Secret Societies podcast

A while back I posted about the Secret Societies event I took part in with Electric Sheep as part of East End Film Festival. You can listen to it here

Sarabet

Not the first to perform a coloured light and music works live, but Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1871-1951) invented machines, particularly the Sarabet, that she could use for her colour light art, that she called Nourathar, essence of light. Her inventions allowed her to respond in coloured light to music live, the first woman on record to create audio-visual performances perhaps. I enjoy the Crowley-esque title for her invention and the aesthetic of her set, high chair, long dress, psychadelic makeshift background. Here she is.

She also invented the rheostat, still used today as a form of resistor of electrical signals (volume/light). Her patent was disputed by General Electric but she spent some years fighting to be recognised as the lawful author for this device. She won.

Above is an example of her notation for a light performance.

Malmberget

Malmberget, Gallivare Municipality, a small mining town in Lapland, Sweden, is on the move again. The tunnels of the mine stretch for miles and have created a network under the town. Older tunnels have made the structure of the ground unstable to the extent that part of the ground started to cave in, starting in the fifties. Each year more of this residential area falls away into the mouth of Gropen, 'the Pit'. On the standard map, Gropen is represented as a grey, nondescript, mass. But the birds eye view shows a huge cavern. Not the mine itself, but what was the town, now a pit, gradually getting bigger.

Small posts, seismometers, stuck in the ground are dotted around the town. A fence marks off the area around the pit that has shown to be unstable by the readings. Within that fence are many abandoned homes. The people that lived there have had to move on.

Here is Gropen in the 60s:

And now:

Malmberget established itself as a result of high wages from mining work, it began to flourish from the 1880s onward. When Gropen became a danger, offices and houses were moved. But even these settlements and more around them are transient. When the mining companies (now LKAB, a state owned company) realised there was more ore under the town, and more danger of subsidence, they attained permission to enforce the removal of houses to nearby Gallivare. Some houses can be moved successfully, not all. The upheaval has been well documented.

I don't speak Swedish but I can tell from the facial expressions of the Malmberget residents in this report that they are sad to leave their homes. At one stage the woman in her kitchen looks perturbed, this is because everynight around 11pm the mine blasts can be heard, in this video the vibrations are visible.

Children's nightmares here, possibly, are not of a bogey man under the bed, but of the bed, and the house falling into the ground. To the east of Gropen are a hundred or more houses due for demolition. Gropen threatens their foundations and the owners have mostly packed up and gone. The abandoned, detached, residencies look recently vacated. They have been. There has been no chance for maintenance to lag. Paint is fresh on the walls, windows are boarded up, but others are in tact. Strangely no graffiti here, no break in, traces of teenage fires. Round the back of a house a chair only just has a twine of ivy growing round it. Gardens are yet to overgrow. The place has more of a sense of evaccuation than desertion. The reasons to leave are invisible, but the rumbling of explosions heard everynight from the mine, are a reminder. The blasts, to mine for iron ore, copper. Also, more sinister, and unexpected rumbles, small tremors are also reminders.

Walking through this area at night in the summer renders it even more strange. An unearthly light, midnight sun behind a clouded over sky. The dank, bleak emptiness met us with bone cold. Deserted roads, boarded up windows, silence. Intrigue and aesthetic interest was dragged down, indeed by the 'oppressiveness of the place'. This puts me in mind of Andre Breton's Mad Love (1937 Chap. 6), where he questions whether the oppressiveness of some places was due to their history, or whether some primordial, metaphysical presence 'made' people act immorally or despairingly:

As we gradually moved forward, the dismal nature of the site, which developed without changing in any sense, took on a poignant twist we could sense in our conversation, however increasingly vague...The presence of an apparently uninhabited house a hundred metres along on the right added to the absurd and the unjustifiable nature of our walking along in a setting like this. This house, recently built, had nothing to compensate the watching eye for its isolation. It opened out on a rather large enclosure stretching down to the sea, and bordered, it seemed to me, by a metallic trellis, which, given prodigious avarice of the land in such a place, had a lugubrious effect on me, without me stopping to analyse it. My gift of observation, which is in general not remarkable, was noticeably diminished by sadness.

Breton goes on to say that the walk between this house, across a stream and to a small fort gave him a sense of inner despair, and a rift grew between him and his lover. When he returns to his parents they explain that they had passed the site of a murder, a woman shot by her husband. He speaks also of the painting The House of the Hanged Man by Cezanne.

This is not just anecdotal: it is a question, painting for example, of the necessity of expressing the relationship which cannot fail to exist between the fall of a human body, a chord strung round its neck, into emptiness, and the place itself where this drama has come to pass, a place which it is, moreover, human nature to come and inspect.

He establishes, from his parents accounts, that the space between the house and the fort was 'the world' of the man, Michel Henriot and his wife, the site he and his lover had walked through earlier that day. He too had felt diabolically separated from his partner. Was it the site itself, the genus loci, that was the cause, or the gory details of the crime that had happened there that had made it so miserable:

Thus the space between these two buildings, which had been for me that afternoon such an exceptional place of disgrace, revealed itself in its very limits, to be the previous theatre of a singular tragedy.

Black and white archive images above courtesy of Gellivare Bildarkiv.

Stay Home Tonight

One motive for the riots is 'See what you get when you take away a kids future'. Indeed cuts have ensured that opportunities for access to higher education are nil, job opportunities, possibility of affording a decent place to live, negligible. Even after a patch up job, where community figure heads might try to take some of the blame here and ensure the provision of more youth services, improve police dialogue etc UK society will never provide financial equality for all if neoliberalism remains central. I think an important question we actually need to ask 'what kind of future?' ... a great future as a wage-slave, working all the hours in the week to pay the mortgage and buy 'stuff', or work in goal/corporate orientated academia, or a social sector driven by key performance indicators etc? - in the neoliberal emerald city, the streets aren't paved with gold for most. I think the kids have seen through this and nihilism has set in.

What these looting kids are doing in a 419 culture, cut out the middleman, style is cutting to the chase. They got the trainers, the gold, the track suit, and did they have to work for months or nurture soul scalding credit? ... they did not. The way these objects of desire are produced and distributed is the problem, not the objects themselves or the desire. Look to Adam Curtis' All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace for a history on the oil crisis in Nigeria for insight into the actual costs of primary source theft, i.e. oil to make our Play Stations etc. Surely this is the individualistic entrepreneurship neoliberalism advocates, talk about instant profit. Fast wealth looks bad and unfair, but at least these kids have the guts to do it out in the open, not behind false shrouds of dignity like the political elite and the mega-rich.

The gangs already have their organised unions, I think it shines a light on the lack of other Londoners to come together and take to the streets to protest. I resent Teresa May et als exclusion of these kids as 'thugs' that 'Londoners' should unite against. These kids are Londoners. At this time any demonisation should be abhorred. Denying responsibility for social malaise is a tabloid tactic. However, I think the governmental stance will play on the idea that at this time of great austerity, everyone should be making do and mend, altruism is key. These kids are not playing fair, not showing allegiance to the Big Society and not showing the negative solidarity that is needed. Their criminality will be seen as a great burden, they will be outlawed. I think everyone is looking for significance here, political intent, or a logical motive. Of course the rioters' motives will be mixed. But on the whole I think the motive is angry revenge, revenge for taking out one of their own (Mark Duggan) revenge for being poor and for being bored.

As I write short term solutions are being proposed - further denial of civil liberties, legal police brutality in the form of surveillance of phone calls, use of water canons and plastic bullets.

Psychic Fayre

Stake Land

Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2011) is a pretty good watch, with rousing action scenes where locals turned vampires tear up rural America, although this is hindered by some unneeded frills. The film is set in apocalyptic America (what has caused this is unexplained). Towns and cities are dysfunctional and many are deserted. Various groups jostle for position: an extremist Christian cult, disenfranchised ‘simple folk’ searching for a new frontier and a pack of blood-guzzling vampires, each aiming for supremacy.

The story follows the travels of vampire stalker Mister (Nick Damici, Mulberry Street, World Trade Center) and orphaned Martin (Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl), picked up by Mister as an apprentice/vampire killer pal (I hope named after George Romero’s awkward be-fanged teenager). They are trying to find the promised land, a mysterious place called New Eden.

Stake Land is part buddy movie, part road movie, part sci-fi, part social commentary, part Western. Watching the film is like flicking through cable channels:Mad Max follows Karate Kid follows The Champ, all with teeth. There is a lot going on and it’s impressive that the filmmakers manage to cover so much film territory. But it feels a bit like an attempt to cover their bases and have something for everyone: slowed-down glamorous sections where the leading actors look cool, set to a melancholic soundtrack, are next to gripping and noisy action scenes of blood lust and staking (the best part of the film for me), and sensitive bonding scenes between the characters as they travel through a stunning landscape. All this set to music that is so unnecessary it feels like being smothered with a pillow of emotional impact.

The subtext of the film seems to suggest that in a new era of sluggish economies and ecological disaster only the fittest will survive, and those commonly portrayed as a drain on resources and not ‘pulling their weight’ are cast out. Indeed, many sequences are reminiscent of media-fetishised disasters. Vampire-struck towns with deserted houses, shops and people scavenging for food reminded me of images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or images of terrorist attacks. The vampire format has been used before to flesh out a particular time’s anxieties (disease, addiction, etc), and here it’s a fear of terrorism. With Stake Land, we’re made more aware than ever of a ‘watch your back’ generation of Americans desperately in need of a bit of meditation and some Ritalin.

Some of these references to contemporary society work well. One of the film’s strengths is the way familiar American suburban tropes are adjusted to fit this apocalyptic vamp landscape. The scenes where these mythical beings are seen as roadkill for ’Nam-styled Mister, or where an infected Santa Claus awaits his impending doom in a cul-de-sac, dripping with tar-like blood, are high points. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are not allowed to fully develop, so that the audience can neither genuinely root for them, nor really despise them. Damici’s character has some great moments and his cool lines give the film some laughs, but part of the narrative draw is dropped too early. Four of the people that Mister and Martin befriend are promptly killed off, notably an old woman and a black man, and rather predictably, it’s the young white couple who survive long enough to try and reach the promised land in the end. Published in Electric Sheep Magazine June 2011

Electric Sheep book launch

A good time was had by all at the Horse Hospital, London on Tues 7th June and I was really delighted to see the anthology. Its a brilliant collection of visual and written work. Here are the remains of the celebratory cake - suitable gore.