17/12 The 12 Days of XMAS - Day 4
LIBRARY artefact #034
ON THE 4th DAY OF XMAS…
‘Four calling birds? Well, they remind me of our four faithful friends, the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and Obi-Wan… but don’t let my preachin hold you back from the cheap bon-bons these upright Xanaduum folks got lined up for you in today’s advent socket (I say ‘upright’ but by golly, that ‘X’ for ‘Xanaduum’ sitting in place of Christ’s name our Lord sure sets my temple to throbbing so bad I can feel all my inner demons banging on the latches and prepping up a wrathful tempest to get loose and cause some FUCKEN HAVOC in this TOWM!!!)’
They call them the ‘freegzz’, the ‘qwierdies’, the ‘upside-insideniks’, the ‘not-now-people’, the ‘flower formation’!
They’re the nuts that live to get cracked, the stiffs that won’t bend lightly, the nixed-out never generation with stars in their teeth, who KNOW where it ain’t - and if they’re not HERE they probably will be soon enough!..
Before that’s the case, here’s a rare, heartrending glimpse into some early Invisibles-era tomfoolery round GM’s house at Solstice and Sunreturn! ’93 or ’94? I did right by nature and got rid of these last sprouts of ‘hair’ for good not long after, so thenabouts. Someone somewhere’s sure to know. This is how people who lived before you dressed and how they behaved and how we celebrated a genuine Dickensian Yuletime back in the 20th century, in the Good Old Days of that misidentified lull in hostilities the Old Ones somewhat prematurely declared ‘The End of History’!
I picked up the garish fractal shirt as a once-in-many-lifetimes bargain at Camden Market and sometimes wore it for rituals, Hookah-smoking attempts, or impromptu festive photoshoots like this one. Otherwise, it was a far from comfortable fit and you’d mostly wear it to liven up the visual field indoors.
The shirt – as you’ll see from the photographic evidence, a mobile DMT trip shaped like a headless torso seen through some kaleidoscopes - had its secret weapon on the back, where the manufacturer’s tag and washing instructions concealed a hidden pocket devised by fellow knowing clubbers who’d stitched the ingenious rag so you could cut a migraine dash on the dancefloor and stash your pills (‘ecstasy’ then, prescription now perhaps) safe from any bouncer’s groping hands! They’d NEVER look up there, mate!
In practice, the shirt’s obvious appeal to people who liked party drugs invited immediate questioning and arrest and was rarely worn outdoors; the tag with its hidden smuggler’s pouch could be safely relied upon to irritate the sensitive skin at the back of the human neck. The effect was to induce a blazing red rash, whose pulsing, radiating edges worked like Radar soundings to identify the precise location of any cunningly stowed pharmaceutical contraband.
The shirt – already an odd and awkward fit that was tight under the armpits and loose around the neck, to hint at the pattern’s plausible origins on some tailor’s dummy crafted to model the physique of an adult orang utan - was itself so loud and demonstrative, so clear and unambiguous in its forthright Dayglo depiction of any likely wearer’s actual inner mental territory, it may as well have flashed out ‘ME, OFFICER, ME!’ in 3-inch-high fibre optic letters.
To wear this ‘psychedelic’ fractal shirt in public was the visual equivalent of storming a care home screaming abstract formulae through a loudhailer.
Simply slipping into the offending item made one an instant eyesore, a target for attention, marked out in bright patterns as an obvious wrong un!
It probably glowed under UV and lit up like a frontal lobe spasm in the dark as well!
And yet… once inside a club or warehouse, the outlandish multicoloured monstrosity could convert to instant effective camouflage, a means to abruptly vanish in the shifting, disorienting mass of the tranced-out multitudes, all with their own tie-dye and paisley!
What days they were before the new regime!
MYSTICAL SHIT
‘Dear Buddhadelic Santasattva –
‘All I want for Christmas is my old moptop…’
GALLERY artefact #031
Glasgow, 1994
KILL RAVE! KILL RAVE!
‘It’s beautiful – I’m flying like a flag… like a buttress… like a fish…’
GALLERY artefact #032
Glasgow, 1994
‘As KAP konfronts a KOSMIK KRISMAS KRISIS…’
WHAT LIES BEYOND THE BACK OF BEHIND?
It’s a reasonable question…