He supposed at least the snow was melting. The estate he was staying on, the estate he’d been living on for over a year now, had been completely snowed in by the fierce winter and not even his dilapidated old Range Rover was able to traverse the narrow winding path that led into the village. He was glad because he was fast running out of cigarettes. Like all addicts, like all recovering addicts, he had come to understand his obsession with excess. He smoked nowadays, not one or two here or there, but thirty or forty a day, lighting one off the other and watching them slowly burn down, imagining they were the sands of time.

It had been over a year since he came here. Not a lot had happened. Of course, everything had happened. Just not to him. His father, caught up in the expenses scandal, was due to stand down at the next election and, he supposed, now that it didn’t really matter, the heat was off. He could leave, although he didn’t really have anywhere to go. Mia, he’d heard, was now married — to some rich banker. And she’d started using her title again. Contessa. Who’d have thought it? Sara was on television, one more reason to avoid it, and he hadn’t heard a word from Miranda, or anyone else from those days, since he left rehab in the clothes he’d arrived in and been driven to this awful place and told to wait.

He was going to chance a drive into the village. He’d run the Range Rover every day in the snow, even if it couldn’t go anywhere, just to keep the engine turning. Matt grabbed his fake plastic Wayfarers and put them on — not the most cunning of disguises, but then again he’d started to dye his hair darker and slick it back, and he didn’t suppose anyone would really be looking for him in the depths of Surrey anyway. No reporters, no gangsters, no angry dealers looking to collect on his debts. He was, to all intents and purposes, a non-person. Lost in time.

The car started. First try. Matt rolled down the hill, past the white fields, through slush that had melted, making the roads passable again. The village seemed full of life. Sure, there were only two or three hundred people, and it seemed to him at one time there could be no more than two or three. But compared to the last two weeks spent sitting alone, this felt like heaven. He almost — but not quite — managed a smile. A queue at the village shop. He waited patiently. He had all the time in the world.

Restocked with Camels he wondered what to do. Life had at least had a little purpose when he was still going to NA meetings (the reason his father had allowed him the car) but they started to talk to him about God and he wasn’t having any of that. It was the final indignity. He’d rather trudge through the wilderness alone than get caught up in some goddamn cult. If they’d been more upfront at the treatment centre about exactly what “recovery” entailed he would have just done himself in there and then. As it was, he ended up getting better, but only a little better.

Deep down inside Matt was a broken man. He wasn’t an artist. He’d tried.

It was infuriating. His watercolours had no consistency and his oil paintings were just smudges of grease. Worse still, everything he sketched seemed flat, and dull, and lifeless. His drawings seemed to lack perspective and that, he supposed, was the problem with his entire life. He was a survivor, he’d been through the calamity. But now he found himself lost and utterly unable to find anything to do. At his father’s request he’d put in for law school next year, but that was a long way away. He had months and months to kill before he’d be allowed to return to civilisation. There weren’t even any girls. The village had two bars, which he avoided, and a small, grubby canteen. It was there that Matt headed, parking the enormous Range Rover outside.

He looked at the sandwich counter with a morbid sense of gloom and instead ordered a fried breakfast. He wouldn’t eat it, he rarely ate (the cigarettes, he supposed), but it would at least afford him some novel way of passing the time, of watching people from the window, perhaps sharing a word or two with the other diners about the daily news. Taking his sugary tea from the waitress he sat down with the day’s paper and began to flick through it. It felt like a dispatch from another world.

Foie gras and the veal, please. He found himself drifting away into a dream world, a world of expensive restaurants and beautiful girls on his shoulder, a world of late nights and bright lights and parties and cocaine and people, friends, people. But he was all alone.

The waitress set a steaming pile of grease down at his table, bringing him back to earth.
‘Are you alright, love?’ she asked. ‘You look ever so peaky.’

Matt had never looked in the best of health, but now with his dark hair his pallid complexion seemed even more apparent, and the doctors told him it’d be a long time before he’d be well enough to eat, to put on any real weight. For now his body ran simply on sugar, cigarettes, and a dour refusal to lay down and die. Consequently his gaunt appearance had continued its steady decline and now, his clothes two sizes too big for him, black bags permanently hovering beneath his eyes, every time he caught sight of himself in the mirror he could only think of Andros, his dead friend, his brother, his foil — the one who had to die before he could see the light.

Matt’s lifestyle had led him close to death. The doctors said he was very lucky, his heart had atrophied and his liver was ready to give up the game. Rehab. They’d made him feel bad about himself and he carried on feeling it almost out of obligation. His liver was getting better. But they could do nothing for his heart.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, finally. Adding: ‘thanks.’

At least Matt’s manners were finally improving. Now he had to rely on people’s kindness, rather than simply paying them a bribe. He could barely afford the breakfast, let alone find the money to leave a tip.

‘Never could understand what a nice boy like you is doing out here on your own,’ the elderly lady said. ‘Every week you come in here. And it’s always the same. Head shrouded in gloom.’

‘I used to be someone,’ started Matt. He faltered. ‘At least, I think.’

The woman nodded. ‘Thought I’d seen you on the telly.’

Matt shook his head. ‘You’ve got me confused with someone else.’

People often thought he was an actor for some reason.

‘I was a…’

Again he trailed off.

‘Never you mind, dear,’ the woman said, ‘it’ll all work out in the end.’

‘Maybe,’ said Matt. He was twenty five.

He stared down at the food on his plate. This was life. This was survival.

This was the end.

Trivial Blake

It’s easy to see that the technology that is most salient in our age is the internet, as made possible by consumer electronics. Have our philosophers stepped forward to engage with the latest technological crop? Perhaps Wikipedia is proof of a consensus theory of truth? I’m sure many  theses are addressing concerns in this vein as you read.

But what of our artists? Will Gompertz recently posted to share an apparently widely held view that no piece of art has yet spoken eloquently from or about the internet. He cites Turner prize winning Jeremy Deller describing our era as “post-warholian”, presumably indicating that Warhol was last person to adequately reference technological change – meaning, in this instance, mass production and consumerism. I wonder if the more recent Saatchi-fueled crop of artists has  captured something of marketing landscape we currently inhabit, but whatever the last sufficient reflection on cultural change afforded by art was, I think we may be on safe ground in stating that the first widely acclaimed artistic portrait of the digital era is still to come.

Which is some surprise when you consider how engaged the news agenda is with technology: I was amazed to see that Google’s Wave technology (still barely incipient) got substantial coverage in the news, while a certain Cupertino based company recently received more than a sprinkling of press when it announced its tablet based computer….

Earning a living from the internet, as I happen to,  I’ve been curious about the Gompertz question for some time, and the  Kinetica Art Fair seemed like a good place to satisfy my pretensions at cultural engagement.   Kinetica is a museum which aims to ‘encourage convergence of art and technology’. The fair certainly captured one aspect of contemporary mood – a very reasonably priced bar was a welcome response to our collective (and my personal) financial deficit.

Standout pieces included a cleverly designed mechanical system for tracing the contours of plaster bust onto a piece of paper and a strangely terrifying triangular mirror with mechanically operated metal rods [Unfortunately I can't find the artists names in the catalog]. The mirror and rods looked like a Buck Rogers inspired torture device designed to inflict pain by a method so awful that you’d have to see it in operation before its evil would be comprehensible. The other works varied from the malfunctioning to a urinal which provided an opportunity for punters to simulate pan-global urination (sadly not with real urine) via Google maps [by Ric Carvalho]. I would defy anyone not to be entertained while wondering round the the fair, its certainly not boring art.

However, Will Gompertz’s challenge was not answered at Kinetica – the essence of the technological modernity was not distilled into any single work, or indeed represented collectively.

I’ve been mulling over various possible reasons for the difficulty of the problem, and quite a few suggestions spring to mind. Do computers naturally alienate artists? Is information technology to visually banal to be characterised succinctly?

My favorite theory is that the transitory nature of our electronic lives that makes them so hard to pin down. Mobile phones, web sites, computers and operating systems from a decade ago all look ludicrously dated – it’s almost impossible to capture the platonic form of these items because they have so little essential similarity between incarnations. Moreover, their form is almost an accident, and not connected with their more profound meaning in any way. The square riggers of the mercantile age and the smoke stacks of the industrial era seem to denote something broader -  how, for example, can communism be separated from its tractors? Yet the form factor of my computer is trivial. Form and functional significance are of necessity separated by digital goods, their flexibility is the source of their power.

In some way I think films give us tacit acknowledgment of the contingent nature of the digital environment that we spend much of our lives in: characters  are never seen using Windows on their computer, in films computer interfaces are always generic. And when we see a Mac in a movie it’s impossible to see it as anything other than product placement.

So, the Kinetica Art Fair may not have been able to help society understand its relationship with technology, but in fairness that might be a misunderstanding on my part. Really the fair was about works facilitated by technology, rather than about it.

I may have picked a straw man in Kinetica. However, the V&As ongoing exhibition Decode really does no better, though its failures and successes are another topic. In this case I think we can say that Decode exhibition does addresses itself to the Gompertz challenge, and it too fails.

As if to illustrate the perversity of the digital landscape the Gompertz post has become a de facto collection of net art, which is well worth checking out. In a still  keener illustration of the era of mass participation, despite the author’s instance that he is questioning the “eminence not of existence” of net art, commenters continue to post links in the belief that enough evidence of the existence of net art will somehow make it eminent.

Jimmy Tidey

The film focuses on the unnamed man, a suited-and-booted hitman who sits around in cafe bars meeting people who give him a series of cryptic instructions about where to go next. I’d say I’m going to spoil the plot for you, but the truth is, there is no plot. Or if there is, you’ll never understand it. But that’s the point. Even the denouement, where the hitman breaks into a heavily fortified compound, is a brilliant tease, a sleight of hand that leaves you reeling. One moment he’s outside. The film cuts away. He’s inside. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ his target asks. ‘I used my imagination,’ the hitman replies.

And that’s the thing. This is a thinking man’s film. It requires you to think. It forces you to think. ‘Sometimes I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything,’ says one of the hitman’s contacts. The characters then proceed to sit in silence, unmoving, for two minutes. Or perhaps it just feels like two minutes. Either way, it’s a long time. It’s longer than is comfortable. This is a film that will take you right out of your comfort zone. It isn’t a narrative, it’s a dissection — of motivation, of alienation, of existential nausea . It’s also beautiful. Every scene is like a slowly moving picture postcard. Avatar, it ain’t. But I’d rather watch this film any day.

The Limits of Control isn’t a film — in the conventional sense. In fact, it’s a film that deliberately breaks every possible convention, forcing you, as audience, to question every last formulaic trope in genre filmmaking. The naked girl on the bed. The cryptic cyphers. The ice-cold killer. The nature of reality. This film will make you question everything while revealing nothing. We’re so used to looking at moving pictures now, we never even consider the way they’re framed. This is a film that demands you take a step back into the meta-narrative of filmmaking itself — it’s self-consciously aware of its own existence as a work of fiction. You aren’t asked to suspend your disbelief. Quite the opposite. Here, nothing is real. You’re stepping into a dream.

Some people see nothing more than two hours of their life they’ll never get back. Others recommend you watch it with a couple of sheets of blotter acid. Me, I felt as if I was staring into the mirror for a couple of hours. Not because I saw any of myself reflected in the film, but because the film itself holds up a mirror to the way we view our lives and forces us to ask: in a world where we’ve come to expect predictable story arcs and neat, tidy endings, how do the films we usually watch really depict reality?

The truth is, in all its weird glory, The Limits of Control is closer to real life than any other film that’s been documented recently. Don’t expect answers. When the credits roll, all you’ll have is more questions.

Richard Allday

To them, this is the first day of setting right the world’s wrongs. Of saving the world from global catastrophe. To the rest of us, it’s just another way for the politicians to rip us off.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you must have noticed the huge scandal about the CRU — the scientist boffins who’ve been cooking the books to make it look like climate change is more of a threat than it really is.

Now they’re trying to say it’s the Russian security services smearing the name of our good scientists. Well, frankly, whoever it is, they’ve done us a favour.

They’ve put these tree-hugging, pot-smoking, save-the-world-types back in their place.

The fact is, I’m gonna drive my car, eat red meat, and smoke chimney stack cigars. And I don’t give a toss what you think about it. I’ve got news for you, hippies. The world’s already going to hell in a hand cart. You’re just using “climate change” as the latest excuse to get all self-righteous on the rest of us.

And the politicians are using you. It’s in the interest of the political class to impose more laws on us. To control us, as people. The green lobby is giving politicians the chance they’ve always wanted — to have a legitimate excuse to clamp down on our personal freedoms.

Today they come for the car drivers. Tomorrow they come for the meat eaters. And don’t even think about setting foot on that plane. That’s bad. You’ll take the rest of your holidays for life in Skegness.

Science offers progress. Science offers civilized solutions. We should be researching ways of using science to improve our biosphere. We shouldn’t be using research as an excuse for returning civilization to a pre-industrialized dark age.

Sneer at me now, but see how you like it when the hippies make you give up your car for a daily commute on a bus that takes twice as long. They’d have you in a pony and trap if they could.

Fuck you, hippies. Fuck you and your carbon trading passports. Fuck you, celebrity hippies, who endorse us mere mortals brushing our teeth and pissing in the shower to save water, yet think nothing of hopping in their private jets to go stage some fucking celebrity concert about saving the world.

Most of all fuck you George Monbiot, and your shitty cabal of “green” (hardline, left wing) followers. To equate scepticism about an unproven scientific theory with holocaust denial cheapens the memory of millions of dead. It’s a cheap semantic trick used by the left. The same trick they always use. Smear your enemy as a murderous, egomaniacal bad guy, a racist, a denier… a comic book villain. It just doesn’t work any more.

I believe in individual freedom. The freedom to choose. The hippies would limit our freedom, would limit our nations’ growth, would limit industrial progress — that’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of living in a mud hovel — in the name of saving the environment.

Well I say it’s time for science to pull its finger out of its arse and start saving the environment for us. Because turning the clock back isn’t an option.

Make no mistake. The Copenhagen summit is nothing more than a bloodletting excuse for bleeding-heart liberal guilt. It’s a wallet-lightening experience where rich nations will be forced to shed bucketloads of their citizens’ cash just because some phony doctors have cooked up a statistical model that says industrialization might cause some sort of harm to the environment. Maybe. Possibly. We’ll have to check the figures. Which we won’t show you. Which we’ve accidentally destroyed.

Fuck off, hippies. On your bike.

Chad Fanstor

Thursday’s debate du jour was served wrapped in the rind of yet another debate. I spent the day leading up to Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time watching the socio-political fallout. With great interest I followed the story as it proliferated itself across the Internet and news outlets, rattling the doors of parliament and rousing the executive suites of the BBC. Watching again as I ate my lunch, I was again moved by just how incendiary an issue this has been. And not just in terms of the wider populous. I truly flit between opinions as to the morality amidst this issue with all its gloomy complexity. I felt as though I needed my own debate about the issue before Griffin even reached the television studio. There are too many things to be said about this issue, too many views I myself want to express. But here is just one. It is a troublesome one, but one I would love to see given the kind of intellectual currency afforded to such platforms as the Intelligence Squared debates.

I put forward the proposition that the BNP, distasteful and undemocratic though it is, is in fact a powerful force for the re-democratisation of the UK. If you can put to one side for a moment the controversy and scaremongering (not to downplay the importance of the bias and racism inherent in the what the BNP stands for), it is plain to see that the drafting of this party onto a highbrow political platform and therefore into the upper echelons of the political arena, has exorcised the populous in a manner practically unheard of in contemporary party-politics. Not since the expenses scandals have ordinary, grass-roots voters been motivated to comment on the functioning of politics and I would suggest that contrary to its outward appearance to have roused political interest, the expenses issue served mainly to cement widespread dislike of the political classes and apathy in the process of democracy and its ability to offer real options and real change.

The BNP’s appearance on prime-time television, however, is one which leaves the moral compass spinning. If pushed I think I find myself most in agreement with the ex-editor of the Sun who commented that the BBC cannot be blamed for simply fulfilling the mandate for which we pay our license fee. I am not sure I am happy about Griffin appearing on Q.T. but it’s worth noting that it is the fundamental bases and building blocks of our society – law, rules, codes of conduct – that keep the BNP and its followers from exerting a greater influence than they do in this country, and therefore we must adhere to these markers of civilisation, and follow the rules and codes in deciding whether to give the BNP this platform. This taken as a given, it is plain that the BBC had only one choice given the BNP’s six percent share of the vote and two seats in the European Elections.

In which case it is not the BBC who is responsible for my discomfort in seeing such a figure ascend the tiers of debate in which I could find at least some semblance of respect for the participants until now. It is in fact the voting public, my fellow countrymen and women.

Quite simply, I do not remember the last time such a divisive political debate lead so readily back to the grass-roots electorate. In my disgust at some of the issues coagulated within this row, I cannot help but take enjoyment from the barbed blade planted firmly into the torso of political apathy.

Ed Williams

Worse, the release of this year’s ArtReview power list has seen him plummet from being Top Dog to being a tick-ridden no. 48 which is, I’m sure, the metaphorical equivalent to Mr Hirst of a royal crack to the knackers with a Doctor Marten boot — delivered while he’s already reeling on the ground. To the rest of us, it’s just a reminder that all glory is fleeting. A star is extinguished, not with a bang, but a very anguished whimper.

My point is that as some stars fall, other rise. That’s why I was tempted into going to the opening night of Lucas Price’s exhibition at the Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch. I rolled my eyes when I saw the press release — another graffiti artist — but Price is proof that not every “urban” artist should be tarred with the same can of primer.

I’m going to use the B word. Sorry. But whenever graffiti is mentioned, his spectre looms larger than Banquo at Macbeth’s banquet. Banksy is the street art world’s Vettriano. Sure he does alright and he’s popular, but his work isn’t exactly challenging. Let’s face it, the only provocative statement that’s had Banksy’s name underneath it in at least a decade comes from the anonymous collective that wrecked his Stokes Croft mural by throwing red paint all over it.

I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I like my art to say something. So it’s truly wonderful when you find art that not only says something, but says it from the heart. Lucas Price manages to do both.

He’s nervous. It’s his first big show and he’s worried about how people are going to react. But unlike a certain D Hirst, he’s not worried about his reputation in as much as it fattens his wallet. No, he’s got the same nervous need for acceptance that all recovering addicts do — a need that drives his entire body of work.

He needn’t be worried. Jesus Help Me find my Proper Place is a deeply personal collection that not only draws deep from Price’s years as a homeless drug addict, but also one that says volumes about his recovery. You feel as if he’s put his heart and his soul into his work and when an artist does that, something magical happens — art becomes more than mere technique and becomes imbued with meaning.

There’s a real sense of Price’s former disconnection and his struggle to reconnect with the world — in short, to find his place. A collage of photos of the Earth taken from the moon, shrouded in telling white space and bearing the legend ‘when you’re high it’s so warm… it’s like a blow job’ seemed to sum it up for me. As did his statement ‘I’ve decided to study real hard this year and become rich and famous.’ You get a real sense of an artist struggling to express himself in his work.

He’s definitely obsessed with death. Skulls abound, and there’s an open coffin placed in the centre of the room — the body in it is undoubtedly the corpse of his former self, the unlucky Lucas Price who never sobered up and discovered meaning. But it isn’t a morbid obsession. It’s a celebration of a deserved escape from the jaws of death.

Lucas Price’s work is warm and genuine. You might not think these are high accolades for pieces that can command up to 14k a throw. But they are. In fact, I can’t think of praise any higher.

For what it’s worth, I’d happily have one of Damien Hirst’s new paintings hanging on my wall. But that’s the point. Hirst’s new work is art-school stuff that ought to be hanging up in someone’s bedroom. You really get the feeling that the work of Lucas Price belongs in a gallery.

In short, I think he’s found his place.

Richard Allday

Lucas Price: Jesus help me find my proper place
Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch
October 15th – November 13th 2009

Click here for details

I suppose the first colour in my wardrobe came when someone sent me a demo tape of some early Interpol recordings back in 2001, and I was just blown away that there might be more to life than two albums and a tragically short career.

Okay, so listening to Interpol wasn’t exactly opening my door to all the colours of the rainbow, but it was at least the adoption of some muted shades of contrast, a chiaroscuro landscape out of which I could finally begin to imagine life beyond the travails of a lonely teenager. Then of course it happened. I got into electronic music via way of Radiohead’s Kid A (2001) when someone said “yeah, they’re good, but they’re just copying Aphex Twin.”

I felt like a musical philistine. From that moment I set forth with one goal in mind — to become a musical elitist. I think I studied the music of Autechre harder than I studied for either of my two degrees. I still didn’t get it. There was a reason for that, as I would find out years later, doing an interview with them via email — they were just pretentious posers. Like me. Or like what I wanted to be.

I would sneer. Believe me, I would sneer. If you didn’t understand the cultural implications of the breakcore movement and hold it akin to revolutionary Marxism, based on a semiotic analysis comparing and contrasting it to the proto-punk movement, you were in trouble. Of course, you were sitting there rolling your eyes and wishing I would put some Pink Floyd on. Or some Eminem. Or whatever. Anything that wasn’t going to induce an aneurysm.

I’m not sure when exactly my fall from grace happened. I could tell you, for example, that Rachel Stevens 2005 hit ‘Some Girls’ was sampled from the Timelords (who were, of course, the KLF) 1988 ‘Doctorin the Tardis’ and that that track was itself based on a sample from Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock n Roll part II’ — but you wouldn’t catch me tapping my toe to it. Musically, I was still dressed in black, only now it was the skinny jeans and tight t-shirts of the self proclaimed artiste (naturally I dabbled in Logic Pro) rather than the gothic trenchcoats of my youth.

Don’t get me wrong. I still go mad for an experimental album. Scott Walker’s 2006 masterpiece, ‘The Drift,’ still rates, I think, as one of the finest albums of the last decade, perhaps forever. But it’s so avant-garde it’s practically art, not music at all, and certainly not pop. Something in me changed. Maybe it was reading Gary Mulholland’s This is Uncool in late 2005. It’s a beautiful book — acting as advocate for the 500 greatest pop songs you should’ve heard and never should. I think I downloaded them all. Naturally, thinking it would make me more cool.

And suddenly, there was colour. I could enjoy Slowdive, but now suddenly I could tap my feet to Hall and Oates’ ‘I can’t go for that,’ too. I suppose that opened up the door to a lot of other stuff. Have you heard Chromeo covering that song with Daryl Hall in his studio? Just beautiful. And come to think of it, have you heard any of Chromeo’s recent stuff? Pure pop perfection.

Skream seems to think so, too. That’s why he’s remixed Chromeo’s Night By Night. It’s his best track since his remix of La Roux’s ‘In for the kill’ earlier this year. And that’s about as pop as it gets. I almost found a way to stay po-faced about music forever. There’s always an insular music scene you can latch on to. I’m sure drum n bass is still going, and getting darker day by day. But I’m glad that dubstep seems to have found its sense of humour. Let’s just forget the remix of I kissed a girl ever happened… Sure, a lot of dubstep has gone pop. But there’s plenty of great serious artists out there at the moment. For the purists, there’s always Datsik,  I still don’t think Joker can put a foot wrong, and Borgore still brings a smile to my face.

The point is, I have been cured of my addiction to po-faced music. Sometimes I like it dark and dramatic. Other times, I want to blast out some heavy beats. But sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll catch me singing along to Robyn’s cover of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since you been gone’ while covering as much ground as I can in my car.

I suppose my musical journey has been very much like that of television. We thought black and white was awesome at first, but now I’ve discovered life’s so much better in colour.

Richard Allday

Babylon Revisited

I’m reminded of that old F Scott Fitzgerald short story about the man who lost his family while everyone else was losing their money in the Wall Street Crash.

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.” a wily bartender says.
“I did,” Charlie replies, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

I was very fortunate, in a way, to come of age in the boom. I had an easy ride, and there was always a soft landing. Credit was easy and money was so simple to make you couldn’t fall over yourself without landing on a tenner. I spent high and I lived hard. Life was good, or so I thought.

I turned twenty five soon after the credit crisis. I was too busy to notice. My life had fallen into disarray. I was involved with two women, I was drinking too much, for all the wrong reasons, I was no longer able to command a decent salary, and the novel I’d been working on for the past four years had been rejected by pretty much every publisher going. Too commercial. Not commercial enough. The characters are too mean. But nobody will believe the story if you make them nice.

Ultimately, I only cared about one thing. One of the girls I was involved with. The rest of the world, I said, could burn.

Burn

It did. While I was busy falling apart, so was the world. I lost the girl. I quit my job. I left town. I started again.

It’s easy to look back, in retrospect, and say yes, this was my quarter life crisis. It was certainly the moment when I realized the dreams I had as a child weren’t necessarily the life I was going to have as an adult.

I had to do a lot of growing up, very fast.

I had dreams of being a great novelist. Then I woke up. As it turns out, I’m a rather good creative director. We can’t all be F Scott Fitzgerald. I’ll settle for being Don Draper. At least Don Draper can pay his bills on time, and he isn’t trying to drink himself to death.

I think I’ve smiled more in the last six months than I’ve smiled in the last five years. I’ve come to terms with who I am, and what I really want in life. (Hint: it’s not to be a great writer. I just did that to get girls into bed. It worked.) It seems as if everybody has a crisis of confidence in their twenties, when they realize how hard it really is out there. Some go running for cover. They hide in perpetual childhood, living with their parents, hanging out with old school friends. Others, a lot of girls, go the other way. They run straight into the arms of older men, father figures who’ll protect them and pay for them. Until, of course, the men get tired of the girls and change them in for a younger model. Then you’re fucked.

Don’t be a child

My point is, I guess, that you can’t put off having a quarter life crisis forever. It’ll only make your mid-life worse. You have to face up to the responsibilities of the world and sometimes, you have to do it alone. I’m  happier being single than I ever was trying to juggle all those girls. Women are a headache. Even when they’re not trying to have you duffed up. I’m running a business, I’m earning a living, and I answer to nobody. Life is hard, but I never really enjoyed it when it was easy.

Having to work, having to struggle, having to beat the odds — that’s what life’s about. We had it handed to us on a silver platter when times were good. Now I see all the quarter lifers running for cover, trying to get those times back. They’re just delaying the inevitable. Those of us who lost everything and had to start again from scratch will be the real winners.

I finally got round to washing my car today. I bring this up because it’s been at least six months. Since I moved here. Since I began my life again.

Six months of dirt and grime. It felt like I was washing away a lot more. It felt like a purification, of sorts. Sweeping the trash away. Seeing the sparkling underneath.

I spend a lot of time in that car, commuting as I do through town and country. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an adult, it’s that you’d better invest in a car you like. You’re going to be spending a lot of time in it.

Also: avoid mad women, don’t drink too much, put something by for a rainy day, no setback is ever permanent, no state of being lasts forever.

In fact, I’ve finally learned what my parents were trying to tell me all along.

Richard Allday

What we fail to realize is, this isn’t all we have to worry about. This is just the surface of a much deeper disaster. We’ve become a self-diagnosing, self-medicating, self-absorbed mess. To say it most simply: drama drama drama, we are so fucking drama obsessed.

Somehow, being fucked up has been glorified into ‘alluring tragicness’, and the worst of our generation has embraced this idea and made it a lifestyle. Drug addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, depression – the new problem does not simply lie in these actual things anymore; the issue is embodying and adopting them in order to define yourself as a person, and to attract and attach others who are the ’same’ – consequently creating social bonds which serve to amplify how driven we’ve become by drama.

The scariest factor is the thought of a generation so bored, lost, unimpressed and disillusioned that there is nothing else worth aspiring to, that there is no other worthwhile way to spend time, that self-esteem is so low the ability to form relationships with a healthy ‘normal’ foundation, has vanished.

But all this is a little too sympathetic. Because rather than popping pills for our latest mental ‘defect’, why don’t we call it a difference, call it a day, concluding “I’m just being too dramatic”? Why do we instead make such a fuss? The answer is, we WANT the drama! We crave it. We want, we need, to be fucked up. We feel special that way. We feel more interesting.

We could claim, somewhere in between too many pills and watching Twilight show us love is being saved from near death experiences, we have subconsciously learned to associate drama with happiness. We could say, I suppose you can’t really blame us when the people responsible for us were too preoccupied being their own version of fucked up.

Or
We could say, lets just stop being so fucking dramatic
and get over ourselves.

Rina B

A much deeper problem is that it’s hard to genuinely slate a piece of art without opening a can of worms. Are you really going to claim that you have the objective standard by which art can be judged? You can say you don’t like it, or that there are better examples, but would you really be prepared to say that any given piece was totally fucking meaningless? Well, my visit to the Turner Prize Exhibition left me inclined to give it a go… . Ok not really, but criticism seems to be in order.

Going to the Tate Britain at the weekend blessed me with the opportunity to observe plenty of visitors (screaming children expressed an understandable viewpoint), and as a result I was privy to much conversation. Not once did I hear anyone articulate anything that approached understanding, delight, emotional displacement or pleasure.

A notice board at the end of the exhibition which solicited the punters views confirmed a failure to engage with the works. People were mainly moved to draw cocks with the drawing pins or relate bawdy versions of nursery rhymes. You might think of that as creative reaction to the psychological whirlwind of the previous hour, but I think it’s more likely to be indicative of people bored out of their minds, with nothing about the exhibition to say.

If the works of the Turner Prize had emotion to impart, pearls of wisdom to espouse, or polemic to orate then they roundly failed to deliver their payload to the three-wheeled pram-pushing masses. But what of the experts, who are judge, jury and short-lister of the Turner Prize? Perhaps they are able to fathom some deep and complex meaning in these works, which eludes us mere mortals.

Certainly Goshka Macuga’s piece might lead us to believe we needed a higher expertise in art. Her work is about the relationship of the wives of artists Paul Nash and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous in their field perhaps, but not names that come up around the dinner table. Not in my house anyway. Fortunately the blurb tells you what the installation is about, because if it didn’t it’s pretty clear we’d need a large team of forensic art experts to find it out. I didn’t hear anyone saying “Oh look, isn’t that Paul Nash’s wife? Do you know, I’ve always pondered her relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s other half.”

Anyway, it’s my strong suspicion is that whatever degree of prior knowledge you had her sculptures constructed form the steel and glass fittings normally used as banisters in public spaces never quite aspired to the sublime, or even the awful. They might perhaps teeter on the insipid.

Cathy Wilkes’ arrangement of female mannequins, supermarket checkouts and dirty bowls of baby food do come together to indicate some kind of meaning. I don’t think I deserve a prize for guessing that her thrust (although she probably doesn’t approve of the inherently male gesture of thrusting) may have something to do with feminity. For this reason this work stands out as the winner for me – not because it’s great, just because it has some kind of meaning that I was able to discern. And for that reason I’d like to exclude it from the criticism that follows.

All of the works, excepting the mannequins, fail a test that I thought up during the extreme boredom of being subjected to Mark Leckey’s video. The idea of this test came to me by way of the post-modernist essay generator. It’s a website that automatically generates essays by stringing together randomly ordered catch phrases and buzz words from post-modernist thought. The results are convincing in the sense that they are very hard to tell apart from some genuine academic papers. I think it’s fair to say that if an essay cannot be told apart from a randomly generated one it can only be of any value by coincidence, and a very unlikely coincidence at that.

So, the Turner Prize equivalent: as a thought experiment imagine having a computer spit out a random plot for video art – or a random selection of ‘found objects’ randomly arranged for a sculpture, and see if you can tell the difference between what you imagined work and the work being your evaluating. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that you might expect a piece of art to convey some more meaning than any random arrangement of matter. Or for it to be aesthetically pleasing, but that’s pretty much not a concern when it comes to the Turner Prize.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be hard to pick out a video of tuk-tuk drivers doing nothing (Runa Islam’s submission) from “coal miners learning French” or “oranges rolling down the stairs” (my random inventions). The tuk-tuk drivers may have significance and meaning, but even when I try really hard, I can’t see very much. Actually this piece may have been slightly less than random – think back to the 1997 Turner Prize winner “Frozen Policemen”. An hour long video of, you guessed it, policemen doing nothing.

Take another piece of Islam’s – a single continuous shot (I think) of somekind of workshop space. Whatever, frankly.

Perhaps a soporific and interminable video of man making inscrutable points about cartoon cats (Mark Leckey)? What about a black and white epic about the growth cycle of sorghum in China, with subtitles in binary (plot randomly generated by me)? Whatever.

What about a video of someone smashing porcelain cups? What about someone chasing a fictional greased weasel round a fetid bathroom? Can you guess which one is a real submission?

So I don’t quite want to say that these (putative) works are totally fucking meaningless. I want to say that they are about as meaningful as any other randomly chosen arrangement of matter.

Who cares? – well, it’s not the holocaust obviously – but when I think of the number of people who are excited to be challenged by difficult, avant-garde films, or have a passion for, frankly, inaccessible music, it does seem like a shame there is no equivalent to engage our questing minds on the visual art front. Or perhaps there is, but it certainly seems that the lime-light is hogged by bullshit.

Jimmy Tidey