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THE NEW VIOLENCE
A MANIFESTO
even writing this is an effort. violence takes effort, so for that it must be celebrated. effort is really all we have left apart from love, and love is the most effort of all. in this way love is the most violent thing that there is.
so this comes from a place of love. the world has brought us to a place where to be sincere is to look foolish. self-image has become so tangled with creation that the end result suffers and serves only to reinforce the unnerving feeling that nothing is really real anymore.
anyone who creates in this way should be executed.
1. the new violence believe that the destruction of the ego within art is nearly always appropriate. ants do not build anthills to look more ant. they build them because they can, and must.
2. make what you want, how you want, when you want. don’t try to make it accessible, don’t aim to make people laugh or cry. just make it.
3. be critical. don’t make excuses for people. if someone is being inauthentic in your eyes then tell them, and why. niceties are for the weak.
4. embrace aggression- it is an indicator of passion. as long as it is directed right it is perfectly acceptable. walk aggressively, eat aggressively and sleep aggressively. do everything with intention, even nothing.
5. ‘networking’ is the lowest form of human communication.
6. humanity is not all that but it would be far better if hierarchy was not looked upon as ‘civilised’. let’s be honest- elitism is for the apes.
7. become your own society.
8. fashion is part of the old violence. ignore it at all costs.
9. be honest. most poetry, for example, is very boring. an awful lot of art and music is also boring. acknowledge that perhaps 70% of anything you produce is probably very dull to anyone else but you. that’s ok too, art doesn’t have to be for other people.
10. dancing is the main tenet of the new violence. even if you ignore all the other principles you will still be participating in our cause every time you indulge in the medium of dance.
11. never rely on other people to make you happy. they won’t. people are generally terrible. if you truly accept this about yourself and others then you will be set free.
manifestos are always only the tip of an enormous sexy iceberg. update the list and pass it on. a tame person is a dead one.
vive la violence! -
this is a piece i wrote for the young pines project. the music is by karl brummer and the voice is that of guy jackson, master storyteller. it was part of an exhibition about mythological porn. SEXY. see all the others pieces here
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erica read made one of my poems look all olden days for an art project- i love it. erica also did the cover from my second pamplet ‘Sleeveless errand’. see more of her stuff here http://ericaread.tumblr.com/
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this is a short video produced by me and superstar film maker daniel munday.
on a long walk from kilburn to kings cross we took a number of videos and this is the result. the music is andrew bird- it’s a live track called tin foil from the album “fingerlings 3”. the editing probably needs to be cleaned up a bit, but who knows when that will get done? -
the 23,786th day
sorley pinkles is about 7. he has red hair and sits cross- legged on a milk crate reading the FT which is upside down. all of a sudden there is a puff of smoke and a loud CRACK. pegleg who’s dead, stands there like a wet suit on a coathanger.
pegleg loonbucket -
i have gone to my place of eternal rest- crossed over and lie
flipping outside the bowl. can you see me twitching sorley? i can’t.
sorley pinkles-
Yep. you’ve had it. i asked ma all about it. she says you’re up in the sky or something. i knew you were underground.
pegleg loonbucket -
in jesus? i can’t feel that though, and i’ve tried it. i think he must have been here- for it’s light enough.
sorley pinkles-
it’s probably not worth guessing at. poor old jesus in his scratchy dress. i saw a sausage dog today.
pegleg loonbucket -
sausage dogs… i would say NOT! real isn’t even real. there’s a few shapes, but they’re all wrong. i’m yesterday’s papers- up the spout.
sorley appears to have lost interest in the conversation and takes a paper bag from his pocket. it is full of red gobstoppers. he holds one up to the light.
pegleg takes 2 speech cards from his pocket.
pegleg loonbucket-
and this is what i was taught to expect-
death as a journey [he skims it one way]
death as the end [he skims it the other]
HA! [he shouts, alarming himself]
death’s just death. i can’t see a way out…
sorley pinkles- [putting the gobstopper in his gob]-
you’re done for. when mac badgley died we put him in an ice cream tub and tied a ribbon round. da put him in the car and took him to the tip.
pegleg loonbucket -
…and my fingers are not there. fibre optics cease to amaze. i am without genitals. i feel constantly, nothing. i am non…un! non and un!
sorley pinkles-
being dead doesn’t bother me.
pegleg loonbucket -
but where does it leave me? i always thought i’d be further along than this- a ladybird perhaps.sorley pinkles-
a ladybird?
pegleg loonbucket -
or a yew tree. waving outward into the fishy winds of a harbour. grieving in a way.
sorley pinkles-
perhaps you are a tree. when i die i will be a king. with an army.
pegleg loonbucket -
what will you do, sorley?
sorley pinkles-
i’ll be a fireman. i’ve seen the way the girls go into flames when the big red truck goes by. i’ll save people. then i’ll go fishing.
pegleg sits down on the floor very suddenly. he looks more tired than ever.
pegleg loonbucket -
i wasted my life away. god of what? me- yet i never existed.
as pegleg is talking we see something hot red creeping slowly out of the darkness, spiderlike.
sorley pinkles-
who’s this now? another one of yours.
pegleg loonbucket -
i’ve not seen this one before.
[my red hot car by squarepusher comes on]
the red thing starts to dance, and lip-syncs to the words-
you scream out for more
let me tell you girl that for sure
i’m gonna give you all i’ve got
i’m going to fuck you with my red hot cock
pegleg jumps up and starts to dance against his will. there is a routine- to be choreographed lasting around 2 minutes. sorley (and surely, the audience) watches in disbelief.
[as the music fades]
pegleg loonbucket-
whats this? who could you be? dark spirit! sorley, help me!
sorley pinkles-
i cannot- ‘tis your time. augustus caravel speaks.
augustus caravel-
mr.loonbucket. & for what would you become the best of all living things? a yew, a sunset that opens onto a night-sparkly field? where was your poetry? your reachings? how dark it was. you missed tide upon tide. & i saw it.
pegleg loonbucket-
my workings never allowed for it. my father was a poor man who lent me his temper and not much else. though he taught me some knots once.
sorley pinkles-
i can do a slip knot. once i caught a wild brown trout.
augustus caravel-
three worlds, pegleg. yon gastric mill- a place for lost teaspoons. ok? there you would be mote. a clipping or nut. dreadful in your smallness. a pen-lid in a child’s throat. how’s that?
pegleg loonbucket-
my life was not so lost.
augustus caravel-
you think you are the one to choose?
pegleg loonbucket-
i think i never hurt no one.
sorley pinkles-
it’s true. he never hit a girl.
pegleg loonbucket-
and only thrice a gentleman.
augustus caravel-
yet still you saw your life as burden.
pegleg loonbucket-
i never knew it. i tried to try out jesus once…
augustus caravel-
JESUS! you dead keep on. it’s a fucking joke.
sorley pinkles-[testing out the word]
fuck-ing
augustus caravel-
the mother gives you equilibrioception and you come back with jesus. have you seen him lately?
pegleg loonbucket-
i thought perhaps he lived nearby.
augustus caravel-
have you seen him?
pegleg loonbucket-
i have not.
augustus caravel-
behold our master sorley. i bet thee know a trick or two?
sorley pinkles-
i can do presto chango
[he mimes- badly, pouring water into glasses and pulls faces of varying amazement as the clear water changes to coloured]
RED!
BLUE!
YELLOW!
behold! BLACK!…
augustus caravel-
incredible! -
TRUE CONFESSIONS 2
Charming and I were camping on the outskirts of the kingdom, when a young dashing cat, Puss, pitched his tent next to ours. As campers do we got chatting. Puss asked us for directions to the local beauty spot, a secluded magical lake set all around by tall pine trees. He told us he wanted to go there to clean his boots. As lovers of skinny-dipping we were actually on our way there ourselves so we gave him a lift. I thought about how much it would turn me on to seduce and corrupt a talking cat. Maybe I could show him something of my world.
I found a nice shingled area next to the water and lay down to catch some sun in my little hands. Charming busied himself with his mirror, while Puss and I got out of our clothes. I wore only a blue ribbon and sat on a mat opposite the cat. I asked Charming to oil me and dance over me with his tongue.
Puss kept looking up from where he was polishing his boots, pulling the duster back and forth over the silver buckles. I asked if we were disturbing him and he mewed that he’d never seen a naked princess before. I asked him if he’d like to join us and he leaped over straight away and lay on my lap, his fur warm on my thighs. He was purring and at first I thought he might fall asleep, the sun being so hot and the day so clement, but then he started rubbing me, winding
around me like a blue Russian breeze.
I lay back and let the cat walk on me. Charming’s mouth was all on me and in the oil, my nipples
like two pillaged diamonds. Pirates, the two animals pulled out jewel after jewel until I was rippling like the surface of the lake. Sunlight poured off me and I screwed myself into the shingle with its braille that tripped across me.
Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sound of church bells and as I tipped my head back to listen, a jolt shot through me like a blast from a wand- my whole body alive with electricity. I levitated to the tops of the pines, their peaks around me like green fire. They fused into the blueness, arrows for gods, and as I passed beyond them all around me I could hear birds gossiping about the naked princess in the sky. And then gradually, I drifted down, snow slow and still again- coming round to see the cat, smiling and licking his paws and face.
SW, Fairyland -
TRUE CONFESSIONS 1
Being a student at the Dryad school, I get plenty of opportunity to meet men. One of my favourite places is the Woodland Union mushroom tea outlet. The tea is cheap and the place is always packed to the treetops with fit young Druids, Warlocks and Centaurs. Anyway, I’ll cut to the chase. I was out with my sister, Haruki- we’d been drinking mushroom tea for quite a while and were beginning to see the sky dip in and out of itself. I was in need of some kissing so we picked out some men and went our separate ways. The bloke I went for was smoking a hookah with a couple of brothers. He was a fine brown Centaur, hard and muscly from the waist up, with four strong legs. After a few choice declarations we were kissing on a sofa in the corner, His hooves were all over me after just a couple of minutes. I only had a tiny dress made from cobwebs and dead leaves on, and he easily inched his hoof up the inside of my thigh.
I opened my wisps slightly and his hoof crept toward my growth ring. He whinnied with satisfaction to find firstly that I had no undergarments on and secondly that my budlet was covered in dew. I clambered onto him and straddled him. Anyone looking probably got a great view of my roots. It must have been like a live wood-core show! After a while of him rubbing against me I came, the mushroom tea making colours shoot out of me into his mouth, and all around the spinney.
I rose from his lap and pulling down my skirt to cover myself, took him by the spear. I led him across the glade, past the tearooms and into the tree house. There was a bit of a queue in the ladies and I hesitated, but he bundled me into the nearest men’s. Pressing me up against the door, he locked it with one hoof and yanked my dress up over my head with the other. I was naked and he began kissing me and tangling himself all up in me. After a while he swivelled me round and told me to bend over. Keen to oblige I knelt on a stump and thrust my backside up at him. Wasting no time, he knelt down behind me, buried his face into my magical lake and went to work with his tongue. I creaked with pleasure, my cheek pressed against the cold hard wood.
He lapped at me and reached underneath me to play with my tea leaf. I came to another shuddering gust- all up in my leaves and hair, my sap leaking out onto his chin. Then he used his hooves to spread my furrows wide. He burrowed his tongue into me, probing and darting it around. Then he put his two front legs up on my shoulders and I knew he was going to enter my hollow. Slowly he worked himself into me and I disappeared into the wind, my branches blown this way and that as he pushed into me and snipped away at me with his secateurs. I was like one large hand, fingers all up in the air and waving into him like a hot mirage.
I squirmed as I felt the hot sticky seed fill me then scatter out like sycamore helicopters all over the woodland. I never even found out that Centaur’s name- we just kissed and said tioradh!
Sylvia, Occitania -
magic people #1
1. the mum at school who has twiglets for legs and wears skyscraper shoes. i am pretty sure she is turning into a skyscraper
2. salvo on my gardening course who doesn’t talk to his family anymore. he says ‘you are a crazee girl, you have come out from ze woods’
3. liverpudlian tom from the co-op. he’s disappeared nowadays
4. the drunk on wood st who has a set of encyclopedias in his house ‘just to look at’
5. alison wonderland
6. the insomniac who gives out fruit gums at homebase
7. all security guards who think i’m stealing something
8. the people who work in cat rescue/cat world. they call biros ‘gold-dust’ and one of them knows all the words to every pop song
9. the girl at the vet who has rainbow hair. i say ‘i like your rainbow hair’ over a backdrop of meows
10. wizards
to be continued
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always start with a dead rat. that’s what my granny used to say- and she was tartan. i was kind of in love with this one. he came in and made a nest in my old poems. they weren’t all that anyway, a bit self-conscious. you’re supposed to write that out of yourself- i’m not sure i ever will. he had chewed them up into little pieces.
when the man came to put the poison down i felt quite unhappy for him. he had been scratching and laughing but he wasn’t all bad, just doing his ratty things. i think he wore a hat.
after a week or so i started to smell that deathy smell. it was parallel to what was happening in my life. gone under the floorboards- i could hear it but never saw it. and then the death.
i took everything out of the cupboard where he lived and took up the boards. when i saw him there i experienced a shift. you think they’re like big mice but they’re bigger than that- like suns.
i took him out by the tail and put him in a bag. he was stiff, like that cat on a spade i went out to touch even though dad said not to go in the garage, or the man on the beach who’d suddenly turned into a body.
i was still sad to see him go. he was part of the household and didn’t deserve to go like that. goodbye mr chips.
1. the end
it was of no great loss to me. i was an island of great complexity and filled notebooks full of the kind of writing you might have written recently, being of a lesser talent than i.
i was not accepted into the bosom of any group.
but i discovered that heroin is marvellous for the skin. it also has no werth whatsoever, which greatly appealed to me. i left the other academicals at the student union to their futures and headed back up the hill toward my own.
and from that day on i can not pretend i am not searching for the elusive razzmatazz read about in books and occasionally encountered in others who lead exciting lives swimming with the dolphins.
and i would be lying if i said that it is only things with no werth that get me going. and you are lying if you say that swimming with the dolphins has no werth (although i would be inclined to agree) that they are rather whimsical creatures(only included here as a kind of metaphysical benchmark).
i learnt that there are many other activities one can embark upon in the quest of having an exciting and varied life such as travelling, which is country where you go to meet antipodeans.
i have not yet been to travelling per se, but i liked to think in my quieter moments (and also when i recount my personal mythology) that i am, in fact, well travelled in mind, and not at all gauche.)
so, having no money and little sense of adventure, i got drunk for a while and wandered around.
my degree existed only as another fabrication in my Curriculum Vitae. i found it hard to remain enthusiastic about my new career choice. i was a KP where i learnt transferable skills such as cleaning algae off mussels and how to empty a pig bin. i also got to eat swordfish and quails.
but subbing the olive tree for rocks of crack was not what i had envisaged for myself. i should have been writing a dissertation on how kathy and heathcliff were never really in love so that i could go on and werk in arts administration.
2. werking
i discovered pretty quickly that werking leaves you no time to do all the less important things in life, such as washing and forming meaningful relationships with people, but that this is known as getting on with things. or making do. i made do as well as could be expected. i was a genius trapped in the mind and body of a fool. i alleviated my frustrations by sleeping with strangers. here i learnt that boys don’t sleep with you because they think you are attractive but rather because you let them.
one day i found myself living in a flat (which had a poster of the mona lisa smoking a marijuana cigarette in it) smoking a marijuana cigarette with a boy who was addicted to fruit machines.
after a while of trying to understand the off-side rule whilst picking my cuticles until they bled i realised it was time to move to london. london was a place which i had been trying to bypass because i was scared of getting lost on the tube, but it could not be avoided forever. so i said goodbye to the provinces and i moved to a place where kittens ran over me at night as i slept. i got a job serving the london symphony orchestra rosehip tea and put up a sign that said we are the coffee makers and we are purveyors of tea but got told to take it down. i suppose it was not that funny. i was earning 4.50 an hour and working from 8am to 8pm.
i wore black leggings and a waistcoat with my name on a badge. i was certainly going places.
3. the darkening
the darkening is a thing that happens to everyone. my friend has a theory that it happens to most people around the age of 20. this is when you realise that maybe you are not going to be a pop star after all and that life depends on what you are willing to put into it. this is somewhat crushing if you have always got by on your good looks and sheer luck alone. usually around this period something awful happens to you like a painful love affair or an addiction to marker pens. i was always aware that teenage angst was somewhat of a fabrication on my part generated by a lack of confidence and sepultura.
nothing had prepared me for the reality of true pain.
4. the new werld
when my friends and i get together we try hard to avoid being post-ironic or post-feminist or new wave. or new wave of the new wave of the new wave. it takes some doing for the moment any of us has an idea someone comes in and catches it under a jar and calls it something. the next week it is on the telly being advertised as the next big thing. by which time it is out of date and embarrassing, like old poetry from when you were 13.
some people spend a hundred pounds on sunglasses that make you look like a car’s windscreen. i used to werk in an opticians
where i was not well liked because my trouser hems kept coming down and i had to stick them up with sellotape. but i learnt that sunglasses are very much like shoes, in the way that people think that you can more or less tell someones entire philosophy by the purchases they have made.
me and my Clarks did not stand a chance at university. i soon discovered i did not want anything. because when the chips are down, it does not mean much apart from being nearer to the dolphins. which is a shame really because nowadays it is seen as laziness to not want to werk for stuff you dont need. and it is not the best thing to say in an interview at all. often i am asked where i see myself in 5 years and i get the feeling it is not au fait to tell the truth, which is the same place probably, just 5 years older. i think it is fair to say i am not lazy for i am very motivated. if i were never to werk another day in my life i would not be bored. but this is not an employers wet dream by any stretch, so i remain doing 8 hours a day in my microcosm of boredom.
how many peoples minds are dying day in day out is unknown and just a fact of life now.
it is, however, well known that you can do anything you put your half dead mind to. so i am doing this. because this is anything.
5. a brief history of politics
lately when i watch the news i just cry. when i was small it was the most boring programme in the werld. it was bed time and the only time my parents had to argue. but now it is the only programme i watch apart from top of the pops. i would like to go into it but by the time you read this something else will have happened. it will already be history from which you can learn nothing. i remember reading a story about some boys who had an argument about who was the toughest so one of them cut his own finger off. the other one then decided to cut his own arm off with an electric carving knife. well, you can imagine what happened. after a while, one of them blew their head off with a shotgun and won the prize for being the toughest ever. i learnt that this is what POLITICS is, except lots of people who don’t care who is the toughest get blown up too, sometimes in their front room while they are watching the news. also you could not say you don’t care about politics because that was a political statement in itself and could lead to APATHY. apathy was something that politicians did their best to encourage.
in my naiveté i thought that just not fighting would be the best way to stop fighting but what did i know. some times i tried to imagine what it was like to believe in good and evil but i realised that this was only possible if you believed in other things like GOD. god was a man who lived on a cloud and had a telescope that could only see the bad things that muslims did. if you
believed in god you could do anything you wanted to do because you would be forgiven. in this way it was ok to blow up children because this contributed to the greater good ie a world where children do not get blown up. again in my naiveté i thought that simply not blowing them up in the first place would be a good place to start, but then what did i know.
god did not like criminals unless they were on death row making alan keys. he was not into the idea of anal sex unless it is a priest doing it, in which case it was ok because he would be forgiven. it must be comforting to believe all this. and it may help to have faith in anything other than everything good in the world like ice cream and violets. because maybe
if i did then i would not be a loser, i would be the king.
6. school
before the darkening i suppose i was a fairly normal person. i went to a private school where the teachers did their best to discourage you from learning and told me how i was not as clever as my sister. i was bullied for a while for my nasty haircut and my lack of trainers. i was the girl with the slightly off-blue jumper that had a wooden tennis racket and for this reason it took me a while to become the leader of the cool gang.
teachers do not recognise astounding artistic ability until years later when they claim credit for it when being interviewed by smash hits. i got into this school in the first place by writing a story about robots which took over the werld by flying around on pteradactyls so you can imagine the kind of problems i encountered. it is only recently that i have realised that maths and physics are actually really interesting. the teachers tried to hide this from us for as long as possible in case we started asking questions they could not answer. luckily i discovered LSD around the time we were told to write an essay on what it would be like to be a baked potato. i realised that life could hardly become any more ridiculous. we were told a lot of stuff about how drugs are bad for you at this time. telly, for instance, was a much better way of learning about yourself.
7. lies
here i should say that i am not as jaded as i sound. there are many things in this werld that i enjoy such as going to the beach and skiving off werk. at the time of writing i am currently on my third consecutive day of skiving off werk because i would rather be doing this. i said to my boss that i am as sick as a dog which is not so far from the truth. you cannot say that you are not going in because you are mentally ill, because being mentally ill suggests that you are not fit to be doing your job. once i werked in a 24 hour newsagents where men would come at 4 in the morning to buy pornos. one night a boy came to the hatch with a decanter of sherry and we talked into the early hours. he told me about how one time he had told his werk that his mum had been in a car-crash so he wouldn’t have to go in. the next week his mum really was in a car-crash. so i guess you cannot spend your life lying because it will come back to haunt you. i remember when i told someone that i was a narcoleptic and he said he was too and asked me what medication i was on. that was not such a good lie.
i make no apologies for sounding as if i am shooting myself in my unfashionably clad foot. i understand that hard work is important. i have simply never found my niche. i have tried lots of different things like werking in a cattery, looking after children, giving out leaflets dressed as an edwardian and being a cleaner in a head injuries unit. i have applied for jobs to be a support worker, a librarian, a park keeper, a photographers assistant and snow white at eurodisney. once i did two weeks of an art foundation but gave it up to go apple-picking. at school when we did psychometric tests mine came back saying my perfect job would be being an air-stewardess. but really i just like staying at home with my cat and writing poetry all day.
poetry is a way of saying something difficult in a simple way. a lot of people think it is a way of saying something simple in a difficult way. but that is because they are worried about not understanding it. it’s funny how people think that they have to understand things.
8. injured animals
some girls make a big show of how caring they are. i don’t really care but i like people to be happy. for my own sake really. so i am happy. i think that’s a fair deal.
the people in the guessing-labs come up with stuff about happiness all the time- they say it's liquid and a bendy line and u-shaped in voices from enid blyton. i would come across all controversial if i said i thought it’s a choice- people could get offended by that and claim i had a dark-side etc. i cannot deny this. men who are depressed are like big black clouds and they come in and breathe tornados all round your pretty room until everything goes grey and the flowers wilt. women are worse perhaps- flat and skinless, smelling of marigolds. maybe i can only know this as i have been sad too.
my sadness is kind of black and white. i am nearly always being watched. my crying has points-
1. sea-lion sea-lion sea-lion sea-lion
2. the pleasant sleepy self-aware eastenders phase
3. still warm run over bird
after that i’m ok again. i read somewhere that if you win the lottery then initially you will be extremely happy but then your usual level of happiness will return. this is another good argument as to why there is no point werking for things that you don’t need, but it does not stop me from playing the lottery occasionally. you read a lot of stories about the curse of the lottery. but surely it is just the wrong people winning. if you do not have any hobbies and you win the lottery you must be gutted. after you’d bought a plasma screen telly what would be left? clothes and cars and holidays. i sincerely believe that more people like me should win, so we could get out of everyone’s hair and start t-shirt making businesses which would revolutionise the werld.
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