The Law of the Circle

The Law of the Circle

The world had descended into a cycle of trauma, feeling the need to return to the site of its wound. Trapped in a loop of return, revisit, relive, it had established cyclic time based on the Law of the Circle. It located its wound, not within in its people, but within its architecture. It constantly replayed the Image of its trauma as though it may uncover something new, discover something it had missed, find the missing fragment it required to re-construct itself.

We also felt the need to return to the site of a trauma. Our trauma. It wasn’t great in the spectacular way, but similarly located itself within architecture. The architecture of the bridge. Without knowing the exact location, all bridges became significant and the Albert Bridge became our surrogate. We felt the need to return to this place. To interact with it. To travel back through time, exploring the palimpsest, in the hope of locating a key. The key that would allow us to break free of the cyclic pattern that had been established by the Law of the Circle.

.rupture.

Robin Bale invoking Dionysos

Robbo invoking Dionysos at the start of Red Wine Traces,

after the SAVAGE MESSIAH ISSUE 9 ZINE LAUNCH.

LEYTON: DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS

LEYTON: DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS
A desultory step down from that linear conduit ,the Lea Bridge Road, veering away from its straightness onto the labyrinthine terrain vague of the marshes, little tracks hidden under briars weave and spiral into the nexus of a lost London.

"I give you the end of the golden string
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
William Blake Jerusalem

Leyton. Softly you smother me. What lies beneath that sweet patina, the swirling yellow and grey mists of your residues. To reassemble you would be a sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. You lurk behind me now, holding something back, always. And yet there, in the torn and tattered veneers, the peeling hoardings and crumbling stucco I sense an elegiac emblem, a marker. I am pulled into the fray, tugged into a channel I cannot fathom. Wherever the locus of your broken heart lies, splintered and in pieces, I shall come to it now.

Lea Bridge, just your name conjures up so many repressed desires, the abandonment of reason on the marshes, violent rituals, face ground down in the dirt on muddy football pitches, the brutal and unforgiving sex of confusion and scarring. The dreams of another epoch, the heady scent of hawthorn blossom beneath the pylons.
I conjure up scenes, erotically charged and complicated , a tableaux of curious, senseless topographies. Under the shadow of the power station, a biting scratching kind of fuck, tearing into the scorched ground by the breakers yard, Genet and Lovecraft become my companions.

Along the railway sidings on Lammas Road. Acid house year zero. This became the darkside , the Black e zone, factories left empty from the recession in knots of burnt out blocks. The Intercity firm, " congratulations you have just met the ICF" :warehouse party mayhem, protection rackets, thugs with machetes, corruption and ultraviolence on a grand scale. WHAT IS THIS HORROR ZONE?
Unit 13 , next to that grisly meat packing factory, internal organs melting in fear and paranoia. A Synthetic Circus party, all these ketamine entities in Halloween garb standing shivering as a woman lies haemorrhaging under an awning of relentless drilling gabba. Within a year a gruesome repeat, another pointless death. He watched her frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling back into her head, bastards selling bad gear, and sound systems too scared to stop.
Lammas, the old pagan festival of Lugnasadh ,funeral feast of the God of light, a time of sacrifice, judgement and reckoning..
Where did it all go wrong ? Mousetraps in back pockets to spring the pickpockets, wraps of Ajax to poison the thieves, men hanging around toilets to rape K'd up women and all that with security firms standing by watching, making a fucking killing. A shattered dream. Once there was this perverse hope that these desolate stretches would rise again, the Phoenix of East London rising from the ashes. In the halcyon days of the late 80's it all seemed possible, but then something started to claw it back, this malevolent twitching beneath the flyovers and electricity cables. A brooding cruelty, you couldn't have hoped to get away with it.
A cross quarter fire festival, bonfires to add strength to the powers of the waning sun. Staffa Road, industrial estate becomes inferno as Britart burns, the tokens of Cool Britannia and New Labour hypocrisy razed to the ground in 600 degree flashover. Bataille's accursed share, proposed Olympic site as sacrificial zone.
The Dungeons. Dank, claustrophobic vaults reach out beneath the Lea Bridge Road, a shadow world sealed, gruesome chambers harbouring guilt and shame .Deranged Hell's Angels wanting a cut of the drug money suddenly leaching into the marshes, all these fucking firms, criminal gangs, they were in there straight away. The Greyhound, that was just a front, a sham pub, a veneer of respectibilty, the Dungeons was where it was really going on. Some Merlin automoton serving Red Stripe, moving so slow, and those other bastards trying to put the fear in with tales of torture, electrocuted genitalia, a screaming, paranoid darkness. Headfuck and Uglyfunk are there, five rooms five soundsystems, Crossbones room, Sick n twisted Vs pitchless room, Darkside, The Lurker, Face Hoover, Rave Enforcer, Necro and Anoianoid, the iconography of horror, 80's slasher movies resurrected in this god forsaken territory. Ketamine casualties lurch zombified through the wastelands with no fears of noise abatement orders. Red stripe goes up, R and B crews move in, a shooting outside and in this, it's final incarnation ,the Dungeons becomes the last outpost of Murder Mile.

HEATHROW:THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF PARANOIA.

“In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" Giorgio Agamben.

"Of many shifts , blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods." Chalked on the roadside were words lifted from a Homeric hymn to Hermes.

Heathrow is a tangle of paranoia, to traverse the perimeter is to dodge clusters of armed coppers. We edge beneath the razor wire of a forlorn camp , a guarded non space mutating into a contemporary locus of struggle. Middle England just this side of the fence, clinging to heritage and hanging baskets,, no site clothes/work boots, no third runway daubed on George cross banners, who do yOU align yourself with? Immigration removal centres, privatised prisons, they're not keen, they don't want them coming in, and they don’t like unhealthy proles holidaying in Spain much either.
Terrorism, a word almost drained of its psychotic cravings by the anodyne platitudes mouthed on ABC lurks in the infrastructure. Does anyone really believe in it? Conspiracy theories abound, there’s a retreat into the escapism of fantasy lands, the irrational.

The three magpies, relic of the 70’s, nothing really changed, a saccharine rendition of’silent night’ on the juke box, it’s August. We’re ignored for a long time and when I get my tea it’s lukewarm and the little cup only half full, its like tea you get from a flask. Its Monday afternoon so there’s just us and a couple of baggage handlers. We leave the faux heritage of this Edwardian tudor and head for the patio bar which is actually some tables and a fence and a car park then the airport. It’s an out of time zone, where people come to have clandestine encounters, a few drinks before a dash to the Renaissance hotel. Its a place of undertable powder slipping and hawkers peddling stuff off the luggage truck. You get it now, or its on its way to the auction house in Tooting love. Julie’s had everything in here, mainly perfume and stuff, specially since the ban on hand luggage and liquids, some nice stuff, expensive, all sorts really. Julie grew up in Bradford, she used to be married to a biker, she had tattoos and loved the allegiance of belonging to a tribe. Then there was feuding and he got nasty and she swapped her council house in Bradford for a flat in Hounslow, it was a clean break,a fresh start..,here in this transit zone everyone was just passing through, she could just disappear. It was her and the Polish and the Somalians and Sikhs and everyone, loads of Polish everywhere, all the pubs and shops turning Polish now. Used to be that a lot of the pubs closed and turned into boring stuff like burglar alarm fitting businesses cos the Asians didn’t really use them so much but now the Poles are bringing them back to life.
The three magpies is alright, she’s been working there three years. Strangely, for a transit zone you get your regulars, blokes from the airport. Then there’s lads from nearby up on a weekend, mainly for the karaoke and late licence, airport meant it was easy to get one, funny hours people work and us with no neighbours to annoy. Outside this strictly controlled zone we had this little pocket that was almost operating outside the law. We had all sorts going on, a lot of young ones off their heads but the old bill never looking in.

savagemessiahzine.com

The above circuit should be suitable for the construction of the device you where enquiring about.

For more information see my research.

.rupture.

smooth space

James had lived along the perimeter his whole life. As a child he would climb up into the attic, using the slightly rickety pull down ladder, to gaze through the small skylight window, in order to snatch a better view of the terminal building. An arched glass structure that seemed to cut the sky like the blade of the scythe his father kept in a special locked trunk in the garden shed. The panes of glass of the terminal building would catch the sun, sending beams of light like lasers shooting across the no mans land that separated the terminal building from James’s suburban semi as though they had been aimed directly into the small attic. Some times the flashes of light would appear to have some sort of meaning, a regular pulse then a gap, another flash, then a long wait followed by an intense beam. James felt that these patterns of light were forming an undecipherable message, one that was beckoning to him over the fence that ran further than he had walked to both the east and west.

As James sat looking through the fence, coiled wire, car parks and long track of shimmering grey runway that marked the perimeter, he would sometimes dream of being one of the dark suit clad figures he occasionally glimpsed boarding the aircraft. It had been fifteen years now since the Green Party had taken power, two years before James was born, and the emergency powers restricting all long distance travel for all but the wealthy and the political elite had been imposed

…………………… TO BE CONTINUED………………MAYBE………………..

.rupture.

Tracing the path of the River Fleet.

We drift in circles around each other. Threads untangle in the memory flashes of an uncanny landscape.
One night in a pub on Rosslyn Hill, I witnessed three skirmishes, three explosive grasps at ultra violence. We ended up in a cab to Camden, shifting over the path of the Fleet, and I felt London cascading, cinematic and charged. When we got to Inverness street there was a carnivalesque loopiness , it was a feverish Summer night and there were hordes of screechers and brawlers, a real demented din. We weaved through a maelstrom of dodgy loiterers and onion fryers , delighting in the thrill and degeneracy of the fairground.

The slow arduousness of that coach trip ,the impossible yearning, stranded up North, I saw our first encounter played out in such vivid clarity, the frantic kisses, it was the most alive sequence, I just watched it unfold, didn’t have to focus or even try, all that plotting and dreaming, eyes pressed to the window to see the first ragged boundaries of Edgware. Drill holes in rock, ravines gouged out in the cliff face, envelopes of blocks opening one on top of another.
In Wooley Edge services I yearned for the baroque whorls and curlicues of the labyrinth, smearing red lipstick in the fluorescent glare of the mirror.

The coach stops at Golders green station, a limp nexus, then there’s an ecstatic bundling rush with a hip flask of rum to the heath. London sprawls under a canopy of ruptures and livid blooms. I’m so tuned in to the desire you wouldn’t believe it, it scuttles all over me, little shivers of pleasure, bursts of erratic joy from shoulders to finger tips.

The ancient pathways are hazy with smoke as I drop down to the glowing windows of the Vale of Health. I search in the November dark for the traveller site behind corrugated iron, briars and hawthorn. A big crew of skinheads smash up cars defying the dead time of the Barrat estate. Caravans and trailers are reconfigured as mobile architecture. .
To desire placelessnesss is to defy authority.

Bouts of extreme violence activate my desire.

Michael Foot campaigned against that traveller site when he lived up there, called them vermin.

The covert symbols of chance encounters are visible on the heath. The city becomes cinema, signs oscillating and shimmering. I find scattered rice and hearts chalked on stone. London is a character in flux, vivid and psychoactive .

Jack Straws castle. I run through the back to blush up face and backcomb hair. Stop for a pint and conjure up images of Wat Tyler on his way to invade London with an enraged mob, smashing open prisons, beheading judges and lawyers. The Jack Straws castle is now a weather boarded simulacrum dating from 1964, you can sit in the ‘turret bar’ and survey the ‘spectacular views of the heath’

Surveying London from Parliament hill I think about De Certeau’s writings on the city. He says the aerial perspective that offers an overview of the city in it’s entirety ”transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes” but denies knowledge of the city in it’s rawest sense. I look down imagining all the knots of disorder and crave my place in it.

TO BE CONTINUED..........................

London drift: Victoria to Bethnal Green.

Robbo came to meet me after work yesterday. We were wandering through some peabody estates behind Victoria station when we encountered the work of some of our acolytes; the We are Bad retard head was chalked all over the courtyards and alleyways of SW1!
We decided to follow the trail. It took us on a convoluted route through Westminster, along the embankment, through the maze of side streets on Ludgate Hill, on past the Barbican and through Smithfield. At Smithfield we stopped for a cup of tea at the 24 hour caf then returned to the search.
The graffitied pavements led us on through the Golden lane estate, Whitecross street and Bunhill fields. We found a proliferation of glyphs round the Foundry on great eastern street. From here the symbols were accompanied by increasingly aggressive text culminating with the particularly brutal defacement of a bollard in Horatio street, E2.
From here the trail could not be followed.

A Drift through the ruins of Post Modernism

We have traced the ruins of Post Modernism along the flight paths radiating from the Genius Loci of the Airport.

The Airport has shifted from the once ultimate post-modern experience, a non-space in which all sense of time and place was suspended, to a locus of struggle and Conflict in which all the anesthetising tenants of postmodernism have been shattered.

Al Qaeda as they sat suspended in the placeless and timeless ambiance of the departure lounge understood in an instance that they where the first truly post-modern fighters, decentered and Deterritorialised, detouring the ultimate symbols of modernity, the airplane and the Skyscraper, in order to puncture simulacra so deep that the momentary stench of the rotting flesh of the real was revealed. A stench so strong that only a new paradigm could mask the scent. A paradigm that would lay waste to post-modernism and aim for our own ideological mobalisation in its support.

The Airport has become the flashpoint of contestation from climate change, terrorism, surveillance technologies, immigration and the transfiguration of the future body.

The We Are Bad Collective are engaged in experimental research exploring the lines of flight connecting the Airport to the ruins of Post Modernism.

A day glo explosion of glitter balls, balloons and killer klowns from outer space.

As soon as I spy The Stag on the corner of Fleet road I’ve crossed an imperceptible boundary that takes me beyond the grasp of affluent Hampstead and into a realm of inebriation and spontaneity. I pass the council yard on Cressy road where a multitude of sweepers are setting out to know every contour of the Fleet valley. The subterranean river asserts iself in street signs.

I pause to call on a lost acquaintance in Polgrave house and push through amusement arcade kitsch, tainted nets and falling dreylon. There’s a cat in the communal launderette dozing between geraniums pots.

This place is a nest of junkies, the dank pain of boredom spans the threshold.
I haven’t been here for 9 years but everything’s the same, even the scorched teaspoon on the gas fire is still there.

I drift out of those flats with that dislocated feeling you get when you emerge from a matinee, and suddenly feel a deep nostalgia for those film noir treble bills at the Everyman. In 1960 a film called Peeping Tom came out by Michael Powell,it was about voyeurism,the ubiquitous eye and covert surveillance. The main character was a TV studio serial killer who prowled around Hampstead secretly filming people.

I pass the hysterical darkness of Party party, a day glo explosion of glitter balls, balloons and Killer Clowns from outer space.
The Gospel Oak estate is a nexus of brutalism. There’s a warped Cartesian logic at work ,an attempt to eradicate the erratic flare ups of the street. Got to keep moving to escape the striations of control. Taking photographs risks being hauled in for enforced DNA swabs.

Listen to the Towers of Babel

.rupture.