Confronting the Danger of Art

Introductory page from Confronting the Danger of Art, a pamphlet I've created with artist Phil Cooper for Sidekick Books.

Retrato de Armando Seijo

University documentary on the painter Armando Seijo I helped produce.

Confronting the Danger of Art

I'm currently collaborating with the artist Phil Cooper on a pamphlet of illustrated poems for Sidekick Books entitled Confronting the Danger of Art. This pamphlet will have the look and feel of government booklets produced in the 70s and early 80s, and will use the arguments put forward by Plato in Book X of The Republic to justify the government's suppression of art and artistic expression in the UK. The text is basically all written and Phil's just in the process of illustrating it now.

Salem's Lot moment

Salem’s Lot moment: feeling of elation when you realise you and one other person have resisted a virulent cultural meme that has infected the rest of the local population. e.g. having met the one other person at a party who refuses to dance to commercial R'n'B, you both hide out in the garden. Should you fail to find another such person, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the infection, dancing along to Beyonce, now one of the damned.

Etymology: the 1979 television adaptation of Salem’s Lot concludes with two characters, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, hiding in a church from the other town inhabitants, all of whom have been transformed into vampires. Despite the danger of their predicament there’s a sense of elation that they have resisted the vampire infection.

Narcissus

AM. Sunlight an upbeat headache.

Twisted sheet, love's last conquest 


gone, Opium and cash drift south. 

Check the void. Parish shirt, gold

chain. Straight dope on the radio.

Turn it up, Stunners, battle dance. 


Halting, in lit plate check the void; 

some double. Jewels, Hummers, 


Bathing Apes, my girl, yours, for
the void, swallows murders. At

the door, I show myself to it.

My December

I love the Holloway Road