Commentary: Simon Sellars. Photography: Michael Shaw.
Originally published in Abaddon #3, Autumn 2000.
“Psychogeography is the study of the exact effects of geographic environments, controlled or otherwise, on the affective behaviour of individuals.”
– Guy Debord.
Office block. High-rise. Bridgework and tower. Angular, canted and enchanted. Animation – bird fades in, swoops low. Little fluffy clouds, purple and red. An oblique horizon, like the shores of a distant planet. Washed up remains, an archaeological find: ‘Late twentieth-century city dweller’…
An innocuous loungeroom in the southern suburbs – a mid-thirties, pot-bellied oaf opens a stubbie of beer, scratches his balls, belches. Marilyn Monroe walks into the room; Twinkle the Dream Being is already present. Marilyn pouts seductively and grabs the oaf’s cock through the raspy fabric of his footy shorts, squeezing it playfully; Twinkle watches with cartoonish glee. The elements of new technologies makes this tryst possible, investing these clapped-out icons with a metallic sheen – a vapour which the oaf inhales, coating his lungs. Encouraged by Twinkle, the oaf looks deeply into Marilyn’s eyes, to find his ghostly pallour and sunken eye sockets reflected back at him…
Diseased brain cast adrift, prised loose by the elements of an unstable, precision-pointless universe. Myopic, tunnel vision. Mind like a supertanker – how to turn it around? Polite convention deems it necessary to kick the cat, beat the wife, abuse the child. Self-loathing: deflected and aimed at ‘soft’ targets. A smart bomb – the structure is left standing, while the spirit is squeezed flat. And the enemy moves in, claiming the territory.
The Overpass moves into view, its low rumble providing the soundtrack to a calm albedo. Patiently – with all the time in the world – a slither of metalskin makes its way towards autogeddon, tracking this stress-reinforced Moebius strip, enraptured by the easy mood and ambient jazz of its concrete grooves.
Crash, hit, run… Clotted sump spreads a dark stain over bone-white tarmac. Bloodied fingers scrabble against macadam, searching for the harshest flower. Confused lattice-work, overlaid with a million distress calls. A grid of spastic, kinetic energy. Free fall in inner space.
The lights dim, flicker and short; streets reek; buildings sag. No-one comes out to play. A child is snuffed out – faceripped in high-rise hell – and resonance flickers through hearts and minds. No-one is suspect, everyone is guilty… Revolution will always be stillborn, when its nurturing womb is festering and withered.
Natural order – electric babes raised under neon flash. Photosynthetic. Brain pan redundant. Brain-fried on non-stick fry pan. Under the skin. In the skin. The poison and the remedy. Finely woven, intricately laid: ‘Substance D’ – Designer Death.
…the Great Arterial Road, arbitrary and ataxic, ringed by girders and steel from endless State roadworks – twisted diodes of concrete and metal, reaching for the sky like limbs without flesh. Sublime poetry of death. Flesh dissolved in acid of light.
And now, let me tell you something — ‘There is a famous recording of a French orchestra, which was in existence during World War Three. First Violin was in the hands of one Jean Baudrillard; Paul Virilio was the Master Cellist. On this particular recording, as Jean and Virilio and the other members of the orchestra serenely ply their craft, it is possible to discern the sound of bombs exploding in the background – a steady and rhythmic percussion, as the destruction all around is woven into sumptuous fabric.’
Touchdown, the last brainforest – vista of truth and beauty – where skeletal technology surgically bifurcates the wastescape, presided over by the caustic slint of the sun’s glow.
‘They who put out the people’s eyes,’ spake John Milton, ‘reproach them of their blindness.’
The glare of factory sodium lights possesses me with a vibrant aura, splitting ions in the ether – like St Turing’s Fire.
My forehead stings, palms ache; I can no longer control myself.
The orgasm is squeezed out of me, like the removal of some cancerous lump. I am reborn, biomekanoid of the prophet Giger; I sink to one knee, saluting my magickal totems…
‘These are our poems,’ Carlyle said in 1842, looking at the new locomotives.