Went to the Pere Ubu Moon Unit gig, London Fields, the second time in as many weeks after not having sanctified its precinct for nearly a decade. A number of old friends and acquaintances there, at a level I hadn’t really been prepared to field. The question ‘Hey! How’s it going?!’ brought me to something that felt like mild panic at its sixth or seventh iteration.
I’m racking my brains, and I really don’t know would have been a truthful answer. I’ve been racking my brains for a while and I really don’t know how I am also.
Not great, maybe?
Not prepared for jokes, quiz questions, high fives, or banter anyway.
A friend and I considered the question of Covid. How my brain persists in seeing 2019 as yesterday, and there is a sense you should just be able to pick up who you are. All the people and things are the same, they’re still there in the same appearance and format, and yet it is not the same, it is not a case of picking up where you left off, resetting. The territory is not the same. it looks familiar but it is unfamiliar. Things have changed internally and I don’t know how, and it’s a case of probing and testing and finding you get different responses, internally, from the world. It’s not as it was, I’m not the same.
When I was young I used to leave records lying around, so that they’d accumulate scratches and imperfections, blurs and scrapes. They played, more or less, with the odd hop, or wipe across several grooves, and furry moments, but the whole record was compromised or in some cases eg when I’d let a Doors record fall down the back of a radiator, fatally compromised. During the gig I realised what I feel like, I feel like that, a scratched and scraped record, no longer playing as it did.
Probing and testing to get responses, and understand the new environment in which you exist, the changed you that exists in the environment, if they are different.
Pere Ubu
The Pere Ubu Moon Unit gig was perfect for that. Moon Unit is Pere Ubu’s live testing function. The group will turn the dial on the radio finding signals, sounds, fragments of delta blues, scraps of melody, stray tendrils of electric guitar, clarinet, theremin, probing around each other, while David Thomas intones the landscape in his mind. It’s an extremely well developed landscape of symbolic locations, pop culture, radio, folk songs, routes and plains, understood across a number of years and albums and written manifestos. The aim is to find connections, amplifications of the psychic material, a soundtrack not yet made, or being iterated, or with a form not yet fully defined. There are no repeatable objects found in a Moon Unit gig. They are in the process of being discovered.
Like the pre-covid self, old lyrics get taken out for a ride to how known and understood areas can provide a lyrical location for new forms of music and territories for new lyrics. 30 Seconds over Tokyo gets a long slow run-through, its lyrics even more striking unfolded in this way.
Where do the old lyrics and new intonations connect with the musical territory in a way that manifests into objects.
Alex Ward’s clarinet finds the melodic phrasing David Thomas seems to crave this evening and creates some of the most striking, almost pastoral moments – a texas pastoral, a delta pastoral. It’s strange and quite haunting, an element that doesn’t exactly belong yet at several moments allows Ward and Thomas to come together perfectly in the aesthetic, symbolic landsape/space they’re searching in.
Afterwards a number of musicians in the audience express disgust at David Thomas’ rudeness to his musicians on stage. They haven’t been to many Pere Ubu gigs is one answer, maybe. Another is that Thomas is old, and ill, and extremely cantankerous. But as a friend points out, he was cantankerous when he was young and fat.
The other is that he’s dying and has a project he wants to complete. He will never complete it of course, despite its professed periods, and stages and chapters. The low-level, attenuated music and slow intonation of the lyrics, makes the whole feel appropriately like a light gradually going out, and in that will be its mode and its further discovery.
and yes he’ll be here forever and no we won’t cry when he’s gone.
But the point is he knows what he wants, and maybe it’s just a feeling that’s hard to define or find until you’ve found it, and if expressing that were easy… well, who would want to see that.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Writing
Earlier in the day, I read Ursula K Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which, inexplicably, I’d never read before (it’s great obv). Le Guin mentions trickster stories at one point, and it occurred to me that one definition of a trickster is one who says the container contains one thing, when in fact it contains another, or even nothing. I include the definition of money as a store of value here. (SBF to thread in his mode as an ickle boy confused by big numbers, which legislators and the media seem to have lapped up.)
I go into town and get a somewhat radical haircut, irritated generally with a personal lack of individual distinction and definition. Probing, testing the personal space.
Nus contes rimes n’est verais
Also reading Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London. At one level it feels like a gigantic tactic for dealing with writer’s block, essentially a self-confessed failure of writing. A failure, in its bifurcations and branches to manage what VS Pritchett said were the key elements of story writing: emphasis and selection, out of the imaginative space.
Also, quite often, it’s not very easy to understand what he means, though whether that’s a failure of the original text or the translation is hard to say. A short section introduced by a meditation on a medieval text, updated into modern French – Nul contes rimé n’est vrai – and translated as ‘No story told in rhyme is true’ – deals with the ‘expressed truth-telling intention of prose’ and whether to use this as a constraint on the metatext he himself is writing. I went round about it several times and haven’t really got to the bottom of what Roubaud means.
But I’m in a mood for ontological uncertainty, perhaps for the reasons set out at the top, and there’s enough anecdote and tantalising emotional force in the abstractions here to make it more compelling than the challenging structure and meta-mode might indicate.
Also a superb disquisition on the perfect butter croissant in one of the bifurcations.
ATTACK BY STRATAGEM
I go home and play through some music, the best being Ja’King the Divine’s new album 手术: BLACK SUN TZU:
Then out to London Fields for the Pere Ubu Moon Unit gig.
So
how am I?
I feel serious, man.
Not really in an E-40 way, but what the hell let’s do it anyway.