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Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite |
1.
...as a child I was told that not knowing the alphabet will cause illiteracy. It'll send you into a drugged out gangland life of white trash nightmares and corner boy peddling to homosexuals, who are professional players, obsessed with age and are willing to drag it and you into emptiness. That in knowing the letters, I’ll know that they assemble to construct various images that become words. Words are the narrative transformation of the images. Printing a page of unbroken words is like a fresh tattoo. It captures a moment/place, sentiment and period. It orchestrates the body in motion as it flexes to move a pen/strike at a key/form a fist/lift a drink or move to a rhythm. The words become the unspoken intertextuality of ethnic, racial and cultural metaphoric speech. The metre of casual dialogue = a rhythm/noise/visual/bass, a soundtrack to a post-literate train of thought.
I dedicated Wigger to the sound of Slayer and Sonic Youth—"Bloodland" to Cannibal Corpse (George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher) = I dedicated them to sound. Slayer is for the fury and speed and violence that the book has. Deathmetal is the living desire of the neo-redneck burnout. It's all going after the sport of brutality—the art of hurting someone. The walking jokes, with targets on their backs, placed there by lil’bitches, ‘taking them for M’n M’s. The only violence is, the way the words appear on the page, marked by the slashes that connote rhythm of speech and interrupted thought. They are like semi-colons = / the // are colons and so are the = signs. Sometimes the - move out to separate speech—someone takes lead//does a solo. Sonic Youth's sounds appear in the form of the book dissolving. Deathmetal is just dealing with the situation. The book and the story, like the characters, are trying to hold themselves together. Brian and Jerehmia symbolize this the most. They talk. No one listens.
...a printer ejects swatches of stolen tissue that collects the sound and images of what is considered low brow art and skill//
Hardcore (H.C.)/Country/Rockabilly
Thrash and Speedmetal/Rap/Deathmetal/Blackmetal
Cinema/Television and;
Comics Books
Brian appears to be rambling but he makes the most sense because he speaks through metaphor and his heart, like Black speech and song—the negro spiritual, seeming to sing about a river,
when it is a code,
for an escape,
at a certain time,
from the plantation.
Gangsta rap seems to boast
about an evening
or event
but is just shouting
validity,
existence and
enterprise.
Brian’s grasp on reality becomes inconsequential.
Jerehmia’s story is dumbshow.
Brian surrenders his ideals and his soul, by killing Spook (the Black hustler friend).
Jerehmia is just having his taken and he's telling you about it—but I knew people in Atlanta that didn't want to hear about any of that or them. I knew a boy from Tennessee hurting worst than what was going as oppression under those 100 dollar Afro centric hats.
...Wordcore, Jamaican dub poetry, Rap and Rock Steady are disposed to the Homeric boasts and catalogues of post-modern thugs/hoodlums and desperadoes w/ the hope of kindness and compassion.
In donning the Black persona, symbolized through the silver jacket, Brian finally does what everyone has been attempting to do throughout the book. Brian is killed—his soul is killed, through the burden of the weight of the Black youth—the Black persona, the persona of deglamoured oppression. He has achieved the goal of being Black but he is unprepared to handle something that the Blacks are raised to deal with through centuries of struggle—you’d suppose.
I met a boy with crystal smack grey eyes, who was offering to suck the fender (for $5) off an urban assault vehicle for a painkiller.
If you listen and see the page, you'll see a tattoo and note well, that some words are//
-Rhythm
-Lead and
-Bass
Jerehmia, he has no desire to be Black. He knows what the shit is and he's got his own. He just watches the seemingly liberal Perry go catch back the Black boy trying to bail on the whole scene. He just knows that nothing that's happening, is about him or the niglet. It's about the little men with big shirts and the chicks in bed or sitting off from the Bar b q..
...strange how all the youngmen holding up walls waiting on passers by had deep drawls, no smiles and trailers in their hearts.
The book and the story are collapsing. The spaces and sparsness of the narrative is there to get you to listen carefully and read again and close read and not take things at face value. People say more, especially, when they've had a lifetime of hurt, through very few words and the words look in ways that they feel—speeching in accapella. The words sound the way they feel. The book shows patterns of speech.
Mcluhan would argue the global village: technology is good—the book people are lacking in the rich grammar of the TV = This is referred to today as the post-literate generation—John Cage’s bastard children turn to violence and the acoustic space of video and computer games and the delicacy of words typed over television screens.
Mcluhan would argue...
...the acoustic
2 .
The Comic book uses frames and juxtaposition to connect the disconnectedness of thought and words, be it through the gruff noireness of Frank Miller, Dave Sim or Martin Wales’ "Kinder Nacht," or the smooth lines, colours and ruff justice of Todd McFarlane. They collect the street sounds and activities the way Rap culture manipulates and emulates, via spin art and samples, the ready made terror of interurban life. To frame is to make perfect the moment of the fingers striking the keys, which can be the repetition of words and phrases = outlets ripping and shredding, w/ the knowledge that framing is certainly an attempt to make perfect, to make the words as enticing and elegant as the bovine euphony of a fascist's goose step.
Brian is condemned to sit, numbed out on pills, in a room, filled with drag queens, watching them transform. Just like Brian's desire, and the other characters desires, to be Black, the drag queens attempt to be women, without knowing, that beyond the glamour, is a lot of hardship and struggle. Drag queens die, as well, when they finally achieve their dream of being a woman. It's not as much fun or better than they thought it would be. They are unprepared for the daily struggle and threats. You can see this on the page. They are boxed in, allowing themselves to be, finally, separated from the freeness and flow of the book. They must stay within the parameters. The glamour is gone. They have to bear the actual pain. Brian has got the auditory recollection of rape in his head. Brian is numb. So’s Jerehmia, but he's numb from the beginning, any way. He’s just recollecting, now—no need to figure. He can’t hold it together, nor does he want to. His flag is upside down, Oswald’s dead—nothings right. You separate the body from the mind and it’s all good.
...a word can be the hums or bops in the background as when a funk musician beats the strings w/ his thumb—the buzz and scratch of a tat gun on a steadied arm or back—the stilled breath and firm muscle of a word or image engraved on a belly. It gets tied into the paragraph. Some words take on the repetitive ecstatic riff of ska or reggae or the decay of the crash/noise of H.C. or metal. They recline on the page or in the air as if they were all going to amount to a junkie’s last sigh. Instead, they collapse into the lost, disorientated and somewhat satisfied image of Orsen Wells after thrashing a room at Xanadu.
...and the book and story crumble into a final sustained note, done through a note to Andrew from Jerry. "Bloodland" has a crack of gun shot and shit and a heart beat. As it began on a note—it ends. His (Jerry’s) speech is proper and distant from the language of the book. He has become a literary character of the Modernist sense.
Jerking the Modernist approach to distance, into "groovy times,” is the dumbshow to the contemporary adoration of the absurdist tragic comedy = anti-romantic. It presents itself, today, through the jaded situationism of talkshow culture. The sort that "Blast" and "Counter Blast" utilized through the headlines and print of newspapers. The newspapers place horror and glory side by side in a folio that has a calculated randomness. It will always assemble to state 1 thing = these events happen. It is only through such genres of media (music/comic/print/television), that we can see that each has a thing in common/coupons and advertising = rhetoric and metaphor. If the passage of a text takes on the sound and image of the disjointedneness of casual speech and media, then the results are not only the coded tales being woven, but the presentation of the brutality that leads to the violent outcome.
Jerehmia, he just figures...he’s just feedback from a bass, right now.
Wigger and "Bloodland" are what the printer jetted out—a conceptual pastiche alphabet from the corner or gutter. It assembles the images in sequence which persuades the narrative to be pulled out from under a character. It’s what got them blocked off—formatted, layed out, then pile-drived with carefully selected skin grafts of onomatopoeias. The words takes Auden’s diver, diving w/ his ‘brilliant bow’ and takes it beyond the enthralled spectator. They suppose that he has forgotten to test the water and has come out a dumb struck paraplegic = what just happened/where are our people/who are our people/do we have any people: NO. However, they still keep tabs on the moment, place sound and period that left the object devastated, hung over, and w/ an image permanently scratched and coloured onto his flesh or hanging in a window.--
Oi Cheers,
Laz