Mediations
FRAGMENTS (A-G)
A long time ago in pre-internet days I came across an old photograph of a doll of Felix the Cat surrounded by strange machinery (Google it).
VALERIA PISANI AND HER LAUGH IN TEN PRODUCTIONS
Valeria Pisani unfastened all but one of his shirt buttons and placed the palms of her small hands on his chest. His skin was white, like a Rossetti. She ran her palms down, over the shadows of his ribs until his shirt gaped to the last button. Then she stepped back. She said, ‘What was your name again?’ She noted his body tighten. Until she spoke the only sound was Nico's voice turning softly on the record player. It was a first press record, hard to get your hands on she had said as he took it from the sleeve. The thick red curtains, the dark wood vanity table: all the things in her room were old. Nicholas opened his mouth and closed it again. Valeria Pisani laughed and undid the final button of his shirt. The only thing she wanted to get her hands on was his skin.
THE PURPLE DEATH
‘Here was the treasure, a treasure impossible to describe because the assortment of miscellaneous objects in the drawer had been so far stripped of their original function, so charged with symbolism that what remained looked merely like old junk – empty aspirin bottles, metal rings, keys, curling-pins, all worthless rubbish, save to the eye of the initiate.’
(Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles)
AN UNTELEVISED EMERGENCY
There was a woman once with straggly black hair and battered Clarks trainers who received daily letters from the debt collectors that she left in the shared hallway, unopened. Her name, which I read off those letters, was Ellen Tyler. Being smashed to smithereens until they went away. Well, we made friends again, Banny and I, but it might have been the blood loss or perhaps the alarm that had started and would not stop squealing though we couldn’t find it. The fire alarm we broke up after three false accusations and after that there was no doubt it was coming from somewhere else. Soon it was time for the football so I allowed that we could watch it, hoping the adrenaline would block out the noise. After all, Banny was bleeding more heavily than At the time, I was dangerously in love with her, though as far as I knew she had never given me a second thought. She did not think about me every time she opened the front door, did not dream about laying her neat hands on my crinkled smoked-out face, did not imagine us in swimsuits holding hands on sunset beaches, did not, most probably, know my name.
WAVEFORM TRANSMISSION VOL.4
ARMIN RAZNAHAN: So I’d spent some time think about the intersection between ideas around reproduction and transformation and evolution and, I guess, they all seem to be related somehow, to me – and biology, and the work you create. And I don’t know whether you had had any thoughts, or whether the magazine theme had triggered any reflections in your mind.
JEFF MILLS: Well, I mean, I mean, um, you know, creating music or art, I think you have a very similar sense, from the idea of creating something from nothing – that there must be some design pattern or some type of thought about something for practical reasons or, I guess, some type of moral connection for the listener. There is a certain amount of, I guess, characteristic type designing I suppose, that goes with it, and...
AR: You mean the intentional act of creating is there, in a purely artistic sense, or in science?
JM: Yeah, in a certain sense intentional. But then, you know, characteristics...In other words, I play certain keys, as opposed to hitting other keys and I tend to do that by habit and my character by the setting that I’m trying to put myself. And it comes out as, you know, people recognise it as a certain, as a particular style I suppose. So yeah, I mean, in a non-descript way, yeah I suppose it can be similar.
RADIO
It’s 1am and I speak my first few words, speaking to myself in here. Breathing quietly, keeping my voice low. This string of knotty words emerges. I press buttons and slide up four faders, and get these processes in motion. Things can start happening. The tangles start to tingle. This equipment at my fingers begins to work. The equipment, patched up with several ages of tape.
PHONE VOICE
A man walked past my flat today. I heard him first; he was shouting. There was no response to his stentorian tones. I’ve been researching the phone voice and was intrigued as to whether that’s what I was hearing. I raced to another window. Through ample spring leaves I discerned that indeed he was yelling into a device. I tried to imagine his voice existing elsewhere simultaneously – his anger reproduced belowsome other tree. I wondered if the person on the other end was shouting back, their voices not just here and there, but alongside each other and in between. How do I picture the cellular voice: as pixelation, vibratile; as a cloud of bats at dusk – diffuse and converged, flickering.