The Futurist Movement

A técnica intertextual do Cut-Up em Naked Lunch de William Burroughs por Flávia Andrea Rodrigues Benfatti (UNICERES)

2009-09-30T06:26:00.000-07:00

A técnica intertextual do Cut-Up em "Naked Lunch" de William Burroughs

por Flávia Andrea Rodrigues Benfatti* (UNICERES)

Resumo:
Esta comunicação visa apresentar a técnica intertextual, o cut-up,
utilizada por William Burroughs na obra Naked Lunch (1959). Para tanto, foi
utilizado como arcabouço teórico Mikhail Bakhtin e Laurent Jenny para embasar o
construto literário do autor.

O conceito de dialogismo desenvolvido por Bakhtin é apontado por Barros (1994) como imprescindível para a formação de sentido de um texto. Em se tratando da interação verbal, na relação dialógica “eu-tu”, o sujeito se descentraliza, sendo substituído por vozes sociais e históricas. A autora ainda acrescenta que, não sendo mais o foco do discurso centrado no “eu” ou no “tu”, a interlocução passa para o espaço criado entre ambos, o texto.
O segundo aspecto do dialogismo discutido pela autora se refere às vozes oriundas de diversos textos que se instauram no interior de cada um e o definem. Tais vozes foram chamadas por Bakhtin de polifonia. Essas vozes criam um diálogo intertextual com outros textos existentes. Esse caráter dinâmico do texto literário permite um encontro de superfícies
textuais que faz com que ele não seja um ponto fixo. Nesse sentido, Bakhtin, partindo de um
estudo sobre a obra de Dostoiévski, leu o texto literário dentro de seu contexto, situando-o na
história e na sociedade. Dessa forma, há uma interação entre o “eu” e o “outro” dentro de um texto, isto é, ocorre uma relação dialógica. Segundo o teórico:

[...] o diálogo não é o limiar da ação, mas a própria a ação. Tampouco é um
meio de revelação, de descobrimento do caráter como que já acabado do
homem. Não, aqui o homem não apenas se revela exteriormente como se
torna, pela primeira vez, aquilo que é, repetimos, não só para os outros mas
também para si mesmo. Ser significa comunicar-se pelo diálogo. Quando
termina o diálogo, tudo termina. Daí o diálogo, em essência não pode nem
dever terminar. (1981, p. 222-223)

Ainda, segundo Barros, há de se fazer uma distinção entre dialogismo e polifonia, embora, para ela, ambos sejam usados, muitas vezes, como sinônimos. A autora discute que a polifonia ocorre dentro de um texto dialógico, ou seja, há nele o embate de muitas vozes sociais. Por outro lado, esse efeito polifônico é percebido se as vozes deixam ser ouvidas, pois, do contrário, elas se ocultarão em uma única voz monofônica. Esta, por sua vez, mostra-se camuflada, quando por procedimentos discursivos, abafam as múltiplas vozes que compõem todo texto. Isso se dá quando há um discurso autoritário o qual busca externar uma verdade única.
Para a autora, Bakhtin estabelece o princípio arquitetônico da prosa romanesca, quando reconhece que o conceito de vozes se encontra dentro da linguagem literária e que somente por meio dessa linguagem é possível observar discursos obscurecidos de outras fontes diversas. Nesse sentido, há uma tensão dialética entre esses discursos plurais dentro de um texto e não uma busca pela síntese do conjunto.
Quando Julia Kristeva (1974) afirma que todo texto é absorção e transformação de outro texto, compartilha da idéia de Bakhtin de que a língua é concreta (não abstrata) e apresenta uma forma plurilíngüe ao absorver vários textos em um. O procedimento de somatória de outros textos não impede que o texto em formação elabore sua própria significação e possua sua própria maneira de ser. Pode-se inferir, então, que os textos se completam e se inter-relacionam, seja em uma relação contratual e polêmica.
Dentro desse cenário, William Burroughs em Naked Lunch (1957) permite que observemos essa pluralidade de vozes que dialogam especificamente com os meios de comunicação de massa, como veremos adiante.
Jenny (1979) abre a sua discussão do processo intertextual com a inferência de que em “face aos modelos arquetípicos, a obra literária entra sempre numa relação de realização, transformação ou transgressão” sendo essa a relação que a define. Isso significa que os arquétipos, sendo uma linguagem primária, dão vazão a uma linguagem secundária que é a literatura. Nesse sentido, a literatura se apropria desses arquétipos transformando-os, transgredindo-os, dando a eles uma nova roupagem.
Jenny apresenta vários tipos de construções intertextuais. Em primeiro lugar, trata da intertextualidade implícita, ou seja, a obra literária remete implicitamente, do ponto de vista de sua gênese, a outros textos, e a intertextualidade explícita é aquela que deixa transparecer
sua relação com outro texto, como é o caso da paródia, da citação, do plágio.
A intertextualidade poética é explicada pelo autor por dois eixos históricos: um que procura a intertextualidade na história do sujeito criador; e outro que procura a intertextualidade na evolução da memória literária de uma determinada época enfatizando a influência da tecnologia da informação. A idéia dos media desenvolvida por McLuhan (1967) é a de que existe uma memória gerada pelos media a partir de diferentes épocas e que constitui uma resposta satisfatória à questão intertextual. Nesse segundo eixo, encaixa-se a técnica do cut-up desenvolvida por Burroughs, pois é o medium audiovisual que determina a sua obra. No entanto, Jenny aponta para um certo reducionismo ao se considerar a intertextualidade como apenas reflexo dos media. O que William Burroughs faz é utilizar-se dos media para mostrar os mecanismos de poder exercidos por eles fazendo-nos crer que sua visão intertextual está relacionada a uma crítica à parafernália de informações da sociedade do consumo. Como afirma Jenny, “o olhar intertextual é então um olhar crítico: é isso que o define”(p.10).
Ainda segundo o teórico, o conceito de crítica formal vê a obra de arte por si mesma (arte pela arte) esquecendo que o texto está inserido em um momento histórico. A crítica idealista procura explicar a obra literária por meio da biografia do autor e de outras disciplinas, porém, esquecem-se de seu caráter imanente. Para resolver o impasse intertextual, o teórico Tynianov (apud JENNY, 1979) propõe que o texto literário ora se relaciona com textos pré-existentes, ora com outros sistemas de significação não-literários, como as linguagens orais. No entanto, o autor não vê uma possível junção dos dois em uma mesma obra. Kristeva, por sua vez, amplia a visão de Tynianov alegando que um texto é formado por meio de uma transposição literária quer se trate de “obras literárias, de linguagens orais, de sistemas simbólicos sociais ou inconscientes” (JENNY, 1979, p.13). Para Kristeva, a literatura é uma representação de várias sistemas sígnicos que coexistem ao mesmo tempo.
Com relação a Naked Lunch de Burroughs, pode-se inferir que o caráter biográfico deve ser levado em consideração para a análise textual já que a obra se insere dentro das narrativas autobiográficas, mas isso não significa que os elementos internos da obra não possuam sua independência. De acordo com Bakhtin,

[...] não existe um limite acentuado e de princípio entre a autobiografia e a
biografia [...] ser autobiografia, ou seja, do ponto de vista de uma eventual
coincidência pessoal entre personagem e o autor nela, ou melhor (porque
coincidência entre personagem e autor é contradicto in adjecto, o autor é
elemento todo artístico e como tal não pode coincidir dentro desse todo com
a personagem, outro elemento seu. A coincidência pessoal “na vida” da
pessoa de quem se fala com a pessoa que fala não elimina a diferença entre
esses elementos no interior do todo artístico. (2003, p.138-139)

No entanto, esses dados se mesclam aos aspectos intertextuais produzidos pelos media bem como ao caráter imanente, peculiar da criação artística do escritor. Além disso, há, na obra do autor, uma confluência de vários sistemas sígnicos, como apontado por Kristeva, pois Burroughs apropriou-se não apenas dos media (cinema, jornal, TV) como também de frases orais produzidas nas ruas (as quais ele ora gravava em um gravador de mão, ora reproduzia de cabeça) e imagens e frases em outdoors.
Jenny (1979) também trabalhou com os conceitos de intertextualidade fraca, que segundo ele, diz respeito à imagem de um texto utilizada em outro texto, entretanto sem correlação entre os contextos; e intertextualidade por interversão, ou seja, uma contradição entre discursos trocados. Como exemplo do primeiro, o autor cita a cena do coveiro em Hamlet, de Shakespeare e em Cantos de Maldoror, de Lautréamont. Enquanto na cena do coveiro, em Hamlet, a personagem homônima da peça se encontra sentada próxima à cova de seu pai, na mesma cena em Cantos de Maldoror, há uma imagem de um Pelicano que “dá o peito a devorar aos filhos” (p.14). Portanto, não há uma correlação de contextos entre as duas obras. Quanto ao segundo tipo de intertextualidade – por interversão – pode-se citar como exemplo o conto “A Cartomante” (1974) de Machado de Assis e “As Cartas não Mentem Jamais” (1992) de Sérgio Sant’ana. A cartomante no conto de Sant’ana, diferentemente da cartomante de Machado, é dissimulada, finge um saber e um poder que não possui. Ela age ao nível do “parecer”, e não do “ser”.
Burroughs utilizou o segundo tipo de intertextualidade quando, por exemplo, em uma passagem em que apresenta o senhor A.J. e pede a atenção dos convidados de uma festa. Usa-se, em situações formais, introduzir a frase: “senhoras e senhores...”. O que o autor fez foi transgredir esse tipo de formalidade por meio de uma linguagem chocante a fim de escancarar
as concepções puritanas e os tabus sexuais da sociedade norte-americana:

A.J. turns to the guests. “Cunts, pricks, fence stradlers, tonight I give you –
that international-known impresario of blue movies and short-wave TV, the
one, the only, The Great Slashtubitch!” (p. 109)

Como já foi dito antes, Kristeva atesta que qualquer sistema significante pode passar de um para outro independentemente de ser literário ou não-literário. A autora trata da transposição de texto para texto. Jenny, por sua vez, assume que o termo intertextualidade seria inadequado para falar de literatura. Prefere, então, tratar de uma relação que se estabelece entre dois sistemas de significantes abertos, e não entre dois textos. Para o autor, o
trabalho intertextual resume-se a uma transposição do signo lingüístico para o signo literário,
já que o signo literário rompe com o referente do mundo real, ampliando a natureza da palavra literária. O autor ainda acrescenta que a palavra intertextual não pode ser analisada dentro de um discurso monolítico porque ela é remissão. No texto literário, o que é significante vira significado e vice-versa. Como exemplo, temos a sentença de uma canção de Chico César na qual ele canta: “O ser tão vai vir a amar”, a pronúncia dessa combinação significante nos remete ao que já conhecemos – a música “Sobradinho” de Sá e Guarabira: “O sertão vai virar mar”. Existe, então, neste contexto, uma transposição de significante para significado, o que é
intitulado trocadilho.
Nesse sentido, Burroughs trata de uma explosão virótica que não se refere literalmente à proliferação de um vírus no sentido biológico, mas dos males da sociedade que se instauram no indivíduo e se proliferam:

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by
cell…Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all
symptoms of The Human Virus. (p. 191)

A intertextualidade também é criada por meio de recursos como o anagrama. Em Naked Lunch, Burroughs utiliza-se de anagramas como efeito estilístico. No trecho a seguir, o escritor menciona as iniciais A.J. que pode ser uma referência, embora com as letras invertidas, a Jackson Anderson, um piloto de asa delta com o qual teve relações sexuais:

I was working for na outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A.J., the
notoruius Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when he
appeared at the Duc de Ventre’s ball as a walking penis covered by a huge
condom emblazoned with the A.J. motto “They Shall Not Pass.” (p. 167)

Jenny (1979) ainda comenta que o processo intertextual gera a desintegração do narrativo, a desestruturação de sua ordem como no caso de textos surrealistas e como a própria técnica do cut-up de Burroughs. O teórico aponta que “a narrativa esvai-se, a sintaxe explode, o próprio significante abre brechas, a partir do momento em que a montagem dos textos deixa de se reger por um desejo de salvaguardar” (p.28). Nesse sentido, Burroughs rompe com a sintaxe tradicional dando vazão às mais variadas combinações. Assim como os textos surrealistas nos quais a ausência de lógica predomina no campo narrativo, pode-se inferir que a obra de Burroughs em questão se assemelha a tais textos, quando se trata de não apresentar lógica, embora haja coesão e coerência, como podemos constatar no trecho abaixo:

“I’ve got these racing dogs...pedigree grey-hounds....All sick with the
dysentery...tropical climate...the shits…you sabe shit?...My Whippets Are
Dying…” He screamed…. His eyes lit up with blue fire….The flame went
out…smell of burning metal…. “Administer with an eye dropper….” He
nodded out against the counter….The druggist took a tooth-pick out of his
mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head…. (p.245)

Como conclusão, Jenny (1979) expõe que as ideologias intertextuais estão relacionadas com a intertextualidade como desvio cultural, ou seja, a quebra de barreiras; a intertextualidade como reativação do sentido, a fim de provocar uma reação no leitor e a intertextualidade como espelho dos sujeitos cujo objetivo é produzir uma visão diferente em cada ser além de ultrapassar as fronteiras do pensamento e ser absorvido socialmente.

Tratando mais de perto a técnica de composição literária intitulada cut-up, inaugurada por Burroughs, apresentaremos, a seguir, o seu precedente histórico e alguns exemplos de trechos comentados.
O precedente histórico dessa técnica data da década de 1920 quando Tristan Tzara ofereceu-se para criar um poema a partir de palavras retiradas aleatoriamente de um chapéu.
Na década de 1950, o pintor e escritor Brion Gysin desenvolveu o método do cut-up acidentalmente quando resolveu cobrir a superfície de uma mesa com jornais para protegê-la.
Isso feito, o artista passou a cortar jornais com uma lâmina e percebeu que as camadas cortadas ofereciam justaposições interessantes. Após essa descoberta, começou em seguida a reorganizar esses cortes de jornal que resultou no experimento inicial do cut-up. Ao comunicar ao amigo Burroughs o que havia acontecido, ambos então passaram a aprimorar a técnica, estendendo-a aos media impressos e gravações em áudio. O objetivo da dupla era tentar decodificar o conteúdo implícito do material coletado, ou seja, tentar decifrar o verdadeiro sentido de um texto. Mais tarde ambos publicaram o livro intitulado The Third Mind (1978) – uma coleção de escritas cut-ups e ensaios sobre a forma. Com isso, o cut-up surge como um estilo literário que tenta quebrar a linearidade da literatura comum.
O cut-up foi influenciado pela técnica do collage usado por artistas e fotógrafos. Gysin e Burroughs procuraram levar a espontaneidade do collage para a literatura.
O cut-up foi desenvolvido por Burroughs por meio de uma justaposição de trechos de textos coletados de diversas fontes, como a Bíblia, jornais, diálogos de filmes, gravações em áudio e outros, compõe a sua obra. Ele ordenava esses trechos e os reescrevia. Segundo o escritor, o método é simples: deve-se pegar uma página e cortá-la ao meio para que se obtenha quatro seções e, então, reorganizar as sessões misturando a seção um a quatro e a seção dois a três para se obter uma nova página. Às vezes se tem a mesma coisa, mas, às vezes, algo inusitado é formado. Isso pode ser feito com discursos políticos, com poemas de grandes escritores, como Shakespeare e Rimbaud. De fato, o interesse do escritor nesta técnica é a de sair do convencional e obter novos discursos, já que, segundo ele, as palavras perderam sentido durante anos de repetição. O autor, em uma entrevista concedida ao jornal Paranaense Nicolau (1973) afirmou que: “O passado é, em grande parte uma fabricação dos vivos. E a história é simplesmente um montão de coisas fabricadas. Não existem coisas de verdade”. Ainda segundo o autor, o cut-up é uma experiência que pode ser usada por qualquer um. Ele
atesta que os melhores textos escritos foram feitos quase que acidentalmente por escritores antes que o método do cut-up fosse explicitado.
Na mesma entrevista, o escritor explica:

O cut-up consiste numa introdução deliberada das coisas pela porta dos
fundos. Vamos supor que você está olhando um cara atravessando a rua
com um maço de flores e uma bicicleta. Um carro o atropela, você o vê
voando à sua frente enquanto uma outra pessoa vem em sua direção
gritando ‘táxi’. Então você olha para o neon da loja da frente e vê escrito:
FLORICULTURA PARAÍSO. Isso seria um cut-up. A vida é um cut-up. O
que é a vida senão uma seqüência mais ou menos ilógica de acontecimentos
que não se prestam a nenhum segundo para fazer sentido?

A cada vez que se olha pela janela ou que se anda pela rua, a consciência
descreve círculos, vai de frente para trás e vice-versa [...] uma das tarefas da
arte é chegar o mais perto possível do mecanismo da percepção. (1973)**

A técnica exerceu não apenas influência literária, mas musical e comportamental. O músico, escritor e artista Gênesis P-Orridge (1950) utilizou o método nas suas criações musicais e artísticas. No início dos anos 1970, o músico David Bowie utilizou-se do cut-up para criar suas músicas. Na década de 1990, Kurt Cobain, do Nirvana, também utilizou o cut-up em suas canções. O grupo anarquista, anti-capitalista e anti-autoritário CrimethInc (EUA, 2000) publicou um livro intitulado Receitas para Desastre no qual propõe performance de atividades de rotina socialmente aceitas com o intuito de torná-las criativas e divertidas. A intenção é que a pessoa faça performances por um longo tempo até se desgastar e mudar de comportamento.
Naked Lunch é um relato sem censura de sua experiência como um viciado, cuja vida já não lhe pertence, não sendo mais guiada pelas sensações ou emoções. Nicolau Sevcenko, no prefácio à obra, sintetiza:

Comprimido entre a repressão policial e a ganância espúria do traficante, o
viciado é a presa universal, o pária por excelência da sociedade, vista de
cima para baixo ou de baixo para cima. Quanto a si mesmo, ele é a presa da
droga, reduzido à compulsão do seu vício. (1959, p.4)

O romance, constituído de episódios visionários, revela a desilusão do protagonista com relação ao vício em drogas e que luta contra a sociedade tecnológica detentora de poder e auto-destrutiva. A experiência do viciado conduz à percepção de que o corpo é uma presa biológica e a sociedade é controlada por “fanáticos” que usam a necessidade do corpo para satisfazer sua obsessão pelo poder.
O texto é construído sem qualquer linearidade discursiva, mas de forma fragmentária, na qual imagens, relatos e representações do mundo (que parece real) mesclam-se à sede, angústia e ao medo causados pela droga, num ritmo louco e repugnante. Os capítulos, colocados em ordem aleatória, apontam para um estilo de fluxo de consciência. Neles, Burroughs usa uma vasta gama de recursos literários tais como noticiários, propagandas, trechos de entrevistas que, justapostos, formam o cut-up. Nesse construto narrativo, Burroughs levanta questionamentos com relação ao poder manipulatório dos media e dos detentores do Poder na sociedade capitalista que pretendem criar cidadãos manipulados por eles, idiotizados e destituídos de individualidade:

Desintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal.... Everything looks
blue....Flesh dead, doughy, toneless
Withdrawal Nightnares. A mirror –lined café. Empty….Waiting for
something….A man appears in a side door….A slight, short Arab dressed in
a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face…There is a pitcher of boiling
acid in my hand….Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his
face….[…] (p.75)

Em meio a todos os recortes feitos por Burroughs, a narrativa traz críticas à sociedade capitalista do consumo, como no trecho abaixo, em que o narrador, em um desabafo exprime o tédio americano que ele não consegue explicar de onde vem. Talvez esse tédio fosse o reflexo da futilidade e do conformismo da sociedade afluente que estava diante dos olhos das pessoas, em cada esquina, mas que não trazia nenhum alívio para as aflições internas de cada um.
Embora, após questionar a procedência do tédio, o narrador afirma que ele não está relacionado ao colorido dos banquinhos do bar, ou à luz de néon, esses traços podem indicar ironia, significando exatamente o contrário, já que o narrador atesta que o vício aumenta com
o tédio e é um dos males da sociedade de consumo:

But there is no drag like U.S.drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it
comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision
street – every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and
liquorstore. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from?
Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding
the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV. (p.30)

Burroughs utiliza as imagens provenientes dessa sociedade como forma de sátira social.
Em vários trechos, o autor também trabalha com a metáfora da decadência decorrente de sua vida no submundo das drogas e, por conseguinte, de sua aproximação com os mais baixos degraus da sociedade. A metáfora sugere uma deterioração do ambiente, causada pelo consumo sem limites e não consciente de suas conseqüências para a natureza e para o próprio
ser humano. No excerto a seguir é nítido o uso de imagens justapostas que, novamente, culminam em uma crítica à sociedade de consumo:

[...] smell of chilli houses and dank overcoats and atrophied testicles...[...]
walking in a rubbish heap to the sky…scattered gasoline fires…smoke
hangs black and solid as excremente in the motionless air;;;smudging the
white film of noon heat…[…]
A heaving sea of air hammers in the purple brown dusk tainted with rotten
metal smell of sewer gas…young worker faces vibrating out of focus in
yellow halos of carbide lanterns…broken pipes exposed…[…] (p.259-261)

No trecho a seguir, o autor, por meio de uma descrição coloquial do ato sexual, sobrepõe imagens da sociedade de consumo com imagens alucinantes de um prazer mórbido decorrente de seu fascínio pelo lado perverso e sórdido da natureza humana em decorrência de seu protesto contra o olhar negligente da sociedade para com as minorias, sejam elas étnicas, sociais ou sexuais:

A train roar through him whistle blowing...boat whistle, foghorn, sky rocket
burst over oily lagoons…penny arcade open into a maze of dirty
pictures…ceremonial cannon boom in the harbour…a scream shoots down
a white hospital corridor…out along a wide dusty street between palm trees,
whistles out across the desert like a bullet (vulture wings husk in the dry
air), a thousand boys come at once in out-houses, bleak public school
toilets, attics, basements, treehouses, Ferris wheels, deserted houses,
limestone caves, rowboats, garages, barns, rubbly windy city outskirts
behind mud walls (smell of dried excrement) […] (p. 114)

Neste outro trecho tem-se uma profusão de descrições aparentemente desconexas que relatam o período de abstinência da droga vivido pelo protagonista:

Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light... pockets of rotten
ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick
morning…
Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama
City… Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.
(p.245)

Dessa forma, nota-se que, dos diversos caminhos do processo intertextual, o cut-up é um dos mais ousados pelo fato de agrupar, em um único texto, elementos literários e não-literários em uma seqüência narrativa ilógica.

. . .

Burroughs não apenas criticou o abuso da autoridade como também o incentivo ao consumo, esse último de forma enfática em Naked Lunch. O escritor vê o mundo como um grande centro comercial e burocrático, manipulado pelos detentores do poder. É nesse mundo material, onde até as pessoas transformam-se em objetos vendáveis: do drogado que se vende
ao vício, tornando-se presa fácil das autoridades, às pessoas em geral, que consomem de tudo,
poluindo o planeta e transformando-o em um grande aterro sanitário.

Na obra de Burroughs, pode-se encontrar intervenções de várias áreas, como a pintura, o cinema, a cultura pop, a filosofia, a antropologia e a psicanálise, o que nos apresenta o caráter intertextual e polivocal desta literatura levando o leitor a outras linguagens artísticas, e a um diálogo polifônico de imagens e idéias fragmentadas (técnica do cut-up).

Referências Bibliográficas
1] BAKHTIN, M. Problemas da poética de Dostoéviski. Tradução de Paulo Bezerra. Rio de
Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 1981.
2] ______. Estética da Criação Verbal. Tradução de Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins
Fontes, 2003.
3] BARROS, Diana Pessoa de; FIORIN, José Luiz (Orgs.). Dialogismo, Polifonia,
Intertextualidade. São Paulo: EDUSP, 1994.
4] BURROUGHS, W. S. The Naked Lunch. Corgi Books: Great Britain, 1969.
5] JENNY, L. Intertextualidades. Coimbra: Almedina, 1979.
6] KRISTEVA, Julia. Introdução à semanálise. Tradução de Léia Helena França Ferraz. São
Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974.
7] MCLUHAN, M. The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of effects. New York: Bantan
Books, 1967.

* - Instituto Ceres de Educação [E-mail: flaviabenfatti@terra.com.br]
** - O Jornal não apresenta paginação.

Fonte:
Encontro Regional da ABRALIC 2007
Literaturas, Artes, Saberes
23 a 25 de julho de 2007
USP – São Paulo, Brasil

O mais além da escrita na obra “The Ticket That Exploded” De William Burroughs por Pedro Teixeira Castilho

2009-09-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

O mais além da escrita na obra “The Ticket That Exploded” De William Burroughs

por Pedro Teixeira Castilho*

RESUMO:
A escrita do autor americano William Burroughs é analisada
levando em consideração a concepção de linguagem como um
vírus e os desdobramentos desta concepção: o cut up e o fold
in. O livro The ticket that exploded é a fonte para demonstrar
a prática de escrita do autor denunciando que Burroughs
escreve subvertendo a ordem sintagmática das frases.

A escrita de William Burroughs possui uma peculiaridade se levarmos em consideração os mecanismos de cut up e fold in presentes nas suas obras. Para tanto pretendo elucidar os mecanismos de cut up e fold in na sua escrita me concentrando em alguns fragmentos da obra The ticket that exploded para apresentar uma leitura que autoriza essa escrita em um campo que extrapola as concepções lingüísticas – cut up e fold in –, estabelecendo uma narrativa bastante veloz e desorganizada, na qual um enredo aparece e desaparece. Esse enredo constitui-se como um dispositivo que se desenrola com momentos de lucidez e clareza, mas, em outros, quando a narrativa do cut up torna-se mais rebuscada, a ficção pulveriza-se.

Enquanto “as imagens criadas pela leitura da obra podem constantemente ser arbitrárias e repulsivas, os padrões rítmicos das palavras, das sentenças e das narrativas são altamente selecionados produzindo uma sonoridade” (Lydenberg,1987: 76).

Se existe uma possibilidade de apontar o estilo desse autor, esta passaria pelo sentido que é dado ao enredo, aparecendo e desaparecendo, questionando a originalidade do texto (se o texto pertence a ele ou a outrem), palavras e frases que se repetem em capítulos diversos, como também palavras que saem de corpos e vozes sem corpos. Essa escrita é o estilo de Burroughs, que já se manifesta em sua primeira obra. Em alguns momentos, Burroughs chega até a citar a fonte de onde ele tirou o texto original; na página 23 da edição americana do livro Ticket ele cita “quote from Fury by Henry Kuttner page 143.”
Burroughs é um autor da palavra, da palavra que deve ser expelida do corpo ou ingerida pelo corpo, como um vírus. Logo no primeiro capítulo de The ticket that exploded, a palavra toma algumas dimensões de matéria: “de fato a sua voz foi cortada em 24 vezes por segundo com o som de sua respiração e batimentos de seu coração e agora o meu corpo está convencido que a minha respiração e meu coração vão parar se sua voz parar” (Burroughs, 1965: 3). Ou outra passagem, no segundo capítulo, na qual fica ainda mais clara a noção de materialidade da palavra, que ultrapassa a concepção de linguagem na episteme moderna: “o homem que usava aquela voz não tinha língua materna. Ele aprendeu o uso de uma ferramenta alienígena. As palavras flutuavam no ar atrás dele enquanto ele andava” (Burroughs, 1965: 9). A linguagem não é algo natural para Burroughs, a língua flutua atrás de corpos que não possuem língua materna, pois toda língua é estranha. Nota-se nessas duas passagens construções descritivas das palavras; quando a leitura avança, as construções do início do livro vão sendo substituídas por frases impactantes e desorganizadas gramaticalmente.
Esse caminho encontrado por Burroughs constitui uma descrição do enredo, palavras que flutuam sobre o sujeito, localizando a maneira que o leitor deve-se conduzir na leitura do livro, no segundo momento, a escrita torna-se rebuscada com os efeitos do cut up, frases que constituíam a descrição do enredo reaparecem; “o som da sua voz e sua imagem tremendo sobre o gravador são tão familiares para mim como os movimentos do meu intestino e o som da minha respiração e o batido do meu coração”. na página 1 e, somente na página 50, o capítulo que a natureza virótica da linguagem é explicitado os sons do corpo são confundidos com a palavra reaparecendo as partes citadas anteriormente; “A palavra é cortada com o som de seu intestino e a respiração com o batido do coração. O primeiro passo é gravar os sons do seu corpo e começar a corta-lo em você mesmo“ (Burroughs, 1965: 50).
É essa a questão literária de William Burroughs, a palavra tratada em sua materialidade. Essa concepção da palavra desdobra-se na escrita do autor. O prazer de ler a obra The ticket that exploded está em perceber as dimensões atribuídas à palavra, como também as conseqüências que Burroughs construiu a partir de seu conceito de linguagem. Robin Lydenberg recomenda “sermos temporariamente Burroughs” (Lydenberg, 1987: 73) na leitura do Ticket, mas isso não quer dizer que devamos ficar imersos em imagens de sexo e violência, uma acusação freqüente à escrita de Burroughs, mas sim que percebamos a relação desse autor com a linguagem que cria essas imagens. Ou seja, para Burroughs, sexo e violência são conseqüências da atuação parasitária da linguagem no corpo.
A escrita desse autor induz novos circuitos de sentidos que vão além de uma ordem sintagmática e lingüística, provocando um estranhamento no sujeito que lê. Ao mesmo tempo, uma familiaridade com o texto surge diante do sentido induzido pelo enredo.
Logo, a escrita desse autor é sua própria concepção de linguagem, que se constrói no seu estilo. Para ler o livro Ticket é necessário penetrar no texto e deixar os efeitos das palavras constituírem o enredo da obra. O leitor, então, deve desconectar-se das imagens do texto e entrar no próprio estilo de Burroughs. Não é apenas a atenção racional, cartesiana, aplicada à
leitura de um texto, mas é importante perceber que as palavras têm uma exterioridade, como também uma materialidade, para se deixar possuir pela escrita do cut up. A insistência de Burroughs com a palavra virótica é exatamente a referência do leitor na construção do Ticket.
No capítulo “Do you love me?”, Burroughs seleciona fragmentos de canções românticas americanas para justapor às frases de filmes pornográficos. No final do capítulo, essa justaposição intensifica-se, levando os personagens dessa parte, dois amantes, a um sentimento recíproco de incompletude. Na leitura desse fragmento, percebe-se uma ironia de Burroughs diante da relação entre os sexos, surgindo, repetidamente, essa frase, “eu explodi em um risada cósmica” (Burroughs, 1987: 43-45).
Todo o capítulo é construído por títulos e fragmentos de músicas populares americanas, – "Lovey lovey dovey... Do you love me? Love is para olvidar – Tell Laura oh jelly love you – i can´t – got you under my skin on my mind (Burroughs, 1987: 144), a palavra love tem sua grafia adulterada pelo acréscimo de um “y”, seguida de uma palavra criada pelos amantes para como uma forma de expressar carinho, dovey, juntamente com uma expressão trazida do espanhol, para olvidar, que aparece italizado no texto. Como se não bastasse, o autor adiciona um fragmento de uma música de Cole Porter, consagrada na voz de Frank Sinatra; além disso, o pessoal de primeira pessoa do singular vem grafado em minúscula, “i”, contrariando a norma da língua inglesa; isso não ocorre a todo o momento, pois no início do livro esse pronome aparece na forma convencional, havendo a mudança a partir da metade do texto.

Todos as melodias e os efeitos sonoros do “Amor” partem da permutação do gemido sexual do planeta figura: Você me ama? – Mas eu explodi em uma risada cósmica – Velho conhecido seja esquecido? – Oh querida apenas uma fotografia? Mary eu te amo eu te amo você sabe que eu te amo? – De joelhos eu espero que você me ame também – eu correria até eu sentir o estremecimento de tempos atrás – Agora minha inspiração, mas, isto não vai ficar e nós seremos apenas uma fotografia – eu esqueci de você então? – eu não posso dormir olhos azuis se eu não tenho você – será que eu a amo? – eu te amo eu te amo coisa mais esplendida
(Burroughs, 1965: 43 – 44)

Assim, depois de uma narrativa mais calma, o cut up vai ficando mais evidente, aparecendo uma narrativa mais caótica, que chega a uma conclusão previsível, a impossibilidade dos opostos se unirem.
Burroughs escreve misturando canções sentimentais americanas com depoimentos pornográficos, criando uma escrita que vai além da disposição aleatória de palavras. Essa escrita traz “buracos” que são preenchidos por pornografias, transformando a narrativa em uma questão sobre o amor.
Ilusões e imagens são criadas pelas palavras que vêm de fora, pois, essas palavras atacam, viroticamente, os seres humanos e instituem a concepção binária da diferença sexual. A diferença sexual é um efeito da virulência da linguagem, a relação homem/mulher só existe porque os corpos estão submersos na linguagem. Por um outro lado, segundo Burroughs, o pensamento binário estabelece o desejo de união que não pode ser nunca atingido porque os opostos nunca podem se transformar em um Won’t be two.
Na leitura dessa obra de Burroughs, a relação do vírus com a sexualidade torna-se efetivamente clara no capítulo intitulado “operation rewrite”, no qual o autor explicita a vinculação da palavra com o corpo, expondo a idéia de uma Outra Metade, a palavra, “uma invasão da área sexual tomando espaço”(Burroughs, 1965: 51).
O enredo do livro de Burroughs gira em torno dessa Outra Metade (The Other Half, The Mob), a palavra. Esta constrói a subjetivação dos seres humanos e controla, pela ação virulenta, o prazer do orgasmo, os sentimentos do amor, o sexo oposto e o outro corpo.
O erótico da obra de Burroughs é um erótico com a linguagem, a língua deve ser roçada e tocada pelo corpo sem mesmo saber quais são os limites da natureza viva da linguagem. Burroughs experimenta a relação das palavras com os corpos ao limite, construindo momentos inusitados. Um desprendimento do sujeito é a razão do erótico da palavra impactante sobre o corpo. Denunciando sua materialidade e sua virulência, a palavra é a contaminação de um corpo que pode ser adoecido por esse vírus mortificante da realidade sexual e do sujeito da enunciação.
A obra Ticket é escrita para resistir ao vício da palavra, um circuito de dominação que o autor pretende romper usando aquilo que ele mesmo criou, a invasão parasitária da palavra. O autor faz da palavra escrita por ele uma prática e uma saída para a questão colocada no próprio enredo.
Assim sendo, o corpo é explorado no seu limite, cortado e desmembrado em pedaços, o tempo traz um ritmo e uma quebra de padrões lingüísticos no qual a sintaxe aparece cheia de traços, parênteses e hífens.
Se a sintaxe é a constituição das frases dentro do discurso, bem como a relação lógica das frases entre si e a correta construção gramatical, nessa obra de Burroughs existe um desafio aos padrões lingüísticos. O sintagma, a construção lógica das frases, é contornado pela prática do cut up. Isso aparece quando Burroughs corta longas construções de frases de outros autores mantendo a maior parte da sintaxe do escrito original ocorrendo disjunções com menor freqüência. Mas, por outro lado, se o método do cut up for aplicado da maneira que Burroughs comumente postula, “um pequeno pedaço de papel sendo cortado em quatro partes iguais”, as disjunções ocorrerão com mais freqüência e a sintaxe será comprometida.
Assim, dentro do texto de Burroughs, a realidade passa a ser um mosaico constituído na e pela fragmentação do texto. Esse movimento que o autor faz entre o involuntário e o voluntário, entre a memória e a amnésia, é uma estratégia com relação à organização lógica da sintaxe.
Desse modo, Burroughs afirma que o “corte e a manipulação provocam fortes reações eróticas” (Burroughs, 1965: 18), sem hesitar em convocar o leitor para a faceta erótica da linguagem. A memória mescla-se entre a realidade factual e a realidade psíquica, as cenas de personagens e de lugares se misturam umas com as outras. As palavras são assombradas por corpos desmembrados e anônimos – rostos, mãos e dedos.
As várias maneiras de ler essa obra de Burroughs apontam para um mais além da escrita. Entre elas, está a leitura de um enredo que aparece e desaparece na sua escrita, com uma gramática convencional e significados aparentemente decifráveis; uma outra possibilidade está em uma leitura hipnótica, no encantamento agramatical.
A narrativa de Burroughs não quer garantir nada para o leitor, ela não quer aparecer com um final construído. No último capítulo do livro "Silence to say good bye", logo no início, dois personagens escutam a freqüência que sinaliza para a presença de uma vida parasítica – a presença parasitária da palavra que induz e constrói o sujeito, dando a ele uma sexualidade, um corpo, o tempo e a imagem: “todas as ações são pregravadas e dopadas e não têm vida que ficou para trás no presente chupado e seco por um corpo que anda resmungando através do pátio vazio sob filmes no céu de Marakesh” (Burroughs, 1965: 189), A narrativa continua a mudar e se retorcer como aparecia em outros capítulos: “lábios caem – silêncio para dizer adeus – olhe a ação B.J.? O Hassan I Sabbah realmente trabalha para a inteligência naval... Você está escutando B.J.”(Burroughs, 1965: 202). Burroughs esclarece ou confunde o leitor ainda mais quando este se lembra que a última pergunta nos remete, novamente, ao primeiro capítulo, intitulado “See the action B.J.?”, induzindo a leitura para um final, que pode se constituir como uma espiral ou um círculo.
Depois desse último capítulo, Burroughs inclui um desenho de seu amigo Brion Gysin, feito a partir da frase “Silence to say good bye”, seguido de um ensaio de Burroughs, adicionado depois da primeira edição, no qual ele propõeao leitor mecanismos que lhe possibilitam escapar da linguagem. Dessa forma, o desenho de Gysin começa a se dissolver e a brincar com as palavras que compõem o título do capítulo, enquanto Burroughs descreve novas maneiras de se relacionar
com as palavras. Entre elas, está uma frase escrita com espaços em branco “cut the prerecordings into air into thin air” (Burroughs, 1965: 217) As palavras perdem as pontuações, como também desaparecem as letras maiúsculas, os hífens, as inflexões e a violência, e as frases imperativas dão o tom desse ensaio.
Em resumo, na obra The ticket that exploded, Burroughs instaura na língua uma infecção virótica causada por um organismo parasita, a língua captura os corpos, sendo construída pelo autor uma terceira dimensão, estabelecida entre as palavras e os corpos. No apêndice do livro, “The Invisible Generation”, escrito a quatros mãos, com o artista plástico Brion Gysin, Burroughs propõem diferentes maneiras para que a influência da linguagem sobre os corpos seja atenuada, como, por exemplo, tocar uma fita cassete de traz para frente, “sendo assim uma pessoa pode aprender a “desdizer” aquilo que foi dito... tal exercício deixa as pessoas livres
de palavras que podem trancá-las”. Aparece, enfim, uma variedade de métodos que extraem a relação do corpo parasitado pela palavra: colocar as fitas cassetes em diferentes velocidades para se escutar novas palavras sendo formadas e poder juntá-las com sons dos corpos e de animais.
Para o autor, ainda nesse mesmo capítulo, a palavra começa a ser interrogada e investigada. Para Burroughs, podemos descobrir mais sobre o sistema psíquico e conseguir maior controle sobre suas reações; ele recomenda que escutemos nossas vozes em fitas cassetes recém-gravadas para que saibamos quem realmente somos, e, ainda, que escutemos as fitas de hoje e de ontem, para vermos quais impressões esses sons podem trazer. Logo depois dessa passagem, ele pergunta:

quem é que te programa?
Quem decide que cassete deve tocar de novo no presente?
Quem toca novamente suas velhas humilhações e vence te segurando no presente gravado?
(Burroughs, 1965: 223)

Nota-se que Burroughs deposita a palavra dentro de um campo outro, em sua própria autonomia, a partir da qual pode controlar e manejar o corpo humano, como um ventríloquo, criando na relação palavra/corpo um mais além da escrita.

Referências Bibliográficas
BURROUGHS, William S. The ticket that exploded. New
York: Grove Press, 1965.
LYDENBERG, Robin. Word Culture: radical theory and
practice in William S. Burroughs’ fiction. Urbana:
University of Illionois Press, 1987.

* - Mestre em Letras: Literatura e outros Sistemas Semióticos (Área de concentração: Teoria
da Literatura), 2004.

Fonte:
Revista "Em Tese" - Belo Horizonte, v. 9, p. 1–281, dez. 2005

Ultimatum - Álvaro de Campos (heterônimo de Fernando Pessoa)

2009-09-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

Ultimatum - Álvaro de Campos
(heterônimo de Fernando Pessoa)

Mandado de despejo aos mandarins do mundo
Fora tu reles esnobe plebeu
E fora tu, imperialista das sucatas
Charlatão da sinceridade e tu, da juba socialista, e tu qualquer outro.
Ultimatum a todos eles e a todos que sejam como eles todos.
Monte de tijolos com pretensões a casa
Inútil luxo, megalomania triunfante
E tu Brasil, blague de Pedro Álvares Cabral que nem te queria descobrir.
Ultimatum a vós que confundis o humano com o popular
Que confundis tudo!
Vós anarquistas deveras sinceros
Socialistas a invocar a sua qualidade de trabalhadores para quererem deixar de trabalhar.
Sim, todos vos que representais o mundo, homens altos passai por baixo do meu desprezo
Passai, aristocratas de tanga de ouro,
Passai frouxos
Passai radicais do pouco!
Quem acredita neles?
Mandem tudo isso para casa, descascar batatas simbólicas
Fechem-me isso a chave e deitem a chave fora.
Sufoco de ter só isso a minha volta.
Deixem-me respirar!
Abram todas as janelas
Abram mais janelas do que todas as janelas que há no mundo.
Nenhuma idéia grande, nenhuma corrente política que soe a uma idéia grão!
E o mundo quer a inteligência nova
O mundo tem sede de que se crie
O que aí está a apodrecer a vida, quando muito, é estrume para o futuro.
O que aí está não pode durar porque não é nada.
Eu, da raça dos navegadores, afirmo que não pode durar!
Eu, da raça dos descobridores, desprezo o que seja menos que descobrir o mundo novo.
Proclamo isso bem alto, braços erguidos, fitando o Atlântico
e saudando abstratamente o infinito.

Ultimatum Futurista - José de Almada Negreiros

2009-09-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

ULTIMATUM FUTURISTA

ÀS GERAÇÕES PORTUGUESAS DO SÉC. XXI

José de Almada Negreiros

Acabemos com este maelstrom de chá morno!
Mandem descascar batatas simbólicas a quem disser que não há tempo para a criação!
Transformem em bonecos de palha todos os pessimistas e desiludidos!
Despejem caixotes de lixo à porta dos que sofrem da impotência de criar!
Rejeitem o sentimento de insuficiência da nossa época!
Cultivem o amor do perigo, o hábito da energia e da ousadia!
Virem contra a parede todos os alcoviteiros e invejosos do dinamismo!
Declarem guerra aos rotineiros e aos cultores do hipnotismo!
Livrem-se da choldra provinciana e da safardanagem intelectual!
Defendam a fé da profissão contra atmosferas de tédio ou qualquer resignação!
Façam com que educar não signifique burocratizar!
Sujeitem a operação cirúrgica todos os reumatismos espirituais!
Mandem para a sucata todas as ideias e opiniões fixas!
Mostrem que a geração portuguesa do século XXI dispõe de toda a força criadora e construtiva!
Atirem-se independentes prá sublime brutalidade da vida!
Dispensem todas as teorias passadistas!
Criem o espírito de aventura e matem todos os sentimentos passivos!
Desencadeiem uma guerra sem tréguas contra todos os "botas de elástico"!
Coloquem as vossas vidas sob a influência de astros divertidos!
Desafiem e desrespeitem todos os astros sérios deste mundo!
Incendeiem os vossos cérebros com um projecto futurista!
Criem a vossa experiência e sereis os maiores!
Morram todos os derrotismos! Morram! PIM!

J o s é d e A l m a d a N e g r e i r o s P O E T A F U T U R I S T A E T U D O

Manifesto Anti-Dantas e Por Extenso por José de Almada-Negreiros

2009-09-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

José de Almada-Negreiros (1917)

O Manifesto Anti-Dantas foi um panfleto satírico de 8 páginas impresso em papel de embrulho, ao preço de 100 reis, todo grafado em maiúsculas e utilizando aqui e além, para sublinhar a onomatopeia - PIM!-, uns ícones representando uma mão no gesto de apontar, da autoria de José de Almada Negreiros cujo alvo era Júlio Dantas e, como diz o texto, todos os Dantas que houver por aí.
Em 1915 foi publicada a revista Orpheu, marco inicial do Modernismo Português, e de cuja elaboração participaram nomes como Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, entre outros.
Todavia, a sua novidade, o seu arrojo, a sua ousadia tanto na produção literária como na pictórica, muito influenciadas sobretudo pelo Futurismo e pelo Cubismo, causou escândalo junto de uma burguesia lisboeta conservadora em questões de arte, obtendo «a bofetada no gosto público» de que falava Maiakovsky, frase que constava de um dos artigos do primeiro número da revista.
Entre os opositores ao movimento estava o crítico literário Júlio Dantas, defensor dos cânones estéticos de até então, e cuja crítica aos vanguardistas foi feroz. Os membros da Revista Orpheu não consentiram calados esse ataque e, pela pena de Almada Negreiros, truculento polemista como se pode verificar em obras como Cena de ódio ou Manifesto as Gerações Futuristas, brandiram um ataque sobre Júlio Dantas, e, a partir dele, sobre todos os que mantinham uma atitude de renitência em relação à inovação nas artes: à burguesia «bota de elástico» (expressão cunhada por Eduardo Viana, também ele membro do Orpheu, quando lhe recusaram uma exposição por ser Modernista) de um modo geral.
Este texto virulento do jovem Almada (que contava 23 anos) terá sido escrito entre Abril e Setembro de 1916, sendo, portanto, anterior à conferência de 1917, início oficial do movimento futurista em Portugal.

...

MANIFESTO ANTI-DANTAS E POR EXTENSO

por José de Almada-Negreiros

POETA D'ORPHEU FUTURISTA e TUDO

BASTA PUM BASTA!

UMA GERAÇÃO, QUE CONSENTE DEIXAR-SE REPRESENTAR POR UM DANTAS É UMA GERAÇÃO QUE NUNCA O FOI! É UM COIO D'INDIGENTES, D'INDIGNOS E DE CEGOS! É UMA RÊSMA DE CHARLATÃES E DE VENDIDOS, E SÓ PODE PARIR ABAIXO DE ZERO!

ABAIXO A GERAÇÃO!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

UMA GERAÇÃO COM UM DANTAS A CAVALO É UM BURRO IMPOTENTE!

UMA GERAÇÃO COM UM DANTAS À PROA É UMA CANÔA UNI SECO!

O DANTAS É UM CIGANO!

O DANTAS É MEIO CIGANO!

O DANTAS SABERÁ GRAMMÁTICA, SABERÁ SYNTAXE, SABERÁ MEDICINA, SABERÁ FAZER CEIAS P'RA CARDEAIS SABERÁ TUDO MENOS ESCREVER QUE É A ÚNICA COISA QUE ELLLE FAZ!

O DANTAS PESCA TANTO DE POESIA QUE ATÉ FAZ SONETOS COM LIGAS DE DUQUEZAS!

O DANTAS É UM HABILIDOSO!

O DANTAS VESTE-SE MAL!

O DANTAS USA CEROULAS DE MALHA!

O DANTAS ESPECÚLA E INÓCULA OS CONCUBINOS!

O DANTAS É DANTAS!

O DANTAS É JÚLIO!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

O DANTAS FEZ UMA SORÔR MARIANNA QUE TANTO O PODIA SER COMO A SORÔR IGNEZ OU A IGNEZ DE CASTRO, OU A LEONOR TELLES, OU O MESTRE D'AVIZ, OU A DONA CONSTANÇA, OU A NAU CATHRINETA, OU A MARIA RAPAZ!

E O DANTAS TEVE CLÁQUE! E O DANTAS TEVE PALMAS! E O DANTAS AGRADECEU!

O DANTAS É UM CIGANÃO!

NÃO É PRECISO IR P'RÓ ROCIO P'RA SE SER UM PANTOMINEIRO, BASTA SER-SE PANTOMINEIRO!

NÃO É PRECISO DISFARÇAR-SE P'RA SE SER SALTEADOR, BASTA ESCREVER COMO DANTAS! BASTA NÃO TER ESCRÚPULOS NEM MORAES, NEM ARTÍSTICOS, NEM HUMANOS! BASTA ANDAR CO'AS MODAS, CO'AS POLÍTICAS E CO'AS OPINIÕES! BASTA USAR O TAL SORRISINHO, BASTA SER MUITO DELICADO E USAR CÔCO E OLHOS MEIGOS! BASTA SER JUDAS! BASTA SER DANTAS!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

O DANTAS NASCEU PARA PROVAR QUE, NEM TODOS OS QUE ESCREVEM SABEM ESCREVER!

O DANTAS É UM AUTOMATO QUE DEITA PR'A FÓRA O QUE A GENTE JÁ SABE QUE VAE SAHIR... MAS É PRECISO DEITAR DINHEIRO!

O DANTAS É UM SONETO D'ELLE-PRÓPRIO!

O DANTAS EM GÉNIO NUNCA CHEGA A PÓLVORA SECCA E EM TALENTO É PIM-PAM-PUM!

O DANTAS NÚ É HORROROSO!

O DANTAS CHEIRA MAL DA BOCA!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

O DANTAS É O ESCARNEO DA CONSCIÊNCIA!

SE O DANTAS É PORTUGUEZ EU QUERO SER HESPANHOL!

O DANTAS É A VERGONHA DA INTELLECTUALIDADE PORTUGUEZA! O DANTAS É A META DA DECADÊNCIA MENTAL!

E AINDA HÁ QUEM NÃO CÓRE QUANDO DIZ ADMIRAR O DANTAS!

E AINDA HÁ QUEM LHE ESTENDA A MÃO!

E QUEM LHE LAVE A ROUPA!

E QUEM TENHA DÓ DO DANTAS!

E AINDA HÁ QUEM DUVIDE DE QUE O DANTAS NÃO VALE NADA, E QUE NÃO SABE NADA, E QUE NEM É INTELLIGENTE NEM DECENTE, NEM ZERO!

VOCÊS NÃO SABEM QUEM É A SOROR MARIANNA DO DANTAS? EU VOU-LHES CONTAR:

A PRINCÍPIO, POR CARTAZES, ENTREVISTAS E OUTRAS PREPARAÇÕES COM AS QUAES NADA TEMOS QUE VÊR, PENSEI TRATAR-SE DE SORÔR MARIANNA ALCOFORADO A PSEUDO AUCTORA D'AQUELLAS CARTAS FRANCEZAS QUE DOIS ILLUSTRES SENHORES D'ESTA TERRA NÃO DESCANÇARAM ENQUANTO NÃO ESTRAGARAM P'RA PORTUGUEZ, QUANDO SUBIU O PANNO TAMBÉM NÃO FUI CAPAZ DE DISTINGUIR PORQUE ERA NOITE MUITO ESCURA E SÓ DEPOIS DE MEIO ACTO É QUE DESCOBRI QUE ERA DE MADRUGADA PORQUE O BISPO DE BEJA DISSE QUE TINHA ESTADO À ESPERA DO NASCER DO SOL!

A MARIANNA VEM DESCENDO UMA ESCADA ESTREITÍSSIMA MAS NÃO VEM SÓ. TRAZ TAMBÉM O CHAMILLY QUE EU NÃO CHEGUEI A VER, OUVINDO APENAS UMA VOZ MUITO CONHECIDA AQUI NA BRAZILEIRA DO CHIADO. POUCO DEPOIS O BISPO DE BEJA É QUE ME DISSE QUE ELLE TRAZIA CALÇÕES VERMELHOS. A MARIANNA E O CHAMILLY ESTÃO SÒZINHOS EM SCENA, E ÀS ESCURAS DANDO A ENTENDER PERFEITAMENTE QUE FIZERAM INDECÊNCIAS NO QUARTO. DEPOIS O CHAMILLY, COMPLETAMENTE SATISFEITO DESPEDE-SE E SALTA P'LA JANELLA COM GRANDE MAGUA DA FREIRA LACRIMOSA. E ANDA HOJE OS TURISTES TEEM OCCASIÃO DE OBSERVAR AS GRADES ARROMBADAS DA JANELLA DO QUINTO ANDAR DO CONVENTO DA CONCEIÇÃO DE BEJA NA RUA DO TOURO, POR ONDE SE DIZ QUE FUGIU O CÉLEBRE CAPITÃO DE CAVALOS EM PARIS E DENTISTA EM LISBOA.

A MARIANNA QUE É HISTÉRICA COMEÇA DE CHORAR DESATINADAMENTE NOS BRAÇOS DA SUA CONFDENTE E EXCELLENTE PAU DE CABELEIRA SORÔR IGNEZ.

VEEM DESCENDO P'LA DITA ESTREITÍSSIMA ESCALA (sic), VARIAS MARIANNAS TODAS EGUAES E DE CANDEIAS ACESAS, MENOS UMA QUE USA ÓCULOS E BENGALLA E AINDA (sic) TODA CURVADA P'RÁ FRENTE O QUE QUER DIZER QUE É ABBADESSA.

E SERIA ATÉ UMA EXCELENTE PERSONIFICAÇÃO DAS BRUXAS DE GOYA SE QUANDO FALLASSE NÃO TIVESSE AQUELLA VOZ TÃO FRESCA E MAVIOSA DA TIA FELICIDADE DA VIZINHA DO LADO, E REPARANDO NOS DOIS VULTOS INTERROGA ESPAÇADAMENTE COM CADÊNCIA, AUSTERIDADE E IMMENSA FALTA DE CORDA...

QUEM ESTÁ AHI?... E DE CANDEIAS APAGADAS?

- FOI O VENTO, DIZEM AS POBRES INNOCENTES VARADAS DE TERROR... E A ABADESSA QUE SÓ É VELHA NOS ÓCULOS, NA BENGALA E EM ANDAR CURVADA P'RÁ FRENTE MANDA TOCAR A SINETA QUE É UM DÓ D'ALMA O OUVI-LA ASSIM TÃO DEBILITADA, VÃO TODAS P'RÓ CÔRO, MAS EIS QUE, DE REPENTE BATEM NO PORTÃO E SEM SE ANNUNCIAR NEM LIMPAR-SE DA POEIRA, SOBE A ESCADA E ENTRA P'LO SALÃO UM BISPO DE BEJA QUE QUANDO ERA NOVO FEZ BRÉGEIRICES CO'A MENINA DO CHOCOLATE.

AGORA COMPLETAMENTE EMENDADO REVELA À ABBADESSA QUE SABE POR CARTAS QUE HÁ HOMENS QUE VÃO ÀS MULHERES DO CONVENTO E QUE AINDA HÁ POUCO VIRA UM DE CAVALLOS A SALTAR P'LA JANELLA. A ABADESSA DIZ QUE EFFECTIVAMENTE JÁ HÁ TEMPOS QUE VINHA DANDO P'LA FALTA DE GALLINHAS E TÃO INNOCENTINHA, COITADA, QUE N'AQUELLES OITENTA ANNOS AINDA NÃO TEVE TEMPO P'RA DESCOBRIR A RAZÃO DA HUMANIDADE ESTAR DIVIDIDA EM HOMENS E MULHERES.

DEPOIS DE SÉRIOS EMBARAÇOS DO BISPO É QUE ELLA DEU COM O ATREVIMENTO E MANDOU CHAMAR AS DUAS FREIRAS DE HÁ POUCO CO'AS CANDEIAS APAGADAS. N'ESTA ALTURA ESTA PEÇA POLICIAL TOMA UM PEDAÇO D'INTERESSE PORQUE O BISPO ORA PARECE UM POLÍCIA DE INVESTIGAÇÃO DISFARÇADO EM BISPO, ORA UM BISPO COM A FALTA DE DELICADEZA DE UM POLÍCIA D'INVESTIGAÇÃO, E TÃO PERSPICAZ QUE DESCOBRE EM MENOS DE MEIO MINUTO O QUE O PÚBLICO JÁ ESTÁ FARTO DE SABER - QUE A MARIANNA DORMIU CO'O NOEL. O PEOR É QUE A MARIANNA FOI À SERRA CO'AS INDISCREÇÕES DO BISPO E DESATA A BERRAR, A BERRAR COMO QUEM SE ESTAVA MARIMBANDO P'RA TUDO AQUILLO. ESTEVE MESMO MUITO PERTO DE

SE ESTRElAR COM UM PAR DE MURROS NA CORÔA DO BISPO NO QUE (SE) MOSTROU DE UM ATREVIMENTO, DE UMA INSOLÊNCIA E DE UMA DECISÃO REFILONA QUE EXCEDEU TODAS AS EXPECTATIVAS.

OUVE-SE UMA CORNETA A TOCAR UMA MARCHA DE CLARINS E MARIANNA SENTINDO NAS PATAS DOS CAVALLOS TODA A ALMA DO SEU PREFERIDO FOI QUAL PARDALITO ENGAIOLADO A CORRER ATÉ ÀS GRADES DA JANELLA A GRITAR DESALMADAMENTE P'LO SEU NOEL. GRITA, ASSOBIA E REDOPIA E PIA E RASGA-SE E MAGÓA-SE E CAE DE COSTAS COM UM ACCIDENTE, DO QUE JÁ PREVIAMENTE TINHA AVISADO O PÚBLICO E O PANNO TAMBÉM CAE E O ESPECTADOR TAMBÉM CAE DA PACIÊNCIA ABAIXO E DESATA N'UMA DESTAS PATEADAS TÃO ENORMES E TÃO MONUMENTAES QUE TODOS OS JORNAES DE LISBOA NO DIA SEGUINTE FORAM UNÂNIMES N'AQUELLE ÊXITO TEATRAL DO DANTAS.

A ÚNICA CONSOLAÇÃO QUE OS ESPECTADORES DECENTES TIVERAM FOI A CERTEZA DE QUE AQUILLO NÃO ERA A SORÔR ALCOFORADO MAS SIM UMA MERDARIANNA ALDANTASCUFURADO QUE TINHA CHELIQUES E EXAGEROS SEXUAES.

CONTINUE O SENHOR DANTAS A ESCREVER ASSIM QUE HÁ-DE GANHAR MUITO CO'O ALCUFURADO E HÁ-DE VER, QUE AINDA APANHA UMA ESTÁTUA DE PRATA POR UM OURIVES DO PORTO, E UMA EXPOSIÇÃO DAS MAQUETES P'RÓ SEU MONUMENTO ERECTO POR SUBSCRIÇAO NACIONAL DO SÉCULO A FAVOR DOS FERIDOS DA GUERRA, E A PRAÇA DE CAMÕES MUDADA EM PRAÇA DO DR. JULIO DANTAS, E COM FESTAS DA CIDADE P'LOS ANNIVERSÁRIOS, E SABONETES EM CONTA «JULIO DANTAS» E PASTAS DANTAS P'RÓS DENTES, E GRAXA DANTAS P'RÁS BOTAS, E NIVEINA DANTAS, E COMPRIMIDOS DANTAS E AUTOCLISMOS

DANTAS E DANTAS, DANTAS, DANTAS, DANTAS... E LIMONADAS DANTAS - MAGNESIA.

E FIQUE SABENDO O DANTAS QUE SE UM DIA HOUVER JUSTIÇA EM PORTUGAL TODO O MUNDO SABERÁ QUE O AUTOR DOS LUZÍADAS É O DANTAS QUE N'UM RASGO MEMORÁVEL DE MODÉSTIA SÓ CONSENTIU A GLÓRIA DO SEU PSEUDÓNIMO CAMÕES.

E FIQUE SABENDO O DANTAS QUE SE TODOS FÔSSEM COMO EU, HAVERIA TAES MUNIÇÕES DE MANGUITOS QUE LEVARIAM DOIS SÉCULOS A GASTAR.

MAS JUYGAES QUE N'ISTO SE RESUME A LITTERATURA PORTUGUEZA? NÃÓ! MIL VEZES NÃO!

TEMOS, ALÉM D'ISTO O CHIANCA QUE JÁ FEZ RIMAS P'RA ALUBARROTA QUE DEIXOU DE SER A DERROTA DOS CASTELHANOS P'RA SER A DERROTA DO CHIANCA.

E AS PINOQUICES DE VASCO MENDONÇA ALVES PASSADAS NO TEMPO DA AVÔSINHA! E AS INFELICIDADES DE RAMADA CURTO! E O TALENTO INSÓLITO DE URBANO RODRIGUES! E AS GAITADAS DO BRUN! E AS TRADUCÇÕES SÓ P'RA HOMEM (D) O ILLUSTRÍSSIMO EXCELENTÍSSIMO SENHOR MELLO BARRETO! E O FREI MATTA NUNES MÔXO! E A IGNEZ SYPHILITICA DO FAUSTINO! E AS IMBECILIDADES DO SOUSA COSTA! E MAIS PEDANTICES DO DANTAS! E ALBERTO SOUSA, O DANTAS DO DESENHO! E OS JORNALISTAS DO SECULO E DA CAPITAL E DO NOTICIAS E DO PAIZ E DO DIA E DA NAÇÃO E DA REPUBUCA E DA LUCTA E DE TODOS, TODOS OS JORNAES! E OS ACTORES DE TODOS OS THEATROS! E TODOS OS PINTORES DAS BELLAS ARTES E TODOS OS ARTISTAS DE PORTUGAL QUE EU NÃO GOSTO. E OS DA AGUIA DO PORTO E OS PALERMAS DE COIMBRA! E A ESTUPIDEZ DO OLDEMIRO CESAR E O DOUTOR JOSÉ DE FIGUEIREDO AMANTE DO MUSEU E AH OH OS SOUSA PINTO HU HI E OS BURROS DE CACILHAS E OS MENÚS DO ALFREDO GUISADO! E (O) RACHITICO ALBINO FORJAZ SAMPAIO, CRITICO DA LUCTA A QUEM O FIALHO COM IMMENSA PIADA INTRUJOU DE QUE TINHA TALENTO! E TODOS OS QUE SÃO POLITICOS E ARTISTAS! E AS EXPOSIÇÕES ANNUAES DAS BELLAS ARTE(S)! E TODAS AS MAQUETAS DO MARQUEZ DE POMBAL! E AS DE CAMÕES EM PARIS! E OS VAZ, OS ESTRELLA, OS LACERDA, OS LUCENA, OS ROSA, OS COSTA, OS ALMEIDA, OS CAMACHO, OS CUNHA, OS CARNEIRO, OS BARROS, OS SILVA, OS GOMES, OS VELHOS, OS IDIOTAS, OS ARRANJISTAS, OS IMPOTENTES, OS SCELERADOS, OS VENDIDOS, OS IMBECIS, OS PÁRIAS, OS ASCETAS, OS LOPES, OS PEIXOTOS, OS MOTTA, OS GODINHO, OS TEIXEIRA, OS DIABO QUE OS LEVE, OS CONSTANTINO, OS GRAVE, OS MANTUA, OS BAHIA, OS MENDONÇA, OS BRAZÃO, OS MATTOS, OS ALVES, OS ALBUQUERQUE, OS SOUSAS E TODOS OS DANTAS QUE HOUVER POR AHI!!!!!!

E AS CONVICÇÕES URGENTES DO HOMEM CHRISTO PAE E AS CONVICÇÕES CATITAS DO HOMEM CHRISTO FILHO!

E OS CONCERTOS DO BLANCH! E AS ESTATUAS AO LEME, AO EÇA E AO DESPERTAR E A TUDO! E TUDO O QUE SEJA ARTE EM PORTUGAL! E TUDO! TUDO POR CAUSA DO DANTAS!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

PORTUGAL QUE COM TODOS ESTES SENHORES, CONSEGUIU A CLASSIFICAÇÃO DO PAIZ MAIS ATRAZADO DA EUROPA E DE TODO OMUNDO! O PAIZ MAIS SELVAGEM DE TODAS AS ÁFRICAS! O EXILIO DOS DEGRADADOS E DOS INDIFERENTES! A AFRICA RECLUSA DOS EUROPEUS! O ENTULHO DAS DESVANTAGENS E DOS SOBEJOS! PORTUGAL INTEIRO HA-DE ABRIR OS OLHOS UM DIA - SE É QUE A SUA CEGUEIRA NÃO É INCURÁVEL E ENTÃO GRITARÁ COMMIGO, A MEU LADO, A NECESSIDADE QUE PORTUGAL TEM DE SER QUALQUER COISA DE ASSEIADO!

MORRA O DANTAS, MORRA! PIM!

José de Almada-Negreiros

POETA D'ORPHEU

FUTURISTA

TUDO

Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil - Oswald de Andrade

2009-09-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

Capa do Livro de Pesias "Pau-Brasil" de Oswald de Andrade. - Ilustração por Tarsila do Amaral

Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil - Oswald de Andrade

A poesia existe nos fatos. Os casebres de açafrão e de ocre nos verdes da Favela, sob o azul cabralino, são fatos estéticos.

O Carnaval no Rio é o acontecimento religioso da raça. Pau-Brasil. Wagner submerge ante os cordões de Botafogo. Bárbaro e nosso. A formação étnica rica. Riqueza vegetal. O minério. A cozinha. O vatapá, o ouro e a dança.

Toda a história bandeirante e a história comercial do Brasil. O lado doutor, o lado citações, o lado autores conhecidos. Comovente. Rui Barbosa: uma cartola na Senegâmbia. Tudo revertendo em riqueza. A riqueza dos bailes e das frases feitas. Negras de jockey. Odaliscas no Catumbi. Falar difícil.

O lado doutor. Fatalidade do primeiro branco aportado e dominando politicamente as selvas selvagens. O bacharel. Não podemos deixar de ser doutos. Doutores. País de dores anônimas, de doutores anônimos. O Império foi assim. Eruditamos tudo. Esquecemos o gavião de penacho.

A nunca exportação de poesia. A poesia anda oculta nos cipós maliciosos da sabedoria. Nas lianas da saudade universitária.

Mas houve um estouro nos aprendimentos. Os homens que sabiam tudo se deformaram como borrachas sopradas. Rebentaram.

A volta à especialização. Filósofos fazendo filosofia, críticos, crítica, donas de casa tratando de cozinha.

A Poesia para os poetas. Alegria dos que não sabem e descobrem.

Tinha havido a inversão de tudo, a invasão de tudo: o teatro de base e a luta no palco entre morais e imorais. A tese deve ser decidida em guerra de sociólogos, de homens de lei, gordos e dourados como Corpus Juris.

Ágil o teatro, filho do saltimbanco. Ágil e ilógico. Ágil o romance, nascido da invenção. Ágil a poesia.

A poesia Pau-Brasil, ágil e cândida. Como uma criança.

Uma sugestão de Blaise Cendrars: - Tendes as locomotivas cheias, ides partir. Um negro gira a manivela do desvio rotativo em que estais. O menor descuido vos fará partir na direção oposta ao vosso destino.

Contra o gabinetismo, a prática culta da vida. Engenheiros em vez de jurisconsultos, perdidos como chineses na genealogia das idéias.

A língua sem arcaísmos, sem erudição. Natural e neológica. A contribuição milionária de todos os erros. Como falamos. Como somos.

Não há luta na terra de vocações acadêmicas. Há só fardas. Os futuristas e os outros.

Uma única luta - a luta pelo caminho. Dividamos: poesia de importação. E a Poesia Pau-Brasil, de exportação.

Houve um fenômeno de democratização estética nas cinco partes sábias do mundo. Instituíra-se o naturalismo. Copiar. Quadro de carneiros que não fosse lã mesmo, não prestava. A interpretação no dicionário oral das Escolas de Belas Artes queria dizer reproduzir igualzinho...Veio a pirogravura. As meninas de todos os lares ficaram artistas. Apareceu a máquina fotográfica. E com todas as prerrogativas do cabelo grande, da caspa e da misteriosa genialidade de olho virado - o artista fotográfico.

Na música, o piano invadiu as saletas nuas, de folhinha na parede. Todas as meninas ficaram pianistas. Surgiu o piano de manivela, o piano de patas. A pleyela. E a ironia eslava compôs para a pleyela. Stravinski.

A estatuária andou atrás. As procissões saíram novinhas das fábricas.

Só não se inventou uma máquina de fazer versos - a havia o poeta parnasiano.

Ora, a revolução indicou apenas que a arte voltava para as elites. E as elites começaram desmanchando. Duas fases: 1a) a deformação através do impressionismo, a fragmentação, o caos voluntário. De Cézanne e Mallarrmé, Rodin e Debussy até agora. 2a) o lirismo, a apresentação no templo, os materiais, a inocência construtiva.

O Brasil profiteur. O Brasil doutor. E a coincidência da primeira construção brasileira no movimento de reconstrução geral. Poesia Pau-Brasil.

Como a época é miraculosa, as leis nasceram do próprio rotamento dinâmico dos fatores destrutivos.

A síntese

O equilíbrio

O acabamento de carrosserie

A invenção

A surpresa

Uma nova perspectiva

Uma nova escala

Qualquer esforço natural nesse sentido será bom. Poesia Pau-Brasil.

O trabalho contra o detalhe naturalista - pela síntese; contra a morbidez romântica - pelo equilíbrio geômetra e pelo acabamento técnico; contra a cópia, pela invenção e pela surpresa.

Uma nova perspectiva.

A outra, a de Paolo Ucello criou o naturalismo de apogeu. Era uma ilusão de ótica. Os objetos distantes não diminuíam. Era uma lei de aparência. Ora, o momento é de reação à aparência. Reação à cópia. Substituir a perspectiva visual e naturalista por uma perspectiva de outra ordem: sentimental, intelectual, irônica, ingênua.

Uma nova escala:

A outra, a de um mundo proporcionado e catalogado com letras nos livros, crianças nos colos. O reclame produzindo letras maiores que torres. E as novas formas da indústria, da viação, da aviação. Postes. Gasômetros Rails. Laboratórios e oficinas técnicas. Vozes e tics de fios e ondas e fulgurações. Estrelas familiarizadas com negativos fotográficos. O correspondente da surpresa física em arte.

A reação contra o assunto invasor, diverso da finalidade. A peça de tese era um arranjo monstruoso. O romance de idéias, uma mistura. O quadro histórico, uma aberração. A escultura eloqüente, um pavor sem sentido.

Nossa época anuncia a volta ao sentido puro.

Um quadro são linhas e cores. A estatuária são volumes sob a luz.

A Poesia Pau-Brasil é uma sala de jantar das gaiolas, um sujeito magro compondo uma valsa para flauta e a Maricota lendo o jornal. No jornal anda todo o presente.

Nenhuma fórmula para a contemporânea expressão do mundo. Ver com olhos livres.

Temos a base dupla e presente - a floresta e a escola. A raça crédula e dualista e a geometria, a álgebra e a química logo depois da mamadeira e do chá de erva-doce. Um misto de "dorme nenê que o bicho vem pegá" e de equações.

Uma visão que bata nos cilindros dos moinhos, nas turbinas elétricas, nas usinas produtoras, nas questões cambiais, sem perder de vista o Museu Nacional. Pau-Brasil.

Obuses de elevadores, cubos de arranha-céus e a sábia preguiça solar. A reza. O Carnaval. A energia íntima. O sabiá. A hospitalidade um pouco sensual, amorosa. A saudade dos pajés e os campos de aviação militar. Pau-Brasil.

O trabalho da geração futurista foi ciclópico. Acertar o relógio império da literatura nacional.

Realizada essa etapa, o problema é outro. Ser regional e puro em sua época.

O estado de inocência substituindo o estado de graça que pode ser uma atitude do espírito.

O contrapeso da originalidade nativa para inutilizar a adesão acadêmica.

A reação contra todas as indigestões de sabedoria. O melhor de nossa tradição lírica. O melhor de nossa demonstração moderna.

Apenas brasileiros de nossa época. O necessário de química, de mecânica, de economia e de balística. Tudo digerido. Sem meeting cultural. Práticos. Experimentais. Poetas. Sem reminiscências livrescas. Sem comparações de apoio. Sem pesquisa etimológica. Sem ontologia.

Bárbaros, crédulos, pitorescos e meigos. Leitores de jornais. Pau-Brasil. A floresta e a escola. O Museu Nacional. A cozinha, o minério e a dança. A vegetação. Pau-Brasil.

Oswald de Andrade (Correio da Manhã, 18 de março de 1924)

Oswald de Andrade - Manifesto Antropofágico

2009-09-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

O Manifesto Antropófago (ou Manifesto Antropofágico) foi escrito por Oswald de Andrade. Foi lido em 1928 para seus amigos na casa de Mário de Andrade. Foi publicado na Revista de Antropofagia, que ajudou a fundar com os amigos Raul Bopp e Antônio de Alcântara Machado.
...

Só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente.

Única lei do mundo. Expressão mascarada de todos os individualismos, de todos os coletivismos. De todas as religiões. De todos os tratados de paz.

Tupi, or not tupi that is the question.

Contra todas as catequeses. E contra a mãe dos Gracos.

Só me interessa o que não é meu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago.

Estamos fatigados de todos os maridos católicos suspeitosos postos em drama. Freud acabou com o enigma mulher e com outros sustos da psicologia impressa.

O que atropelava a verdade era a roupa, o impermeável entre o mundo interior e o mundo exterior. A reação contra o homem vestido. O cinema americano informará.

Filhos do sol, mãe dos viventes. Encontrados e amados ferozmente, com toda a hipocrisia da saudade, pelos imigrados, pelos traficados e pelos touristes. No país da cobra grande.

Foi porque nunca tivemos gramáticas, nem coleções de velhos vegetais. E nunca soubemos o que era urbano, suburbano, fronteiriço e continental. Preguiçosos no mapa-múndi do Brasil.

Uma consciência participante, uma rítmica religiosa.

Contra todos os importadores de consciência enlatada. A existência palpável da vida. E a mentalidade pré-lógica para o Sr. Lévy-Bruhl estudar.

Queremos a Revolução Caraíba. Maior que a Revolução Francesa. A unificação de todas as revoltas eficazes na direção do homem. Sem nós a Europa não teria sequer a sua pobre declaração dos direitos do homem.

A idade de ouro anunciada pela América. A idade de ouro. E todas as girls.

Filiação. O contato com o Brasil Caraíba. Ori Villegaignon print terre. Montaig-ne. O homem natural. Rousseau. Da Revolução Francesa ao Romantismo, à Revolução Bolchevista, à Revolução Surrealista e ao bárbaro tecnizado de Keyserling. Caminhamos..

Nunca fomos catequizados. Vivemos através de um direito sonâmbulo. Fizemos Cristo nascer na Bahia. Ou em Belém do Pará.

Mas nunca admitimos o nascimento da lógica entre nós.

Contra o Padre Vieira. Autor do nosso primeiro empréstimo, para ganhar comissão. O rei-analfabeto dissera-lhe : ponha isso no papel mas sem muita lábia. Fez-se o empréstimo. Gravou-se o açúcar brasileiro. Vieira deixou o dinheiro em Portugal e nos trouxe a lábia.

O espírito recusa-se a conceber o espírito sem o corpo. O antropomorfismo. Necessidade da vacina antropofágica. Para o equilíbrio contra as religiões de meridiano. E as inquisições exteriores.

Só podemos atender ao mundo orecular.

Tínhamos a justiça codificação da vingança. A ciência codificação da Magia. Antropofagia. A transformação permanente do Tabu em totem.

Contra o mundo reversível e as idéias objetivadas. Cadaverizadas. O stop do pensamento que é dinâmico. O indivíduo vitima do sistema. Fonte das injustiças clássicas. Das injustiças românticas. E o esquecimento das conquistas interiores.

Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros.

O instinto Caraíba.

Morte e vida das hipóteses. Da equação eu parte do Cosmos ao axioma Cosmos parte do eu. Subsistência. Conhecimento. Antropofagia.

Contra as elites vegetais. Em comunicação com o solo.

Nunca fomos catequizados. Fizemos foi Carnaval. O índio vestido de senador do Império. Fingindo de Pitt. Ou figurando nas óperas de Alencar cheio de bons sentimentos portugueses.

Já tínhamos o comunismo. Já tínhamos a língua surrealista. A idade de ouro.

Catiti Catiti

Imara Notiá

Notiá Imara

Ipeju*

A magia e a vida. Tínhamos a relação e a distribuição dos bens físicos, dos bens morais, dos bens dignários. E sabíamos transpor o mistério e a morte com o auxílio de algumas formas gramaticais.

Perguntei a um homem o que era o Direito. Ele me respondeu que era a garantia do exercício da possibilidade. Esse homem chamava-se Galli Mathias. Comia.

Só não há determinismo onde há mistério. Mas que temos nós com isso?

Contra as histórias do homem que começam no Cabo Finisterra. O mundo não datado. Não rubricado. Sem Napoleão. Sem César.

A fixação do progresso por meio de catálogos e aparelhos de televisão. Só a maquinaria. E os transfusores de sangue.

Contra as sublimações antagônicas. Trazidas nas caravelas.

Contra a verdade dos povos missionários, definida pela sagacidade de um antropófago, o Visconde de Cairu: – É mentira muitas vezes repetida.

Mas não foram cruzados que vieram. Foram fugitivos de uma civilização que estamos comendo, porque somos fortes e vingativos como o Jabuti.

Se Deus é a consciência do Universo Incriado. Guaraci é a mãe dos viventes. Jaci é a mãe dos vegetais.

Não tivemos especulação. Mas tínhamos adivinhação. Tínhamos Política que é a ciência da distribuição. E um sistema social-planetário.

As migrações. A fuga dos estados tediosos. Contra as escleroses urbanas. Contra os Conservatórios e o tédio especulativo.

De William James e Voronoff. A transfiguração do Tabu em totem. Antropofagia.

O pater famílias e a criação da Moral da Cegonha: Ignorância real das coisas+ fala de imaginação + sentimento de autoridade ante a prole curiosa.

É preciso partir de um profundo ateísmo para se chegar à idéia de Deus. Mas a caraíba não precisava. Porque tinha Guaraci.

O objetivo criado reage com os Anjos da Queda. Depois Moisés divaga. Que temos nós com isso?

Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil tinha descoberto a felicidade.

Contra o índio de tocheiro. O índio filho de Maria, afilhado de Catarina de Médicis e genro de D. Antônio de Mariz.

A alegria é a prova dos nove.

No matriarcado de Pindorama.

Contra a Memória fonte do costume. A experiência pessoal renovada.

Somos concretistas. As idéias tomam conta, reagem, queimam gente nas praças públicas. Suprimamos as idéias e as outras paralisias. Pelos roteiros. Acreditar nos sinais, acreditar nos instrumentos e nas estrelas.

Contra Goethe, a mãe dos Gracos, e a Corte de D. João VI.

A alegria é a prova dos nove.

A luta entre o que se chamaria Incriado e a Criatura – ilustrada pela contradição permanente do homem e o seu Tabu. O amor cotidiano e o modus vivendi capitalista. Antropofagia. Absorção do inimigo sacro. Para transformá-lo em totem. A humana aventura. A terrena finalidade. Porém, só as puras elites conseguiram realizar a antropofagia carnal, que traz em si o mais alto sentido da vida e evita todos os males identificados por Freud, males catequistas. O que se dá não é uma sublimação do instinto sexual. É a escala termométrica do instinto antropofágico. De carnal, ele se torna eletivo e cria a amizade. Afetivo, o amor. Especulativo, a ciência. Desvia-se e transfere-se. Chegamos ao aviltamento. A baixa antropofagia aglomerada nos pecados de catecismo – a inveja, a usura, a calúnia, o assassinato. Peste dos chamados povos cultos e cristianizados, é contra ela que estamos agindo. Antropófagos.

Contra Anchieta cantando as onze mil virgens do céu, na terra de Iracema, – o patriarca João Ramalho fundador de São Paulo.

A nossa independência ainda não foi proclamada. Frase típica de D. João VI: – Meu filho, põe essa coroa na tua cabeça, antes que algum aventureiro o faça! Expulsamos a dinastia. É preciso expulsar o espírito bragantino, as ordenações e o rapé de Maria da Fonte.

Contra a realidade social, vestida e opressora, cadastrada por Freud – a realidade sem complexos, sem loucura, sem prostituições e sem penitenciárias do matriarcado de Pindorama.

OSWALD DE ANDRADE Em Piratininga Ano 374 da Deglutição do Bispo Sardinha." (Revista de Antropofagia, Ano 1, No. 1, maio de 1928.)

* "Lua Nova, ó Lua Nova, assopra em Fulano lembranças de mim", in O Selvagem, de Couto Magalhães

Batalha Sob Vidro-Vento - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

2009-09-28T22:44:00.000-07:00

Milano - Corso Venezia - Lapide F. T. Marinetti - Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto

.
BATALHA SOB VIDRO-VENTO
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Tradução de Mário Faustino

a 5.000 m. diante da calma solenidade método da
batalha em surdina rumores oleados da
distância fragores levados no cristal ve-
loz do vento forte Kartal-Tépé (FRESCO CINZENTO – PÉROLA
AMARELINHO COMICHANTE INAFERRÁVEL DUVIDOSO)
forte Kazal-Tépé forte Cheittam-Tépé
forte Kazal-Tépé 30 chamas sucessivas isócronas
valllsas de 30 casais vermelho atrás dos vidros fechados
(SILENCIOSO INCOMPREENSÍVEL ABSURDO) fitas-transmissões
de ecos rooossssssnantes
trabalho ordenado de oficina
moinho oscilar
tear tessitura fusos de fogo seta do rumor fuzilaria
= estridor de mola fuga alternada de sutis fumaças
brancas (SHRAPNELS) grossos fumos negros (GRANADAS)
concorrência industrial de gritos + chamas + projéteis
+ esfacelamentos sob o vento regulador comercial
greve de rumores a 1.000 m.
diante de mim 2 arados paciêêêêêência raaange-raaange de
torrões pedregosos pentes-furtivos-do-vento sobre 6 ovelhas
tosse de um oficial sentado num caixão na trincheira
ressonância dos pulmões tísica fluxxxxo e refluxxx-
xxxo de folhas trêmulas sobre a praia do silêncio
búlgaro mar agonias elegantes Nice Menton
San Remo patapum-pluff (ONDA)
fraaaaah (SAIBRO)
plupumflac (DURO PRECIPITADO LÚGUBRE)
fraaaaaah (INDULGENTE DESCONSOLADO)
pluuuuum (CADÁVER OU CANHONEIO)
chaaaaah (LEQUE D’ ÁGUA ANGÚSTIAS LEMBRANÇAS)
a 8.000 m. à direita além da Maritza vale
cheio de explosões amordaçadas (CALMO DESPREOCUPADO)
AZUUUUUL VERDE CINZA FRESSSSSCO JOVEM SORRI-
DENTE) ingenuidade de 4 umaças brancas aquele alto
shrapnels quase silenciosos gentileza de uma
bateria invisível varrer a CrRrRista sobre subiragar-
rando-se (INVISÍVEL POUCO RUMOROSO CERTO TEIMOSO)
infantaria sobressaltos graciosos de água fervendo aquela
caldeira borbulhar (PIO LONGÍNQUO DOCE DULCÍÍÍSSIMO PA-
CÍFICO INOCENTE) resposta igualmente gen-
til shrapnels turcos (LEVE FESTIVO DESCUIDADO)
fogos artificiais leque perfurante das
metralhadoras longínquas resfrescar porém resfrescar certo
a marmelada amarela de espinheiros intestinos gordura
sangue lama entre pulos dos tições entusiastas ossadas
carbonizadas apagar-se 2-3-4
sacudidelas apagar-se calafrio
calafrio imobilidade indiferença
da Maritza sorrisos calma afetada das amoreiras
(VERDE AZUL MOLE SEDOSO DELICADO LENTO)
abaixo de mim a 3.000 metros 3a
divisão búlgara
(apressar-se certo correr correr correr) diminuiramar-
cha aparente como para esconder-se vacilações cautela ao
abrigo daqueles altos (que também parecem esmagados)
descer paz sede dos rebanhos cornudos de baionetas
bebedouro Maritza 1.000 m. mais
longe 4a
divisão búlgara brancura
triângulos tendas serenidade
indiferença sono de um acampamento
nômade sob 4 shrapnels (ISÓCRONO FAMILIAR ALE-
GRE TÍMIDO INFANTIL LENDÁRIO) bateria turca tiro
rápido 4 estrelas prateadas aparecidas
4 desaparecidas

4 APARECIDAS
4 desaparecidas
8 apareciiidas

PRESÉPIO

Notas Sobre o Futurismo Literário por Mariarosaria Fabris

2009-09-28T17:17:00.000-07:00

Notas Sobre o∗Futurismo Literário
Mariarosaria Fabris*

Versão ampliada da comunicação “Futurismo literário: da alegoria à poética da matéria”,
apresentada no simpósio “Modernidade, tradição e vanguardas literário-artísticas na época do
‘moderno inelutável’”, que integrou o IX Congresso Internacional da ABRALIC–Travessias, Porto
Alegre, UFRGS, 18-21 de julho de 2004.

RESUMO

A publicação de “Fundação e Manifesto do Futurismo” (Le Figaro, Paris, 20/2/1909) apresentava ao meio intelectual mundial o movimento criado por Marinetti, que abarcará quase todas as manifestações artísticas. Na literatura, as palavras em liberdade e as tavole parolibere
representaram uma fragmentação da estrutura lingüística da poesia, mas serão também a matéria prima para a construção de outras experiências literárias das vanguardas e das neovanguardas.

Com a publicação de “Fundação e Manifesto do Futurismo” em Le Figaro, a 20 de fevereiro de 1909, o movimento futurista era lançado em Paris. Como salienta Annateresa Fabris (1987, p. 57, 59), o fato de o Futurismo se anunciar por um manifesto não representava em si um dado novo do ponto de vista cultural, uma vez que todo movimento nascido na França desde o último quartel do século XIX havia proclamado seu surgimento dessa forma. Se, de um lado, não se tratava de um acontecimento culturalmente inédito, de outro, era indubitável que as teorias do Futurismo eram muito mais ousadas e inovadoras do que as de seus antecessores, por se valerem da provocação para se afirmar.
A escolha da Cidade-Luz para a apresentação oficial do Futurismo e sua veiculação num jornal como Le Figaro não foram gratuitas, pois vinham assegurar ao movimento uma repercussão no meio cultural italiano e
internacional muito maior do que a alcançada se este tivesse sido anunciado no país de origem. De fato, apesar do lançamento na França, pesquisas mais recentes assinalam que “Fundação e Manifesto do Futurismo” já havia sido divulgado alguns dias antes em dois periódicos napolitanos: na revista La Tavola Rotonda (14 de fevereiro), que o publicou na íntegra, e no jornal Il Giorno (16-17 de fevereiro), que reproduziu alguns de seus trechos (D’AMBROSIO, 1996, p. 125, 15).
Esse manifesto serviu de modelo para todos os outros que o Futurismo lançou, por seu duplo aspecto: ao mesmo tempo em que atestava a fundação do movimento, representava também a afirmação de uma poética, que se relacionava dialeticamente com a literatura que o havia antecedido. Annateresa Fabris (1987, p. 60-2) lembra que vários críticos viram em sua introdução uma viagem de iniciação comparável à empreendida por Dante Alighieri em A divina comédia, se bem que às avessas, pois, se para o poeta florentino a morte espiritual simbolizava a maneira encontrada pela razão para ensinar ao homem como superar a própria morte, para Marinetti conhecer a morte e transformá-la em companheira eterna era um modo de rechaçar a
razão. Isso seria atestado pelo emprego de figuras peculiares de linguagem: o automóvel era comparado com a “fera”, o “tubarão”; os futuristas, arrebatados pela “furiosa vassoura da loucura” e guiados pelo “faro”,
domesticavam a Morte e repudiavam a sabedoria. Os “cães de guarda” que vigiavam as “soleiras” das “casas” (metáfora dos que ainda defendiam a velha sensibilidade, as fórmulas artísticas desgastadas) eram esmagados; o homem novo, num gesto repentino e inesperado, para se descartar dos ideais dos passadistas, que Marinetti (1968) configurava como dois ciclistas “titubeantes”, dois raciocínios “persuasivos” e "contraditórios” ao mesmo tempo, saltava no fosso lamacento para renascer de suas águas. Renascia aberto psicologicamente ao universo da nova sensibilidade mecânica, e abandonava as velhas categorias mentais, lingüisticamente recorrentes em metáforas e imagens que ele repudiava.
A polêmica com o passado representava a afirmação das novas forças criadoras e isso se explicitava ao longo dos onze pontos programáticos, que constituem o manifesto propriamente dito, em que o estilo discursivo e
fortemente alegórico (ainda com laivos decadentes e simbolistas) do prólogo era substituído por um tom declamatório, peremptório, concitador na exposição das crenças e do programa de ação dos futuristas.
Do ponto de vista literário, os manifestos muitas vezes constituíram o reverso da medalha, pois, para expor suas concepções, os futuristas raramente recorreram às formas sintéticas de expressão preconizadas nesses textos, as quais se limitarão às construções poéticas. Nas outras áreas de expressão e comunicação continuaram a respeitar a sintaxe e a pontuação, quando não se serviram de uma retórica desgastada e de imagens tradicionais.
O manifesto de fundação, com seus dois níveis de escrita, remete-nos, de um lado, ao Marinetti pré-futurista, promotor do verso livre; de outro, aponta para o que será a poética futurista, explicitada, no caso da literatura, nos programas dos manifestos técnicos.
Tentar estabelecer datas e fases para um movimento é sempre uma tarefa ingrata, pois esbarramos em critérios diferentes, conforme o autor que consultamos. O Futurismo literário também não escapa dessa regra; se pegarmos somente três autores (escolhidos dentre os mais importantes estudiosos do movimento), veremos que há algumas divergências. Enquanto Luciano De Maria (1973) fala em dois momentos – o do verso livre, entre 1909 e 1913, e o das palavras em liberdade, de 1914 a 1944 –, Mario Verdone (1986) e
Enrico Falqui (1959) falam em três, pois acrescentam o das tavole parolibere [composições de palavras em liberdade] e o da aeropoesia, respectivamente. Verdone antecipa para 1890, com Gian Pietro Lucini (quando não para 1811, com Ugo Foscolo) o nascimento do verso livre, e, embora reconheça que sua difusão mais ampla se deu entre 1909 e 1914, encontra ecos até 1937; quanto ao momento das palavras em liberdade, este se estenderia de 1914 a 1919, mas haveria antecedentes em 1912 e epígonos até 1940.
Escolhemos a datação estabelecida por De Maria pelos motivos arrolados a seguir:

1. Apesar de já em 1905 ter surgido a revista Poesia, divulgadora do verso livre, foi a partir de 1909 que o Futurismo se afirmou (1) e, se quisermos ser ainda mais radicais, foi só em 1912, com a publicação do Manifesto técnico da literatura futurista”, que se pode falar de literatura futurista e, nesse caso, ela só corresponderia às palavras em liberdade, sendo a fase do verso livre um estágio preparatório. Ao considerarmos como textos literários também os manifestos – malgrado a literatura futurista seja mais marcada pela poesia –, então podemos tomar como data inicial o ano de 1909;
2. Embora as palavras em liberdade já estivessem explicitadas nesse primeiro manifesto técnico e um exemplo delas – Batalha Peso + Odor – tivesse aparecido nas “Respostas às objeções” (1912); embora tenham sido retomadas nos manifestos “Destruição da sintaxe Imaginação sem fios Palavras em liberdade” (1913) e “O esplendor geométrico e mecânico e a sensibilidade numérica” (1914), seu grande momento de afirmação deu-se a partir da publicação de Zang tumb tuuum (1914), de Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, em que a sucessão mecânica de substantivos e infinitivos de Batalha Peso + Odor era substituída por uma orquestração verbal mais variada e elástica;
3. Quanto à distinção entre palavras em liberdade, tavole parolibere e aeropoesia, pode-se dizer que elas constituem três momentos da nova poesia, três momentos em estrita interdependência. De fato, na própria concepção das palavras em liberdade já estavam contidas as tavole parolibere, só que nestas acabavam por predominar os ritmos figurativos. No que diz respeito à aeropoesia (que surge em 1931), esta nada mais era do que “uma versão mais elástica e ampliada das palavras em liberdade” (DE MARIA, 1973, p. XIX) e, em
relação às tavole parolibere, constituiu um retrocesso, pois as palavras voltavam a seguir um fluxo retilíneo. O texto, que havia se tornado mais visual, voltava a ser mais literário, mais retórico. Ademais, o próprio Marinetti (1968g), em 1937, em “A técnica da nova poesia”, caracterizava as tavole parolibere, as palavras em liberdade e as palavras em liberdade de aeropoesia como três tipos de parolibrismo.
Como De Maria, portanto, manteremos esses dois momentos: o do verso livre e o das palavras em liberdade, lembrando ainda que um não excluiu o outro, pois, mesmo na fase das palavras em liberdade, alguns poetas
continuaram a escrever em versos livres (2).

Embora a fase do verso livre só tenha durado quatro anos (1909-1913), para Marinetti a polêmica já havia iniciado nas páginas da revista Poesia, lançada em fevereiro de 1905 em Milão, junto com Sem Benelli e Vitaliano Ponti.
Poesia, como observa Annateresa Fabris (1987, p. 48-54), propunha-se a publicar versos inéditos e renovar as formas de expressão lírica, mas, quando de seu lançamento, era colocada sob a égide de um poeta consagrado, Giosuè Carducci, apresentava uma capa de inspiração simbolista e seu editorial havia sido redigido numa linguagem decadente-nietzschiana. Apesar dessa premissa a revista não seguia uma linha rígida, pois publicava lado a lado poetas franceses simbolistas e vers-libristes (praticamente desconhecidos na Itália) e novas vozes poéticas italianas, como Aldo Palazzeschi, Corrado Govoni, Enrico Cavacchioli, Paolo Buzzi, Federico De Maria, associados a poetas tradicionais, dentre os quais Giuseppe Lipparini, e a nomes consagrados, como Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giovanni Pascoli e Ada Negri, além do já citado Giosuè Carducci.
O espírito de Poesia era internacionalista e, entre seus colaboradores, constavam vários autores que estavam na base da formação literária de Marinetti: Paul Adam, Emile Verhaeren, Alfred Jarry, os integrantes da Abadia de Créteil, Catulle Mendès, Comtesse de Noailles, Henri de Régnier, Paul Fort, Francis Jammes, Jules Laforgue, Jean Moréas, Paul Claudel, além de Gustave Kahn (divulgador do verso livre na França, ao lado de Marie Krysinska).
A revista Poesia podia ser caracterizada como uma grande antologia desordenada e caótica, que promovia não só a divulgação da produção lírica (na qual, raras vezes, se concretizou o interesse pela modernidade e seus símbolos, em obras como “À l’automobile”, de Marinetti; “L’artigliere meccanico”, de Mario Morasso; “Lyrisme militariste”, de Jarry), como também concursos e enquetes, destacando-se, dentre estas, a do verso livre. A “Prima inchiesta internazionale sul verso libero” – que, iniciada em 1907, se prolongou até o ano seguinte – nasceu do encontro entre Marinetti e Lucini, o qual, desde o fim do século XIX, estava elaborando uma visão nacional da poesia simbolista, operação que acontecia na Itália quando na França o Simbolismo já iniciava seu declínio.
Com a enquete, instaurava-se, no âmbito da revista, o único debate de verdade, em que se envolveu também Carlos Magalhães de Azeredo, o qual declarou que no Brasil os “versos bárbaros” – expressão que preferia a “verso livre” – haviam sido acolhidos com simpatia, mas sem unanimidade (julho-setembro de 1906). Poeta pós-parnasiano que queria aperfeiçoar os “metros bárbaros” de Carducci, Magalhães de Azeredo teve duas de suas composições publicadas por Poesia: “Canção do nauta seduzido” (fevereiro-maio de 1907) e “Sobre uma ânfora de vinho grego” (outubro de 1908).
Na discussão sobre o verso livre, enfrentavam-se dois grupos: os franceses, quase todos favoráveis, a começar por Kahn, e os italianos, quase todos contrários, com exceção de poucos: Buzzi, De Maria e Lucini. Das quarenta e cinco respostas se deduz que o tema, o qual não era uma novidade para a França, na Itália constituía um elemento de ruptura com a tradição.
Se a prioridade da experiência vers-libriste na Itália cabe a Gian Pietro Lucini – que, em 1898, publicava Drammi delle maschere, em 1908, Il verso libero e, em 1909, Revolverate (com “Prefácio futurista” de Marinetti) –, a divulgação polêmica em escala nacional cabe, sem dúvida, à ação da revista Poesia.
A destruição do soneto, do hendecassílabo, do terceto, a absoluta liberdade de acentuação, as estrofes de tamanhos imprevistos e diferentes, o novo ritmo, os novos efeitos fônicos eram algumas das características do verso livre. Entre os melhores exemplos de poemas em verso livre lembramos: Aeroplani (1909), de Paolo Buzzi; L’incendiario (1910), de Aldo Palazzeschi; Poesie elettriche (1911), de Corrado Govoni; Il canto dei motori (1912), de Luciano Folgore, e Cavalcando il sole (1914), de Enrico Cavacchioli.
A renovação representada pelo verso livre, entretanto, não bastava; de fato, além do prefácio da obra de Lucini, Marinetti (1968b) só fez referências explícitas a ele em “Discurso aos triestinos” (1910) e em "Manifesto dos dramaturgos futuristas” (1911). No primeiro manifesto, como vimos, havia uma referência às temáticas futuristas, mas não às técnicas, uma vez que neste a ordem sintática das palavras era respeitada e a corrente da emoção lírica era aprisionada pela sintaxe; por isso era preciso libertar as palavras dos fios condutores que as mantinham ligadas, “fazer explodir as pontes das coisas já ditas”, “destruir os trilhos do verso”, era necessário que a essência da matéria aflorasse, para poder adentrar o Novo e o Futuro. Desse modo, a partir de 1912, Marinetti começava a propor a teoria das palavras em liberdade, numa tentativa de superação das técnicas literárias anteriores.
Destruída a poética do passado, por meio de uma subversão que não era só gramatical ou estilística, mas principalmente psicológica, porque era o reflexo de uma nova sensibilidade, estava aberto o caminho para a construção da poesia moderna.
A teoria das palavras em liberdade foi elaborada, como já dissemos, nos três manifestos “técnicos”, surgidos entre 1912 e 1914, que era também o período de gestação de Zang tumb tuuum, o que vem provar que teoria e práxis se desenvolviam paralelamente. Pela análise dos três manifestos, podemos arrolar as seguintes características das palavras em liberdade:

01) destruição da sintaxe;
02) emprego do verbo no infinitivo(3);
03) uso do adjetivo-semáforo ou adjetivo-farol ou adjetivo-atmosfera;
04) criação de um duplo para cada substantivo;
05) abolição da pontuação;
06) expansão das ligações analógicas;
07) eliminação das categorias de imagens;
08) disposição caótica na orquestração das imagens;
09) destruição do eu (subjetivismo) na literatura, substituído pela
10) obsessão lírica da matéria, cuja essência seria captada por meio da
11) introdução do rumor, do peso e do odor dos objetos na literatura;
12) exaltação do feio na literatura.

Muitas dessas características, como bem lembra Luciano De Maria (1986), já estavam presentes na literatura francesa: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud e Stéphane Mallarmé eram alguns dos modelos. A originalidade de Marinetti consistiu em ter aglutinado esses elementos dispersos, transformando-os numa linguagem própria.
O cerne do manifesto de 1912, “Manifesto técnico da literatura futurista” (MARINETTI, 1968e), era o ataque ao psicologismo na literatura, a negação do subjetivismo dos românticos e dos simbolistas, a destruição do eu obsessivo, que levava a atribuir paixões e atribulações próprias do homem a outros seres animados e inanimados. Depois da “simultaneidade dos estados d’alma”, proclamada pelos pintores futuristas em fevereiro de 1912 (“Prefácio do catálogo das exposições de Paris, Londres, Berlim, Bruxelas, Munique,
Hamburgo, Viena etc.”, assinado por Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla e Gino Severini), a subjetividade, que parecia completamente eliminada das teorizações marinettianas, seria recuperada. No manifesto de 1913, “Destruição da sintaxe Imaginação sem fios Palavras em liberdade”, Marinetti (1968d) começava a falar de “consciências múltiplas e simultâneas num mesmo indivíduo”, apropriando-se da simultaneidade, “palavra mágica” – como a define De Maria (1969, p. XXIX) – descoberta pelos pintores. A aceitação do conceito de simultaneidade lírica – ou “lirismo multilíneo”, para usarmos a expressão de Marinetti – representou um importante passo adiante em relação à teoria enunciada no manifesto de 1912: o objetivismo absoluto era substituído pelo subjetivismo relativo, que permitia
a coexistência de vários pontos de vista. Subjetivismo confirmado em 1914, no terceiro manifesto técnico, “O esplendor geométrico e mecânico e a sensibilidade numérica”, quando Marinetti (1968f) propôs que se alcançasse uma “perspectiva emocional multiforme” através das palavras em liberdade e pelo repúdio da sintaxe, inimiga da emoção.
Os exemplos mais significativos de palavras em liberdade são do próprio Marinetti: Zang tumb tuuum (1914), mas, já antes, Batalha Peso + Odor (1912) e Adrinopla cerco orquestração (publicado em Lacerba, 15 mar. 1913), além de várias “colagens tipográficas”, em que o autor antecipava a poesia visual ou concreta, reunidas em 1919 em Les mots en liberté futuristes, e do “romance explosivo” Otto anime in una bomba (1919).
Zang tumb tuuum pode ser considerado a melhor realização prática dos conceitos teóricos formulados por Marinetti entre 1912 e 1914. A correspondência entre a poética, contida nos três manifestos técnicos, e a
poesia, expressa nessa obra, era praticamente perfeita: embora o resultado final deixasse um pouco a desejar, nas intenções formais os preceitos teóricos haviam sido bem aplicados. A harmonia do estilo era substituída por uma escrita dinâmica que se valia de várias técnicas:

1. Destruição da sintaxe, pois as palavras apareciam soltas, não mais ligadas pelos fios da lógica gramatical. Não havendo mais esse intermediário, o leitor era atraído para dentro do texto (como nas obras de Mallarmé);

2. Verbos no infinitivo: a descrição da batalha tornava-se mais incisiva e direta, com o emprego de poucos verbos no infinitivo (que é uma das formas nominais do verbo). Nesse tipo de enunciado mais sintético, a expressividade provinha dos substantivos e dos adjetivos, que se manifestavam com maior força realista. Conseqüentemente, alcançava-se a destruição do subjetivismo, seguindo as pegadas da tradição poética francesa, principalmente de Baudelaire;

3. Abolição da pontuação: o tamanho variável dos espaços em branco (como em Mallarmé) indicava ao leitor as pausas da intuição. A pontuação podia ser substituída também por símbolos matemáticos;

4. Onomatopéias e expansão de vogais e consoantes: Marinetti, no entanto, nem sempre confiava no valor do rumor da matéria em movimento e decifrava as onomatopéias para o leitor, entre parênteses;

5. Revolução tipográfica, graças ao uso de corpos diferentes;

6. Adjetivo-farol, o qual, com a eliminação do advérbio e do adjetivo comum, lançava sua luz sobre as palavras circunstantes;

7. Ligações analógicas entre as palavras, o que permitia gradações de analogias cada vez mais amplas, uma maior orquestração das imagens e uma fusão de sentimentos e sensações (visuais, olfativas, auditivas, táteis).

A matéria não estava mais sujeita aos estados d’alma do poeta, mas ganhava uma força própria. Não existiam mais as barreiras, as névoas, as cortinas do Simbolismo, havia o contato direto com a realidade física.
Entrementes, era um realismo que, estranhamente, se construía, como vimos, através de sensações. Isso no que diz respeito ao estilo. Quanto ao conteúdo, a guerra (para dentro da qual o leitor era arrastado) era apresentada como uma festa, um espetáculo grandioso e, paradoxalmente, como afirmação da vida.
A leitura de Zang tumb tuuum não é fácil, pois a ausência de uma sintaxe organizada a dificulta muito. Além disso, nem sempre é possível reconstruir a rede de analogias pensadas por Marinetti. Quando apresentava essa obra, o autor contornava as dificuldades propondo uma interpretação física em que, para espalhar as palavras em liberdade, o declamador, pela movimentação, fizesse de seu corpo um instrumento no meio de outros instrumentos: o rosto e a voz deviam ser desumanizados e a gesticulação geométrica. O dinamismo desse novo tipo de declamação tornaria o espectador participativo, arrancando-o da atitude contemplativa, como preconizado em “A declamação dinâmica e sinóptica”, em 1916 (MARINETTI, 1968c)(4).
Dessa forma, o poema assumia um aspecto contraditório: de um lado, era o ponto de partida da poesia visual ou concreta; de outro, representava a última manifestação da poesia declamada. O aspecto visual e o aspecto
acústico, portanto, coexistiam: a tipografia livre expressiva e as onomatopéias precisavam ser declamadas para se realizarem plenamente. A poliexpressividade, auspiciada no manifesto “A cinematografia futurista”, em 1916 (MARINETTI et al., 1973), já vinha-se concretizando: “Colocaremos em movimento as palavras em liberdade que rompem com os limites da literatura, marchando para a pintura, para a arte dos rumores e lançando uma ponte maravilhosa entre a palavra e o objeto real”(5).
Além de Marinetti, na fase das palavras em liberdade, destacaram-se: Luciano Folgore, com Ponti sull’oceano (1914); Carlo Carrà, o qual, em Guerrapittura (1915) demonstrava a inexistência, em muitos casos, da distinção entre as artes figurativas e a literatura; Auro D’Alba, com Baionette (1915); Corrado Govoni, com Rarefazioni e parole in libertà (1915); Paolo Buzzi, com L’elisse e la spirale (Film + parole in libertà) (1915); Francesco Meriano, com Equatore notturno (1916); Volt (Vincenzo Fani-Ciotti), com Archi voltaici (1916); Armando Mazza, com Firmamento (1920); Francesco Cangiullo com Piedigrotta (1916) e Caffeconcerto (1919), obras eivadas de um grande senso de humor, nas quais o elemento visual predominava; Ardengo Soffici, que, em BIF§ZF + 18 simultaneità e chimismi lirici (1919), oferecia um dos melhores exemplos de tavole parolibere. Nessa obra, a mensagem poética recorria às novas técnicas de comunicação industrial e se exprimia por meio do uso de corpos tipográficos diferentes.
Outros exemplos significativos pertencem à década de 1930, isto é, ao período do segundo Futurismo: Infinito (1933) e Accenti e quote (1935), de Bruno Sanzin; Tavole parolibere (1932), Canti della metropoli verde (1935) e Poesie dei ferri chirurgici (1940), de Pino Masnata. Este último autor inventou o substantivo “de dupla função” – um nome que, colocado entre dois verbos, servia de objeto direto para o primeiro e de sujeito para o segundo – e o adjetivo “bivalente”, assim denominado porque concordava com os dois substantivos entre os quais era colocado (VERDONE, 1986, p. 45). Isso vinha demonstrar que, mesmo depois da fase heróica (1909-1920) (6), ou seja, aquela da vanguarda como descoberta, como renovação, os futuristas continuaram em sua busca experimental.
A fase da aeropoesia, cujas maiores expressões foram o “Manifesto da aeropoesia” (1931) e O aeropoema do golfo de La Spezia (1935)(7), correspondeu à realização literária da aeropintura (surgida em 1929), dominada pela síntese, pelo dinamismo, pela interpenetração, pela simultaneidade e pela nova afirmação do mito da máquina.
A aeropoesia caracterizava-se por uma exacerbação da simultaneidade, sobretudo graças à eliminação da pontuação, à fusão de palavras, ao emprego de adjetivos-atmosfera e de verbos em modos finitos (Presente do Indicativo) ao lado de verbos no infinitivo. O emprego do Presente permitia à lembrança se vivificar, fundindo simultaneamente o presente e o passado na memória do autor. A simultaneidade do presente e do passado, ao anular as distâncias espaciotemporais, correspondia à simultaneidade de visão e à interpenetração propiciada pela velocidade aérea, pelas comunicações via rádio e pelo cinema. Os meios de percepção e de expressão se ampliavam: cores, odores e sons favoreciam uma síntese, às vezes forçada, de realidades distantes. A sintaxe, o discurso, destruídos na fase anterior, ressurgiam de forma muitas vezes retórica, através da exaltação da guerra e da tensão oratória. Os nexos lógicos, antes negados, tornavam a aparecer de forma imprópria, em momentos em que poderiam ter sido eliminados, por já estarem pressupostos. Em suma, entre o parolibrismo e a aeropoesia não havia uma grande diferença: havia algumas variações, às vezes uma redução, um recuo em termos estilísticos.
As palavras em liberdade e, principalmente, os poemas paroliberi, com as analogias desenhadas, a ortografia e a tipografia livre expressiva, representaram uma fragmentação da estrutura lingüística da poesia, mas, ao mesmo tempo, serviram como material de construção de outras experiências literárias. Por exemplo, na Rússia, as obras de Maiakóvski apresentavam muitas afinidades com o Futurismo no campo dos procedimentos formais, embora partindo de concepções ideológicas opostas. Dadaístas e surrealistas (Tzara e
Breton) valer-se-ão da experiência futurista em nível teórico e prático, assimilando imagens, analogias, a sintaxe nominal. Na Itália, foram devedores do Futurismo, dentre outros, Dino Campana, Massimo Bontempelli, Salvatore Quasimodo e, sobretudo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, que chegou a adotar uma declamação futurista (VERDONE, 1986; DE MARIA, 1973, 1986; BRIOSI, 1972; GRISI, 1994; GIMÉNEZ-FRONTIN, 1977).
No Brasil, o diálogo com os futuristas é facilmente detectável em Oswald de Andrade, não só em Poesia pau-brasil (1925), mas também nos romances Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924) e Serafim Ponte Grande (1933), que se caracterizam por rápidos flashes sintéticos (fragmentos), estilo nominal, telegráfico, fluxo de idéias, paródia ou reescrita de autores anteriores (apropriação do olhar do outro). Estará presente, ainda, nas neovanguardas – por via direta ou indireta, através de outras vanguardas históricas – como foi o caso da poesia concreta nos anos 1950. No Plano-piloto para poesia concreta (1958), de Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari e Haroldo de Campos (2002, p. 204), a contribuição do Futurismo, arrolado como um dos precursores da nova poética brasileira, é mais substancial do que se pode supor à primeira vista. A idéia de ideograma (“método de compor baseado na justaposição direta – analógica, não lógico-discursiva – de elementos”), a “tendência à substantivação e à verbificação”, a “sintaxe puramente relacional baseada exclusivamente na ordem das palavras”, a negação do subjetivismo, a descoberta do “espaço gráfico como agente estrutural”, em oposição ao “desenvolvimento meramente temporístico-linear” da composição, são
evidências de que a poética da matéria, preconizada por Marinetti, continuava a se afirmar mesmo depois de seu momento histórico, comprovando a vitalidade das teorizações e da práxis futuristas.

* - Professora doutora aposentada do Departamento de Letras Modernas da Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brasil).

(1) - Como pondera Annateresa Fabris (1987, p. 51-52), “antecipar o nascimento do Futurismo para 1905, a fim de fazê-lo coincidir com Poesia, [é uma] operação que não pode ser aceita historicamente, pois a enquête sobre o verso livre representava a atualização do público italiano com uma temática já consolidada na França e não uma nova proposta estética como aquela que surgiria alguns anos depois através de meios promocionais em consonância com os instrumentos de divulgação do século XX”.

(2) - A distinção entre versos livres e palavras em liberdade nem sempre é fácil. Por exemplo, Poesie a Beny – uma coletânea de poesias escritas em francês por Marinetti, entre 1920 e 1938, para sua esposa Benedetta – são consideradas composições em versos livres por Luciano De Maria (1973, p. XXXVIII), enquanto Gilberto Finzi (1979, p. 68) encontra, nesses “textos só aparentemente ‘regulares’”, o mesmo poeta das palavras em liberdade.

(3) - Luciano Folgore, em “Lirismo sintético e sensação física” (publicado na revista Lacerba, 1º. jan. 1914), proporá a abolição total do verbo.

(4) - Em sua viagem ao Brasil, em maio de 1926, Marinetti declamou vários poemas, entre os quais O bombardeio de Adrinopla, cuja apresentação surpreendeu o público e foi considerado pela imprensa, “excessivamente cheio de ruídos: marcha de batalhões, clarins, apitos, guinchos, gritos de soldados feridos, estouros de metralha, fuzilaria, resfolegar de motores, fragor de edifícios que se desmoronam...”(FABRIS, 1994, p. 220-222).

(5) - O manifesto era assinado por F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla e Remo Chiti.

(6) - Nesse caso, também, a periodização estabelecida por De Maria difere daquela de Verdone, que a prolonga até 1940, e daquela de Falqui, para quem a fase áurea não iria além de 1915-1916 (quando os marinettianos se afastaram do grupo da revista Lacerba).

(7) - Podem ser lembrados ainda: Aeropoema del golfo di Napoli (1937), de Emilio Buccafusca, Idrovolanti in siesta nel golfo di Napoli (1938), de Geppo Tedeschi, Il poema del vestito di latte (1937), Il poema di Torre Viscosa (1938) e Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi (1940), de Marinetti, L’aeropoema futurista della Sardegna, de Gaetano Pattarozzi, L’aeroporto, de Ignazio Scurto, L’aeropoema futurista dell’Umbria, de Franca Maria Corneli, dentre muitos outros. (D’AMBROSIO, 1996; VIAZZI, 1977; PAGLIA, 1977).

Créditos:
TRICEVERSA
Revista do Centro Ítalo-Luso-Brasileiro
de Estudos Lingüísticos e Culturais
ISSN 1981 8432
www.assis.unesp.br/cilbelc
.
TriceVersa, Assis, v.1, n.1, maio-out. 2007

Genesis P. Orridge in How to Operate Your Brain - a TV Show by Timothy Leary

2009-09-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

A public access television show called How to Operate Your Brain, hosted by Timothy Leary from 1993, with Genesis P. Orridge.

Cosey Fanni Tutti in The Pop Manifesto magazine

2009-09-19T15:32:00.000-07:00

LINK

Cosey Fanni Tutti & Maria Fusco talk about linguistc hardcore

2009-09-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

MF (Maria Fusco): For you what’s Linguistic Hardcore?

CFT (Cosey Fanni Tutti): I take it as it is. Hardcore frst means more to me than linguistics, in that it has to be brutally honest. If you want to express that linguistically, visually whatever, it must be very honest. Brutal honesty could be expressed in sentimentality too though, not just
violence. It doesn’t have to be shocking in that respect, just very, very direct. It should just hit the part of you that more subtle methods might allow you to escape from, there’s no way out, you have to connect with it. So Linguistic Hardcore would be something that forces you to connect with the message, deal with it and assimilate it.

MF: I’m sure you’re really fed up talking about your name, but...
CFT: How I came to be called Cosey Fanni Tutti? I was first called... well, my christened name is
Carol and when I first met Genesis years ago, he didn’t know my name and he called me Cosmosis, and that was shortened to Cosey. I sent a postcard, a Mail Art postcard to a friend of ours, Robin Klassnick, and he wrote back and nicknamed me, Cosey Fanni Tutti, that was it.
Later on, when I found out what it means, ‘as all women should be’, to me it was great. Not because I’d have to live up to it, but because I thought it was a nice idea because the name was actually given to me, as something that described me, by someone who knew me. So, it was a fattering thing to have said about me and then to be translated like that – both in terms of the language and the meaning – I’ve always kept it. I tend to write Cosey F. Tutti sometimes now, you know.

MF: Are you known by more than one name now?

CFT: I’ve kept Cosey as my legal name, but not the Fanni Tutti bit. I do have a bank account
that’s named Cosey Fanni Tutti. It’s my artist’s name, I use it for all my music and everything
else. When I’m getting paid people often write cheques out assuming Cosey Fanni Tutti is my
legal name, so I’ve been forced into keeping it like a business account, which is weird. Funny
though isn’t it?

MF: Your name’s not quite a ‘brand’ but it does have a separate life
from yourself.

CFT: Yeah, totally, yeah. Cosey is a concept.

MF: I like that. Paraphrasing a quote from Finnegans Wake Joyce writes, ‘Who
gave you that numb?’ with the idea of being struck by your own name, that well,
I suppose it petrifes you, or maybe it’s that you’re just stuck with it.
CFT: Very important. You either connect with what someone else has called you, or you don’t.
When I was christened (I was actually christened Christine Carol) my father was hoping for a boy – he would have been called Christopher. I don’t know if my father couldn’t face the fact that I wasn’t Christopher or what, so he always called me Carol. My name has always had a kind of like weird thing about it for me, so when I was called Cosey I just didn’t even think about it, I just thought, ‘Yeah, okay’.

MF: Did you feel Cosey was numbing in a good way, rather than numbing in a bad way?

CFT: Good way, because it came, it tied in with, with me leaving... well, getting thrown out of home. So it was almost like a new life for me if you like, a new identity and one I was more comfortable with. It was, well it was free of everything that I felt I was sort of chained down by. Even when I look back to my childhood my closest friend, who’s like my brother really, he was called Lesley and we always changed his name to either Lez with a Z or Lilly when he decided he was gay and he wanted to be a bit softer. So we’ve always messed with names, I’ve always messed with names, even from being under ten years old. It was always Caz for me, not Carol, Caz and Lez – he still calls me Caz. Then it got to Cosey, and when I was stripping it was Scarlet. I’m Carol to my sister, she does know me as Cosey, but she just still calls me Carol. I did a talk on my magazine work and everything in Hull, she came along to it and that was quite a revelation for her and a big thing for me. I warned her what would be there, because she’s older than me, and she’s not in the arts or anything. But she was like totally blown away by it. But it still didn’t make her call me Cosey. Some days I wake up and I forget who I am!

MF: Must have allowed you a nice ordering system in a way too, when it works well, because you can decide who are on any particular day. Do you think that names make you freer? I’m obsessed by class you know, an important aspect of what we’re discussing is about your nomenclature – it’s outside of, it exists outside of class, because it’s not, well there’s nothing average about it, is there? Cosey doesn’t exist outside of language, it’s not a squiggle, it has
a form and can be written down (even on cheques!), but still it’s outside of normal naming structures. A weird existence all of its own. Very direct.

CFT: It is who I am and what I do. It’s not just my name. It’s something totally different.

MF: I have a quote for you from Elaine Showalter from her essay, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, on what she called Gynocriticism, I think it could be interesting here: ‘A woman is producer of textual meaning and in that including the psycho-dynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problem of female language.’ I don’t know if everybody feels like this, I certainly do – does Showalter mean that one feels constricted or fxed in that place that your name is a representation of?

CFT: It’s funny because I don’t, I don’t feel fxed anywhere now, even when I go back to Hull,
if I go back I have all the smells and the physical structure of the place is still there, it’s all still there, so that is familiar to me and it has certain... it evokes certain feelings in me, but I can’t relate to who I was then.

MF: Let’s talk about your music a wee bit now. Am I pronouncing this
properly: Luchtbal?

CFT: Ah, Luchtbal yes.

MF: There are some tracks in there from Music Fantastique, is that right?

CFT: We pulled together some of the classic tracks for that album, because we were moving from one place to another, that name thing again. We had been Chris and Cosey, but we were becoming CARTER TUTTI. People had got to know us with certain song structures and sounds and everything else, and we felt that we’d moved so far away from that, you know, that we could... it was quite dishonest to put Chris and Cosey on something that really wasn’t Chris and Cosey, it was defnitely something else now and we just felt it would be good to have to CARTER TUTTI not because the work had matured exactly, that’s the wrong word for it, but it had gone to a different level completely.

MF: And it needed a new name...

CFT: And it needed a new... yeah, a new umbrella name for it, so that people knew immediately
what they were getting.

MF: I love some of the track titles – Apocalipzo, Spectrofeelya, Fantasteek – the sound of them, freaky aggregates of words and spellings...

CFT: That’s right, we’ve always done it, because we’ve had Exotica and we did – what was the
one you just said on there? Spectrofeelya, yeah and we had a thing about doing that, that was
from the Martin Denny sort of thing that we like, you know, he did all those sort of things. It
twists the idea of the word, Apocalipzo, an apocalypse is something really drastic and if you just
put that on the end you can have more fun with it. We like to put things together that confict, that’s what basically represents our music, because we put a swing in it but the lyrics can be quite hard although they sound simple, when you actually read them you think, ‘Oh that’s not very nice’. A pretty icing on the top so that you get seduced into it, while what we’re really saying is hardcore, Linguistic Hardcore really. You have to go in, you go into it and then you’re suddenly dealing with something different. You might think it’s a love song, but in fact it’s about rape. Because in life that’s what things are like, isn’t it? You get seduced into situations you can’t deal with, or you just get thrown into them against your will – that’s what the music’s like for us.

MF: Then both you and your audience have the chance to come round to another type of understanding later on.

CFT: Well, we did a track called Misunderstandings, and Illusion was all about that too. It’s not
a literal thing of course, it’s taken at face value or you can start getting inside it.
I know that a friend of mine, a Japanese scientist, is researching how our eyes can actually see more than we see now, it’s just that the way we’ve evolved we don’t see what’s between me and you in the air. You know, well you might see it if you’re on acid…

MF: Ezra Pound talks about how accuracy of meaning is the sole morality of writing, taking morality very loosely here. Thinking about that in relation to the new words you’ve created for your songs, fnding the right tools for the job. So you might have the actual track as an entity, a very carefully crafted entity, but one that doesn’t have a name to it. The title both opens
and closes it to the audience? I fnd that interesting, thinking about not only how you’re using the titles based on what you’ve said there, but also in terms of thinking... thinking across your range of practice. How do you choose what form is right for which ideas, they must share a lot in common?

CFT: Well, depending on whether it’s the obvious thing, visual or sound, that’s the frst thing to
consider. But even then that crosses over because we do, we do visuals to go with the sound that we make, and when we play live we have visuals behind us. What I don’t actually impose on myself is any kind of method, so when ideas come through, I let them sort of run themselves through me and then out into whatever...

MF: Do you produce quickly or does it percolate about a bit and then come back
to you?

CFT: With music sometimes it’s really quick, other times it can take a couple of weeks just
because the kind of sound that we want, like you were saying, the accuracy is really important,
sounds have their own kind of language, like names. There are so many presets that people use
to make music that as a maker you can get bombarded, if you’re familiar with a certain kind of
sound, even if it’s a violin, there’s a certain kind of sample of violin that you hear a lot. That’s not right for us, we prefer to fnd different sounds so that they’re unique to what we do. I know it’s quite anal but that’s just the way we work.

MF: Well, it’s precision isn’t it?

CFT: It is precision. I don’t want a kind of sound that’s on an advert for a Volkswagen Beetle
on my album...

MF: Unless of course you want...

CFT: Unless I want that reference, yeah. So I would change it and that’s why we never use presets for that reason. Our music has its own language.

MF: Presets aren’t precise enough.

CFT: No. They’re not our language or what we want to say. So going back to how, how I decide about how my work should fnd form. When I work with the photographs that Szabo took of me, I’ll be scanning his slides and then doing some prints and see which size works, and I’ll get the right feel – which selection of images work well together or in confict with one another that kind of thing. So there has to be a conversation, I don’t want a defnitive response or meaning to anything, that’s one thing I defnitely don’t want, I’ve never had that in my life and I don’t agree with that, because everybody’s different, but I would like to give off the... if I give off the genuine feeling of how it really was then, maybe people will receive that, assimilate and understand it and give meaning to the work in their own way. Then I’m happy, because I’ve given them something that is honest, my work is based on total honesty, people can run with that, you know.

MF: Does that honesty ever drain you?

CFT: No, the opposite, I find it very hard to conceal things from people. I have real diffculty
playing games, I’ve never ever subscribed to that because I just think it’s a waste of time and
energy and emotion, you know.

MF: [LAUGHS] On that note, I’ve a fyer here for a performance that you did at the Zap Club in 1986, you wrote: ‘There was a time when all images crossed and pursued their separate lives. From the one person came many, one ‘being’ to some and a totally different perception to others. Now is the time for all to realise the many sides were indeed the one person and it is this person who needs to be seen as a whole and not as a fragment of her personality.’ There’s a cousin
quote to go with it, from Hélène Cixous’ book Coming to Writing, have you read it? It’s brilliant, I’m trying to get her to do something for the next issue, someone told me that she only likes to communicate via wee handwritten letters.

CFT: Oh I’ve got ... a friend of mine does that and I save all these envelopes he sends me, because they’re really nice. It’s like that red envelope there, can you reach over?

MF: This one? Oh yeah, where does he live?

CFT: Lincolnshire. So he addresses it like that, all over the envelope… And his return address is like that.

MF: Oh that’s lovely.

CFT: It’s Robert Wyatt, you know Robert Wyatt?

MF: Yes! Do you know, I went to see him a couple of weeks ago at the Purcell Rooms, I was actually thinking about him when you were talking about compounding song names... But I digress, back to Cixous,‘The text is always written under the sweet pressure of love. My only torment, my only fear, is of failing to write as high up as the Other, my only chagrin is of failing to write as beautifully as Love. The text always comes to me in connection with the Source.
If the source were dammed up, I would not write. And the source is given to me. It is not me. One cannot be one’s own source. Source: always there.’ So she’s got this idea of vacillation between self as source and material but also self as other. ‘The source is given to me it is not me’ and your words ‘a person who needs to be seen as a whole and not a fragment’ has a direct relationship...?

CFT: Well, it’s very relevant actually. The name Cosey Fanni Tutti had become synonymous with nudity and a certain kind of performance. I wrote that flyer text because I wanted to challenge all that, I wanted to start saying, you better forget about it, because I’m not going to continue, you know, with this kind of work forever. I hadn’t found a formula that I was going to stick with, like a lot of artists, I wanted to move forward, I wanted to say that if it’s only the nudity you’re into, then forget it. I can’t remember what I did in that performance, I don’t think I stripped off in that one. I think that was one of the frst ones I didn’t strip off in.
I can’t remember which venue it was, but I had a lot of the images of myself that were known,
from the ICA and so on, from Chris and Cosey and all those things, they were all hung up around
me and I destroyed them all. I wanted to show the audience that this is literally what was happening then, what to connect with. It was as simple as that.

MF: You were talking earlier about how over time one creates new signifcance or works are reinvigorated in different ways. Thinking about time, certainly maybe when we’re reading or listening to music, on one hand it’s so very experiential, the maker is asking the reader or the listener for their personal time, a very precious commodity. But on the other hand, it’s not about the moment at all is it? We’re asking our audience to travel across time in some way, to bring their own material to our material. Now thinking about that in relation to your track
Driving Blind, the sounds on that are so elongated and striated, the song feels like someone got hold of it and stretched-pulled it, it seems to suggest a long journey, because of its textual surface. There’s also an idea of a bigger time-frame set around sound somehow, how is it remembered? Does that make sense?

CFT: I know what you mean, this is why working with sound is really, really good fun. You can
make it do, express all kinds of things that you can’t express visually, it has a universality about
it, so you can trigger responses in people with sounds. I’m not talking about subliminals, which
we have done before, but just regular sounds and tones and that sort of thing. Because neither me or Chris write music anyway, it’s all done, you know, just as we feel it. So we feel our way through everything and in that respect we’re our own guinea pigs, you know. Because you know, when a sound is wrong it doesn’t give you that feeling, it’s not quite right – not low enough, it’s too high, it’s got a little bit of a waver in it – after three seconds it just does that little thing that’s really irritating and every three seconds that will drive you nuts. People listen to things in different ways.

MF: So it’s listening habits as well, isn’t it? It’s like how some people, well my partner you know, has always listened to a lot of music and he listens to the same track over and over and over and over and over and over again, like he’s trying to learn it, in a way. I think people maybe try to learn the one track for that reason that you’ve just expressed. Perhaps they have an intuitive knowledge or memory of it that is activated in the act of listening.
Then after listening that knowledge will brew for a while, maybe popping up again later. I wonder if this is how creativity functions too?

CFT: Interesting, creativity is something that you just can’t explain. I have an artist friend of mine come to see me and she said – she’s a lot younger than I am, only a few years older than our son –and she asked me ‘What’s your practice?’ I didn’t know what she meant at frst. I suddenly thought, well that’s quite an alright question, but it’s not something that’s part of my vocabulary, because I don’t have a practice, well, I’ve not labelled it as such, but I suppose there is that kind of thing with a lot of people where they have a specifc methodology. When I have an idea, I have to research it, then take it through these different stages before it becomes manifest, but sometimes, suddenly it’s there, within 30 minutes it’s there. So methodology is useless to me because it’s completely always changing.

MF: Isn’t that a problem sometimes?

CFT: I wouldn’t want a methodology, I really wouldn’t want it. And yet sometimes if something has to be precise, I suppose there is an argument to say there should be some kind of methodology imposed on form, but only in so much as when it comes down to fine tweaking. But not at the beginning, not in the actual creating, not at all.

MF: Thinking about methodology in relation to your work Magazine Actions, along with these ideas of experiential time-lines and histories and again textual editing. That piece pulled all these strands together. I like the materiality of paper, I like the idea of the transportable nature of magazines and books, moving across time, if you see what I mean. There’s a different kind of space in there though, a sensuous text (when I say text here I’m not just thinking
about words, Driving Blind, is text too in this context) can you tell me about the ordering structures you out in place for Magazine Actions, after all you must have so much material, and you’re not into methodology as such.

CFT: I didn’t want to make any sense out of it, not my sense anyway, because the whole point of the project, was that it was what had made sense to the sex industry. I surrendered myself into that industry to be used as they use any other girl, but I didn’t let them know who I was or anything or why I was doing it, otherwise it would be pointless, because I wouldn’t be treated the same way. What I wanted to reveal was the, the thinking of the industry and how different magazines were for different markets. Like you were saying, magazines are so portable, little pocket-size, so people can potentially have them with them all the time, this gives the industry a head start. What was exciting to me, and what I wanted to show, was the differences and the different kind of varied customer-led images that the publishers wanted, even down to the certain positions, the clothing… You’d get the top end, very glamorous ones, like Men Only and Penthouse, which remove a lot of reality away, so that it becomes very much fantasy. But in a different way to the fantasy of the small pocket-size book that’s in black and white with just a couple of colour pages, more or less ‘Readers Wives’ kind of photographs, as if it was the woman next door and the reader is looking through the keyhole. If that was what they were going for, then they’d bring someone who looked like that in and put you together, to do whatever you do together, you know. So that interested me a lot, very specific.

MF: A vernacular in a way?

CFT: Absolutely, even in so much as each genre of the sex magazines had their own kind of
advertisers in them, because they fed a particular readership. So you would have sports cars and
expensive things in Penthouse, cheap hardcore flms or like soiled pants in the more downmarket one and in the middle, it would sort of crossover in between into sort of like massage parlours… when you think about it it’s quite class based, isn’t it?

MF: Yes, yes, yes.

CFT: The language in some of those magazines was sometimes quite shocking. There was one
phrase in a magazine I did some work in The Piccadilly. So the whole 80 odd pages were framed up in three frames, a real eye-opener, at the end of one of the magazines and it said ‘Does she stink?’ and then there was like an open crotch shot. To me was just like so insulting and really what they were saying, I mean it was a double meaning obviously, but what they were saying was, ‘Is she any good or is this one better, whichever one you decide we’ll put here in the magazine next month.’ But to see it, ‘Does she stink?’ it was just absolutely horrible, and it wasn’t like the lowest of the lowest genre by any means.

MF: Maybe the opposite of Linguistic Hardcore then?

CFT: Maybe. That’s the base kind of instinct they’re publishing for their readership, tells you
exactly how they feel about the girls.

Cosey and myself had an interesting chat on the way to her house (before the
Dictaphone was recording) about how much we both love swearing. We agreed that
it was a treasured part of our own idiolects, culturally specifc of course,
Cosey is from Hull and I’m from Belfast.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

2009-09-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

Cosey Autograph

Cosey Fanni Tutti - photos

2009-09-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

Photos by order

1º - 'LIP SERVICE', First International Female Artists Art Biennal ',Stockholm Sweden. 1994.
2º - ‘Genetic Fear’, Acme Gallery, London, U.K. 1977.
3º - 'Sex Une Bonne Idée', Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, UK. 1975
4º - 'Couming of Age', Oval House, London, UK. 1974

5º - 'Mail Art' - Martello Street studio, London UK. 1973.

Cosey Fanni Tutti press article about...

2009-09-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Published after Tate Triennial opening. Feb-April 2006

Cosey Fanni Tutti Interview by Fari Bradley

2009-09-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

After appearing on the same compilation, "Women Take Back the Noise", Fari Bradley discusses being women in sound, above all the 'noise' genre, Carter Tutti, Throbbing Gristle, Athens and Fari's term Shelectronica to describe the feminine in noise.
This interview was originally broadcast as part of a longer live show on Resonance fm on 104.4fm in London.

Genesis P-Orridge - interview from Only Magazine

2009-09-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Beyond the Body (an interview with Genesis P. Orridge)

The lead vocalist for the band Throbbing Gristle and one of the founding minds of Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge has been charged with having invented industrial music, acid house and some even lump Brit Pop into that mix. A musician, performance artist and social provocateur, Orridge has made it his, or her, life’s work to push the boundaries of social behavior. From the early days of living in an anarchist commune fueled by the infinite frustration he experienced in the 60s and 70s he has always worked to explore the intellectual and very human experience of why do we do the things we do. His art has taken many forms, it is both playful and confrontational and has covered ground ranging from pornography, totalitarianism, Nazism, love, peace, evolution and especially gender. Both his art and music often defy the conventional, in fact they mischievously and intelligently deny the use of conventional expression as words and symbols and definitions become altered, removed, unnecessary. Throughout his career his life has become inseparable from his art and most recently he and his other half, Lady Jaye began a physical, living art project that saw them both undergo body modification and plastic surgery in an philosophical and artistic effort to explore the concept of what they call Pandrogeny – the realization of a third entity that exists beyond the sum of either one of them. Unfortunately the project has since ended with the abrupt passing of his partner Lady Jaye in October 2007. Regardless, he continues with his work, having recently released an new Psychic TV album and DVD and his intelligent and thoughtful ability to articulate his ideas and heartfelt hope for the survival of the human race has helped him find a new and excited audience in Universities around the world. I spoke to Genesis on the phone from New York.

ONLY: How are you?

G.P.O: It’s been a really hectic week. Tomorrow we’re the visiting artist at NYU so we have to get things organized.

ONLY: I can imagine that there is a lot to talk about on your behalf.

G.P.O: I suppose, but it’s been interesting lately, in the last 8 weeks maybe even the last 6 weeks we’ve given a lecture at Rutger’s University, at Columbia and at the gender studies department at NYU and now we’re doing the art department. And at Rutger’s the Head of Graduate Studies said afterward that our lecture had the largest attendance in the history of the University.

ONLY: That’s great.

G.P.O: Isn’t that interesting? That there is that much awareness of the project that Jaye and I were doing?

ONLY: I certainly think that that kind of reaction is quite compelling and an interesting testament to the awareness of both the project and for the ideas and the concepts that you have been working with and towards for so long.

G.P.O: That’s funny to think about for an old codger like me.

ONLY: It must be an exciting time to discover that there is an audience for you.

G.P.O: It is, but obviously it’s tragic that Jaye’s not here to share that with us.

ONLY: Of course. But I’m happy to hear that you have found the strength to continue.

G.P.O: Well it’s partly the fact that there is such a positive response to what he have been doing that encourages me to keep going. It’s an irony isn’t it? Derek Jarmen once said to me, when he just turned fifty and been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he said : “You know Gen, now that I’m dying they’re going to throw money at me to make movies and they’re going to give me all this praise and publicity, but they won’t do it until you’re either dying or dead.”

ONLY: I think that anyone who is pushing boundaries or concepts, like yourself, that seems so far ahead of the general public consciousness has to expect that it will take time for the public to catch up. For example so much of what you have contributed culturally and even philosophically has been ahead of the curve. It can sometimes take a generation or two to catch up to what were originally seen as radical ideas.

G.P.O: A good example would be something like industrial music. We did the first Throbbing Gristle gigs to less than 20 people, most of them throwing things and screaming abuse that it was just a racket. Of course, now it’s a global phenomenon and most young people would look at you wide eyed and startled if you said there was a time when there was no industrial music.

ONLY: Of course and obviously you were at the absolute forefront of that. I’ve heard you be referred to as a cultural engineer…

G.P.O: Yeah that phrase popped out one day. I can’t remember where it was but somebody who had enough importance to me to merit that thoughtful said: “How would you sum up what you do in two or three words”…and out pops this phrase, “cultural engineer”. And the minute it popped out we thought it does sound arrogant but there’s enough evidence out there to justify that as an explanation. I mean we have actually taken the flows and the ebbs and the underlying subtexts of popular culture and then submitted it to a detailed analysis and then proposed the next mutation. It’s not so much that we’re claiming that we’re geniuses in an isolated world where we come up with these marvelous ideas, it’s more that we’ve become skilled at reading what’s inevitable in the culture and we have the nerve, the stubbornness or the stupidity to then see if we can make it happen.

ONLY: I wonder how these sorts of expressions, that you seem to naturally migrate towards, begin to form. Is it a result of being engaged with a sympathetic collective group? Do these ideas come about organically?

G.P.O: It’s very much the result of dialogue. It really begins with when we were….oh by the way you probably realized that we’re trying to use “we” instead of “I” so we can represent both myself and Lady Jaye in the physical…

ONLY: I had yes.

G.P.O:…So when we dropped out of university in 1969, we joined an artistic, psycho-therapeutic commune called the Exploding Galaxy, that’s really one of the root influences, one of the basic training camps for a lot of what has come since. It was a very brutal, very analytical environment. You would constantly be interrogated as to why you still looked how you did yesterday or why your hair was the same, or why you wore the clothes other people were wearing…why you were following any habits. That sort of environment of living with no privacy and being constantly intellectually harassed, to be de-conditioned in every possible way has left a very deep imprint on my way of perceiving nonsense reality as we prefer to call it. The other really, really important methodology of course is the “cut up”, in all of it’s infinite variety, which could simplistically be called “collage” refers to the way that we edit our experience of reality, the way that the media edit what they present, the same reality and the underlying themes of that nonsense reality that can be revealed by unexpected collision and frictions and the rearranging the linear structures. All of those techniques, we’ve applied, not just to the mediums of writing, film, video, music and art…we’ve applied it to behavior. And that was where we got into the Shu shamanism and the majik and the focused orgasm and eventually, the body itself. The cheap suitcase as Lady Jaye would call it. Which is where the battle rages between the software program of DNA and the concept at least of intellectual free will.

ONLY: It seems to me that you have treated your whole life as an art project really…

G.P.O: Absolutely.

ONLY: And one of the integral aspects of being an artist is the concept, or rather the process of evolution. To not be mired in one specific approach or by simple repetition of form.

G.P.O: Except here’s the irony and one of the issues that remains problematic. If for example you are Briget Reilly the painter and you see a canvas with stripes and you go: oh that’s probably a Briget Reilly, you see silk screen images and you say: oh it’s an Andy Warhol, you can recognize a Dali. Now how can you recognise these pieces of art? It’s because they are so similar to all the others that went before. That there’s a basic formula, a branding if you like in contemporary language. So the problem for the artist is change and evolution and mutation are absolutely-we would agree with you- the essence to us of creation. and yet to fully live with that means that you are always outside the bounds of the art world, the art market or the music market. The commercial cultural world wants recognizability. As if to say you’re investing in this and you can tell this is what we’ve given you because it looks like all the others. It’s a horrible problem for every artist…do we try to make a living at making art, is creation about making a living? Is it possible to make a living and maintain an obsession with novelty and change? Or do you have to surrender to that and hope that you can still have content? Obviously you know that with me, we did not surrender. (laughs)

ONLY: Your entire career could be seen in the context of this kind of conflict. Particularly in relation to perceived convention or normal behavior. But at the heart of all of this there is also a pattern of love that transcends your work. From the earliest Throbbing Gristle days which were perhaps more directly confrontational and maybe even personally violent, but never has your work openly advocated violence. In fact it goes against violence, so there is an interesting contradiction that your work elicits violent reactions from certain people…

G.P.O: …those who maintain the status quo…

ONLY: …but denies any form of appeal to conventional violence.

G.P.O: Well with Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions we sort of went from theater of the absurd street theater, into again inevitably looking at the intimate structure of personal taboos and behavior. Why for example is it okay to masturbate in bed at home and not to masturbate in the shopping center? the action is exactly the same but the location is changed. So what is it? Is it context? What makes the parameters? Where are the boundaries and why are they there? And who creates the boundaries of what’s acceptable and not in any culture? And of course you can go from one country where is acceptable to have five wives and then to another country where it’s not allowed, and so culture changes in accordance to geography, and therefore it is malleable because the rules can contradict each other depending on where you are. So culture is contrived by human beings, but what is it contrived to do…to control them. In particular to police the aspects of personal experience we find liberating, that’s why sexuality is policed by culture. Because it has so much power. And while it is also linked to love it is a very powerful force. So when we were doing COUM we went from generalized attacks on the absurdity of society’s contrived ethics into a very, very intimate exploration of that interface between the individual’s sexual and imaginative life and how that causes friction and anger sometimes. And to look at the role of male-female as well. While that was all happening we discovered that from having been rejected by the art establishment, we were beginning to be courted and embraced and we felt uncomfortable with that. So we started to move away from that world and look again at what was happening in the outside. we wanted to not be elitist and to just talk to a few people in galleries. We wanted to see if we could change society. If we could actually apply the things we’d learned about behavior and make something else happen. So we experimented with Rock music because that seemed to be one of the most easily accepted vehicles for ideas amongst younger people.

ONLY: Music certainly has the opportunity for the shared experience.

G.P.O: But with both COUM and Throbbing Gristle there were times in our explorations of ideas where people were shocked by the content, but in fact we weren’t trying to shock people we were trying to find out why they were shocked.

ONLY: Interesting. It wasn’t simply a case of “here is the line and we are going to push it just to push it”.

G.P.O: No it was about asking “why is the line here and who created it.” And with TG, we were in our mid twenties and we have to confess there was a lot of anger and frustration in me, as a vocalist and performer at the hypocrisy and the bigotry of the society that we found ourselves in. And also anger that this incredibly unique moment in human history, the 60s, had been battered to pieces by propaganda. It was the only time in human history where millions and millions of young people chose to explore peace, love and consciousness instead of just accepting what went before and accepting violence as an answer to things that were surprising and confusing. It was this amazing experiment, whether people realize it today or not. And yes there was a lot of anger in me and the anger and violence that we felt was directed inwards, because we felt as the artist that we were somehow failing the human species if carried on behaving in these negative self-destructive ways. Why can’t we get them to wake up and realize that war is insanity. And it’s still true. We can’t understand how there could have been a second war…ever. surely after one war thousands of years ago people would look at the dead bodies and wounds and grief and go: “we’ll never do that again.” And yet we keep on and on with these self-destructive, species threatening behaviors. So what is that? Is that what people mean when in organised religion when they talk about the fatal flaw? The original sin? Is that what they mean that in the recording, the software of our behavior there’s something that keeps on and on keeps leading us to self destruction? and if there is…where is hidden? What is it and can we get rid of it? That’s really been the center of all of my work.

ONLY: Your work has always reflected a transformative aspect, even here where you mentioned that you have begun to replace “I” with “we”, and I read this somewhere, in an effort to better represent the multiple aspects with any one person. To use “I” refers to a singularity of personality when in fact most people have many facets to their identity better embodied by the use of “we”.

G.P.O: Absolutely. Yes.

ONLY: You have also consistently taken the use of language and of cultural signifiers and played with them and reorganised them, as you might see in the influence of the “cut-up”, and all of this helps to create a somewhat cohesive narrative for you and your work.

G.P.O: Well thank you. When I first met William Burroughs, way, way back in 1972…it’s kind of funny, but he said to me: “Genesis, this is your task. How do you short-circuit control?” And somehow that instruction has stuck with me really deeply. and when Lady Jay met me, we both, for different reasons had focused on this same issue. “Where is that special flaw in us, where is control and are they the same thing.” And we came to the conclusion that the answer is in the DNA. that the DNA is a software program and in that program, originally, when we were man apes, we needed to have an element of our genetic structure where the male of the species was protective of the female which were the breeders. and in order for the species to survive the males had to be violent to get food, to protect themselves. so anything that was not understood, that was different was attacked. So that genetic program of violent reaction originally helped us survive, it was if you will, a friendly gene at that point.

ONLY: What I find interesting is with that is that the one thing that greatest things that separates us from other creature on an evolutionary scale is our brain. It has allowed us to create complicated social structures, great works of art. It has allowed us to create and appreciate all of these things…

G.P.O: Well we are very clever chimpanzees if you like, and we became toolmakers because of the brain, but what’s happened in a simplified form is that over the next few thousand years from that original situation, we have created and taken control of our environment. So now we have this 21st century environment that is miraculous. We have people floating around in space labs, we can talk to people across the world on these little boxes, we have the internet, computers and it’s mind boggling. But we have not bothered to apply the same amount of effort, finance and thought to our behavior. We now have the same behavioral patters that we had in prehistoric time but in this amazingly futuristic environment. Of course that’s a recipe for disaster. You wouldn’t put a bunch of clever chimpanzees in a room with a bunch of red buttons that set of an atomic war. But basically that’s what we’ve done. we’ve ignored the need to maintain and evolve consciousness on a par with technology. We assumed it took care of itself. Or even worse we’ve assumed that the human body as it is right now is the final version of our evolved self. That it’s somehow sacred. It’s not. It’s a work in progress just like everything else. the brain is still evolving, and getting larger. And now that people are semi-cyborgs with new technologies like ipods and cell phones their brains are going to change again. But we’re not taking it into account and we’re not looking at it as an absolutely necessary are of research in order to maintain our survival. And that’s where pandrogeny comes in. We believe that DNA is the program and the program is out of date. So we need to look at how we can adjust that program in order to evolve, in order to realize our innate potential and to ultimately explore both inner and outer space. But we will never be able to escape this planet and escape disaster if we ignore behavior.

ONLY: Your relationship with Lady Jaye and the living art project that you both embarked on with the creation of the pandrogyne as the realization of the third entity, has at this stage taken on a directly physical manifestation. Would you imagine the next phase of this be a collective conscious recognition and an attempt to transcend the body?

G.P.O: Oh absolutely. That is definitely the next step. It’s worth going back to how the idea of pandrogeny evolved when Lady Jaye and myself began working together. When we met it was a meeting of equal minds, as she was already a quite stunning intellect and it was actual Lady Jaye, who on the first day we met, started dressing me in some of her clothes. That was an intuitive and traditionally female intuition. that the minute she saw me she was beginning to manifest what became this pandrogeny project. And we were so in love, and still are, but you know when you love someone so much you say things like “I wish I could just eat you up” as if to just totally adsorb the other person? Well we felt like that and when you have a mutual orgasm you reach this supreme otherworldly state of bliss. So at the beginning it was an expression of our love for each other and we began to look the same. Very superficially. Doing our hair the same, wearing the same clothes, we got tattoos. I got beauty spots on my cheek to match hers, then she had her nose done to match mine. As that happened we were thinking about why we were drawn so compulsively to become a hermaphroditic middle ground of each other. What was this that was making us feel this way. And we went back to the idea of the “cut ups” and the idea of the third mind where the collaboration reveals something beyond which either participant is the actual author. These “cut ups” were the creations of what Brion Gysin and William Burroughs called the third mind. And we thought that maybe we could take that even further and apply that to identity and to gender stereotypes. Then perhaps we can adjust behavior by neutralizing difference. So we began to take plastic surgery more seriously as a way to get us as close as possible to realizing a third person. By removing differences. To draw a third way that got rid of binary systems and made the discussion become much more conceptual and less rooted in difference.

ONLY: In an interview Lady Jaye discussed how this wasn’t a project directly linked to sexuality and that the idea of, say you having your genitals removed to become more feminine was not the point because that would deny you the possibility of pleasure. Instead that it would be more to the point if you both could have both sets of genitals.

G.P.O: Yes we even spoke to surgeons to see if it was somehow possible to create both genital for each of us. And so far that’s not feasible. But we’d like people to not get bogged down in the male female aspect. Yes we wanted to become hermaphrodites because that would work for human beings culturally as a statement of neutrality, saying lets forget about either or and male, female because that simply encourages polarity. If we remove the binary symptoms and become hermaphrodites and chemical symbols then we can discuss evolution in a much more positive and useful way. This is why pandrogeny digs so deeply into some of the most embedded issues in western society, because it is saying that we need to completely re-imagine ourselves as a species and we need to make decisions socially, politically and economically as a species that is fighting to survive. And once it can maintain a reasonable expectation of survival it must then think of evolution as its primary program. That should be what we all devote ourselves to in one form or another…the mutual and positive and potential rewarding evolution of the whole species.

ONLY: If I were to think of one particular trait that was both a blessing and a curse in the human species I would suggest that our curious nature is something that of we could refine, might help us. It’s what has given us this idea of exploring new frontiers that might be of benefit to us as a species.

G.P.O: Of course that comes back to what you were saying at the beginning about the artist, for us, for Lady Jaye and myself. We absolutely believe that to be an artist, to be a creator is a calling, just like it would be for a priest or a doctor. Lady Jaye was also a nurse. It’s incredibly important to look at things in that way. For us it’s a sacred calling and it’s an act of devotion to the species to become an artist.

ONLY: Is it this idea to give yourself over to something…

G.P.O:…without knowing the frustrations ahead.

ONLY: Yes.

G.P.O: And that’s where what you said about “love being a thread in the work” is so true. There are many tyime when we wish we didn’t care as much as we do, and that we could turn away and say “so what it’s their own problem.” But we just can’t. We are duty bound and honor bound to do everything we can to keep a dialogue of survival and evolution and change alive. In a way pandrogeny seems to be the project that ties together all the threads that have been part of my life before and we see it and its various implications is more than enough to deal with however long we still have left in physical form. The ultimate objective of pandrogeny for myself and Lady Jaye as individuals was always that post physical death we could still be together and still be absorbed into each other and become one new form of self-aware consciousness but that was made of the two of us.

ONLY: If the thread of everything here is that the programming construct is DNA, it seems then that the hope would be at some point to be able to extract or combine genetic material from different sources. For example you and Lady Jaye have shared physical qualities to an extent, but let’s say for example that you loved her sense of humor, or her laugh, it would be of interest then to seek out that genetic material related to the programming for those kinds of things.

G.P.O: That would be fine.

ONLY: I guess the big fear and the big question then is how as a public and as a species do we maintain control over, or even access to that kind of powerful, scientific technology when so much of this technology already lays exclusively in the hands of an elite group.

G.P.O: One of things that tends to happen is that with technology the research costs are so high that the people who are subsidizing it, i.e. the big corporations, that luckily for us, they tend to share the spoils of their research in order to recoup their costs. It’s not altruism; it’s a strange form of greed. Like personal computers and Polaroid cameras and cell phones and all the other things that have come back to us as spillage from the program and so on. The people who invest are so self centered that they let it filter down. Having said that, of course there is going to be fear of totalitarianism but listen, we are entering a state of totalitarian capitalism right now…

ONLY: …whether we like it or not.

G.P.O: Exactly, and so from our perspective it is better to challenge that in any way we can and try to utilize to subvert one obviously disastrous future into at least the option of a future that might be more positive. And perhaps that shift will bit by bit create more shifts until as a species we wake up and think “my goodness, we don’t need to listen to these people.” I man there is probably only five thousand of them, why should we let them control three billion? And then we turn our back on them, at which point their power is gone. So we have to have faith in ourselves and in our intentions. And if we have pure intentions then we will not add to the disaster, if we do nothing we will add to the disaster.

ONLY: Well, hope is a powerful force.

G.P.O: Definitely. The human species is so frustrating to observe because on one level it is so self-destructive and self-obsessed and greedy and violent that keeps on repeating the most ludicrous, nasty and shocking mistakes, especially socially and politically, but we are also the most wonderful creatures, full as you said, of curiosity and pragmatic invention and inspirational imagination…and that’s what you have to hold on to. And we need to nurture those qualities. If we all do that then we would be shocked at what we could achieve.

ONLY: Let’s hope that we get to live, in some form or another to see that day. But speaking of achievement, and this is a bit of a departure, but you have just released a new album.

G.P.O: Oh yes.

ONLY: I thought it was really interesting in the way that it sort of spans a lot of your previous work, but offers new and fresh interpretations of the genres and sensibilities you have touched on throughout the years.

G.P.O: Well we have always done that, taken things and reworked them at certain points.

ONLY: The title of the album, “Mr. Alien Brain versus The Skinwalkers”, I have to wonder if it doesn’t somehow relate to everything we have just talked about.

G.P.O: Hopefully.

ONLY: Well immediately it made me think of the alien brain as something foreign or otherworldly and then the skinwalkers simply being bodies covered in flesh that are in essence automatons.

G.P.O: Yes. Of course the alien brain is the title of the first public theater piece that the COUM Transmissions did, so there’s a reference there that says that this record is covering a whole spectrum of work. For me personally, this is our most favorite album we have ever done. It feels as if it were made by someone else.

ONLY: The accompanying DVD is also a definite bonus. You can really see the hypnotic joy in the performances.

G.P.O: There is a lot of commmaradery in the band. But it’s worth mentioning that all the main tracks were recorded live. There were no overdubs. We were invited to do a program for National Public Radio and they asked us if we would be interested in doing a live broadcast of some songs in honor of Lady Jaye, and we hadn’t played at all since she dropped her body. We had a one hour rehearsal the night before we went. And we recorded live, very much like Abbey Road, in a great big live room, straight to tape so to speak. So we basically improvised most of the arrangements and some of the lyrics spontaneously.

ONLY: That’s quite amazing because to listen it feels so intuitive and together.

G.P.O: It’s quite mind-boggling. We think Lady Jaye was there helping.

All credits: Only

Article: Current 93 in Wire Magazine - #163 | Robert Wyatt. Plus Sun Ra Special | September 1997

2009-09-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Wire

Current 93

Issue #163 (September '97) | Interviews
By: David Keenan | About: Current 93

The apocalyptic post-Industrial folk of Current 93 emerges from David Tibet's vision of an adult world bereft of happiness. In its place he has set up an underground Eden for like-minded artists, musicians and writers

I'm in Walthamstow, East London with Current 93's David Tibet. We're talking 'puppet theology'. "I was obsessed with Noddy," Tibet states matter of factly. "I took a load of acid on the top of the house where Rose McDowell [of Strawberry Switchblade] was living and I had a vision of Noddy crucified in the sky and it really impressed me... as you would expect," he adds, laughing. "The next day I just went mad for buying Noddy. Before I'd seen him crucified I wasn't any more interested in him than any other kid who's read Noddy as a child. I was taking such a huge amount of speed at the time that I had a massive amount of energy so I just started hoovering around and would come back with bin-liners full of anything with Noddy on. Rugs, mugs, jugs, didn't matter, bought it all, to the extent that I started wandering around London wearing a red Noddy hat with a bell on the end. Which was possibly not a good move to make in terms of fashion... I was very keen on Noddy."
This was not what I expected. I'd arrived in Walthamstow this evening with a half-scrawled image in my head of Tibet as some austere and black-draped prophet of apocalypse, an image I'd built up through rabid consumption of Current 93's large back catalogue of "nursery rhymes and eschatological imagery". To discover that the creator of the terror-howl depths of such seminal documents as 1984's Nature Unveiled and Dogs Blood Rising is in fact as funny, amiable and charismatic as his long-term musical sparring partner and closest friend Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound) shouldn't really come as a surprise.
Like Stapleton, Tibet is wary of publicity, worries about being misquoted or misunderstood, or about coming across as "too didactic". He's also fed up with London and contemplating disappearance. When I meet him he's just returned from a three week trip to the States - where Current 93 enjoy a huge and fanatical following - which he undertook to call on Tiny Tim's widow. One of the 20th century's last true troubadours, Tiny Tim was a walking encyclopaedia of popular song, from vaudeville through Broadway to Tin Pan Alley. Having released three Tiny Tim albums on his Durtro label, Tibet remains obsessed with the singer. In fact he seems constantly drawn towards misfits, outsiders and artists who pursue a unique and uncompromising vision, often at the cost of recognition and fame. As such he's quick to evangelise about Tiny. "I miss Tiny so much," he mourns. "One of the most moving and profound people I've ever met. I loved him so much and I was devastated when he died. I was the last person to speak to him on the phone. He said to me, 'You must weather the storm, Tibet.' To me he was the greatest genius of popular song ever. It's tragic that people still perceive him as some kind of one-hit comedy turn."
We're sitting in Tibet's study, on the first floor of an old foliage-draped semi, surrounded by his favourite paintings: Louis Wain's joyous cat sketches take up the whole of one wall, while Charles Sims's beautifully eerie ghost-lit pieces hang by the window, next to a pair of Tiny Tim's shoes. Books on Christian theology, ghost stories by Vincent O'Sullivan, Studies Of Death by SE Stenbock - the homosexual drug addict, alcoholic late 19th century poet/writer of eerily hallucinogenic works whose posthumous work Tibet publishes through his Durtro book imprint - battle for shelf space amid religious icons, Steven Stapleton artwork and CD overflow. Two huge, flickering candles illuminate the room as we discuss Swastikas For Noddy, the landmark 1986 Current 93 album that saw Tibet shed the last lingering associations with his Inudstrial past and marked his headlong plunge into "apocalyptic folk and menstrual minstrels". In other words, he forsook the back-masked, looped noisescrapes of his early work for more directly communicative acoustic music.
"For me," Tibet continues, "Noddy was the total epitome of innocent childhood. What would be the most unsuitable thing you could give Noddy for a present? I felt probably swastikas. It then became Swastikas For Gnoddy on some releases because I started thinking that Noddy was - er, I was taking a lot of speed at the time - that Noddy was in fact a Gnostic icon. This was round about the same time I became interested in Punch and Judy and was seriously thinking that it might be worth... I mean, I probably wasn't well at the time mentally, but I thought it might be good to start worshipping Punch and Judy. I don't know why. Having decided that Noddy is a Gnostic deity, then it's really a small step to thinking that I might as well worship Punch and Judy. Having been obsessed by Christ for so long, and since Noddy had appeard in the sky crucified, and since Christ was God, therefore Noddy was also God, so he was a Goddy. My mind started going into other ramifications - whole puppet theology."
David Tibet was born in a converted stable ("Couldn't have been any other way," he suggests playfully) in the north of Malaysia in 1960, a place called Batu Gajah (meaning 'Stone Elephant') near Ipoh. "I was in Malaysia for about 14 years," he recalls. "I loved it. My childhood in Malaysia was practically perfect and I really miss it a lot. I dream about it a lot, it echoes in my soul always. It reverberates, and as you get older and you lie in bed and you think, the rain sounds like it's the monsoon coming. I was always interested in religion so I used to spend a lot of time in the temples, Buddhist temples, Taoist temples, Hindu temples, I remember all of it."
His parents finally moved back to the UK in 1973 just in time for Tibet to develop a glam rock habit. "I bought Raw Power by Iggy And The Stooges when it came out," he explains. "When I was in Malaysia I liked T Rex and Alice Cooper and then I got to like David Bowie because, like them, he wore make-up, and then I bought [Lou Reed's] Transformer. The New York Dolls were wearing a lot of make-up so I bought them. I used to quite like The Sweet as well, "Blockbuster" and "Hellraiser". Chicory Tip were hopeless, though."
He continues: "When I went to university in 1978 to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne I liked The Sex Pistols, bought "Anarchy In The UK", and a few years before that I'd started liking Amon Düül 2, mainly because of "Archangel's Thunderbird"."
Tibet gradually gravitated towards the then nascent Industrial scene - specifically groups like Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and Nurse With Wound. Such groups transformed their sense of alienation into powerful interrogations of systems of control, be they aesthetic, cultural or political. Their questioning led them down some decidedly bizarre roads, and one of the most useful side products of Industrial culture is the vast archives of esoterica and arcane knowledge its participants amassed over the years. For the young Tibet a large part of their appeal was their decidedly anti-rock 'n' roll stance. Non-musicians were beginning to create some of the most extreme (sonic and visual) examples of outsider invention, releasing it themselves in limited edition runs complete with handmade covers. These groups had taken the DIY and democratic art ideals of punk rock and married them to an avant garde sensibility. Not unnaturally, given its self-inflicted brief to expose the inner processes of the entertainment industry, Industrial imagery could be excessively bleak or ugly.
Coming to London ostensibly sto study Tibetan - "I was always going on about Tibet, so people started calling me it," Tibet recalls - he became a regular at Throbbing Gristle gigs. He gradually got to know Genesis P Orridge, who asked him to join his new group Psychic TV once Throbbing Gristle decided to "terminate their mission". He played on the Themes I album that came free with Pychic TV's debut Force The Hand Of Chance, the former being a ritualistic workout on massed Tibetan thighbone trumpets. Increasingly active, Tibet also played with the percussion-heavy, proto ethnic-Ambient trance outfit 23 Skidoo. But it didn't take long for things to turn sour in Psychic TV's Temple Ov Psychic Youth. "I did a tiny bit of recording on their second album, Dreams Less Sweet," explains Tibet, "but I didn't get on with P Orridge any longer so I left the group to concentrate on my own music. We'd already done the first Current record when I was still in PTV with John Balance [founder of Coil] and Fritz Haaman from Skidoo, the "LAShTAL" 12"."
Released on the LAYLAH label in 1983, "LAShTAL" is a prototype of the desolate, haunted soundtracks, the "waking dreams", that would define early Current 93: ritual percussion thundering beneath walls of dark, muttering voices and distant foghorns. One fortuitous meeting, however, would change everything.
"At the Equinox event I met Steve Stapleton," Tibet recalls, referring to the 1983 festival of Industrial culture held at the London Musicians' Collective. "I was introduced by Jordi Valls who had a group called Vagina Dentata Organ. When I met Stapleton we just clicked immediately. I think he's the greatest musical genius of this century and when I first met him I suddenly thought this will be my closest friend ever, I don't know why. I asked if he'd work on my first album and we started meeting quite regularly, and he also asked me down to the IPS studio in Shepherds Bush; he had ever Friday block-booked, all year. He asked me to come and start recording with him there, which of course I did, and then he asked me if I'd join Nurse With Wound. The first thing I did was Ostranenie 1913 which was a re-working of a side of Merzbild Schwet and a side of To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl. Steven and I got on so well and we did a concert as Dogs Blood Order, doing "Maldoror Is Dead"."
Although by this time Current 93 were already up and running, John Balance's reluctance to leave Psychic TV made it difficult for the group to perform as such. Instead, Tibet performed twice under the name Dogs Blood Order. "Then a friend of mine was working at the Roundhouse studio and got free time there," Tibet continues. "He was an engineer, and he said, 'Do you want to come in and do an album?' We went in and did the A-side of Nature Unveiled as Current. Steve came down along with John Fothergill, who was then in Nurse as well."
Nature Unveiled was a landmark release for the British underground, a free-floating assemblage of distant chorales, alien chant and sonic depth charges ascending into a buzzball of static and noise. Inspired by the uncompromising vision of the likes of Stapleton, Tibet created a unique document of all his then current obsessions. His refusal to reference anything else happening at the time helped define Current 93's future working process. With the help of a floating group of contributors, Tibet set out to creat his own hermetic soundworld, which, both musically and in its business practice, operated completely independently of the music industry. In time, he and like-minded individuals like Nurse With Wound and Coil established a worldwide network of fans, who would often be inspired to establish their own musical cells, thereby strengthening and furthering the network's reach.
As Tibet sees it, "Current's music is really really simple. I'll begin with possibly just one sound that I like. For Nature's Unveiled's "Maldoror Is Dead" it was a loop of Aleister Crowley saying "Om, Om". I had lyrics and I had, most importantly of all, an idea of the atmosphere I wanted. I described it to Steve as being like a hypnotic dream that sped up as we came to the end of it because at that time I was just so obsessed with the apocalypse, I felt things were just telescoping really quickly, it was all just spiralling quickly, quickly, which is what "Maldoror" does. I told Steve this and I played him the loop, told him the lyrics, and I said it has to have the stately slow motion of a dream when it's starting. It's often very slow, people's gestures are like shadow puppets - full of meaning, it seems, but they're not actually doing very much. It's like a shadow thrown by a candle onto the wall, it's distorted, everything is emphasised, exaggerated. By the end it becomes frantic like somebody shuffling or dealing cards. I would say all these sorts of things to Steve and he would do it, he would understand exactly what I wanted."
Stapleton became Current's vital other half and over the course of the records like the strange graveyard dream of 1985's In Menstrual Night, they took their accidentally evolved work process to the extreme. Then they hit a creative dead end.
"I did an album, Dawn, which I was really ashamed of doing in the sense that it was just so easy to do," Tibet confesses. "It was in the style of Nature Unveiled, a long 20 minute piece made up of loops, various sounds coming in, and some sort of structure. I did it so quickly, I just felt I'd become lazy, it wasn't moving me any more, it was simply-made mechanical weirdness. I felt I was moving away from the most important thing, which was the centrality of emotion, of trying to get across what I was feeling. It had become too formularised, I needed to return to what moved me, which was nursery rhymes and folk music. Not folk rock, just really simple unadorned melodies, maybe no choruses, just direct, a minute or two long. So Swastikas For Noddy marked my decision to rethink the way that I expressed the emotions that I felt about the things that were moving me."
Tibet's discover of Shirley Collins's legendary folk recordings for Topic and Harvest, The Power Of The True Love Knot, Love Death And The Lady and, in particular, Anthems In Eden, was a major factor in his conversion. "Savage Pencil, Edwin Pouncey, once said to me, 'You should really listen to Shirley Collins'. I didn't know who she was but when I heard her I became completely obsessed, and I realised that she was able to express so much with the minimum of arrangements, not even using her own words, using words that had been sung by 100,000 people. Her direct involvement in the incredibly moving melancholy she was creating made me realise that it was possible to get that effect across without using loops."
Current 93's engineer David Kenny was also the in-house engineer for Topic Records, and was able to supply Tibet with a contact number for Collins. "I called her up and told her I worshipped her, and I'd like to put out an anthology of her recordings, and perhaps do an interview. She had no idea how influential she was." They got on so well that Tibet invited her to record with Current 93. but since she'd retired from singing she had no confidence in her voice. However, Tibet's persistence eroded her resistance and she duly recorded a talking part on the transitional Thunder Perfect Mind album, and went on to sing on The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home.
Although superficially a world away from the themes and approaches of Current's previous material, Tibet sees an obvious link between his early music and the subsequent Collins-influenced recordings - specifically his interest in eschatological imagery. "For me, folk music was all about endings and the effect that endings have on our lives. It would be easy to overstate the point and say yes, folk music is the 'working man's apocalypse', or whatever. It's not the case at all, of course, but there was that incredible sense of beautiful melancholy. So moving and so pure, so honest and so human. That's what I really wanted to express with Current, the importance of our humanity. If we don't have our humanity then we've got nothing, it's all that we have and yet, in that, terrible things happen. And folk expresses that and also a way of coming to terms with that, and seeing beyond it, going on: life continues."
1988's Earth Covers Earth took Tibet's new found passion further. The package was completed with a beautiful cover photograph of the entire Current 93 'family' (which at that point included Rose McDowell, and Tony Wakeford, then of Sol Invictus). However it wasn't until Thunder Perfect Mind (1991) that Tibet felt his music was finally getting across what he wanted to say.
"With Thunder Perfect Mind I started writing about friends of mine, about how I felt about things, and then with Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre it became a specifically autobiographical record. I think Current became a lot purer for me. it's also because I met Michael Cashmore [who also plays in his own group, Nature And Organisation] who was able, unfailingly, to enunciate musically on the guitar exactly what I wanted to say. So between Steve and him they were both able in their respective areas of expertise to come up with that I was wanting to get across. It all worked seamlessly. Since then I feel the music's become better and better and also, equally important for me, more and more simple. Something I always liked was simplicity and space, and I think Current's work has become more and more aligned to what I wanted it to be at the beginning. When I was younger the music that moved me so much was people like The Ronettes or Peggy March, early liturgical music and so on. I always felt that I wanted to make music that would move others as much as the music that I loved moved me."
That music really began to emerge with last year's genre-defying Inmost Light trilogy, Where The Long Shadows Fall, The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home and, in particular, All The Pretty Little Horses. With contributions from Shirley Collins and Nick Cave, who had been introduced to Tibet by a mutual friend, Geoffrey Cox-Doree, the latter album represents a devastatingly moving and sometimes upsetting synthesis of Tibet's obsessions. Built round the traditional children's song of the same title, the tiny bells and spectral guitars on Pretty Little Horses ring out like a testament to childhood lost forever, while Tibet's heartfelt voice speaks from beneath Stapleton's collage of doctored voices, haunted choral loops and random electronics.
"All The Pretty Little Horses is definitely my favourite," sighs Tibet. " think I'm so interested in childhood because when I was a child was the last time I was ever happy. As we get older and we become more and more unhappy, and as we see more and more the terrible state of the world and the terrible things it does to us, and that we also do back to it, that childhood becomes more and more perfect. In itself it isn't so, but the experience of it... the Japanese have this phrase, 'Mono No Aware', and the Tibetans say, 'khor.ba'i.nyes.dmigs', which means 'the Sadness of Things', that this life is not as it should be and we know that's the case and so we desperately try and find a time when the world was as we pictured it as a child, full of marvels, mysteries, full of wonder, full of joy and immanence. I think that one of the most important things about humans and humanity, there, is that we carry within us a belief in redemption, that we can redeem ourselves somehow, and I think, harking back to the innocence of childhood, there's one way that we start to do that. For myself, when I think back to a girlfriend that I used to go out with, in 1980 or whatever, now I think about her with incredible longing and love and think how perfect it was. But of course the reality wasn't like that at all, which is why we split up. So we paint the past in a way that appeals to our sense of recovering the paradise that we've lost."
We talk of future plans, of the new Current 93 collaboration with the macabre American novelist Thomas Ligotti, whom Tibet considers to be "the greatest living writer". After stumbling across Ligotti's first short story collection, Tibet became an obsessive fan of the writer's "terrible vision" which combines gruesome HP Lovecraft-like imagery with a Kafkaesque sense of the bizarre. A working relationship grew out of the correspondence they established, resulting in the In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land project. This release consists of a beautiful cloth-bound book by Ligotti (published by Durtro) and a Current 93 disc that somewhat ironically, given its line-up of Tibet, Stapleton, Christoph Heemann and Shirley Collins, marks a slight return to the earlier space-throb pieces. All tone pulse and treated electronics, Stapleton and Heemann here provide minimal Krautrock-inspired backdrops for Tibet's and Collins's occasional interjections of text. "I think the Ligotti CD is absolutely wonderful," states Tibet unashamedly. "The next album we've started on already. It's very simple, very spacious, more of a follow on from All The Pretty Little Horses. Hopefully it'll be out in February/March." Also forthcoming early next year is a book of Tibet's lyrics, and a record with Steven Stapleton and Shirley Collins is promised.
It's getting late and Tibet sees me to the door. Outside silence reigns in the moonlit street. "What permeates life completely, I believe, is The Inmost Light," Tibet concludes. "The secret glory, this is whatever you want to call it, the presence of Christ in everything. It is there and if we don't find it before we die then we're doomed. We must find it, we must, it's the only thing we're made for, to try and get even just a glimpse of the glory that lies behind everything that's hidden from us. The world seems to be disappointing and full of suffering, because we just can't see what's shining behind it all. And it's the only thing which is important. Although there is that incredible transcendence at the same time - although that is a reason for great joy and a feeling that there is something, there is more that just this - at the same time if we miss the chance to get it, that's it: we don't get second chances."

All credits: Wire Magazine

Article: John Cage in Wire Magazine - #56 | Composers | October 1988

2009-09-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

The Wire

John Cage

Issue #56 (October '88) | Interviews
By: Brian Morton | About: John Cage

That there are silences at all seems perfectly appropriate, for this is the man who made a corner in silence. It's just that some of these silences tend to be awkward rather than aesthetically pleasing. An interview with John Cage provides ample occasions to gauge the delights of ambience: fly in the double glazing, piano tuner upstairs, hands whispering together like parchment, Christ, why didn't I grab a sandwich? All good solid New Journalistic staples but hardly to the point. There isn't enough in the ambient soundtrack - even of an Almeida Theatre midway through a short run of Cage pieces - on which to get by.

Mr Cage doesn't like talking about his music.

"I never see any point to music journalism; all those reviews, just to say what one person thinks about another person's work; those questions about what it all means, what your intentions are." One of the first ground rules of big-game interviewing is never to draw logic from your holster unless you intend to use it. Even upwind, it seems fair to make the point that Cage wasn't exactly sandbagged into this little encounter. "It's expected of you" counts in my book as a very palpable hit. When he is under some pressure to be "Cage", there's a certain gratification in finding him off guard enough to be honestly curmudgeonly.
The truth is that he looks tired and fractious, put-upon. There's little evidence of the legendary buoyancy and wit - who else would sport deedle-bompers to pick up an honorary doctorate - and the Zen Master flourishes sound a little shop-worn, less telling than they ought to be, like a re-run of Kung Fu.
At 76, Cage has entered what must be the uneasiest phase of his musical career. Unlike Samuel Beckett, who has quietly announced that he will write no more, Cage is as busy as ever. "I'm very involved in my opera, and I have so many commissions in hand that I would never need to sit and think what direction I might take next... even if I did think that a worthwhile question." Sadly, though, as that stockpile of commissions might well indicate, he's also having to face the same commodification of his work that is the awkward lot of the elderstatesmanly in any art.
It's not so easy, though, for Cage to retire. He can't bequeath posterity a pile of enigmatic Fabers. Though his most characteristic message to the world is similar to Beckett's - "tacet", "remain silent" - it's trapped within a piece, the notorious 4'33", that is explicitly scored for "any instrument or combination of instruments", a negative injunction that removes it entirely from Cage's posthumous orbit. His 'impersonality' will not, ironically, survive him. It is, in any case, of a very different sort from Beckett's which is a slow, almost surgical refinement of personality down to its most radically minimal essence - 'imagine'. Cage takes the irrelevance of personality - and the associated questions of authorship, 'expression' - almost as a premise. His most distinctive compositional methods, though even these are misunderstood, are the I Ching and the 'discovery' of chance configurations in what only an artist would consider nature - star maps, the grain of paper, patterns of number. The relation of Beckett to How It Is or Play is very different from that of Cage to the Etudes Australes or even Roaratorio, his most 'literary' work.
While he is diffident about earthly things like copyright - "I'm not very interested in the question of publishing my music. I consider it a kind of non-problem" - he is increasingly made aware by the proliferation of recordings, notably of the magnificent Sonatas And Interludes For Prepared Piano, that his music has become uncomfortably manipulable. There are, though, worse indignities than awkward or unfeeling performances. "I find that more and more people will come up to me with a piece of music paper and expect me to write some notes on it and then inscribe my name for them. They seem to expect me to give my music away." We're on the cusp of a paradox here, since isn't that almost the implication of apiece like 4'33", that it is given away, the twin secrets of conception and performance impossible to withhold? Wouldn't it in any case be simpler just to gaze intently at the empty paper and say, "But, my dear, I can see a piece there already. How can I possibly improve on that?" Cheap. But cheerful.
All the same, it does seem impossibly bad manners to expect benediction of that sort on even close acquaintance, much, we agree, like asking a dentist to check out a dodgy filling in the middle of a dinner party. Cage, who grew up in the doubtless rule-bound care of a mother active enough in the higher echelons of Los Angeles society to cancel out any eccentricities instilled by an inventor father, has a fine feel for fitting manners, but mostly for the irrelevance of unfitting gestures. It's not hard to get the sense that flattery would be ruthlessly rubber-eared.
One - doubtless dog-tired - anecdote makes the point, and shows how lonely Cage's offspring are out in the world. "I remember that once I was invited to a cocktail party in Beverley Hills. When we arrived, there was some music playing in the next room. It was very beautiful and I was intrigued to know what it was, so I called over to the hostess and asked her. She looked very shocked. 'You must be kidding,' she said, 'it's yours, of course'." It could be that we read too much into an anecdote of this sort for who, in the middle of a living made with pen and typewriter has never turned up an old cutting in a box and read it with bland but unimplicated interest for ten minutes before spotting the name at the foot? Out of a career of 40-odd years, and given his celebrated distrust of recorded music, is it really so surprising that a solitary by-blow, met out of context in a world buzzing with claimants, should fail to be acknowledged?
As with interviews, the injunction on recording is not absolute. Cage is currently working with the Mode label on a 'composer-supervised' series of albums. Again, by his own terms, why? "It's very simple and it has nothing to do with money or reputation. It's just that I've reached the age where it's important to document what I do." All the same, you're not that content to look back, as if your music were an unbroken journey from past to present? "There's another Zen story about two monks travelling through the countryside. They came to a deep river where the younger monk sees a woman waiting to cross. Without thinking he picks her up and carries her through the water, despite knowing that he is forbidden any contact with women. On the other side, it preys on his mind, all the more so because the older monk says nothing, which he takes to be a silent condemnation. Eventually, he breaks down and confesses his guilt in breaking the rules by touching a woman. 'What woman?' asks the older monk. 'Oh, that woman - but that was an hour ago'." The more pharisical critics have not found 36 years long enough to forgive or forget 4'33". The more monomaniacal of his supporters have been apt to forget that he wrote anything else.
Given the extraordinary range of his output and the fissiparous nature of some of the pieces, it's clear that no process of documentation - composer-supervised or not - can ever hope to be complete. A work such as Music For Piano (1953-56) exists in a potential for performance by between four and 84 pianos. It takes a Platonist of hardened conviction to state that any one version is definitive. Ironically, though, Cage's so-called 'chance' works, like the Etudes Australes, actually result in a total serialism of which only an absolutely accurate performance can be considered in any way authentic; since every tone commands its own absolute value outside any recoverable hierarchy, faking or modulation - though probably undetectable - are absolutely corrosive of the composer's 'intentions'.
Is it necessary to understand the mechanics of a Cage piece in order to appreciate it? Do we need to know the disposition of screws and bolts in one of his 'prepared' pianos or can we rest content with the recognition that some inscrutably controlled transformation has taken place? What, for instance, would anyone have got out of the previous night's 'performance' of his Lecture On Anarchy had he not explained its mesostic process beforehand? "But I didn't explain it. I merely said that was the process and then went on to read it." One of the sounds that customarily breaks the silence is the faint squeal of a hair splitting; on the other hand, the music itself proceeds by such nice distinctions.
Cage seems to me one of those paradoxical figures - Beckett again, his beloved Joyce - who are forced to use language to bring about its own final suffocation or asphyxiation. It's altogether possible that a later age will take at full face value Cage's half-meant anathema on recorded music; it might, more positively, have abandoned our rather specious distinction between composers and writers. Cage is already one of America's important writers - part of the vast sub-tradition that runs from Gertrude Stein, through Williams, Nin and Creeley, to moderns like Gilbert Sorrentino. If it's possible to think of works like Silence and Notations, hard covers and all, as a kind of music, it should be easy enough to look on Cage's music as a form of writing.
Like all virtuosos of evasion - from Warhol to Mark E Smith and Margaret H Thatcher - he's adept equally with the well-placed silence and the reverse tack. "What is it makes you do this?" That's his question of us, listeners and critics alike, and if in time he learns to find it a double-edged inquiry, it's not one that we can afford to duck with quite his vigour.

All credits: Wire magazine

Article: Cabaret voltaire in Wire Magazine - #215 | Le Tigre | January 2002

2009-09-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Wire

Cabaret Voltaire

Issue #215 (January '02) | Essays
By: Ken Hollings | About: Cabaret Voltaire

Decoding Society

Events move faster as they recede from the present. Time collapses. Moments elide. Midway through 2001, in a scarily accurate reconstruction of Manchester's Hacienda club, created for Michael Winterbottom's film on the life and death of Factory Record s' legendary social space, 24 Hour Party People, Richard H Kirk stands gazing at the stage, where two young actors are busy being Cabaret Voltaire for the cameras. Judging by the sparse crowd of kids watching, the scene reflects a moment from Fac 51's earlier existence (the nightclub was assigned its own number in the Factory catalogue), when it was still less of a building than a barely inhabited floor plan, a design waiting to be executed. Back then, Cabaret Voltaire were completely at home in its hedonistic severity. They were actually the first group ever to perform live there, playing the club's opening night on 21 May 1982. Associations and connections have shifted in this historical recreation of the Hac's early days, however. The song that the movie version of Cabaret Voltaire are shown performing is "Sex Money Freaks", a track taken from their 1987 album Code. By the time of its release, the nature of electronic dance music and the people responding to it, especially in the Hacienda, had altered radically. Cabaret Voltaire suddenly found themselves strangers in a strange land they had originally helped uncover, and their reputation suffered accordingly. The innovative and genuinely subversive dance beats Cabaret Voltaire laid down during those missing years between 1982 and 87 have been dropped out of the picture.
Now, with the appearance of Conform To Deform, a four CD box set containing rare and unreleased material predominantly culled from this period, plus The Original Sound Of Sheffield 83-87, a compilation of original Cabs 12" mixes available for the first time, that critical deficit can finally be addressed. A whole squad of studio innovators, including Derrick May, Orbital's Paul and Phil Hartnoll, Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, and Warp Records founder Steve Beckett, have already come forward to acknowledge Cabaret Voltaire as an influence. "I think we conceptualise after the record has come out," Stephen Mallinder observed to journalist Paul Morley back in November 1980, when the group was still a trio comprising himself, Chris Watson and Richard Kirk, and the Hacienda had yet to be built. "A lot of the things that we've done make a lot more sense after we've done them." Film sets, however authentic, are just the stiff ghosts left by lived experience. As the camera travels across the Hac's fabled dancefloor to where the real Richard H Kirk stands among The Cabs' recreated audience, this is perhaps a good moment to remember that history is only ever rewritten. Nothing is as you left it.
Time was when Cabaret Voltaire's very name stood for the artless chaos that conceals art. As an independent group operating through Rough Trade from 1978-82, 'The Cabs', as they came to be known, conformed pretty well to the stolid pluralities that punk had coalesced into. The NME could even praise them as "an original punk band made good", but the sense of relief that accompanied such an assertion could come a little too close to the surface on occasion. It seemed impossible to write a profile of Kirk, Mallinder and Watson without mentioning how approachable they were, so completely unlike their image as aloof grey manufacturers of musical elitism. If the group came across as friendly and unassuming, their music during this period did not: a bleak expression of overload, distortion and decay, such releases as Voice Of America (1980), the three-part "Sluggin' Fer Jesus" (released on Crepescule 12"s between 1981-83) and Red Mecca (1981) gave noisy celebration to the corruption of meaning: the sound of signals feeding back on themselves.
Cabaret Voltaire had successfully exploited the faultlines opening up in musical form due to the increasing availability of cheap electronic keyboards, rhythm machines and processors, but it was difficult to grasp what that achievement entailed. The subject kept slipping away, partially because the equipment The Cabs were using could not answer for itself. The raw exposed aesthetic of punk, its wilful drive towards demystification, could never fully accommodate the boxes, leads and connections behind modern electronic music. Besides, as Kirk and Mallinder had both come to realise by the time Chris Watson decided to quit the group in 1982, cutting edge sound technology meant dancefloor technology. "The technological breakthroughs and the most radical music," Richard Kirk recalls, "were both coming out of the dance scene." Fancy gizmos like the sequencer, the harmoniser, the Claptrap and the digital delay were all about making funky things to play with, offering the perfect expression of how art and dance were perceived as being mutually exclusive opposites. "Fuck art, let's dance", the T-shirts on sale in Soho's Old Compton Street used to read, but first, they implied, let's make a deal.
When Cabaret Voltaire's The Crackdown came out on Virgin in 1983, it was clear that things had moved on. Kirk had already observed that, with Watson's departure for a full time job as a TV sound recordist, Cabaret Voltaire was "less a group and more like a business partnership" - and they now had the corporate logo to prove it. Designed by 1980s typographic visionary Neville Brody, Cabaret Voltaire's elegant 'CV' chevron meant business. Simple, direct and easily identifiable, it was a sure sign that something had changed. Encouraged by stylish entrepreneurial berserker Stevo, whose company Some Bizzare had mastered the art of the early 1980s music deal, Kirk and Mallinder had refined their strengths, redefined their roles and started to strip back their sound. It was Stevo who offered to broker a contract with Virgin Records that would allow the Cabs access to 24 track recording facilities in London, the services of a good producer and possible crossover into the rapidly growing dance market. He would also come up with the funding CV required to set up their independent video label, Doublevision. All he asked in return was that the vocals, formerly strained and filtered into harsh declamations when run through the desk back at Western Works, The Cabs' home studio in Sheffield, become a little more prominent and a little less processed.
Through such simplicity, however, comes a new diversity. Just as Andy Warhol constantly juggled the geometric relationship of the hammer and sickle in his 1976 series of paintings inspired by the Soviet Union's original brand identity, so Brody reworked the CV insignia into different configurations on The Crackdown's sleeve design. Beneath the bland, impassive authority of the corporate logo, Cabaret Voltaire's spirit of creative disarray was still at work. It was there in the hand-retouched photographic image painter Phil Barnes had supplied for the album's cover. Showing Kirk and Mallinder jointly operating a video camera system, its lines and colour fields have been rendered in a high contrast style, strongly reminiscent of the solarized pictures often used in the late 60s and early 70s to sell all-purpose strangeness to the mainstream. Solarizing a photograph rendered its reality harshly altered, recognisable yet unknowable, preparing the public for everything from The Beatles' psychedelic period to the Switched On Rock collection and Martin Denny's Exotic Moog. It helped reverse perceptions, unseat opinions.
Starting with the skeletal funk of its opening cut "24-24", The Crackdown presents the 1980s as the screwed down oppressive nightmare it actually was, rather than the glossy playground of surplus values fondly remembered by today's media. This is, after all, the decade that brought you AIDS, crack cocaine and the free market economy, although not necessarily in that order. It was also the era in which, as writer Mick Farren later commented, "drugs brought money back and Reagan was elected president and shit went on. In fact, that's the sad part: hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I'm saying? Punk couldn't actually take a good challenge."
Perhaps it couldn't deal with the challenge head-on, but it knew how to take that sense of stiff opposition to a different arena. Assisted by drummer Alan Fisch and Soft Cell's Dave Ball, with producer Flood at the desk, The Crackdown's streamlined rhythmic assault lent itself to an emergent culture in which the 12", the mixing desk and the dancefloor had become new platforms of expression. In this respect, Cabaret Voltaire were one of the few groups who understood that going into a club and starting to dance could both be political acts. With its use of edited tapes featuring the voices of black American convicts describing prison experience, its fractured sequencers, harsh electronic handclaps and Mal's seething vocal delivery, "24-24" is a dark reflection of the enclosed technological environment fostered by the Western political economy, where the money markets, data flows and media entertainment were beginning to feed into each other. This was the lightless electronic cage in which humanity, increasingly becoming convinced that it had ceased to exist ideologically, would be forced to occupy (today, we barely even notice the bars).
Free to concentrate upon his vocals in what had evolved into a more formally structured working relationship, Mallinder delivered texts that haunted, nagged and probed at the listener. His urgent whispering became an ambiguous carrier signal, offering a point of contact with an actual flesh and blood performer while simultaneously hinting that all was not well on the streets of Technopolis. "It's just a trick to hold you down", Mal states repeatedly on "Talking Time", while a vocoder chorus swirls around the back of the mix and a synthetic voice remorselessly counts off the track's five minute duration. Through the interplay of those three voices, bringing the artificial, the processed and the real into tense proximity with each other, "Talking Time" was a pioneering slice of electronica, suggesting ways in which studio technology could communicate directly with the dancefloor in a voice that was both alien and familiar. When New York rap act Whodini released "Five Minutes Of Funk" in 1984, blending oppressive electro beats and an arid computer-generated countdown with a searching freestyle lyrical flow, it was clear that someone had been listening.
Chris Watson's departure from the group, together with Stevo's intervention in their business affairs, may have acted as catalysts for CV's redefinition and crossover, but an interest in the possibilities of that change was already establishing itself. Back in 1982, word came from New York that John Robie, who had worked with Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker on the electro funk classic "Planet Rock", was interested in remixing "Yashar", from The Cabs' 2x45 EP on Rough Trade, for possible release on the Tommy Boy label. "I love this track, but you guys don't know what you're doing here," Robie told Kirk and Mallinder. "Let me remix it." Reluctant to have him remodel something from their back catalogue, CV offered Robie two specially recorded tracks to work with, "Diskono" and "Gut Level", which he rejected outright, describing them as "New wave disco" rather than the pared-down dance number he had in mind.
What lay behind Robie's discernment was an awareness of how the 12" format could extend the structures and broaden the dynamics of dance music. After the great vinyl shortages of the mid-70s, resulting in the kind of rigid industry standards that punk had rebelled against, the market was awash with a flood of the stuff. By 1980, records were available in just about every shape, size and colour, but it was the newly popularised 12" single, with its running time of eight to ten minutes, that was the most exciting. As its title suggests, 2x45 was an early experiment in putting this template to use. Through his two remixes of "Yashar", eventually released on Factory, Robie took that experimentation to the next stage. "What Robie did with that track," Kirk explained, "showed us what the possibilities of 12" mixes were. You could strip back the music to its basic elements and it would work better in a club. Maybe some of the early Cabs stuff was just too full, too cluttered, to work properly in clubs, but when you start to strip the clutter away it becomes much more user friendly. It was a big underground dance hit."
The 12" dance mix hinted at luxury and excess, the hi-tech seduction of the club sound system and a lifestyle tailored for people who could either afford to stay up all night or simply didn't have a job worth getting up for next morning. The trouble was finding this kind of material in your local Megastore. Grace Jones came close with her cover of Joy Division's "She's Lost Control"; New Order's "Blue Monday" achieved iconic status; while George Clinton upped the ante with stomping 12" versions of "Atomic Dog" and "Loopzilla" from his Computer Games project, as well as his Sly Stone collaboration on "Hydraulic Pump Squad, Pts 1-3", whose pre-eminence on the dance scene was only curtailed by severe distribution problems. When CV moved to Virgin it was with the firm understanding that they would be allowed to put out 12" remixes of individual album tracks.
The Crackdown was preceded onto the floor by sophisticated dance-oriented mixes of "Fascination" and "Crackdown", two of its standout cuts, released back to back on the same disc. Produced by John Luongo, who had previously worked with The Jacksons, Gladys Night and Blancmange, both of these bass-heavy workouts built confidently upon the smooth, freeflowing structures Flood's careful engineering had revealed in CV's new sound. From the brooding and staccato holding pattern maintained by the bass synth on "Fascination" through to the mournful keyboard call signs at the closing of "Crackdown", Kirk and Mallinder had fashioned a skilful restatement of space, order and purpose. Compared with other compositions on The Crackdown, such as "In The Shadows", which almost seemed to be defining itself as it went along, as if the future were only a few hesitant seconds ahead, it was the 12" releases from this period that capitalised most upon CV's growing sense of rhythmic certainty.
In music, 'crossover' is ultimately a technological issue: finding the right tools for the right job. Certain pieces of studio equipment offer direct access from one set of attitudes to another. The Claptrap, a compressed synthetic version of the handclapping found on every rock or pop record in the mood to party, was also an electro staple. The harmoniser, a means of digitally tweaking an off-key passage, could be used to bend and blend just about anything, allowing New Wave guitar dissonance to exist over the edgy measured flow of the sequencer. Industrial funk, from Throbbing Gristle's last London and San Francisco performances, to A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo, was a snap-on reality. Most of these applications stretched sound, allowing them to occupy greater structural space, thereby opening up new musical forms. Precise electronic repetition encouraged a lack of focus, especially in funk and disco tracks, where sounds became increasingly layered, texts more allusive and hypnotic. Similarly Cabaret Voltaire constructed songs that were no more about any one subject than a night spent channel-hopping on TV, tuning through the shortwave radio dial or watching a sequence of advertising hoardings from the window of a speeding car could ever be. "It was more about creating atmosphere," Kirk comments, about their cut-up method of setting voices snatched from the mediascape against Mal's vocals.
With the introduction of the Fairlight Emulator, first used by CV on their 1984 Micro-phonies LP, this complex interplay of words and meanings could be achieved with higher levels of precision. Whereas found material previously had to be edited together on magnetic tape, then dropped into the track with no guarantee of accuracy, its digital rendering could go exactly where it was sent. Context and content were thrown into sharp conflict with each other. A good example of this process was the 12" mix of "Sensoria": originally recorded as part of the Micro-phonies session, it took on a life of its own when refashioned for the dancefloor. Over twitchy nerveless beats, an unidentified speaker offers a series of mushy-mouthed commands: "Always work. Go to church. Respect those in authority over you. Do right. Do right." In a grim reversal of funk's standard commands to get down and party, "Sensoria" presented Redneck America's party line on clean living, lifted from a television documentary on the Ku Klux Klan. Set against it, to deepen the conceptual irony further still, were the chants of Zulu singers. From "Do The Mussolini (Head Kick!)" back in 1978 right through to 1987's "Don't Argue", expressions of negative authority were a Cabaret Voltaire trademark. Offering instructions to some impossibly dangerous dance, they locked step with the state of the nation. "Sensoria" reflected the group's experiences while touring the UK during the 1984 miners' strike. Riot police and official checkpoints were the frontline of a regime that no longer believed in society and had no further use for surplus flesh or the dignity of labour. Dance had become a form of hard work.
It was, however, the video camera, first glimpsed on the cover of The Crackdown, which became CV's key piece of crossover technology. As a cipher for the electronica's unapproachable strangeness, here was a black box adept at explaining itself, whose guerrilla skirmishes with mass telecommunications revolved entirely around questions of demystification. Cabaret Voltaire's Doublevision label - run from a Nottingham address by Paul Smith, who later founded Blast First - offered freedoms hard to appreciate by today's standards. Until the moral panic over video nasties whipped through the industry, releases on tape were free from scrutiny, making free market issues of censorship, classification and copyright largely irrelevant. Cut-ups, hardcore sex and anatomical surgery, audiovisual montage, overlays and pointed juxtaposition were all up for grabs, allowing CV to experiment with various formats including the straight video promo and their own TV Wipeout magazine. The videocassette's longer playing time also offered more scope (CDs still being far from standard issue) for extended musical structures. The frozen ambience of CV's video soundtracks, such as "Automotivation" and "Slow Boat To Thassos" from 1985's Gasoline In Your Eye release, foreshadow Techno's exploration of cinematic dimensions, as does "Lost Possibilities Of Modern Dreams", specifically created to accompany a 1983 sequence of Phil Barnes's paintings captured on videotape.
Even with such compositions as "Doublevision" and "Theme From Earthshaker", a brief musical trailer for an unrealised sci-fi film project, available on vinyl, misunderstandings still occurred. There is a story, for example, that when the first Cabaret Voltaire video, a densely overlaid optical assault, was sent to the relevant executive at Virgin Records, it was immediately returned with an apologetic note saying that the finished product had obviously been damaged during processing, so could they possibly film another one? A cheque was enclosed to cover production costs.
Drinking Gasoline, a 12" EP issued simultaneously with Gasoline In Your Eye, marked Cabaret Voltaire's return to the harsher, more jagged sound of their Western Works studio in Sheffield. With Flood as engineer and producers like Luongo and John 'Tokes' Potoker handling remixes, CV's overall approach to melody and rhythm had been greatly enhanced, but the full extent of this change only became apparent when Kirk and Mallinder took total control of the desk again for their 1985 LP, The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. Recorded relatively quickly at Western Works, following a protracted stay in the United States, The Covenant... was an impassioned burst of static white noise and a near perfect expression of CV's interventionist aesthetics. Packaged in a Brody-designed sleeve incorporating frames taken from some 8mm footage Kirk and his wife had filmed at a San Francisco shooting range, it was a savage revelation of how the communications media had evolved into a weapons delivery system. Just as Brody's graphics aligned the split semicircles of the Pentax camera lens with the assassin's telescopic crosshairs, so the stabbing aggressive electronics on "L21ST", with its layered bass patterns and nagging synthetic percussion, meshed with a heightened sense of cultural paranoia. Named after a 100-strong Christian survivalist group, whose stockpile of guns and explosives, together with anti-tank missiles and quantities of cyanide intended for the water supply of an unnamed city, had been raided by the FBI in April of that year, The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord was a summation of 1980s dark exotica. A core belief of the CSA was that Western society was facing a 'coming war' brought about by economic collapse, famine and rioting. It was time to take up arms against the Godless pornographers, the anarchist street gangs and the racially inferior that threatened to tear civilization apart. Such views were encouraged by a political system that fostered crisis as means of social control.
Drawing upon the words of American televangelists using the networks as their ministry, Charles Manson being interviewed about his music, an instructor offering targeting advice on the shooting range and a porn star going for the money on "Warm", The Covenant... mapped out the psychic dimensions and increasingly embattled media terrain. In a culture no longer interested in following lines of argument, it obsessively explored the singularities, paradoxes and contradictions of mass communication, forcing information into inadvertently exposing its own inner workings. Adding extra punch to the bruising cyberfunk of "Kickback" and "Whip Blow" was Cabaret Voltaire's recently acquired sampler. Instead of hiring a Fairlight in by the hour, along with its programmer, as on the Micro-phonies sessions, they could now integrate soundbytes and random streams of interference more intimately into each new track. As a consequence the raw intricacies to be discovered on "Golden Haloes" and "The Web" still repay close attention, while in the jarring attack of "I Want You", the words that once formed the basic unit meaning for just about every pop song in existence are skilfully exposed as the utterance of a TV preacher calling his faithful viewers to prayer. At the same time the open dissimulation of digital technology represented a complex moment of transition in which Cabaret Voltaire ran the risk of no longer appearing so strange a proposition. With the recorded sound hoards of the entire world ready to be aped, adapted and plundered, the electronic need not necessarily seem exotic any more. The data storm raging through The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord was clearing the way for a more radically altered order of experience than any survivalist could ever have dreamed of.
The sampler layered and crowded audio data into new densities - it had no choice. In this respect, albums like Public Enemy's 1988 It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Keith LeBlanc's 1986 Major Malfunction were patched into the same circuit board as The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. One major difference, however, was Kirk and Mallinder's initial hesitancy over sampling other people's grooves for funkier effects. At a fundamental level, Cabaret Voltaire was still a group and maintained a group's interest in producing its own music. But finally, an awareness of how dated their drum machines were going to sound finally caused them to plunder loops and breakbeats as the 1980s started winding to a close. (Reaction times were becoming crucial: even the role of the safety pin as fashion accessory had shifted. Pinned to a black MA1 jacket in a club, it signified that the wearer practised safe sex, as opposed to propagating punk's diseased state.)
By this time, Chicago House, a music created using nothing but electronic media, had already been spreading its message to a growing and enthusiastic congregation since 1985. An exuberant, hi-tempo energy flow, House was a collective embrace that did not rely upon the visibility of its creators to provide a focus. The relative anonymity of Chicago House and Detroit Techno allowed the producer and DJ to refashion themselves as futuristic engineers, the designers and architects of the new metropolis. By contrast, The Covenant... presented Kirk and Mallinder as anchormen for Apocalypse TV, talking straight to camera and speaking in tongues. Even remixed, a track like "The Web", for all its technical daring, was never going to be House. Much of its drive came directly from the clenched frenetic spasm of rock, concerned primarily with the essential business of concentrating effort into motion. House was post-industrial - it replaced work. It didn't crowd in on all sides with activities, in the way that rock and funk would actually instruct you in what dance steps to follow.
At the same time, CV's influence on the growing House scene cannot be overestimated. For many, they still represented what Derrick May has described as "the mystique of what electronic music was supposed to be and how it was supposed to be presented. Everybody from Frankie Knuckles to Ron Hardy, young black DJs in Detroit, and Richie Hawtin, loved Cabaret Voltaire." Cabaret Voltaire knew enough about the technology of dance to meet up with the producers of House and Techno and share ideas.
The crossover was having a different effect on the dancefloor, however. The mutated funk and dance beat dub of the Tackhead/St Che/Gary Clail collective, with Keith LeBlanc and Adrian Sherwood at the controls, was awakening clubbers' interest in what lay beyond electro and HipHop. DJs at the Hacienda were throwing more House into the mix. Ecstasy was in; the awareness boosted by fracture and paranoia was out. "All of a sudden these people were nice and passive," Kirk recalls. "They weren't going out smashing windows and protesting about things any more. They just wanted to party, and things have been going downhill ever since." The haunted urban soul of Cabaret Voltaire's "Don't Argue", the opening track on the 1987 Code album (EMI), suddenly seemed out of place. Using stentorian words of advice lifted from a 1945 US army training film, Your Job In Germany, designed to teach GIs how to behave in occupied territory, "Don't Argue" ran counter to the prevailing mood of loved-up euphoria. "You will not be friendly," commanded this new voice of negative authority. "You will be aloof... watchful... suspicious." Blissed out and ready to hug anything in sight, the Stepford Ravers would have a hard time getting their heads around a message like that. Produced with Adrian Sherwood, Code was a digital deconstruction of modern society that revealed the armed state of siege at its heart. Gun references predominated; viral infections and data panics vibrated through each track. If anyone threw their hands in the air on one of these cuts, it was probably because they had a weapon pointed at them. When muggings started to take place on the Hac's dancefloor, while drug dealers and promoters waved shotguns at each other in muddy fields, it looked like CV had got it about right.
With its tensile funk rhythms clocking in at a crucial few BPMs slower than those favoured by House, Code failed to capture the attention of its home market, despite selling well abroad. Since the album is currently deleted from the EMI/Virgin catalogue, there's nothing left of it now but the remixes, courtesy of Sherwood, Robie and Francois Kervorkian. It's ironic that an album named after the systematic scrambling of meanings, locked up information and locked out access should lose so much when reworked for 12". Kervorkian's previously unreleased mixes of "Sex Money Freaks" demonstrate the same inability to settle into CV's lean and funky groove as his 12" take on "Thank You America", while the sassy female chorus that John Robie slathers across "Don't Argue" in an attempt to make it sound sexy just plain misses the point. The rest, as they say, is history. Or it should be. With their 1992 collection, Technology: Western Re-works, Cabaret Voltaire stripped back their key Virgin recordings further still to reveal their steely ambience to an audience attuned to the artificial intelligence of such labels as Plus 8, R&S and Warp. The electronic sound that Kirk and Mallinder had helped pioneer in the 1980s had made it through to the other side of its own future.

All credits: Wire Magazine

Genesis P-Orridge - interview in Wire Magazine - #271 | Kool Keith | September 2006

2009-09-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

#271 | Kool Keith | September 2006

The Wire
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

* Issue #271 (September '06) | In Writing
* By: Alan Licht | About: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

MARK PERRY "Death Looks Down" from Snappy Turns (Deptford Fun City)

GPO: (laughs) I haven't heard Mark Perry's voice for a long time.

A: This is from his first solo album. How did you get acquainted with him and Alex Fergusson?

G: I'm pretty sure what happened was I met Sandy Robertson, he was working at Sounds writing things, and he also had a fanzine called Piss Factory about Patti Smith. They [he and Alex] both moved to London from Glasgow at the same time, and were living in the same squat. So I met Mark P through Sandy Robertson and Alex Fergusson. Mark at that time was going out with the original Sue Catwoman, who's on the front of the No Future newspaper. I got to know Mark P quite well and I even wrote a page for an issue of Sniffing Glue and got involved in that. And then Sue Catwoman got really ill with appendicitis. I went to see Sue Catwoman in hospital and I gave her a great, big, giant latex pool of vomit with "Get Well Soon" written on it. And she was quite taken with that and actually ended up being my girlfriend after that. So I ended up, through her and Mark P, going around all the early punk gigs, the Roxy and various places, and seeing The Jam when they first played and Eater, all those early punk bands. And then Mark P decided that he would like to have his own band. Alex Fergusson and Sandy Robertson had originally had a band which they called the Nobodies in Glasgow, and the Nobodies played only one song which was "European Son" and they would play that for as long as they could, about an hour, and that was the entire set.
Throbbing Gristle was already in existence, and we had our rehearsal space at the Death Factory, so I invited Mark P and Alex to come down there and rehearse and jam and come up with ideas for how the band would be. I had a drum kit, and actually began-strangely enough, not many people realize I began as a drummer, my father was a drummer in big bands. So I was the drummer, for a while, until Alternative TV were invited to play at the first punk rock festival in Birmingham, and I said I can't be in two bands at the same time. When I started my own band after Throbbing Gristle, Alternative TV were in a hiatus at that point, so I took Alex Fergusson and formed Psychic TV.

A: How long was Alex involved in Psychic TV?

G: Alex was the original co-founder of Psychic TV, before anyone else it was just me and Alex, and that would have been 1981, and he stayed in Psychic TV right up until after Godstar, 1986. Alex and I wrote that wonderful song, Godstar, which was number one in the indie charts for fifteen or sixteen weeks and got to number 29 in the national charts. And we had experimented with getting a manager, this guy Terry McLellan. While we were in California filming the video for the follow-up single, "Roman P", he went into Rough Trade and said he was collected the money on our behalf from the record (Godstar) and he disappeared with all the money. It was the last straw for Alex. He'd been in ATV and got critical acclaim and written amazing songs, like "Love Lies Limp", all these really really great, memorable riffs; and then he'd done the Psychic TV thing, with all these seminal ideas, holophonic sound right through to the hyperdelic pop songs, and he never made a cent. Likewise, neither had I, but for Alex, it was just too much, he was just disgusted with the whole music scene, and being ripped off. And he made a decision that that was enough, enough is enough. So he didn't just quit PTV, he quit music.
Once in a while I tempted him back to co-write songs with me, and he performed at Royal Festival Hall with Psychic TV in 1999. And just recently he sent me a solo CD that he'd done on a very small indie label in Germany, which was lots of really catchy little songs, and he's now living in Germany with his girlfriend in a small town. He came to see Throbbing Gristle play in Berlin, in January. So we're still friends, it was amicable.
He's a genius. You can sit him down with any lyric and he'll come up with a really catchy riff, he's like a computer, just endless classic pop tunes. It's a tragedy, really.

A: The other reason I picked this track is because Mark is playing violin and I know that you played violin way back when you did that one record in a high school project and throughout these other bands. It's not an instrument you studied, so I'm wondering how playing the violin came about or how you picked it.

G: Oh that's easy. In 1966 in England I was doing my O Levels and I also was going out with this girl called Jane Ray, and she played violin at school. My other friend, Spidey, rang me up, having listened to John Peel on pirate radio, and said "You've got to hear this band called the Velvet Underground. They've just released a record in America, and you're gonna love it, you've got to hear it, you've got to hear it." I went to school one morning, I had a Vespa scooter, did some O Levels, and at lunchtime I got on my scooter and went to The Boots. And I'd already pre-ordered this record on import, from America, it had just come in that very day so it was the first day it was available In England. They still let you listen to the records in the booths in those days, and they put on "Black Angel's Death Song." I listened to that on my lunch hour, and I got so engrossed in that that I was late for whatever O Level was next, missed an exam. I bought it there and then, and I used to put it on my record player, and I played it and played it and played it until I wore it out-I've had three copies now that I've worn out. And that was it, that was my epiphany, which was the violin could be electrified and put through effects. It touched me in a very special way. I felt that was something that had been the missing link in terms of my being able to visualize an electric form of modern music. I didn't ever want to be the guitarist in a band, I had no particular interest in being a vocalist, I didn't know what I wanted to do, maybe drum-but once I heard that I wanted to play electric violin in some way or another. So I developed my own style, hours a day I would play.
After I dropped out of university in 1969 and moved to Islington to be in the Exploding Galaxy, around the corner were the Third Ear Band. I used to hang out with them and play violin with them too, just sort of jam. Later on I heard Jean-Luc Ponty with Frank Zappa. I still often take the violin with me on tour, in case I want to play it, it's kind of a talisman for me. I can't imagine not having a violin there... I still play it with Throbbing Gristle.

A: Bill Breeze also played violin with Psychic TV at one point, right?

G: That's right, yeah-he plays viola. Bill Breeze is a really remarkable viola player, he went to Juilliard and studied viola and composition and Indian tonalities, which is how he ended up meeting Angus Maclise. He played on the album Trip Reset, which I still consider the lost classic PTV album. It was meant to be promoted and toured with in 1995 before the fire, so it was lost because I was busy being... injured. He improvised parts, and we built the tracks around what he played.
People think that improvisation is an easy option but my experience is it's actually one of the most difficult things to make convincing and potent, because it requires listening almost in advance of hearing. And that requires a sublimation of ego, really, in a very particular way. It's almost prophecy as well, if you understand the way each other emotionally and intellectually operate then you can guess and imagine what the other people involved will most likely do in response to the other things happening. So there's a great degree of empathy and prophecy as well as reaction. That's why there's a spiritual sense, often, with Coltrane or people like that, the spirituality one feels I think is because of that need to empathize, like a seer imagining a future before it happens.
Was that enough for one song? (laughs)

TERRY FOX: "5" from Echo: The Images of Sound II (Het Apollohuis)

G: I was going to guess it was La Monte Young, but it has a more electric almost pre-Velvets, early 66 sound to it too.

A: It's Terry Fox.

G: Terry Fox, remind me who Terry Fox is.

A: He was a body artist in the early 70s and he did a lot of sound installations like this with piano wires, stretching piano wires.

G: Ah, okay, okay... that makes sense with why there's a certain quality in sound of the strings that I wasn't quite getting, wasn't sure what it was. There was a German artist named Albrecht D, who was sort of a minor Fluxus artist, somebody I met through mail art, and was also an associate of Joseph Beuys, and he made installations in parks because of that whole socialist approach to art, that art should be brought to people and with the people, in the streets. But his installations were with piano wires.

A: I was wondering to what extent, in the transition from COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle, if you were aware of people like Terry Fox or Charlemagne Palestine who were doing both music and body art in the same period.

G: I heard of Palestine, and I heard about Albrecht D; I was aware of Fluxus, which obviously was performance that involved radical ideas of a concert, nailing down the keys of a piano as a piano piece and so on, so those theories and the anecdotes that I read about those movements certainly helped break down what few barriers I had to complete freedom, if there were any. When we lived still in the north of England in a semi-commune, with COUM, we had two semi-derelict houses, and between 1970 and 973 we'd collect any old tape recorders we could find, take out the speakers from radios and so on, and we gradually wired the entire house so that there were speakers and microphones in all the rooms, and speakers hidden outside, and it was a shortcut to the open market which was open on the weekends. We had a room just with drums in it, so the whole house could be played, in a sense. And on the weekend we would also have a microphone outside the house hidden so that people were walking along, the sounds of them talking in the street would be picked up, amplified, manipulated and played back out into the street, plus we would also be saying things about people's clothing... so we were inevitably involving sound as part of the performance ideas. In fact, the main reason I eventually quit the last remants of the Exploding Galaxy was because they wouldn't include sound, they were very prissy about the idea of including sound and they thought that was somehow was going to lead to "entertainment" in some sort of demeaning form.
After 73 COUM moved to London and started to be more art gallery oriented, starting to be given grants and taken more seriously, if you like. We began to create sound collages on tape that we would include in performances as well as noises that were made either by us or by the audience, we saw those as being part of the performance. We even wrote a piece called "Marcel Duchamp's Next work" where we had 12 bicycle wheels/sculptures, and the score was a circle that looked like a bicycle, and each spoke was an instruction of different ways to play the wheels, stroking them, and so on. It's hard to explain in a short way, but by 1975/76 COUM was becoming so integrated with the art world and the art avant garde and included in retrospectives of modern British art with Gilbert and George and things like that, that we, in a typically perverse way, shied away from that moment of potential success, and decided to revert to something that was more potentially chaotic and anarchic which was music. We rejected the art world in favor of exploring what became Throbbing Gristle. But we had learned so much from our art world explorations, and by meeting people. There was a German sound poet, Ernst Jandl, who played me a lot of sound poetry tapes, and they were very influential on my approach to vocals with Throbbing Gristle, in terms of freeing up the idea of what it could be. It didn't need to be literal sense, and it didn't need to be melodic in any traditional rock and roll way. And also John Giorno, is another person whose experiments with delays and loops and so on I definitely utilized, especially in "Hamburger Lady." I was distinctly thinking of him as one of the ways I wanted to resolve what I wanted to do with that piece.

A: What about Hermann Nitsch? The noise orchestra was part of the actions.

G: Well I knew about Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese actionists but I hadn't actually heard any of the sound or seen any of the videos until later so that didn't have any direct effect. With Hermann Nitsch, he was in a difficult situation which was, first kill one sheep and drink its blood and then next time kill three sheep and then kill thirty sheep and then kill a hundred sheep, and then where does that take you? He was confronting excess for its own sake, almost, and that struck me as problematic in the long term.

MIKE HERON "Spirit Beautiful" from Smiling Men With Bad Reputations (Elektra)

G: Guess who this is... Incredible String Band?

A: It's Mike Heron-

G: Yeah-

A: From the solo record.

G: Which one?

A: Smiling Men with Bad Reputations. And this is the track with Dr. Strangely Strange on backing vocals.

G: ooh, you're crafty. God I love his voice so much.

A: What do you think about the current rediscovery, or interest in, this scene?

G: (laughs) It's strange how quickly it happened. When I did that piece for ARTHUR ("My Ten Favorite Psychedelic Folk Songs" November 2004 issue) most people looked at me with a completely blank face... and yet within six months most people looked at me like "Oh yeah! I've got one of those... " Devendra Banhart obviously has something to do with that too. I always think these things are inevitable, you know, there's a kind of reactive cause and effect with music, almost like hopscotch, or leapfrog. And when you've had something like grunge, and then that died very slowly as it merged into (whispers) "boy bands", and superficiality beyond anything you might have imagined, not that long ago. And there's obviously gonna come a point where a new generation want to hear a radically different sound, and it often goes very simply-whatever you did last time, do the exact opposite. You get this bouncing, between loud, noisy things and soft, gentle things. It's part of that biological... flow, that happens through culture generally. Then a few people who are really enthusiastic, if they have a voice that's heard, can have quite an effect. David Tibet, who's an old friend of mine, we're still in touch almost every other day, he got turned on to a lot of this through my collection, and I got turned on to some of it through his. I've still got my Jan Dukes du Grey albums, I actually saw them play, and sit and talk with them when they used to play in Hull.
I remember a lot of this from the first time around, in fact some of the Exploding Galaxy left to become Stone Monkey, who were this dancing performance group that worked with Incredible String Band.

A: The influence is a little more evident in a lot of David Tibet's music than it is in your own.

G: Yeah, people were always really surprised when they looked at my record collection and almost all of it is psychedelic folk music and there's hardly anything recorded after '69. It was my private world, it was the one thing I had which was my secret. Nick Drake's voice... I think it's the voices as well, Mike Heron's voice, Nick Drake's voice, Strangely Strange, they have this beautiful, multiple tone in their voices that goes to tape so well. That particular of singing to tape-and I do think that it's important that it's on tape and it's not digital. It's like a violin-it contains more emotions per square inch than anything else can. I don't care what nick Drake sings, I just listen to the sound of his voice. It's warmth, and melancholy, a million experiences, and dreams, and lifetimes, and love affairs go by in a couple of minutes. Some people have that capacity, and there's no need for any bombast in order for that to occur. Whereas those who are less gifted tend to have to use theatrical tricks, noise, and surprising sculptural, symphonic structures to make the same sort of thing happen.
I think we're in a moment in time, in social and cultural history, where there's so much noise and bombast and crudeness and violence; people are being inflicted with negative, bigoted, apocalyptic tornadoes of media overload-you're going to want somewhere to sit back and be touched in a different way. You want a safe place to remember kindness and simplicity and the connection between people and nature and... subtleties. So it somehow makes sense to me that in an age where we have this ugly culture that there would be an urge and an appetite to move towards simple, gentle, poetic music and forms of expression that give hope and healing, and have at least in some way a sense of optimism. Why do you think it's become popular again?

A: Especially with people like Devendra it seems like people really focus in on his voice, and there's people like CocoRosie or Antony who are singing in roughly the same style-and that becomes the voice of the moment. Even if you go back to the 70s punk era there's a lot of similarities in the singing styles of David Byrne, David Thomas, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell. There's something in the vocalization, not necessarily the words, that speaks to and for a certain moment in time. I think also there was so much laptop and electronica at the end of the 90s and people wanted to unplug from that, that's where the interest in acoustic music comes from.

G: Yeah, exactly, that's what I meant when I said leapfrog or hopscotch.

A: When you mentioned grunge before, even that was a reaction to the much more polished music of the 80s.

G: Punk claimed to be a reaction against prog rock and disco... and Industrial was a reaction against all of it (laughs). But also in a way it was nostalgia, TG for example, was trying to find a continuation point for what the Velvet Underground had been doing, not to copy it, but to explore what could be lyrics, and what you could talk about lyrically above and beyond the "I love you, oh you've left me", what else is there. And what could be excluded in terms of instrumentation, if you take out the elements which are most recognizable of a previous era then you are inevitably going to develop something that's different, and often that's a useful exercise, even if it's only an exercise, and sometimes it becomes an epiphany or a revelation.

PATTI SMITH "Birdland" from Teenage Perversity And Ships in the Night (bootleg)

G: (after listening intently for several minutes) Amazing.

A: You know who it is?

G: Surely it's Patti Smith? (laughs) Hope so, otherwise it's a very good impersonation (laughs). I just wanted to hear as much as I could for a change (laughs). Very nice. And the band is just totally following everything...

A: What I love about this in particular is the improvisation she does, that monologue in the beginning, and you used to improvise a lot of vocals on stage.

G: I still do. We saw Patti Smith at Warsaw and it was amazing. The previous time I saw her was at Wembly Stadium, when she had that big hit ["Because the Night"], and the majority of people who were there were there because of this pop song. And they kind of tolerated the first section, and the rest of the band wandered off and she stayed on stayed on stage with a clarinet and did a seventeen minute clarinet solo. And slowly but surely I saw the entire audience's mood shift, from anger to alienation to confusion to dislocation. There's this fabulous moment with great art where there's dislocation between conscious thought and expectation and the actuality of what are the sensations of that? And that's the same as an orgasm, it's that secret moment when the conscious and the subconscious are all opened up. All the pores open simultaneously and they all line up, so that the messages slip through into the nervous system in a way that can't happen any other way. And that's the joy of improvising and allowing random chance and surprise and novelty to be part of the formula of what you do. If you don't pay homage to the spirit of the fool or the shapeshifter or the joker then you're never going to reach... inspiration. And all music, all art, all writing, all performing, all conversing, all loving is about inspiration.

A: Uh, right.

G: (laughs) I feel very strongly about it, as you can tell (laughs).

A: When you were conceptualizing TG was improvising vocals something you had in mind from the outset?

G: At the outset, I didn't expect to be doing vocals. I expected it to be more like the Sonic Arts Union, something like that, a kind of post-Fluxus rock band. But it soon became obvious that for it to be convincing enough to get people's attention or even to allow us to perform in public spaces that were not art-oriented, pubs and rock venues and so on-we wanted to slip into these places as a surprise. So we had to compromise, as we thought, at the beginning, by having vocals sometimes. And it fell to me just because I protested the least. I did sing when I was younger, I was in a cathedral choir, I had four or five years of proper vocal training and did medieval plain chant. But with TG the music was so different that I had to look for voices that sat in this new sound. So that was a whole extra experiment, and that could only happen by experimenting and improvising and letting go and not feeling intimidated or embarrassed, just making noises with my throat and how it interacted with the other noises.
I've done some work with gestalt and also some with Gurdjieff techniques and the Tibetan tecnique of finding your true voice by getting stones to resonate with your voice. So I started to incorporate those ideas into the microphone and I got to make friends with the microphone, and I discovered that it was possible to make the microphone vibrate and resonate the same way stones or metal did. And once that happened I realized there were no limitations at all except... inhibitions. There was a whole new landscape available, populated with different characters. And each character would sing it's own separate songs. Even now I experiment with a song lyric or an idea for a song until I get a voice that goes with it. So in a way each one of them has a person that talks. None of them have to be me. And none of them have to be the voice I usually speak with. They can be all kinds of people. And on the new (PTV3) album, you'll hear that very clearly. Sometimes I tease the band and say there are dozens of people living here (points to head) and they all want a turn to say something. I always found it odd that people would sing every song, no matter what the subject, with more or less the same voice. The song is a story, and it's a compact message and hopefully it's a communication that will be recognized or will have some kind of resonance and empathy with other people you've never met. They each have a storyteller... that's why I'm so fascinated with troubadours, as time goes by, I've got more and more interested in troubadours in France, and how they would travel ¡®round and they were responsible for what became history. Whoever records the songs is the one who tells the story that is going to be accepted as what happened. So it's a huge responsibility as well as being a fascinating thing.

A: And it's an oral history.

G: An oral history, exactly. I think the reason that music is still so profoundly important, especially in adolescence, is because people still sense that somehow, the truest story of what is happening, and what has gone before, is contained in songs.

A: Patti Smith is someone who people associate with the Beats, as a descendant of that, in particular William Burroughs, and I know you had a long personal association with Burroughs. The underground music of the 70s brought Burroughs an audience he didn't necessarily have before, and I was wondering how you felt about other people at the time who were extolling the virtues of Burroughs.

G: You mean David Bowie? (laughs) Ever since I met William Burroughs and then later Brion Gysin, my entire body of work in every media is without any doubt influenced by them. And I'm a great believer in telling people who your influences are, not pretending that everything is divine inspiration and unique, and your own personal prophecies... you're just part of an ongoing formula that's all integrated, it's a tapestry, it's woven together into this fantastic fabric. So I think anyone who makes sure that the importance of their proselytizing of cut-up, of random chance, the whole depth of the third mind, but most of all the cut-up, the idea that linear thinking and linear time and linear explanations and linear existence are both a fraud and pointless way of envisioning our experience of being alive. Anything that keeps their message alive or expands on it is a good thing.
It's often easy to forget that we're often talking about a limited territory in the West, and there are great sections of the planet who have no interest whatsoever the unfolding of so-called rock and roll... it's irrelevant to them, they just want to eat. It's important to get things in perspective and remember that we're very privileged to debate how we decide to talk about what interests us, and that's one of the things that Patti Smith includes in the sound of her voice. A modesty, and an anguish, and a humility all simultaneously with messages, and that's a very noble and difficult thing to do.

IRA COHEN "Kathmandu Dream Piece" from The Majoon Traveller (SubRosa)

G: Ira Cohen.

A: You issued a book of poetry by Ira, and Angus MacLise, who did the music on this track, in 1991 had you known them or their poetry before that time?

G: Only Ira. I had met Hetty MacLise. But I was always fascinated with the whole Factory scenario, so it seemed appropriate to have the three of them together. I'm very proud of putting that book out actually, it's not that well known.

A: Is poetry something you've a long interest in? I'm bringing this up in relation to Thee Majesty, where you recite poetry with musical backing.

G: yeah, I've been writing poetry, seems like forever... It was a great way of learning how words work with each other so that when it came to me doing improvised vocals and music I had a really deep relationship to the structure of the words themselves. I started writing poetry when I was 12. From then on I started sending poetry to poetry magazines, when I was 13 or 14, and got things published occasionally from then on. I guess I was very determined to try every style and read every book of poetry I could find and then strip it down and try and find out how it worked and why it worked, or why certain things were very touching and other things weren't. I write something every day. That's the thing that I've spent the most consistent and serious attention to, poetry and words. Everything else sort of flowed around that. If I have anything that's sacred it's that. Which is one reason I love the Incredible String Band; the lyrics still blow my mind, and Syd Barrett's do too.
To talk about Thee Majesty, what happened was after I was hurt in the fire in 1995, for various reasons I felt betrayed by people that I knew in the music business and let down by them. Once I was a damaged and hurt animal, like a bird with a broken wing, they couldn't be bothered. They only wanted me when I had pretty feathers that I could display. After one or two years of being convinced I would never, ever have anything to do with music again, it was Lady Jaye who said, "sit down, and think what is it you love? You never have to do anything again, you have no obliagation to do music again." I realized it was words, the incredible magic of putting words next to each other in ways that surprise and reveal something you never expected from the simplest interactions, in the same way you can do that collage, you can create worlds that don't exist, but you can illustrate them, and you can do that with words too.

A: Have you done poetry readings without musical backing?

G: Sure, oh yeah, since the 60s. The earliest ones were probably '64, '65. When I was in University in '69 I was doing more Fluxus type things, and there was a poetry reading and I took an orange, and a knife, and it was my turn to read a poem, and I just waited and waited, would let the tension build up, and then I took the knife very fast and slammed it down and split the orange in two. And that was it (claps hands).
Lady Jaye thinks that the less music there is the more she likes Thee Majesty. And there is definitely a sense that sound is a crutch, you know? That by having sound you're saying the words don't work enough.

MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA "Festival Part 2" from MmoJ: Tribe Al Serif (Musical Heritage Society 2xLP)

G: (immediately) Jajouka.

A: When did you first hear of MMoJ, was it the Brian Jones LP?

G: Yeah, Brian Jones, pretty sure that was it. It could have been before, it could have been through Burroughs, or Gysin. I don't think I would have bought the record, in all honesty, if it hadn't been Brian Jones. Somewhere I've got a tape of Brion Gysin talking about how the Stones dumped Brian Jones in Morocco. It's very sad. They drove to Tangier, Brian got really ill and got left behind in the hospital in Spain and during that time Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg started having an affair, so by the time Brian jones got there he was in the way, so the rest of the Stones were encouraging Brian to go off to Jajouka with Brion Gysin and record this music. And it was while he was doing that that they all went back to England; he got back to the hotel and the rest of the Stones and Anita were gone. And didn't even leave him any money to pay the hotel.
In 1980 I saw that MMoJ were performaning at the Commonwealth Institute in London, so I went and got tickets for the front row of the two days that they played. At that time I think there were about 30 musicians still, plus dancers. They did do some of the rites of Pan and had the boy in the goatskin dancing. It was fantastic, Bachir Attar's father was still a Master Musician, and Bachir was just a teenager. I recorded that with their permission, and it's lucky because that's the only recording of that performance, and since then the musicians have been dying of old age, and the young people of the village don't want to be musicians, they don't want to spend their life learning this oral tradition of music with thousands of different permutations, they want Nikes and hip hop, so they're all leaving the village and living in different towns, a lot of them are taxi drivers in Paris. So the music is literally dying out, there's only about 5 left. And legend has it that when the music stops being played that's when time stops. So, combined with the Mayan calendar saying 2012 is when time stops, the two things are gonna intersect-which is kind of spooky, isn't it?
I used to go see Brion Gysin in Paris, and on one of my visits he said, "Oh, Gen, there's a couple of people staying with me at the moment from Jajouka, Bachir and Mustapha," so I got to meet them and they cooked me a special meal with Moroccan lamb and played sacred, secret flute music while I was eating a meal with Brion Gysin, and then we all took the Dreamachine listening to side two of Heathen Earth (Throbbing Gristle). I remember thinking you couldn't buy this evening if you were a millionaire, you know? It's about as good as it gets. We stayed in touch with Bachir after that. In fact, Thee Majesty grew from conversations between Bachir and myself and Lady Jaye. Bachir performed in the first two or three performances of Thee Majesty.

A: Was your interest in Tibetan singing bowls and thighbone trumpet related to your interest in Jajouka?

G: I was actually interested in Tibetan music and Tibetan culture from the age of 10. I was ill, as I often was when I was younger, asthma and so on, and my father gave me this book, Seven Years in Tibet. I heard about the music and how it was completely functional, it was for healing and for interdimensional travel. I tend now to think that all these functions are included in the interesting music that's made in Western culture, but its done sometimes in ignorance, so sometimes it can backfire and music can do lots of damage.

JOEY BELTRAM "Energy Flash" from Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash book companion CD

G: We're in the acid house era here.

A: Yeah, this is maybe a little late for that by a year or two.

G: It's not as squishy, is it? I don't recognize it, specifically.

A: It's a track by Joey Beltram. You had done dance oriented tracks all along, like "United" with TG, but what was the particular attraction of acid house?

G: Well... TG had experimented with rhythms, "Discipline" funnily enough has turned out to be our classic dance track; since we reformed, as soon as that begins the audience all start going crazy, bouncing up and down. There was always a rhythmic sense and as a drummer I grew up being fascinated with rhythm. And I was listening to Tibetan music more seriously, and I was realizing that high frequencies release certain endorphins and learning about the metabolic side of music, that low frequencies affect the stomach... I started a conversation with Dave Ball from Soft Cell and Richard Norris from Bam Caruso, Andy Weatherall, which became, the title Towards Thee Infinite Beat, saying what we were looking for was... I had two big enthusiasms in music at the time, one was psychedelic music, garage psychedelic music and the other was rhythmic music, ethnic music, trance music that actually had a function, so functional trance music. It was a discussion group, almost... there must be a way to create a sort of rhythmic trance/dance music that's also psychedelic. Then on a tour of America with Psychic TV in mid-80s I'd already started experimenting with radio shows, instead of doing interviews I would do mixes, and I would have this box of tape decks so I could play six cassettes, mixing them all together and start doing these live, long rhythmic mixes that would have one basic beat, then fly all the other stuff in and change it. When I got to Detroit I went on the radio doing this for about an hour and a half, and at the end of it was Derek Carter there and they said we really liked what you were doing on the radio you should come and hear some of the stuff people are doing in Chicago and Detroit. So they took me to this tiny record shop in the ghetto and Derek Carter was playing records, this really early white label acid house thing. I said what's that and they said oh that's acid house. I said "acid house? Wow, what is it?" I said I'll buy every single thing you've got, and it was only 4 records, but I bought all four. That was it really, I took them back to England, made a cassette, and put it in the stereo in my car, got Dave Ball and said "this is it, this is the solution to what we've been trying to do" and drove around London playing it really loud.
Then we did Jack the Tab. I knew that if we did it as Psychic TV or Soft Cell there would be prejudice, so we pretended that it was early tapes that we'd found like those compilations on Rhino or Bam Caruso, Pebbles, Nuggets, and we'll make up names for these different bands, so we'll see what happens. And it got rave reviews. I started to DJ as Jack the Tab and Dave Ball started to do remixes. Already the Psychic TV gigs, we were calling those raves, and there was Towards thee infinite beat and Beyond the Infinite Beat, and we used to be really good friends with the E dealers, when you came to our gigs there were free tabs of E, our things became like parties, so it was a big crossover for a while, all the different threads-Andy Weatherall was a big PTV fan, with a psychic cross tattoo and everything. It was an exciting time. Then I worked on this single "Turn On, Tune in to the Acid House", which for what it's worth was the first record to actually have acid house in the title, although the phrase came from America. And it got banned, not because of the acid house bit, but I used a picture of Superman as the label, and Warner Brothers sent a really heavy letter saying "We own Superman-you've got to destroy all the copies, and give us the masters and apologize." They sent someone around on a motorbike, got the tapes, then went to the warehouse and got all the copies they could find of the record. What they didn't realize was that 5,000 had been already shipped to America (laughs).
I was really disappointed with the way it (acid house) unfolded, it became very conservative, formularized, the DJs became stars just like the singers in bands. There were less and less surprises every time the records came out and then there were experts, all of a sudden, and then there were subgroups, or cliques. And then the raves weren't these secret parties anymore, 20,000 people paying thirty dollars to get in-and it's not what we were thinking at all.

A: Do you think it's partially because it's tied in to a physical experience, not only dancing but drugs, that people aren't listening to what the actual music is-that it's more about a beat than a music listening experience?

G: Yeah, probably. We miscalculated, in a way we were elitist, we were thinking conceptually, it didn't cross our minds that it would just be like going to the pub and getting drunk. Same thing that happened with acid in the 60s, I should have known, at first acid was setting, and trying to travel and change one's programming and then it was "let's go out and drop a couple of tabs and have a good time and feel weird." And then people would go out, drop two tabs and go out to the pub! So I guess there's a whole resilience in people to just enjoy the novelty of weird sensations without trying to think about what they imply. But certainly I very quickly lost interest in it and moved on; it was obvious that it had been co-opted, and also the drug thing was so big so fast, there were huge amounts of money to be made. There was one point where the police themselves estimated that 2 to 3 million people were taking ecstasy every weekend in England. So promoters, and gangsters, and dealers were all having to work together and making these massive events because it was the best way to make a profit. And so it all became about... money. I don't know if the West is ready to have a spiritual experience with music. I think our culture is so corrupted by commerce and so homogenized at this point that its going to be very hard for anything except small, autonomous, private groups, clans, and tribes having their own little scenes.

SWAMP RATS "Psycho" from Back to the Grave Vol 1 (Crypt)

G: (chuckling) Listen to that guitar sound. I don't know who this is. It's a fantastic sound. I like the way they go off rhythm too. Wow.

FLOWER POWER "Mt Olympus" from Beyond the Calico Wall (Voxx)

G: (laughing, and clapping his hands) What the hell were they all thinking? There's that freedom we were talking about earlier. What was that bit there, was that a guitar sound, like a strangled cat bit? (chuckling) Where did you find these? I've got quite a lot of compilations but these I've not heard before. (listening back to the track) The freakout doesn't go with the little kind of cutesy, nice song at all-

A: Yeah, it's still the same tune.

G: Fabulous. (track ends, Genesis laughs and applauds). Wonderful.

A: So the moral of the story is, rock music was pretty radical in the 60s (laughs).

G: I think so. When everything got amplified and there were very few effects, people had to push limited equipment to its limits. It brought out the best in people in terms of exploring, looking for something that was surprising even to them. I remember the progression; it got so that you would literally hear something, almost every week, that you'd never heard before. And that's a really fantastic landscape to be in. The first time you hear Strictly Personal by Beefheart, with all the phasing on it, first time you hear the Velvet Underground with the viola... logic seemed to become irrelevant, which I thought was wonderful. It was almost as if there was a competition to become as irrational as possible. It gave a lot of people the sense, just like punk did, that they could have a go, and opening for them to experiment and have a look at what could happen. The really early Pink Floyd, if you look at those films of them, they're slicker, but they're not that far removed from what's happening there, they just figured out a way to arrange it and place things so it just was more convincing. Syd Barrett was fascinating with sound in and of itself. Rolling ball bearings up and down the strings of the guitar... he actually converted the echoplex from the ones that the telephone company used for the automatic clock when you rang up.
Brion Gysin used to call those "hot spots"; there were certain moments in culture where there was a hot spot and all of a sudden for 2 or 3 years, usually not much more, there was this incredibly overwhelming explosion of possibilities and experiments because of a piece of technology, or a theory like the cut-ups. Often technology and/or a drug combined, for some reason those two things together often trigger the hot spots.
One of the things that I really find with records like that is somewhere amongst those 3 to 5 minutes there's one sound that's genius. So that's when we started to do the Electric Newspaper, just started to collect all our favorite moments from those. One weird guitar or bass line, or somebody screaming something, just collaging them together.

A: The other interesting thing about that era is the imposed time limit, where everything had to be under 3 minutes to be played on the radio, so people started to pack as much information into those 3 minutes as they possibly could. A band like the Music Machine, all those songs are very, very sophisticated in the way they're structured; "Talk Talk" is two minutes exactly, but it seems like there's a dozen different sections.

G: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to be learned from how they can tell such a complex story in such a short time. I'm still endlessly studying how they do that, cause I find it really hard to make songs short. It's a skill; that's another example of limitations creating something very special.
Today it's almost a reflection of that inertia I was talking about in the culture, the equipment is built to impose a sort of mean average, it can't be overdriven or bent or twisted to do unexpected things it wasn't supposed to do. I'm surprised that it's inspiring, really, I don't know why people think the expected is exciting. I'm not surprised that more and more musicians I run into are collecting old equipment. Remember those circular fuzz faces? I used to have one of those in Throbbing Gristle, to go with my violin. I could just hit the button and it would go (makes noise) and I could do a rhythm with it, just amazing, completely over the top feedback but with a note in it. Then they decided to make them again because people were collecting them, so I bought one of the new ones and it didn't do that at all. You can't get all the little electrical parts, they don't make them anymore, and if you do get them they're not the same because they're so good at making stuff now, electronically, that it doesn't have any built in flaws. Makes me wonder what happens to the minds of young people growing up in a culture where everything is condensed and limited and compressed, what happens to the way they hear things and what happens to the way they see things. When I see modern movies now, it's the same software for all the special effects, and I find it tedious and irritating.
One reason I started PTV again was I think there's really room for people to remind the younger generation of the whole visceral, out of control live experience, a real live gig, a five minute song becomes 15 minutes and the lyrics are different, and there's all this visual stuff happening. We've played 20 countries already and the most common response is "Wow, I didn't know gigs could be like that."
We're in a very strange place now with culture becoming more global, MTV, VH1, satellite TV and the internet... there's less and less room for authentic experience, in terms of collective musical experience. Bands in the 60s, in the first explosion of electric groups, if you read the stories of the Beatles and the Stones, they're playing two or three times a night, and each gig was two sets, and then they'd be playing somewhere else the next night, and the next night, and some of them were doing 300 or more nights a year.

A: I remember seeing a schedule for an early Stones tour in the U.S. and they would play a show in Philadelphia in the afternoon and then a show in New York the same night.

G: What was exciting was the only way to experience the Stones, or whoever, was to go and see them. A live event is always a completely different experience to listening at home. And I've always felt very strongly that recordings, whether they be records or CDs, that those should be viewed as a completely separate project to playing live. You shouldn't be trying to play an exact replica of the record when you play live, that's pointless. I've always thought that a live experience should be as immersive and multisensory as possible.

A: I think people's listening, before the advent of records, was much more intense, cause they knew they wouldn't have a chance to hear an orchestral piece, or something like that, very often.

G: That's very true.

A: And even sheet music or a home piano was the idea of trying to re-create a live experience in the home, but a tinker-toy reproduction of it.

G: My father and my uncles would get together on a Saturday and they all played different instruments.

A: So much of performance is about image, that when you divorce the sound from that it's just harder to be sold on it; I find that I really have to see a band live to feel like I've gotten the full idea of what they're trying to do.

G: Sometimes it takes a long time. I've always liked the Pretty Things, they started to do gigs again a few years ago, and they were amazing. Everything that I'd liked was five times better, and they were fun to watch. It made me fall in love with them all over again on a much deeper level.

A: I saw ? and the Mysterians about 10 years ago at Maxwell's-

G: YEAAHH! Aren't they great?

A:--and they came out and they had Roland keyboards and I'm thinking "oh no, I hope this isn't some updated version of this." But they started playing and it sounded exactly (snaps fingers) like 1966, unbelievable. The way they built the set up, it got more and more and more intense, and they finally played "96 Tears", which was completely over the top.

G: We took him to England when we did Royal Festival Hall, we had ? and the Mysterians, and Billy childish and the Headcoatees, and MMoJ, Quentin Crisp introducing everything, and then Thee Majesty, and then the Alex Fergusson lineup of PTV. ? was fabulous. He was so excited, he got to play in front of 4,000 people.
A lot of bands are very lazy in terms of the way they perform these days. That's one reason I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is that Karen O puts herself in 100%. Whether it looks ridiculous or not doesn't matter, she'll wear ridiculous things, deliberately trip up, it's great. In fact Nick Zinner plays on our new album. I remixed one of their songs from their last album, "Y Control". The other person who's guesting on our new album is Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers.

CHARLES MANSON "ego" from Lie (ESP)

G: Charlie.

A: I hadn't heard this record in about 20 years, and I was really amazed at how much he sounds like Van Morrison in Them, and there's some songs that reminded me of Arthur Lee.

G: It would have been interesting if they'd given him an actual band to work with. I mean, Squeaky and everybody trying to keep the rhythm on bongos in the background didn't really help very much (laughs). There's no question he had some talent.

A: I kind of listened to it again wondering if he was a kind of original freak-folk character, but it really just sounds like he's another aspiring, California singer-songwriter, he must have heard Arthur Lee since Bobby Beausoleil was playing in one of Arthur Lee's pre-Love bands.

G: Yeah, and Love were playing constantly on the Sunset Strip. Did you read that book about Love that came out?

A: I actually played with Arthur Lee about 10, 12 years ago.

G: You did?! Is he as crazy as he sounds in the book?

A: He's a complex person, let's put it that way. You could almost see him changing gears, sometimes he would be really on the ball, saying "I should be making a cut of the bar at this gig, I've been in this business for thirty years, I know how it's supposed to work", and then you could see him slip out of that and be the kind of free-spirited, head-in-the-clouds guy most of his fans might imagine him to be. To some extent, he's crazy like a fox, but on the other hand, that over-complexity is exacerbated by the drugs and alcohol. One of his friends told me that he once saw Arthur drink two bottles of tequila in an hour.

G: (gasps) How's he still alive?

A: Good question (laughs).

A: I know you were interested in Manson's philosophy is that something you still reflect on?

G: No, no, that was a long time ago. It seemed more relevant when I lived in England and I had a very biased view of American culture, as did most Europeans. And having lived here now for 12 or 13 years I've moderated my disgust (laughs). I used to think that he was the classic thing in the 60s, when it first all came out. That he was the inevitable ghost in the closet of culture here. Someone had to end up being Charlie Manson because of the hypocrisy. He transcended his own limitations and lack of education and had sort of an epiphany through being given so much media attention, that he actually made some very astute criticisms of the corruption going on in American media and politics that were just being ignored. It was a very relevant critique, the reasons that American culture was losing its creativity and inspiration and becoming more paranoid and fear driven. Kind of ironic that something that created fear exposed a fear-driven society. I suppose like many people who live on the fringes of society, marginalized people, I initially would tend to root for the underdog. Nowadays I think there's also a side that one has to confess to which is that he was also a thug. Also there's no question in my mind that he didn't get a fair trial.

A: People tended to look at the Family as a kind of evil twin to hippie culture and the flower children.

G: I think that was exploited, though. I don't think it was the evil twin of the flower child at all, because there was Mel Lyman, there were lots of nasty cults. I think the LSD amplified that in ways that no one expected. That was one of the things that was revealed, all drugs are amplifiers in one way or another, and LSD was an amplifier of the crevices and cracks of the mind. It was the equivalent of splitting the atom with the mind, you don't always know what you're gonna get when you do that. I was friends with Timothy Leary but his gung ho, "everybody should take acid" was a flawed idea. It's not that straightforward. If you're going to tinker with the mind on that level, you've got to have an awful lot of safety measures in place. I think things became very irresponsible and thoughtless in terms of the accessorizing of alternative culture, until it reached the point that we were talking about earlier, of "let's take two tabs of acid and go to the pub, and maybe end up having a fight, like we always did." It wasn't the perfect pill to change people's personalities.

A: It's also interesting, all the nicknames that people in the Family had, and in the Factory too, and going into the punk era people were changing their last names.

G: I'm reading this book of Bob Dylan interviews, and a couple of times people asked him why he changed his name, and he said "we're born as nothing, a name is what you make of it, and Bob Dylan is a name I wanted to grow into." It's an old tried and tested technique which obviously I've used in my own life, the name you get given at birth I think should be seen as a temporary tag, and it goes with the families and the social groups and the expectations of what we're supposed to become, and if that tag doesn't fit what you imagine you want to become it should be discarded, changing names is a really potent form of magic. It's also well-known in any study of cults, that another way of controlling people is to remove their previous name and give them one of their own. Because when you do that you become parental, you're taking control of who they might become. When you join the Freemasons you get a secret name, and so on.

A: But criminals also use aliases as a way to elude identification, and to me being a musician, especially on an underground level, is a lot like being an outlaw. I remember looking at the back cover of No New York and thinking the pictures all looked like mug shots. (G chuckles)

G: I hadn't thought of that but it's true. I've actually been an outlaw, literally, as well. And since I changed my name legally it's kind of ironic, it starts as a statement of separation from traditional society, that I'm going to be this other character, that I'm building, but then it labeled me with this name that was really easy to spot when going through customs and so on. It makes moving around invisibly more difficult, there's pros and cons depending on how well known the alias becomes.

A: So much of songwriting is stealing, too. To go back to Dylan, a lot of the songs on his first records are appropriated from other people or are traditional melodies. Which is part of the folk tradition, but if you know that book Positively 4th Street, there's a story in there about how Joan Baez stole her entire early stage show--songs, singing style, everything--from this other folksinger in Cambridge, Debbie Green. She started off mimicking this person.

G: That's almost like voodoo or something, isn't it? I always liked that band name Pop Will Eat Itself, I always thought that was very true... it is an organic process. For example, with Throbbing Gristle, "Zyklon B Zombie" is exactly the same structure as "I Heard Her Call My Name", and because it was so apparent, to me, I sang "and then my mind split open" to make it clear that I knew that it was the same structure. And then I found out years later that the other members of TG didn't realize.

YA HO WA "Journey Thru An Elemental Kingdom" from Penetration (Higher Key)

G: Sort of sounds like Can.

A: It's Ya Ho Wa, they were a rock band in the 70s but also sort of a cult centered around this guy named Father Yod in California. With Psychic TV you had the Temple of Psychic Youth, a kind of cult, to go along with it; what was the beginning of that idea, how did you feel it turned out?

G: (Laughs) That's a big question isn't it. Funnily enough I hadn't thought of it, but there was actually a TOPY event where we sounded a bit like that (the track), going into this heavy drumming thing, with Alex Fergusson doing guitar over it. It was in an abandoned synagogue, the sound was amazing. If you whispered on one side you could hear everything on the other side. The TOPY idea grew from conversations with Monte Cazazza, we were throwing ideas back and forth. What would happen if a band actually accepted the adulation that happens, instead of seeing the fans as either the commoners, or maintaining a distance from them, seeing them as kind of a necessary but irritating part of what happens; what happens if you designed them, or took that energy and worked with it? There'd been an article about David Bowie where he'd come from the station and was driven in a car and done this kind of pastiche of being a German officer in an open-top car, there were all these scandalous bits in the paper about what if one of these people with all of their fans was a Nazi, or had a cult, and we picked up on that and said, yeah, what if? What if something took that and deliberately embraced it to see what would happen? That was the original premise.
So we thought of the idea of the uniform, even if you wear the same grey uniform it's the details that make you unique. That it's impossible to all look the same, it's a contradiction in terms.
Being a paramilitary occult organization sort of needed some content. I'd been getting more and more interested in the side effects of some of these shamanic rituals that I'd been exploring, basically designed it to be an open-ended exploration of if there was information and content beyond just music, why should the back of the record just be stuff about the band, why not have it be an essay about something that concerns you about what's going on in the world, or whatever. Much to our surprise, lots and lots of people wrote to us, we put some information on our first album, gave it this clear image and look, the shaved head and everything, and it worked, people wanted to know more. We did it as an anti-cult, really. We said ok, you have to send 23 pounds and we'll send you the grey book and it will tell you what you need to know. It said how to do a sort of simple sex magic ritual, and essay about fear controlled societies, and some propanganda about what we were thinking, and lo and behold, all of a sudden, there were 10,000 people involved worldwide. And the government of England got really scared by it (laughs). It was very effective. We had stations and autonomous groups that looked after different geographical areas, and we kept having to split it up because there were more and more people. People would organize events, and concerts, and do books, and records, start labels, all kinds of things-we had 2 or 3 book publishing companies, about 5 labels. Once a year people who were more active would come from all over the world and we'd go off to a farm up north, there was a big stone circle there, the farmer gave us permission to camp out. You could run around naked and take magic mushrooms and talk about what we thought was right with the world and wrong with the world... basically, we came to the conclusion that nothing would improve except by changing human behavior. And how do you do that? We realized that the rituals and all the things we were doing were cut ups, we were doing cut ups with behavior, the same way that you break up the linearity of literature with cut ups or the linearity of music with sampling. And it backfired, the wonderful design that was paramilitary made it very easy for the media to paint us as neo-Nazi. And then of course the sex part freaked them out, anything that pro-sexual is a threat... and the basic fact that we were trying, truly, to attempt to affect the evolution of the human species in a small way was seen as extremely threatening. Because we were a very active organization and very self-motivating, we were involved in closing the dolphin area, in Brighton where I lived, which was a 1 and a half million dollar a year business. We worked with the anti-apartheid movement, we worked with gay liberation... my way of explaining it is, if you think of one of those one-armed bandits in Las Vegas with the circles that go round, eventually Scotland Yard pulled the lever and my name popped up on all of them. Everything that they didn't like, all the activities that they were against, I was involved in some way. That's how it looked to them. Of course we were also involved with raves and acid house, so everywhere they turned, everything they were threatened by or scared of, or trying to stop, we were encouraging (laughs). There was bound to be a clash at some point.
It was always meant to be an anarchic organization with no one in charge, but I miscalculated how much people want someone to tell them what to do. We spent more time, in the end, trying to think of more ways to avoid there being any hint of hierarchy than we did doing anything useful. It got just ludicrous; and then, of course, the people who were at the center of it, doing the most work, who were also financing it-Psychic TV and everyone else involved was spending their own money to do it-were losing money as well. We just decided there was no way around it, we'd just have to quit, to stop it. We were driving along one day and there was a sign up by some roadwork that said "changed priorities ahead." And I said, that's it, that's what has to happen next (laughs). So we printed all these nice postcards that said "Changed Priorities Ahead" and then sent them to everybody, and that was it (claps hands), the end, they had to figure it out for themselves. We never figured out how to change behavior, it seems pretty obvious it's down to each person. It worked rather well but it caused me an awful lot of aggravation in the end.

WOLF EYES: from Live Scum (Hanson)

G: I don't know what that is.

A: It's Wolf Eyes.

G: Oh, Wolf Eyes, they played with us a couple of times. They didn't sound like that, maybe cause live it's much louder.

A: Olson is playing sax on that, which he doesn't always play. Those guys each have their own labels, and they release what seems like every single show they play (laughs), which is something TG did with the 24 Hours box on Industrial. Is this something you've taken notice of over the years? And what was the thinking in making that statement of releasing every live show at the time?

G: well, one thing was because none of us could play traditionally, certainly couldn't then, the only way to remember what we'd done was to tape it. Early on when I'd been going to hang out with Burroughs in London, I asked him what was the best tape recorder to get. And he told me to get this Sony tape recorder that had a nice condenser mic in it. The first TG album was recorded on that tape recorder in our space. From the very beginning when we started experimenting with sound in a band format, I just recorded everything, based on Burroughs' advice, thinking at the very least it would be raw material that something could be made out of. The first release we did was a cassette, The Best of Throbbing Gristle Vol. 1, and that was just bits that we thought worked the best, edited together. We used that as a template to see if we could reproduce any of those sounds. Our way of learning to play was creating bits of tape and each week we'd meet Friday, Saturday, Sunday and play hours and hours and record stuff and then listen to it, and then over the period of a whole year, we developed a sound, and enough proficiency to be able to do something for an hour. But it was loose enough that it was still worth recording to see how it sounded afterwards. So that just slipped from learning how to be TG to recording what TG was. We recorded the gigs so that eventually we could edit our favorite bits and that became the first album. One side was bits from gigs, and the other side was just playing in the space.
TG did, altogether, about 30 gigs, and I just came up with the title one day, 24 Hours of Throbbing Gristle. That worked... the others also thought that was witty and interesting, and what better way to show the development of the band from stage one right through, lay it out and just say there it is. There's every gig. Seemed like a good idea (laughs). We decided to do it on cassette tapes, Chris and Sleazy found these high-speed cassette duplicators so we could make 5 copies at a time. We rang up Virgin Megastore and said we've got this project, do you think you'd be interested in buying one or two to sell, and they said "we'll buy 120." I think we made about 118 and just couldn't stand it anymore.
We did our Industrial newsletters people started to send us cassettes of their music, so we would print all the addresses of people who'd sent us their music, so they started to swap them, so we did encourage people to start setting up networks and exchanging cassettes. So I think we played some part in that approach.

A: I think Wolf Eyes would admit that they were influenced by TG.

G: There seems to be a renaissance of bands that have been influenced by aspects of TG. They don't try and copy TG they'll take one aspects of our experiments which they particularly find interesting and they'll pursue that and explore it and develop it into something which flowers in its own way.

A: it's sort of like the Velvet underground in that way, that's its inspired a lot of bands that just take one aspect of it.

G: I always thought it would be nice to be in a band that people thought would be worthy of being influenced by but I didn't honest

© The Wire 2009

All Credits: Wire [Adventures in Modern Music Magazine]

Article Genesis P-Orridge in Wire Magazine #182 | Arto Lindsay | April 1999

2009-09-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry, but I dont found the article

Genesis P-Orridge - Constructivism, 1987

2009-09-19T12:04:00.001-07:00

Constructivism, 1987
Mixed media - 12.5 x 21.25 inches

Genesis P-Orridge - Assume Power Focus, 1977

2009-09-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Assume Power Focus, 1977
Mixed media (two-sided) - 11 x 8 1/4 inches

Genesis P-Orridge - Untitled (Mail art to Robert Delford Brown), 1975

2009-09-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

Untitled (Mail art to Robert Delford Brown), 1975
Mixed media - 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches

Genesis P-Orridge - Flowering Pain Give Space, 1998

2009-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Flowering Pain Give Space, 1998
Mixed media - 17.5 x 12 inches on 22 x 14 inch pape

Genesis P-Orridge - Untitled (mail art to Ana Banana), 1977

2009-09-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

Untitled (mail art to Ana Banana), 1977
Mixed media - 6 x 4 inches

Genesis P-Orridge - Electric Newspaper, Issue Two, 1995

2009-09-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Electric Newspaper, Issue Two, 1995
Mixed media - 9 x 9 inches on 15.25 x 12 inch paper

Genesis P-Orridge - Sunflowers, 2002

2009-09-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

Sunflowers, 2002
Mixed media - 23.25 x 16 inches on 30 x 20 inch paper

Genesis P-Orridge - Thee Fractured Garden, 1995

2009-09-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thee Fractured Garden, 1995

Mixed media - 12 x 12 inches on 20 x 16 inch paper

Genesis P-Orridge - 30 Years of Being Cut Up

2009-09-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

“30 Years of Being Cut Up” is a three decade retrospective of photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, which includes many works never exhibited before, as well as a sampling of Genesis P-Orridge’s early Mail Art. The show will mark the culmination of a new, re-emergent phase in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s life.

Press Released HERE

Notice - Psychic TV gig cancelled due to transgender discrimination

2009-09-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

Anderson's cancels band with transgender lead singer

Lesley Wright and Peter Corbett
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 24, 2007 05:34 PM

SCOTTSDALE - A Scottsdale nightclub embroiled in controversy over accusations of transgender discrimination has canceled a concert planned for Monday that would have featured a transgender singer.
Anderson's Fifth Estate was set to stage Psychic TV and lead singer Genesis P-Orridge, who reportedly had breast-enlargement surgery on Valentine's Day 2003 with his wife Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.
But club owner Tom Anderson on Friday canceled the performance, saying that the outside promoter who booked the band had not informed him that it included a transgender front-person.

Anderson said he had planned to let the concert proceed, but then received word that transgender advocates planned to picket the event and crash the concert.

"After looking at the potential for disruption and after consulting with my attorney, Chuck Kelhoffer, I felt I had no choice but to pull the plug on the event," Anderson said.

Psychic TV and its predecessor, Throbbing Gristle, are known for over-the-edge experimental, psychedelic and industrial music.Transgender patrons of Anderson's Fifth Estate, 6820 E. Fifth Ave.,would have gotten a bathroom of their own for one night if the concert had proceeded.
The Arizona Attorney General's Office is investigating a civil-rights complaint from Michele deLaFreniere that Anderson discriminated against her and other transgender patrons when he banned them from the downtown Scottsdale club.
Anderson said he acted after a group of transgender patrons created a stir when they used the women's bathroom.
Women complained and threatened to take their business elsewhere, Anderson said.
For Monday's show, which features a band, Psychic TV, with a transgender lead singer, Anderson's was to have had a transgender bathroom as well as one for women and men.
The nightclub could not always do that because the three bathrooms are not large enough, Anderson said, adding that one has just a single stall.
"I'm not changing my stance," Anderson said, noting that businesses are not required to provide unisex bathrooms. Anderson declined to voluntarily attend a meeting earlier this month at the Attorney General's Office to answer questions about the alleged discrimination, saying he would only respond if he were issued a subpoena.

From: AZ Central

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Por Richard Metzger

2009-09-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Born in Manchester, England, 1950, Member of Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration, 1969-70. Conceived and founded seminal British "performance art" group Coum Transmissions, 1969; pioner co-founder (with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Cris Carter) os Trobbing Gristle, 1975; co-founder (with Alex Fergusson) of hyperdelic acid house innovators Psychic TV, 1981; founded spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty 1999, invented the term/genre industrial music (with Monte Cazazza) September 3rd, 1975, releasing more than 200CDs of ezperiments in music to date. Has worked and collaborated with Beatnik writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin; radical queer filmmaker Derek Jarman; psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary and many others luminaries. Early pionner/innovator of Acid House/Rave Movement in UK and USA from early 80s-mid-90s. Early champion of internet and commentator on its media virus cultural implications, often collaborating with Douglas Rushkoff, Richard Metzger and other leading figures in Cyberia. He has published thousands of articles, texts, interviews covering the functional and metaphysical implications and strategies of popular culture. Also explored human behavior, ritual, and personality modification through splintering of expectation in private magical situations to create neo-shamanic collaged paintings called "sigils". Currently resides in the new York area as an author, ultural engineer/commentator and fine artist. Has performed his improvised "Expanded Poetry" as THEE MAJESTY (with guitarist Bryin Dali, guitarist Lady J. and tabla player Larry Thrasher) at arts festivals and music venues all over the USA and Europe since 1998. A monograph on his fine art Painful But Fabulous (Soft Skull Press, NYC) has been publisehd and exhibitions, installations and lectures are held across Europe and the USA.
Website at: www.genesisp-orridge.com
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.
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Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult Por Richard Metzger

Paul Laffoley - The Alchemy of History

2009-09-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Alchemy of History, Paul Laffoley, 17" x 21" ink, letters on board, 1975

"To now death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gallbladder."
-Udo Kier in Andy Warhol's Frakenstein.

Paul Laffoley - Thanaton III

2009-09-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

Thanaton III, Paul Laffoley, 73 1/2'' x 73 1/2'' oil, acrylic, ink and lettering on canvas, 1989

From the collection of Richard metzer

"The aesthetitcs of death is having a pseudo-posthumous revival"

The Horrorist - Room of Poser's (Letra)

2009-04-18T04:29:00.000-07:00

Room Of Posers

.
Walking around the nightclub
all the people make me sick.
Dancing and having a goodtime
oh there all just full of shit.
.
Yeah I have to slip myself something
there's nothing else to do.
I"m in a room of posers
and you know i'm looking at you!
.
She's in makeup ads
She's a beauty queen
she throws up on the floor.
He's an independant filmstar
but really just a faggit whore!
.
The princess of bolemia
dancing with the kind of queer
all there problems twisted together
I can't help but stop and stare!
.
All the people dance around look at all the fools.
All the people dance around look at all the fools.
All the people dance around look at all the fools.
.
The dj spins some records
he think he is a musician.
The bouncers think there tough guys
but they are just big and fat.
The bartender's a slut
and the barbacks are illegal.
It makes me really wonder
why do i fit in?
...

Futurisk - Video's

2009-04-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

Futurisk - Meteoright

Futurisk - Army Now

Pavillon 7B - The Sailor (Letra)

2009-04-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

[ pavillon 7b - the sailor ]
.

i, love you!

(i... i was, i... i... was, i wasn't scared, i swim, i mustn't swim, i swear?)

you find within you find my mind
you find the big deep man in me
you find the stream you find the gate
you find the filling in the bed
you find the rail you'll find the beast
you find the red beast on my way
you find the stream you find the gate
you find the filling in...,
THE BED

i... i wasn't scared...!

you find the beam you find my mind
you find the big deep man in me
you find the stream you find the gate
you find the filling in the bed
you find the rail you'll find the beast
you find the red beast on my way
you find the stream you find the gate
you find the filling in...,
THE BED

were trying out sex, a no good exercise
were trying out sex, a no good exercise
were trying out sex, a no good exercise
were trying out sex, a no good exercise

i wasn't scared, i wasn't i wasn't scared!

i'm a sailor on your sea
i'm a sailor on your sea
i'm a sailor on your sea

i'm a sailor on your sea
x1,000 background lyric (you're trying out sex as a good exercise)

César vallejo

2009-04-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

"999 calorías.
Rumbbb... Trrraprrr rrach... chaz
Serpentinica u del bizcochero"

César vallejo, Trilce, XXXII

Décio Pignatari

2009-04-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

E arrancou minha pele sem sangue

E partiu encoberto com ela
Atirando-me os poros na cara.
Décio Pignatari.

Giacomo Balla - Manifesto futurista da roupa masculina. 1913

2009-04-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Giacomo Balla - Página do "Manifesto futurista da roupa masculina". 1913

"Flutucaféchique Rosaverdastocheio transpomotocar lojalegucorte
casabrancazupreta aerobitucharutal céutelhamareluz fotocinechato
barbebumzoado"

Antonio Sant'Elia - Aeroporto e estação ferroviária ...1914

2009-04-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

Antonio Sant'Elia - Aeroporto e estação ferroviária com elevadores e funiculares sobre rua de três niveis 1914

Oswald de Andrade

2009-04-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

"Contra o Padre Vieira. Autor do nosso primeiro empréstimo, para ganhar comissão. O rei-analfabeto dissera-lhe : ponha isso no papel mas sem muita lábia. Fez-se o empréstimo. Gravou-se o açúcar brasileiro. Vieira deixou o dinheiro em Portugal e nos trouxe a lábia.

OSWALD DE ANDRADE Manifesto Antropófago - Em Piratininga Ano 374 da Deglutição do Bispo Sardinha." (Revista de Antropofagia, Ano 1, No. 1, maio de 1928.)