Wednesday 5 February 2014
Tuesday 4 February 2014
The alphabet according to Cosey Fanni Tutti
A-Z"W as in William S. Burroughs: I’ve never been as interested in his work as much as the other members of TG were. I was “discouraged” from being involved on a personal level when meetings with Burroughs were arranged. I was told he was a misogynist. Or maybe it just wasn’t “cool” to have a woman with you when you go to meet and want to impress your hero."
William Bennett (Whitehouse/Cut Hands) on GPO
“Simon Reynolds' much-feted Rip It Up And Start Again is an entertaining but ultimately shoddily researched book about what he describes as 'post-punk'; he has far less grasp on the literary and artistic cultural references he bandies about than he and his band of nostalgic mostly fortysomething readers might like to think. But that's rock writers for you. Anyway, enough of that.I wonder what story relating to WSB old Gen will come up with for the 100th? Maybe a vid over at Danger Ass Behinds alongside Dick calling for a 5:1 version of 'Call Me Burroughs' eh?
--------On a personal note, it's irritating how Reynolds' included unverified quotes from Neil Megson get lazily regurgitated in various quarters, and once again, in this month's Wire magazine, Megson eagerly jumps at the opportunity tossed in his direction. And before I continue, I should state for the record that I admire both Chris and Cosey, nor do I have a problem with Sleazy (despite not being especially familiar with his latter-day work).
--------Hippie Megson has been playing the numbers game since the early 70s, trying his luck at almost any thing in the hope of hitting the big celebrity jackpot that, like the grapes to Tantalus, so sadly seems to keep eluding him. And despite the bold bulimic rhetoric he utilises in conversation, Megson in all that time - with the assistance of his trusty sidekick, the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary - has not managed (in my opinion) to write one single half-decent set of lyrics. His continual griping and posturing and bitching and rationalising and whingeing and namechecking and boasting says a lot more about him than it does about anyone else: a subtext of why he doesn't get the recognition and public love for everything that, at least in his own addled moral worldview, he feels he's invented or achieved, and donated to the world.
--------The ironic and disappointing truth is that he's not a man in drag at all, I really wish he was. He's Nicholas Fairbairn with piercings.”
William Burroughs: Brussels/Amsterdam 1979
...Bill stopped and leaned against a wall. I looked at him stopped there as though he was trying to catch his breath. He looked at me and we made eye contact. That look which I spoke of in the limousine back in Brussels, well it wasn’t there. Instead was the look of desperation, as though somehow he had had the same cogitative experience, which I had had inside during the reading. His look of what the fuck have I created am I somehow responsible for this? I asked him if he was cool, needed anything to which he sighed, and then in his typical Kansas (sic) drawl said. No, I’m cool, let’s just get me home.Gerard Pas
Monday 3 February 2014
Abbott and Empathy
Tony Abbott (1987)...A little earlier, I had been appointed college infirmarian. This post was a legacy from quasi-monastic days and involved supervising the medicine cabinet and ensuring that the ill were not forgotten in their rooms.
But during winter, when up to 30 percent of the college would be down with “flu” at any one time, the infirmarian spent much of his day ferrying food and aspirin to the rooms of the sick. My view was that I knew nothing about medicine and that those too sick to eat in the dining room ought to be in hospital.
Anyway, I thought, most were malingering. So I encouraged “self-service” of medicines and suggested that meals would be better fetched by the friends of the sick. Many deeply resented this disdain for college’s caring and communitarian ethos. And, I confess, I did not have the courage to refuse room service to members of the seminary staff.
Via
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