SELF-SAVAGERY no.3

Self-Savagery no3: Self-Savagery is a polemic against choice. With your talents, you could be anything; that bothers you. Do nothing well to retain choice. Do everything poorly to lose it.
‘
Everyone’s a specialist these days. They’re getting better and better at less and less; One day someone will be simply superb at precisely nothing.’ Kenneth Williams


That is all for today's lesson.

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.

POINTS REGARDING SELF-SAVAGERY--- RULES TO SUCCESS AT ROBUST FAILURE

‘I am now so superior to those around me, one wonders when anyone will take notice’ Kenneth Williams

‘Achievement, n. The death of endeavour and the birth of disgust’ Ambrose Bierce

The Self-Savagery manifesto, as created by Great-Uncle Dylan Savage in 1899 (and revised and expanded in later, equally ignored, editions), contains the wit and wisdom of an under-achiever. I, in this humble periodical, will aim to take up the mantle left by this great man, a blood relative of whom I can be truly proud. I will include some of his sweetest ideas in my blog, as and when I can be bothered to invent anymore. Here is the first to get you all started on the path to self-sabotage:

"Self-Savagery no.1:I am a genius. It is a miracle I have failed to succeed at anything. But I have managed, living a life of quiet failure and lazy underachievement."

Wonderful. Moving on, we begin, then, you assembled few, with a nod to those who have shaken us in recent times: The live byplay of the Vile Imbeciles; and the artwork of Dark Medulla.


VILE IMBECILES
Catch, 27th July

'Vile.' 'The Imbeciles' wasn't enough. 'Vile Imbeciles' it is then. Vile has something Victorian about it. And this lot's sharp blacksmithery has in it's designs, something of the hue of the masonic devilry in Alan Moore's From Hell; Brutal murder, but not just with excess in mind, but with a complex grand plan to reach some nirvana.
Their days are spent, I'm sure, making sonic sculputes in Tom Waits junkyard, from discarded metal, hexes and juju. Epic twisted creations, and no mistake, arcing cathedrals that on first evidence appear to be an ugly, intestinal mess, but reveal themselves to be, like the work of a demented Magic Band, to be an absurdly complicated treasure map.
'Autistic jazz' said some smartarse. 'I feel sick' said my main squeeze. 'Right in the stomach.'
Standing like a rictus puppet, Andy Huxley, without whose angular skeleton it seems 80's MB will continue their descent from kings of the strip to a fleshy puddle, is all Murnau shapes, his shadow playing across the midnight hour at Catch like a rickety-pretty Nosferatu. Huxley hasn't got Guy McKnight's lungs, but he has a fair old hoarse scowl, which swoops and weaves with the drummer's pterodactyl of a throat.. Drums have their ears boxed in, Neanderthal style, and are then ka-clicking and ka-clunking out some peculiar rock'n'roll,then a gammy morse; The bass notes huff and puff then blow our house in, only to build a new one from the rubble, a riff-walled monster, that itself will trip and fall into some spazzy foul-smelling funk; The stilletoes from Huxley's guitar emerge occasionally from the junk of a mix to stab strangers eyes out, but there's no time to muse on thes assanitions, as we're immediately taken off down a different back alley. Stop. Go. Stop. Go-go. Now he croons! It's a kicking rockabilly groove for a bar or two! But now they're dogfighting over the last pieces of flesh on the bone again, and it's an all-against-all, horribly-choreographed wrestle.
Oh, it's hard to be this right and sound so wrong, this correct and this messy.
The lady can't cope. We're off home in a daze, wondering if the ruptured guts of the assembled might be arranged into some kind of delicate pattern to spell out the word of some cursed god. Or is the plan even worse than that? Vile is the word.

DARK MEDULLA
Shangri-la Tattoo Parlour, 3rd August

Wine is gone, so it's free water. The illustrations are sublime. Siamese twins, footballing dogs, god-fearing hicks, twisted superhero fantasies. It all goes to display, in just coincidence no. 24 of the day, the exact contents of my dreams the previous night.

The dreams which prompted an idea for a graphic novel:
THE SUPERHERO WHO WAS ALWAYS LATE, AND SO RESOLVED TO SAVE THE WORLD BY RESETTING US TO THREE HOURS AGO!

BUT EVERY TIME, HE DISCOVERS:

A NEW DISADVANTAGE OF TIME TRAVEL!
OUR HERO HAS REVOLVED THE WORLD ON IT'S AXIS THE WRONG WAY TO RESET TIME TO THREE HOURS BEFORE! THIS SAVES US FROM THE BIG EVENT, BUT HAS UNFORSEEN CIRCUMSTANCES!

1.SOME PEOPLE WHO MOVED IN THOSE THREE HOURS WERE RIPPED ASUNDER! THEIR HEADS WERE FOUND AT HOME, THEIR INNARDS AT WORK! SOME, WHO STOOD IN THE SAME PLACE AS SOMEONE ELSE STOOD DURING THOSE THREE HOURS, BECAME A HYBRID SIAMESE BEING! A COJOINED TWIN!

2.WE WERE SAVED, BUT EVERYTHING WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE! A CHINESE FAMILY AWOKE IN VENTNOR! MEXICANS IN HINCKLEY!

3.THEN THERE WAS THE TIME WHEN THE ENTIRE WORLD AWOKE ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT! AND THEY DID INDEED FIT, AS THE LINE ALWAYS HAD IT! BUT WHAT A MESS! THE PANIC, THE DROWNINGS, THE OVERWORKED FERRYMEN. AND NOT ONLY THAT, BUT THE EMPTY WORLD, WITHOUT PEOPLE! AS WE REPOPULATED OUR CITIES IN A MASS EXODUS BACK TO OUR OWN FOUR CORNERS, JUST THINK! THE LOOTING! THE RIOTS!

In the fine traditions of Self-Savagery, the finer points of which will be explained in further posts, this is an idea that will never be seen through by me. Unfinished ideas are at the core of a Self-Savagery existence. 'Do not be sad, Let them down the drain, for there will be more ideas tomorrow, to ignore once again...'

But anyways, good afternoon.