Simon Strong's Blog

musicalpamphlet:

LedaTape at Waterstones, Brighton

I was a little surprised to see my own books on sale locally. I've tried to get this sorted on a number of occasions, but it's difficult getting to grips with centralised buying. Maybe best to let these things happen as they happen…

b/w, 2008, 62mins

Full length version (with directors commentary) of The Second Most Annoying Film Ever Made…

Now up on ubu.com via ledatape.net

Planet X - Michael Helms' psyche n trash eXXXploitation bubblegum phreak out out out…

why not head over to Bandcamp n check it oot?

musicalpamphlet:

I should apologise for posting old news, but it's new news to me:

"Every damn year we include a Billy Childish joint in our list.  There's a reason for that…he's one of the most important voices in rock 'n' roll over the past 30 years or more.  Until we turn the man into a million-seller, well, we're gonna keep pimpin'.  

This new incarnation of his is full on rawk, 60's inspired, full of piss and loud as a motherfucker, out of control and singular.  Situationist, but furious and angry, the very essence of punk aesthetic filtered through Huddie Ledbetter and The Sonics.  The best "pure" rawk record of the year."

I think he means "existentialist" not "Situationist", but since it's old news I shan't quibble.

musicalpamphlet:

A couple of years ago I had a website. It was kind of a fallow period, but I kept my hand and brain in writing on various subjects, including folk music and The Unexplained, among many others. For about a week or so I wrote about a couple painters that I was interested in.

I visited a Brighton art fair in 2007, a pretty dispiriting experience except for Christopher Noulton's paintings. I loved that Noulton looked for and found the invisible context of the startling realist illustrations in Ladybird Books, which I remember from my childhood.

Here's my text, which Noulton kindly used on his site for a while:

Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — Signposts and Memorial Reportage: Christopher Noulton's Revisioning of Commercial Art.

Following hard on the trail of my previous post about Edward Summerton, on Friday evening I encountered another artist working in the long gouache shadow of Ladybird book images.

Christopher Noulton's recent paintings begin in the viewer's mind with the commercial style of 1960s Ladybird book illustrations, although he starts the ball rolling with with careful research and 3D models and works on to produce pictures comprising intertextual images that reappear in multiple canvases. Taken individually and/or collectively, Noulton's narratives revision the mundaneity of image-nostalgia by making realistic representations of his ideal originals that underscore their great affectivity. He creates dioramic narratives that figure in minute detail the decal-perfect imaginary of a historicist enthusiast.

Noulton figures the comings and goings of an extended ideal community acting out an ideal past of utopian possibilities long after its historical moment has departed. His characters are lit from within by his manipulation of pigment, his understanding of their historical image provenance and by his technically brilliant refiguring of the commercial art techniques used to animate their Ladybird forebears.

But Noulton is not reproducing idealised versions of childhood or attempting to recreate intact moribund representations of ideal rural or suburban locations. He prefers to isolate his characters and images and pull focus. Pulling back, he reveals the precise location of Davey the milkman's milk float on a Y-juntion, for example. And, focusing further in, he lights on a unhappy-looking child from the 1950s stands uncomfortably outside a 1930s deco detached house. Doing so, Noulton calls to mind and questions the strangeness in conjunctions of images — of childhood, ideal landscapes, utopian architecture, etc. — that are often subject to nostalgia. We should question why TV prgrammes about the 1970s, for example, tend not to feature images/products/landscape interventions from previous eras.

In other paintings, Noulton's weird landscaping — placing a 1960s Commer milk float in front of a 1930s white deco house or block of flats, or locating the aforementioned deco building on a lonley green heath or moor — queers the pitch of those who may want to bandy accusations that he's appealing to people's cultural homesickness. His conscious confusion of image subjects and subject positions — placing familiar types in unusual locations or using The [generic, recent] Past ironically as the context for specific interventions — directs the viewer to the intent and affectivity of his own works and those he's working from. He paints signposts to and memorials for nostalgia.

Noulton's previous work has included paintings of his findings during road trips up and down and side to side throughout the British Isles in search of rural ritual happenings, including one of the Whittlesea straw bear. His graphical website, Rite Peculiar, is a fictionalised version of this series of investigative journeys.

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For nostalgic context and comparison, if you doubt my antiquarian way of seeing and doing things, you might like to see how others choose to ride The Past without the benefit of hauntology or psychogeography — or, indeed, anything — in which case, go to Yesterday's World. I've a lot more to say about The Past and I'll do so in future posts.

Honk for hauntiquarianism!

ENDS

+++++++++++++++++

So, what's Hauntiquarianism? It's something I set up to counter the quotidian cybernetic take on Hauntology, but that's a subject for another post. As is the work of Edward Summerton, which I found while doing further research into the use of Ladybird Books illustrations in modern art. I'll try to find my text on Summerton.

The LedaTape Ecclesfield Office is collaborating (inna good way) with Planet X Broadcast (3CR.org / every THU 23.30 AEST) - with selected shows being transmediated onto YouTube - your mileage may vary but we got special Celebrity Guests (eg Steve Lucas ex-X ) and now Damian Cowell (x-TISM) - includes: Pere Ubu / Mekons / Fall / Magazine / and many more (inc. Non's multi-speed multi-axis wankfest!) YEEEE!

musicalpamphlet:

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Real encounters with Rock n Roll, actual and imaginary. Including Pub Rock, Punk Rock, Psychedelia, record collecting and the whole panoply of filth and fun of the utterly invented, self-destroying mess of Rock History.

This is the latest book by Neil Palmer, writer, musician, artist. His most recent musical pamphleteering has been as long-time songwriting partner of Billy Childish in The Spartan Dreggs (read a great feature article in Psychkicks) and previously The Vermin Poets. In the past, he was the leader of the Fire Dept, one of the greatest forgotten punk rock unknowns of all time.

FREE DOWNLOAD AT UBU.COM

In September 1994 I was living in a dilapidated English seaside town called Brighton, the UK's San Francisco if ya like. I used to enjoy hanging out at a local spoken word club and getting ignored by the hip kids. Do Tongues (aka the Twat Club to we un-hipsters) put on writers I didn't like such as Douglas Coupland, Dennis Cooper or that sad Oxbridge junkie who likes to try and sound hard. The problem was that the hipster kids had no inkling that I was really an incognito underground impresario with a successful label under my belt (it said '28inch real leather'). Furthermore, I had just set up a publishing imprint on the premise that I could publish books by musicians and records by writers.

So I was stoked when I heard that Kathy Acker was coming. Kathy Acker was the most shoplifted female author in the world! Here was a chance to give some five-finger discount options to the kids on the street. I got in touch with her booking agent and asked if she'd cut a disc for CodeX, since that's what the label was called. When she hit town I invited her for a curry but I said I wasn't hungry even though I was but I didn't have the cash to spring for both of us. My mind has long gone somewhere else and I can't remember anything of what we talked about, except for that bit about the legendary warehouse (in Paris?) that was still full of Olympia Press volumes, and also about a distro deal I was putting down that would potentially land our product in High Street chains like Woolworths and Boots Chemists. The balance will come back in my dotage. Did I give her a copy of my novel? I must have…

So the next day or so, Kathy went into a local studio and read pretty much the set she did for the spoken word club. I think it was mostly early versions of stuff from a forthcoming work titled 'Pussy'. I remember I was laid up with shocking flu. I commissioned our fave local artist to do a portrait for the cover and Kathy was kind enough to send some photos by Michael Delsol. The disc came out in 1995 and sold out pretty fast.

The gist of it is that I have no idea how I come to have a signed copy with a comment about Woolworths on it. Maybe I got that done when she played again in Brighton with the Mekons in 1996. I don't know. I mean surely I would've gone and seen the fucking Mekons! Nah… It's all gone in the fog of lager. I can't explain any of it. What a lady. Wouldn't it be great if we had three times as many books? But we don't. Oh yeah! She gave me the slop of the suppression of 'Young Lust' too… hahahahahaha!

SS