Collage, Julian Cope, Kreng & King Mob

Why Must I Be Cursed? Full picture over on the art blog here

***

...................................yeah, yeah.......what? Someone just asked for fiction recommendations but I couldn't help because I haven't read a great novel in ages and her asking made me realise the fact......'though I've just started Julian Cope's One Three One, only because I found it in a charity shop for £2....'One of the most brilliant, serious, funny, life-crammed novels any reader is likely to lay their mitts on' said The Guardian - I doubt it, but judging by the opening three chapters, it won't be dull...........................................................

***

.........as the cheery month of January gradually dies (perhaps we'll all wake up soon) I listen to the new album from Kreng, The Summoner, on Miasmah...it's not helping...shedding any light onto the cold slab of earth that is my life...but it suits this time of year perfectly for there are icy, deep, orchestral manoeuvres embedded into this very dark album - actually, most of it is just that, the Strings of Doom as soundtrack to the endgame in which we all sit in dustbins waiting to be fed crumbs of hope - "What time is it?" "Zero time", to quote, or paraphrase, Samuel Beckett. The first four tracks feel like a long build-up to one that lasts for over 15mins in which something like a melody from Hell (Pepijn Caudron exorcising every Horror soundtrack he's heard and more) culminating in a Death Metal finale complete with Satanic screaming before the final, peaceful piano refrain.........

***

'Rated slightly above the run-of-the-mill consumers of traditional culture is a sort of mass avant garde of consumers who wouldn't miss a single episode of the 'revolt' churned out by the spectacle: the latest solemn 80 minute flick of 360 variegated bare arses, the latest manual of how to freak out without tears, the latest napalm-twisted monsters of air-expressed to the local Theatre of Fact. One builds up resistance to the spectacle and, like any other drug, its continued effectiveness demands increasingly suicidal doses. Today, with everyone all but dead from boredom, the spectacle is essentially a spectacle of revolt. Its function is quite simply to distract attention from the only real revolt: revolt against the spectacle.' - King Mob, 1967