Rabbit: On the Obscene Beyond and Other Abhorrent Mysteries

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit 

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit ...

 

 

One of the most astonishing and disturbing chapters in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) is entitled Rabbit. 

 

And although there is a large lagomorph at the centre of the chapter, our main concern here is with what Lawrence terms the obscene beyond and the manner in which Gudrun and Gerald conduct their love affair in relation to this material reality which threatens to disrupt life as it is lived ideally beneath the Great Umbrella that mankind has erected between itself and the inhuman chaos of actuality which is neither Good, True, nor Beautiful.   

 

Gudrun is acting as art mistress to Gerald's young sister, Winifred, and it is decided they will draw the latter's pet rabbit, Bismarck. Gerald is hanging around watching - disconcerted by Gudrun's pale-yellow stockings, but in love with her all the same. He can't help admiring her body and imagining the silky softness of her flesh; "she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful" [a] and he wanted only to give himself to her.

 

(Be careful what you wish for ...)

 

Bismarck, it turns out, is not only big, he's also strong - and he doesn't like to be handled:

 

"They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms' length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind." [240]

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the midlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her." [240]    

 

At this point Gerald steps forward to offer his assistance and, after a further struggle, the demonic bunny is eventually subdued. But this incident has brought him and Gudrun into a fateful relation of some kind and there was a mutual hellish recognition: "They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries." [242]  

 

Ignoring his own scratches, Gerald is perversely fascinated by the deep red gash on the silken white arm of Gudrun: 

 

"It was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm [...] The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. [...] 

      There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. [...]

      Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition." [242-43]  

 

These lines tell us something crucial about Gudrun and Gerald's relationship and indeed about the violent metaphysics of obscenity underlying Lawrence's thinking. 

 

He, Lawrence, obviously uses the term knowledge here in the biblical (i.e., carnal) sense, which implies that the gaping wound on Gudrun's arm has a sexual (as well as deathly) aspect, although Gerald doesn't merely equate it with her vagina, but sees within it a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities [b]. 

 

And Gudrun knows it: they both delight in recognition of this fact and that soul-destructive obscenity is at the heart of their passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 239. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the text. [b] 

 

This phrase - which I hope I recall correctly - is from J. G. Ballard's brilliant novel Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).    

 

 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.      

With Wings Spread Silent Over Roofs: In Defence of the Urban Gull

 

Image: Gary Hershorn / Getty Images

Apparently, whilst the number of coastal birds continues to decline, the number of seagulls making a home in our towns and cities is booming and this makes me happy. 

 

For whilst gulls can certainly be noisy and messy - and may even steal your chips - they are also beautiful and intelligent birds which, I like to believe, act as messengers of the ancient sea goddess Leukothéa; she upon whom all men look with misty eyes, such is her loveliness.

 

Despite this, there are people who react to urban gulls with the same irrational hatred that they do to other creatures that have made their home amongst us, such as foxes and grey squirrels. Personally, I'd like to see those who call openly for extermination or speak euphemistically of pest control subject to a reduction in numbers. 

 

For to paraphrase Lawrence writing of a mountain lion [1]:

 

I think in this lonely city there is room for me and a seagull.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans

And never miss them. 

Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-surf face of that long-legged bird!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 351-52. 

 

To read another defence of seagulls, see Stephen Moss's article in The Guardian (19 Aug 2009): click here.   

 

 

Soured Through the Ages Like Piss Lemonade: Notes on Punk Is Dead (2017)

(Zero Books, 2017)

 

 

I.

 

Pressed between the 300 or so pages of this book are a series of memories from various contributors who still like to filter their experiences and thinking through the prism of punk in order to explore the past and indicate their own role within it: I was there is the running refrain throughout the work: And bliss it was in that Summer of Hate to be alive (and to be a young punk was very heaven) [a]. 

 

There is, of course, a certain irony in this: if punk prided itself on anything, it was the refusal to be nostalgic or to acknowledge that it owed anything to the past: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977 ... [b]

 

Similarly, punk was not sentimental. As Tony Drayton reminds us, the phrase Kill Your Pet Puppy meant breaking all ties, committments, and responsibilities; "reject domesticity, keep on moving [...] never look back, leave your family behind" [195] [c].

 

And so there's a further irony in the fact that the book opens with the two editors - Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix - thanking their partners, parents and children and thereby placing punk within the Oedipal triangle.
 

Still, never mind the bollocks - let's move on ...

 

 

II. 

 

First up, there's a Foreword by Judy Nylon; a colourful figure who, by her own admission, is "often left out of punk histories" [1], despite being - like her friend and compatriot Chrissie Hynde - on the London scene from the very beginning. 

 

I suspect the reason for this is that Nylon is bigger and more complex than any scene or subcultural identity, which makes her - like many of the singular individuals in this period - too punk for punk. The fact that her "very existence would eventually come into conflict with Malcolm and Vivienne's version of punk" [2] probably also helps to explain her exclusion from many (official) accounts of the period.  

 

Next comes a two part Introduction by the editors ...

 

Richard Cabut makes the perfectly valid point that punk in the early days - "before the Clash essentialy" [8] - had no fixed essence or political allegiance, but was, rather, a defiant and stylish response to the boredom of everyday life. 

 

Where he and I differ, is that he understands this in terms of a "quest for truth and significance" [9], whilst I see it more as the playful deconstruction of these and related ideals as part of what D. H. Lawrence terms a sane revolution:

 

If you make a revolution, make it for fun, 

don’t make it in ghastly seriousness, 

don’t do it in deadly earnest, do it for fun. 

 

Don’t do it because you hate people, 

do it just to spit in their eye. [d]           

 

This resentment-free gobbing - and not the search for meaning - is surely what defines punk, is it not?

 

Andrew Gallix, meanwhile, muses on the passing of time and the fact that even punk rockers - unless they live fast enough to die young like Sid and Nancy - get old ... 

 

I suspect, however, as a reader of Deleuze, Gallix is perfectly aware of the fact that one can, in fact, age stylishly - that is to say, like Malcolm (but unlike Rotten) - not by attempting to remain young, but by extracting the molecular elements, the forces and flows, that constitute the youth of whatever age one happens to be. 

 

Gallix also warns of the dangers of retrospective reinterpretation; "of the way in which the past is subtly rewritten, every nuance gradually airbrushed out of the picture" [11]. For this is not just a way of negating certain inconvenient elements in the past, but of creating a sanitised present. This whitewashing of history and murder of reality is what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime.    

 

Ultimately, however, the cultural importance of punk must be remembered, even if, as a selective process, remembering always involves a degree of forgetting. 

 

Indeed, Gallix argues that punk must not just be remembered, but commemorated in museums and art galleries; both as "the last great youth subculture" [12] and a "summation of all avant-garde movements of the 20th-century" [12] [e].  

 

 

III. 

 

In his essay 'The Boy Looked at Eurydice', Gallix continues to reflect upon the punk obsession with youth: "All we can say for sure is that, more than any other subculture before or since, punk was afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome." [17] 

 

That's probably true: I remember one of the first things I ever wrote was entitled Never Trust Anyone Over Twenty and I always (like Sid) used the term grown-up perjoratively. Again, this came from Malcolm who encouraged his spiky-haired charges to be childish, irresponsible and disrespectful of adult authority [f].   

 

More importantly, however, was the fact that punk was a thinking against itself - "internal dissent was its identity" [26]. Real punks, as Gallix rightly says, always hated the term: "Being a true punk was something that could only go without saying, it implied never describing oneself as such" [26-27] [g].   

 

 

IV.  

 

For me, one of the most interesting pieces in Punk Is Dead is by Tom Vague who retraces the semi-mythical origin of punk rock to the Situationist International and the Gordon Riots of 1780; a connection first made by Fred Vermorel. 

 

The fact is, whilst you can analyse the Sex Pistols from various perspectives, to talk exclusively about the music or the fashion whilst ignoring the politics which inspired McLaren and Jamie Reid is to profoundly miss the point. 

 

Crucial aspects of the project - particularly in the glorious last days of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, when the band essentially no longer existed - will simply not make sense unless you first understand the political context in which things evolved and I would advise everyone to read Chris Gray's Leaving the Twentieth Century (1974), which, as Vague reminds us, is a kind of blueprint for the punk revolution [h].    

 

V.

 

Sadly, of course, for the majority of punk rockers it was all about the music (not the chaos); all about forming (or following) bands, making (or buying) records, playing (or going to) gigs, etc. These were the kind of people who read the NME (not Guy Debord) and failed to see that the most exciting thing about Never Mind the Bollocks was the sleeve (just as the only interesting thing about Johnny Rotten was his public image).    

Unfortunately, these music lovers abound within the pages of Punk Is Dead - still talking reverently about rock history and referring to the Sex Pistols as the Pistols thereby turning them into just another boring band rather than the embodiment of an attitude and an approach to art, politics, and life that bubbled up at 430 Kings Road. 

 

To his credit, Paul Gorman understands the importance of the above address as an immersive art environment and recognises that the music was simply an expression of SEX and Seditionaries (and arguably of far less importance than McLaren and Westwood's clothes designs) [i]. Not everyone could join the band - but anyone could be a SEX Pistol if they had the right look, the right attitude. 

 

Punk was perhaps not all and always about Talcy Malcy, but, as Gorman says, without McLaren and his odd little shop at 430 Kings Road, punk "wouldn't have taken the form it did" [77] [j].       

 

    

VI.

I would normally at this point in a review indicate which are the pieces (and who are the authors) contained in this collection that I really hate - and there are several (not to mention one or two essays that simply don't belong in this book, interesting as they may be). 

 

But, in the spirit of Richard Cabut's positive punk, let me end with a wonderful line taken from Dorothy Max Prior's 'SEX in the City', an amusing account of her days working as a stripper in the pubs of punk London, full of dodgy-geezers and brassy-birds: 

 

"Modernity killed not only every night, but every lunchtime over a pint of Double Diamond in a City Road boozer." [118]

 

 

   

Notes

 

[a] This line from Wordsworth - paraphrased here - is also paraphrased by Andrew Gallix in 'The Boy Looked at Eurydice', in Punk Is Dead, (Zero Books, 2017), pp. 17-18. Note that future page references to this book will be given directly in the text. 

      To his credit, punk-turned philosopher Simon Critchley says he consciously tries not to lecture young people about "how great it was to be alive in the 1970s". Of course, as he admits, he often fails in this. See 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', Punk Is Dead, p. 39. 

[b] As the Clash sang on the B-side of their first single White Riot (CBS, 1977): click here. 

      Andrew Gallix, however, persuasively argues that without nostalgia we would have no Homer or Proust. See his Introduction to Punk Is Dead, p. 12. 

      See also 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', in which the latter says that although he hates nostalgia, "it is unavoidable and I get whimsical when I think back to the punk years and how everything suddeny became possible". Punk Is Dead, p. 37. 

 

[c] Tony Drayton (in conversation with Richard Cabut), 'Learning to Fight', Punk Is Dead. Drayton was the founder of the punk fanzines Ripped & Torn (1976) and Kill Your Pet Puppy (1980). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'A sane revolution', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 449.

[e] Interestingly, Simon Critchley takes an entirely opposite view: "I must say that I find the idea of the commemoration of punk particularly distasteful, and that punk can be archived and celebrated in museums pretty awful." See 'Rummaging in the Ashes: An Interview with Simon Critchley', in Punk Is Dead, p. 38.

[f] Ted Polhemus picks up on the deliberate and determined childishness of punk in his essay 'Boom!', describing it as "the opposite of the beard-stroking, educated, technically-accomplished, grown-up world where the Boring Old Farts had reduced the anything-goes spirit of rock 'n' roll to a limp, ageing shadow of its former self". See Punk Is Dead, p. 98.

[g] As Paul Gorman writes in 'The Flyaway-Collared Shirt': "Everyone I knew, and/or admired, moved on from punk as soon as it was given a name. [...] The richness of [the] scene had been traduced to the saleable gob 'n' pogo archetype: spiky hair, permanent sneer, brotel creepers, Lewis leathers." See Punk Is Dead, p. 105. 

       

[h] For example, Chris Gray's idea of forming a totally unpleasant pop group "designed to subvert show business from within would obviously be a major influence on the [Sex] Pistols project". See Andrew Gallix, 'Unheard Melodies', Punk Is Dead, p. 213.   

 

[i] As Richard Cabut says in 'A Letter to Jordan', in terms of cultural influence upon style, SEX (later to become Seditionaries and World's End) is "the most influential shop/meeting place ever". See Punk Is Dead, p. 120. Cabut is also right to recognise - like Adam Ant before him - that the perfect embodiment of SEX was Jordan, rather than Rotten. 

 

[j] Ted Polhemus challenges the view that punk was primarily and most significantly shaped by Malcolm: 

      "Not only is this view a reductionist distortion of how history happens - and actually did happen in 1976 - but it also fails to give credit were credit is surely due to the startling, unprecedented creativity of hundreds and then thousands of teenagers like John Lydon [...] and so very many others whose contribution was great but whose names were never known to us [...]." 

      See his essay 'Boom!' in Punk Is Dead, p. 99. The fact that Polhemus refers to Rotten as John Lydon perhaps indicates where his sympathies lie and why he might wish to down play McLaren's role.    

  

Final Reflections on Hölderlin's Poltergeists (A Drama for Voices by Síomón Solomon)

(Peter Lang, 2020)

 

 

I. 

 

Astute readers may have noticed that whilst I published a quintet of posts last month on the supplementary writings contained within Síomón Solomon's study Hölderlin's Poltergeists,* I didn't actually comment on the highly original adaptation of the radio play which is at its heart. 

 

This was due to the fact that although Nietzsche may figure prominently in my intellectual background, I simply do not feel qualified to do so: I am not a German literature scholar and not only have I never studied Hölderlin, but I hadn't even heard of Stephan Hermlin or his 1970 audio drama, Scardanelli, before reading Solomon's book. 

 

Further, whilst I've read a lot of novels and seen a lot of films, my knowledge and appreciation of plays is shamefully underdeveloped. I don't know why, but watching plays unfold on stage, or listening to them on the radio, has always filled me with a kind of performance anxiety. I even find reading plays troubling. 

And so, I'm perfectly happy to accept Dan Farrelly's estimation of Solomon's work as a "beautiful, free and creative translation" which "opens access to an extraordinarily creative poet who is superbly served by the playwright and his translator" [1]. 

 

Happy also to reproduce below remarks made by Solomon in his introduction, which give a fascinating insight into his thinking and working method ...    

 

 

II. 

 

According to Solomon, although his adaptation is rooted in "an exhaustive attentiveness to the minutiae" [2] of Hermlin's original German text, he has nevertheless seen fit to take a transmorphic approach in accordance with which he has made "a host of minor and major infidelities to the mother script, from compensations (moved text), borrowings (untranslated language items), tweaked directions, insertions and elisions to new dramatis personae and whole scenic re/writings" [3]. 

 

Solomon continues:

 

"As a result, the source text - already, of course, a seething intertext implicating a range of semiotic fields (Classical/Romantic poetics, early European psychiatry, Franco-German revolutionary politics, epistolary erotics, etc.) - has been both critically trimmed and lavishly enhanced. Our clamorous ark of thirty-five speakers [...] through twenty-eight scenes - roughly doubling Hermlin's quantities in each case and all doing their many varieties of violence to Hölderlin's voice - has been accordingly relaunched as a keening vessel of ventriloquized voices, in which ill-starred poets, idealist philosophers, literary editors, hamstrung employers, pious relatives, mortified lovers, political tyrants, ghoulish voyeurs and anonymous critics collide and collude." [4] 

 

In consequence: Solomon calls his work a 'remix', "aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [5]. 

 

And in sum: "Hermlin's play has been treated playfully, with a passionate recklessness or irreverent love" [6] that some might term abusive fidelity. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dan Farrelly, Senior Lecturer in German (retired), University College Dublin. I am quoting from the blurb provided by Farrelly for the back cover of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 13. 

[3] - [5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 14.

 

* The quintet of earlier posts inspired by Hölderlin's Poltergeists are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics 

 

 

From the Archives ... A Brief Style Guide for the Nietzschean Woman

"We are the smart set, a world apart set 

We are the neatest, ergo elitist." [1] 

 

As Derrida pointed out, the question of style and the question of woman almost become one and the same question within Nietzsche's philosophy - particularly when thought in relation to the question of Truth [2].   

Perhaps that's what I was thinking of when, in 2004, I wrote this brief style guide for the Nietzschean woman - anticipating my Philosophy on the Catwalk project ...

 

1. Burn all soft-cotton frocks as these invariably suggest Laura Ashley and her ersatz brand of pseudo-traditional fashion. The key point for the Nietzschean woman of today is to look smart and well-groomed; to demonstrate she has both discipline and breeding. 

2. Always wear a hat and gloves when out of doors. It does not matter if you are wearing the most beautiful Chanel outfit, if you lack these things you will look like a member of the herd. 

3. Stockings should also always be worn. Even during the hottest summer days, the Nietzschean woman does not parade around with bare legs; nor on the coldest of cold winter nights does she ever think of pulling on woolly socks. Tights, of course, are utterly infra dig - a sordid remnant of the 1960s. 

 

4. Make-up is a necessity and should be worn with pride and defiance so that one looks striking and dramatic; clearly defined lips, eyes luxuriantly shadowed, brows pencilled with firm, think curves; cheekbones emphasised with rouge. A face without make up looks offensively bare and contrary to what our idealists believe, Truth does not love to go naked. 

 

There is, of course, much more to Nietzschean style than this. But any woman who sticks to the above will already have gone a long way towards a revaluation of values and protecting herself from viral infections: For has a woman who knows herself to be well dressed ever caught a cold? [3] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting here from an English version of a Berlin cabaret song - Das Gesellschaftlied (1931) - written by Mischa Spoliansky (music) and Marcellus Schiffer (lyrics) and performed by Ute Lemper (Decca, 1996): click here.   

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, (The University of Chicago Press, 1979). And to read my take on this work, click here.  

 

[3] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows', 25.

 

 

Put on a Little Makeup and Make Sure They Get Your Good Side: A Brief Note on Positive Punk

The Class of '83 ... Photo by Mike Laye

 

"Consigned to a foul demise by the forces of cash and chaos, punk broods alone in its dark tomb. 

Its evolution away from the light has been a cruel and twisted one, from guerilla assault on the media 

to ghost dancing on the bones of Red Indian mysticism, from glue to Gothick. 

Naturally, unattended for so long, its hair has grown. So have its aspirations." [1]

                                                                                                                                      

  

What is so-called positive punk? 

 

I'm not sure I knew back in 1983 when the movement was first identified by Richard North writing in the NME [2] and I'm still not sure I know even now, although, if North is to be believed, it seems primarily to involve the internalisation of punk's energy in order to produce a new gothic sensibility. 

 

In other words, it was punk - but this time with feeling - as reimagined by the art school crowd and drama students who looked on in (Rocky) horror at the antics of those for whom the word Oi! was invented (by yet another music journalist, this time working for Sounds; the loathsome Garry Bushell).  

 

And, in a sense, that was my crowd; the crowd who danced the night away at Le Phonographique to the sounds of the Southern Death Cult and the Sex Gang Children [3]. And yet, at the same time, it was never quite my crowd and I never quite followed them into the night. 

 

I don't know why: perhaps it was because the gloomier-than-thou fanaticism of Killing Joke meant more to me at the time than any form of positivity. Also, I quite liked a lot of the three-chord rubbish that North dismisses, if ultimately conceding that this can become a bit boring after a while and that a soft-centre is often more seductive than a hard core.          

        

 

Notes

 

[1] Marek Kohn, 'Punk's New Clothes', in The Face (Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[2] Under the pen-name Richard North, the interesting figure of Richard Cabut - bass player with Brigandage - wrote his positive punk manifesto in a piece entitled 'Punk Warriors' for the NME (19 Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[3] Musical bonus: Southern Death Cult, Fat Man (1982): click here / Sex Gang Children, Sebastiane (1983): click here.  

Reflections on The Rokeby Venus

Diego Velázquez: The Toilet of Venus 

aka 'The Rokeby Venus' (1647-51) 

Oil on canvas, 122.5 x 177 cm 

nationalgallery.org.uk

 

D. H. Lawrence once jokingly suggested that his painting The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928) might best be described as a 'Study in Arses' [1]. 

 

And perhaps something similar might also be said of the only surviving female nude painted by Velázquez - the so-called Rokeby Venus - which has a lovely looking bottom as its focus point (one hardly notices the rather blurry face reflected in the mirror held by Cupid). 

 

Although paintings of the naked Venus had been popularised by 16th-century Venetian painters, such an overtly sensual picture would, of course, have been highly controversial in 17th-century Spain; the Catholic Church strongly disapproving of such risqué images. 

 

Amusingly, it's a picture that has continued to provoke outrage amongst moralists and militant ascetics of all stripes, including fanatic suffragettes such as Mary Richardson who, on the morning of March 10th, 1914, entered the National Gallery and attacked Velázquez’s most celebrated work with a meat-cleaver [2], and contemporary feminists concerned with the imperial male gaze and the sexual objectification of women, etc., etc. 

 

On the other hand, since its arrival and public display at the National Gallery in 1906, this extraordinary painting continues to inspire a wide range of artists, including the photographer Helmut Newton, who in 1981, took this beautiful photograph, after Velázquez, in his apartment in Paris, for an edition of French Vogue [3]:

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4370, sent to Aldous and Maria Huxley [2 April 1928], p. 353.  

[2] Frustrated by their failure to achieve equal voting rights for women, some within the suffragette movement, including Mary Richardson - a loyal supporter of Emmeline Pankhurst - favoured the adoption of increasingly militant tactics. As well as the attack on The Rokeby Venus, Richardson committed acts of arson, smashed windows at the Home Office, and bombed a railway station. She was arrested on nine occasions and received prison terms totalling more than three years. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering her penchant for political violence, in 1932 she joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (as did several other leading suffragettes, including Norah Elam and Mary Sophia Allen). 

      For an interesting online essay on all this, see Philip McCouat, 'From the Rokeby Venus to Fascism', Journal of Art in Society - click here. 

[3] To be honest, this photo has always meant more to me than the painting that inspired it and those who attended my Visions of Excess series at Treadwell's in 2004 might remember that the final paper on nihilism, culture, art and technology, featured an adapted version of this picture on the poster designed to advertise the talk.     

 

 

From the Archives ... Lovely Louise (On the Nakedness of the Prostitute)

 

My fascination with the cards left in the now nearly vanished red phone boxes by London's prositutes advertising their services and physical charms, already had a long history before I decided to produce an adapted range of my own cards in the early 2000s, containing fragments of text taken from my Illicit Lover's Discourse project [click here].  

 

I suppose - using a term coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery - this might be described as a form of subvertising. Having said that, whilst my cards mimicked the look and feel of the original works, I wasn't attempting to undermine the sex trade, nor mock those involved in such.  

 

Rather, I was just playfully trying to introduce a little philosophical speculation into the world of vice and perhaps deconstruct some of the stereotypes and clichés that endlessly circulate within the pornographic imagination. 

 

Perhaps what I was doing might better be thought of as an apolitical détournement - i.e., something done just for the fun of it, with no real objective and free of all judgement.   

The cards - extremely limited in number - were placed in phone boxes in Soho and Paddington. Fuck knows if anyone ever saw them before teams from Westminster City Council removed them, but it pleases me to imagine that an illicit lover went round collecting them in the same way I went round collecting the real cards. 

 

Sadly, the only example I seem to have kept in the archives is a card featuring Lovely Louise (New - 19 Yrs Old), who specialised in solo exhibitions and strip tease. My addition to the card is a text in which I muse on the nakedness of the prostitute:

 

"Were we ever to succeed in peeling away that series of coverings given her by the pornographic imagination in order to ensure the erotic appeal of her flesh (and advertise its availability), the Prostitute would not merely be desexualised, she would in fact cease to exist. 

 

Knowing this, the Prostitute is very reluctant to remove her clothes (to have her strip always costs extra). And knowing this, the Illicit Lover is often a fetishist who realises that desire is aroused and sustained by signs and symbols of the surface; like the Greeks, he becomes superficial out of profundity."

 

 

From the Archives ... On My Dealings with Channel 4

My application for a job as an Assistant Editor 

(Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4

 

 

I.

 

My first dealings with Channel 4 were in the autumn of 1983, less than a year after the station started broadcasting. Rather naively, I believed that they fully intended to stick to their public service remit and provide a genuine alternative to the shit served up by the BBC and ITV. 

 

That is to say, provide 'a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which [...] demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes; appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society; exhibits a distinctive character.'

I was then collaborating with a spiky-haired student of Communications, Arts and Media called Gillian Hall on various projects and, encouraged by Alan Fountain - an independent producer hired by Channel 4 as a commissioning editor and mentor to new filmmakers - we submitted a proposal for a series that would be profoundly anti-Christian in nature and feature music, dance, witchcraft, sex-magick, and Satanic ritual.

 

In other words, we basically assembled ideas and images from all the usual suspects - from Aleister Crowley to Killing Joke (the album Fire Dances had just been released and I was under its spell all summer) - and visualised a kind of postmodern black mass with a post-punk soundtrack. It may well have been catastrophically bad had it ever been made - but it wouldn't have been Songs of Praise.

Alas, whilst initially intrigued by the proposal, Fountain lost his nerve somewhere along the line and Gillian and I were politely informed by letter that our Pagan TV show was not something that Channel 4 would be willing to commission, not least because many of the ideas that the show intended to explore were ones that the vast majority of people would find profoundly offensive.  

 

 

II.

 

Several years later, I again had dealings with Channel 4 - and again suffered the pain and disappointment of rejection (although these feelings were alleviated by the fact that I didn't give a shit).

 

Having failed to land a role as a presenter on the 24-hour cable and satellite TV channel the Music Box (a sort of naff pan-European version of MTV), Malcolm had advised me that I needed to be a 'little less Johnny Rotten and a little more Simon Le Bon'. With that in mind, I decided to apply for a job as an Assistant Editor (Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4, which I had seen advertised in The Guardian. 

 

The ad for the post (reference number BH01) made clear that applicants should have 'definite opinions regarding youth programmes, journalism and the youth entertainment market in general'. 

 

Well, I definitely had opinions regarding these things; unfortunately, they were largely (if not entirely) negative and, Sex Pistol that I remained at heart, I basically just wanted to destroy everything and cause as much chaos as possible. (Of course, I didn't list this under career goals and ambitions on my CV, though I suspect that something of my underlying nihilism shone through the bullshit that I did write.)

Instead of the requested covering letter to accompany the CV, I sent the above poster which clearly illustrated who and what they would be getting if they hired me. The text on the poster, which paraphrased Zarathustra and referenced a favourite song by Bow Wow Wow reads: 

'If culture is, before all things, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people, then barbarism is surely a lack of style; or a chaotic jumble of all styles. Thus we postmoderns, we parodists of world history and plunderers of the past, are the new barbarians: we are the TV savages! We are that hybrid breed, without meaning, substance, or style: we are Youth!'

 

I don't remember if anyone ever bothered to reply: if they did, I don't have the letter or recall its contents. 

 

And that, pretty much, was the end of my dealings with Channel 4 - a short (and not particularly spectacular) history of failure and rejection (but no regrets).