J. Fares
Double Exposure -My Love is Free (Frankie Knuckles Mix)
what Hegel meant by the non-identity of spirit, I’m not entirely sure
but talking to a few friends tonight we think it has something to do
with the depthless motion of post-millennial life, where things persist
along their dead paths, amid vape clouds & debt, as tho all were already lost
in the detritus of a dated romanticism, & in the moment it makes crystalline sense
getting my nails did on D.’s decrepit porch, cobalt blue & feeling some type of way
about the delirious elsewhere between prompt relish & unspoken allure of autarkic drift
we hear unfold in a Salsoul mix on Spotify, harmonically rich but gruesomely
unmoored to any essential sense of development, capitulation & resolve, as tho
the arc of inner urge were more vivid in the trance-like &aqueous, mere preludes
to an arrested glimmer, chopped & screwed among the textures of erosion
our feckless umweltcohabits, & it’s here, in this moment, that we attenuate
to the lurk of obsolescence concealed by the luster of atmosphere, that elemental
chasm latent in the phantasm’s rich allure, feeling hurled from the shadows
of social production into a splintered sense of calm, as if not entirely tied together
our heads burst in the chromatic combustion of capillaries huffing nitrate
blood-rushed & standing to dance with unearned nerve when a pale hand
manifests from the haze to hand me an open can of flat beer—aren’t all things
unmade by connection even when the itch to reciprocate softens? the echoic
assembly-line, the endless conjuring of mass produced melody, everything else
achieves a cerebral distance congenial to the baroque indulgence of endless after
-parties, the continuous blending of bodies in makeshift slumlord discotheque
sour sensory overload, the last rhetorical possibility of shame liberated in frivolity
there’s a sprinkle donut on the turntable missing a bite, & whatever weak grasp
endures in the erased relation spoils itself in the watery womb of the unconscious
bloated, only the empty vessel abides, we puke, we go home & the dawning
shivers of morning air renews our ensnare
what Hegel meant by the non-identity of spirit, I’m not entirely sure
but talking to a few friends tonight we think it has something to do
with the depthless motion of post-millennial life, where things persist
along their dead paths, amid vape clouds & debt, as tho all were already lost
in the detritus of a dated romanticism, & in the moment it makes crystalline sense
getting my nails did on D.’s decrepit porch, cobalt blue & feeling some type of way
about the delirious elsewhere between prompt relish & unspoken allure of autarkic drift
we hear unfold in a Salsoul mix on Spotify, harmonically rich but gruesomely
unmoored to any essential sense of development, capitulation & resolve, as tho
the arc of inner urge were more vivid in the trance-like &aqueous, mere preludes
to an arrested glimmer, chopped & screwed among the textures of erosion
our feckless umweltcohabits, & it’s here, in this moment, that we attenuate
to the lurk of obsolescence concealed by the luster of atmosphere, that elemental
chasm latent in the phantasm’s rich allure, feeling hurled from the shadows
of social production into a splintered sense of calm, as if not entirely tied together
our heads burst in the chromatic combustion of capillaries huffing nitrate
blood-rushed & standing to dance with unearned nerve when a pale hand
manifests from the haze to hand me an open can of flat beer—aren’t all things
unmade by connection even when the itch to reciprocate softens? the echoic
assembly-line, the endless conjuring of mass produced melody, everything else
achieves a cerebral distance congenial to the baroque indulgence of endless after
-parties, the continuous blending of bodies in makeshift slumlord discotheque
sour sensory overload, the last rhetorical possibility of shame liberated in frivolity
there’s a sprinkle donut on the turntable missing a bite, & whatever weak grasp
endures in the erased relation spoils itself in the watery womb of the unconscious
bloated, only the empty vessel abides, we puke, we go home & the dawning
shivers of morning air renews our ensnare
Cleopatra in the Underworld
goth music is about one thing & one thing only: death
ok maybe that’s obvious but it didn’t appear to me as such
until Siouxsie detailed it for me on “Spellbound,”
opening track to their fourth album, Juju, that I first hear
at a friend’s punk squat sitting around a busted tv monitor
watching YouTube videos & sipping Old Milwaukee
more so than any sonic marker or tonal impression
it’s really when Siouxsie first catches my eye that it all comes
together, her cosmetic resemblance to an Egyptian doll
her strange, animatronic dancing mixing with the beer wooze
that makes my head spin in total mesmerization, now
don’t get me wrong, my pre-teen years were nurtured
on a steady diet of mall goth, its mortifying melodrama
& ostentatious displays of emotion suffusing my adolescent
angst with an expressive venom upended that afternoon
by Siouxsie’s pallid deadpan devoid of all introspection
bereft of all fluid feeling, as she intones a life reduced
to nothing but a grotesque ballet of dead dolls
where things unfold in a tenebrous zone of indistinction
that suspends the human & inhuman into a motley
of perspiring plastic & pulsing puppetry, where living
& dead emulsify into a single sickly substance purged
of all zeal & urge, & where, in this near-beyond
we’re entranced—literally held in place—by the material
detritus that litters our everyday life, & feeling weak
against her lifeless thrall, I stare into the digital ether
voice, lyric & costume fusing into a stark style, not so much
death per se, but the living dead, the forced re-animation
of dead tissue, & that’s the point of Siouxsie’s singular glam
element, as tho under the panoptic gaze of Antony’s amore
courtois, the passive object Cleopatra becomes made manifest
in her cadaverous appearance, preemptively objectifying
herself—isn’t there something to cherish there?—the way
she channels a dandy’s aversion to the paltry proffers
of corporeal pleasure & strives for an atmosphere of detachment
her inhuman erotic intermingled with an awareness that all desire
is mangled in the machinery of merchandise, so by the first chorus
I’m catching drift of the simple score that no subject position precedes
its entanglement from the debased world of extinct objects
that renders all things equal, that is, equally petrified
& that’s what “joujou” means anyway, spiritual matter rendered
mere toy, novel plaything, which a few years later comes to mind
when reading Althusser’s insistence that subjectivity is a beckoning
call that arrives outside ourselves—from language, from cops--
which presents us with a grotesque scene of morbid bewitchment
at the inanimate hordes of suburban bio-trash transfixed by the manicure
that glistens at us from the gutter, myself included, & all of us here
wasting away in the starless motion of early evening gloom,dimly
hip to the total uselessness we deform to under the dispossessive
power of inert objects, our very own becoming-carcass & by the end
of the music video something that divides the inside from the outside
begins to breach, tho not so much a wailing warning than an inhuman
ejaculation of unreality that will command my every action forevermore
goth music is about one thing & one thing only: death
ok maybe that’s obvious but it didn’t appear to me as such
until Siouxsie detailed it for me on “Spellbound,”
opening track to their fourth album, Juju, that I first hear
at a friend’s punk squat sitting around a busted tv monitor
watching YouTube videos & sipping Old Milwaukee
more so than any sonic marker or tonal impression
it’s really when Siouxsie first catches my eye that it all comes
together, her cosmetic resemblance to an Egyptian doll
her strange, animatronic dancing mixing with the beer wooze
that makes my head spin in total mesmerization, now
don’t get me wrong, my pre-teen years were nurtured
on a steady diet of mall goth, its mortifying melodrama
& ostentatious displays of emotion suffusing my adolescent
angst with an expressive venom upended that afternoon
by Siouxsie’s pallid deadpan devoid of all introspection
bereft of all fluid feeling, as she intones a life reduced
to nothing but a grotesque ballet of dead dolls
where things unfold in a tenebrous zone of indistinction
that suspends the human & inhuman into a motley
of perspiring plastic & pulsing puppetry, where living
& dead emulsify into a single sickly substance purged
of all zeal & urge, & where, in this near-beyond
we’re entranced—literally held in place—by the material
detritus that litters our everyday life, & feeling weak
against her lifeless thrall, I stare into the digital ether
voice, lyric & costume fusing into a stark style, not so much
death per se, but the living dead, the forced re-animation
of dead tissue, & that’s the point of Siouxsie’s singular glam
element, as tho under the panoptic gaze of Antony’s amore
courtois, the passive object Cleopatra becomes made manifest
in her cadaverous appearance, preemptively objectifying
herself—isn’t there something to cherish there?—the way
she channels a dandy’s aversion to the paltry proffers
of corporeal pleasure & strives for an atmosphere of detachment
her inhuman erotic intermingled with an awareness that all desire
is mangled in the machinery of merchandise, so by the first chorus
I’m catching drift of the simple score that no subject position precedes
its entanglement from the debased world of extinct objects
that renders all things equal, that is, equally petrified
& that’s what “joujou” means anyway, spiritual matter rendered
mere toy, novel plaything, which a few years later comes to mind
when reading Althusser’s insistence that subjectivity is a beckoning
call that arrives outside ourselves—from language, from cops--
which presents us with a grotesque scene of morbid bewitchment
at the inanimate hordes of suburban bio-trash transfixed by the manicure
that glistens at us from the gutter, myself included, & all of us here
wasting away in the starless motion of early evening gloom,dimly
hip to the total uselessness we deform to under the dispossessive
power of inert objects, our very own becoming-carcass & by the end
of the music video something that divides the inside from the outside
begins to breach, tho not so much a wailing warning than an inhuman
ejaculation of unreality that will command my every action forevermore
J. Fares resides in a conservative prairie town where he works for a students’ union and writes about the sexual politics of goth music in his free time. His work on Frédéric Chopin’s piano nocturnes recently appeared in Baest: Journal of Queer Forms & Affects. He has spent his quarantine binging the new Lady Gaga album and missing his homies.