HARDCORE

As it is swiftly becoming cornwall’s premier musical export, in as much it has any, I’m struggling to understand the appeal of Hardcore.

It is a scene that has organically developed its ethos upon values of integrity, a D.I.Y approach to marketing/promotion/merchandise and an emphasis upon pure expression and authenticity with a leftwing slant. So in its core values then it appears not too dissimilar to any musical movement, which strives to develop in the shadow of major label or mainstream recognition- and in fact seeks to exclude them. Its essential basis as a cultural movement is virtually, to the uninitiated, undecipherable from punk rock or indie. As far as I can make out, not professing to be any hardcore scholar, its roots lie in the early 1980’s West Coast scene when Punk was imported to the states and swiftly got brasher, brattier, faster, arguably less fun and snottier. These origins perhaps explain why the scenes intertwined with skating, metal and ripped jeans, caps and all its other sartorial choices. If this is taken into account then it is undeniably impressive that a scene approaching middle age has managed to resist being branded, packaged and marketed in the way so many of its forbearers were. Perhaps this is the enduring attraction for a lot of people- the sense of involvement with fostering a scene in your local area, where your friend’s bands play with your bands your other friends design the shirts and flyers and others take the pictures/ spread the word/ distribute the e.p’s. All very honourable anti-authoritarian stuff involving a communal outlook countless other scenes could do well to emulate. However the confusion for me doesn’t arise from all the paraphernalia but the actual music itself.

Now your first bonafide hardcore gig is likely to leave you feeling deeply impressed, probably slightly concerned and saturated in sweat. There’s traditionally a diminutive tattooed shirtless and angry singer hurling himself around in a frenzied assortment of contortions, messianic postures and ferocious screams at the crowd. The final coda of the set will resolve (?) with this glistening homunculus coiled on the floor in the microphone lead bellowing like a newborn whilst the rest of the band sheepishly depart offstage, not without forgetting to rest the guitars by the amps in an inferno of feedback. Your witnessing this scene of roars, lunges and flung fists by the, predominately white, crowd you know by day to be largely content, bourgeois and vegetarian with stupefaction- who’s the enemy here? So in search of a clue you return home to consult the lyric sheet that came attached with the gatefold ep and are confronted only with vague revolutionary platitudes, some odes to beer and Evil Dead style brutality.

So maybe you’ve missed the point, after all the majority of contemporary music’s purpose isn’t held in the words. Well that leaves the dishwater where muddied guitar tones languish at snail speed with break beats and dissonance clashes in a dirge. If atonality is the point then anything involving john cage or Schoenburg’s 12 note scale fits the bill, if its raw power then Mahler is hardcore or if the qualification is minimalist and aleatoric then Steve Reich slips under the manifold. This is not to say that the gigs aren’t enticing but it’s more for the theatre and the flamboyance of the stage show than any conviction in what’s being said or heard. There’s an illusion of depth to it all- reinforced in part by the budding cultural theorists and Marxists amongst them, which you can be forgiven for thinking involves some subversion of audience expectations/established rock conventions. But it’s fundamentally so derivative at every junction that the original impression of fascination fades to reveal the lack of ambition and imagination at the core of many of the bands.

Regardless of how insightful the content may be, the form it takes ultimately maroons them beyond either critical or mainstream appreciation. Precisely because so many of the key participants in a scene like this are so stable, genuine and outgoing in real life- its hard to pinpoint where their vehemence originates from. Not that I’m suggesting that art should be confined to the artists mood alone but if not it should at least be imaginative- otherwise its hard to reconcile creator with creation. Which then, despite all the expressions of sincerity, comradery and authenticity, makes it all seem rather false and disingenuous- more a simulation of what the impassioned and furious look like than an accurate reflection. Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Much have I travelled in the Realms of Gold

The Lolcat logged on and mused ‘Nom Nom Nom’

Before alluding to the six dislikes with a pithy remark,

And halting to *correct a noob’s spelling.

When the bad speller reappropriated the *

LoLcat was nonplussed, scouring his files

For a gif that read ‘cool story bro’

Such heavy artillery confounded the speller

So on he prowled, disambiguating a trail of

11!!1!’s and casual racism behind him.

Schooled in the art of trolling,

He rickrolls joylessly, propregating memes

Deep into the suburban night.

He’s derisive, well informed

Armies of irreverence observe his every

stroke of the Keyboard cat on his lap.

Yet this artisan of 4chan

Slumped in his chair,

Poring over the

Scripture of Courage wolf,

Is plunged in despair

By his loss of the game,

By a taken domain name

By the knowledge that no O Rly will spare him the reaper,

That no accusation of Creeping will chase off the

Scythe, that whilst a winner online he’s a FAILer in Life

and his mind inscribes in bold white cap’s

LIFE FAIL across every tragic mishap he endures

in the 3^rd dimension.

The ventriloquist who invested in his dummy found

That in his lair

He’s granted the freedom of a gentrified lord.

To patrol his grounds, to denigrate and deplore to just

Look at this fucking hipster

Migrating

In Cognito from each comment,

Hoping to soar and infect.

Inboxes, to skim the tops of the long grass

Whilst vultures circle overhead,

swooping Presto to Adagio

at the rest of a fingers click.

Escher's Stairs

Days and weeks on escher’s stairs

Facing only ever what is yet to tread,

How long must these ritual bounds

These lapping entanglements

Continue? Descending only to glimpse

Up on high my pensive self stuck

In transit. Clenching a banister

Head swimming,

And a tumultuous gut.

I’ll mount a rescue, peer into the gathered fog,

Map paths in the condensation.

IF On A Winters Night A Traveller

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, outside the town of Marbork, leaning from the steep slope, without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow, without fear of wind or vertigo, in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, around an empty grave- What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to hear the story.

Calvino paints a myriad grid of interlacing story lines, mistaken identity, fraudulence, plagiary and parody in several different colours, each more dazzling and vivid than the next. Its a virtuoso pastiche of not only the cheap airline novel - in which ourselves as the 'reader' are passively dragged from situation to situation, clandestine group to group, along the way falling in love, tripping over ourselves and repeatedly losing sight of our original objective,- but it is also a profound meditation on authorship and multiple interpretations. It could be seen, given its vantage point (1980), of foretelling the decade of Deconstructionism which was to spawn endless fields of critical debate. One scene which ingeniously parodies this is the chapter after the reading of 'without wind or vertigo' in which the professor and his students instantly submit the text they have just heard to a critical dissection, attaching tags and labels each more ludicrous than the last to the authors intentions, 'at this point they throw open the discussion, Events characters, settings,impressions are thrust aside to make room for the general concepts'

"the polymorphic-pervese sexuality.." "the laws of a market economy..." "the homologies of the signifying structures"

Calvino's thoughts upon the role of the reader are made fairly transparent in his choice of heroine 'the OTHER reader' (no doubt to many feminists chagrin) Ludmilla, who see's in the text- not the author as an auteur, not the context he wrote in or his sublimated political, social or otherwise- but the possibility of immersion, of abandoning oneself nakedly to the written word and its power and admires 'novels that bring me...into a world where everything is precise,concrete,specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in theat certain fashion and not otherwise..." In a move of ingenuity then Calvino crafts a novel of such fluctuations and fragmentation that his heroine would most likely abandon it upon discovering the first change of narrative voice to second person, and the intentional fluidity of the characters, who seem to give up the fight against the rapids that determine their course. This is of course meant to signify the experience of the reader, faced with the novel, so despite the impression Calvino crafts of our autonomy he is in fact throughout dictating our thoughts and intentions- an experience so unfamiliar and eccentric that it is at first quite unnerving. The stories that partition the narrative of the reader, or in reality give meaning to the exterior narrative that bookends them, are (with the exception of two) each distinct and vividly crafted tales that if expanded upon would surely justify and satisfy separate publication and expansion into novels. BUt this is precisely the glory of this most escher-like narrative maze, that we are every second chapter drawn into these immaculately rendered worlds only to be rudely interrupted and withdrawn at the moment of highest tension. It's a book which collects stolen moments and almost mocks how easily transfixed us fickle readers can be, he plays with our sense of anticipation, expectancy and desires like a chess-player arranging his pawns. The idea of the incipit lies at the core of 'if on a winters night...' as the author exposes how a book of multiple beginning's can sustain the awe and vulnerability the reader encounters on starting a novel, which is often nullified as they proceed to the Middle and End of their journey.

There are so many more paragraphs i feel i need to unleash to fully give voice to all the sensations i traversed when reading this book, but i'm not sure i will be able to ever quite exhaust the level of themes that are deducible from it, it is in short a triumph. There is one paragraph towards the end , from the dialogue held between Reader's, which i believe to exhibit one of the most acute understanding of The Readers experience yet demonstrated in print by The Writer, who we could reasonably expect to be as cut off from such matters as a CEO of a company is from the discussions held between his corporations secretaries:

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in the way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an intinerary of reasonings and fantasies that i feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until i have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, i manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which i can never exhaust."

This is a phenomenon i went through several times in the course of reading Calvino's novel, so much so that chapters seemed to take longer to conclude than some more throwaway material as idea's he minutely touched on snowballed in my mind so that they began to obscure and cloud everything else on the page. An example which it took the longest to resume reading once i had considered, was the suggestion (small though it was) by the 'true author?' Silas Flannery that his next novel should simply be reduced to a list of words and their frequency of appearance from which the reader would guess the plot.

'We will not introduce top up fee's and will legislate to prevent them'

Tony Blair Labour manifesto Pledge 2001

'I pledge to vote against any increase in fee's in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a FAIRER ALTERNATIVE'

Signed- Nick Clegg

Strange times in Blighty when (hashtag) Day 3 (or "dayX") saw the 'baying rabble of masked and hooded troublemakers' ( ©DAILY BILE)along with their accomplices the 'feral mob' (© DAV CAM) once more exert their civil right resulting in a police response that it is now apparent was neither civil nor right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=axWyu1t4rkE

The Met decided to redeploy the 'kettling' tactic of crowd control last witnessed at the previous Student Protest, during which schoolchildren and others where incarcerated (too emphatic?) in freezing temperatures, denied toilet facilities, food water or exit from Trafalgaur Square up until (in some cases) ten o clock in the evening. However in addition to this most counterproductive and intimidating of police options came a yet more medieval decision- to, with the intent of dispersing a peaceful crowd of protesters, instruct a charge of 21 horses headlong into the students. Now, let me stress that I am not a dogmatic ideologue who views every police officer as an architect of state brutality, but it is hard to dispel that perception when the curtailment of civil liberties is as forceful and flagrant as it was yesterday. Tellingly, the reportage of this incident has predominately been concerned with the one officer who was toppled from his horse amid the carnage, rather than any protesters on the ground subject to it.

I was unfortunately unable to attend yesterday's protest but have one previous experience of seeing a crowd 'kettled' from a restaurant window just off High Street Ken back in 2008. The demonstration being staged was a 'Free Palestine' protest in which a relatively humble sized crowd (certainly bearing no resemblance to yesterday's proportions) gathered to voice their grievances over the Israeli bombardment of the West Bank and Gaza strip in January of that year. Me and my family watched in amazement as this crowd of no more than 50 was advanced upon by a horde of officers wielding riot shields and rubber truncheons (some of whom where also on horesback) who proceeded to hem them in a semicircle and prohibit any movement. I took away from this singular example two observations which have acquired greater pertinence in recent weeks; firstly that the amount of police presence was entirely disproportionate to both the temperament and size of the protests being enacted and latterly that the experience of being tightly and arbitrarily restricted in a limited space served not to mollify the already peaceful protesters but in fact to aggravate them.

The final commons result on the Browne Report is as culpable as any major political event to spin because whilst it may inevitably lead many to crown the efforts of britains yoof/ youngsters/ whippersnappers (substitute accordingly) as 'futile' it was by no means a triumphant victory for the coalition. Although not quite the mass defection hoped for, 21 LibDem's favoured being able to sleep at night and disobeyed the whips. The impact of the mass demonstrations seems to have been to remind Westminster that the younger demographic whilst often foggy in its message and less clear still in its allegiances, is capable of defiance and activism. Teenagers across the country have slipped into the roles of protest co-ordinator's, sit-in and occupation manager's and militant critic's of government hipocrosy with minimal effort.

Although the media's lens may gravitate as ever towards the violent minority, to paraphrase Edmund Burke (of all people) although the Crickets in the night are the first you here they obscure the sounds of all the other wildlife underneath. The vast majority of the protests have been moderate and the examples of violence can be shown to be either products of the draconian police measures mentioned earlier or the intrusion of anarchist elements onto the movements fringes. Excluding the recent surge in party membership this does represent a largely bipartisan movement amongst which the dark shadows of the Iraq war, expenses scandal and recession are cast heavily over any political party attempting to capitalize on the outrage. Long may this movement elude the shackles of ideology! It is only in doing so and through sustaining their optimism and naivety that the views of the anti-cut militia amongst our generation will keep their place at the forefront of the opposition!

a possible introductory paragraph for a story about a globalwarming-sceptic geologist delivered in a monologue

“You can, and no doubt once this discussion has finished, will talk to me all you want about climate change and try ignite a rumble of unease in my stomach. If gorging me on facts about the imminent droughts, tornado’s, melting icecap’s, earthquakes, food shortages and the drying up of the gulf stream gives you a morbid twang of satisfaction then go ahead. If you want you can call me a ‘stoic ignorant refusnik’ when I upturn my palms and ask ‘and?’ in response. (indeed I believe I just saw Janet scribble those very words onto her notepad a minute ago) Because we haven’t ‘scarred the earth’ and we don’t need to ‘protect’ our ‘frail’ and ‘vulnerable’ ecosystem, things are going to pan out naturally. Trust man’s hubris to think that laying our asphalt coat on the earth and encrusting it with houses and cars, that embroidering its surface with coal factories and skyscrapers, allowing pesticides to seep into its babbling brooks and endangering its many species through centuries of hunting has inflicted any permanent damage on it. Just because we’ve killed, cremated and scattered god’s ashes doesn’t mean that nature hasn’t taken up that biblical force.

It’s not this feeble, sensitive edifice, requiring the patient adoration of an eco-conscious 5 foot creature who sees itself as the harbinger of mankind’s restoration to remain intact. Do you honestly think that it needs to do more than shrug to entirely eradicate us? That’ll it’ll even need to yawn to reduce any trace of man’s short dominion to ash, dust and the odd bone? No, the earths not bruised and weakened by our actions but simply napping, tolerating us whilst its alchemy of lava sits at its core awaiting an eruption of primal intensity. Do we truly believe that the homosapien with his posable thumb prised on the nuclear button has a greater right to occupancy than that of the Velociraptor? Well of course we do, and that’s why the extinction of the most majestic breed of creatures to knowingly have inhabited ‘our’ earth is labelled ‘pre’ history. It’s why the palaeontologist is not the same revered intellectual titan as the military historian. I don’t see how devoting endless pages of scrupulous documentation on mans folly is going to profit anyone, so why is prehistoric life marketed predominately as an interesting distraction for children, whilst knowledge of Stalingrad is a..”

he interrupted himself to stop and take a lengthy swig from the glass of water in front of him, swishing the fluid around his cheeks so they inflated like balloons. The attention of the room was what you’d call rapt, with the silence punctured only by a muted sneeze of the man propped up on the wall at the back and then the odd torrent of coughs that bubbled in succession as though acquiring an unstoppable momentum with each phlegm-soaked emission. The conference hall was packed right to the two exits at the back, with the room arranged in a kind of gradient of importance- journalists and advocates towards the front tailing further back to cynics and further back still to those ambivalent to Dr. Werther’s opinions but attracted by the large turnout.

Theres the polished asphalt, closed off by men in reflective wastecoats, permitting an uninhibited stroll across territory usually unchartered by people on foot.Theres no immediate danger present and furthermore very little likelihood of a renegade car defying the blockade to tear down those in the road, so why are the vast majority coyly sticking to the pavements? Perhaps they think its some kind of decietful trap designed by the authorities to lull the citizen into a state of unshackled freedom only to then apprehend them by once more opening the thoroughfare to the cars. Tricked once to often, the possibility of remaining stood stationery in a spot which ordinarily would see you ground beneath the churning momentum of a 4x4 without disrupting traffic, seems for the flummoxed christmas shoppers too much to process. So the sheer volume of families and clans engaged in their debates on the appropriate choice of present for grandad (could he navigate an ipod?) edge across the pavestones on either end of the road at such a gradual pace you have to pay attention to realise their even moving at all. They're cautious of what such a moment of approved rebellion could unearth in them, watch the glances those on the pavement shoot in envy at the few strutting along the road in brash certainty, embellishing their bravery with swaggers and sneers. I hear fragments of conversations all around swell into a tumultuous dawn chorus of anxieties, jokes and taunts, a girl near me says "and then i tried to save it but i couldn't'

'Theres an elderly lady who lives in my town on the helston road approaching the station. She has registered an impact on me in the last month, through a series of encounters which are all but identical in their tone and content, but for the changing of the seasons around us. The way it will go is that i'll be ambling in my usual state of mild delirium when a frail form in a blue nightie and a head of milk white hair will loom out of a doorway and ask in a quivering but pleasant tone "excuse me dear, what day of the week is it?" At which point on our three prior meetings i have replied after a brief moment of hesitation 'The day is Saturday'. Now, i travel that road every day, give or take a few exemptions, and yet this woman requires assurance about the day of the week it would appear only once a week. On the second meeting i caught a glimpse into the corridor behind her to see a staircase with a stairlift attached and numerous handles attached to surfaces, presumably to aid her balance around the house. A wave of pity started to crest in me as i considered that this brief encounter could be her only contact with the outside world, ambling over the doorsteps frontier into the crisp Winter morning to confirm that she is still compus mentis? But then another more callous thought occured to me, perhaps she is to be tested later to check whether her faculties are all there, the visiting doctor will ask her in a voice of benign reassurance "ok, so can you tell me what day of the week it is? and can you tell me who the prime minister is? very good Vera, now do you know how old you are?" Upon hearing the first inquiry i can imagine her face illuminating with the knowledge i had supplied on my trip up the hill earlier. However ludicrous this train of thought seemed i could not banish the feeling that i was dealing in a cartel of information for the uninformed, it appealed to my inner philanthropist i suppose. What frightened me most in each instance of our dialogue though was the genuine mental exertion i had to perform, i had to seriously consider what the day was. My insecurity rose up and i become disconcerted about having given a senile woman false information- after all if i had to think to affirm it was Saturday then where we not in the same situation? Give them thought then, the shoppers fearing to stray from their habitat in their existential angst and the lady grasping for the security, the familiarity of the weekday in the cold."