Four Minutes to Midnight 04

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23:56 ISSUE FOUR OCTOBER 2/2 2004

four minutes to midnight

4

RE

kevin lo hey man, can you give me an opinion on something?

I just sent you an email. thanks cool. I still need to work on it a bit more. flesh it out. does it sound too egotistical? yeah, for sure, I totally agree.

good point, but I disagree with your accusation of me being logical I know man, but at the same time, this isn’t a plea for a return to innocence. it’s an attempt to work with the cards being dealt. nothing exists in isolation. so we have to work within this context and find the most effective means to do so.

??

yeah in that case, graphic design would not be what you are doing with your project either. me too, i think... tartakover’s? tartakover. yeah. true. yeah. fuck. good point. ok. I’m off to school.

constantin denmer ok. hm. i totally get your point. but i don’t know, when i wrote my contribution, i just saw by the reaction that it gave people strength, instead of pulling them down. you’re a person who mainly uses academia, his head, and logic i think that if you look outside the western world, outside the science, and all the knowledge and all the studying and teaching, you find real communication. people sharing. not rhetoric. FUCKING rhetoric. FUCKING power of language. power of language is CONTROL. don’t forget that. i agree.

that’s the absurdity of the whole situation. all i know is that if you want to make people talk, which is difficult, because people tend to join when they want, not when one wants - same thing with urban planning and putting gates up so people don’t cross at unsafe roads. if you were a writer, people would take the time and read your book, but the nature of graphic design is different, you catch people’s attention, you manipulate, you kind of force people to do things. that’s the absurdity of the whole situation. graphic design is graphic design and it always will be. what you are doing is not graphic design, the design is just the finishing. i know, and i am happy about that. you remember the coke bottle poster the israel one that is graphic design. an icon.

MIX

THE REMIX While compiling this fourth issue, I had in mind a fugue, a term I first encountered while listening to Patricia Zimmerman speak at Concordia University shortly after September 11th, 2001. She used it as a metaphor to describe the swirling network of internet based activities opposing the militarism of her government and the assault on civil liberties. She further theorised on fugues as a critical creative strategy of flux and constant change and in her Manifesto for Digital Memories she states;

one, but appropriate(d) to(from) our day and age.

The remix is familiar and friendly. I think of the mix tape I made for my first girlfriend and I think of De La Soul; “because everybody wants to be a DJ,” adding voices to the mix.

The point of the digital archive is to fight the anaesthesia and amnesia of transnational capital which is ultimately authoritarian because there is no change or mutation. The digital archive fights back with synaesthesia and polyphony. (...) We must enter into and reactivate it in recombinant ways that entail swarm tactics, cells, provisional kidnappings of spaces for historiographic, semiotic and political guerrilla warfare.

The goal here (if there needs to be one) is to reveal shared meaning between a diverse group of individuals scattered around the world.

Strangers and friends. Shared meaning does not imply thinking the same thing (that’s only the spectre of communism chasing us), it means an understanding revealed through difference. It means going through this mess and determining what matters to you, and what matters to others, looking critically at how we speak and how we listen. And then, most importantly, deciding how to act based on this understanding. To quote the rallying cry that, despite my cynicism, still brings a tear to my eye and wakes the butterflies in my stomach, “this is what democracy looks like.”

No. Seriously. We’re getting too grand again, so let’s take it down a notch...

It was only later that I discovered the musical origins of the term. As my interpretation of the dictionary definition goes; a fugue is a polyphonic musical composition which cumulatively develops from a given theme.

The theme is first given out by one voice, and then, while that continues, it is repeated by another voice in counterpoint. Further voices are gradually added, interweaving into a complex and progressive whole, in which the theme is often lost and reappears. In a sense a dialogue, the simple equation of the sum being greater than its parts.

Bach is widely recognised as the greatest composer of fugues. But Bach is too grand, and Zimmerman is too smart, so let’s try another term; the remix. A trendy word if there ever was

I’d like to think of the contents of this issue as a remix, visual and textual responses, reinterpretations and refutations, of the conversations we’ve had over the last few months, in this ‘space’ amongst others.

All we’re trying to do is start a kind of dialogue here. A simple conversation about the things we think matter. As we all know, the beginning is always the hardest part, but let’s hope we’re heading in the right direction.

PAX = the latin root of peace LUST = shameless love and desire GOAT = absurdity in the face of fear

LOVE &

PAIN

,

DISSENT

The starting point of these zines was the pain I experienced from the loss of love and a peculiar conception of dissent and activism that it shed light upon. I’ve quoted Che, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” and Raoul Vaneigem, “True love is revolutionary praxis or it is nothing,” but also “no love is possible in an unhappy world.” This understanding of love has inflected my work, as I attempted to imbue it with a personal dimension.

How this comes through the artifact is a pertinent question.

Honesty or angsty teenage crap? Does opening oneself up like this encourage dialogue and communication or does it cause one to pull away from it?

JOEL SHANE Read Don Delillo’s book White Noise. It is almost exclusively about love; family’s, couples’, the lust driven’s, teenagers’ and parents’ in the context of consumer living, the academy, mass catastrophe on american soil – and it was published in 1985. WAY ahead of its time.

TOM GLEASON I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t excited by the possibility of real, deep, personal conversation. That’s not to say these people always feel comfortable with it. Many pull away for psychological reasons. And I’ve never met anyone who has engaged in such talk for a significant period of time who was not spiritually transformed by it. Such talk usually unveils pain and encourages dissent against the status quo (not to mention that such talk often is, in itself, an act of dissent). This begins with dissent against the systematically-created obstructions to free communication, which are among the most common inhibitors of love, sources of limit on empathy, freedom, and thus a primary source of pain. Anyone who has experienced conversation has a sense of this, and I doubt any sane person who has ever tried to converse or argue with someone really lacks this sense. Since we’re conditioned to think that revealing ourselves can be painful, I suppose it does take a leap of faith. Fear of pain keeps us in pain.

TOM LIACAS After years of doing this, I believe more than ever that activism is born of inner pain. To what extent society is responsible, our parents, our genes, we’ll probably never know. But thank god some people have felt the need to act out. That’s how the whole organism moves forwards...

OLIVER I am convinced that a huge percentage of activists became activists because of a certain personality – an authoritarian one. And a huge percentage because they suffered pain, be it on

a collective or personal level. But there are also activists who would not necessarily consider themselves as activists. People who don’t seem to have suffered personal trauma, pain or suffering. People who are simply in love with the whole world and who through their sense of empathy are changing the world into a better place without ever thinking too much of it.

But there are a lot of authoritarian personality activists. Sometimes it seems they are in this game because of their own ego. The cause does not really matter and this becomes quite obvious when personal problems are being solved, when pain diminishes, when money gets involved, their activism lessens.

I am convinced that the most productive and the most radical activists are the ones who have overcome pain, suffering and the “hate the authority” state of mind and became people of love.

CHRIS (FROM OTTAWA) Love is the ultimate illusion. My ignorance has kept me in love’ s arms. I don’t want to see beyond it because I don’t think I can. And why would I? In matters of happiness, love has served me right on so many occasions... and has also made me feel the deepest pain. The ontology of love and pain has a varied collection of instances.

Theses instances, personal accounts with love and pain, are unique to every individual. It may be hard to agree on what love and pain are as feelings. However I think that we can agree on their motivational properties. Love and pain are responsible for my most brilliant and my most stupid actions.

NADINE Writing this contradicts everything that I will be saying but, at the same time, I think it needs to be said–don’t show them that you love them, don’t show them that you care. Shield yourself from hurt. This is what I have been bought up with. Why did they ever tell me this? Why

should I hide what I feel? Usually feelings tend to complicate things and opening myself to them scares me. Fear, that is a feeling, but what I’m talking about is deeper, more concrete.

Something I want to hold on to forever, but as soon as I try to face it or make it tangible, I run away.

I don’t think feelings open dialogue, or at least not these. You can’t discuss why you love a person or who loves the other more. Love isn’t something you can discuss, it is at best something you can enjoy.

AUDREY Raoul’s text is disheartening though on a bad day I am compelled to agree... however, if I really believed that any kind of communication or interelationship is a selfish conversation with myself or “empty”, I would have no reason to push on. I am still here so...

I agree that love/pain is perhaps the most powerful impetus for any action, thought or... sometimes I find myself inquiring into peoples’ deepest feelings to find an understanding of myself as well. I am genuinely interested, in the other and myself. Sometimes in the process you gain a friend, for a short or long while, and sometimes it is a loss. If ‘emptiness’ means the inevitable outcome is my loneliness, then for me, the ‘emptiness’ is a space to digest what I have discovered, and in turn where that newly positions me in relation to the world.

Ultimately, I feel love/pain are necessary to my creation of anything I deem valid in the end. [perhaps this is self-evident or I am rambling, these subjects are hard and so personal... who am I telling all this anyway?!]

One beautiful thought on this subject has been related to me by a friend, his take on Deuleuze’s ‘what is philosophy’. That philosophy [I think interchangeable here], requires friendship, for it is a love, hence a friendship of wisdom. I add

that through the building and destroying of these relationships we are pursuing ‘wisdom’.

Kevin, you’re killing me here ;) it’s hard to tell the screen how I feel and certainly I don’t know who is reading this and... well there it is. for now... it’s the most I can muster. no apologies.

One last thing— “Does opening oneself up like this encourage dialogue and participation or does it cause one to pull away from it?” If one is sincere (no ulterior motives) it encourages dialogue with those who are ‘ready’ for it (want to).

ELSA MATHERN Trent Reznor as well as most country singers have already covered this subject for me. You added dissent to the mix and name checked the situationists. Let old frenchmen rest in peace. Clever ideas, brighter future, and a failed revolution... They helped, but ultimately it didn’t work out.. Don’t overlook their historical context. Revolutions don’t happen the second time round.

JOHN STUART Kevin’s pain is love is dissent is being gentrified & co-opted is chilled by the feline certainty of winter. is open 4 business ‘till midnight is shared edited & cropped is printed on a screen and folded a4 sheets in london, mile end & ljubljana. is mine. wwhisperingg “I am glad there isn’t you sitting here to laugh, in sleep — I will not write fake poems about brown eyes — shoulders. or leap & laugh or pause to consider a kinder fate or sleep or greying temples (modernism’s last stand) or blonde highlights or french perfume or english suits, or cry. or lyric or sauna or sonnet or home or a dead soldier’s broken heart.”

IDENTITY, AUTHENTICITY AND CO-OPTION When I see Boxfresh using Zapatista slogans (we are you) spray painted in the street to sell trendy clothing, or Barbara Kruger’s once challenging statements (Buy me. I’ll change your life) flyposted onto walls to promote a Selfridges sale, my stomach turns. Cultural gentrification occurs at an alarming rate these days, with signifiers of dissent transforming into the most versatile of commodities within the span of months if not weeks. Yet at the same time, in the first issue, and even here, I continue to use other’s words to express my thoughts and advance my own private interests. What is a visual identity of dissent? As a designer with an imperative to give form, and even more specifically, form to dissent, how does one ‘communicate authenticity’ (yes, I’m aware of the irony) when everything is up for sale?

TOM GLEASON No, I don’t think you’re doing anything really wrong. But I think that this kind of thing has the potential to limit discussions of politics in design to “the message” rather than the more “subtle dimensions” of design practice itself. It is no coincidence that the only political messages worth talking about in those discussions seem to be ones that are completely co-opted already.

JOEL SHANE One problem is that everything’s cool, the tools to talk are cool, the field of design is supposedly cool, and once it’s in illustrator – and not folk art or a painting of a wolf against the moon on a tshirt, which is too genuine to be cool – once it’s presented in a cool forum, it’s in the hands of the viewer’s world. And if we’re reading it, we’re probably concerned with being cool and looking at stuff that is cool too.

This all has a lot to do with the identity part of dissent: I was surfing today and thought to myself, alright, here I am in Hawaii, sitting under blue, above blue, fucking turtles surfacing, mountains, and yesterday my dad writes that it snowed in Winnipeg. And I’m thinking, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay here, how much work I can get, etc. and what would I do – but what would I have done otherwise? The cultural climate I was raised in encouraged upper-middle class professionalism: lawyer, doctor, dentist, business. And this is where identity comes in: the experience I was having, removed from everything but prime experience in Hawaii, SEEMED to be my own experience. I could have been living another life, but it seems that any other one [including continuing academic pursuits, cultural studies or writing a thesis on type design that was done in the 30’s for a certain machine] would be SOMEONE ELSE’S EXPERIENCE. That is what it’s all about: asking yourself if I am thinking someone else’s thoughts, and experiencing

someone else’s experiences, living someone else’s life. Left, right or center.

And being a canadian in a pacific american colony, just because the radio, one’s thoughts can be taken by others. The ad agency I am freelancing for did a bunch of work for the Dalai Lama. Someone asked him if he was vengefully angry with the Chinese. He said they had taken their land, done terrible things to his people, taken away their rights, but he would never let them take his mind.

The biggest lesson I have to learn is in that one sentence. Maybe the problem is that our minds seem to be made to be taken...

DBJ Conventional wisdom tells us that even within a fringe group, also exists fringe groups; meaning that the majority within a leftist socially responsible anti-capitalist group of breakers is still mediocre. Due to its success, entities like ‘Adbusters’ became a caricature of itself.

But is it still relevant? Are they still posing the same questions that have yet to be satisfactorily answered. Hell yes. Critical self discovery is as important as ever, whether it pertains to yourself, your neighbourhood, or your local chapter of angry little men. Dissent became a trend, and as trendwhores we ate it up with a Philippe Starck spork. So when we tire of the fad, the tireless and unabashed will continue the gruntwork for this generation and the next.

KATHERINE GILLIESON I reject the idea that a graphic style or approach can be linked solely to a political position. Any graphic style is prone to being co-opted so all designers would be better off not sweating about it and just using whatever form is best for the function. The desire to be an active participant or get engaged exists outside of any aesthetic.

And what gets printed at the end of the process is not necessarily rhetoric, it may just be one

little chunk of a conversation and part of a much larger exchange of ideas!

TOM LIACAS Authenticity, ah, that losing battle! You know, it strikes me that the only way to maintain authenticity is to keep to your personal convictions and let culture do its silly dance.

I mean, print your zine on recycled paper because it’s the right thing to do, not because it makes it more grassrootsy.. Likewise, stencil and screenprint when those are the right tools for the job, not when its a uniform effect that dictates your choices. Authenticity comes from uncomplicated choices, maybe its time to bring them back.

OLIVER VODEB There are a million different ways of co-optation that the commercial industry uses to get the dollar rolling , but there are a million different voices and approaches to dissent which are being constantly innovated that keep cultural and mental autonomous zones alive, and new ones growing.

A loosing battle? Well it depends on one’s perspective I guess. Individualisation of the collective! It does not only mean sticking with one’s personal convictions, but to stick with them and to constantly collaborate and communicate with others. The authentic personalities do not get lost in the process, it’s just that people disappear as stars and signatures. It is critical (media) literacy that allows people to look through the image of a piece of graffiti and feel and recognise authenticity and intention, if there is some.

That’s how the battles are being won.

I guess more and more people are getting media literate, but the memes are mutating, and the commercial culture industry is using this fact, effectively selling self-critical, ironic messages as the epitome of cool. I am sure it doesn’t happen consciously in most cases.

There is to some extent an organism out there consisting of memes which are mutating that no one is critically aware of. But the game is not about being for or against commercial culture anymore. Of course at some level it is, but it seems that constant attention to it takes up more time than we spend living and it gets us into an illiterate vacuum.

I guess the dedication to live a pure life outside the realm of spectacle and simulation is the important decision. Some are living it without ever knowing about these terms and theories, some need the analytical apparatus to do so, but concentrating more on actually living outside the spectacle will generate media literacy and activism by itself. And that’s what real authenticity means for me.

JOHN STUART because the biggest lie is property because alone is impossible is infinity because every drop has past our lips, once before now, transubstantiated saatchi, benjamin, sandanista, zapatista because we are ‘a group of folks with evil in our hearts’ passed from hand to hand to heart because voices from the dirt together are only only that mi amore because consensus is the highest plane, hungry for something new.

JOKE RASCH Visually, revolution makes me think of a circular movement with an arrow. Whereas the notion of evolution seems to be more progressive and forward moving with a directional arrow pointed forward. Dialogue is a two pointed arrow.

Dialogue is about true discourse and communication, and its platform has to be well considered. For example, a table right in the middle of a street, or walkway, with chairs, plates, jam and butter, are a true platform... which are also visually speaking as interesting as the dialogue that happens.

SAYING DOING VE RS US

In the last issue, Joel levelled a critique against my idea of a dialogue on dialogue, and more specifically, against the exclusionary and ineffective discourse that often happens within the academic environment. More fundamentally he addressed the separation between saying and doing, and the fact that we need to be ‘doing’ more. Who wouldn’t agree? But what does that ‘doing’ entail, especially if what you ‘do’ is use your skills to ‘say’? Naively, I asked, “getting Bush out of office is one thing, but can we find more fundamental ways in which to engage wit h design as an agent of social change?”

KATHERINE GILLIESON For me dialogue doesn’t imply theory at all, but politics. And the university system is not the natural centre of political discussions.

My definition of political dialogue is an old school one: talking about how you want to live.

So anything that falls outside mundane chat about ‘what will we have for dinner tonight’ is dialogue. Isn’t it? But you could go even further and say that dialogue is about political consciousness. If you believe that the personal is political, then talking about what you’re going to have for dinner is also dialogue.

I agree that academia tends to be too insular and use too much exclusive language. But I also think that sometimes being critical about anything, such as a social issue, requires some special language. And language is very conservative: it tends to maintain the status quo so that new terms or phrases often become an object of ridicule. Think about the initially benign idea of ‘politically correct’ and how it now seems sinister. And all political movements use specialised language; we know exactly where someone stands if they say ‘anti-life’ rather than ‘pro-choice’. Ideally, talking about political things would be easy to do using plain language, but what really tends to happen is that pockets of like-minded people, including academic circles, will talk to each other using specialist terms.

And although this is a natural tendency, no-one, including academics, necessarily believe that its a good thing.

Another problem related to thinking/doing is that if people in general aren’t having conversations about big issues, maybe it is because we are all just too apolitical (in the Western mass alienation sense.) Like I said earlier: there is nothing inherently academic about dialogue! The way I see it, its not a university vs real world debate; I think we’ve generally lost the ability to talk about some kinds of things. Why is it taboo to talk about elections and how you vote, for example? This is just

as good a topic of conversation (if not better) than discussing food, shelter, love, friendship or anything else. Consumerism has dulled our ability to talk about politics.

I think we need to look beyond the theory vs. practice debate, and maybe overhaul that whole dichotomy. There should be no opposition between work and school – this is an individualistic ‘us versus them’ attitude breeding a gang mentality and preventing real progress.

I can think of two small steps towards this, for people who ‘do’ (designers) and people who ‘reflect’ (academics): 1) Be a politically aware, open-minded designer, realising your own ability and potential contribution through doing. 2) Academics (or anyone involved in reflecting and commenting on the world around them) could be forcing change from within. The ‘thinkers’ need to realise they are also doing, and need to see their work as a potentially important cultural contribution and attempt to communicate it to the general public rather than keep it hidden in obscure, short-run publications. If the university system isn’t working then maybe we should join it and try changing it from the inside! Too many academics are profoundly apolitical and self-interested. I argue that we need to resist the pressure to publish ad nauseam, and that graphic designers should do the same in resisting the circles of nepotism that grow around design competitions and other self-congratulatory events in which designers just end up patting each other on the back.

Hard to swallow that any of our work might be meaningless to most people in society, isn’t it?

If we are talking about critical thinking, this can happen in different ways for different people and there are plenty of examples of working class grassroots movements to prove a critical position is not a university-specific thing. People just need awareness not fall into the trap of self-obsessed consumerism that substitutes for real life in this (I mean the 1st) world. Being too postmodern kind of ruins everything too, that

vicious cycle of nihilism thing... I agree we could all be Machiavellian about trying to force social change.

Does that make me a hypocrite, yes probably, but that’s part of the point. I am an honest hypocrite...

TOM GLEASON I’m not concerned with which is better, because they are essentially both actions. There should be a certain level of consistency (sincerity) between what is said and what is done (even if the doing is more saying).

JOEL SHANE Not to let my mind be stolen but it already has been partially by seeing people with Bush stickers, and all the us crap out here, but getting bush out cannot be more fundamental. Although no one outside of the us can do it. Hell – no one inside the us can either! After the ceo of Diebold, which makes the voting machines, says “I will deliver this election to Bush”, and as of this fall 30% of votes will be electronic (see the documentary Everywhere but Florida – message: it’s all over, even the illusion of democracy through voting), it is clear to me (unlike some others I know who actually think Kerry will win and that voting can count) that there is no hope for anything but a quick slide into mid twentieth century modes of living, except all suv’d and fox’d and insane like never before. Will there be Republican backed slaughters of people like the Mayans in Guatemala under Reagan? I bet there will be – the razing of Iraq over the past decade is just one manifestation. And don’t forget Kosovo – look up Camp Bondsteel.

My sister, amongst many others, says it was a media-led illumination on a bad situation which led to the us having to act as liberators. But I once saw this government official on Leno, years back, when it happened, saying that it was all about oil and the Caspian. Wasn’t there mention of it in Fahrenheit 9/11? What was the detail? I can’t remember. Can you? I posed the idea to a friend’s father, an ex-military, now lawyer, wealthy, self-described Christian (who said referring to the bombed civilians in Iraq “... they will be punished, like it says in the Bible”) who had just come back from the presidential breakfast with Bush himself, and he said people like me are all ignorant. Then I looked up Camp Bondsteel 2 years later. All about oil...

TOM LIACAS Balance. I believe everyone that does should stop once in a while to listen, say or teach. Likewise, those that spend their time listening, saying and teaching have to get their hands dirty once in a while. For designers and academics, the prescription is obvious. You can’t spend your life designing protest graphics without ever having attended a demonstration.

OLIVER Hard to say when speech is action and when ‘action’ is action in the activist sense. Both can be, both are not always.

There has to be a coherence between speech and action, that’s for sure. But there has to be a coherence with what one is saying/doing today and what one is saying/doing tomorrow.

Practice and theory are profoundly intertwined, they both enrich each other and learn from each other. There are actions which will make one speak differently the next day and there is definitely speech (act)ion that will make one act differently the next day.

The only thing I am looking for is coherence.

The past is important. If it is not important what somebody did /said in the past, how can I believe what one says /does today.

ELSA MATHERN If you say what you do and do what you say and always say the same damn thing, you are a robot.

Is there a way to stop it? Who the hell is going to answer that?

GODSPEED YOU!

I don’t exactly recall how I stumbled upon Damien’s website (http://pulp.orangephotography.com/damien), but I remember being struck by the sincerity of his words and photographs. His description of the music of Godspeed You Black Emperor, one of my favourite bands, beautifully mirrored my own experience. I was moved and left him a short note expressing my appreciation.

Two months later, while finishing up this issue, I received an email from Damien telling me how much he had enjoyed the first issue of 23:56. He encouraged me to use whatever I wanted from his site, “once you’ve put something a bit thoughtful on the market or on the internet, this something does not belong to you anymore, but to everyone. It should be used and abused to whatever lengths. Copyright is evil stuff.”

So thanks Damien, for our very first ‘music review.’

BLACK EMPEROR “Divine anarchy, adorable anarchy, you’re not a system, a political party, a reference, but a state of mind” (Léo Ferré) Beyond the obvious anarchist references, canadian band Godspeed You Black Emperor and french singer Léo Ferré (1916-1993) share the same humanist and visionary playground. the way Ferré spat out loneliness, sincerity, violence, tenderness, vulnerability, contradiction, bitterness, lucidity, ferocity and above all love, and created small symphonies with them is very close to that of Godspeed. The language used (can’t you hear words in Godspeed’s instrumental music? can’t you hear the music in Ferré’s words?) is universal, timeless, frequently overwhelming and never defeatist.

Their work is, as french writer Quentin Dupont says apropos of Ferré’s oeuvre “an hymn to happiness and hope, a fight for man’s dignity. he pushes us into living standing up”.

Disturbing, challenging and thought provoking, their records have fed my quite recent will to LIVE in a way that is more positive and constructive than anything and anyone has ever fed me with. how ironic that this feeding frenzy had to be hosted by a guy who’s written some of the darkest pages of twentieth century french poetry and a band that is not exactly renowned for their joie de vivre.

“Sometimes, it feels like killing oneself would be for the best. Yet I believe it is the one thing we mustn’t do. There was this spider in my house.

I’d see it every day. And every day, it was in the same corner. Once, I poured some milk on a saucer and put it on the floor. (which was a very silly thing to do because I don’t know if spiders like milk). Anyways, it made me very happy! Spiders, they don’t know much. They don’t kill themselves.

Horses, they don’t know they will die someday.

Dogs don’t know either. You and I, we know it!

Now, you and I must pretend that we don’t know.”

A singer, songwriter, author, composer, arranger, orchestra director and above all a poet, Léo Ferré is, along with Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, one of the most revered french chanson figures.

Brel, Gainsbourg and Ferré were very popular and hugely talented and respected artists. I like to think that if every new generation that comes along pays attention to them, it is because these great characters were honest, very humane, overemotional, generous, crazy, rebellious and solitary all the way through; everything a great poet is.

They always spoke their minds, didn’t give a flying toss about the ever looming backlash. They wore their big red perforated hearts in need on their sleeves.

How comforting it is that we can count on great artists and performers to tell us what we are supposed to do with our adult life: to make our childhood dreams come true. And how sad it is that these dreams do not often seem to materialize since most of us do not go on falling a lot, crying a lot, making utterly silly and funny things, and remain crazy enough.

I first heard about Godspeed in April 1999. It was in the music weekly Melody Maker, a few lines which made me go “whooah, I’d probably love that!” I was in Barcelona visiting my friend Laetitia and on that day they were due to play in London. I flew back so that I could go to the gig.

I went straight from Heathrow to the Union Chapel, a beautiful church in north London where Godspeed were playing that evening and where I’d go to my first Sigur Ros concert a year or so later and my first A Silver Mt. Zion gig too. luckily, it wasn’t sold out. That was just before they made the cover of the new musical express and subsequently became, in true stupid english fashion, ‘the indie saviour of the month’.

That evening, something great happened to me. Something which I had never experienced before...

In 1817, a young Stendhal—a french novelist whose most well known work, Le rouge et le noir, is a powerful character study of an ambitious young man and also an acute picture of restoration france— visited Florence and soon found himself overwhelmed by the city’s intensely rich legacy of art and history. when he visited Santa Croce (the cathedral where the likes of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried) and saw Giotto’s ceiling frescoes for the first time, he was overcome with emotion.

He wrote: “I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... everything spoke so vividly to my soul.”

A century and a half later, an italian psychiatrist noticed that some of the tourists who visited florence were overcome with anything from temporary panic attacks to bouts of outright madness that lasted several days. She remembered that stendhal had had similar symptoms, so she named the condition ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’.

That night at the Union Chapel, I lost the plot, broke down and cried freakin’ rivers for the whole gig. I was shaking all over and I couldn’t control myself. I was totally out of it, at the mercy of some unidentified, dark and beautiful attraction that I couldn’t escape from. The only thing to do would have been to leave the church. But I didn’t want to because it was such an ‘absolute experience’.

I never failed to break down at most subsequent Godspeed gigs I went to. It’s stronger than me. I can’t help it. It’s always like ‘oh shite, here you go again, you overemotional weirdo!’

All this makes me think of the first time I listened to Credo, a 13 minutes piece of music

by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. It was late at night, I had turned the lights off and turned the volume up to 10. By the end of it, I wanted to die. I wanted to die because I had just seen it all.

I really had. I remember that I crashed into my flatmate’s room: – I’ve just listened to the most incredible music!

It’s the most rock n’ roll music your head can take without exploding!

– What the fuck was that? it was so loud!

No wonder officials banned Credo back in 1968.

It is such a powerful piece, they were probably worried that everyone would rebel against the soviet regime by the end of the song!

Credo was born from Pärt’s fascination with the central idea of christianity – ‘love your enemies.’ Pärt says: “Through unfolding the music in an unrelenting manner, as if it was under the spell of some chain

reaction, I wanted to show how the postulate ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, however benign it may seem, gradually shows its true face and its destructive dimension; a crescendo of violence which, as an avalanche, ends up by bumping into its own walls.”

No future, indeed.

So, credo starts beautifully with the choir singing credo in jesum christum (I believe in Jesus Christ) and a few minutes later you are in hell, the music gets increasingly violent, chaotic and distorted, the choir now shouting oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente (an eye for en eye and a tooth for a tooth).

So, no future? Well, that would be far too convenient.

Then, as in the chrysalis process, a luminous crescendo manages to overthrow the quite ugly stuff, autem ego vobis dico, non esse resistendum injuriae (but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil) with the choir finally screaming twice in a row and to dramatic effect credo (i believe). We may even have the impression that the power of faith here is so strong that the postulate ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ metamorphoses into some very humane figure and joins forces with the believers.

Hope, indeed.

powerful, dangerous and subversive music I’ve ever listened to.

Live in Paris at Le Cabaret sauvage in 2003: two minutes into the gig and I was already shaking like a leaf. Some of my senses switched into ‘absolute mode’, whatever that means.

It was like all of my memories, my relation to this world, all of the present and future of mankind and all of my feelings towards humanity surfaced before my eyes and inside my guts. All at once. And it was so much to take that I couldn’t help but end up on my knees and lose myself in visions and thoughts that were extremely dark, beautiful, violent and serene, like the music itself.

I went to this gig with Thierry, a friend of mine who’s been to hundreds of concerts. He told me that night that he hadn’t experienced such a thing since his early teens.

You know, teens... throwing up at your parents’ ugly words (well, my parents anyway), drinking and taking whatever-can-make-you-sink so that you can forget how shite it all is. Teens as believing in fuck all. Teens as keeping a sense of hope, deep within. Teens as being arrogant, full of shite and thinking you know so much.

After the gig, Thierry had this light in his eyes which I had never seen before. And It made me happy.

To me, this piece of music is a call for unity. a call to build something all together. Anything that would give a good kick to the arses of people bent on destruction.

In credo I hear: “don’t be a fuckwit. Hatred and negative feelings will take you to an abyss of darkness; to your own loss. Learn to look around, there is much beauty to fall in love with, to smile with and to help you to believe.” It is a shame that most of this sounds like religious or hippie ideology to the cynics. It’s quite stupid, really, especially when you think that ultimately, the question here is “do I want to be an asshole all my life?”.

I don’t know much about contemporary music, but Pärt has written some of the most beautiful,

Godspeed’s music keeps me from the harmful world of adulthood and the desperation I often feel from being a part of it. Their music comforts me in my rejection of a society that breeds on huge chunks of fear, spite, hate and cynicism.

It makes me feel like I belong to something bigger than the tiny and suffocating cube I live in. A tiny cube which I have built with whatever tools I could put my desperate hands on in order to survive. The tiny cube that I fill with whatever/ whoever helps me to get through it all.

It might be a dangerous cube I’m building here. but, aren’t they all? at least, my cube doesn’t strive for money and power. and it’s got big child’s eyes. and I try to make it as humane as I can. and more often than not I feel alive in it.

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