Catamidiate Art

If you spent your teens smoking low quality council estate hash and watching MTV and The Cable Jukebox you really can't help but have a lingering fondness for jiggy R'n'B of the R Kelly, Jodeci and Ginuwine model. In those days R Kelly was just a libido hooked up to a vocoder. Obviously he's matured since then, but only in the sense that he's now much, much older than the girls he's singing about. Out of court settlements notwithstanding, it's clear that Kels has more in common in with Nabokov than might be at first apparent.

A chance conversation with a reprobrate friend of mine led me to this. Don't worry, it won't have the special branch round to confiscate your computer, but it is nonetheless deeply appalling: a musical written and starring disgraced hitmaker Jonathon King. It's basically a long self-indulgent and partly sung rebuttal of the charges of sexual abuse brought against him by the media. King is a a deeply unsympathetic piece of work, but boy, can he write a catchy tune.

R Kelly wrote the hip-hopera during the dark days when Sparkle allegations first came to light and he was dropped from the Jay-Z tour. The turnaround on King's musical was just as short, and with King playing all the parts, and the camera often fixed, it's a lonely man's project. I also sincerely doubt that he paid anyone to come up with those animations.

Creativity is always attached to shame. Artists are the delinquent infants who won't throw away what they've just 'created'. There's a compromise that takes place between what the artist wants to expose and what the internalised society, whose influence manifests as shame, will allow.

By doing the one thing that even Prince probably wouldn't do, both these men have arrived in an extraordinary place. A land beyond shame.

Just watch the first minute of Vile Pervert the Musical and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Danger DIY

There that was fun wasn't it?

Spain is great. An entire nation incapable of efficiency. On the up-side, they aren't cursed, like the British, with impatience – which is just self-importance on a time axis.

As well as mooning around in Cafe Comercial with a pencil pretending to be a writer, I also had time to read a bit more about Eric Gill. I read biographies, mainly of authors and rock-stars, as a form of self help. You can spot the narcissists on the Underground, flicking back to the beginning of their Life of Keith Richards, to check how old he was when Exile on Mainstreet came out and confirm that there's still time for them to make that move they've been planning, from second division advertising copywriter to rock icon. I also occasionally read biographies of serial killers, like Fred West. These I find more cheering, because their notoriety is based not on success but chaotic failure. Their lives tend to have a different sort of shape – the temptation for the biographer of a successful subject is to arrange everything neatly around his or her achievements, like iron filings around a magnet – where as life as it is lived feels like so much stumbling, blindly groping for the next moment's gratification.

I started reading about Eric Gill for my next piece in Bulimics' Digest. Gill was a typographer responsible for, amongst other things, the beautiful Gill Sans face, used by the BBC and latterly every single Brit brand looking for a type that's vaguely reminiscent of scouting manuals and books about knots. Gill was also a sculptor of some genius, producing the statue of Ariel at Broadcasting House and Westminster Cathedral's Stations of the Cross – controversially some might say since he managed to have sex with an array of people who weren't his wife, some of whom he was nonetheless related to, and some of whom weren't even people.



Many questioned the appropriateness his work appearing in a Catholic Cathedral. Suffice to say that these people were viewing the situation from a moral, rather than an artistic point of view. The Fiona McCarthy biography deals with all this pretty coolly. It seems like if, as a biographer, you discover that kind of thing about your subject you just have to keep going, because what else are you going to do? I read a biography of Evelyn Waugh which suggested that having sex with 9 year olds in Egypt was just what literary men did in the 1930s.

The comparison with West is slightly facile, since, so far as we know, Gill never kidnapped, killed or tortured anyone. Nor, according to his biographer (however worrying the implications of this might be) did he rape anyone. His daughters grew up to be relatively well adjusted, under the circumstances. And despite these revelations about Gill's lifestyle his reputation is, if anything, resurgent right now.

What he shares with West and latterly, Josef Fritzl, is a kind of dismay at the idea that what he was doing was wrong, or very far beyond the bounds of normal behaviour. All three developed a large extended family for themselves, effectively a small society – with rules they could control. All three were, to differing degrees, technically gifted. West's children describe him as "always working" and as well as his famous contribution to the mystique of the patio, he also constructed Rose's Black Magic Bar for her paying customers, replete with peep-holes and listening devices. Fritzl likewise was able to build and plumb living quarters for his second family. It seems like this willingness to innovate within the physical structure of your home is connected to a willingness to fall back on a jerry-rigged morality that allows you to do whatever the fuck you want.

I'm just saying, unless you are actually a builder, you have no business with that tool-belt.

UPDATE: The more I read about Eric Gill the more he reminds me of Iggy Pop, another small wiry man with a famously big cock.

Autistics with mad skills

Quite often I have cause to ask myself, "What is actually wrong with you?"

My favourite explanation is autism. My least favourite is narcissism. With autism you have trouble empathising with others, stunted emotional development, obsessional behaviour, an air of abstraction and perhaps, mad skills in maths, drawing or even, I'm quite sure, copywriting. Narcissism is obviously much less sympathetic - you have the same trouble empathising with others, stunted emotional development, obsessional behaviour and air of abstraction, but its source is an incessant self-regard, basically finding yourself so fucking interesting that people have to beat you about the temples with an inflated pig's bladder to wrench your attention away from your own navel for two seconds at a time. There's also no promise of any mad skills whatsoever, only the unfounded suspicion that if anyone round here has mad skills, it's probably you. Like autism it's technically not your fault, but no one else sees it that way - they just think you're not trying, and that you're a self-absorbed little shit. No-one would accuse an autistic, sitting there with a stub of charcoal, drawing detailed maps of non-existent cities including demographic statistics and bus timetables of just not trying. Or being a self-absorbed little shit.

Because they are trying, just at the wrong thing.

I always seem to be trying at the wrong thing, and usually at the wrong time too. This blog is only one instance of this behaviour.

I think I'm almost certainly autistic.



This being so I thought I'd do my bit for the autistic brothers out there. I don't know whether Paul Laffoley really has a diagnosis of autism, he certainly claims to, but he also claims that his dentist told him he had a kind of probe implanted in his brain. He lived and worked, for something like 30 years, in a small room in an office building in downtown Boston, which he named, with characteristic grandiosity "The Boston Visonary Cell". Early in his career he was employed by Andy Warhol to watch TV late at night, he was sacked by Emery Roth & Sons for suggesting they build walkways between the Twin Towers, for safety. His work has this strange sci-fi tenor, which is also weirdly retro - you can watch videos of him applying type decals to his paintings with a scalpel. His writing is really interesting, if you're interested in what writing by totally mad people is like, that is, meaning dislocated from sign. I remember when I was learning to speak thinking, wow this is easy, you just make these noises with your mouth and then everyone is pleased with you and smiles and you get a biscuit.

"As a felt and lived sensibility, Utopic space has a generic religious base because the concept of “Utopia” as Saint Thomas (1478-1535) said in his book of 1516, (who coined the term) Utopia means “Heaven on Earth”. This is an ontic state distinct from both heaven and earth, a situation that states that which has not history connects directly with that which has only history. What Saint Thomas Moore is describing is a reference to the major portal between eternity and time that the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428-347 BC) immortalized in one of his last dialogues, the pythagoreau cosmology of Timaeus."

You have to admit the man has an inpenetrable written style - it's almost like certain kinds of rap.



There's also Gilles Trehin, who is more your standard Aspergic diagnosis. He started off building a model airport out of Lego, in meticulous detail, and quickly moved on to writing a departure timetable for the said Lego airport. Having constructed this airport, it was only natural that it should be attached to a major city, and so Urville was born. In the intervening years he's produced hundreds of pictures of this city, devised its economy and a history and culture that goes back several hundred years. This is a tremendous, freakish feat of creativity - and one that I believe could only have been achieved with a total disregard for others. Even with the necessary polymath abilities to link all one's creative ideas up into a single unified system, most people lack the single mindedness to see something like this through.

This is actually the opposite of advertising, where things are only judged to be useful based on their impact on the consumer. Here all the energy goes in the other direction and to hell with everyone else.

Patrick Hamilton, Alcoholism and Christmas

Alright, alright, so I thought I should do some bookish posing just to round things out, rather than scanning bits of books and lazily pasting them onto my blog.

Patrick Hamilton is my favourite English author. For people who threw Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying at the wall because it was just too rosy a look at 1930s London, Hangover Square is the perfect antidote.

Hamilton is the king of urban melancholia and loneliness - his understanding of people's private worlds and self-deceits is in the English tradition of George Eliot, but unlike George Eliot, there's no way of their ever reaching out to one another - his characters fall in love, but it's not so much love and more an insane projective frenzy, borne out of the loneliness of their own lives. In fact there is no love, only these hopeless fantasies, and anyway the people his characters fall for are so unworthy of any putative emotion that the whole thingis just a cruel, cruel joke.

As you may have gathered he's also extremely funny - in the way that falling in love with a prostitute who then refuses to sleep with you is funny.

Christmas has a special significance for Hamilton, lots of his books either begin or end at Christmas, and he describes the build up to it as a kind of a mania. Of course the only thing worse than being lonely, is being lonely at Christmas. Also, he was a hopeless alcoholic and I think Christmas has special significance for alcoholics, because it's the one time of the year when your drinking looks more or less like everyone else's. Christmas sums up the alcoholic worldview better than anything - this being a kind of madness where one believes in a perfect set of circumstances that can only come about under a special set of conditions, in which you will be truly happy - like the idea of the White Christmas. The more chronically alcoholic you become the more your actual circumstances are offensive to your conception of how the world should be and this intolerable condition can only be relieved through more drinking. And so on, until your liver explodes.

At Christmas time everyone tries desperately to conform to an ideal of festive cheer, it's tied to our sense of ourselves as functional human beings, but it's incredibly stressful - the only way that nationally we can block out reality and pretend that we're living in some kind of cosy, ember-lit Dickensian dreamworld is by drinking Super Tenants through a straw.

Watching children at Christmas is particularly interesting, because it's quite clear that they believe that this is how things should be, all the time. Desire continually awakened and instantly gratified. I can remember this feeling vividly.

It's no accident that the best Christmas song is by an incorrigible bedwetter.



Ho, ho, horribly sentimental. About ten seconds from the end you get to watch McGowan "waltzing" with Kirsty MacColl as snow falls - this is a scene that McGowan revisits in several videos as well as every time he plays the song live, staggering round drooling into the ear of whatever folksy wench he happens to be singing with, nor does he stint to use a snow machine.

Anyway, I don't think I'll be posting again till next week with normal service resuming on the 5th or so. See you on the other side.