Review Revolting

Review of Lena Mellony TAMI, Revolting. Sayaghul Fantasy, 2017. Pp. 405. ISBN 978-8869572056. CDN$20.99.

One of last year's most talked about fantasy authors (thanks to two nominations and a win in major genre awards) was Lena Mellony Tami, who latest novel--reputed to be darker and more unpleasant than most epic fantasy in the current crop--I was able to acquire in ARC.

The title, Revolting, is of course a play on words, since the plot pivots around a rebellion against society and its norms (and ultimately against the very empire and its gods) by a boy whose very existence disgusts and repels his countrymen, leaving him outcast, untouchable, intolerable. The crime against decency committed by this wretch? To have survived the death of his twin, an achievement normally supernaturally impossible due to spiritual bonds. The existence of our hero, then, is more distasteful to his fellows, we are told, than a man fucking his mother is in our world. The trouble is, aside from the credibility of this taboo, on which more later, the comparison by which Tami tells us this fact breaks the fourth wall (and not in a good way, Reader). The whole things feels anachronistic, or at least to spoil the author's otherwise game effort to create a world at once morally very different from our own, and more or less believable.

And here is my problem with this book, which is in large part with how the book was marketed. We are told that this is a book about taboo, disgust, about individuals too repugnant to accept in society, about discrimination of a degree unknown in our own world. PW called it “nauseating … unsettling”; SH said, “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable, almost unclean”; NYRB restrained themselves to “upsetting”, which is closest to the truth. This is an upsetting book; there is violence, abuse, bigotry, bloody and disproportionate revenge. But it is not a book that successfully conveys that sense of disgust, of taboo, of deep-seated, psychological, bowel-churning moral rejection and stigma. We constantly feel the injustice of the boy subject to societal ostracism, but we're never shown what it is to be a member of the cultural that rejects on the basis of (to us arbitrary) personal status. And if you lay claim to writing a book about disgust, revulsion and horror, you need to do better than that.

While we have a fairly solid addition to the epic fantasy genre, therefore, with lower-class (and arguably "untouchable" caste) protagonists, a deep and keenly felt sense of injustice, and a hand for physically and viscerally (sometimes sadistically) described horror that comes from intimate knowledge of human military and criminal history, Tami has failed at her ostensible goal. While we see quite plainly why the hero of this book revolts, at no point does the reader understand, truly feel, why he is revolting.

Peace

In the bottom corner of an otherwise banal (if well-executed) palimpsest of graffiti I spotted on a visit to the Cité last month, a text annotation (presumably with multiple authors, but the final result is of course to be considered complete and coherent, as of the snapshot in time it was recorded) with a nice message for the afficionado.

“☮2 [peace to] all the writers!”
[second hand] “...thief!”

Is "thief" appositive to “the writers” (leave aside the disagreement of number, which is acceptable in the vernacular of graffiti)? Is "thief" the signature of the peacewisher (prefixing an autograph with ellipsis being a semi-literate but attested practice)? Is the thief a third person, perhaps the reader, or society at large, complicit in the exploitation of unpaid labour that is public art, non-remunerated, consumed by every passerby, anonymous, unattributed, copied, stolen and exhibited with impunity? Is the thief me?

Well-wishes from a friend

Rattlesnake
Neck break
Find a charm at the foot of a stake

Hysteria
Night's eerier
Never forget dreams're yours to make

Gravity
No pity
You'll always fall, the Earth'll always take

Archéologie du graffiti

© Paul De Graaf, 2017.

Dans Le Monde de France cette semaine, l’histoire de Paul De Graaf, un néerlandais qui a posté sur Imgur des photographes presque archéologiques de trentes années de graffitis sur un mur à Nijmegen (Nimègue). Passons du vandalisme de cet « archéologue », qui détruit le passé qu’il prétend étudier (comme toujours), ça me fait pensée des mementos du mur de Berlin, autant qu’a la grotte de Lascaux ou les couleurs presques invisibles de la sculpture grecque. Ça serait fascinant de faire des analyses chromatographiques et chimiques pour étudier les peintures et autres traces (pollution, marijuana, traces biologiques) que s’agglomérent le long des trente ans d’histoire artistique qu’on témoigne ici.

Review MDA

It's not often that your host Debuse will review mainstream pop culture works, either in literature or media, preferring to opine where his opinion is welcome. Sometimes, though, a popular work, however hyped and survalued, ever so much admired by the unthinking classes, retains a higher worth that has been overlooked even by the most simpering of pundits, requiring the sure hand of a critic to do it justice.

© 2015 Archipelagic Records

Such is the case with last year's offering from Pop Search, purveyor of saccharine anthems often done more justice in cover versions by the pre-teen girls in the courtyards of your inner-city housing project. Referred to everywhere but the CD sleeve by the abbreviation "M.D.A." as if to spare the breath of generations of fans of this precocious legend, the slightly surreal "Mildewy Dinner Activates" is at odds with the otherwise Disneyesque self-presentation of this family-friendly ensemble. I'm sure the teen magazines have made much of the fact that the closest the title comes to reflecting the album content is that there is one song in this collection about a shower curtain, one about eating an evening meal, and one about setting up a new cellphone, if that's what passes for close reading in the pop music press these days. (It wouldn't pass muster in the independent poetry scene.)

I am not interested here in reviewing the music, however (which I have mostly heard from the cherubic mouths of your pre-teen neighbours). I bought my copy of this album--on vinyl, from one of the more pretentious local music stores that still offers this format--in order to hang the frankly inspired sleeve in a bare spot on my office wall. The disc itself I took to the park to play with my dog, until it was no longer any use even for that.

Take a look at this cover art a moment. Not for nothing do graphic designers complain of being the most unrecognised artists in the creative industries. (She is unnamed anywhere on this album's sleeve notes. I checked.) At first glance, it's a photograph as banal as a basket of potatoes. At first glance it's as original as every other pastel pink, princess-eye-catching piece of tat on the immature pop shelves. At first glance Pop Search's “logo” (if you can call the band's name dropped in a mid-century font a piece of design) is regulation-consistent with every previous album they've released.

Look again. With your brain as well as your eyes, this time.

The photograph, far from having been digitally saturated to produce the nauseating hue that barely stands before you today, was over-exposed. (Look closely at the glare on a decent-sized print of the sleeve, and you'll see that the wash-out happened in the studio.) The foodstuff sitting unexcitingly in front of our eyes, washed but otherwise unprepared, unseasoned, and not especially fresh, are root vegetables, that grow under the ground and whose colours are never meant for our eyes. I count at least four different varieties, but it's a bit hard to tell if there are more. Far from being a random scattering of potatoes in a box or kitchen counter, if you look closely these tubers have been deliberately posed in a wire basket to show as much variety and colour as possible in one shot.

I'm sure the band--or even the management keepers--didn't know what she was up to when she designed this cover, but someone give this graphic artist a raise!

Review of Military Pizza

Review of Burn Your Eyes Inside, Military Pizza. No label, 2013. 33 min.

It was only recently that I picked up a hand-labeled copy of the first self-published album by “surrealist rock” band Burn Your Eyes Inside—although to be fair I think Ceci n’est pas une musique was more of a demo CD, and the copy I acquired may have been either bootlegged or from an A&R rep’s discarded collection. Still, I was impressed by the classic psychedelic quality, the unashamed naïvety of 60s dark/high fantasy themes, and the sheer silliness of the vocal and musical interaction.

Having enjoyed the first “album,” when I learned that the second Burn Your Eyes Inside release was now available not only as “pay what you like” MP3, but could be ordered as a home-pressed CD via Paypal, I took a leap of faith at the chance to pick that up too. I’m listening to it now, although it reminds me of the Captain Beefheart tapes that are in a box under my bed somewhere, which I might have to dig out and listen to for the first time in ten years.

I don’t want to flatter BYEI that they have singlehandedly awakened in me a love of free-form or surreal musical styles; if anything it’s remembering that Beefheart did this shit better. But this second album departs so wildly from the psych-rock pastiche of Ceci n’est pas… that for a while I wondered if I hadn’t inadvertently picked up a demo by a different band of the same name. Where the former teased and titillated us with childish terrors and drug-induced tomfoolery, Military Pizza disorients and discords our senses with clunky refrains and technically ugly jazz virtuosity. To the untrained ear, there’s little to link these two albums on the musical level.

What convinced me that I had not made a mistake even before my first listen to Military Pizza, however, was the clear and consistent horror aesthetic that pervades the œuvre. Where Ceci n’est pas… gave us rabbit holes and snow witches and transvestite crusaders, claustrophobia and cannibalism and war crimes, the nightmares in this new collection are more fuck-you, more psychological, inward-facing and contemporary. Night terrors, asylum imagery, hallucination and dysfunctional families all make an appearance, although the lyrics are rarely the most prominent part of any of the songs.

The opening track, “Milk Safe,” is an obvious homage to Beefheart, at least in title and in eccentric mixing, although his obsessive repetitive refrains are more evident in the long and electronic “Pepper On I’?” whose beat is almost as migraine-inducing as the faux-Brit-punk voiceover. “Don’t Believe Me” is an Evanescence-inspired mental-health industry nightmare, which becomes muted, cloudy and cotton-wool smothered mid-way through to represent the progressive sedation of the protagonist. An instrumental piece, “Rain Night,” features electric piano and woofed-base mixed hard to the left, and acoustic guitar and hand-drums mixed all the way to the right, so you feel almost like you’re sat in a concert hall with competing bands on opposite stages. It’s a better idea than it is a song, but it grows on you (and if you don’t sit right between the speakers it’s not quite so much of an ear-fuck).

Slightly longer than Ceci n’est pas la musique, which would have fit on one side of a 12” vinyl disc back in the day, Military Pizza runs to 33 minutes of oddly-mixed music. While I didn’t love it as much as the earlier album, which sometimes spontaneously makes it onto a Friday night playlist, this more experimental outing is worth a listen, and might even be useful in setting the atmosphere for certain types of especially pretentious poetry gatherings. I’ll be super careful before shelling out for anything Burn Your Eyes Inside bring out in future though, if they keeping pissing with our expectations like this.

Chisel me all the ways

In Montréal, the happy agglomeration of muraille and graffiti:

Zoom in on this—it really is a lovely piece of work. All the more striking for the smoky bubbles of crude tags forming a cloudy bed of dry ice below the main figure (and if you could reach a position where the garish ice cream advertisement on the shop downstairs wasn’t overshadowing the mural, it would be better).

Our hero lies on his back, deconstructed and re-folded with all his faces showing in best cubist fashion; his arms are folded on his chest, as if staring restfully at the sky, or as if laid to rest in a monumental tomb. He lies on his front, face resting on his hands, fingers interlinked forming a barrier before his mouth a reminder to speak no evil, knees tucked up comfortably as he stares down at the world. Eyes open, alert but weary, expressive but vacant.

Simultaneously, four bent and haggard figures are chiseling our hero from a single megalith of gray stone. Hunchbacked, bald-headed, faces covered with kerchiefs to keep the stone-dust from infecting their lungs as generations of miners have learned with endemic breathing disorders, they wield their stonemasons chisels and large hammers wearily, as if they’ve been at it for weeks. (By the time this photograph was taken, they probably had!)

At once a classic ecphrasis, capturing the essence of a granite sculpture in monochrome paints; and a fine cubist unraveling, showing the hero as in passage, the simultaneity of several actions and perspectives in the single shot; and an Esher-esque optical illusion, as both the sculpture and the movement are impossible in anything but 2D. As cubism, this work owes more to the chunky sensuality of André Lhote than it does to the smoky mysticism of Georges Braque or the busy mechanised tropes of Fernand Léger, but it feels more like an early work than the product of an artist who has been through the gauntlet of the futurist critics or the breeding ground of the Salons. One wonders how this would fare on the streets of Paris today; is this only good enough for provincial Montréal, or could it hold its own in the home of the art form it pastiches?

Response to Hutcheson

It pains me to do this, as it would sadden me to chasten an adorable puppy that had shat in my slippers, but it is against my religion to leave a moronic, erroneous, slanderous and ad hominem review unanswered, however hapless the culprit.

In the unedited “public responses” of last month’s Bamfette, diminutive septuagenarian Millie Nash Hutcheson (I’m guessing her age, but when I briefly met her at the Alberta Poetry Festival about five years ago she was bubbling excitedly about her impending retirement, and rather quaintly assuming anybody gave a shit) exposed her complete ignorance of any poetic developments later than her 10th birthday via a criticism of my performance at the annual Jackson Frière memorial slam last April. It will be instructive to quote her salient words in full here, interspersed with my replies.

1. I was looking forward to seeing our enthusiastic, amateur, native poet Silver Debuse take the stage a little before midnight,
1. Amateur, Millie? As opposed to you who’ve never been paid a penny for your work, I understand. (And it was nowhere near midnight. You must have been drunk.)
2. for while I've never dug out his self-published books myself, I have heard good things about his creativity and his performance.
1. What about the six volumes of my poetry published by traditional houses, Millie? Ever think of reading something yourself rather than relying on reports from moronic critics?
3. Unfortunately the work he chose to read for us on this somber occasion
1. I did not read, I performed. Why should a slam be somber? We remember Frière with joy, not with po-faced priggishness.
4. was a sonnet about sex with animals, not terribly well put together,
1. It was not a sonnet. Have you never read poetry?
5. and I'm afraid the poor man forgot his lines, because it barely rhymed at all,
1. No, Millie, you're a moron.
6. and the meter, what you could detect through his stammering, monotonous rendition, was by no stretch of the imagination iambic pentameter.
1. No, Millie, you're a moron.
7. It was rather embarrassing for everyone concerned.

I can stop there, I think.

Make no mistake...

Dark of the Heart (1998)

On the recommendation of at least two "friends" (one of whom I suspect was winding me up, the other is only a "friend" in the sense that taking a shit in your own back patio is a "party") I had the misfortune of sitting down to watch a 1998 "classic" low-budget horror movie, Dark of the Heart. If not entertained, I expected at least to be mildly amused and titillatingly grossed out. I'd probably have had more fun watching an imbecilic episode of Doctor Who.

Directed by the otherwise unknown to me Stuart Emersen Cade, this DVD came with a label that looked like it had been hand-printed. I think that's the budget rather than a pirate copy, but it is quite hard to tell. The movie bills itself as "hilarious", "homage" and "cult", but those aren't the words that came to my mind. (They might rhyme with them.) There are quite obvious references to the classic movies, and more importantly the cinematic styles and trademark cheapness of directors like Bava, Romero, Argento, and all the low-budget masters of '70s Italian horror. The trouble is, Cade imitates without improving, pastiches without critiquing, borrows from without any self-awareness, irony, humour, or--saddest of all--talent whatsoever. To take a single example, Dark of the Heart is as sexist, gratuitous, misogynistic and soft-pornographic as the most tasteless of the European classics, not as a critique of the now horribly dated tradition, but unimaginatively and gratuitously in its own right. Pretty much every scene is an excuse for half- or fully naked women to run screaming or expose their tits on a mortuary slab. Of course, this lack of self-awareness or self-respect describes most cheap horror films made in in the 1990s or even today.

The storyline is nonexistent; I have no idea whatsoever why Squire's camply villainous doctor is after the girl's heart. I have no idea why the two sisters (played by Valentina Vitalia and Luce Antonini, who look entirely unalike, and I suspect at least one of them was only pretending to be Italian) came to a creepy, apparently non-functioning surgery and take off all their outer clothes. Vitalia then spends half the film running out while doffing and donning random items of clothing as she does so, while Antonini is either in a stupor, drugged, unconscious, undergoing surgery (suddenly conscious again and of course screaming) and eventually dead, all while showing her admirably immobile breasts from various angles.

I understand that this production was not actually short of funding, but that the low-budget effects were meant to imitate the classic horror films of the genre. That turned out to be pretty stupid, as all it did was fail to draw attention from the director's complete lack of talent, the laxness in scriptwriting, the soporific behaviour of the "actors", and the sheer stupidity of the whole exercise. Every squirt of ketchup or pasta sauce (at one point you could actually see the zucchini and melanzane pieces dripping down Antonini's enhanced cleavage), every camera cut from human to wax dummy, every mistimed scream or in-shot microphone boom just made the viewing more tedious.

Perhaps the most bizarre failure of the production is the lack of basic props. In one scene, Vitalia and Antonini and their partners are drinking in a sophisticated lounge, mixing expensive cocktails and bantering about the more expensive malt whiskeys, but they appear to be drinking out of paper cups, have no access to ice or fruit, and have mismatched chairs in a room with no carpet or wall-hangings (all filmed from a single angle, of course).

I fully expect that Cade will die in the obscurity he deserves, having never again been given the budget or the authority to fuck an audience in the eyes by making a turgid piece of crap like this. He'll be missed about as much as a used paper cup stained with cheap piss-coloured whiskey. Fuck you. Give me my two fucking hours back.

Who is this squid...

...and how does he know Yuri?

Dr Abel

Under the water, everyone was the same. A shadowy torso, arms and legs that move too slowly, clumsy thrashing like infants, clouds and bubbles scattering as they bob between the competing pressures to float and be sucked down, faces blurred and puffy, so serious. You’d think they were trying really hard, except that they aren’t really going anywhere. Leaking from pores in their skin, from tiny lesions and larger orifices, you can smell them an hour away. My sisters gather, circle, stare; we’ve never really figured out what they’re doing here. Not that it matters. Now everyone’s here, we feed.

Revision...

Kill it.

Kill it with fire.

Let beauty blossom from the ashes.

The street-art is listening to you!

A very nice mural reported this morning by Street Art News, who ascribe it to English artist Banksy. Click through for a higher-quality image, and more photographs, but in short this piece incorporates a classic British telephone box (vandalized, graffiti-daubed and piss-stained, but unusually not festooned with postcards advertising prostitutes and escorts) and externalizes the lack of privacy in Western telecommunications. Surrounding the box are three men dressed as stereotypical 1950s spies, complete with trench coats, hats and dark glasses, using various archaic technologies to eavesdrop on the conversation in the booth and transmit them to GCHQ in Gloucestershire. I don't expect many people use phone boxes in England these days, which is in one sense a shame, because this artwork would look even better captured with various people making calls from inside the box over the course of the day. The workmanlike expressions on the faces of the spies would then be especially apt: they're doing their jobs, without shame or regret, but also without prurient interest or enthusiasm; they are technicians. The upper figure on the right shows a small amount of discomfort, but that's more due to his position, reaching up with a small satellite transceiver, shoulders hunched, fedora dislodged by large headphones and resting awkwardly on his glasses. The lower right-hand figure, crouching like a plumber or electrician working in your house, looks especially bored with his work, recording telephone conversations onto an old-fashioned tape deck, and does his job uncomplainingly only out of thorough professionalism. Even the spies hacking into our telephones and email accounts, blackmailing our Web service providers, sabotaging Internet security and watching us masturbate on Yahoo webcams, don't give a shit about us.

Silver reviewed in CROSS

By chance I learned yesterday that my book of butchered poetry published last year was reviewed in the "literature" section of the Cultural Review Of the Society for the Sanctity of the family, a flimsy journal with the somewhat creative acronym CROSS, published somewhere in the darks of fuckin' Newfoundland.

The idiocy starts in line 1 of the review:

We were, perhaps inadvertently, sent this galley volume of animal-slaughter themed poetry by the publicity department of a deservedly obscure and ill-organized press called Fallen Albatross Books.

(I count seven errors in that sentence alone.) We can only imagine our erstwhile reviewer Reginald May's growing confusion as he passed the first 55 pages of the collection without coming across a single reference to animals, abattoirs, or the sale or consumption of meat. Assuming he read the book any more than skimming the back cover and two or three randomly selected pages. Assuming he can read at all, or understands that poetry is not just prose with a ragged right margin, or knows that the garlicky piss spewing from his mouth is not the same as the considered opinion of a trained literary critic.

He misunderstands the very concept of a poetry collection:

The selection of poems in this volume, all by a single author of clear counter-cultural proclivities but with no unity of purpose, plot, theme or style, defeats all comprehension.

Even the closing words of the review fail to engage in any way with the literary merit, cultural context, generic conceits or thematic content of my book, the words and poems therein, or even any recognition of the talent and history of the author. His criticisms, while I really do take them as a compliment, are so banal and inept as to beggar belief:

To be perfectly frank, the work lacks dignity, gravitas and taste, not to mention the kind of social responsibility that we at CROSS like to endorse.

To be perfectly frank, Mr May, I wouldn't shit in your mouth unless it were from a great height and I had some assurance of protection against splash-back.