Possession, Pianolae, Polly

I really liked Polly Harvey's last LP, a whalebone and sepia affair in which hexes and live burial and possession and all those Gothic staples figure more or less latently/metaphorically (as the cover pretty economically signals). One of the songs, 'The Piano,' is about how following the cues a musical score prescribes can compromise yr identity; by reprising the postures another, earlier piano player once assumed - occupying the same space and, if not the same time, the same rhythm they did - the protagonist's able to effect a symbiotic (re)union w/ them. To quote: 

'My fingers sting / Where I feel your fingers have been / Ghostly fingers/ Moving my limbs.. Oh God I miss you.’ 

I was  >>ing through Bladerunner in order to  get to the bit where Deckard scans the photograph the other day (while trying not to smirk at the meta-ness of that scenario) & I was struck by how,  immediately pre-scanning, there's a similar piano/intersubjectivity conjunction, whereby the sheet music on Deckard's piano (he falls asleep at it immediately pre-scanning) is juxtaposed w/ the photos by way of which the replicants are furnished w/ false or borrowed memories. 

Like those good girls in days of yore whose facility with the spinet guaranteed their marriageability/tractability replicants aren't supposed to improvise. 

ALSO did Polly Harvey crib her hair from Bladerunner era  Sean Young??

(Pianola lithography + encoded Beet's 5th (that's what the dashes and lavender crescents are) from adclassix, sepia portrait from here, Peej + adorable redrawing of rock criticism's paradigms here, Rachel pensive at piano + her coiffure from leagueofmelbotis) 

Post Apocalyptate

Saw Tate Modern's new turbine hall installation last week, the one where its notionally 2058, London's drowned and sculptures by Moore, Bourgeois & Nauman taken in from the rain cohabit with refugees, on whose bunks there's strewn assorted classics of apocalypt-lit  - Ballard,* Wells, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc.

Basically it does the same thing I think Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor did more eloquently and economically, evoking a time when contemporary culture shalt be but relics and ruins, playing on that Tate as surrogate cathedral trope and the (not wholly unjustified) gloom w/r/t our civilization's/planet's long-term prospects we're all feeling right now.

:(

 The Tate also, you may remember, featured in a decline and fall context in Children of Men,** another work that tapped into this whole inverted Ozymandias complex we seem to have, whereby rather than being shamed into dumb humility by the monuments of long-vanished cultures we cultivate this vain curiosity about how we'll look to posterity, what future Hornbyesques will rank as our top 5 greatest hits - remember Michael Caine's adorable portrayal of an old geezer who gets dewy-eyed listening to Aphex Twin LPs from the turn of the century? Ahahaha.

*As a blogger from the London suburbs who's half-digested misc. modish Theory, I'm obligated here to mention the Kode9 & Spaceape LP - as inspired by Ballard's Drowned World  (the which maybe the next printing could synergistically say on a cover sticker?)

**which I didn't much like, to go on the record. Bladerunner or Alien or Terminator 2 are pretty outwardly straightforward but let you extrapolate this or that, whereas this film wanted to let you know that it was very densely and profoundly freighted with serious and courageous messages about weighty issues but was basically a thriller with cute sight gags (Did you peep that London 2012 hoodie!)

(Ballard & dubstep debated here, cracked ramp from here, mossed trunk from here, pseudo-Bourgeois arachnid of the post-cataclysm from the guardie, Napoleon/Sphinx tete-a-tete voici la (sic) )

Its hard to know whether Goyan flagellants, voodoo ritual, abuses at Abu Ghraib or Robert Mapplethorpe's S/M pix provided the lion's share of the inspiration for the candy speckled hoodie top right, but the transmutation of fanaticism, abjection and terror into directional casualwear is something we can all get behind, I think.

(Polka dot ritual from a Maurice Bessy book I'll yet blog about, hoodie from I don't remember where, processional Goya from here, NSFW becowled Mapplethorpe beefcake from artnet, document of US interrogation techniques from Errol Morris' discussion of the hooded man myth on his NYT blog)

 'The presentation of the story of this last adventure was given purposely in slow motion; not with the intention of instilling terror into the reader, but of giving the murder the effect that is sometimes to be derived from an animated cartoon. Moreover, the latter method would best suit the display of the extraordinary malformations in our hero's soul and body'

Jean Genet, Querelle of Brest

(Bacon out of Michael Leiris' monograph, Vampire Savior (sic) electrocution from Sega Saturn magazine, flat out Wile E. from the youtubes, mashed papier on a Danish kitchen table, teleplasmic gush from photographymuseum.com, tissue from cytochemistry.net)