that searches for new meaning and interpretation between the two.

CONTENT

The texts that I collected for the nature of clouds refer to a spectrum of subjects such as: self inflicted blindness, blindness as punishment, the blind’s perception of their surroundings, adaptation, echolocation, the symbology of blindness the explorations of blindness within art, blind prophets, et al. I sought out and chose these texts for the thought provoking ways in which they enhanced the visual content of the book’s collected images.

These texts include excerpted works from philosophers such as George Berkeley, Denis Diderot, and René Descartes Greek tragedian Sophocles, physician-authors F. González-Crussi and Patrick Trevor-Roper, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, critic and novelist John Berger, theorist Guy Debord, as well as texts focusing on the works of artists, such as Giuseppe Penone and Lygia Clark who specifically explored blindness and sensory deprivation in their work.

Meanwhile, the connective thread shared between the images that I’ve presented throughout this project, as it quickly becomes obvious, is the fact that all of the subjects appearing in these images 57

are shown either with their faces and eyes completely covered (often with a large, flowing piece of cloth or drapery) or, simply, with their vision obstructed in some way. The subjects in these images can, as I like to think of it be imagined to be in a state of blindness (or, at least in a state of heavily impaired vision).

I prefer to describe what is appearing in this collection of images as a type of “visual phenomenon”—one that, based on the shear amount of iterations produced, appears to be alive and well within the contexts of contemporary photography, art direction, fashion, visual art, et al.

SETTING THE STAGE

The intended sentiment behind the book is one in which the viewer wouldn’t necessarily be able to determine whether the book advocates for the visual phenomenon mentioned or if it’s tearing it down. I felt that taking one position or the other, especially in this scenario, became much less interesting because the chosen position leaves you at a conclusive point where the conversation terminates. Instead, I attempted to leave the message and editorial direction of the book more open to interpretation and the reader’s own imagination.

I also believe it was necessary to go beyond the point of producing a book that simply said: “hey, look at all these similar images of people with their faces and eyes covered, isn’t this crazy?!” Pointing a light on this visual phenomenon is, of course, a substantial part of the book, but the book couldn’t just be about the visual phenomenon alone. That’s what a Tumblr cataloging the visual phenomenon would be for, because that’s all a Tumblr is expected to be. As such, I had no doubt that the collected texts were essential for inclusion in this book. An examination of this visual phenomenon (regardless of your position on it) becomes so much more compelling when an image is simultaneously presented alongside a text that provides the basis for viewing the image through an alternative lens or which tells a story in such a way that the reader is encouraged to imaginatively interpret the image beyond it’s surface intentions.

This project began as a recognition of a pattern that wasn’t difficult to see. But the more this pattern seemed to perpetuate itself, the more I felt compelled (like some modern visual anthropologist) to explore it further and to create a context or site that could enable the pattern to be seen from new and unexpected perspectives.

Poetry derives from inspiration, from an inner vision connected to dreams.

Closed, blind eyes connect one with the world of the dead, with those who can no longer see. They are the mask which hides the expression of the face from the onlooker and allows a vision of the world which in not present but past or future. To be there but not to see, to appear there but not

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to be present, like the Pythia or Sibyl who used to pronounce prophecies with their faces covered. The condition of dreaming is blindness. One can imagine better with one’s eyes closed as light invades the mind. With eyes open one absorbs light. With the eyes closed images from one’s mind are projected onto the vault of the cranium, on the wrapping which surrounds us, on the inside of our skin which becomes a border, a division a definition of the body and a container of our thought. The wrapping is important as it is the definition of the individual.

— Giuseppe Penone, in Giuseppe Penone: Sculture di linfa (Milan: Mondadori Electa S.p.A., 2007), 226.

APPROACH

I do think there’s some relevance to bringing visual trends, patterns, phenomenon, recurring motifs (or whatever you want to call them) into the arena of collective examination and reflection.

That said, I also feel very aware of the relative absurdity of bringing attention to a visual occurrence taking place within a niche world of creative output. With that thought at the fore of my mind throughout the project, I attempted to interject elements of humor (albeit a very deadpan type of humor) into the book as a means of throwing the seemingly serious tone of the book off balance.

EXAMPLES INCLUDE:

—The book’s overall tone of feigned naivety that suggests that the subjects depicted in the images throughout the book are actually coping with and adapting to the affects of blindness.

—The use of satirical and amusing pairings of text and image content, as with the section of the book that pairs an excerpt from Patrick Trevor Roper’s essay, “Total Blindness” in which he recounts the story of a saint who, after looking at a man lustfully, tears out both of her eyes, only to then be given two replacements

by God that, unfortunately are so large that they had to be carried around like handbags with an image of a woman (her head completely draped with vision obstructing fabric no doubt) who is lugging around two pineapples.

—The implication that the subjects in the images have, as with Oedipus Rex, willingly inflicted injury on their own eyes to the point of blindness.

—The inclusion of a statement of dedication, addressed to René Magritte, which acknowledges the influence of his demonstrations (referring to his 1928 paintings, titled Les Amants and L’histoire centrale) of how one should go about “swathing the heads of pretty young things with excessive yet stylish amounts of cloth and drapery.”

ON THE TITLE: THE NATURE OF CLOUDS I had happened across a John Berger book that I had never heard of titled The Sense of Sight. Many of the texts were a nice surprise 59

to me because they were written in such a different way than the structured and academic tone of writing found in the Berger text that many of us know so well, Ways of Seeing.

Many of the texts in The Sense of Sight are poetic, obscure, and at times difficult to read and decipher. But one of these texts in particular, titled “On Visibility,” had an influential affect on my search for a book title that was at once mysterious and referential. In many ways, I feel that the below passages from “On Visibility” serve as very apt metaphors for the modern condition of image production, creativity, and trends. At the beginning of the text, Berger points to what has become increasingly more obvious in the worlds of visual production as time moves on: All appearances are continually changing one another: visually everything is interdependent.

He then speaks to the concept of visibility in a very remarkable way: Visibility is a form of growth. Aim: to see the appearance of a thing (even an inanimate thing) as a stage in its growth—or as a stage in a growth of which it is part. To see its visibility as a kind of flowering.

Finally, he concludes the text with a really great allegory. The passage could be interpreted in many different ways, but through the lens that I had created for this project, I found the word “clouds” in this passage to be interchangeable with the notion of the life and existence of a visual phenomenon which, of course, is what the nature of clouds indirectly addresses: Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility.

All appearances are of the nature of clouds.

— John Berger, “On Visibility,” in The Sense of Sight (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 219.

ON THE MARKS OF ULTRAMARINE-BLUE CHALK

ON THAMYRIS, PHINEUS, AND TIRESIAS

These marks/gestures, simply said, are an attempt to visually represent and reinforce the arguments that Berger proposed in the above passages from “On Visibility,” namely: the idea that a visible thing is a form of growth and that it gathers visibility (represented by the actual making of the mark of ultramarine-blue chalk) and that this visible thing then disperses or disappears into invisibility (represented by the fact that the mark of ultramarineblue chalk is highly mutable by touch and able to be effectively erased).

The publication is accompanied by 3 limited edition, offset printed,ultramarine-blue-chalk-marked posters, respectively titled thamyris, phineus, and tiresias, each the name of a blind prophet.

Rarely in history was a humane thought given to the armies of blind beggars

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“CAME TO THE FORE WHEN THEIR SIGHTLESS EYES WERE REPLACED

BY AN INNER VISION. THE FAMOUS SOOTHSAYERS OF HISTORY AND FABLE HAVE, IN THE MAIN HAD THEIR PROPHETIC EYES LIBERATED BY THEIR BLINDNESS.”

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that languished in every kingdom.…[The] Byzan tine Emperor Basil … sent back his 15,000 prisoners every man blinded, to their king (who died of the shock). And in England blinding was introduced in AD 600 as an alternative to the death penalty. Thus the blind remained through history as ineducable mendicants, who only came to the fore when their sightless eyes were replaced by an inner vision. The famous soothsayers of history and fable have, in the main, had their prophetic eyes liberated by their blindness. As Milton put it: Blind Thamyris and blind Meonides and Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old. To these may be added Blind Bartimeus, who recognized Jesus as Messiah, ‘Capys, the sightless seer,’ who inspired Romulus, and Appius Claudius, who warned the Roman Senate of disaster if they came to terms with Pyrrhus. Democritus the laughing philosopher of Abdera, even eviscerated his eyes so that he might think more clearly, and this was the practice of some muezzins, who, after learning the Koran by heart thus ensured that they could not be distracted by beauty. Indeed a similar pseudo-castration was suggested by certain Fathers of the Church on the ground that a vision of the next world was preferable to vision in this.— Patrick Trevor-Roper, “Total Blindness,” in The World Through Blunted Sight: An inquiry into the influence of defective vision on art and character (New York: Viking Penguin Inc. 1988), 159– 160.

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Fig. 13 RenĂŠ Magritte, Les Amants (The Lovers), 1928

TILLY SLEVEN

On the Difference between a Work and a Project Selected writing 2000—2014

→Written by Paul Chan

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I make work and have done projects. Sometimes they are even called art (though not by me). It has never occurred to me to think about what distinguishes what is work and what is a project until now. And I wonder if the use of “project” to describe what one makes coincides, as least incidentally, with the changing idea of work itself.

A work is work. But strangely, work has been decoupled in the last three decades from labor. What i mean is that the very notion of creating something - whether art or a toothbrush has itself gone through a division of labor. It is possible to make a toothbrush and it wildly popular without knowing or understanding or even caring about what the toothbrush actually is or does. Labor as productive power is now only one component among many others needed in order to bring something into being - which is to say, for this something to appear as part of a public.

This is perhaps why what was once called work can now be called (or wants to be known as) a project. A project encompasses the making of something that is not dependant on work to appear.

A project feels as if there are many hands on deck, all serving a collective purpose, despite different interests and abilities. A project words by emanating the feel of a big tent. Or an office.

It’s funny to think about this now because more people are out of work in the United States that at any other time since the 1970s. The official unemployment rate is currently 9.6 percent, but of course the official rate is much rosier than what is actually happening on the streets. People need work, but there doesn’t seem to be any. How does finding work differ from making work?

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TOMMY SPITTERS

Big Sur (chapter 38)

→Written by Jack Kerouac

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Dawn is most horrible of all with the owls suddenly calling back and forth in the misty moon haunt - And even worse than dawn is morning, the bright sun only GLARING in on my pain, making it all brighter, hotter, more maddening, more nervewracking - I even go roaming up and down the valley in the bright Sunday morning sunshine with bag under arm looking hopelessly for some spot to sleep in - As soon as I find a spot of grass by the path I realize I cant lie down there because the tourists might walk by and see me - As soon as I find a glade near the creek I realize it’s too sinister there, like Hemingway’s darker part of the swamp where “the fishing would be more tragic” somehow - All the haunts and glades having certain special evil forces concentrated there and driving me away - So haunted I go wandering up and down the canyon crying with that bag under my arm: “What on earth’s happened to me? and how can earth be like that? “ Am I not a human being and have done my best as well as anybody else? never really trying to hurt anybody or halfhearted cursing Heaven? The words I’d studied all my life have suddenly gotten to me in all their serious and definite deathliness, never more I be a “happy poet” “Singing” “about death” and allied romantic matters, “Go thou crumb of dust you with your silt of a billion years, here’s a billion pieces of silt for you, shake that out of your shaker” - And all the green nature of the canyon now waving in the morning sun looking like a cruel idiot convocation.

Coming back to the sleepers and staring at them wild eyed like my brother once stared at me in the dark over my crib, staring at them not only enviously but lonely in human isolation from their simple sleeping minds - “But they all look dead!” I’m carking in my canyon, “Sleep is death, everything is death!” The horrible climax coming when the others finally get up and pook about making a troubled breakfast, and I’ve told Dave I cant possibly stay here another minute, he must drive us all back to town, “Okay but I sure wish we could stay a week like Romana wants to do” - “Well you drive me and come back” - “Well I dunno if Monsanta would like that we’ve already dirtied up the place aplenty, in fact we’ve got to dig a garbage pit and get rid of the junk” - Billie offers to dig the garbage pit but does so by digging a neat tiny coffin shaped grave instead of just a garbage hole - Even Dave Wain blinks to see it - It’s exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliott in it, Dave is thinking the same thing I am I can tell by a glance he gives me... We’ve all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there - Besides little Elliott’s been crying all morning and has had two beatings both of them ending up crying and Billie saying she cant stand it any more she’s going to kill herself - And Romana too notices it, the perfect 4 foot by 3 foot neatly sided grave like you’re ready to sink a little box in it - Horrifying me so much I take the shovel and go down to dump junk into it and mess up the neat pattern 67

“ON SOFT SPRING NIGHTS I’LL STAND IN THE YARD UNDER THE STARS. SOMETHING GOOD WILL COME OUT OF ALL THINGS YET AND IT WILL BE GOLDEN AND ETERNAL JUST LIKE THAT”

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somehow but little Elliott starts screaming and grabs the shovel and refuses I go near the hole - So Billie herself goes and starts filling the garbage in but then looks at me significantly (I’m sure sometimes she really did aspire to make me crazy) “Do you want to finish the job yourself?” - “What do you mean?” - “Cover the earth on, do the honors?” “What do you mean do the honors!” “Well I said I’d dig the garbage pit and I’ve done that, aint you supposed to do the rest?” - Dave Wain is watching fascinated, there’s something screwy he sees there too, something cold and frightening - “Well okay” I say, “I’ll dump the earth over it and tamp it down” but I go down to do this Elliot is screaming “NO no no no no!” (My God, the fishes bones are in that grave” I realize too) - “What’s the matter he wont let me go near that hole! why did you make it look like a grave?” I finally yell, but Billie is only smiling quietly and steadily at me, over the grave, shovel in hand, the kid weeping tugging the shovel, rushing up to block my way, trying to shove me back with his little hands...I cant understand any of it - He’s screaming as I grab the shovel as tho I’m about to bury Billie in there or something or himself maybe - “What’s the matter with this kid is he a cretin?” I yell. With the same quiet steady smile Billie says “Oh you’re so fucking neurotic!” I simply get mad and dump earth over the garbage and tromp it all down and say “The hell with all this madness!” I get mad and stomp up on the porch and throw myself in the canvas chair and close my eyes - Dave Wain says he’s going down the road to investigate the canyon a bit and when he comes back the girls will have finished packing and we’ll all leave - Dave goes off, the girls clean up and sweep, the little kid is sleeping and suddenly hopelessly and completely finished I sit there in the hot sun and close my eyes: and there’s the golden swarming peace of Heaven in my eyelids - It comes with a sure hand a soft blessing as big as it is beneficent, i.e, endless - I’ve fallen asleep. I’ve fallen asleep in a strange way, with my hands clasped behind my head thinking I’m just going to sit there and think, but I’m sleeping like that, and when I wake up just one short minute later I realize the two girls are both sitting behind me in absolute silence - When I’d sat down they were sweeping but now they were squatting behind my back, facing each other not a word - I turn and see them there - Blessed relief has come to me from just that minute - Everything has washed away - I’m perfectly normal again - Dave Wain is down the road looking at fields and flowers - I’m sitting smiling in the sun, the birds sing again all’s well again. I still cant understand it.

Most of all I cant understand the miraculousness of the silence of the girls and the sleeping boy and the silence of Dave Wain in the fields - Just a golden wash of goodness has spread over all and over all my body and mind - All the dark torture is a memory - I know now I can get out of there, we’ll drive back to the City, 69

I’ll take Billie home, I’ll say goodbye to her properly, she wont commit no suicide or do anything wrong, she’ll forget me her life’ll go on, Romana’s life will go on, old Dave will manage somehow, I’ll forgive them and explain everything (as I’m doing now) - And Cody, and George Baso, and ravened McLear and perfect starry Fagan, they’ll all pass through one way or the other - I’ll stay with Monsanto at his home a few days and he’ll smile and show me how to be happy awhile, we’ll drink dry wine instead of sweet and have quiet evenings in his home - Arthur Ma will come to quietly draw pictures at my side - Monsanto will say “That’s all there is to it, take it easy, everything’s okay, don’t take things too serious, it’s bad enough as it is without you going the deep end over imaginary conceptions just like you always said yourself” - I’ll get my ticket and say goodbye on a flower day and leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America and it’ll all be like it was in the beginning - Simple golden eternity blessing all - Nothing ever happened - Not even this - St Carolyn by the Sea will go on being golden one way or the other. The little boy will grow up and be a great man.

There’ll be farewells and smiles - My mother will be waiting for me glad - The corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow - On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet and it will be golden and eternal just like that - There’s no need to say another word.

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Fig. 14 Kerouac’s Naval Reserve Enlistment photograph, 1943

WILLIAM LYALL

“Inga’s was the only opinion that mattered”: An audience with the elusive Dean Blunt

→Written by Chal Ravens

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Naturally, being granted an audience with Dean Blunt is unlike interviewing any other musician.

Rendezvousing in the affectless sphere of communication that is Skype’s instant messenger service, and instructed by Blunt’s people not to ask any questions pertaining to what – or who – might have inspired his anomalous album The Redeemer, the resulting back-and-forth puts the interviewer (that is, me) in a terrifying position. The balance of power shifts subtly towards the unseen subject who, hidden from the inquisitor’s gaze, is able to pause and reflect before answering, to brush off unwanted questions with a blank screen or leave non-sequitur replies hanging limply in the ether. Maintaining the appropriately deadpan composure is likewise unnecessary for the invisible interviewee.

As a result, the conversation slips from the serious (the shadow of his former collaborator) to the irreverent (Danny Dyer’s arrival on Eastenders), and every ‘sensible’ question on my list suddenly seems as facile as it does futile. Ultimately, it’s Blunt’s show, and I’m merely the messenger – a situation that few, if any, other musicians are able to orchestrate so successfully (even that great media manipulator, Kanye West).

Blunt’s impenetrable veneer has been in place since he first sloped into view as one half of engagingly weird duo Hype Williams, whose steady trickle of lo-fi, sample-heavy and deeply unsettling loops and collages finally petered out this year as the pair announced their split. The album that Blunt delivered this spring, The Redeemer, along with its low-profile companion piece Stone Island, which slipped out quietly via a Russian website this summer, presented a drastic about face for the producer and singer. Driven by deeply personal (though perhaps questionably sincere) lyrics and constructed from pop music’s most familiar gestures of heartbreak and despair (weepy strings, gently fingerpicked guitars), Blunt’s new material is above all guided by his own voice.

His transition from art provocateur to doleful troubadour is both awkward and fascinating; a recent show at The 100 Club in London offered the unexpectedly weird experience of seeing Blunt simply perform, standing centre stage and singing the intimate details of his messy break-up (albeit with an interlude devoted to an aural onslaught of sub-bass). It’s hard not to assume this rupture has something to do with the disappearance of his former Hype Williams accomplice of course, and though questions of this nature were decisively banned from our conversation, Blunt himself lets slip the occasional fragment that hints at his unhealed wounds, and what could be the title of his next release (A Bullet In Yr Eye, Throwin Money Tha Sky).

Frankly, it feels like the closest we’re going to get to the artist in his current incarnation.

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Apparently located in Atlanta, Georgia, for the duration of FACT’s interview, Blunt will soon return to Europe to tour his live show across Portugal, Germany, Holland, France and the UK before the end of the year, beginning with a performance at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland, on November 18. Catch him if you can.

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Dean Blunt: Da, hi Hello. Where are you today?

Atlanta.

Really? What brings you there?

Teaching kids about agency.

unplugged in acapella working on the Lauryn Hill one, minus the breakdown or maybe including it cannae rem, I star valentine is his name, he believes in himself.

The show included a section of heavy strobing and sub-bass was that music that you had made especially for the show? ...

It’s not the first time you’ve created an extreme, visceral experience as part of the live performance. I saw the Hype Are you making music with them? Williams show at The Dome last Nein, I couldn’t teach them year – it was pitch-black and anything in regards to that.

I remember feeling like I was being physically attacked by Okay. Well let’s talk about music bass. It was very disorientating anyway then.

– I couldn’t even work out Do we have to? Guess so. where the stage was after a while. On one hand it seems It’s vital that we do. You played like a mode of performance art at the 100 Club recently, – bludgeoning your audience and for once you were the with volume, making them visible ‘star’ of the show. uncomfortable?

How did it feel to be at the Or is there a link with dub front of the stage, exposed? music too, maybe?

With Hype Williams gigs you The dome is shaka country. were often hidden in darkness.

Don’t think I’ve ever intentionally Yeah I get paid more now. made dub. I’m from here, so certain sounds enter your Who was with you? language so can’t articulate Joanne and Dave, Rosie and Jim, beyond that its a noisy city.

Tia and Tamera.

But you enjoy forcing that You had a security guy on stage intense experience on your with you too. Is that to protect audience, I guess? you from rabid fans?

People not from london obsess Few reasons. over london sounds, way more Always need a brother by my than actual londoners, they try side; always. too hard so most ‘dub/uk/bass nonsense is usually swag when Tell me about the support act it’s made by tom from bath you chose. like...

He can do the whole maxwell mtv Justin timber-lake aint a good What kind of agency?

Just making them aware of the wide palette, I don’t like kids so its not one of those I’m teaching them so hopefully I’ll like kids in the future college park waterbwoys.

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dancer..he counts his steps like raatid mathematician, it isn’t natural to him and it translates so ramalamadindongman or whatever he is called can’t ever nail what he’s trying because its assimilated, not felt, anyway, …

Dub…not thinking about it conciously, or at all.

happen almost at the same time as recording?

Nah sorry, the answers to all these things can come in a less direct form. It’s not important how long I spend or what happens in that space.

Let me try to be less direct, then. Why do you think some people might find your music “difficult”?

Never thought about what people think, inga was the only opinion Stone Island seems like that mattered.‘was’, and I can’t a companion piece to the answer ..as its not difficult to Redeemer, it seems to share the me, why would someone make same musical DNA, if you like. something purposefully difficult.

Same champagne, I understand it but aint nobody different pourer, here got time for that. different hotel.

You obviously prefer not to And you gave it away as a free “explain” your music – but do download – was that a way you welcome other people’s of drawing a line under this attempts to excavate meaning particular phase so that the next from it? record will be quite different?

And if I’m talking too fast it just I gave it to the russians because means you’re listening too slow. they always have to rip things And if you listen a little faster from us, no one wants to give maybe you’ll catch up and them anything, didn’t want it I think I’m talking at a normal to leave russia. pace so who nose, I’m not on the net so I don’t know what Unfortunately that’s what people think; has nowt to do happens when things appear with me but someones listening on the internet. So will you be and keeping me out of trouble drinking the same champagne else I’d be back in the ring. in a different hotel soon, or are you onto a different drink But the fact that you release entirely now? music means you know that She chooses I drink, and pay, people are out there, she rolls I smoke, and pay, listening to it. dynamic set.

Nope. People bitch about the world That’s a bum deal. Let’s talk a bit about actually making music.

You could choose not to How long do you spend on release it – surely you’re composition, or does writing putting it out there for others

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to enjoy as well?

But it’s there job to make things exist. That they want to see or hear. Else stfu *their job, nobody listened and I had to do other things to get by, then I didn’t have to.

Production of work has never ceased in all that time. But now I don’t have to do certain things to get by and can own a bugatti so ..who knows. Bugatti without drivers license, bum deal kim deal reel deal holyfield evander is a serious name.

What happened to the play you wrote? It was going to be performed at the ICA but I think it got canceled.

Yeah the ica is bruck pocket, no pay no play, turned it into a bbc radio play. Should air this year. Trying to get the cast of that itv show, oasis to do the sequel, but dean gaffney is a bit of a long ting, diva.

What’s your favourite UK gangster film?

Blunt wraps, and a pembury estate coming of age story voots, dreem.

You’re from round there right?

Do you spend much time in Hackney these days?

Pretty dry now, all the new people think I’m gonna rob them, other wise they ask me to sign shit, so no, its dry.

Have you left London completely? I read you once said something along the lines of Berlin being a coffee shop for people who’ve failed in their own city.

I always remember that.

Yeah I lost a few berlin soldiers after that one.

Skype contacts dropped a bit but they too sensitive all that damn coffee, I lived in lisbon.

Do you think living in London is better for making art and music then?

Nope.

Aren’t you in the play yourself? It’ s just better than berlin...

No I wrote it. people like to remove themselves from the place that triggers their Have you heard that Danny insecurities, or to save relationships.

Dyer has just moved into Go where temptation doesn’t the Queen Vic? I’m deadly exist. But maybe insecurities are serious. Maybe Dean Gaffney inevitable. Like mice in a hole is not such a long shot. face the demons. London is full Danny Dyer has had a reverse of them, New York is worse hence career.. why I like it, need to go through All he wanted was to have his the inferno, to know the truth and name above that door. find peace, its rewarding.

Everything till now was for this moment. I’m getting a tear tattoo Does pain always make for in his honour and pouring some good art? hen-dog in his memory.

Dunno… henn-dogg. ask him.

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I’m just going to ask a few more questions cos I’ve kept you for an hour now.

I’m easy. Watching a film.

What are you watching?

Black gestapo.

Recommended? nein.

Ha ha.

Depends what amuses you in it gotta see a black face on screen at least once a day.

I don’t know it but a quick Google tells me it’s a solid oneand-a-half star rated film. Is that unfair?

Today its a bad reel.

Okay, two more questions.

Hype Williams has come to end. You’ve described it before as a project that gets passed on from one artist to the next, but it seems like you held onto it for quite a while. Have you passed it on to another person?

Would we be able to recognise the next reincarnation of Hype Williams somewhere?

Hype Williams hasn’t ended inga just isn’t there but she wasn’t the only other person involved in the project, sometimes to work with someone, you need to consume each other to realise things and unfortunately once that consumption has run its course, things may change but the child remains.

Do you think you would want to work with someone else again?

Or is it a solo mission from now on?

78

As I said, hype williams is not a two person affair just two fools that take the flak for it *took.

Ha. Okay, final question.

A Bullet In Yr Eye, Throwin Money Tha Sky’ ….soonish Do you think I’m going to ask what you’re releasing next?

And is that the answer?

I was actually just going to ask what the weed’s like in Atlanta.

Demonik.

Like a slap in the face from a tootsies miami doorman Perfect. Okay, well enjoy the rest of Black Gestapo. Thanks for Skyping man.

Peace.

Fig. 15 Dean Blunt at Electroqwekz, London.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Funes the Memorious Written by Jorge Luis Borges Wenger calls Mourinho “stupid” A quote by Arsène Wenger Without people you’re nothing A statement by Joe Strummer Stoner (An extract from page 40) Written by John Williams Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death Written by Douglas Coupland Lisa Jones, girlfriend of undercover policemen Mark Kennedy: ‘I thought I knew him better than anyone’ Written by Rob Evans Don’t Poem by Michael Ronen Helsinki Bus Station Theory Written by Oliver Burkeman La Belle Dame Sans Merci Written by John Keats Balance Lyrics from the band Future Islands The All Blacks HAKA Composed by Te Rauparaha Vision, Interrupted Written by Ryan Gerald Nelson

© 2016 Dillon Biltcliffe Newell

On the Difference between a Work and a Project Written by Paul Chan Big Sur (Chapter 38) Written by Jack Kerouac “Inga’s” was the only opinion that mattered” An audience with the elusive Dean Blunt