Beneath the Pavement, the Beach
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
When ugliness, poor design, & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart’s longing for grace.
A hypothesis: Say there are 100 articles in a newspaper. Ask 100 people to choose the one they find most interesting. Ask them to do it for 100 days. Weavers foregrounding threads of meaning: themes and obsessions will inevitably emerge.
Remember during lockdown when the white stag appeared in the streets of England, and they killed it?1
The garden that won the Chelsea Flower Show in May 2022 was beaver-inspired, with gnawed logs, recorded beaver-sounds (which are a kind of chirping) and weeds run wild. There were rough stone steps leading up to a vegetation-choked cottage. It looked like a vignette from a half-wild world, like the house of a witch. The beavers were somewhere nearby, I guess, just out of shot.2
Snow on Wet Earth
In May 2022, a man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair suddenly jumped up and smeared cake across the bullet-proof glass of the Mona Lisa, yelling about climate change. As he was dragged away, wig askew and lipstick smeared, he threw roses into the crowd. “It was a moment in a million,” said a young onlooker.3
As the activist was escorted out by security, he said, in French, “There are people who are destroying the Earth. Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth.4 That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.”
This act was witnessed by the dense forest of gallery-goers standing in ranks before the Mona Lisa with their smartphones held aloft, as at a rock concert. (For all this blanket surveillance, however, nobody filmed the actual cake incident: only the aftermath.5)
Later I read that before the cake-smearing, he punched the Mona Lisa in the face.6 (Alternate interpretation: he tried to smash the bulletproof glass.) That makes me think of the people who stab the eyes out of paintings, angered to the point of rage-fuelled violence against inanimate objects by the Devil’s-work of uncanny verisimilitude.7
Would Leonardo approve or disapprove? I can’t decide. Is it any worse than the Queen stamping her mark— in ink— on Leonardo’s exquisite drawing of a blackberry sprig?8 Unlike the stamp, the cake wipes off.
What it looked like, the cake on the painting, was white on dark, snow on wet earth: something very young on top of something very old.
Bendigedig
Meanwhile in Wales a seven-year-old girl, Florrie Edwards, was asked by her school to dress as a member of the Royal Family ahead of the Queen’s… (Thing… Jubilee… Some sort of having-ruled-for-aeons-party, while stars blazed and faded in the sky...9) Anyway, this seven-year-old, the rightful ruler of the British Isles, went dressed as Boudicca, 'because she was brave': her hair braided, a plaid cloak thrown over her shoulder, a triple-spiral-painted buckler made of brown cardboard, blue patterns painted on her freckled face, and a proud smile. Go that kid.
Florrie told her Mum that the three million Twitter-views of her costume, and the positive responses, made her feel ‘bendigedig’ (fantastic).
Techno-Ferrets
June 2022. Elon Musk claims to have implanted two chips into the brain of a macaque named ‘Pager’.10 The grainy newspaper photo shows the pink-faced brunette monkey staring at a screen, on which is a game of Pong.11 (The pink face against the brown silky fur reminds me of a penis, but that’s not the monkey’s fault / problem.) Pager was initially taught to play Pong with a joystick, rewarded with banana smoothie. The implant recorded his brain patterns; the joystick was removed; then he played using only his mind, 'like a boss.’
Pager’s name, and the retro game selection, are both knowing references— allusions to the tech-Utopian past. Remember? We thought the Internet was going to free all the knowledge there ever was, and that was going to be awesome for everyone.12
(I’m talking about the 90s, kids, not the 90s that are sort-of-back in the diluted watered-down form of logo t-shirts and big jeans and platform Docs, but the long-lost sound of dial-up whistled down a phone line. The wide open digital prairie. Virtual reality and avatars and William Gibson and Snow Crash and chaos magick and Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and nos13, and the two Douglasses, Coupland and Rushkoff, and the command line and heavy metal, and nostalgic Mortal Kombat in the burger bar, the smell of dreadlocks and cigarettes, the smell of Red Bull and vodka, the smell of ferrets, phone boxes, techno, Nethack, ASCII porn, boys kissing boys, black leather, sunglasses at night, burner phones, wardriving. Satan Burger with Extra Evil. The time Krusher had to go to hospital with heart palpitations from too much caffeine syrup.)
Musk and his minions are trying to push those nostalgia-buttons in our brains with their in-jokes, just as surely as their wetware in the macaque’s literal grey matter pushes his innermost brain-electricity buttons.14
Looking at the photo again, I see that Pager has his paw around a metal rod, like a theremin’s control, like a synth-rock wizard. That’s how he’s playing the game. Bare palm-skin on bare metal. The feeling of looking at that piece of metal is risk of electric shock.
Looking again, I see that hanging behind the black and white screen where the Pong ball is suspended in time-space, midway between paddles, is an insult of a fake jungle: lurid green straight-up-and-down tree trunks like those drawn by a child, and a distorted-looking, smeared-sideways fern bank. The newsprint rubs off on my fingers.
Regarding the Pain of Others
The older you get, the more (obsolete) maps of the past-world you carry around in your mental glovebox. Remember how it felt to be a kid, hearing an old person describing steam engines? I guess you had to be there. Listen, no one wants to hear stories of other time-places. It's a privileging of the dead past over the living present. Here we all are. Now we all are.
In the newspaper there are photos of the bound hands of a dead person in Ukraine, the fingernails black, the wrists tied with a plastic bag. Black-wrapped bodies in a clay trench. Two Alsatians scavenging for food in a bombed-out streetscape. I’d been trying not to look. But a photo enters the mind through the eye like an injection enters a vein: instantly, irrevocably.15
Lady Marmalade
Platinum Jubilee.16 The Queen appears (in lieu of showing herself in the flesh) in a video with Paddington Bear. Push that nostalgia button. On principle I can’t watch it, but I gather— in the osmotic way one does via social media— that it has to do with marmalade. The Queen carrying marmalade sandwiches in her handbag. (The King asked the Queen, and the Queen asked the Dairymaid…)
Afterwards, a hand-drawn cartoon homage to this painstakingly animated set piece circulates amongst my (British, Boomer) friends, which shows Her Madge and Paddington and a corgi’s17 bum18, all three draped with bunting, walking away into blank paper. Guys, she's not dead yet. (Or... is she? If they can render an imaginary bear, surely they can deep-fake the Queen, whose every life-moment has been seen as worthy of public record.)
You Say the Ocean’s Rising, Like I Give a Shit
June 2022. Microplastics are found in freshly fallen Antarctic snow for the first time.
Beside the plastic snow article, a link to another. A human forefinger holding a little dusting heap of what looks like sand, or sugar, with the caption ‘Microplastics found deep in the lungs of living people for the first time’.19
The twin headlines, by having the same format, make it seem like parallel virginities lost. The sacred snowfall of the South, the sacred branching air-cathedrals of the chest, those inner geometries that shouldn’t see light.
The Ross ice shelf, pristine and remote … isn’t.
Meanwhile, in Japan: Scientists make ‘slightly sweaty’ robot finger with living skin.
The image is a lone finger— a dildoesque object due to its shade of pink, which we might classify as ‘engorged’ or at least ‘flushed’— floating in a Petri dish full of translucent, darker pink liquid goo.
“The finger is a work-in-progress: its skin is much weaker than natural skin and has to be kept moist… Its movements are also distinctly mechanical.”
Ugg Smash
June 2022. A huge glowing blue double-spiral of light, like a spontaneous galaxy, appears suddenly in the night sky over Aotearoa.20 I see it first on social media, photographed by a friend in Takaka. No warning before it happens. Just the sudden light-patterns in the sky-vault.
Amy reads off her phone: “Newshub says it was a rocket refuelling a satellite doing a fuel dump. But the hippies say it is Falcon Nine from Antarctica.”
Before explanations begin to trickle in, it is possible to believe for a moment that aliens are here.21 OK then. Alien invasion, fifth horse-being of the Apocalypse, can I accept that? Behold, a white ship. Come to that, I could. If it were true. Interplanetary parents finally stepping in, Ekumenically, to intervene in this sandpit dispute, to make us learn to share, a species on the naughty step. (A visual arises, courtesy of Hollywood: octopus-creatures in the mist. Even imagining the alien, we imagine terrestrial forms.)
Millionaire’s junk, sky-pollution. I remember sitting on my own beach and seeing, for the first time, the parallel bright lines of Starlink crossing the evening sky.22 Instant rage, the urge to smash. There is a drone video of a Mediaeval festival in Russia where a warrior steps suddenly from the crowd below and downs the drone with a spear cast.23 There is the scene in Woman at War where she shoots the drone down with bow and tethered arrow, and smashes it with a rock.24 There are innumerable videos of ‘Animal vs Drone’, a favourite sub-category of mine. The shoe in the machine, Ned Ludd smashing frames.
Because I hate robots, the algorithms show me more robots. I type their name,25 and thus, I summon more of them. Anger and love are two horns on the same goat, equally click-profitable. Algorithms are a kind of uncontrollable distillation of the online self, like illegal liquor brewed in prison out of Marmite or fruit peels.26
There is a Bomb in Gilead
On June 24th 2022, Roe v. Wade is overturned. A photo of a front door. Vaguely Neoclassical in that McMansion style, flanked by shrubs, that Hollywood look of perfectly manicured bush that says you pay someone to do it, the trimming. Beige and cream tones. A huge Anarchist A on the driveway in red paint, splashed like blood, and a hastily written slogan: If abortion is not safe, then neither are you. The glass of the front door is smashed like a car window, and the remaining red paint has been slung across the frontage.
The women marching in America carry hastily-made signs. They wear red paint handprints on their bare skin, expressions of grief and distress, words frozen half-out their mouths, mid-yell. This is war, they say, we’re not going back.
But the Republican wives are perfectly, frostily styled, straightened blonde hair, pink lips and nails. Without seeing their feet it is nevertheless easy to guess that they are wearing Melaniaesque towering stilettos. Tastefully they hail their day of glorious victory over the baby-murderers.
An event in time is a stone dropped in an infinity-pond. Ripples run out from it, backwards as well as forward and sideways, if those terms have any purchase in the boundlessness of time-space.27 Do I favour that metaphor because I live in a place made of pebbles, at the edge of a large body of water?
The need to throw a stone into water is an urge that never leaves some people. It’s possible that at a higher plane of enlightenment a person is content to leave stones alone. In the Arctic, it’s a sin to move a stone, because they serve as landmarks in a subtly featured land, and to move them is to interfere with other beings’ mental maps and trackways.
Bender
In July 2022, a chess-playing robot at the Moscow Open grabs a seven-year-old Russian boy’s finger hard enough to break it, and won’t let go. The robot has to be wrestled off like a locked-on dog, by adults who come running to the child’s screams.
Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation: “The robot broke the child’s finger. This is of course bad.” The boy apparently confused and angered the robot by breaking the rules: he made his counter-move too quickly, before the robot had finished making its.
In August 2022 a 20-month-old child in Catalonia is hit by a hailstone and killed. Other people are bruised and their bones broken, but she is the first person to die by hail in Europe in a quarter of a century. Some say the world will end in ice.
A Sponge and a Rusty Spanner
September 2022. Amy tells me that she saw a raruraru28 on Castlecliff Beach. A boy had been riding a horse in sand too soft and deep. The horse broke its leg and was killed there on the beach, and buried. I say “He tohu, nē?”29
“We’re going to get new money, now,” says Fredd.
Why? Because the Queen is Dead. Operation Unicorn. ‘London Bridge is fallen.’
My brain, on repeat: “Take me back to dear old Blighty, put me on the train for London Town… [Drum solo]”30
Vanitas: a wax model of a head. The right half is the face of Elizabeth the First. The left half is a skull, insect-scattered, reptiles twining its sockets.
The papers hit print on the supplements they have had sitting in reserve for decades, fully formed but for the death-dates. (How must it feel to know your obituaries sit written, waiting your death, adorned by photos of your flawless young self, weighed down with stolen jewels? Probably no weirder than anything about being royal.)
Brian tells me that when the Queen was crowned he was seven. He went with all his classmates to wave flags as she went by. A wasp crawled under his shorts and stung him. What may have looked like fervent patriotism was in fact pain.
He also tells me how he met the future King once, walking in tweeds in the hills behind Aberdeen. They chatted about the weather. Brian’s friend, coming along behind, told him afterwards, “I could see the cogs whirring in your brain as you tried to work out how you knew him. Then it clicked, and you suddenly whipped off your beret.”31
A meme: ‘A male Queen?? This woke nonsense has gone too far.’
In Scotland a 22-year-old man is dragged down by Police as the Queen’s coffin passes, for shouting at Prince Andrew that he is a filthy old man. “God Save the King! God Save the King!” the crowd chants.
“Get your hands off him!” a young woman yells.
As the cops drag him away, he cries out “I’ve done nothing wrong!”
In England, a history teacher coming out of church just as the new King is proclaimed, yells out “He’s not my King!” and is also arrested.
Oh, has the world changed or have I changed?
Jim’ll Paint It has his post— showing the Queen in a #YOLO t-shirt, in front of a giant Union Jack, flanked by a pair of flying shits, being saluted by rows of Monty Pythonesque bum-trumpets— taken down for being ‘pornographic’.
He responds by reprising his drawing showing the Queen crouching in her crown and ermines, chewing at a bloody swan’s neck: he swaps her face out for the face of the new King.
Eliza tells me that in England, people32 have been leaving marmalade sandwiches about the place as tributes to the dead Queen, and that angers her because— starving kids. “For fuck’s sake, give a loaf of bread to the foodbank.”
The Beauty of Ordinary Everyday Objects
October 2022. Two young Just Stop Oil activists throw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888).33 Unlike the white cake-icing on the Mona Lisa, the tomato soup is surprisingly harmoniously toned with Sunflowers. Ochre, like the sacred blood-mud they rubbed on the Dead in the Palaeolithic.
(People also ask: ‘Was Van Goghs Sunflowers ruined? Are the Van Gogh Sunflowers okay? Who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh painting? Why did they throw tomato soup on painting?’)
Pink-haired Phoebe Plummer, 21, her hand superglued to the wall under the painting, declaims: “What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup.”
Headsman
In November 2022 Johnny Depp is exonerated on domestic abuse / defamation charges, and my astrologer friend Erika shows how both Depp and the plaintiff, Amber Heard, have the fixed star Algol conjunct their natal Venuses, and how this can lead to symbolic beheading, as in the loss of their mutual reputations; or literal beheading, as in the case of Princess Diana.
This theory is reinforced by Dorian saying on Camelia’s post that his response to anyone trying to talk about Depp / Heard is ‘Off with their heads!”
I say that I don’t believe in astrology, only in the historical veracity of the guillotine.34
Light Ten Fires
Playing Minigolf at Carlucciland, Swami Bakverandah kept assiduously accurate score at every hole. When the game was over he ripped up the scoresheet with nary a glance, and threw the pieces away.
(There were frogs in the pond, I heard them sing.)
Zara found a four-leaf clover. She would have left it in situ, but the errant parent harvested it.
On the way out, Bakverandah saw a sign that afforded him much merriment: it had previously said ‘LIGHT NO FIRES’, but some wag had scraped off the first vertical and the diagonal of the N, so that it now read ‘LIGHT 10 FIRES’.
Beavers are important in re-wilding, because they are the architects of wetlands.
Aren’t all moments?
Alternately quoted as “All artists, think about the Earth.”
Looking at the photo of people sardined into the Louvre holding their phones aloft, I suddenly understand that the phones are periscopes rather than tiny flames of tribute: they are the means by which people see over other people’s heads.
Mona Lisa has been behind glass since 1956, when a Bolivian man threw a rock at her, damaging her left elbow. In 2009, a Russian woman threw an empty teacup, which shattered against the glass.
Because she owns it. It belongs to her. The hubris, though! How very dare! Royal Collection Trust: A Sprig of Blackberry
The Scottish group ‘That’s not just Bullshit, it’s Horseshite’ informs me it’s the Platty Joobs— the Platinum Jubilee.
First they did a pig, Gertrude. The chip in her brain told all about snout— the pleasure of eating.
(The Muskovites know that the experimented-upon ape is not a good look in the vegan age, so they also released a video of themselves stroking both animals and talking about how much they love them.)
Thinking about the feel of the image, I guess that it’s a still from the video Musk released.
LOL
What the kids now call nangs.
The cover story about the monkey-wetware is that Musk is trying to broker an inter-dynastic marriage between robots and humans— the filthy traitor— so that we are one ‘people’ rather than opposing armies. Assimilation of the enemy, À la Alexander the Great and the Persians. (Or maybe Musk is more like Willy Wonka.) The story also goes that this tech is aiming to benefit the paralysed, to enable them to use phones with their brains.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others: “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding— at a distance, through the medium of photography— other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen… An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry.”
My friend Elise, an Alabaman living in London, said during the Jubilee: “I can hardly move for Union Jack bunting. The British love to be crushed beneath a diamond-crusted sensible heel.”
One time one of the Queen’s corgis had sex with the wrong bitch: her sister Margaret’s dachshund Pipkin. Instead of drowning the miscegenated runts, Hear ye hear ye! it was declared a new breed had been created, the ‘dorgi’.
There is an Internet cult dedicated to the cuteness of corgis bums. First hit: ‘13 Corgi Butts That Will Drive You Absolutely Nuts!’ (People also ask: Do all corgis get hip dysplasia? Do you have to wipe corgis?)
Breastmilk, too.
Blue spiral: like the Celts, like that girl in Wales, like the spinning lights they project on trees at bush-doofs.
I went to an exhibition of space perfumes by Nathan Taare at the old observatory on the very top of the mountain, and the smell of the Alien Body ‘fume leached from the cardboard dip-stick and permeated all things, my journal, my bag, my clothes, my masks, for weeks. Skatoles / corpse flesh. Marine rot.
As if the night sky were a further Antarctica, and Musk’s arrogant technology the polluting microplastics.
Death to all robots!
I’m making another kind of home-brew here, a literary booze, trying to create novel biotics, trying to entice wild yeasts into partnership.
That’s how we can see what’s coming.
Trouble, commotion
“An omen, eh?’‘
The Prince had his bodyguards walking a wee way behind so he could pretend to be alone. When Brian’s friend caught up to them, the Prince hastily departed: mathematics of risk.
Read: gammons.
The Guardian says, of Sunflowers: “The image, like so much of the Dutch artist’s work, celebrates the beauty of ordinary everyday objects - a flower, a chair, a shoe. In 1987, one of the series was sold for $39m.”
A technological advance on the headsman, at least; who might be inexperienced, inaccurate, or drunk.
That was quite a ride. Wonder what type of cake it was. You’d want something white, vanilla frosting maybe but a sponge cake just wouldn’t have the weight to throw from a distance.