Yoko Ono and Annie Leibovitz are exhibiting a collection of  Sean Lennon’s as yet unseen childhood photos – aged 4-7.

PHYLLIDA has invested in the exhibit as the second stage of FRANKIE and PHYLLIDA’s plan to help heroine Leibovitz out of financial dire straits. Their private aim: to acquire 10 portraits from Lebovitz of each of them.  An offer as yet persistently refused.

9am Heathrow. September 30^th 2009

P   Samson wouldn’t touch me this morning.

F   Why.  You forgot Joseph Conrad was Polish at his birthday quiz?

P   I was wearing something fuscia he’d asked me not to buy. To WH SMITH’S 1^st class vendor Three packets of quavers.

F   Not all boys fathom it.  Bernie only wore it to fit in.  Samson’s a 12 year old overdeveloped acne party.  You’ve got to get over him Peeps.  You’re having a father complex with your son, it’s getting absurd.

Tokyo 10pm that evening. Airport.

F   You weren’t sick on your clothes because of the colour.  You were sick because you didn’t eat anything.

P   Get me some clothes

They exit, luggage forgotten. (Later, Frankie remembers the luggage and calls her fiancé of 5 years (first call in 3 months), who has the airport forward it).

Mandarin Hotel

Both girls kimonoed.

P on the phone Will they be on sale, the portraits?

Man at the end   No.

P   Will they be for sale to benefactors of the exhibit?

Man   Ms Ono has expressed a sincere wish that in the interests of child protection, the photos won’t be available.

P   Sean’s my godson.

Man   Strictly no Madam

F hushed whisper Nice

P   It’s a question of keeping the memories.

Man   Well then will it not be possible to acquire a photo of Sean from your own collection?

P   We had a house fire…. My god…. Christ… you’ve bought it all straight back. My photos were like dandruff. … Don’t start me crying .. .Christ

F hushed whisper Nice

Man   Ok.  Well Ms Ono will, I’m sure settle this privately.  Can I offer her your number Mrs Raymond?

P   No. no. We don’t get on so well.

Man     But you’re the biggest benefactor of the exhibit.

P    Bye.

P  To Frankie. Pass me my cheque book.

They exit, passing, as predicted, their luggage in the lobby.

(PART 3.  At the exhibit.  TUNE IN. ).

1)      Philippa Gordon, later Blake.  Remember Anne of Green fucking Gables?  I loved those books, and even I thought Anne was a bit annoying, with all that tree-hugging shit.  But Philippa Gordon, she was a proper hero.  Incredibly gorgeous, with golden blonde hair and a sexy, crooked nose, totally rich, amazingly intelligent – and completely arrogant to boot.  Everything she said was witty and charming.  She couldn’t decide whether to marry Alec or Alonzo – and in the end married an ugly, penniless vicar named Jonas and went off to be a missionary’s wife.  She was excellent.  Once, when Anne asked if she knew how good-looking she was, Philippa replied, in all seriousness: “Of course, honey.  What else do you think men and looking-glasses are good for?”

2)      Anne Frank.  Fanbloodytastic.  Have you read the dirty critical version yet?  They’re dirty bastards, those critics are – and Anne Frank was dirty too – she always masturbating, basically.  But I just love the way she was stuck in the attic for all her teenage years and still managed to find some inadequate boy to pretend to be in love with.  Teenage girls are the same the whole world over….  Hated her mother, too.  Don’t we all.  What a hero.

3)      Emily Davison threw herself under a horse so you could fucking vote.  Now stop being such a stupid cunt and complaining about your cellulite.  End of.

4)      Agatha Christie.  Really crap mother.  Anti-Semite.  Posh bint.  But fuck, at least she was interesting which is more than we can say for Ruth Yawn Fucking Yawn Rendell.  I love the fact that when her husband abandoned her like a filthy bastard man she just had a mini-nervous-breakdown, went missing, let over 5,000 people go searching for her and actually  all the while she was chilling out in a spa in Hartlepool.  You go, girl.

5)      Jordan.  No one knows whether she got raped or not.  We don’t and can’t know.  The only people who are certain she is lying are misogynistic cunts who need their dicks sawing off.  WE DON’T AND CAN’T KNOW.  What we do know about her is that she is a fucking hero.  She has survived child abuse, cancer, single motherhood, Peter Andre and she will survive any crap you chuck her way now but you are still cunts for doing it.

6)      George in the Famous Five.  Bringing lesbianism into the mainstream  since 1942.

7)      Marie Antoinette.  I’ll be honest here.  I was raised Socialist so I was always raised to believe that cake crap.  But it is just a myth, which is why French people don’t know about it.  The truth about Marie Antoinette is that she was the biggest fucking hero whoever fucking lived.  After they killed her husband, they took her oldest boy off of her, and got him to say she had abused him.  BUT SHE NEVER BLAMED HIM FOR IT, EVER.  Who of us can say we think we would be that dignified, that generous, that strong?  ONLY A LIAR.  When they asked Marie Antoinette what she had to say at her trial, she said: “I was a Queen – but you dethroned me.  I was a wife, and you killed my husband.  I was a mother, and you took my children.  Now all I have left is my blood – take it in haste.”  WHAT A FUCKING HERO.  Royalty is a load of shite and the Queen Mum was an alcoholic old hag but Marie Antoinette is a fucking hero.

8)      Madonna.  It doesn’t matter what she does, really.  We will never  forget.   We owe her something.  We owe her everything.  You think we despise her for being into Kabbalah?  Pah!  She could re-convert to Catholicism and we would still be loyal.

9)      Courtney Love.  It doesn’t matter how much this one scrubs up either.  When I was fourteen I wrote a Courtney Love quote on my Maths book.  It was: “I don’t have a penis and I don’t want one.” My Maths teacher wanted me to mark over it with black pen but I refused to.  I had to go to the Head of Year.  I told her it was a feminist statement.  She said she supported me but what if I covered my Maths book with a poster of Courtney Love?  I said okay.  This is how feminists are born, people.

10)   Elizabeth from Pride & Prejudice.  “She loved walking, that Elizabeth from Pride & Prejudice,” says my mum.  “Yeah, I know.”  I reply.  “I love walking, too,” says my mum.  “I’m a big walker, I am.  Are you a big walker, Cint?  You take after me in that way, I reckon.  I love walking too.  Just like Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice.  She loved walking, that one.”  Also the conversation with Lady Catherine de Bourgh where Lady Catherine asks her whether the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted is one of the most perfect rows I have ever read in a book, ever.

THEY’RE MINE – WHO ARE YOURS?

PS: Anne Frank’s old classmate (he invented Guess Who!) commented on my Exberliner blog. I know.

Dorothy Feaver

Rich Sheehan

‘No hero is mortal till he dies’ (W.H.Auden)

Dorothy Feaver

(Jose Guadelupe Posada)

Rich Sheehan

Dorothy Feaver

The ‘Church of Bones’ or Kostnice (Sedlec Ossuary) in Kutna Hora, Prague; Frantisek Rint used some of the estimated 40,000 to 70,000 skeletons of people buried there during the Black Death in the 15th century to adorn the interior of the church. A very different way of seeing these same bones and skulls, amassed to support great structures and sculptures.

Rich Sheehan

* The wooden postcard draws together two Murdofleur heroes: Joseph Beuys and Francis Bacon. Bacon’s text, ‘Silva Silvarum’, meaning ‘wood of woods’ (published posthumously in 1628), is about acquiring knowledge through methodological experiment; ideas are accumulated to the point of listing. So too Murdofleur’s scroll of postcards aims to stimulate ideas beyond.

Dorothy Feaver

And if you want more music, the links to the right will yield Tina Weymouth cataloguing the members of her dream band, a Soviet sporting anthem and  a Dutch hardcore commingling of Thatcher, Prokofiev and Doctor Who. In other words there should – whatever you personally happen to believe in or hold dear – be something to inspire you to selfless acts of derring-do.

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Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• The Congos – Congoman
• Madvillain feat. Viktor Vaughn – Fancy Clown
• Daft Punk – Teachers
• Public Enemy – Fight the Power
• Matmos – Tract for Valerie Solanas
• Ciccone Youth – Addicted to Love
• The Kinks – David Watts
• The Flaming Lips – Waitin’ for a Superman
• Dunaevsky and Churkin – Fitzkulturnaya
• Neophyte – I Will Have That Power

Maybe you’ve read Courtney Love’s characteristically agrammatical twitterings on the Kurt Cobain/Guitar Hero 5 furore. If not, here’s a sample tweet: “ucking nmegafraud and youve got to show for it Kurt LUNCHBOXES< CONVERESE SNEAKERS AND ACTIVISION SMUGLY BOASTING OF RAPE.” Basically, Activision – currently the biggest videogames publisher in the industry – included a Kurt avatar in the latest iteration of their enormously successful music game. While some might find this tasteless enough, what really seems to have gotten people’s goats is that digiCobain can made to sing Bon Jovi and Billy Idol songs and goof around like Flavour Flav and play air guitar alongside a CG skeleton and Shirley Manson out of Garbage and (he’s in there too) Johnny Cash. Never having been a Nirvana fan I can’t say it especially bothers me, although the effect really is pretty creepy. Love – despite the fact that no one seems to know who else would have been able to authorise the use of Cobain’s likeness – has been avidly and incoherently attempting to distance herself from the controversy, affirming the view of fans who’ve argued Kurt would not have been cool with this.

That so many fans can feel so secure in asserting what a notional 2k9 Cobain would feel says something about his status, his being arguably one of the last pop stars you could call ‘heroic’ without it seeming totally ridiculous. Not to say that there’s anything heroic about addiction or suicide (or writing gristly quiet/loud post hardcore songs, for that matter), merely that Cobain came to embody a fairly coherent set of values/attitudes/aesthetic approaches for a lot of people. He became meaning-loaded, representative. Mostly, he came to represent refusal – up to and including, of course, the refusal to live; the third most frequent Cobain-related Google search is ‘Kurt Cobain suicide.’

That’s according, incidentally, to Google Insights – a tool which allows you to ‘compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties,’ seeing how many people are searching for what, where and when. If, as a producer of online ‘content,’ you want to accrue more hits and move further up search engine listings, you have to pack either end of a post with words and phrases that rank highly – Kurt Cobain + Nirvana gets more returns than Kurt Cobain + Courtney Love, for instance. An obvious consequence is that a self-perpetuating cycle gets established, whereby certain associations, tags, terms or descriptors become welded to certain people, events, objects. I’ve already suggested that a hero might be described as someone who embodies valued qualities/principles especially directly and coherently. Dead heroes are best, because it’s less easy to impose consensus-building narratives and meanings on a moving target.

The internet ought to create opportunities for marginal viewpoints and sidelined data to find an audience, for consensus to be nagged at and unravelled a bit. To an extent it does, but too often it reneges on this promise, affording a thousand rearrangements or regurgitations of the same old information rather than anything new. Insights suggests how and why this happens. In part, it’s to do with the market; a good consumer should have catholic tastes, should be ready to sample and appreciate a bit of everything, ranging widely but not probing too deeply – not so deeply that they miss out on other neat experiences/products. Check out Hounds of Love or Gatsby but don’t worry about the rest of KB’s or Fitzgerald’s back catalogue; too knotty and time-consuming. Liberalism of taste. There’s a current British Airways ad that suggests you pop over to South America and partake of the rillyrilly rich and authentic cultural spectacle that is the Boca Juniors vs. River Plate classico – a kind of horribly sad and patronising idea if you think about it. In this sort of climate, one where we’re taught to skim and cherry pick and only vicariously invest in stuff, refusal can be heroic – after all, a deep engagement with any one thing equates to a refusal of other things. Its weird how anachronistic the ‘NO TO PORN’ scrawled on the wall outside Charing Cross seemed when I saw it the other day. It’s much more ‘now’ to give Deleuzian readings of porn’s affective charge and debate its emancipatory potential and curate Sexploitation seasons at the British Film Institute. To a large extent I agree with (and am a product of) this sort of speulative, agnostic, anti-hierarchical, omnivorous attitude, but I do worry that prioritising, letting go and saying no are things that our culture’s become really bad at, that we have to find ways to decide and exclude that aren’t just expressions of philistinism or prejudice or snobbery.

Interestingly, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoslevic have requested that Activision patch out the ability to make Kurt perform others songs. The reason ‘patch out’ is such a weird phrase is because patches normally –as the name suggests – mend or add to titles. Its common practice for companies to release downloadable bug fixes and supplementary content to games post release, but normally it’s with the intention of opening up new possibilities. Taking content out of a title is a fascinatingly aberrant gesture, a rare instance of thinking about it and deciding to say no.

POST SCRIPT

1. Just to slip in a quick plug for an artspace, I played Guitar Hero for the first time at 176 the other week. David Blandy’s Fortress of Solitude – which is all about teenage self-definition via pop-cultural heroes and talismanic texts – is on show there till next summer and contains a bunch of playable computer games. I didn’t really figure out if Blandy had anything interesting to say about avatars and heroes and subcultural style though because I was too busy getting the figurative shit virtually dragon punched out of me on the Street Fighter Zero 2’ cabinet.

2. Long-time Murdofleur fans might remember us chatting about the Buddha machine and Throbbing Gristle. Well, freakishly enough, TG have teamed up with the Buddha machine’s inventor to launch their own version of the music player, which’ll come packed not with soothing mantras but with fragments  of TG classics like ‘Maggot Death,’ ‘Wimpy Bar’ and the horrifying ‘Persuasion.’ Who’d've guessed?