A Kind Bigging-up By Squealermag
Brighton based Love Among The Mannequins release their debut album ‘Radial Images’ on Function Records this autumn. The four piece deliver the melodic fluidity of Pavement and Built To Spill, bounced off the concrete walls of Ballardian dystopias. Musings of philosophers and ailments of great composers abound. Is this Polymath rock?
The Twentieth Century (Alan Watts & Edward Bernays) by Love Among the Mannequins
the writer delusion
I am writing a novel about absurdity. Writing a novel is absurd. Rampant paradox disease. Grudgingly chant the mantra. Get back to work.
In my novel, two men stand, symmetrically inverted. One of these men is a roshi, preaching an unorthodox blend of Taoism, Buddhism, Zen and Hinduism, the purpose being to engender in his disciples a sense of spiritual oneness, of being-in-nature, leading to the transcendence of suffering and the tyranny of the ego, the “confirmed positive”. The other is a scientist who seeks the same end through putting forward the implications of cosmology and neuropsychology: the human race (and all its accoutrements: accrued technology, wisdom, works of art, advances in medicine, culture, chronicled history etc.) will inevitably disappear subject to inviolable physical laws, and our “reality” is a simulation cobbled together from compressed sensory information and neurological dot-joining and colouring-in, meaning we are (in the nicest way possible, natch) chaotically complicated biological machines dictated over - utterly - by deeply flawed perceptions and what tit bits of data the unconscious deigns to channel into that anemic splinter of one’s conscious mind. The implications of this being: you are not in control, your reality is flawed and subjective, nothing you achieve will matter, so why on earth worry? This man preaches the “negated negative”.
My problem is this: I’m with both these men. Their philosophies seem opposed, yet both lead to the same conclusion. Identity is absurd. Achievement is absurd. Art is absurd. Trying to be in control of your surroundings is absurd. Trusting your perception is absurd. Everything one does, everywhere one turns, everything one puts one’s hands to, it is putting up wallpaper in a damp house. It’s just going to peel off. It’s going to come down.
Here is a painful truth I’ve forced myself into confronting. I’m pursuing the writer delusion as others pursue the electrician delusion or the philosopher delusion. There is no such thing as a writer or an electrician or a philosopher. There are only human beings that write and human beings that wire houses and human beings that ask unanswerable questions like why. Their roles and egos are frail constructs that require a constant process of covert self-delusion because being a human being is not enough. We sniff it out - what kind of commodity are you? And those with none are scentless, like ghosts.
Our mantra: aluid agere quam nihil, or better do to no end than nothing.
Get back to work.
But see the madman rage downright
With furious looks, a ghastly sight.
Naked in chains bound doth he lie,
And roars again, he knows not why.
Observe him; for as in a glass,
Thine angry portraiture it was.
His picture still keep in thy presence;
‘Twixt him and thee there’s no difference.
—Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy; The Argument of the Frontispiece, part VII)
An Ironist of the Absurd
While sketching dialogue I exhumed, from some tricksy trough in my psyche, a glimpse of the “message” behind Dirty Skeletons that I’ve been trying - trying since the novel’s conception! - to concretize for myself. It goes something like this:
“Perception - well, that’s subjective. No faith can ever be proven. No faith can ever be disproven. The universe has no sympathy for anything and no moral code. If only we could trust one another to harbour nothing but love and good intentions. Then, at the very least, we’d have a delusion we can all believe in …”
Douglas Hofstadter (GEB; I Am A Strange Loop) on the role of analogy in cognition. The lecture starts at around 14 minutes. If you are a “creative writer” in any sense (song lyrics, fiction, poetry) you might find this lecture exploring the evocative / mnemonic / emotional processes behind word choice particularly interesting.
Ever used a metaphor? Ever used a simile? Ever used dramatic irony? What is the strange power such devices have to delight us as writers and readers, listeners and speakers?
toodemure asked: Brighton-based musician and writer Alexander Ross; how old are you?
28. Just started reading R D Laing’s The Divided Self, which he wrote at the same age. My word, have I some catching up to do …
1286 asked: not so much a question, but more a statement of the obvious.... "the does" makes my ears smile. to say i'm looking forward to buying the record is an understatement :)
Thank you very much! Glad you like it!
Toby Hayes is a fucking radman.
A Record Called Radial Images
“Amateurs” is now “Love Among The Mannequins”, having suffered near misses with the likes of “No Damn Cat, No Damn Cradle”, “Everywhere Were Bluets”, “Baedeker Blitz”, “Kyoran Mono” and about fifty others. Yes, we stole this phrase from J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. Links to music sites and such up soon.
On April 23rd we set up a bunch of gear and recorded our first LP, titled “Radial Images” - a nod to the loose, record-wide concept of theming the songs around interesting (also: dead) people, and a theory cooked up by 19th century futurist Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov whereby a “radial image” of a person’s identity, memories and so on is somehow imprinted into the fabric of space to be exploited later for the purposes of resurrection (though there is a catch: he believed every one of the atoms of that person’s physical body had to be recovered first).
Radial Images will be comprised of ten songs dedicated to the aforementioned Nikolai Fydorovich Fyodorov; the nom de plume / alter ego of Hunter S. Thompson, Raoul Duke; sturm und drang polymath Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe; anonymous corpses; population geneticist George Robert Price; Alan Watts / Edward Louis Bernays; an allegorical horse appearing in the fever dreams of a fictional murderer; the novelist and genius J. G. Ballard; the polystylistic composer Alfred Garyevich Schnittke; and, finally, the king of mimes, Marcel Marceau. Great liberties have been taken with the source material. At times surreal, others, impressionistic. And as I did most of the vocals in one take … well, let’s say it sounds “live”. Kinda Tim Kinsella live.
Toby is - as I type - scraping some last minute artwork together, and tomorrow(ish) it all gets shipped off. Some machines will crunch and the physical record will plop back for tour flogging in mid-June, a short UK jaunt with Fresh Eyes For the Dead Guy, though I believe it will see its official release in August. I’ll post the cover up when I can. It should be interesting.
Some others helped greatly: Eloisa-Fleur and Eleanor, who recorded a brilliant violin homage to Schnittke and sang sweet things over my campy gruff ruff respectively. Also, Jack, thanks for the studio and Dan - thank you for all your support in the past and sorry for forgetting to put your name on that first Amateurs EP!
