Wednesday 20 June 2012

"I want to create a new chamber"


A false start and a misplaced sense of history every time.
A whole heap of middles.

NinteenNinetyFive Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version.


Part one: Hatchings and Smashings. Easy on my balls they fragile as eggs.
What kind of eggs? Cuckoo eggs! Monstrous offspring, huge. Bastard eggs of the next man, inserted in the nest in the dead of night, who's the father? Rick James? Teddy Pendergrass? Raised in a velvet basement and then unleashed to make hideous love to the world. You know that line from Beowolf? You know the one:
It harrowed him to hear the din of the loud banquet every day in the hall, the harp being struck and the clear song of a skilled poet.
Well that's part of this mythos. That's part of it. But you have to remember who's writing the story, what is being made absent. What I'm saying is that's just one opinion, and you best hear another.

I watched Jackie Chan do drunken monkey kung fu when I was just a boy but even then I knew there was more going on than was being presented. Those drunken kung fus are hard on your body, hard on your joints especially. Watch the man do his thing it's as beautiful as swallows, as beautiful as cream going into your coffee. Strange attractors. Things are pulled in one direction and as intensity rises somewhere else another part of the body seems to become the head, seems to now take the lead. Well drunken kung fu is anything but, it isn't the result of damaged nerves, it's clarity. Watch the man move and it's more like micro-metrologicical-hypersensitivity, points of pressure rise and fall all around him, pull him in complex swirls feeding back into one another. The other combatant thought he was the only other there, thought it was just subject and object but that isn't the case is it? The drunken master is not just looking at you, he's looking at it all, you're just one relatively intense area, just one moment-by moment assemblage pushing air and throwing off waste heat and eventually getting your ass beat down and all the while all those other zones are a swirling riot rushing from point to point (headless) and they are going to keep on shimmying, keep drawing the man in the dirty draws this way and that, dancing to something you (doubly) can't hear because you're knocked the fuck out. 

collapse

 
The Ol' Dirty Bastard, first record, and ninteenhundredandninetyfive.
Try and focus on a hole, an absence. In terms of a style to which there is no father there is no Oedipal lineage to dwell on (Compare and contrast with Masta “who?” Killa). The Beowolf quote is bullshit precisely because ODB is not against anything stylistically, it's not a reactionary dichotomy. I like that story you'd hear a lot in old interviews of around this time, something like “I mixed rapping with singing, […] and I can't sing”. It's the cuckoo egg switch again, swap one part of the arrangement for something else and then reveal that something else as a negative value, as a yawning nameless negation, a black hole in the next. Singing has no aim but to unleash [animal] becomings. The singing eats up the words around it, beautiful non-sequiters (more so than Ghostface), points popping up all out of phase becoming phonic noise, eating themselves and defecating the magpie rattle of vocal chords, eating themselves again and sucking in the guest verses of other Wu Tang members, give me the mic so I can take it away



 



I felt the earth tremble underneath my balls. Sitting down with a wine cup on the Wudang mountain, the one plate met the other plate and this zone of intensity increased bringing forth heat and shivering in continual self correction and this energy just has to realize itself as a creative force, forcing billions of tons of rock up into the cosmos for some people to one day build temples and dragon-head incense burners on and found a discipline that bonded that mountain to the body. The was no one path this could have gone, every moment was local, every tremble was a moment of creation, an unplottable complex series, the only thing predictable with any degree of accuracy is from this point right here to what might be the next point, one single vibration. Maybe best not predict at all, no pretence of a plan, awkward as the RZA trying to hold it all together pausing between every line and trying to carry over some semblance of order through sheer angry frustration. Maybe best just go with it.
Look at Russell Jones dancing like a sailor, leaning back off/
to the right the shoulders both/
up and slumped/
the eyes back in the skull, the spit on the lips/
that line through the shoulders like the boom on a ship/
swaying as the pressure drops/
somewhere out to sea as the boom arm swings round over that sailor's head/
as the boom swings back to knock that sailor/
in the back of the head and out over the side/
out to sea down into the port side wash (we haven't left the dock)/
hitting a rock/ 
and/
laughing bubbles back up to the surface all weightless and falling/
a honey Timberland slipping/
from one foot/
laces like linguine/
hung from the toe against gravity/
deep within the water exploding ordinances/
a lapping, wailing of molecular discordances/
Wudang son


Leaning back to the point of a fall, a hip out, a dinosaur rock n roll hip, the tremble comes down or maybe comes up. And then collapse. The violence of self-violence in a plane of immanence, communal infection I'm not saying I got it but nigga if I got it you got it.
[I had a whole paragraph here about the difference between the video for Shimmy Shimmy Ya and Sabotage from the year before. I couldn't get it to sit flat. Trying to explain how this video is a true carnival grotesque, whereas Sabotage is just the soft conservative cover of irony. One doesn't care and the other really does care. Like I said, it wouldn't lie down, so I sent it away. Shimmy Shimmy Ya is not a joke, that's for sure. It's a Swiftian hotshot.]


 
Part two: Heart of a dog (glands of the ol dirty doggy)

  I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblances nor by analogy. 
That brief collision of participles that make up the body can become a changing process that acknowledges both the body and the brief collision of particles. A loose and formless delivery, a slack stance, images into sound, into a logos-less sound of childhood (Wu Tang is for the children) remember when you was young and you used to go a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaaaaaaa [...] remember when you used to say who could do this the long[est]? Sound as matter, like a punch as percussion, like all relationships between men and women being based not on signs but on smells. Like that very relationship being an entity. The interface is an object itself with emergent properties not found in either part separately but accessed through an encounter with the material world.

When her feet walked across the floor/ 
without a smell/
but with a smell/
that you can smell/  
your own smell/
and you know that feet stink/
it got an aroma to it/
and you're calculating how her ass moves from side to side with that aroma/
and you know that it's aroma in that ass too, but you can lick that asshole too and you won't get no aroma/
but you know that the aroma exists/
and then you can kiss her neck and/
suck this and suck that/
lick that and lick that/
and you can, you can actually feel/
you can feel the prophecy of a woman being sexy/
called a sex object and a sex tool/
and a, a fine scandalous romantic most moveable object/
that a motherfucker couldn't even get/
if he didn't have a motherfucking woman/



The Ancient Earthly Anti-Oedipus




All italicized quotes are taken from Ol Dirty Bastard, Deleuze & Guattari or Seamus Heaney.









3 comments:

David K Wayne said...

Love it!

ODB also had the best album cover of the 90s. Particularly apt as he got nabbed for welfare 'fraud' when they spotted him on MTV.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Wayne. I find the time when he, a previous gunshot victim, was arrested for possessing a bulletproof vest even more bizarre. Listening back to those early Wu Tang records what most struck me is how utterly banal Methodman was/is, yet he's arguably the most successful. I can't even stomach Tical any more, even though it has some good moments, though these are more in the patchy production. I also had to try very hard not to do the cliched rant about how Liquid Swords and Cuban Linx are amazing when writing this post.

Also, what has happened with these blogs? It's gone dead quiet again, has everyone got a book deal and job at the guardian except me? If so why am I left out? I can engage with that readership, I can grade olive oil by touch alone and I am an authority on second hand narrow boats. If the people in power are reading this, call me. I know you are reading this.

David K Wayne said...

I think the thing with Method Man was the texture or 'tone' of his voice really (contrasting nicely with R'n'B singers like Mary J). But Tical has ended up the dullest of those 'first run' Wu albums. Liquid Swordz seems least dated of all of them now.

As for these blogs, can't speak for the others. My own excuse is that I want to complete some long (very long) posts for these sites soon. Just after I sort a few 'life' things out...

But to all contributors:
In the meantime YOUR BLOGS NEED YOU.