We’ve always admired the mystery that comes with doing something no-one else knows about. It’s yours. You can share it if you want, or you can keep it to yourself. It’s getting harder and harder to do now we’ve got twitter and whatever and friends with big mouths. But we all still do it, don’t we. Just like my friend who comes home from her shitty dayjob waiting on toothless perverts in a Wetherspoons pub to sit in her room and spend a few more equally challenging hours drawing nice things to exhibit and maybe sell. As our parents, loved ones and the English winter constantly remind us that we need money to live and keep warm, it may seem frivolous to keep fucking around with something that might, just, have the slim chance, one day, of making us a few extra pounds here and there. But the truth is plain and simple: we do it because we can’t not. Because it feels right. As
right as having to listen to your callous boss at your 9-5 feels wrong. As wrong as going home to spend a few hours’ quality time with the tv set every night feels, instead of doing something, anything else. The comic book heroes I used to read when I was a kid often didn’t like a lot of the things that came with their secret lives: the pressure it put on their relationships, the little lies they had to tell, the lack of time they had for virtually anything else - but they just couldn’t stop sneaking off to try and save the world. The compulsion to do it was greater than anything they had in their ‘normal’ lives. This issue is dedicated to everyone who scurries home to do something that defines them better than their wage can. Don’t you see? We’re all turning into superheroes.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the concept of super powers, not in the sense of US/Russia Cold War. Unfortunately, it’s been more along the lines of cool super powers and the identities that keep them hidden. Think Clarke Kent/Superman and Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fundamentally, if comics teach us anything it’s don’t judge a book by its cover as you never know what life is being lead behind the superficial. In a common theme it seems that most of our childhood hero’s have the ability to disguise and make invisible their ‘real’ selves. Of course not all journalists in glasses have superpowers and not all obscenely rich business men over identify with bats, just like not all women in Burkas disguise their ‘real lives’ under a cloak...but some evidently do. It began, like all good theories, in anecdotal stories over the dinner table about girls in full burka turning up at sexual health clinic’s getting checks for STI’s...Mills and Boon Esq. pre-martial promiscuity, not what you would expect looking at the cover of that book but definitely enough to make me curious. Then came the image of a burka clad lady in my reception at Probation, her crime; shoplifting to fund a Class A addiction. As you can imagine, after this my curiosity reached its peak and the cat was most definitely on its last legs. It seemed that the secret life lead by some under the Burka wasn’t just a London centric phenomenon. In Mombasa, Kenya, ‘twilight ladies’, as the prostitutes have come to be known, have reportedly ‘ditched their skimpy uniforms’ for the more conservative Muslim dress of the local women including full body and
head covering. A recent report goes on to interview some of these sex workers who say the new dress hides their identity, helps them avoid arrest and look respectable. Sounds like the same justifications given by Bruce Wayne and through it you can see why this power has at times in history been harnessed for political purposes. During the Algerian Revolution, an early tactic used by the revolutionary forces was to get women to carry ammunition and correspondence along the winding medina streets under their Burkas. Later, even the men would don the Burka so they could pass through the same streets and evade detection. Interestingly, the use of the Burka as a cloak of invisibility spans into more conservative Muslim countries too. The documentary ‘Behind the Veil’ was aired by Channel 4 and revealed the secret world of Muslim Iranian sex workers who stalk the night wearing full veil whilst standing on the sides of busy roads with only their stiletto’s on show to passing crawlers. Further, a more recent estimation suggested that there are several thousand ‘night butterflies’ in Dubai thought to be serving the ‘fun starved’ Saudi’s at the cost of around £7000 US dollars a week. So what does this all mean? To be honest I’m not too sure...I guess that’s why it is a ‘developing theory’. Clearly for some women who choose to don the Burka it gives them the super power of invisibility. Society, although often scandalized by the sight of it wandering down the high street, in the same breath chooses to ignore the women that exist under it. For some women this leaves them free to be whoever they want to be without ever being detected. It leaves them free to live whatever life they choose, safe in the knowledge that their identity is disguised and that they are invisible, not just from the authorities, but usually from the persecuting eyes of the community they are trying to live in.
As was the tradition in those days, the cops barged in, the lights were turned on, the clientele scattered and those remaining were lined up and escorted out. But a crowd was gathering outside and they were having none of it. All of a sudden shit and fan came together in perfect harmony and a full-on riot kicked off with the ever growing crowd swelled by a legion of curious local homos. Eventually things calmed down but the point had been made and the gay rights movement gathered momentum. They were here, queer, and they weren’t going to take it any more.
But riddle me this. Was Stonewall the right way to begin the fight for gay rights or would an alternate path have led to a more lasting understanding and acceptance? In the early 1950s, two gay organisations were formed with a very specific agenda. The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis believed that they could change the minds of the general public by showing that gay people were no different from everyone else. They were attempting a war of attrition and education which would be blown away in the aftermath of the dropping of the Stonewall A-bomb. Would this subtler path to equality have yielded ultimately better results? I think perhaps it would. The lasting image of the Stonewall riots is of preening, cavorting drag queens getting in the faces of the police and quite aggressively demanding their rights. Think about this from the point of view of your average middle class, eternally frightened American. He sees a confusing mob of unrelated men making violent demands of him and others like him. So long as the effect on his everyday life is minimal, he will probably give in and let them have what they want. But what will he think of these men? How will he judge others like them?
His fear and confusion will not be assuaged, if anything they will become greater. He doesn’t know who these men are, what these men want or why they want it, only that they want it now and they won’t be taking no for an answer. Now he is not allowed to think the way he has been taught to think since childhood but he doesn’t really know why. So he will react. Probably not in any major way, as his trundle towards the grave will most likely continue more or less undisturbed, but whenever ‘those people’ do have some impact on his life he will subconsciously judge them. The fear they fill him with will boil up to the surface and his brain will convert it in one of two ways. Either he will confront the fear and fight it with a hefty dollop of hate, or, he will attempt to neutralise that which frightens him by mocking and undermining. As a result, the premature caesarean that was Stonewall has left a deep and lasting scar on the perception of homosexuals and homosexuality in society. Think about it this way - if a TV show or Hollywood film was to have a character who was an athletic, criminal, black guy with natural rhythm, they would be shouted down for giving in to the laziest sort of stereotyping. But it’s rare you’ll encounter a gay character who isn’t an insecure girl’s bitchy best friend. Would the programme of education and understanding advocated by the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis have changed this? Not necessarily. But by gently letting the world know about the true nature of homosexuality, rather than barging in and demanding to be treated a certain way, it seems likely that things would be different now and we would at least be closer as a society to the way things should be.
Some people are gay, others are not. If society as a whole could wake up and realise that the ultimate difference between gay and straight is simply to do with what sort of thing we like to get up to with our genitals, then surely this crazy old world of ours could be a happier place and an awful lot of unnecessary silliness could be avoided.
How much do we really know about some of our most captivating and celebrated writers? Georgina Copestake explores the infamous secret lives of Enid Blyton, Oscar Wilde and Sylvia Plath to discover if their lives may make for a better read than the stories they made up. by Georgina copestake Edward Bulwer – Lytton once wrote ‘The pen is mightier that the sword’. Whilst Edward Bulwer – Lytton remains unknown to me, I agree with the sentiment entirely. One of the greatest forms of expression, writing provides the writer with an outlet in which to articulate their emotion and can create an impact on the reader much deeper than the mere cut of a knife. Yet writing can be deceiving, for how much do we really know about some of our most captivating and celebrated writers? We buy the books, we cherish the stories, yet would this be the case if the real lives, the lives intentionally hidden from public view, were at the heart of the story? Enid Blyton is arguably Britain’s favourite author when it comes to children’s adventure stories. She captivated us all from early childhood with stories from The Secret Seven, The Famous Five, Malory Towers and even the Noddy books. Reading her tales of do and dare, in which the child out-smarts the witless adult, you could almost taste the piles of plum pie pudding and lashings of ginger beer that were the very essence of her narrative. Yet whilst Blyton had the ability to capture a childhood that most can only dream of, her own life was far from perfection. She maintained a picturesque exterior, living in a beautiful thatched country cottage surrounded by children and animals; yet behind closed doors things were not as they seemed. Far from warm and comforting, she was cold, arrogant and perpetually stuck in the twelve-year-old adolescent body of her Famous Five character ‘George’. She spent most of her days hidden away in her writing pursuits, frequently writing up to 10,000 words a day, ceasing writing only to engage in a number of adulterous affairs that were the cause of her first husband’s depression and subsequent alcohol addiction. She was a woman of voracious sexual appetite, fondly nicknamed ‘little bunny’ by her husband. Her sexual orientation was predominantly male although it has been hinted that she engaged in an intense sexual relationship with her children’s nanny, Dorothy Richards. Most bizarrely, her
visitors often remembered her penchant for a game of naked tennis. Blyton was a woman stuck in the idealized image of childhood; a Peter Pan figure who never wanted to grow up. She disguised her secret life of sexual appetite and isolated immaturity, allowing her readers to familiarise themselves instead with a woman of family perfection. It is hard to imagine two worlds further apart - Blyton managed to inhabit and co-exist in both. Naughty rabbit. Equally sex-obsessed, Oscar Wilde is perhaps best known to the modern reader for his flamboyant homosexuality. Whilst this is not problematic in today’s society, for the Victorians it was the scandal of the century. Wilde was unarguably an effeminate man, yet this was not uncommon for the Victorians. The scandal arose in the secret life he kept hidden from the public - a life of rent boys, sodomy and consorting with the very top of the homosexual London nobility. But his success and fame came hand in hand with his image as a wholesome husband and family man: the collapse of the façade cost him his fortune, his family and his freedom. He married Constance Lloyd and became the father of two beloved sons a little after he finished University, yet by this stage he had become the sexual protégé of Robert Ross, who introduced him to the wild world of rent boys. His renowned masterpiece and only novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, was based on his visits to the studio of the artist Basil Ward, who would often invite young male models to get naked around the house. But with all this safely within gated gardens and private residences, Wilde was a success. Within a week of the opening of his celebrated play, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, whilst Wilde was celebrating at his privately-owned Abermale club, the Marquees of Queesbury and father of Wilde’s young lover ‘Bosie’, libelled him on the accusation of sodomy (yes, a crime). The day before the trail, Wilde learned that the defence had come up with the names of ten rent boys who he had solicited with on a number of occasions, alongside letters he had written to them. Wilde’s
Wilde’s young lover ‘Bosie’, libelled him on the accusation of sodomy (yes, a crime). The day before the trail, Wilde learned that the defence had come up with the names of ten rent boys who he had solicited with on a number of occasions, alongside letters he had written to them. Wilde’s desperately hidden secret was out, and yet even in his defending speech, he refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation, instead speaking of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His marriage collapsed as his wife fled the country and changed both her name and the names of his two sons. He was declared bankrupt and ruined. He became a lost and broken man in prison and upon his release, fled to France where he died aged only 44 of cerebral meningitis. Wilde’s story is a tale of hidden love and identity that caused scandal and outrage to the readers of his time. And he undeniably remains one of the most exquisite writers of the English tradition. Renowned for her flexible authorial style and tumultuous relationship with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath is one of the most tragic female writers of the twentieth century. She is known professionally as an American poet, novelist, children’s author and short story writer, however it is perhaps the collapse of her disastrous relationship and subsequent suicide attempt that is at the very heart of Plath’s cause. Impressively forward thinking, we can almost understand the inner workings of Plath’s tortured mind in ‘The Bell-Jar’, Plath’s most semi – autobiographical novel. The protagonist, Esther Greenwood is a bright and ambitious student and begins interning for a fashion magazine in New York before soon experiencing a mental breakdown and attempting suicide. Plath herself interned for Mademoiselle Magazine and, like her protagonist, had a mental breakdown and unsuccessfully attempted suicide for the first time. Plath first met Hughes at a party held at Newnham College, Cambridge, where Plath was a student. They married soon after and had two children but the relationship was marred with jealousies and traumas, pinnacled by Hughes’ adultery with Assia Welvill. Unsurprisingly the couple separated, but Plath never recovered from her heart break and her second and final suicide attempt was a fatal success. Sealing the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with wet towels, Plath placed her head in the oven and turned on the gas. Much speculation surrounds the death, with some questioning whether it was indeed an intended suicide attempt, or, a desperate cry for help from a deeply troubled and broken woman.
Regardless of the rumours, Plath remains one of the most celebrated authors of her generation and a tragic loss to English literature. Understanding an author’s private and hidden life allows us as the reader a greater insight into the reasons behind the story. Perhaps a form of escapism, perhaps a form of acceptance, perhaps an outlet of expression and emotion. For Blyton, her writing allowed her access to a world that as an adult she felt she was perhaps excluded from. For Wilde, writing was an outlet in which to express his sexuality. In such a repressive and ridged Victorian society, his pen was a form of relief and acceptance of who he really was. For Plath, it became a form of self-expression; a way of telling the world of her grief and anxiety without perhaps even admitting it to herself. All three are cherished writers of the English tradition yet each held a secret desperately hidden from public display.
Uni Correa’s stuck in the wrong place. She’s ploughing the countryside of Brazil for fashion ideas when she should be in Sao Paulo – the undisputed style capital of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. She’s also stuck in a guy’s body when she should be a girl. Uni’s one of the only transvestites we know that you wouldn’t mind checking out when you’re all drunk and flirty. Plus she’s one of like two transvestites that’s ever been given the chance to be on Brazilian TV (it’s mostly reserved for scantily-clad female dancers and fat, leering male hosts). We heard about her on the Sao Paulo party circuit and decided to ask her about her life, which was a million times harder than yours.
When did you know you were a transvestite? My mom knew with my first steps, apparently. When I was 4 years old, I used to talk to her shoes. I spent my whole childhood sneakily decorating myself with girly stuff. I’d paint little price tags in different colours and stick them on my fingernails, to pretend like I was using nail varnish. I’d dress up in my sister’s clothes and strut around the house, I’d draw outfits for Carnival – because it’s the time when almost any kind of behaviour is accepted, I could be myself. It’s funny remembering this, actually. Jesus, I was confused from the start of school until the end of it. It was intense, but survivable. When I was 18 I really began to question if I had made the right choice. Because I was really unhappy and frustrated, I never identified with anybody else. Corny bullshit aside, I ended up realising that actually it wasn’t a choice. It was kind of my condition, so I decided to make it really mine, I mean, I might as well give it my own character, right? Nowadays, it seems to be cool to be the friend of a girl with a dick, I make the most of it. How do men react when they think you’re a real girl? Hahaha, in the most varied ways imaginable. The question is, when I’m first walking up to them, before I give them my cute little ‘hey’, should I tell them ‘Hey, I’m a transvestite, you wanna talk to me?’ It’s the age-old problem. Where are you living now? And what’s the scene there like for transvestites? I’m not living, I’m wandering. For the past 6 months I’ve been travelling through the frontiers of Brazil collecting clothes and design ideas like some kind of lost gypsy. Another 3 months on the road and I’ll return to Sao Paulo to start my ‘new vintage’ saga with the help of my Japanese business partner. For transvestites, I notice that everywhere is similar; the scene here is like there and like everywhere, transvestites living off the sex trade, really few of them studying, developing themselves.
What do you do to earn money? Well, I graduated in fashion and design in the south of Brazil, but quickly moved to Sao Paulo, working for small model agencies, then as a salesgirl. I designed clothes for some people - but nothing really special, to tell the truth. Today I’m preparing to open a vintage store. Because life kind of messed with my mind and my professional career over here, I’m trying to create my own space, in every sense of the word. It’s well-known that people in positions of power, businessmen etc. hire transvestites for S&M sex – do you have any friends or know anyone that does this? It’s true – I’ve received loads of offers like that because I used to live on a posh street in Sao Paulo, but I don’t live there anymore because of it. These rich businessmen spend the whole day dominating everyone and end up becoming a little eccentric – it can only be relaxing for them after long hours at work, ordering everyone about, signing boring papers, to let themselves get abused a little and enjoy rough sex. Appearances are so deceiving. People like the ‘successful businessman’ along with the ‘jiujitsu playboys’ (well-known gangs of middle-class skinheads who practise a specific style of Judo/ street fighting, and go around picking fights in the city) make the craziest T-lovers. Men that are attracted to the transvestite scene are normally either way too normal (love football, badly dressed, etc.) or way too eccentric (masochistic vampires who love getting abused). I just want a well-dressed guy who has good taste in music! What is this ‘Goodnight Cinderella’ thing that you hear about so often in Gay/Lesbian clubs? It’s the nickname for a drug used by people who are crass, dirty and entirely lacking in attitude, who need to knock someone out in order to fuck them and whatever. It’s kind of like rohypnol.
Are you masculine in the bedroom? Most of the time, I myself am sweet enough to fuck guys. Hahaha… I don’t know how to be a man. There was a famous investigation made by the Brazilian broadcast journalist, Goulart de Andrade, about transvestites who lived in rural areas that used to self-inject industrial silicone to ‘enhance’ their bodies. What do you think of that kind of modification? Yeah, I’ve seen loads of transvestites with tits that have slid down to their stomachs – that kind of thing. It’s sad; they’ve almost become zombies from horror films – with silicone implants in their faces, their asses, their breasts, thighs, legs. The extremity doesn’t stop. This is what happens when you’re desperate to be what you want to be without access to any kind of information on the subject from anyone, and no time to do any research. This modified and mutilated transvestite is you, you people who are reading this interview, only with no money, no respect, no self-esteem, no dignity and in the wrong body – think about it. It’s the physical result of pure rejection. Trust me, if everything was easier, there’d be so many beautiful girls with dicks, because only those who have one know how good it is! I firmly believe that in the future near or distant, penis transplants will be quite commonplace. The fact is that we are on the margins of society – no-one can dispute that. To endure the jokes, the self-questioning, the stereotypes and ‘normal’ life is nothing easy. Don’t go thinking that we have any notion of normality or rationality, because we don’t have enough space for that inside our heads. How many real transvestites do you know (if you know any, period) that have a degree? That work in an area other than sex? Who are beautiful and don’t turn into silicone monsters to compete with other females? How many of them are in long-lasting relationships? I myself honestly don’t know if I am enlightened or if I’m part of the category I’ve described above.
By Karim Khan
Karim Khan tries to get under the skin of one of the most important European poets of the 20th Century, as noted by the Western literary Canon. Only you’ve probably never heard of him. Fernando Pessoa, the cerebral master of the multiple personality disorder. ‘Ever since I was a child, I have had the tendency to create a fictitious world around me, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed. (I don’t know, of course, if they didn’t really exist or if it is me who doesn’t exist. On such matters, as in all others, one shouldn’t be dogmatic.) Ever since I became aware of the thing that I call self, I can remember the figures, the movements, the character and the history of several fictitious people who were, to me, as visible and mine as those things which we, perhaps abusively, call real life. This tendency has always been with me, modifying slightly the kind of music it uses to bewitch me but never altering its manner of bewitching’ – Fernando Pessoa in a letter to Casais Monteiro, 1935. Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa lived most of his life in a furnished room in Lisbon, where he died in obscurity in 1935, aged forty-seven. He had never married, preferring instead his own company or that of a brandy bottle (it was his heavy drinking that killed him). He had left as his legacy, one slim volume of verse called A Mensagem – ‘The Message’, which was largely ignored
by the Portuguese literary fraternity. When cleaners were sent to clear out his belongings, however, they found a locked trunk. Inside were close to 26,000 pages of writings that were to make him, posthumously, into one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. Pessoa was remarkable not only for his angst-ridden, vital elegance in poetry, but the fractured, post-modern nature of his very being. What began as a childhood game of talking with imaginary characters became in later years an obsession with depersonalisation and the fracturing of the self. Indeed, Pessoa’s grip on his own identity was so weak that at one point he started writing to his old teachers and schoolmates in Durban (S.A.), posing as a psychiatrist and asking for their opinion on the mental state of his patient, Fernando Pessoa who, depending on the letter, had either committed suicide or was under restraint at an asylum. Chain-smoking in his room, Pessoa lived with a constant fear of madness. At the age of 20 he wrote that “One of my mental complications - horrible beyond words - is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.” coupled with an equally distressing inability to ‘act’. “I suffer - on the very limit of madness, I swear it - as if I could do all and was unable to do it, by deficiency of will.”
So, here was the late twenty-something Pessoa, he can’t decide who the hell he is. Mental paralysis prevents him from actually trying something new. It’s small wonder that Pessoa would compensate by creating an altogether uncomplicated and un self-conscious alter ego. A heteronym –like a pseudonym but much more complex and defined. He wrote of his first real heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, to a friend: ‘One day…March 8, 1914…It was the most triumphant day of my life…What followed was the appearance of someone in me…Alberto Caeiro. Forgive the absurdity of the sentence: in me there appeared my master.’ Alberto Caeiro, the blue-eyed, uneducated shepherd, was a simple man. “My mysticism is not to try to know… It is to live and not think about it.” From Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep: I’ve never kept sheep But it’s as if I’d done so. My soul is like a shepherd It knows wind and sun Walking hand in hand with the Seasons Observing and following along.
All of Nature’s unpeopled peacefulness Comes to sit alongside me. Still, I’m sad, as a sunset is To the imagination, When it grows cold at the end of the plain And you feel night come in Like a butterfly through the window. But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hands pick flowers And the soul takes no notice. […] I’ve no ambitions or desires. Being a poet isn’t my ambition. It’s my way of being alone. Ricardo Reis, Pessoa’s second heteronym, like Caeiro, urged Pessoa to feel rather than to think. A student of Caeiro, He would advocate the joy of simple pleasures, patience in times of trouble. The avoidance of pain and the search for tranquillity and calm above all else:
As long as I feel the fresh breeze in my hair And see the sun shining strong on the leaves, I will not ask for much. What better thing could destiny grant me? Other than the sensual passing of life in moments Of ignorance such as this? Yet he would muse sadly upon the brevity of life, the vanity of wealth and struggle. Reis was unable to shake off his feelings of sadness, to regard them as a natural part of life. This would connect with our loyal antihero, stuck in the grinding monotony of a day job as a commercial translator, asking himself whether he was really going to spend the rest of his days in a sweaty office, sneaking out to get drunk at lunchtime co he could get through the day. Pessoa’s boss was no fool, and told him that he was actually better to talk to after a few brandies. However, it is Álvaro de Campos, the third and most post-modern of Pessoa’s heterohyms, that offers the closest hint towards Pessoa’s own private identity: de Campos, the modernist, naval engineer, traveller and bisexual dandy, mixing hedonism with oc-
casional bouts of complete depression and a need for isolation. Wanting everything, Knowing nothing. From de Campos’ Tabacaria (The Tobaconists’) I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot wish to be anything. Yet, in me lies all of the dreams of the world. […] How should I know what I’ll be, I, who don’t know what I am? I am what I think? But I think of so many things! And there are so many people that think the same thing that there can’t be enough room for everyone! Pessoa appears to have been consumed more by his spiraling, fractured emotions than the desire to rid himself of them. Or maybe writing was the only way he knew how to do so: “One writes to become other than what one is” he once said.
From Fernando Pessoa’s Bicarbonato de Soda (Bicarbonate of Soda): Should I drink something or should I commit suicide? No; I am going to exist. Dammit! I am going to exist. To ex-ist... To ex-ist... Give me something to drink, for I am not thirsty! To get to know Pessoa is to try and come to terms with the constant, ticking metronome of our own identities, our own endlessly changing desires and occasional complete lack thereof. Not as something bad or malignant, but as something to be accepted as natural, as necessary to life. Something either to be mastered or not thought about at all. To fake or not to fake. From Fernando Pessoa’s Autopsicografia (Self-Analysis): The poet is a faker Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain Of pain he feels in fact. And those who read his words Will feel in what he wrote Neither of the pains he has But just the one they don’t. And so around its track This thing called the heart winds, A little clockwork train To entertain our minds. Perhaps like the American writer Sylvia Plath after him, Pessoa was affected by the awareness that so many of the things he could have been, or potentially be, would remain unrealised. Though Pessoa would break off a potential love affair with Ophelia Queiroz, a young girl he met in his office because of his commitment to poety, a recurrent theme in Pessoa- himself’s poetry is Tédio or Tedium. It is more than simple boredom. It is from a world of weariness and disgust with life, a sense of the finality of failure. Pessoa could find solace in nothing but his literary ‘selves’, consumed more by his spiraling emotions than the desire to rid himself of them.
Or perhaps writing was the only way Pessoa knew how to rid himself of them: “One writes to become other than what one is” he once said. Was he then guilty of making up his alter-egos to compensate for a life deliberately unlived? From Fernando Pessoa’s Bicarbonato de Soda (Bicarbonate of Soda): Should I drink something or should I commit suicide? No; I am going to exist. Dammit! I am going to exist. To ex-ist... To ex-ist... Give me something to drink, for I am not thirsty! To get to know Pessoa is to try and come to terms with the constant, ticking metronome of our own identities, our own endlessly changing desires and occasional complete lack thereof. Not as something bad or malignant but as something to be accepted as natural, as necessary to life. Here’s hoping he found it in death.
From Fernando Pessoa’s Autopsicografia (Self-Analysis): The poet is a faker Who’s so good at his act He even fakes the pain Of pain he feels in fact. And those who read his words Will feel in what he wrote Neither of the pains he has But just the one they don’t. And so around its track This thing called the heart winds, A little clockwork train To entertain our minds.
SUPERMAN Who: Superman/ Clark Kent Slogan: ‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!’ Garb: Blue unitard, red pants, red cape. In a nutshell: Orphan hunk from space with super speed, hearing, strength and X-ray vision: generally A+ sperm potential Style: Midwestern cookie cutter values, will catch you when you fall off a building FYI: Is a vegetarian What do we learn from SUPERMAN? A character defined by his invulnerability (except for that horrid kryptonite), the Man of Steel is generally acknowledged to personify an idealised American code of conduct and with superpowers rooted in the human physiognomy – even if he is from another galaxy. Superman is aspirational in both personality and those posterboy good looks of his; let’s not forget that chiselled jaw and bulging muscles. Notwithstanding the commendable symbolism of hope and ability, Superman’s greatest achievement in the fashion stakes comes down to sex. Underneath Clark Kent’s boring old suit, Superman is the masculine body at its optimum – a physique practically screaming sexual power with all the paranormal extras pushing erotic response into overdrive.
The enhanced human body has appeared continually on the catwalk with Issey Miyake, Bernard Wilhelm, Alexander McQueen and Walter van Beirendonck all choosing to send out exaggerated, inflated chests and shoulders in past menswear collections hoping that it will be the supreme body that sells. FASHION is aspirational. We see pretty clothes and bodies and want to be what they connote. How else would houses like Versace keep going? Most of us certainly aren’t as rich as the housewives in the adverts. Superman has taught us that glamour is a superpower in itself, a superpower for the mortals. Looking at Superman’s plucky and patriotic counterpart, Wonderwoman, we see how theirs is a certain sort of glamour that eventually hits a wall. Wonderwoman, clad in a sensible one-piece and armed with a lasso of Truth to catch the bad men with, admirably, won’t put out easily, especially when there are intergalactic wars to be fought. She’s essentially a sanitised version of femininity that poses no sexual threat to anybody who might have taken offence back in 1941 when she was dreamt up – the freaky sexual stuff came years later in the guise of Catwoman. Yet new designer Charlie le Mindu’s SS10 collection of lifesized Barbie dolls threatened the vision of perfection with a frightening femininity and aggressive sexuality. Glamour, then, is something that can be constructed. Thierry Mugler’s use of the drag queen Ru Paul in his spring/summer show of 1992 intimated that femininity can be self-produced regardless of gender: you could be Wonderwoman even if you were a man. Glamour just got FREAKY and Superman & Wonderwoman almost seem like a deceitful myth.
spiderman Who: Spider-Man/ Peter Parker Slogan: ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ Garb: Metal webbed suit In a nutshell: Orphan science geek is bitten by a radioactive spider. Then climbs walls and shoots webs from his wrists to fight crime Style: Swinging, leaping, catching you when you fall off a building FYI: Sewed his own costume. Gents, superpowers and domesticity are not mutually exclusive Peter Parker, the spotty science prodigy with a penchant for museums, made freaky beautiful - in fact, you don’t even need to be fully human. Spider-man is imbued with insect capabilities which you’d think would send most ladies running for the hills – yet Spider-man teaches us to celebrate diversity and difference, a concept that fashion has never been far from. Mugler thematically drew inspiration from the insect kingdom, with a haute couture outfit constructed to resemble the exoskeleton of a beetle with wing-like protrusions on the rear. Made from ridged leather and studs, its strength corresponded to its protective quality.
Mugler’s ‘Chimere’ dress is a mutant of epic proportions: an elegant Caliban drenched in multicoloured scales, hair and feathers topped off with a manic look in her eye. In the real world she might have been friendless in the playground but as a comic book character and a fashionable body she’s a goddess, worshipped for her difference. These are visions of beauty that address old-school fears about Otherness and things that we perceive to be ‘unnatural’ represent an intolerance that the fashion world and comic books have sought to eradicate. The animal world is also full of warriors, ripe for borrowing from. McQueen in his collections Dante (AW08) and ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, endowed his models with antlers, thorns and wolfish teeth, a freakish evolution and a visceral power. Viktor and Rolf sent out models painted from head to toe in black in the AW01 collection ‘The Black Hole’ often resembling crows or black cats, sometimes both at once. These are animal hybrids that inspire awe rather than disgust. With a dangerous and uncomfortable sex appeal making their wearers formidable villains to the priggish Wonderwoman, you don’t know if their going to kill you or sleep with you. Being superhuman makes people afraid of you – what superhero wants that?
batman Who: Batman/ Bruce Wayne Slogan: Various In a nutshell: Orphan businessman/trust fund beneficiary rolling in murdered parents’ dosh. Has a batcave and butler. Now that’s aspirational Style: Introspection, fear, sketchy paranoia, lurking in dark corners FYI: Robin – alleged to be a different sort of partner altogether. Gosh! The last of our superhero lessons comes from the gravel-voiced Caped Crusader who shows that science is just as potent as fantasy when it comes to smashing your enemies into the ground. Unlike many of his auspicious peers, Bruce Wayne doesn’t have any actual superpowers in the traditional sense, instead relying on state-of-the-art technology, a chunky bank balance, a butler called Alfred, a mighty awful grudge and a tendency towards brutality. Batman teaches us how we can harness science for armour – on the one hand feeling like an anxiety about how we protect ourselves against the external world, on the other the indication of how we can use technology to make ourselves better and ambition sportswear companies, of course, make it their business to develop.
Hussein Chalayan has explored the modern preoccupation with machines simultaneously linking modern progress with the very limits of the human body. A series of Aeroplane Dresses (where panels at the waist slid down and out to the side to mimic wings, the last operated by a boy with a remote control), we are reminded that while we can manipulate technology, we might never fully imitate it. Hence a continual fascination with robots where the machine replaces flesh altogether, although Mugler has featured a ‘robot couture’ piece where a droid took to the catwalk with the breasts and navel the only human skin in view, suggesting a fetishisation of technology and by extension, its empowerment. So is it possible that the robot is the new superhero? Or are we facing a new villain? In the X-Men series, a character called Wildchild gets a crush on a hologram. Like Charlie le Mindu’s pneumatic dolls, which verge on the edge of fembot, the vision is difficult and affronts us with the typically modernist fear about loss of identity; ‘beauty’ at its most unreal with the strive to be harder, better, faster, stronger having gone too far. Fashion has used technology to reinvent us beyond all recognition; maybe we’re not superhuman because we’re not even human any more. ‘Who the hell do you think I am? I’m the goddamn Batman!’ Superheroes teach us that we can become what we want to be, to build on ourselves to be better or even to become different people altogether. While the freakiness might reside in his blood, it ultimately takes a costume to bring it out for Peter Parker. Slipping into the spidey-suit radically shifts his everyman beta-male into super-alpha territory. We can become what we wear: as Comme de Garcons put it, body becomes dress becomes body. Superpowers, these are what we can dress ourselves in. We can play the part, face our fears and SAVE THE WORLD!
By Lukasz Wierzbowski Introduced by Jess Gough
If there's an equivalent in digital photography for lo-fi music, it's mobile phone camera photographs. As in lo-fi, it is the spontaneity and unselfconscious looseness of the mobile camera image that defines its authenticity. Anything can be photographed. Any moment, anywhere. And, as in lomo photography, it is precisely its flaws that become its virtues: pixilation, noise, colour aberration, distortion. They all create a very specific aesthetic for these images. I'm a photographer and I work using a full-frame SLR. Every time I carry that little monster with me, people look a bit scared and intimidated. But with mobile cameras, it's different. Security won't come and ask you to stop photographing. People don't stare. Also, I don't carry my SLR everywhere and I don't stop to photograph my computer desk or the raindrops on the bus window with it. It's the poetry of everyday life, of small insignificant things that becomes revealed through the mobile camera lens. These pictures were taken during a week in my life, a very rainy July (remember its winter in the southern hemisphere) for a friend's blog, Don't Touch My Moleskine. I hope you enjoy.
Graham Greene, an ex-member of the British Secret Service, who in his novel Our Man in Havana presents a satirical look at the occupation of spying that appears to predict the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman living in Cuba, is recruited as a spy by the British he doesn’t know where to start. All he knows is that he needs the money and he sees a way to financial security by feeding fabricated reports back to Britain. However, against all odds his stories are taken seriously, most hilariously (and significantly) when Wormold’s drawings of a mysterious weapon (consisting of parts of a vacuum cleaner) reach the powers that be. Hawthorne stared at the drawings. They reminded him of – something. He was touched, he didn’t know why, by an odd uneasiness. ‘You remember the reports that came with them,’ the Chief said. ‘The source was stroke three. Who is he?’ ‘I think that would be Engineer Cifuentes sir.’ Well, even he was mystified. With all his technical knowledge. These machines were being transported by lorry from the army-headquarters at
Bayamo to the edge of the forest. Then mules took over. General direction those unexplained concrete platforms.’ ‘What does the Air Ministry say, sir?’ ‘They are worried, very worried. Interested too, of course.’ ‘What about the atomic research people?’ ‘We haven’t shown them the drawings yet. You know what those fellows are like. They’ll criticize points of detail, say the whole thing is unreliable, that the tube is out of proportion or points the wrong way. You can’t expect an agent working from memory to get every detail right. I want photographs, Hawthorne.’ ‘That’s asking a lot, sir.’ ‘We have got to have them. At any risk. Do you know what Savage said to me? I can tell you, it gave me a very nasty nightmare. He said that one of the drawings reminded him of a giant vacuum cleaner.’ ‘A vacuum cleaner!’ Hawthorne bent down and examined the drawings again, and the cold struck him once more. ‘Makes you shiver, doesn’t it? ‘But that’s impossible, sir.’ He felt as though he were pleading for his own career, ‘It couldn’t be a vacuum cleaner, sir. Not a vacuum cleaner.’ ‘Fiendish, isn’t it?’ the Chief said. ‘The ingenuity, the simplicity, the devilish imagination of the thing.’
Should an author’s personal life ever affect the way we read a text? Norwegian author Knut Hamsun is a case in point. Feted for novels such as Hunger and The Growth of the Soil, which, in 1920, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hamsun went on to lead a troubled life and died as a frail 92 year-old with an unyielding support for Adolph Hitler. In fact, Hamsun’s devotion to Nazism was so obstinate that he donated his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels and later wrote a eulogy for the German people after Hitler’s death. This year has been the 150th anniversary of Hamsun’s birth. His native Norway have marked the occasion with a new museum, commemorative coins and a statue dedicated to the writer.
Ingar Sletten Kolloen, author of Knut Hamsun: Dreamer & Dissenter, is quoted in the New York Times as saying: “We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years. That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave.” Will such books remain forever overshadowed by the actions of their author? Or perhaps the art is the thing, and we should not be so wedded to biography and history. After all, Walter Gibbs in the New York Times observes that most readers believe “the crude, reactionary impulses displayed by Hamsun during World War II are scarcely evident in his novels”. Even if we accept that the artwork should remain separate from the author, in such extreme circumstances it may be inevitable that today's readers bring modern sensibilities when approaching a text.
Identity plays a crucial part in literature: novels, characters and authors all have their own distinct identities that are a crucial part of why we love them. Before writing, the author will focus on these myriad identities – they will have created strong characters and have a clear idea of where the story is going. In short, they will have a plan for the finished work. For this months’ ‘Secret Identities and Other Guises’ issue we decided to turn this process on its head and attempt to create a story without an identity. One in which we had no pre-conceived idea of how the final product should be. It was to be a collaborative process; an email was sent to the Some Think Blue brethren requesting that they submit up to four lines either of their own creation or from their favourite song, book, poem or comic, on any theme. The hope was that we would be able to cobble together something resembling a coherent scene from these submissions and then set the text alongside an illustration
Initially the task seemed a daunting one. What chance did we have of creating a story from no starting point and with no idea of how we wanted it to turn out? Fortunately, we at Some Think Blue are a soppy and predictable lot and the contributions were, for the most part, loosely based on the theme of love. The finished scene is below, with illustrations by Jon Horner. I’m not sure if the experiment was a wholehearted success, certainly I don’t expect authors to start working in this way, but I am quite happy with how it turned out. Not least because of the seamless inclusion of some Mary J. Blige lyrics!
Ahu Kelesoglu is a woman who knows what she wants, even though she may have stumbled onto it by accident. The singer, producer, radio and club DJ defines the notion of a ‘Jane-of-all-trades’, and it seems to have come out of relentlessly applying herself to everything that she puts into her path. She’s pretty too: petite, slim, with big, brown doeeyes and streaks of blonde in her auburn hair. She once shaved it all off in homage to Skin from Skunk Anansie. It’s interesting and unnerving in equal measure to know that she juggles so many hip and demanding careers – and what’s more, she does it coming across equal parts fun-time girl, beguilingly intelligent and steely-eyed determined.
Her demeanour may well have been cultivated since childhood. Born in Istanbul, Turkey (she still lives there), Ahu’s father died when she was ten years old. She remembers a happy family life with him but grew up an only child in a house filled with five generations of Kelesoglu women; her mother, her grandmother, her great grandmother and her great-great grandmother. “Growing up there was normal, I guess… apart from I think women have a different world-view to men… more magical somehow. But I was at home and as a child I didn’t really want to spend time with my mum, so I was totally into Mario Land. I was writing and drawing all the time - everyone thought I was going to become a painter of something to do with fashion. I was acting too, in school plays. My passion was, and still is, learning and moving forward with that knowledge. I’m a Wikipedia person – I used to read encyclopaedias – seriously! I still like reading dictionaries…” She studied at a private language school, learning German and English - a testimony to her nearly perfect grammar, albeit shaded by a heavy American accent. She started off in music as an alternative radio DJ in Istanbul, playing electronic music - drum n bass and breakbeat. “My radio station that I’m working at now is cool, it’s alternative. But music in Turkey is kind of going through a rough phase… it’s like there’s a record label called Double Moon Records – they used to be really good, but when you get money… like people change, record labels also change. They used to put out jazz, soul, more eclectic stuff. The stuff that’s released now is worse than about six or seven years ago. There used to be a lot of jazz groups…” Of course Ahu is now known as a talented singer, DJ and producer, courted by hip-hop supremo Flying Lotus and the Eglo collective, when she’s in London. She comes and goes: this is her tenth time in the capital, but by no means her only foray out of her homeland. Indeed, things decidedly took off for Ahu following her acceptance to the Red Bull Music Academy in 2005, taking her to Seattle for two weeks. “Drum n bass was just breaking in the States and everyone was like ‘Wow have you heard this? It’s so amazing, so fresh, so new!’ and I was like ‘This isn’t new; I’ve been playing this for two years!’ It’s different everywhere - Japan is so different; The States is so different… I loved it. I went for two weeks and stayed three months. I became friends with the local guys that were doing hip hop, a crew called Fourth City. I became interested in them, started playing at their nights. That’s where my love of hip-hop and trip-hop started,
I think –that and the okayplayer website. But it’s so varied; Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix is from there, Bruce Lee’s grave is there! I think it’s a bit like London. Not in terms of energy, because it’s so chilled, but the city itself reminds me of London, when it’s raining. I remember it rained for 28 days straight when I was there, it was wonderful.”
are going to stay in place forever too I worked with him, but Flying Lotus mension for everyone; everyone starte and it’s become so easy with compute thing.”
But even acceptance to the ultra-prestigious Red Bull Academy hadn’t convinced her of her talent. “I still wasn’t writing my own tracks, I was too scared. I didn’t have the courage to do it but Flying Lotus helped me, encouraged me to be more courageous. I eventually wrote one track called ‘Don’t Leave’ – I just recorded it for my friends but people at the Academy loved it so they put it on the album, this is 2005. So I was thinking ‘hmm, maybe I can write’ but then after speaking to Lotus and working with him, I felt I could do better, so I was writing the lyrics and he was sending the beats. I remember, it was a Saturday night and he sent me a beat and I started to write ‘Roberta Flack’, and he was like “I loved it, I loved it, can you record this?” I mean, I was recording at home, I did everything at home on my Mac.”
I ask her what’s next in her career, full she’s going to climb K2, or take up a c “I’m working on mixes for the radio s do some for RBMA Radio, and I keep I don’t want to write something I’m no I’m waiting for the right moment to w album I want to finish sometime in tracks with Lotus are done, but may through Sam (Floating Points). It’s tri ing to Tricky, Portishead – did I say tha mean, PNYC was an amazing album… anything. It’s a whole different energy – it’s people, there might be differen That’s the amazing part.”
When Ahu starts talking about her musical influences, it’s like a dam breaks. Names and well-phrased references spill out in cascades. “I have all these wonderful singer songwriters in my life: Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Skin – she’s a really amazing writer, Roisin Murphy too, Everything But The Girl, Tori Amos. I mean, it’s not ‘I love you, you love me, now you left me, I hate you’ – it’s much deeper than that.” What’s she into now? “I really like Shuanise, her album’s coming out soon on Eglo Records, and Fatima… Bibio from Warp Records is amazing and also the stuff that Tawiah just did with Zed Bias. I really like Tawiah. Because I’m listening to so much music, like maybe 50 tracks, every day – you start listening to things for like 5 seconds ‘mmm, that’s ok, that’s not, I can play this, I can’t play this.’ When I heard Bibio, I was like ‘what is this?!’ That was exceptional. I like exceptional. Because lots of people are sending me beats and now everyone’s doing their own, it’s like they’re doing the same thing, the same samples, over and over…People are like ‘yeah I’m gonna smoke my weed…’ She dissolves into laugher. Ahu certainly has a critical eye and one thinks that it must be scathing in full effect, but she seems to prefer talking about what’s good, and more importantly, what’s talent. “Bossa Nova and old-school soul/ funk – they’ll stay forever. People are creating things today that
You get the impression that you cou her experiences seemingly giving her opinions on topics that she’s genuinel girl that also loves watching Jeremy K a copy of The Wicca Bible and loves mains a whirlwind - a force of nature t feet.
o – I’m not saying this because s, it opened like a different died beat-making with that album ers… It’s a good thing and a bad
ly expecting her to proclaim that course in Portuguese literature. show, which is still going on – I on writing, but I need to focus. ot proud of… I’m not in a hurry. write the right thing. My E.P. or 2010. It’s written, most of the ybe I want to add more strings ip-hop maybe: I grew up listenat? I think I love trip-hop a lot, I I love live orchestras more than y. It’s not computers, machines nt results, things might change.
uld talk to Ahu for a long time, an endless supply of ideas and ly passionate about. But this is a Kyle, a girl that recently bought reading New Scientist. Ahu rethat’s only beginning to find her
I was sitting with a friend of mine, not so long ago, when he started talking about legacy. His legacy. That alone tells a story. When we think about legacy it is an inherently selfish consideration; one that preoccupies us because we care about what other people think. Because, in the cold light of day, stuff like that matters. Now my friend is worrying about being in the wrong area of the right field of work. He does not want his peers building an image of him in their minds that does not suit where he wants to be seen to be coming from. This is not a concern that ever drifted its way into the consciousness of Arthur Russell. This is a man for whom the completion of a musical project was not its centre. What was paramount for him was how it made him and his audience feel and where it led him.
For me, the way that Arthur Russell conducted himself throughout his musical career, a career that was harnessed and celebrated for the most part in New York City, showed a blind concern for his legacy. He was not at all concerned with the development of his career nor tied to any particular mode or style. He was tied to himself. There seems to have been an intrinsic need to move himself and his work so far forward from what was happening at the time that he often left collaborators and loved ones wondering. His work was quite simply too remarkable, too individual for its own time. It is only now, nearly twenty years after his tragic death in 1992, that Arthur Russell is being recognised for what can only be described as his genius. As a boy, growing up in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Russell was enthralled by the beat poetry of the 1960s and drew particular inspiration from the futurism of Timothy Leary and the composition of John Cage. His love of music made him long for something more than the Midwest conventionalism that his parents embodied and with little else to fire him, he quickly grew into an extremely accomplished cellist and pianist and began to compose his own music. After clashing with his parents for the last time, he ran away, escaping to a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. This is where he met eventual mentor, part-time lover and serial collaborator, Allen Ginsberg. Russell really honed his skills in San Francisco as he divided his time between studying North Indian music at the Ali Akbar College of Music and Western composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The commune adored Russell for his mesmerising string skills but he left them behind when they tried to communalise his cello. By this time he must have had an idea of what he was capable of, having felt the grandeur of having accompanied such a renowned poet as Ginsberg. It is little wonder that Russell followed him to New York City. Leaving home and leaving the commune represent two pivotal moments in Russell’s early life. He had twice rejected positions of real comfort in favour of something else, something more. But it seems his was no ordinary ambition, no ordinary calling. He believed in the music that he created and performed with a very distinctive reticence, one that has uniquely coloured his musical legacy. Pastel shaded and block-coloured all at once, there is a certain spirituality about him that, for me, shows he truly believed in its power to affect those that heard it. He once said that music was not “just something to go dance to, [but that it] could really heal”, and listening to “That’s Us/Wild Combination” and “This is how we walk on the moon” gives us some idea of what he meant. At the age of 23, Russell became the musical director of The Kitchen, a downtown avant-garde performance space where he worked alongside various forward-thinking composers such as Laurie Anderson, Rocco di Pietro and Phillip Glass. Glass describes himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures”, rejecting the minimalist label he is often dressed in, and it was this sort of form that really
struck notes with Russell who absorbed Glass’ melodic yet orchestral approach. At the same time he relished the liberating social aesthetic of the East Village’s underground disco scene, and under various monikers - Dinosuar L, Loose Joints and Indian Ocean – he married the two, producing good-natured, eccentric disco tunes which became the hits of the pre Studio 54 era. That Russell was a musical director at such a young age invited him to explore everything he came across with an innocence and a playfulness that can still be cited today, particularly in some of these early disco records. His first release, “Kiss me again”, released as Dinosaur on Sire Records sold a gargantuan two hundred thousand copies, encouragement enough for Russell to go on to make some of the most downright mischievous “you’ve got me love dancin’” music you’re ever likely to slide foot to. The fact that “Is it all over my face / Pop your funk” was recorded with both a male and a female vocal tells us something about Russell’s slightly ambiguous orientation (he was involved with men and women even when with his longest-term partner Tom Lee) as well as the fact that he understood how to get in touch with the dancing crowds of the early eighties. He got it. The rhythmic drive of “Go Bang” hangs like a glint medallion around the sweaty neck of the time. After his success on the disco scene in the early eighties, Russell retreated, appearing to try to create some sort of utopia for himself where the absorbing process of making music became his life abso lute. This is where he was most comfortable but those around him began to suffer. He began to make self-defeating career choices; collaborators came and went and opportunities passed him by while he
lute. This is where he was most comfortable but those around him began to suffer. He began to make self-defeating career choices; collaborators came and went and opportunities passed him by while he worked alone in his East Village apartment. What resulted was some of Russell’s most emotionally direct and descriptively rich work; the collection of songs with cello and voice, World of Echo. This album is essentially a set of art songs that really capture his defiant commitment to the avant-garde. When I listen to “All boy all girl” I hear a similar appreciation of the space between the notes that I hear from The XX today. The fact that sales of World of Echo are on the upand-up goes to show that Russell’s music is now being marvelled at for its out-on-its-own individualism and sheer personality. In Matt Wolf’s documentary on Russell, Wild Combination; A Portrait of Arthur Russell, friend and musician Steven Hall says that, towards the end of his life, Arthur moved from being a guy who was “spaced out naturally, [to being] spaced out all the time because he was stoned, and then spaced out because he was a genius. And then he became demented spaced out”. This spiral towards his own utopia was coloured by the way Arthur himself saw the way he did not fit into the world. He said himself that “the things that I like seem to be so different. I don’t know, they’re not the things that everybody… likes”. Utter devotion to his music was the only thing of which Arthur Russell was certain, something his obituary in the (East) Village Voice highlights tragically yet triumphantly, “Arthur’s songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music”. Wolf’s documentary is a must for anybody who courts an interest in this long forgotten disco auteur – i.e. anybody with a heart or a soul. YouTube him, then buy him, then ware your copy down, safe in the knowledge that not much comes close to the sheer music of Arthur Russell.
London producer Kwes’s real name is Kwesi, which means ‘born on a Sunday’ in his parents’ native Ghanaian. The universally-acknowledged day of rest equates rather fittingly to Kwes: a self-admitted sloth when he wants to be, a fan of sleep and tea and comfort and more tea. Though the usual distaste one reserves for slackers can’t apply here. You see, at the age of 22, Kwes is making major moves in the production world and has started to devote some of his time to developing solo material that is actually rather wonderful. His newest double A-side, Hearts in Home/Tissues (XL) is an unusually adventurous, delicate, languid affair that reminds me of later Blur - you know, when they ditched the pogo-ing mockney and went fullon sophisticated pop. It also marks Kwes out as a major singersongwriting prospect in his own right, that’s if he ever wanted to stop producing (which he won’t).
Kwes grew up in Lewisham and is still there with his family while he stockpiles what must be a small fortune in cash under his mattress. This is a guy who has produced for Joe from Hot Chip, Damon Albarn, The XX, Micachu and Ghostpoet, and is working with more acts this year than my ailing Dictaphone can recall. He’s got three major labels vying for his signature and here he is, meeting us in a cold, bright park in Kensal Rise near a converted recording studio he is using for the day. Kwes’ dad used to keep a small collection of jazz records and LPs from Rick James’ girl group, the Mary-Jane Girls. This coupled with Ghanaian pop music, known as Hip life (hip-hop fused with the jazzy woodwind and guitar style of highlife), meant that a variety of soul music was always wafting around the household. “But I used to listen to a lot of radio, I watched Top of the Pops religiously – I just loved pop music.” We talk here, however, of a time before pop conjured images of the Simon Cowell/Simon Fuller generation. Popular music once meant exactly that, because, it was too good to be ignored by the mainstream rather than unsubstantial enough to appeal to a million vacant minds: David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Madonna. Blur, Pulp, Skunk Anansie. Kwes very seriously comments “I don’t even want to say that I love all music because I know there’s music from, for example, Eastern cultures that I haven’t even heard of yet… I just want to listen to as much music as I can. Always listening to music, man.” Though his own creations are undoubtedly worthy, it’s his production for others that has labels like Parlophone, Island and XL knocking on his door. “I’m most happy making music for other people, making them happy with the way their music sounds.” When you ask Kwes what he’s listening to at the moment, he reels off a list from his battered Sony-Ericsson that he has attached a pair of seriously expensive studio head
phones to. It seems that he’s just name-checking the artists he’s working with – is he? “I guess, in a way - I really believe in the people I’m working with – I wouldn’t get involved with them otherwise – I think these people are going to be really big in 2010.” Kwes talks about a band called Elviin (sounds like a sunnier Ben Folds), Elan Tamara (think an Adele/Tori Amos collaboration and you’re nearly there) and a former Swedish Pop Idol star called Cornelia (with added synths and blips). Kwes’ dad used to keep a small collection of jazz records and LPs from Rick James’ girl group, the Mary-Jane Girls. This coupled with Ghanaian pop music, known as Hip life (hip-hop fused with the jazzy woodwind and guitar style of highlife), meant that a variety of soul music was always wafting around the household. “But I used to listen to a lot of radio, I watched Top of the Pops religiously – I just loved pop music.” We talk here, however, of a time before pop conjured images of the Simon Cowell/Simon Fuller generation. Popular music once meant exactly that, because, it was too good to be ignored by the mainstream rather than unsubstantial enough to appeal to a million vacant minds: David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Madonna. Blur, Pulp, Skunk Anansie. Kwes very seriously comments “I don’t even want to say that I love all music because I know there’s music from, for example, Eastern cultures that I haven’t even heard of yet… I just want to listen to as much music as I can. Always listening to music, man.” Though his own creations are undoubtedly worthy, it’s his production for others that has labels like Parlophone, Island and XL knocking on his door. “I’m most happy making music for other people, making them happy with the way their music sounds.” When you ask Kwes what he’s listening to at the moment, he reels off a list from his battered Sony-Ericsson that he has attached a pair of seriously expensive studio headphones to. It seems that he’s just name-checking the artists he’s working with – is he? “I guess, in a way - I really believe in the people I’m working with – I wouldn’t get involved with them otherwise – I think these people are going to be really big
in 2010.” Kwes talks about a band called Elviin (sounds like a sunnier Ben Folds), Elan Tamara (think an Adele/Tori Amos collaboration and you’re nearly there) and a former Swedish Pop Idol star called Cornelia (with added synths and blips). Kwes’ successful professional career seems enviously light work – a clear, clean path towards a musical career most dream of. He never really promoted himself, just put up a MySpace and the calls started to come in. “At the very start I didn’t really go crazy militant promoting myself to the general public. I did a bit on MySpace but nothing ridiculously labour intensive (well he was still in school). A lot of the actual hard work involved getting in touch with the right industry people; getting to know who works where and who does what. But I was kind of doing that because I had/and still do have an interest in A&R alongside production, and I think the interest in my own music and production work from the industry people was a by-product of me doing that, which is great. It’s all such a blur now how it all came together.”
If time is a blur, you get the sense that every note Kwes ever hears gets logged and filed meticulously somewhere in that humming brain of his. He is, unquestionably and entirely, connected to the melodies and beats that he has made in his career. “If I went deaf, I don’t know what I’d do... Honestly I’d rather go blind than deaf. Though I loved painting and drawing at school, ever since I was young there wasn’t anything else that I wanted to do.” I remember that other notable creatives, like the poet Charles Bukowski and the celebrated scientist Henri Rousseau (a scientist before he started painting at 40), were of the same vein. Their paintings weren’t half bad either. “I’ve just got back into it actually… I love painting. I didn’t really want to talk about this but I’ve got synaesthesia*, so I used to put that synaesthetic experience down on canvas. I guess I If time is a blur, you get the sense that every note Kwes ever hears gets logged and filed meticulously somewhere in that humming brain of his. He is, unquestionably and entirely, connected to the melodies and beats that he has made in his career. “If I went deaf, I don’t know what I’d do... Honestly I’d rather go blind than deaf. Though I loved painting and drawing at school, ever since I was young there wasn’t anything else that I wanted to do.” I remember that other notable creatives, like the poet Charles Bukowski and the celebrated scientist Henri Rousseau (a scientist before he started painting at 40), were of the same vein. Their paintings weren’t half bad either. “I’ve just got back into it actually… I love painting. I didn’t really want to talk about this but I’ve got synaesthesia*, so I used to put that synaesthetic experience down on canvas. I guess I was influenced quite a lot by an Austrian artist called Hundertwasser. I loved his work because of the amount of colours he used, that, and he eschewed the use of straight lines anywhere in his work- even in his architecture.” How many 22 year-olds do you know who can and choose to use the term ‘eschew’? Kwes chose to eschew (beat) convention on Coyote Wolf, the lone MySpace track that originally grabbed the attention of legendary producer and musician Matthew Herbert who described Kwes as ‘lurking on the fringes of electronic music’. It is a dark, uncomfortable ride. Kwes’ Hearts in Home/ Tissues, although far from mainstream pop, is a far more polished and satisfying listen. “I just felt that I wanted to connect with people. It’s all good making music for myself, but, if you want to push music forward… you need to connect.” Kwes is connecting alright. 2010 should be an excellent year. *synaesthesia is a rare condition where the sufferer can experience sound as both a sound and a specific colour, e.g. a ‘C’ chord can be ‘seen’ as a green light.
Any regular visitor to the Steel City will have undoubtedly spied his iconic stylings - his work spans the breadth of the city limits. Peeping eyes peer out of tree trunks painted in the unlikeliest places, and his mythical creatures crawl, plod, soar and leap across walls in Technicolor rebellion to Sheffield’s reputation as a dull, uninspiring city of collapsed industry. Whilst Phlegm’s work with the spray can may earn him plaudits from those with an eye for the bold, striking and grand, much of Phlegm’s greatest work is featured in his comics. Published approximately once every four months, Phlegm Comics develop the subtler, more intricate side of Phlegm’s art. Savagely satirical and downright hysterical, Phlegm Comics cast a scathing eye over modern society, highlighting the pitfalls of modern culture with dark and twisted humour. Is Phlegm your alter ego? I never really chose to use it. I used to publish comics and zines with my name in them too, phlegm just caught on more like a nickname and I left my own name behind. Why do choose to publish your art under an alias? Partly because I tiptoe on the edge of legality sometimes when it comes to my wall paintings, but I think mainly because I just don’t want the attention my artwork gets intruding on my personal life. I don’t like to be noticed, but in the art world, you have to deal with it...a necessary evil. How does your persona affect the way in which you work, do you feel it gives you more freedom?
I do what I want and don’t really give a shit what people think. I guess hiding behind a silly name helps. All I care about is working every day, i leave my image and persona to fend for itself. It seems to me that people project what they want onto an artist anyway. A lot of your work seems to run along a similar theme with recognizable characters or settings continually popping up what inspires these creations and do your characters have egos of their own? The longer i work the more i notice themes and patterns. I like intricate detail and the accumulation of intricate systems that work together, ecosystems, complex human relationships, that sort of thing. I have simple homogenized † characters I use when I don’t need them, they act more as a prop for an aesthetic or a separate idea. A version of that simplified character has become what I use as a human element in my wall paintings. I tend to draw him as a hooded character with thin hairy limbs and a bald head. He’s the main character in a big book I’m drawing now. It’s funny really, as he started off as a simple nameless character in my comics, was then adopted by my wall work and developed a character… and now he’s back as a fully formed character in my comics again. Tell us a bit about how and why you started drawing and painting? I think most kids draw, the real question is why did I never stop like everyone else? I was moved from urban life when I was about seven when my family wanted to drop out of society and live on top of a big desolate mountain in Wales. This included a school that was dying on its arse. It had a policy that seemed to think nature walks, sitting for hours drawing what you want were more important than education. It shut down the year I left for secondary school. I turned up at secondary school knowing all the plants of the forest and how to draw them. I was illiterate and socially inept. Instead of catching up, I just worked with what I’d got. I think that’s why I’ve always stayed so aggressively independent with what I do.
What is inspiring you the most at the moment? The most inspiring thing I saw this week was in London. I went down to the museum of everything just off Regents Park and saw the outsider art exhibition. It was wonderful, so inspiring to see art that has done with a deep personal drive. A welcome break from the art of today that seems to make a neat commercial product out of every artist.† If you could be someone else - who would you be and why? I’d like to be someone who doesn’t draw and has a healthy social life. Although I think I’d get bored with that pretty fast. Do you believe that all people have an alter ego? Some people seem to have a different ego for every person they talk to, others seem happy with just the one. Do you have a New Year’s resolution? ...other than the standard drink, smoke and eat less no not really. What will 2010 be about for Phlegm? I’m working on an epic 150 page large format comic that’s been taking up all my time for almost a year already. I intend to release that next autumn. Its the first real effort I’ve made to draw a comic, so I’m very exited about that. Phlegm comics are available to purchase from phlegmcomics. com and you can keep up to date with his current projects via his blog by visiting phlegmcomicnews.blogspot.com.