polly jean

'There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff' - PJ Harvey, in ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, interview with John Harris, The Guardian, 28 September 2007.


PJ was outrageously good in Bristol on Saturday night. She has many of the things I love about certain performers (more often in music than elsewhere). A confidence that isn’t bloated ego-driven. A quality of radical present-ness. A kind of lightness & strength in running with something to the nth degree, with phenomenal attack, right in it & on it but not seeming to be burnt, always there and watching, listening, her ample energies harnessed. She looks like she’s massively fed by and with her gang, the music, the worlds (and voices) she passes through with embodied blowtorch intensity, then lets go of oh so lightly. Beautiful. Elegant. Eccentric. Inhabiting the music of she. Her south-west England accent, so far away from narrow rock’n’roll assumptions, seems deeply apt here somehow – her songs are very 'english', with this country's contoured and grained shadows animated, an old soul exposed sometimes delicately, lyrically, sometimes with a roar from some underworld. Above all, she seems to have such a sure sense of her multiplicity without it ever unravelling into blurry dispersal – she is ravelled, joined up, alive, herenow - and her range of vocal textures and grains, as well as the barks, yelps, the intensity of investment & engagement in the doing are startling and massively energising. Full of uninsulated life. Joyous. Human. Loved it. Loved her.
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For PJ Harvey's website, see here

For John Harris's interview with PJ Harvey (‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, The Guardian, 28 September 2007), see here

For the Chapman brothers' video of PJ Harvey's 'Black Hearted Love', see here.

‘Videos are usually made to help to sell a record. But we'd like people to watch our videos, go out into the street and burn their Porsches’ - Jake Chapman, Guardian blogs, 31 March 2009.

For Jake Chapman on the making of the video for PJ Harvey's 'Black Hearted Love', see here

Photos of PJ Harvey, with John Parish and Howe Gelb, from their gig at the Anson Rooms, Bristol, 18 April 2009 © David Williams

as my soul me ella ella tell me

'The use of the word 'subjectivity' is as enigmatic as the use of the word 'responsibility' - and more debatable. For it is a designation chosen, in a way, to preserve our portion of spirituality'
(Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster).

A November drift in freezing London with Sue, around visits to Roger Hiorns' exquisitely self-generating sculpture/installation, Seizure, and to Susan Hiller's brilliant ellipsis-filled exhibition 'Proposals & Demonstrations' at the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Reflections on scale, reproduction, proliferation, consumption, astonishing beauty, morphing magic lantern colour fields, dream life, angels, spirits, the paranormal.

A copper-sulphate crystal encrusted abandoned flat in South London.

Levitations. Voices from beyond the grave in the static of old recordings. Unknown ghostly languages. Churchill says, "Mark you make believe my dear yes". Another voice: "He begged for bread in a dream".

Cushion covers with print images of Ann Frank, Mother Teresa, Prince William. (Let's face it, an unlikely trinity in any context. Why these three? My mind races around possible connections between them).

Serried ranks of little edible people.

Who needs drugs?

*****

Susan Hiller, on abandoning anthropology for art: 'I didn't believe there was anything called objective truth, and I didn't want to be anything but a participant in my own experience. I didn't want to stand outside it'.

instar

'People thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle.In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay". But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming ... The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006, 81-3)













'But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake ... splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 83).

All photos from the Butterfly Farm at Buckfastleigh, Devon
© David Williams 2008