Down Beneath The Ben-Day Dots

Where do you go to my lovely when you’re alone in your bed, when dark shadows surround you like an angry mob and slow dissolve inside your pretty little head? Like a Cadillac scream or a Benzedrine dream, when things get chaotic you can hide inside my pocket; toxic and frantic, lost in semantics. Now you’re in purple, now you’re a turtle; the Strawberry Girl in her raspberry beret, my second hand store cosmetically beautified, chemically tongue tied, mellow yellow Banana Split Baby. You know I can see the whole damn room from here and there’s nothing in it except for a very small circle inside a very large square, where the stone jawed face of some comic book man stares out across the distance, and I know that you deceived me but here’s a big surprise, ‘cos beneath these shades the visions fade but I can see for miles, and miles, and miles, and miles…oh yeah! So while I manoeuvre my roots the irony shoots me from all directions and I’m caught up in the conflicting crossfire of a never ending primal scream, I can’t help thinking that Telegram Sam may be your main man but give me those automatic shoes and California blues any old day. See I was born to boogie, so I guess you’ll never learn as you burn, baby burn, that I may always crash in the same car, but my accidents are meticulously planned.

So as Mild Mouthed Rita and her Chevy Chase cheetah play at mass production in the mirror, high and low heretically blended in some giant abstract expressionist Waring, I lurk in the shadows, copying originals conspicuously; the serious and trivial, the satire and the homage; producing and reproducing, joining the dots until you simply can’t tell the icons and clichés, the epic and ersatz, apart. All hail the Handmade Readymade! Re-made. Re-modelled. Refashioned. Recovered. Refined. Reframed. Re-used!!!

Baby you’re a groove, just like the planets when you move, but you’re much too fast to ever last and you’ll burn and crash as your eyes bleed tears of sixteen years from the muted screams of acid dreams. So why not get yourself together now and fix me something tasty, ‘cos you look so good beneath your hood – so elegantly wasted. You may never glance back while you’re clad in black but I’m the one who pulls your string when you slide inside my Thunderwing. You wouldn’t even like me if you’d never had a drink and you wouldn’t even be here if you’d ever stopped to think about how I’m resolutely unconventional while tonally obscene, defiantly detached and distant inside your teenage dream, with my weird ideas of art and contradictions of the heart. Popularisation, democratisation, vulgarisation….and on, and on and on…manufactured and simulated, excluded but integrated.

So now I’m howling like a loon beneath that be-bop moon ‘cos it makes me wanna croon for you. But representation is always contemplated, mediated, integrated, suffocated, through apertures and camera shutters, peepholes and editing cutters. There was a time everything was fine, and you got drunk all the day on Thunderbird wine, but now I’m like a beggar in the sand with the sky in his hand while you’re dirty and sweet yet strangely incomplete, but you should never look back if you’re all clad in black. You think you’re a champ when you climb my raw ramp, but the noise of the narrative is a roaring silence of fascinating possibilities, reanimating long dead metaphors; the bromidic visual formulae that defines our mass culture, where manufactured Monet’s repeat themselves, cheat themselves, defeat themselves, compete with themselves, and life only becomes clearer the further you walk away from it. Romanticised madness meets tongue in cheek sadness, where the planned is premeditated, sanitised and contemplated. But I guess it’s the truth that your untamed youth will fly you away on a cloak full of eagles, while the midnight moonlight dances on your hubcap diamond star halo.

Here I am in the New York groove, ‘cos I ain’t no square with my corkscrew hair. So let’s celebrate, not exonerate, while I lace your gin with a Mickey Finn and you spin me lies as you gaze in my eyes and say ‘WHY, BRAD DARLING, THIS PAINTING IS A MASTERPIECE!’ How right you are, my Free Angel, although I’d trade in all your easy action for just one night of satisfaction, while probing the tension between surface and death. Because you’ve been a bad girl and hooked me like a chemical, and no matter how hard I try and kick it you fix me like a narcotic, and what’s mine is yours and yours is mine since you pinned me like a porcupine. But electric dreams and groupies screams are more than enough to get by, so I’ll get myself ready for sweet Flo and Eddie, and ride a white swan to the sky.