NARCISSISM, ARIEL PINK AND A FRENCHMAN

Self-Savagery no.2: To sabotage yourself truly, Narcissism is called for. Self-Savagery only works for those with delusions of grandeur, or those, like me, with real grandeur. Those who, with some application, could change the world. This possibility must exist for you to truly crush it with any poetry.


Here's a recent review, one that predates the previous entry by at least a month. We don't do things in the right order round here you know.

Ariel Pink
Luminare, Kilburn June 8th

First, the casualties: A huge Brutus causes carnage as if from a gruesome Crimean tableau upon the head of a Frenchman with the face of a poodle with Dutch Elm Disease; a one-sided fight the like of which I’ve never seen at a gig, least of all the smugly pretty Lumiere. The crowd vanishes. The Frenchman, beaten giddy, stared at the lights. Ariel Pink, oblivious, paces back and forth, immersed in some clouded melody.
Later, a request for ‘For Kate I Wait’, one of Pink's nuggety slices of drama, is met by words from Pink himself: ‘well, you can just keep on waiting. Blame Stockholm. The tapes were stolen. By Palestinian terrorists. Big Ariel Pink fans apparently.’
It all serves to highlight the brittle transience and absurdity at the heart of everything he does. Ariel Pink's music is submerged, meandering, insanely pretty; his live performances are supplemented by the four-track tape machine he recorded the songs on. As such, brilliant, unique (as in the true meaning of the word, as in never to be replicated) works now available on CD can never be performed again. The Palestinian terrorist plot rendered half of The Doldrums lost for good. There is poetry in lies and warfare. Because in an age when music doesn't get lost anymore, in an age when old sketches of great works are rediscovered and spun all over the web, Ariel Pink manages to slip between the cracks, just a little.
The debate, I imagine, in some heads, may have been something along the lines of ‘accidental-man-of-the-woods-autistic-genius or very cleverly-packaged-hipster-invention?’ but truthfully, the brilliance of The Doldrums and the subsequent records knocked that one off the minutes. Thus, the live performance, whether frustrating curio or slick performance would not detract his position in my star charts.
How would those transient songs, sucked from a rattling skull, those muffled elegies from passing car s translate? How would Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti survive in three dimensions? How about Ariel himself? How would his naivete sit with the smug beauty of the venue? Well, dressed as a troubled hero from a JT Leroy truck-stop fantasy, a witchy, sickly boy-man, he would muddle about, fidgeting fiddling, and deny himself a big entrance by conducting lengthy conversations with the sound man onstage before the show; then he'd attempt to create some kind of spectacle for himself and his two partners with bubbles and glitter, administered by themselves from the stage.
Then, the tape hissing and crackling like a comforting log fire, we begin, and the appropriation of the records work remarkably well. With additional bass and synths, the tracks wonder and wander enough to feel fresh and alive.
With a cherubic face the like of which does not exist any more (a kind of David Cassidy, Monkee-esque prettiness), he defies conventional music logic (the dur-brain assumption that pop and weird are opposite ends of a spectrum; or that ambition lies in high-fidelity recording devices), and makes widescreen Technicolor epics that dream of Eden on a tiny four-track tape. And I’m as punch-drunk as the Frenchman.