A bande apart

August 9th, 2008

“It’s all my fault,” my Grandad told me, searching through his pockets for his pipe tobacco, “I should never have introduced you to Aubrey Beardsley.” There was a moment of silence before things slid into place, smooth as a Tetris block. My mind cast itself back over the last 15 years. 15 years spent hopping from books to records, comics to films. 15 years spent on my hands and knees shining torches into obscured corners and inhaling musty spores. The Unica Zurn I finished the day before, the Antonin Artaud the day before that. My first ecstatic discovery of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. My first viewings of Akira and El Topo. A host of patterns began to emerge, way-station lights twinkling the location of minor obsessions and remembered moments: Me and my brother were the only people dancing at the Boredoms gig…That gas mask was only a fiver…Fuck me The Invisibles is amazing, I haven’t thought about this stuff in yea…I hope Naked Lunch is as good as I’ve already told everyone it is…I’d kiss you but I’m on acid and I’m just not sure that my lips could stand it (kissherkissherkissherkissher).
Names combined and re-combined in the murk. Weaving together and separating like bacteria dancing – the mind altering fungus of the Tabula Rasa: Maruo and Hino, Blake to Brian Jones, Savoy, Sinclair, Huysmans, Cale. Answers to an Escher designed crossword filled in in Guinness by an ape with no more idea why he’s doing it than frogspawn does of its cosmic destiny. I was staring in to the Jet-black-streaked-with-vivid-crimson contents of my overloaded brain pan and it made. Me. Fucking. Hard.

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