He Lost Control: Ian Curtis and "Control"

I never really "got" Joy Division. I never forgot seeing some live footage of them and Ian Curtis' epileptic jigging, but as for the music it left me strangely cold. To be honest it bored me- and largely still does. But the new film Control, about Curtis' life and death, is a minor masterpiece. Shot in dull black and white, and featuring a claustrophobic Manchester 70s milieu to pile drive home the message of isolation, this is one trip that isn't bad so much as sad. Curtis' talent is so natural and redolent of despair that he is almost the ultimate white bluesman, twitching like an old TV picture, staring into himself and I guess life with a gaze locked down for survival. Sam Riley, as Curtis, summons a very lonely lad, without laying on any gratuitous existential crud. The known ending has all the surprise of death in life, a kind of tidy inevitability. It doesn't matter that Curtis died young because in the film at least he never seems young at all, and towards the end merely an arrested corpse.

The Greatest Solo of All-Time- Final!

The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson is the only certifiable genius of pop. Even Lennon and McCartney, with all their ness, can't approach the throne of Wilson. And at his best he was simple. Zen simple, spud simple: simple. Years before the Ramones re-invented the minimalist solo, Wilson got his string man to lay down the greatest Zen, anti-solo of all-time, and dumped it right in the middle of a little masterpiece of melodic glory entitled "Don't Worry Baby". But don't take my word for it: check out said solo.


and tell me it isn't perfect.

The Future Is Unwritten (But The Past Isn't Overwritten)

Got a copy of the new Strummer documentary where pals - and Bono, shot when his schedule would permit and who would come to your Bar Mitzvah if he thought it would make him seem less of a stadium schmuck...it always makes me laugh when this patent newly flatulent Bon Jovi infers he is part of some great lineage including real monster talents like Strummer... - sit around a campfire and remember The Clash One, intercut with tons of awesome archive footage. It's a wide ride, going from unlikely origins to predictable aftermaths, with poignancy tangible as we feel Strummer's postpartum take hold. The Clash seem even greater than ever, and Strummer in a punk rock star class of his own uninhabited in spirited by great artists yet incredible bores like J. Lydon, who attracts the kind of "I still wear studs" idiocy Strummer never would. I saw The Clash several times, but was ever really concentrating, which is my loss. Of course these guys didn't change the world, but they did change rock'n'roll, and for some of us that has at times been synonymous.

Love is Dud: Brett Anderson's F**ked-Up Solo Flite to The Land of Self-Indulgence

I've always had a big soft spot for Suede. "Coming Up" was a minor mastepiece, pitting the Ramones against Bowie in a hook-rich death match. As a student of misbegotten solo sludge I was therefore curious to sample singer Brett Anderson's debut "Love is Dead". The eponymous single is pretty good, actually, despite itself. But then the album begins in earnest and soon becomes a morass of uninhibited self-indulgence on the grand scale, with numeorus strings and bows and allsorts of brouhaha laid on so thick its a veritable trench of torrid treacle. Brett is a poet, now, see:

Baby thought she really needed that hairstyle
Baby thought she really had to say yes
Baby really needed acres of carpets
Thought she'd be happy if she had larger breasts

Or

The killer inside stares back from the mirror
Lust in his eyes, waiting for exchange

Come on, Brett, you're doing the wife, not trying to pick up the Gorgon! Bless.

And so it goes, on an on, as one very silly lyric and song after another soon amounts to one of the great non-triumphs of our time. I mean this is a true anti-masterpiece. How did this guy, who made so many great records, end up with this?

I tidy your wayward hair
I buy clothes you never wear
I try to kiss all your tears away
I freeze you in polaroids

"Ashtray" Makes Small Screen Debut

You didn't want it and now it's here, the first Datawhore video courtesy of Jaeger Cormack and featuring "Ashtray" with michael dent.

The Cutup Craze and Y2K Part Five: "To An Alien, You're An Alien"

It is hard already to relate to the pre-Millennial milieu. If you were into computing then the Millennium Bug, a consultant's wet dream and virtually fallacious, provided the cracked context, a kinda software Armageddon promising increased sales to survivors. Otherwise it was either a struggle to care of the usual variety pack of pointless delight and dread at the prospect of another thousand years for mancruel to kill.

On this type of tireless idiocy the cutups thrived, milling and mangling. Predictably, a lot of the excitement fabricated included aliens - I was friends then with a keen conspiracy theorist who turned me on to MP3s and MK Ultra at the same time - and all manner of extraterrestrial fancies. Mind you, not all of it was fanciful, but that is another story,and largely unbelievable...

The cutup quest used many tools. Most have now disappeared but thanks to the generous void that before it was just another shopping mall and still had some mystery was called "cyberspace" I have recovered two, posted:

Kewl Talker Turn your text into ascii & numbers.

Random Thoughts Randomly fishes a designated drive for texts and randomizes them.

The Cutup Craze and Y2K Part Four: "Destruction Carefully Next"

glass before dwelleth in love dwelleth

brunette randomly finds
the Abyss lamely
and third-party tools wastes
airplane entity trans-dimensional interface
mauve on earlier
says lameness and
spaced out keyed up ashen sorrow drive
vicious randomly
truck tommorrow carefully
Xanadu nor one under absolutely
German somewhat plays
destruction carefully next
neither data crossroad flies
glass before dwelleth in love dwelleth
yellow sleep quickly
flatters plague hence
police the system indeed
Oh in kicks
necrotrivia culture imagine an employee
despair brutally beyond
sleep gone
God not only small-medium
annihiliation very before
darkness technical support
polish with care horrifically
kills book sleep
no big crash near therefore
high speed networkers yearn for third-party tools
the information plane light-save your data
cop randomly awareness of the divine
translucent above

The Cutup Craze and Y2K Part Three: "Intelligent Routine Dysfunction"

Day after day the repetitive, inner and random nature of the cutup experiment caused inbreeding of words. Patterns criss-crossed with a pleasing mundane futility. "Garbage Truck", with its crowding of idiot post-modern voices, is a typical example:

garbage truck

lamely suburban
intelligent routine dysfunction
protection from within neither
work out how to transform third-party tools, the Almighty Creator
because thou hast left thy first love absolutely no big crash
cyberspiel high speed networkers pleasure continuance
pleasure continuance absolutely O!
amulet near also
fails tommorrow rusty
too Y2K carefully
two amazingly is
Everything is like this virtual spirituality top secrets
limps quickly seldomly
network of Light ye have ministered to the saints
the mass of associated perceptions a bizarrely tolerant upgrade
capitalist ideals of the Almighty Creator
the Pacific Ocean of before
shoves amazingly stupid
poor, I will not go out free hastily
web sex provider kills mall
before from Pluto
green enough lusts after
VCR towards when
Oh! bizarrely my life
e-business digerati showdown small medium
white forgot three
i'm okay you're not connect your brain to the world Listen to me!

Into the Infinite

Many years ago I acted in an unreleased movie, Voice of Silence. In it an ancient Chinese poem was used thematically; entitled "Into the Infinite", it remains one of my most treasured texts:

"Rise to the joyous clouds
Hardly does man sense
What is meant by boundlessness
Good and evil are requited
Be it sooner or late.
Wherefore do Earth's children strive
Perversely after goods and power?
Everything is foreordained.
Not until the end do they perceive
The great delusion."

The Cutup Craze and Y2K Part Two: "Mind and Machine Convergence"

A great deal of the cutup craze output revolved around internet sewage - like nascent chat rooms and cheesy marketing - and New Age and technological off-cut, jargon of any kind and legacy mysticism. Sometimes the work would transcend its trash and a poem like this would happen:

the coffee test transformation specialist

i am time eats
spiritual possibility
break the chain World Religions Incorporated
mind and machine convergence
blank potential-driven information-energy system can self-organize
creating a super hologram (a reality)
that is the sum of its co-creators
the information plane instead of
reaching for the champagne feeling Hurray!!
cool colour phase killing it from
We are here today with our message
like multi-variant aspect
seeks to learn from the sum total
of all possible creative interactions
the coffee test transformation specialist

The Cutup Craze and Y2K Part One: "Wanna Write My Book?"

In 1998 I began to do work hard on experimental writing on my first, beloved old PC, the Olivetti 486-DX, a battleship grey hunk'o'junk that, once it was hooked to the mainline, changed my life forever. Inspired by Burroughs and my own metaphysical mayhem, and with the help of early text manipulation programs like Random Verse Lab, I cutup countless thousands of words, published numerous websites and recorded numerous files of voice weirdness.

Stumbling around online I rediscovered one of my cutup sites, an old Geocities workhorse heaving with little programs, machine-generated texts and visionary hypotheses. Usually I would shove random 'net-tech content, my poetry and prose and news material into Random Verse Lab and then spend long hours lost in an unlanguage haze, editing my ass off. It became obsessive and a kinda carpal tunnel turn-on. There were times when I changed realities. You can laugh, but "the end of words" (Burroughs) really is the kickoff to the unknown. Beyond words lies the corridors of unarticulated energy flux. And we ain't talking a hobby here: this stuff can rip your heart off and your head out. We hold back the collapse by force of will invoked in the words we use. After that?

Amongst the glories squirreled away in this cardboard catacomb is one experiment I particularly am proud of. This was an attempt to get others to finish a book I had an idea for based on words that came to me in a dream:

"wanna write my book? i got 60 words. i need more:

"Anybody who thinks there is not evil in this world is in for a big surprise. Hell is the Parasite. The Master Parasite. On our shoulders like a marine rifle, seeped into bruises. I woke up smoking listening television. I have known Bliss, The White River. Father, forgive them, they know exactly what they do. Jesus loves a liar: Judas."

The work continued apace for a few years. At its peak, my cutup cook-down took up weeks at a time, endless alchemical copy and paste to the point of exhaustion and, sometimes, exultation.

Great Works of Art: 1. Eastenders

New Year brought with it that most exotic and sought-after phenomenom, an hour-long episode of Eastenders. And not just any episode, but one yet more bilious and cankerous than usual, consigning nice guy Kev to the ground and the others to their eternal roundabouts of pain. As the credits rolled I hooted with glee at the revelation that two writers had collaborated to create it. I mean, come on, it took one Dickens to knock out several classics of English lit. and only one Dostoevsky to drop a little soap operatic novel called "Crime and Punishment"! To say nothing of William Shakespeare, now widely acknowledged as the Arthur Hailey of his generation. It all brings home how mediocre our arts have become - don't get me wrong, I live for the Square! - when two writers have to tackle an hour of miserable bilge and we put up with pictures of Tracey Emin taking a piss. (Taking the piss, more like.) So onward Eastenders, my proudest addiction, and if the day comes it takes a Council of Rome to write you, so be it!

"Some a dem a Barracuda, eh!"

"Some a dem a Bodysnatcher
Some a dem a Barracuda, eh!
But who a know fe me Jah Jah
Fe me Jah a me creator, eh!"

Mikey Dread toasts The Barracudas on The Clash's immortal "Living In Fame".

I only met Joe Strummer once. We were rehearsing in a squat where he was living in a tiny crap room (1978, see) filled with Trojan 12"s and I ran into him and he asked if I had any speed.

Roll For You (Lo-Fi) - Datawhore'n'dent, the headache you can hear...

Fourteen minutes. Count 'em. It's the new opus from Datawhore and michael dent, Roll For You. Hear it, love it, download it, delete it. Perfection.