Thursday, May 20, 2010

notes on Malcom Mclaren's funeral day in London by @disastronaut

i've been so busy recently i havent had a moment to type this up... a few notes from day of MM's funeral...

1.

So from the Green Bus numbered 777 going "Nowhere" with Cash for Chaos bunting up the hill from Camden to the venerated of resting places on the slopes of Highgate,
next to Marx the philosopher of Communism, the philosopher of chaos, Malcom McLaren is laid to rest.
2.
They don't call it exploitation for nothing.
3.
The prescient import of glam rock mixed with the dissolution of the Situationist Society of the Spectacle mixed with the Jubilee year needed a conduit and a traveller to bring the strands together. Even then, London was at that crossroads.
4.
Funerals are for the fixing, but below the surface, already, the worms are getting to work - the skull polished white in the darkness. Appreciative of the Ash cloud, the noises of airplanes are now back on the flight path, I'm late.
5.
And it is -that committed of the spectacular by using the means of production, but also the foresight to do so. With Sex then Seditionaries and the appropriation of Situationist imagery, yet largely stripped of its French political origins, and even more importantly by doing so moving to the annihilation culture discourse as begun by Bataille, perhaps that was an aesthetic engagement of Alterity formed of the popular nihilism of that moment.
6.
~so the jets now roaring through the skies leaving contrails going this way and that and the noise is now back not for them, but for the living on a day that would have been cloudless,
but now criss-crossed and polluted by the heavy jet engines... and at this same moment - in Nigeria two and a half billion cubic feet of natural gas are being flamed off every day.
7.
And despite the call for a minute of Chaos at noon, by 4:30pm most have settled back down to living in total silence, aside from a few paparazzi shutter bursts.
Most have settled down for tea with radio 4 to pass this life.
8.
And over the canal the Chaos bus runs - playing all the hits - and the simulated punks, most born in 80s and forward, mosh behind the bus in a momentary autonomy, before
re-taking their posts on Camden high street giving out leather shop or all you can eat noodle flyers.
9.
'too young to die- too fast to live' spray painted on the coffin; an anarchy symbol in flowers; the decoration of surface with these signifiers of the chaotic - led by the four horses of the apocalypse from the tawdry promised land of NW1 to the new paradise of infinite time, but residues still strong enough...
10.
Our philosopher of Chaos, buried on same grounds. Yet, 'Punk not Dead' seems less potent today, as in some ways it did.
11.
And that dream was good for those pulling the strings of the spectacular - as the puppet master and ringleader usually ends up better off than the puppets.
Buried a day after the Queen's birthday, the woman parodied so mercilessly and so enriched him in "God Save the Queen."

Posted via email from disastronaut's posterous

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