Kids These Days

“They’re awful, they frighten me, they’re evil and wicked and dangerous!” – Nicky Gore, The Changes

A mate went to see Stewart Lee perform live recently, and we discussed how odd it is for him to be now considered a member of the comedy “old guard” when he is in fact the same age as me. We also discussed how he represents perhaps the last of a dying species – the ranter. Albeit a ranter with jokes, but a ranter nonetheless, who refuses to accept the myriad idiocies of the world and is going to say his piece, whether you like it or not. The other “comedians” I see these days are either trying to outshout each other on rigourously-scripted panel shows, or are prancing about before the cameras for the now-mandatory Xmas DVD release. I’m not going to name names, because I think the vast majority are complete twats, and it would take me too long.

Stewart Lee still has it though, and I recently stumbled across a clip of him discussing the changes in children’s TV during his lifetime, comparing the likes of 70’s programmes like Children of the Stones and The Changes with the likes of today’s Skins. Needless to say, the latter does not come out favourably in his assessment but he does explain his argument well. In the Children of the Stones, first broadcast in 1976, you had the bloke out of Blake’s 7 (Gareth Thomas) playing Professor Brake, an astrophycisist who brings his son Matthew to the village of Milbury, which sits inside a megalithic stone circle. The village seems to exist within it’s own pocket of space/time, where the same things appear to happen again and again, and the Prof and Matthew are there to investigate. Shown in 1977, on ITV, it’s now something of a cult classic, mainly because so many kids of that era were still tuned into Blue Peter. I remember it being an odd piece of work though, with an creepy atmosphere that pervaded throughout. They’d captured the same sense of unspecific dread you feel as a kid when you’re suddenly strayed outside of known territory. We see the events unfold through Matthew’s eyes, and feel his fear and increasing sense of disquiet as the adults begin to behave in ways he’s not familiar with.

The Changes, starts with a similar premise, except this time events aren’t contained within a village. Instead, the whole adult world has gone mad, responding to a strange noise coming from all forms of machinery by smashing anything that might be the source. Society breaks down as a result, many people flee the cities, and those left behind try to make some sense of it all. The main character is Nicky Gore, a teenager who’s been abandoned by her parents and left to survive alone in a post-apocalyptic Britain. Filmed around Bristol and Gloucestershire, the location team’s made the most of the eerie post-war landscapes and marching armies of sinister pylons, which carry the “bad wires” that Nicky fears.

Skins is also filmed in Bristol, but there the comparisons end. Skins has no sense of mystery, or awe. All it’s about a bunch of spoiled, narcissistic, and ignorant teenagers who’s lives revolve around texting, skinning up and copping off. The odd hoolie gets chucked in to provide a modicum of challenge and danger, but for the most part fuck all happens except for texting, skinning up and copping off. I’ve seen enough of it to know that it’s loathsome and that the minds behind its creation – that’s the Channel 4 writers and production teams – are globules of pink bubblegum floating in vats of liquid excreta. Stewart Lee makes the excellent observation that the appeal of programmes like The Changes and Children of the Stones was that the children watching would be drawn into the drama of Matthew and Nicky’s circumstances, both of whom were virtually the sole child characters in a world full of adults up to no good. Children feeling alone and frightened by the outside world bearing down on them, could take reassurance that there were other kids out there in much worse situations, and they were surviving. Lee suggests that feeling of fear is a truer reflection of what it’s like to be a teenager, whereas Skins seems to only increase the sense of alienation, in that if you’re not already part of that priveleged world of casual affluence, if you’re not as cool and as elegantly wasted as them, then you should fuck off.

Are the attitudes that inform Skins a reflection of the times we live in, or are they an exaggeration of the tabloid-stoked fears about rampaging teens and the imminent descent into total chaos? Lee says: “I’m really glad I’m not a teenager watching TV for teenagers now, because I think I’d feel really left out watching something like Skins. But there’s something really comforting for nerds and weirdoes about things like Children of the Stones and Changes, things that make you feel less alone, and that’s a really great thing that art can do, whereas something like Skins would make me, as a teenager, feel more alone.”

All Beauty Is Our Enemy

There is no beauty without strangeness.
Karl Lagerfeld

And this is strange enough for me, thank you very much.

Merzbow & Genesis P. Orridge – All Beauty Is Our Enemy

How To Blow Yourself Up

This show is happening right now at the Subliminal Projects Gallery in LA. 5000 miles is a bit too far for me to be bothered, but if someone is going to blow themselves up for ‘art’ – which was my initial assumption when I read about it – then it’s would be sure to make the evening news. But, of course, it’s nothing of the sort, just the usual art-world tomfoolery, this time instigated by French street artist WK. His intention was all about “getting into the heads of various individuals who may not usually or stereotypically attach themselves to such acts but who are equally desirous of controlling destiny.”

Of course. WK made his name with the large scale street paintings of blurred black & white faces, looking like a grainy photo dragged across the screen of a photocopier. His work has made the now de rigeur transition from ginnel to gallery, but he’s not resting on his laurels, oh no. this is a man with a mission, and a message: “We are all wired with our own internal detonators, with switches, which activate on achieving a boiling point. The artificial devices provided in the pieces, encourage the individuals, who reach that point, to reflect on their state of affairs which have brought them to the point of pressing buttons.”

Research of bomb-making techniques came via stripping down motorbike engines, so he could have gone the whole way had he wanted to. How many artists really want their audiences dead though? Anyway, this blatant stunt certainly got my attention, not because I think it’s particularly good, but it’s certainly the first time I’ve seen an artist tackle the modern phenomenon of the suicide bomber head on. It’s such an unfathomable act of faith to an agnostic like me, but trust the zeitgeist to be prepared to co-opt even this for its own ends:

I guess in a very unsubtle way it is the perfect conjunction of sex & death, and I suppose a gesture like strapping on a load of explosives and then blowing yourself up amidst a crowd of strangers does invite an equally unsubtle response. I must say that I’m surprised WK’s street art contemporaries have yet to “appropriate” this image and stencil it all over the place. It come pre-loaded with all the ‘controversy’ they could wish for. In the meantime, a rival artistic response to that of WK’s comes from Julian Cope and his new band Black Sheep, who quite reasonably argue that perhaps these true believers are in for a bit of a shock when they press the detonator and realise they’ve been had in the oldest con game there is.

Julian Cope & Black Sheep – All The Blow-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Were Suckers)

Icky Thump: the art of Barnaby Ward

Everyone, it seems, likes this bloke’s work and it’s not hard to see why. Instantly appealing to the eye, his drawings of saucy waif’s and strange chimera suggest too many viewings of Yellow Submarine at too young an age, subsequently fed through a kaleidoscope of manga, anime and obscure Eurocomics. He lives and works on the island of Barbados, but the imagery he uses – particularly in his single illustrations – suggests he fell down a rabbit hole in Ladbroke Grove 1969 and has yet to emerge from the strange subterranean fantasy land that he discovered down there.

He’s been doing his thing for about six years now, after a period spent working in graphic design drove him to “relearn how to draw” using the now ubiquitous artists tools of Photoshop and Wacom tablet. Looking at his work I’d assumed it was all done with pen & paper, then scanned and coloured using a PC but it’s perhaps a testament to his skills that he’s able to so succesfully replicate the skittery line of the Isograph pen in a virtual medium.

His work has been published in the book Sixteen Miles to Merricks, but you’re more likely to see his imagery cropping up in all areas of the pop culture, which is ever hungry for new stylists. Not that there’s anything especially “new” about his style. It’s a consciously-assimilated nostalgia for a past he probably never directly experienced, but the carefully-considered colour palette and sparse compositions are undoubtedly eye-catching.

By far his most impressive work for me has been his “reimagining” of Alice In Wonderland, imbuing Carroll’s creations with a necessary sinister quality, and, in Alice, unleashing her sexuality by aging her a few years, dressing her like a porn star-cum-catwalk model, and leaving her at the mercies of Wonderland’s creepy inhabitants. These beg to be featured in a new edition of the story, though perhaps not one bound for the Children’s section in Waterstones.

Black: Implication Flooding

Black: Implication Flooding - album cover mock-up by Rik Rawling

I mocked-up this cover a while ago, and remain so pleased with the result that I thought I’d share it with you all. The album itself is - if you’re at all familiar with the ouevre of Keiji Haino - pretty much par for the course, with Boris adding little except increased volume. It’s the usual absurdly exagerrated interpretation of the standard rock & roll template that only the Japanese seem to be able to manage but, as I’ve said before, expect weird shit from the only people on Earth to have had an atomic bomb dropped on them.

Boris & Keiji Haino – Not Knowing If It Would Be Agony Or Comfort For Us

Idol Thoughts

Billy Idol

I know, I know, Billy Idol was/is/always will be “crap”, a joke, a self-parody and an exemplar of all that was wrong with the 1980’s. But this picture suggests otherwise – a failed third division late-to-the-party punk rocker who came good amidst the phantasmagoric smogs of Los Angeles. A life far more interesting than that experienced or even dreamt of by most of his critics, and a life lived to the fullest, which is all that any of us can ask from our brief time on this insane meatball as it hurtles through space/time. I know he’s not died or anything, I just felt like celebrating this larger-than-life character, of which there are increasingly fewer these days. 

Billy Idol – White Wedding

Mate, Spawn & Die

Mate, Spawn & Die

Hair by mail
Tit jobs for teens
Go broke appearing rich
Searching for rosebud in the fire
Pop stars fingers in the fans
The therapist you wish you had
Crucifix or lubricant
Government by fad!

I know it reads like a selection of newspaper headlines, but this is just the opening verse to Lard’s epic ‘Mate, Spawn & Die’, which is arguably the only one that Biafra, Jourgensen and co. should have ever recorded. It amused me no end to learn that during the filming of Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone insisted that appropriate music be playing to create the necessary ambience, and Lard featured heavily on the playlist. Imagine having to work day-in, day-out, filming scenes of unrestrained mayhem, with this blasting in your ears. Then again, it’s not much different from living in the modern Western world to be honest.

Lard – Mate, Spawn & Die

Double Fucked By Two Black Studs

Yoko Spungen for the 21st Century

I was at Sophie’s Bar on Fifth Street
This woman was trying to impress me or something
She told me she had done it all sexually
She had heard it all
She had seen it all
And she had done it all sexually
She said she was jaded
So I asked her if she had ever been double fucked by two black studs
And she didn’t tell me
She just got up and left
So I figured she probably hadn’t

King Missile – Double Fucked By Two Black Studs

Full Grown

Full Grown!

You must surely recognise the film being referenced here in this fine photograph. I’m normally dead set against the idea of remakes but if she was going to play Varla in a new version of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!, then I’d be all for it. In fact, I think I’ve already found the perfect theme tune:

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Full Grown

Here Be Monsters

Me, without the mask.

In recent weeks people have stumbled across PsychSkull using the following Google searches:

Witch Altar
Teen Suicide
Heinrich Himmler Brain Tissue
Meyer Tits

and, my fave…

Pelvic Bones Used In Satanic Rituals

Lovely. Anyway, here’s a tune to rev your weekend up a little:

Earthless – Jull