Performed at the Velvet Lounge, Mt Lawley. August 8, 2006 for the launch of "Happy in our graves: Ten years deep"
push aside the velvet curtain
This is a spoken poem primarily about shopping. Written in an afternoon for a gig that night...
Delivered in just over 10 minutes to a crowd of about 80 people at the Velvet Lounge bar in Mt Lawley. The event was a film launch, with Perth indie bands and a post-rock DJ. I opened the evening's entertainment.
As a performance technique, and working to a strict allocated set-time, I employed very restrained cadence - really pacing my delivery. People expect me, perhaps its the "antipoet" expectation, to be extreme. But it was delicious to slowly, joyfully gesticulate and stretch out the phrasings, almost sing the words. The previously noisily chatting audience became dumbstruck within a minute or so. They really shut up and listened. They were responsive and appreciative.
Throughout I played pre-recorded, heavily remixed, layers of "Forever Young" (Alphaville), featuring John Howard samples from his speech to US Congress in 2002, which I had also made that day...
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TITLE: push aside the velvet curtain
welcome. ladies and gentlemen. here it is...
can you feel it? you're a fragment. under the delicate velvet climate helmets we breathe her lusty toxic air. the sacred goddess akimbo to each and every voluptuous product. a canopy of us all. a necessary hero to worship in an monstrous addiction to authority. forever young we fight back magnificently.
and so there's you - oh yeah, an even flow of textile perfection, a corporate defection. your imagined skin on display for all in this momentary glass-case.
and check me: a naturally humble consumer. all bent over, draped in awe-inspiring all-new smiley faces - a coat of many many new age fears. my liberated terror, lubricated at the offline onset of sonic insertion. oh the rimshot gangrene of it all.
and i spread you like a carpet bomb right here in the mall baby. forever young on this bench - like the saturated mesmeric diaspora of love and guts and glory - a holy money-tin virus. a public transport fantasy.
this nubile halogen light of you - your grandiose memescape - a great new new new flavour as the spinning billboards scroll and rescroll new-skool, old-hat vacuosity. yr eyes an as-seen-on-tv-colour.
and its almost real this sensation. i almost feel alive in this special offer suit. forever young. young forever.
and the deep-scars of a uranium-state determinism, the fly-by spending-habit-police seem distant, in this nonchalant sterility of this bottle-shop coolroom.
the geo-sequestration a mere suggestion. yet i cannot make a necessary executive decision on the beer.
can i? can i? cheers.
stoic resistance is a fools game, she said from the mountainous till. cracking another long neck on the precipice. her brilliant knuckles white-hot in the faded light. her gigantic golden clitoris shimmering on the keys - her grill. my recipe for organic turtle steaks bewildered the audience breaking the duco fascination.
her hand tightens, increases. tightens increases, tightens increases - she's lost in the pulse of her rhythm - my global goal now to break the surface. a nobel peace prize for a new upholstery.
i can feel the plastic bulging in my pockets. its turgidity, its inflated sense of self-importance. and then there's you pushing against my secret thigh. throbbing like a standard-model heartland. man. the clarity more than meets the eye. like a homo-erotic transformer on 'roids, a robot in disguise - i skip in time across this busy intersection - imagining the polyps bleeding an orange memory into the traffic.
ah i am so liberated... so lubricated.
oh i wish i was a rich rich man in a poor mans body - my hips are oh so perfecto. forever young forever young they scream in tribes from the screens.
forever young forever young i wanna be forever young
with this handful of carbon-based toxicity.
and we ran - all the blood n car-swept streets. our aerials spinning like sonic youth channelling. it seems an earful of nothing goes a long long way - a splashing of poster-boy god-speed noise. i'm a pirate radio station on wheels - yet the mobile phone seeps random reasons.
beep beep beep.
tearing bloody chunks from the walls here - sprouting my anti-jingles a reminder that banjo is not a real text, that ern malley was an illegitimate jam. that skateboards are a legitimate, delicate method of transport. that sticker-art is the new da-da. that dishonesty is the best policy. the first fleet. the first fleet.
and this recurring nightmare: our banana's in pyjamas as president. the time to gather moss all lost in a composite of toy satans and wet cocaine. and the shopping centre carpark is where we all really die...
we remembered the first packets of shiny joy - seeking reasons to exist in the font - in the shade of massive tuarts. before the shift.
but for now your splendid corporate flesh - a capitalist's delight neath my callous, mirrored hands- i knead each part of you. a fetish of epic proportions - and we dive into the deepest mothers - a form of nuclear sweat - a radiation suit for jesus, all salt-lakes and network cables to the afterlife.
i'm logged on baby - i'm forever young.
at this point i've blogged my way thru to the other side of the classic war symbols. the semiotic trance. the neon christians scrambling, electing, molesting, erecting each other like rampant followers of a 9000 ft jesus.
yet together, we push the vinyl curtains to one side and force ourselves into yr dripping lip, your ears a broken vase, your fingers a sandlewood tonic.
and we patrol the bastard brick streets licked naked underneath the bullet-proof lucky country theories of everything. and the mind of god no longer a cattle truck. a new pluto moon - a chronic holden chick on the bonnet - an open-mouthed gay icon. we're good to go, she spruiked from the boxes.
and her rippling red biceps tripping against mine, our embrace never reconciled. we knew our star-spangled everythingness. it all seemed proper. the right thing to do - at the time.
we always say that, i hear you thinking, as this poem offers a deconstruction of contemporary culture.
forever young we destroy 2000 years in a moment.
you're pulling the knitting needles over our republic-over-my-spastic-bodybag, he roared from the pulpit - his quivering lip a dead giveaway. the all-time small-town blanket bash.
from the open roof he demands many fresh kids. many fresh faces. the sacrifices too the branded logos of her brittle reality.
you can feel it, your custom-made atomised culture fragment. the velvet curtain punctured - breathe your lusty breath. your heaving welts.
and the goddess stumbles, her bags akimbo, my trolley-boy connection.
forever young we fight back magnificently.
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allanboyd06 Performed at the Velvet Lounge, Mt Lawley. August 8, 2006
at the launch of "Happy in our graves: Ten years deep" - an Anti-Howardian film.
http://antipoet.blogspot.com
allanx@indymedia.org
ph0402 573 580
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