Bourgeois is Beautiful

Man-Hua Chu translated the song: " Who is this man here beside me? Who sings exactly the same words as me? Even if his mouth is not quite the same It opens and closes its just same as I love the smell of his clothes I like his hair and his accent if our eyes met I kiss now and we will love forever Who is this man here beside me? Who sings exactly the same words as me? And if I ever breathed the tempo Is this human being would do it in sync? It would be really too good Who is this human being that breathes with me? Six billion people who breathe by my side. "

I’m obsessing repetitively with my favourite cliché ridden paintings attempting to culturally fumigate them of crass associations.

I’m trying to erase the damnable link that turgid classical muzak has with a raw energetic work of art.

Take for example: “The boating party” by Renior; because It has been dulled and muddied by musical chintz it’s now as irksome as a pack of dogs playing poker in a pub.  

Art resonates and advertisers know this so they’ve beaten it to death with over reproduction; like a poor bitch bred to death.  Damn you, damn you all to hell.

Another example: I take a photo at a party in the Sparrow and with just a smidgen of imagination I can find resemblances and perceive that Renoir has captured an eternal truth; a cliquey wine ridden group of lushes and riddled thinkers having it large on a Saturday afternoon.  

I recommend playing some Saul Williams full blast in your headphones whilst walking through any gallery where the paintings are supposed to be high art. The notion of high art interrupts my ability to commune with the work. Art is the rope between the gutter and the stars; if you lose one or t’other of the ends you’ll burn like Iccarus or wallow in the mire.

The insistent beat smashes any painting into contemporary associations.  However, not even the addition of a soft porn soundtrack can bring me to a sticky Hieros Gamos with the painting-by-numbers-jigsaw on display in Cartwright hall... which I do recommend you view; some chap called David Hockney’s to blame.

Are we (W)hole?

We suffer from an increasing lack of incorporation into our environment; from the TV sets in the student union that blast out cheap pop music on contract before the Omar Souleyman gig to the big unrepresentative dystopian screen in Centenary square; like the green, green city centre park we all howl out for and instead are fed a massive, ugly polluting hole. We must take the city back with our own visions before it is too late. William Blake would be with me on this one for sure.

A local witch told me that Squeaky clean shoulder pads are poncing around the city like post modern vampires. Did you know that a container full of money is coming into this city? It’s going to attract a lot of vermin. Everyone’s going to have an opinion about Bradford in the lobbies and national papers.  Like flies round shit they will descend. So if you have something to say get it said this year. Red riding approaches.  Unfortunately it is my opinion that most of this money will be handed out in council tax rebates in a desperate attempt to appease precisely those businesses that disenfranchise us in the first instance and keep city centre retail rates too high; we shall see. This stymies the micro capitalist or any other type of regeneration; it destroys our city; it is the rich stealing from the poor.

I’m off to finish my bottle of whisky.