Pablo Morais

Begin Today Anew: Reincarnation Every Morning After the Limbo of Sleep

You did not dissipate into nothingness. You did not forget who you were.
You came back to life this morning.
You did not wake in the sweet confusion of unconscious life, like a swallowtail Caterpillar munching the dill like a fraternity man at the beer trough.
You did not wake to blind movement toward light, or
  as a krill unconsciously becoming whale;
no-
You woke to a consciousness-- whatever that is-- and
it is the one you had yesterday.
Freakin Miracle.
Conciousness-
You Know you are Alive.
This day,
Each Day
Every Day

you Begin Anew.
Your Reincarnation.
You were not left in the Limbo of Sleep,

Mercy
Another day
Another Chance
Another obstacle course

Ponder where you did not live up
to who you want to become.
Ponder the Centered place where you want to return.

begin today
like it is a gift
you descended into no control last night.
you're back.

You did not dissipate into nothingness. You did not forget who you were.


You came back to life this morning.

BarnLight



Barnlight Kansas

Anna Wintour: Scary Lady or Fabulously Fierce?

She has been the British-born editor-in-chief of US Vogue since 1988, she has her own trademark hairstyle and she strikes fear into every intern she comes across.  Everyone knows that 'The Devil Wears Prada' was based on a former employee's experiences with her in the office and given that her nickname is "Nuclear Wintour", you know she isn't going to be all flowers and candyfloss.  She intimidates men and women alike due to her ice-queen exterior so I was really interested to watch the recent documentary on the More4 channel, 'The September Issue' to really get an insight into what she is like day-to-day.  Saying that, I know she has the power to manipulate which scenes are used in the documentary and she definitely has access to a powerhouse legal team if she feels the need to sue for deffamation of character.  So we all have to take documentaries like this with a pinch of salt I think.

Here's the trailer for the programme:


Putting that aside, the documentary, which centres around all the work that goes into the biggest and most important Vogue issue of the year, was a must see for me.  I'm always fascinated by the amount of hard work that goes into every facet of a magazine, every page is carefully crafted, designed and styled, like a piece of fine art.  Let's face it, Vogue is a good example of modern iconic art in all it's disposable glory (although I know alot of people keep every issue!).

Anna Wintour has been criticised in the past for wearing fur and also for promoting 'elitist' views on beauty in the magazine by insisting already slender celebs, destined for the cover, lose more weight until they reach a size that is acceptable to her.  She also tends to choose what the celebs will wear on the cover, even celebs/figures as influential as Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Clinton!

She always wears Wayfarer shades and for a long time, I just assumed this was to intimidate people further, to promote the 'ice queen' image and to make her expressions harder to read (I personally don't like it when you can't see someone's eyes when you meet them).  However, I found out that these are prescription sunglasses for her deteriorating vision, a hereditory condition.  It seemed curious to me that someone who comes across as so strong and indestructable could be hiding their self-labelled 'weakness' behind a pair of shades, a kind of armour to protect her from the world.  Is she scared that we might actually get to see a human side to her? Something vulnerable or some smidgen of emotion that might make her seem more like the rest of us?

Many people feel she is a style icon and often emulate her image...

Don't get me wrong, I respect any woman who can command the world of fashion on a global scale and have the world's most famous and brilliant designers and photographers on her beckon call.  Can you be in such a prestigious role without being stubborn, emotionally distant and extremely blunt and rude at times? Maybe not.  I also know that she has probably sacrificed alot in her personal life to be in that job...missing time with her children, neglecting romantic relationships, etc.  But I know one thing...I definitely wouldn't want to work in the same office as her.  I think I'm far too much of a sensitive soul and she would have me crying into my morning coffee before the mail had even been passed round.

But what I want to know is...what do you think of Anna Wintour?

Live Performance | Music (well, not really) | Night of the Living David Strassman

The guy up there – that’s David Strassman. The chap behind – Chuck, or in the show Strassman is currently peddling at this year’s almost-done Edinburgh Fringe, Zach. To understand why the name-change was necessary, I suspect you need to have seen Strassman’s previous shows, which I haven’t. Still, Chuck, Zach, in photo-form, the wooded thing’s way creepy right?

Right. Ventriloquists’ dummies are horrible. As anybody who grew up with even a peripheral awareness of Goosebumps would surely agree, ventriloquists’ dummies are waaaaaay creepier than Monster Blood and at least on the same level of creepiness as the utterly traumatising Barking Ghost. Nobody remembers the Barking Ghost. I do.

I do.

Creepy in photo-form. But not live. I very recently saw Duality, said Strassman show, which is completely brilliant by the way – apparently Strassman’s well worth looking up generally, I can’t comment (beyond pointing to this) but the way Duality riffs off the usual tired, clichéd questions of metatheatrical performance-existentialism in bounding, multi-facetted, ever-replicating, robotic and foul-mouthed ways is breathtaking. As theatre as well as paradigm-redefining NU-ventriloquism. But what was potentially most striking about Duality was the way that, in Strassman’s hands (hand), Zach wasn’t really creepy at all. The thing was fucking alive – just quite simply alive, talking, moving, alive. I frequently had to enter exactly the sort of interior monologue that the show centres on (as a way of understanding how and why ventriloquists ventriloquise) in order to convince myself that Zach wasn’t actually a real boy.

It’s this extraordinary sense, born out of the just-close-enough-to-human-ness of the design of an original ventriloquist’s dummy, that makes me think another protagonist in the ventriloquism renaissance that we’re sort of witnessing – Jeff Dunham and his palette of rather more cartoonish creations – is missing a trick. (Oddly, Nina Conti, the daughter of Tom Conti, Emily’s father in Friends, and an absolute babe to boot, doesn’t suffer from the same problem, despite the fact she puts her hand in a monkey. I can’t explain this. Maybe it’s because she’s an absolute babe. That monkey exists.)

And it also made me realise something: ventriloquism is the Rosetta Stone of live performance. To understand all of the best things, the most important things about live performance, one need only watch a ventriloquist.

Watching a man or lady attempt to compete with, I don’t know, Avatar via an fundamentally ridiculous talent (for even the best ventriloquists move their lips a bit, and look ridiculous when they’re not moving their lips because people actually move their lips when they’re not talking, it turns out, so really ventriloquism makes absolutely no sense) that celebrates the bloody-minded stupidity of human bodily craft for the sake of, best case scenario, an interesting take on the nature of interiority or vaguely surprising reflections on the notion of dialogue, worst case scenario, a framing method for tired jokes, should be an intensely depressing experience.

But watching said man or lady succeed in achieving a far more human, living, breathing artificial reality than any amount of apparently flawless technology will ever produce, via the teeniest details – a dummy’s eyes moving at the right time, a practiced, fluid body-language between person and puppet – is, it turns out, completely bloody heartwarming.

Human beings are a bit shit. Pinocchio really happened. Hans Teeuwen can sing a song and have Little Ronnie eat a Mars bar at the same time. This blogpost's a bit shit. Ventriloquism's a bit shit. Ventriloquism will, therefore, never die.

Wider Reading | Cypress Grove, the Gun Club and mixtape foreplay

Cypress Grove, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and two acoustic guitars

This week’s mixtape, which will go up either tomorrow or Friday, is a pretty special one – it’s been put together by a chap called Cypress Grove, personally responsible for one of the most interesting takes on the ol’ mixtape/compilation/coversrecord/etc. blueprint I’ve ever come across. Silkworms obviously had a responsibility to therefore get the man to give us his interpretation of the Music As Reading mixtape project. And get it we did.

By way of an introduction to Grove’s comp pedigree – while you’re, y’know, waiting for the actual tracks – here’s a wee article/interview I did for the New Statesman a few months back (bastards never printed it) profiling both him and We Are Only Riders, his to my mind groundbreaking album. I’ve pasted it in whole, as it was, don’t currently have time to check it for any now-broken links or now-outdated comments so apologies if there are any of those, such is life.

Sam

***

26/02/10

As is so often the case, a compelling candidate for the (yes, pointless) title of best record of 2010 was released in the first few weeks of the year. We Are Only Riders: the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project came out mid-January. You may well not have noticed: it was generally rewarded with unhelpful 150-odd word reviews in the forgotten corners of the broadsheets (such as this one) and an eager but rather quiet online response from blogs, zines and musicians (i.e. the people what actually know their shit) – see the comprehensive list of comments slash quotations on the record’s myspace page.

A great shame for at least three reasons: firstly, it is a magnificent piece of work. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was the principal creative force behind, arguably, the coolest band of all time, The Gun Club, the altcountry-inventing punk pioneers adored by the likes of Deborah Harry and Jack White (“why are these songs not taught in schools?” the latter once asked an interviewer) – a tragic figure whose alcohol-induced demise, a year or so shy of his fortieth birthday, occurred in the wake of his bassist-lover’s decision to elope with his drummer. An elegant tribute to JLP’s cut-short life and work appeared, in fact, in the New Statesman way back in 1999 – “Pierce and his various line-ups played like men looking to spit in death’s eye,” observed Richard Cook.

We Are Only Riders is, ostensibly, a tribute record – to Pierce, breathing new and eclectic life into a scattering of hitherto unreleased tracks discovered, in his attic, by one Cypress Grove, a friend and collaborator, on a scratchy, barely-audible tape the two men recorded together in the early 1990s. Over a three year period, Grove invited an intimidating assortment of friends and admirers of Pierce to re-arrange and re-record these songs and others. The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project ended up utilising the talents of Nick Cave, Harry, Mark Lanegan, Barry Adamson and the Raveonettes to name but a few. A humdinger of a tribute record then. All the more so for the riskier contributions it features, from lesser known (in these here parts, anyway) artists – hickabilly hero Johnny Dowd, say, or the criminally underrated Lydia Lunch – which in various cases overshadow the big names’ efforts.

Second, it represents an extraordinary labour of love. The album took Grove a full three years to put together. Speaking to him, I got some idea of why that is, via an anecdote detailing his attempts to get Jack White involved:

‘I diligently pursued Jack White right from the beginning. I first tried through his management. That was going nowhere. Then I got a couple of leads – people who knew someone who knew him at one time. Again, nothing came of it. I was convinced that if he got to hear about the project that he would want to do it, and the only way that was ever going to happen was to speak to him personally. So when he was in London with The Dead Weather in June, I thought this is the best chance I will ever get – I will know where he is at specific times. I knew he was playing a live BBC session at Maida Vale, so I went and hung out there for hours. I eventually asked the doorman what time the band were coming out (pretending to be their driver!) and he said they left ages ago through the back door!

‘A few days later he was playing The Forum in Kentish Town, so I handwrote a letter (being aware of his distaste for anything digital) and headed off. I strolled round the back and as luck would have it the support band were just unloading their gear. So through a mixture of timing, luck and guile I managed to walk past the bouncers on the stage door and into the venue. There were about 20 other people in there I guess, and I was aware of being found out at any moment, so I watched the soundcheck as nonchalantly as possible. I rushed to the front and pitched him on the project in about 30 seconds. He looked initially dubious till I told him Kid Congo Powers was involved – then I had his attention. He was really into the whole concept of the project and seemed keen to do it. But Kid went to see him a few weeks later at his Washington DC show, and he said he would have to pass as his other commitments were too great and he simply didn’t have the time.’

It took, apparently, nine months to find a free day to get Nick Cave into the studio. Debbie Harry, the best part of a year.

Thirdly, and most importantly, though, the record also hinges on an intriguing innovation – with implications, I think, for the future of the cover version, the mythical ‘lost song’, the compilation record and musical ‘conservation’ as a whole. Recognising that recreating the songs as Pierce intended them would be an impossible, and apocryphal, task, Grove decided to organise recordings of three utterly different versions (by three utterly different artists) of each of the tracks on his original tape, so as to recreate something of JLP’s widescreen creative vision that would have, certainly, been lost on a single track – and make these the spine of the record. In short, nine of the sixteen tracks that make up We Are Only Riders are, in fact, only three tracks. Here’s how Grove himself explained it to me:

‘I am told that the multiple versions idea is quite a bold concept, and that a lot of people didn’t think it was going to work. I am pretty sure that it has never been done before, but I am willing to be corrected. For me it is the central concept, the core of the album, and the only intelligent way to deal with the material that I had at my disposal, in order to be satisfied that Jeffrey would be proud of what we were doing.

‘We were trying to achieve an approximation of how Jeffrey might have finally realised the songs himself, had he lived to do so. I have a friend who restores paintings, and he was given a portrait of someone’s great great grandfather in a military uniform to restore. It was in really bad condition and parts of the painting were missing. So in order to restore the painting to how it once was, he had to research military uniforms of the time, and use contextual cues from the rest of the painting. The end result may not have been entirely as the painter had originally intended, but it was a sympathetic restoration, and he brought his best mind to the work. I approached the Jeffrey tapes that I found in much the same way. We have only vague notions of how Jeffrey might have finally completed these songs, so here are three artists’ opinions on that. They all knew or admired Jeffrey, and the answer is probably close to an amalgam of all three versions.’

We Are Only Riders is an audacious, respectful, imaginative record that has the potential to change, for good, people’s ideas about what they are entitled to do with music which doesn’t actually belong to them. It deserves as big an audience of serious listeners as possible.

Alexander Kjellevik

Live Performance | Fiction | Good Times With Weapons

Just a quick one today – and this is going to be closer to a rant than the high-quality literary journalism you’ve come to expect from this publication.

(Pause for laughter.)

Poets, I always think – with a glum touch of envy – come to live reading events equipped like a soldier in the SAS. Not even that. Better than that. Equipped like an eight-year-old child acting out the fantasy of what it must be like to be a soldier in the SAS. Crowd are sullen? Rattle out the short poems like an assault rifle! Hit them with the grenade of the haiku! Get in close for some hand-to-hand audience participation, then slug away with the slow, intensely personal shotgun-poem! Maybe even the lightsaber of the love-sonnet, for good measure. An armament for every occasion.

Pictured: a poet.

Fiction writers (and I’m talking about writers of short stories all the way up to novels, not the cunning flash-fiction and prose-poem guerrillas) come to live reading events holding one of those enormous, immensely heavy medieval weapons that was essentially a cow-sized length of metal with a handle. It only really does one thing, and its impact depends on your being able to use it as quickly as you possibly can, which is not very.

Many poets, like fiction writers, are bad at giving live readings. But poets get a chance to slink away faster if necessary, picking and choosing their poems, getting through their set with the speed and precision of a Black Hawk helicopter while fiction writers are forced to clunk their way through page after page of solid prose as elegantly as Henry VIII in his later-life suit of full plate armour.

What's that?  All these military references are making you sort of queasy?  All right, we'll stop.

It’s a serious problem. You may think your three-page short story with the killer twist is perfect for live readings, only to discover that the previous reader has bored the audience silly and they’re now beginning to shift in their seats as soon as you’ve cleared your breath. Suddenly, you don’t have nearly enough flexibility.

This is a problem which has, in the past, resulted in me ‘panic editing’ – skipping out the more descriptive sentences and even paragraphs because I’m afraid my audience is getting bored. In part, I do feel bad about that, almost as if I should hold my ground against my listeners - maybe even annunciate every word as clearly and slowly as I possibly can. But, hell, shouldn’t there be some way of giving live readings of fiction which is flexible and exciting, instead of feeling like a written medium awkwardly transposed into an oral form?

Part of the issue, I’m sure, is the nature of literary readings themselves. When Virgil gave a reading, he’d have had his audience cheering for their heroes, booing for the villains, and hurling dormice at him where they felt the story was getting a little far-fetched. Today’s culture of sitting politely and occasionally grunting appreciatively can kill the energy fast. Damn it, the whole thing’s far too civilised, too sedate; and, as Bruce Chatwin might argue, it begins to stagnate as a result.

What fiction writers need, more than ever, to put a spark back in their readings, is a crowd supplied with some rotten tomatoes, and a drunken heckler at the front who thinks he deserves to be listened too by everybody. Far, far better than a crowd supplied with a dull stupor, and an elderly gentleman at the front who’s going to raise his hand at the end and tell you exactly how your story relates to his time as an Angolan silk-trader.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor