Type/Print: Ad Infinitum and it's evolution / the lure of the skull

 

RTomens, 2025

Above is the finished Ad Infinitum. The title's taken from the sampled Paul Valery texts used. 

It began with this...

...which I typed on, thinking that would be the end of it...

...you guessed, it wasn't. Below is one several versions used to make up the final printed image.

I have to resist the urge to create too many 'skull pieces' because, like a Goth, I'm attracted to them. That is my only Goth inclination, I swear. Here's my favourite skull album cover...

TTN

Collage: Private Lives / The Gas - Charles Platt

RTomens, 2024

I made Private Lives late last year and a few weeks later found myself reading The Gas by Charles Platt. One reflects on privacy and what goes on behind closed doors, the other depicts a country (England) driven sex mad by gas leaked from a military lab.  'Why don't we do it it in the road?' indeed.

If sex circa 1970 in relation to the 60s 'revolution' was supposedly about liberation, Platt drives that idea to an horrific extreme in which no-one can control their desires and sex is not a choice but a compulsion. The results are repulsive and Platt doesn't hesitate to describe them in graphic detail. It's an extraordinary piece of fiction, a grotesque twist on disaster sci-fi...pulpy, conceptual, pornographic and possibly profound, if you like to read it that way. Not for the faint-hearted.

 

Happy New Year From Japan's Propaganda Dept (1939)

New Year's postcards sold in Japan. From Life magazine, Feb, 1939

Howl Now - J. Jeff Jones / The Savoy Book / Vispo: Mechanised?

 

J. Jeff Jones updates Ginsberg's Howl poem in The Savoy Book, published in 1978. Once upon a time I also began a poem with the line 'I saw the best minds of my generation' but have no memory of the rest of it. No, no - that's wrong - I remember nothing. What I have is a recording of the performance, which I haven't played for years. But I remember my voice trails off in a possibly drunken slur after 'generation'.

Success could not destroy me. I never give it the chance. Not that you decide to be successful. Successful at what though?

A practical apprenticeship?

Novel writing?

Mass homicide?

There's so much to be successful at.

Yet.

Yet.

Do you ever wonder, seeing someone in the street, if they've succeeded in anything? Creating a baby, perhaps.

Or earning lots of money.

And on and on and on.

The Savoy Book is very good. It has an interview with Brian Aldiss, fiction by Harlan Ellison and M. J Harrison, great illustrations etc.

*

RTomens, 2024

The other day I thought 'I really should describe what people are seeing' when I post art because...you know...it's wrong of me to assume that it's clear or that they can work it out for themselves. Nothing's clear or obvious, necessarily, in a world where AI exists. As you know, AI can create anything (except good cakes? cups of tea? I dunno). By what people are seeing I mean what it's made of and how it's made, perhaps...what's know as the 'medium' in the Fine Arse world. Or media? The process? 

For the record. So you know. So you know it's not something I made by feeding information into software. Mechanised? consists of a printed background and altered photo of a dubious character's mugshot which I typed onto. That's it.

TTFN

JG Ballard: First Edition Berkley Medallion Books - Financial Concern button switched off!

 

Suddenly, for some reason, money didn't matter.

Something clicked.

It was my Financial Concern button, which I changed from 'On', as it usually is, to 'Off'.

Having done so, I began buying books.

I bought as if it might all end next week. As if a comet large enough to smash the planet to smithereens was on course to do so and no amount of action by either superpower could do anything about it. 

There are no pockets in a shroud, right?

Not that the Ballard books pictured were expensive (that's relative, isn't it?). They were actually cheaper as a job lot than any others I'd seen online. Cheaper individually, that is. A friends asked 'But you have them, don't you?' Meaning the stories. Yes, I do, but as any book-lover knows, sometimes it's about the editions. I am not, mind you, an obsessive collector of editions. But I couldn't resist these.

With the FC button still switched off, I proceeded to scour the internet and found several more books. I may show them to you in the future.

I also struck a deal with a book dealer via email. 

I was high on buying.

Now I'm flying nearly every day as I eagerly await the post. High too on having so many great new books and magazines to explore.

The FC button has been switched on again. It must, after all, remain on by default, otherwise I'd be broke.

I can browse charity shop shelves with the FC button on, no worries, since nothing costs more than £3, usually.

Online however, as you know, is an endless shop stuffed with goodies. It's where you can usually find  what you're after but the price...oh the prices!...can sometimes be far too much.

For now I'm being 'good'. 

New booklet: Mind Games

Here is the new book. 56 pages featuring faces and figures. Full colour. £12 plus p&p. Posts worldwide. Very limited print run. Please contact me at rtomens@gmail.com if interested.

Vispo: Self-censorship

RTomens, 2024

 

Album of the Week: Rian Treanor with Rotherham Sight & Sound - Action Potential

Using software synths designed by Rian Treanor and Mark Fell, visually impaired pensioners Anne Goss (75), Kathleen Allott (74) and Mick Gladwin (65) aka Rotherham Sight & Sound, have made what for them is truly liberating music. They've been practising for a while and now Action Potential is out on Treanor's label, Electronic Music Club. They even played Cafe Oto (see clip below), but don't hold that against them for this is no hipster project. 

Worthiness (in the best sense) aside, what they've created is a joyous selection of seven tracks, comparable to Autechre, if they were really 'free' - ha-ha. An atmosphere of play pervades, like the best Improv,  minus the studious 'intellectual' attitude. Hold has a 'Ragga' feel and consistent rhythms frequently come into play, but elsewhere they cut loose, as on When It Ends and the following 30 Seconds, the latter sounding like the best early electronic 'space music'. The way the last track, 1 Dial, drops off into a percussive black hole is fantastic. 

Buy it here

'Freedom to do what we want'...

Collage: Disinterested?

RTomens, 20119

 

Print/Vispo: You Were Never Really There

RTomens, 2024