scruffy-theory

[scruffy-theory]

Image Persistence

“Unless poetry can absorb the machine [it has] failed of its full contemporary function” Hart Crane Cafeteria Scene Two young people are hunched over a laptop at a corner table in the back of a fluorescent-tube lit cafeteria. The tubes are flickering a little too slow, and not in sync with each other. Perhaps their starter motors need replacing. Several customers have already left due to…

[scruffy-theory]

Public Image Ltd. - Hawaii

Public Image Ltd. – Hawaii

Former Punk Rock firebrand turned turgid reactionary John Lydon throws his hat into the Eurovision fiasco, for some reason. He has stated himself, this week on RTE’s Radio 1, that he has never watched a single broadcast of the event, which has run since 1956, branding it as ‘awful’ and ‘disgusting’. Lydon hopes to represent Ireland in the heavily politicised song contest. Hawaii is just kind of…

[scruffy-theory]

Notes on the contexts of Modernism

Notes on the contexts of Modernism

Happy new year everyone. Today I have begun studying the period between 1870 & 1940 as part of my degree in English Language & Literature. The module I am part way through is entitled ‘Literature in Transition: from 1800 to the present’. The introduction to book 2 (entitled Movements: 1870-1940) of the module examines the contexts around what we think of as Modernist literature and art. As a…

[scruffy-theory]

Iggy Pop - Frenzy

Iggy Pop – Frenzy

“I’m the guy with no shirt who rocks.” Peter Pan of Punk Rock is an iffy title that calls to mind dodgy allusions to everyone’s nana’s favourite pop star, Cliff Richard, but Iggy Pop is 75 and has just released a single he says will “beat the shit out of you.” Frenzy is a three minute punk thrasher that starts with the sound of an amp gently humming to itself with barely contained menace. The…

[scruffy-theory]

Whiteness

For historical context, this short story was written in June or July of 2020. The story was initially supposed to continue in further instalments, hence the subtitle taken from a song lyric, but the attempts to follow it up didn’t really go anywhere & I think (with 2+ year hindsight) that it works fairly well as a standalone, self contained, piece. I don’t wanna be a prologue to history I’ve…

[scruffy-theory]

Disco Elysium Reviews

Here are some hilarious reviews of Disco Elysium. I found them in Disco Elysium Cunoposting and the general idea behind sharing them is that if you want to convince someone to play Disco Elysium, don’t show them the positive reviews, show them the negative ones. Hyperbolic fit. Thinking hurts my brain. Nice touch, linking the Democrats and China. I wonder if this guy owns a MAGA…

[scruffy-theory]

Citizen Sleeper (first impression)

Citizen Sleeper (first impression)

A couple of days ago I Tweeted that I had just completed Elden Ring and that life is now empty. This was a little tongue in cheek, but I have played nothing else for the last two and a half months, clocking up around 190 hours of gameplay. There’s a strange feeling of loss attached to finishing a game which burrowed so completely into my consciousness. I have begun writing something about it so…

[scruffy-theory]

Mogwai - Boltfor

Mogwai – Boltfor

Buoyed by the success of last years late career highlight, As The Love Continues, their first UK number one album, Mogwai return with triumphant new single, Boltfor. Initially conceived during the studio sessions for As The Love Continues, Boltfor sees Mogwai at their epic best. Heavily dominated by atmospheric synths and glitchy percussion, the track begins lowkey, before ascending into a…

[scruffy-theory]

Jäh Division - Dub Will Tear Us Apart... Again

Jäh Division – Dub Will Tear Us Apart… Again

Before hearing Jäh Division’s imaginative deconstructions of classic Joy Division songs, I suppose I was already primed to accept this kind of thing. Due to the success of artists like Easy Star All-Stars & their guest-heavy reinterpretations of classic albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, Radiohead’s OK Computer & Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I was already quite…

[scruffy-theory]

Liminal Bridge

I thought I felt something brush past me As I reached the escape velocity Necessary To escape the gravitational pull Of gods. In the dimly lit fuselage Of the privately funded rocket I stood shoulder to shoulder With dead eyed depressives Undiagnosed Who should be social distancing In this fading future. When the big dumb boosters lit up We found the systems Syncing our cloud data When we needed…

[scruffy-theory]

Interesting pics & memes (Volume 1)

Interesting pics & memes (Volume 1)

When I first began this blog, I started out by just sharing interesting pictures, memes and screenshots that caught my imagination or resonated with me in some way. Here is a kind of return to that format with some interesting, haunting or funny visuals found across the cyberscape we call social media. More hauntological than anything but found in a Liminal Spaces group on Facebook. Quality…

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13,000 SNES Sprites

I don’t particularly have anything to say about this incredible image, I just felt a need to share it. As a man of a certain age, this image which I saw on Facebook, then sourced to reddit, sparks a great deal of nostalgia in me. As a child in the ’90s, I had a SNES & can see many sprites from games I used to love such as Secret Of Mana & Final Fantasy VI. Here’s a link to the original reddit…

[scruffy-theory]

GC/BC

Something a little different from me today. Some microfiction. I hope you like it & let me know if you’d like to see more off this kind of thing. Cheers. The good cop bad cop dynamic was thought to be the surest route to a bloodless coup, but reality like battle plans, rarely survives contact with the enemy. The two cops who exited the cruiser and strolled nonchalantly to the stopped car were…

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Taxidermy #2: Cyberpunk Hauntology

Taxidermy #2: Cyberpunk Hauntology

Another literary taxidermy I have worked on for the past several weeks. This time the first and last lines come from a novel rather than a song, William Gibson’s cyberpunk defining Neuromancer. Taxidermy #2: Cyberpunk Hauntology The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel,Greyscale mashup of crusty pixels,Launching the careers of a million YouTube video…

[scruffy-theory]

Notes: things I don’t remember

Notes: things I don’t remember

So, this is basically a note I found on my phone, dated 20/04/2020, where I’d saved a bunch of memes, Tweets etc. alongside some records of conversations I actually had (with names changed to protect the [sort of] innocent). I think I intended to write something about the Pandemic, which I never started, & these notes were related to that. Obviously that date is the date of the last thing added,…

[scruffy-theory]

Taxidermy #1: Strength

I recently became aware of the concept of Literary Taxidermy. The general idea is that you take the opening & closing lines of a poem, story or book & write an entirely new poem, story etc. between them. Instead of following this formula precisely, I have written this poem using a rhyming couplet from one of my favourite songs, Zürich Is Stained by Pavement (see below). The opening couplet here…

[scruffy-theory]

Remembering William S Burruoghs

Remembering William S Burruoghs

Today marks the 24th anniversary of the passing of William S Burroughs. The hugely influential Postmodernist and key figure in the Beat Generation is loved and revered to this day, as much for his raw & paranoid prose as for his gruff, antiauthoritarian personality. His crowning achievement in literature is surely his nightmarish sequence of vignettes, Naked Lunch. The novel, which famously had…