Today,
good reader, is our fifth birthday! Yes it's five years to the day
since the first ever 'Lucid Frenzy' entry was posted, a
look at the first 'Quatermass Xperiment' film. Of course
it's been nine years since things actually began, as an old-school
photocopied fanzine handed out to all and sundry. (Well, not to all but
there was the odd bit of sundry.) And it's nigh-on thirty years since
I first started contributing to comics fanzines.
But
that just makes me feel old, so let's focus on the most recent
anniversary and celebrate by outlining the two pillars of Lucid
Frenzy.
Now
Islam, needless to say, has marshalled five pillars to its name. But
that’s a global religion steeped in ancient wisdom. Here at Lucid
Frenzy we’re more of a budget enterprise, and the most we can
muster is two. In a half-hearted attempt to atone for this, each
comes with an accompanying illustration. (Actually, one’s a video.)
Of
course these may have differed if one of the other mooted names for
this blog had come to pass; which included Double Negative,
Sympathetic Magic, The Iconoclastic Fury, To Encourage the Others, A
Hotbed of Baboonery, Crash Course, Hurly Burly, Dirty Looks and Early
Closing Wednesday. (Dirty Looks would have at least upped the Google
hits. And I do still intend to one day open a web shop for my comics
which closes early on a Wednesday.)
1.
A Lucid Frenzy
“Although
rationality is a marvelous tool, it has its limits. Sometimes
intuition can yield equally powerful and impressive results. But the
title suggests having fun.”
Though
I borrowed this blog’s name from a surrealist term it’s perhaps
best illustrated by a Diego Riviera linocut, ‘The
Communicating Vessels’ (1938, above), which doesn’t use
the term at all! His aim was to illustrate Breton’s description of
the relationship between dream and wakefulness not as opposite states
but as an interaction, a perpetual interplay, like the ebb and flow
of a fluid between two containers.
I’m
attracted to this concept because it does precisely what Surrealism
often didn’t do. Observing that the “bourgeois
culture” of its era fetishised consciousness and feared the
Freudian id, it attempted to turn all that upside down. Yet just to
take up a parallel fetishisism, merely of the unconscious, was always
heading for a fall. The common observation that surrealist imagery
now fills adverts has its moment of truth here. We’re now told our
dreams and desires can be fulfilled if we start buying shit.
Not
only does Riviera’s image seem to me to be a more desirable state
of affairs, it’s also a better description of how the act of
creation works. The intuitive and puzzle-solving aspects of the brain
have to work in an alliance. If they do then the result, both lucid
and frenzied, will always be more than the sum of its parts.
Furthermore,
there’s a tendency to assume critical writing merely applies some
post-hoc analytical thinking to the original moment of artistic
insight. The artist leaps boldly off into pastures new, then the
critic follows while delineating the map. This seems to me to make
pretty much the same error as above. The vessels communicate in your
own head, which then ebb and flow into the original artwork and back.
By making you see the artwork in a different light, the critic has
effectively rewritten that work. As music writer Simon Reynolds has argued:
“Theory
seemed to provide genuine illumination into qualities and powers
possessed by the music. But beyond that the combination of the ideas
and the music had a potentiation effect, to use the pharmacological
term for when two drugs synergize to create a fiercer buzz.”
(Actually,
after titling this blog, I realised that the Surrealists hadn’t
used the term much at all! If you google it you mostly get references
to here. The few other hits sometimes use it to mean what I mean, but
more often take it as a general statement of exhilaration. Pretty
rarely is it ever quoted from or referred back to the Surrealists!)
2. I’ve Started, I’ll Never Finish
“The
further I go the less I know,
One
foot goes in front of the other...”
As
well as the clip above showing one of my favourite Fugazi songs
(given a particularly fine performance), in my more self-aggrandising
moments I like to imagine it’s this blog’s school song. (Of
course my personal theme song is the Soft Boys' 'I Want To
Be an Anglepoise Lamp', but there I digress.) Now I may
have been at this sort of thing some while now, but I am as nothing
compared to song author Ian MacKaye. He’s the very inverse of the
trajectory Jello Biafra acidly described as “harder core than thou
for a year or two, then it’s time to get a real job”. He's played
his own style of punk his way since 1979 (when he was but seventeen).
But I can’t see MacKaye writing a song to brag, so I don’t think
that’s the nub of the issue here...
The
song’s based around the double vision required of a long distance
runner. Picturing the whole length of the course is just going to
crush your resolve, so you make your mission something in sight - to
get to the next hill. But there’s no use sprinting there, you set
your sights on the next horizon but you run as though you’ll be
doing it forever.
The
key line is “there is not a fixed position.” Don’t ever expect
to get to the end of this. There’s no point where everything has
been said and the subject can be closed. And that's not just true
because new people see the artwork and spin more lines from it, or
new artworks are created which shine the old in a different light. It
would be equally true if there was no further input, if people
stopped making new artworks tomorrow. Art is like one of those magic
wells or bottomless glasses of folklore, which can never be emptied,
which always somehow renews.
As
Paul Éluard (back to the surrealists) said: “There cannot be total
revolution but only permanent revolution. Like love, it is the
fundamental joy of life.”
Coming
soon! Believe it or not, another anniversary...
Happy fifth!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteI suppose I should have baked a cake...