The Artist In Utopia
One
day God lit His Thumb and the resulting flame was the Light of All Creation.
Once it was done God sliced off His Own Pollex and walked away, leaving the
digit ablaze.
And
then:
Olivia
was conceived during Hendrix’s set in Max Yasgur’s field at
Olwyn
despises Olivia. She hates her politics, her taste in music. She used to love
J., a painter and a folk-singer she’d known since they were kids but he’d grown
more and more moody and finally told her it was all over between them and set
off to the city to make his name. She still missed the times they’d steal down
the garden to fuck among the laurel bushes in the rain. She missed those times
even though sometimes she’d had to drag his head down to her nipple just to
stop his mouth, afraid he’d say something cruel. On the guest-list of life
Olwyn had always pictured J.B. her plus-one. Then he’d just upped and gone. But
good riddance, says Olivia in her
This
morning the radio and TV said there’d been a revolution. Something big had
happened overnight. Certain emergency laws passed. Soldiers in the streets,
etc. Olivia was so happy, saying the good guys had finally triumphed, which
Olwyn knew really meant the bad guys had. In the end Olwyn just couldn’t bear
her sister’s gloating anymore so she bashed in her skull with a claw-hammer
and then finished her off at her leisure, garrotting her with a guitar-string
J.’d given her, the very same A-string Roy Orbison used when he recorded “It’s
Over” he said. 
And
Olwyn really loved that song so-o-o much……….
**************************
Chester’s
a mess: crooked back, a lethal stammer and a built-up surgical boot on one
foot, with a pathological dread of men of posture or those that open doors
using a card with their photograph on hanging from a chain round their necks….
He’s a fugitive, on the run after having run down a tourist. (It was neither
exactly an accident nor exactly on purpose, more just one of those moments
when something snaps and your vision swims and you can’t tell hell from a
holiday). The guy might be dead or just concussed, but either
way there’ll be bureaucrats with computers on the case by now, he’ll be in
somebody's database for sure, so Chester’s not taking any chances, he’s pedalled
a hundred miles on a buckled wheel and now it’s dusk and he’s within reach
of the city and so stops to rest. And up the hill comes J., a bag in both
hands and a guitar across his back.
************************
The
revolution’s a real victory for appetite, the story goes: when push came to shove the
yea-sayers walked it. Three cheers
for the can-doers! The whole country is an orgy of solidarity and celebration.
There are drummers in animal-masks on the streets, the Prime Minister himself
stands up to address the nation in a stag’s head with antlers, an oiled muscleman
throwing poses in the public gallery. All competing social and political ideologies
are henceforward reconciled in a massive vindication of hope-centred thinking,
they say and the Regular Guy’s swagger of omni-competence is the
chosen posture of the righteous. Recidivists are bound and gagged and
set adrift on coastal waters in flimsy coracles.
New
quangos proliferate, new guidelines are issued. A new art is demanded, an art
of praise, not a carping one. An art as different from
the old as is laser-guided skywriting from a faded name on a tatty old
sunblind. Symbolism is out for starters, you don’t need symbolism in
US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And
one day a new name comes up: one J. As a singer a real bargain-bin never-was,
but causing ripples as a painter of sorts. Meaning, of the culty kind…… Someone
taps a key and reads off a screen:
“Canvases
of some merit deemed to include ‘Sadist In Open-Toed Sandals’, 1998, tempera,
gouache, oil and pastel on paper. Private collection…. ‘Jobber on a
---
Skip a bit! --- No, enough of this shit ---! Does he paint to praise or regret?
Do we weigh him down with honours or burn the bastard? Let’s fetch him in for
questioning, eh?
They
have a lead. One of the squaddies frequents a particular good-time girl in
whose toilet hangs a picture a john of hers painted in lieu of payment,a
likeness of a goddess whose post-orgasmic ripples flow forth from her to form
the dawn sky. And he half-remembers she said the perpetrator’s name was
….. J….? The squaddie’s canoe being
anyway in bad need of some rapids (lately he’d been feeling so horny that even
the Kookaï shop-window mannequins had him sweating) he said he’d check it out straightaway.
*************************
Sheena
and the Girls are an underground terrorist organisation dedicated to the overthrow
of Heaven On Earth. They bomb and maim like CEO’s PAs send memos. They cut the
genitalia from their victims and gather the trophies in buckets. “ These
ladies are into apocalypse” says a
leading liberal broadsheet. Others say that back before the revolution
Sheena had murdered her own sister with a guitar string Roy Orbison had
strummed on one of his beautiful old hits….. Or was it Del Shannon?
J.
and Chester move from squat to squat, safe-house to safe-house. The word on the
streets is J.’s rattled someone’s cage,
that there’s posters up, a reward offered for information, etc. This very afternoon
J.’s
having bad dreams. Last night he dreamed of a posse of young mothers out with
their prams. The mums are built like Sumo wrestlers from the waist up but strut
along on just chicken-legs. They stuff J. in a pram and wheel him back to a
maisonette. Gassy lunchers in restaurant windows watch them go, chewing
obliviously, deaf to his screams. Back at the maisonette they strip him – he’s
literally shit his pants with fear but no way does that put them off, the
babies are howling and gurgling in high-chairs, their mothers are holding open
their labias, squawking “C’mon, shitbreath! Let’s see you lick!”. And then he wakes up, trembling.
Yes,
he’d done exactly as J. had told him. ( Lately J.’s been despatching him to buy
back or steal all his works --- painting, drawings, installations, whatever –
just get them back and destroy them. Everyone assumes it’s because his name’s
on the shitlist but what do they know?).
So today Chester reports how he dropped by a certain gallery, distracted the receptionist
long enough to make off with one of J.’s early works, then burned it on a
bonfire, scooped up the ashes, stuffed them in a pillow-case and got Archi --,
a true amigo that’d never breathe a word to anyone -- to drive him round the
South Circular from Forest Hill to Putney while he empties the contents of the
pillow-case out the window as they go. But even though
---
“That’s right, SHANKS! What a wanker, eh? What kind of a fucking artist d’you call a
wanker like SHANKS for Christ’s sake!…. So we fight ---”.
---“Y-y-y-you
w-what?”
“We
fight. Bare-knuckles, knives, whatever. Sheena says it’s up to us. But the
winner gets to paint her.”
Jitterbugger
knows he’ll pull all the stops out for Sheena.
Bucketfuls
of impasto trowelled on a bed of crushed sapphires. He’ll tongue the paint on! He’ll pose her pogoing along a catwalk of prostrate
field-marshals or
high-kicking
in skates over a rink of 5-star generals’ chins. Maybe he’ll even write her a song! The only other girl he
ever did that for was Olwyn, about a million years ago.
But
1)
Sheena
and her girls cut men’s cocks off.
2)
People
that hobnob with Sheena and survive only get their bollocks stamped on in
provincial and metropolitan police-stations anyway.
3)
OK,
Shanks is a shit artist but a real tough hombre. Born in a snow-drift, his
mother dead with frostbite and he claws his way out of the womb in a sub-zero
lane.
4)
I
thought we were torching pictures
not painting fresh ones …..?
J.
stands at the window, a toy spyglass in his hand. When the moon shines full in
the eyes of St Ignatius the Martyr, wedged in his nook just below the steeple
of the church a block away, that’s the signal.
And
yo, there it is.
They
head for the breaker’s-yard.
*********************************
At
the yard, the shell of a Vauxhall Cavalier sits at the summit of a column of
twisted metal and in the gap where the driver’s door should be sits Georgie
Boy, Shanks’s look-out, legs dangling, chewing chocolate-coated nuts from a
bag. Immediately beneath the crow’s-nest Shanks is sat chopping out a line. Two
of Sheena’s girls, Jazz and Ellie are there as referees, jigging to the music
on their iPods while they wait. Shanks has more profile as a musician than a
painter lately, sort of Crouch End’s answer to the Antifolk thing and about to
land some luscious deal says certain websites, A& R guys making big round
goo-goo eyes at him, etc. Next year
Later with Jools, the year after, The South Bank Show, they’re saying. But he
likes to keep his hand in, paints the odd mural and is well up for a crack at
Sheena. Eli, another member of the posse, shows up. Georgie Boy’s plating Eli’s psychiatrist and so gets all
his secrets from her and then taunts him with them. But Eli has his own spies
and he’s heard it from Archie that J.’s losing it, torching and shredding his
whole oeuvre -- which is about all it fucking deserves -- plus he’s having
bonkers dreams and only sleeps by day. Believes there’s something being born in his pictures --- “A microdot of talent, could it be?”
enquires Shanks --- but nah, something malevolent!
Something evil! They reckon he’s
only a dick’s length from a breakdown. And yeah, Shanks himself heard some
soldiers carted off a doodle J.’d done for a hooker up Holborn way. Must mean
his name’s on the Index. Can only mean he’s got the wrong colour dazzle on his
social and political convictions, haw haw haw! He must loathe any number higher
than one, eh lads? Must think two souls in intercourse is a fucking mob, am I
right? But then Georgie Boy starts pontificating about the discrediting of all
notions of stable identity and the whole anti-humanist thrust of the
post-structuralist thingummaybob but he’s only being sarky, it’s just some old
bollocks he picked up from some tight-fanny’d polytechnic tart he’d knobbed
years ago, long before Heaven on Earth. Then Ellie says that for security
reasons there’s been a change of location, that the bout’s to take place at a
workshop off Brixton Hill. Will it fuck! says Shanks. Jazz says it’s on
Sheena’s say-so. Shanks protests again and gets a heel in the balls for his
impertinence.
*****************************
The
workshop is decked out like a chapel of silk. Five cocoons of a
semi-transparent, veil-like chiffon material are suspended from the ceiling,
hanging all the way to the floor and piling up there. Jazz will videotape the
contest. The combatants square up to each other, trading
insults,
sniffing each other’s cologne. To Shanks J. is the damp patch on the gatepost
where his chihuahua cocked his leg, the dodgy valve in the engine of the great
common enterprise. To J, Shanks is a fuckwit, a mere scented candle to his own
blazing star. Things kick off, a powerful wind-machine whipping the shrouds,
Wagner pumping through massive bass-bins, and twin strobes shadowing the
action, Shanks hissing like an aerosol, J. --- doing what exactly? The
Charleston? Then Shanks has J. by the throat,
uppercuts him, flings him down, stomps him. It’s a massacre, a public
slaughter, till Ellie steps up behind Shanks and severs his windpipe, Jazz
turning on Eli and Georgie Boy and plugging them, one slug apiece. (Rigged
match? So Life’s unfair! Get over it!). Chester’s whimpering in a corner, Jazz
bends over the prostrate J., pins on the winner’s rosette, tells him Sheena’ll
be in touch.
****************************
But
the next day Chester’s bobbing through a built-up area when he’s arrested,
hoisted by a chain about his ankles and interrogated by eloquent men, impaled
on their syntax, mangled by their compound-tenses, his brain pricked and gouged
by the sharp points of their alphabet. First abuse --- a freak of nature, half-man
half-squid, a human S-bend they call him --- then threats ---
talk
of butchers’-hooks and blow-torches --- until the interview settles down into
‘a cosy chat in preparation for a provisional drafting of affidavits and so
on’. The quiet click of their keyboards proved him a testifier of real mettle,
a paragon of co-operation, his interrogators’ features just squiggles of
amazement at all he had to divulge. He told them everything, about J.’s
nightmares, the contest with Shanks,
even about the tourist.
And
Chester’s plod through the facts led to the following findings: That J. was
not after all the typhoon of subversion for which they might’ve taken him
but a mere sixth-former who would ordinarily be allowed to proceed unimpeded
on his complacent, lackadaisical way to artistic oblivion, steering a course
between the Scylla of well-deserved critical opprobrium and the Charybdis
of
Except?
Except
they really, really wanted that
fucking bitch Sheena, they wanted her so
badly. To serve to the nation sautéed. And J.
could lead them to her and her harpies.
Mobilise
a crack squad! And a tumbler of Mouton-Rothschild all round! To victory!!
***************************
********************************
And
something like two years passed, until one day Sheena contacted J., specifying
a time and place. J.
A crack squad followed at a discreet distance,
on tiptoe.
*****************************
But
some of the girls are bored, moaning about how they have to hang around in the
rain dodging thunderbolts just so Sheena can get her face crayoned by an old
flame, how it’s not what they signed up for. For a long time Sheena doesn’t
answer. Then she says that there’s one more mission to undertake and then
that’s it, they’re to go their separate ways. That they’re to elect a new
Sheena, or just slip back into Heaven On Earth, try and melt back in …..
And
silence sucked down her words like a gourmet soup off a spoon.
A
peal of thunder.
Chester
struggles to the summit, hyper-ventilating.
J. gropes his way towards Sheena, slipping on the wet grass. As he
reaches her he falls to his knees, his brow in the grass, arms outstretched on
either side of his head, in worshipping position.
Sheena:
Fuck!!… What have they done to your eyes!!!!
And
J. explained that a sacrifice had been needed, a big one, that there’d been no
hope of just getting away with an ear-lobe, every star and pebble and ripple
and nerve and sinew had screamed EYES! And so painting a picture was now no way
an option but he still wanted to describe to her how ---------
And
Olwyn tried to explain everything, how one thing had just led to another, how
she’d made it all up as she went along and
had ended up with her not wanting to be Sheena anymore. But J. just kept
on and on about the painting and Olwyn just couldn’t see the J. she’d loved in
this giggling babbler with a face like a clot of vomit.
And
she starts beating and kicking him and the other girls start on Chester and
the storm breaks directly overhead and there’s thunder and lightning and gunfire
and troops swarming over the hill. Olwyn reaches for a Stanley knife to cut
J.’s throat but two soldiers drag her off. Her Girls are being slaughtered,
the survivors rounded up. Chester tries to explain to J. how they made him
lead them there, how they’d twisted all his organs like corkscrews but J.
is moving in a small circle, his face and arms raised to the sky, weeping
tears of joy again.
***********************
A
whole lifetime later and J. is an old man, his studio crammed with canvases on
easels, all reading in different colours and in a childish, spidery hand ‘ J.
Loves Olwyn’. J. is working on a figure of Olwyn in plaster, wildly
unsymmetrical, lumpy, like Sheena hideously deformed. Seventeen hours a day the
world-famous artist toils at these pictures and still his dealer can’t keep
pace with demand.
“Just
who is this Olwyn, anyway?” asks a representative of the world media.
But J. doesn’t respond, or even acknowledge his presence. He gazes inwards
on the void like an Algardi bust, scrawling on another fresh canvas.
His
dealer is embarrassed. “Typical of genius, eh? Too engrossed in the mysteries
of creation to even find time to so much as nibble a Caesar salad!”.
“But
Olwyn?”
“Oh,
I believe she was a lady he knew in his youth. In the bad old days…..”.
Some
days J. asks for Chester. He’s told Chester can’t come, he’s dead.
“When?”.
“You
know perfectly well when! Years ago! Of old age!”.
J.
asks how his unfinished sculpture looks.
“Awful”.
“It’s
Olwyn.”
“Right.
Olwyn”.
And
he gets up, goes to the window, smiling, gazing out at the wet Soho rooftops
under a slate-grey evening sky.
THE END