CosmiKnot

Last Night Dec 19th I was joined on stage by the legend Foz? Together we meandered our way through the origins of our band David Devant and His Spirit Wife. I made a power point of various pieces of evidence for our existence. Foz kept the historical anchor points in position and I riffed on the themes of coincidence, accident and Day dreaming. It seemed to form some kind of cohesive sense of what we do as a group. And this was further enhanced by the arrival of the Professor. Thanks to Fred Pipes for filming this . Iceman levitates Cocky Young'un at The Rock public house circa 1992

Ah I thought, gingerly easing myself from bed into the day ahead. It’s obvious really. What went wrong with Communism is what went wrong with Modernism. It became inextricably joined at the hip with a functionalist morality. Puritanism. This is part of a false dichotomy presented everyday by the presiding left-brain culture - you are either functional or a messy over-indulgence. So with the superscale version of Communism we see a drive to strip away the excess until we are left with what is necessary. Who is fit to say what is necessary? Of course there are echoes of the drive to purify culture of the excesses of the bourgeois that we find in the French revolution. Fragonard painted the Swing just before the Revolution made him an anachronism and the sleek timeless message of classicism replaced the intimate and anecdotal. Commentary of the Swing often focuses on the name of the commissioning patron (?) and the story of how another artist (?) turned down the work thus giving Fragonard...

I was all set to over turn the tables and drive out the money lenders in the Art under Attack exhibition at the Tate Britain when I thought I ought rather to check what the curator’s intentions were. It turns out that the parameters were narrower than you might have presumed – this is an exhibition about “Image breaking in Britain”. The show does achieve this end which makes it’s rather puritanical air seem rather appropriate. As with all acts of creativity (curating included) no matter how scholarly the intention, something unintended will emerge. Something that resonates beyond the artist’s intentions. I’m including curators as artists as the idea of re-appropriating and re-presenting is what a lot of contemporary art is about. The something here is the question of literacy rewiring the brain until we (civilisation) somehow lose the language to express the ineffable problems of being human. There are a few powerful moments in the show. I say powerful but they are not the visceral in...

Funeral The concertina organ ebbs and flows Fingers politely jostle on the keys A chord is resolved Breathe in and breathe out Softly stumble from the pew Feeling suddenly self-conscious Down the aisle now Touch the wood – what tree you wonder? Fingers catch on the varnish Hadn’t expected that Feel more self-conscious Caught out trying to be sagacious Body of Christ Amen Blood of Christ Christ Amen Eyes down body stutters back to pew Pack of tissues in left pocket Mother of dead school friend over right shoulder We always ask ourselves Who am I mourning? The cheerful old soul in the coffin? Body of Christ body of Christ body of Christ Christ the priest has a clip on mic Old chap in the box lived a good life Life and soul Lit up the room Photo in the order of service Glint in his eye I wipe away tears Who am I mourning? Missing mother of two boys? Her mum over my right shoulder How great thou art Filing out now down the aisle God let me be strong enough to listen She’s not in pain any...

I’ve been searching for an analogy to try and explain how it feels to have fibromyalgia. I’ve come a long way in a year. This time last September I was pretty terrified by the tumult of pains that suddenly pummelled my body. In a panic I asked my doctor to test me for lead poisoning. I needed an explanation. The same doctor told me I’d have two weeks off max if I were a premier league footballer. And he told me this apropos of what exactly I still ask myself? It was after sending a two-page complaint about his bullying attitude and compulsive need to make me exercise in front of him that my diagnosis began to take shape. I got referred. Eventually I saw the much-respected Professor Powell and in April he diagnosed me with fibromyalgia as a result of the head on collision with a bandit vehicle two years earlier . He was pretty unequivocal and even when I said I didn’t want to jump to conclusions assured me that this order of events was pretty normal (all the other usual suspects have no...

Science fiction science fiction you’re just a genre with bad diction. So said no one – ever in the entire history of time. But the point is Sci-Fi is a genre and therefore down in the literary pecking order. Hey but hold yer eight legged green equine creatures a moment. Isn’t that whole hierarchy of aesthetics a pooey phoney Victorian thing? You know where historical paintings are more important than portraits or landscapes and shit. It is? Oh good because for a moment I thought we were still applying such moronic notions to art today. Like that other idea that art can’t be entertaining and serious. I took my 13-year-old son to see World’s End earlier this month. He was thrilled because the certificate was a 15 and not I’ll have you a 15A, which would have meant that I would have had to simply decide in my parental wisdom that he was mature enough to see the film. Oh no the missing A meant that we were officially sticking it to the man. And we were real men. Just like the blokes on th...

Will I AM is allegedly not locked in a legal dispute over the copyright infringement of Pharrell William’s I Am Other brand. He is merely defending the territory of his trademark. I Am forms “a significant element” of Will I Am’s professional name according to his lawyer. All this self-assertion is confusing. It’s rather like being trapped in a mirrored elevator with the essence of ego incarnate. “I am I am no I am I am!” claim the new Spartans of popular culture with “entrepreneurial spirit. I AM what I Am? Does Will know about the Iams cat food range which may start getting all territorial tom cat on his ass seeing as he is potentially threatening the individuality of their registered trademark with a “confusingly similar” mark. In fact if they all just agreed to spray their territory it would be a lot simpler. “I am” it says in a non-verbal kind of entrepreneurial spirit. Yay it’s great that there are these free spirited people out there reminding us how individual we all really a...

We continue to ask how does it work? Is this not like a white imperialist receiving a beautifully carved shrine then sending it for analysis instead of trusting. Ah faith is the dunces hat of rational Britain. Did we learn nothing from TV episodes of Star Trek about the limits of rational thought? Placebo is the placebo escape hatch of the enlightened. We are still stuck on Freud - analysing away the monster under the bed. How about befriending the monster under the bed? Artists on telly are psychopaths - cue close up of overly slick facsimile of mad elaborately filled leather bound sketchbook. We still want to stare ourselves into oblivion. Analysing your own consciousness puts me in mind of a table rapper unable to hear the dead spirit screaming in his ear but still giving a very convincing performance of channeling. A teddy is not a real creature but we don't tell the child that because that would be idiotic. A child understands different levels of consciousness in a way that as...

Why is life like this? An amal-gum An amalgamation One big analogous remnant Look there...it's gone Before you've turned to look The gift horse was right there Studiously avoiding eye contact WIth the gift rider. Hello you want to say To all of them Those poor dears Looking through you You're alive right? you're here now? But now I see you're not You are already a glimpse Which makes you older than the hills Remember them? Where you walked arm in arm With your father The long man of Wilmington The gathered hoard at roadside May as well be in period costume Catering off to one side A bombed out house facade Instead it's a doubled up volvo A volvo! You double up. Female middle aged driver Sat on Ercol chair on the pavement How neighbourly Pine teeters on paving slab Can you retrive my keys? She enquires (supercilious old bag) My garage key is on it you see. You're all alive right? Here now yes? That is absurd isn't ...

I now see that, yes, consciousness as self-defined “I” is a necessary illusion. The patriarchal God of monotheist religions is an outward projection of this illusion. Or at least it is a clumsy-complex method of trying to shoehorn spirituality or loss of self into a self-centred universe. This idea of consciousness turns the human body into a kind of armoured vehicle out of which the “individual” data processing machine peers as it trundles through life. Our civilised culture is based on separation. My own frustration is that I have always found this process of viewing life as a separation a rather non-intuitive act that I have non the less persevered with rather too diligently out of duty to the monotheist God that was indoctrinated into my data processing system by table thumping RE teachers. Self-awareness is not an integral part of being human but it strikes me that books such as "I am a Strange Loop" discuss it as if it were. The idea of indi...

Marcus du Sautoy's interactive lecture at the Barbican started with a brief and playful conjecture illustrating the absurdity of the search for consciousness. He joked about the idea of cutting off his hand and whether consciousness might be found residing therein. In terms of "self" exploration it seemed clear that we seem to have remained in flat earth territory since Kant posited that consciousness was located in the pituitary gland. I have written several times (I think) about the obsession with dissecting as path to knowledge that the artists and scholars of the Renaissance rapidly developed and once more I find my self thinking that expecting to find the self by physically chopping up and analyzing the brain in smaller and smaller pieces will not lead to a deeper understanding. We need to make a leap of faith in order to cross disciplines or like children at a party in celebration of our own intelligence we will be left having unwrapped the pass the parcel...

The skyline steadily ascends As the margin decreases And profits continue to soar One down The beanstalk climber Has a lucky escape I should be dead he sighs But I stayed in bed Jack’s a lazy boy The top of the tower is hidden Shrouded in 12 tog clouds A princess is stranded on the shore She awaits her winged fiery chariot Meanwhile back at the ranch The king throws a banquet You’re a wonderful mother Laughs Jack languidly Catching a pattie in his teeth As the old queen Frisbees them Out over the assembled unwashed soon to be stain removed masses Looking out of his high window Pale face sees red and white cranes Not the green shoots On his desk a beanstalk Creeps limply over the edge of a jam jar An earthing wire - the green fuse The fogs have mystified And the tower has buckled It’s all about luck repeats the rabbi Let them eat horse Whinnies the observer As fire rains down from the sky I should be ded ...