Faces

Post-modern Language

The thing about the post-modern age we’re living in, and have been living in, for the past 30 years or so, is that we all want to see citations and references - -we want to see familiar images and hear familiar sounds.  We want movies to either have videobits or audiobits (clips from movies/music/TV we all remember ) and we use these as commonly and ubiquitously as words or even letters.  We live in an age of reproductions and copying and citing and so on - - we want familiarity in our entertainment and in our culture.  And these ‘bits’ operate no less and no more than letters  (or perhaps words) in an increasingly complex video/audio language; in some ways, the new language is quite logographic (writing system that often pairs visual image with sound-based characters).  In some ways, we are becoming more Chinese, if the logographic writing system has any influence on the culture – which McLuhan would, of course, strongly argue for.  (I feel like I’ve written this all before, curiously enough, at the end of University, I think).  Most young people feel the world is devoid of originality because so much of it is familiar and cliched.  But people never say the English language is cliched, or the English alphabet is unoriginal.  Everyone uses them, either words or letters, freely and we treat them as free and open to creative use, or even dull use – but no one ever says, “Oh, you used the word “the” again.  Get a life!  Say something original!  Have an original thought!”  We should treat the post-modern age we live in as the incipience of a new language, whether they take the form of words or individual letters remains to be seen, but it is a new language, more complicated by far than the poor alphabet or English language.  Our discomfort and cynicism with the world and artistic cultures, of the state of being unoriginal and totally incapable of originality, is childish and ignorant.  We are living in the age of Cadmus - -maybe that’s why I wanted to do a short movie based on the myth.  Anyways, quote freely and use the images of the culture as openly as one uses their own mother tongue. You are part of a revolution in language!

Drunken Mr. Thomas by Drunken Mr. Moore

Alan Moore

The night Dylan Thomas died, he bragged to his wife he had had 18 shots of alcohol in a row -- everything is a test of man-strength and man-constitution. But that’s alright.  (It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall of that pub that night; but I doubt the bar even had a little picture on the wall serendipitously celebrating his achievement. Maybe, though- a Turner, a landscape?)

Dylan Thomas

Here, here now! Prince Charles , with his protuberant ears, might say something of Turner, as the Prince dabbles in watercolour painting. 

Hmm, don’t believe Turner ever painted in watercolours.  No, there was no painting in the bar when Dylan Thomas entered, unphased.  .A head goes ahead however you mind it.  So he downed the dreadful elixir and did some more merciless damage to his inner worlds and his disease was blackness inside him, black, black, Bible-black; why kill himself? Mandela said about hate – it's like drinking poison to kill someone else. But what if the poison is to kill you, a big chunk of you, that the rest of you can't even tolerate?

He only wrote when he was drunk.   He died for writing, didn’t he?  Somehow, Dylan Thomas figures for me his way into a “graphic novel” I wrote, called “From Hell”. All about Jack the Ripper.  

We know the culprit early on, so the story isn’t so much about who did it, but more why the hell is he doing it, and gives us a glance into the mind of a psychopath.  But everywhere in the novel, do the English seem drunk and miserable; if you’re from the working class (or from Northampton, as I was), you know what they lived like.  I can’t imagine Dylan Thomas was a very happy man most of the time.  Even some of the time.  And so the murderees of “From Hell” too carry themselves about. As  D.H. Lawrence coined the term, a “murderee”  is someone who is almost born to be a victim - fodder for murder, with inherent weaknesses, useless martyrs,  killing themselves through a whole gamut of possible tortures; some liveable, some a kind of romance with death.  Dylan Thomas was a murderee, an Icarus; he 'drowned' dedicated in his bed, I guess; in his house, I suppose; in his underworld – hmm.

I wonder , Watchmen-esquely,

if Thomas would have made much of a post-modern superhero.  Some people would call him that already, the Welsh son, a great, sloshing poet.  He would probably be given wings, like an angel, but he would learn to use them eventually so well he could go off the cliffs of Dover, and find his way through the huffing of the spirits swimming in the air up there, before being rescued by his reason and bravery to return and set foot on the soft grass on the cliff-top. 

He, too, would travel to various engagements – where locals had gathered to hear him speak, even off the cuff; let him compose in place, follow where he was leading them, and before he got too sloshed, take to the air again and bust a hole in the nightsky,

destroy a spy satelite, (shards clattering down into the sea). And then he would die and sleep, to gain his strength and mind to face the trials and shots from the enemies/miracles below, him needing just a quarter of an hour to pace it out and turn over another gem and start them thinking, start to placate all the murderers, all of them, which lurk in everyone, everywhere, good or bad.