HARMONY TALKS TRASH

Harmony Korine is gleefully recycling the diabolical tagline to the assembled press at London’s Mayfair Hotel: “It’s about people who fuck trash. Not just about people who fuck trash, but that is one of the things that they love to do.” It’s hard to know whether the overgrown wünderkind has hit the festival circuit to promote his latest romcom paean to the weird, Trash Humpers, or simply to offer a public warning. “I’m not trying to trick anyone or tell them it’s …” What is the opposite of humping garbage, though? “…about unicorns” he decides, shrugging his shoulders and bursting into his trademark cackle. Then, like a short circuit, he’s back to the safety of home turf: “IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE THAT FUCK TRASH.”

It’s not so much that plot spoilers are suddenly redundant: Harmony was never that into plot in the first place. It’s just that however much his wilful literalism tries to sidestep any critical backlash, it’s clear that there’s more at stake than he’s letting on. In the past he’s mentioned the project as having being born of his wonder at the “beautiful forms” of trashcans caught in the blind glare of streetlamps — and the video violence that the film offers up is certainly counteracted by the hypnotic bent of the outsider portrait. When he does manage to stop underselling himself, it’s clear that a kind of pure conceptual excess is the motivation. His humper protagonists are “artists of mischief” he elaborates, who “get such a true joy out of doing horrible things that they almost turn it into an art form. Smashing lightbulbs, burning down houses and tap dancing in parking lots becomes something very exceptional.”

Harmony has always been seen as a bit of an exception in the film world — right down to his famed tap dancing habit. Ever since Larry Clark headhunted the then teen to write the screenplay for Kids, he has continued to make projects that descend into the queer corners of life and usually manage to find a strange beauty there. Pedro Costa, the ascetic Portuguese director known for sensitive portraits of the marginalised like Colossal Youth, recently said that 99% of films being made were worthless. The main gala content of the latest London Film Festival hasn’t done much to disprove the theory — a bland mix of Beatles nostalgia with Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy and auteurs like Wes Anderson serving up readymade branded animation. Harmony, whatever he is, is defiantly not a part of all that, which is why many continue to group him with the 1% of interest. His real is different from Pedro Costa’s, but it’s clear that he too is against the realm of pure fantasy; his world is never quite dissociable from life. Harmony’s view is surprisingly even-handed: “I’m not a fan of 99% of the movies that are made” he says, “but they probably matter to some portion of the audience.”

As becomes apparent, Harmony doesn’t like to indulge the big questions, but when asked about the future, he admits that “what constitutes a feature film is evolving or devolving, depending on how you look at it. I have this strange suspicion that the lengths of movies, that the way films are going to be viewed — even the style of stories told — is about to change.” Something has already changed. Korine’s world seemed extraordinary back in 1995 when Kids came out and MTV’s Real World was about as real as it got. Since then the rise of YouTube and the omnipresence of cheap digital video means anyone could theoretically mimic the intimist collage effect of his films by selective YouTube use. How has his view of filmmaking changed now that the world has started to catch up? The new technologies are “both good and bad” and “democratic” he says, “because they make things easy to access.” But Harmony, like most people, is uneasy about the glut of information, admitting “at a certain point everything becomes noise. I find it increasingly difficult for movies to have a lasting emotional resonance, the way they did when I first started watching. You would see something and it would live with you forever and could change the way you thought about things. There seems to be this shift where now it is just about consuming them. Even the movies that people say they love for the most part they forget the next day.”

That’s the thing about Harmony — for all the bravura and the big mouth, he has always been sentimental where his art is concerned. He once said he’d die for the cinema and, although it didn’t come to that, his deliberate provocation of passers-by led to his eventual hospitalisation and the scrapping of that other literally-titled project, Fight Harm. Werner Herzog, his bellicose sometime collaborator, has referred to him as a “soldier of cinema”. So who would Harmony want on his side in a fight for the future of film? “Carlos Reygadas is a soldier of cinema“ he bats back instantly. “Chris Cunningham. Clint Eastwood. Michael Mann. Kim Ki-duk.” From Hollywood grandees to British video nasties, it’s as eclectic as you’d expect — and Harmony will certainly be in the front line although for the moment he’s sanguine: “It is what it is. I’m not frightened. Maybe feature films are only going to be ten minutes long, more about a feeling or a single character. I don’t know but something is happening.”

The future might be unknown but the past has its own problems: namely the kind of old school studio bureaucracy that accompanies any significant increase in budget. His last film, Mister Lonely, cost eight and a half million dollars — a huge step-up for Korine, and a drawn-out experience that seems to have echoed the eponymous Fellini portrait of a harried director in uncomfortable ways. It also explains the appeal of a lo-fi project like Trash Humpers. “It was a very old model,” he says of his last film. “Sitting around waiting for money to come and waiting for actors works against all your creative impulses. It feels like someone’s cutting off your head. Maybe it’s just my personality but I’m very impatient, I get bored and antsy. I just like making things. I want to try and figure out a way to move as quickly as I can think.”

Speed… although he has apparently kicked his former drug habit, there’s definitely still something of the addict in his ricochet answers and my, what big eyes he’s got. One wonders how he has made the transition to married life when there’s no way he’s slowing down for anything or – as a recent father — anyone. Yet the Korine filmmaking model is firmly in place: hang out with friends, film your life, live day to day, do what you want. In Trash Humpers, both Harmony and his wife Rachel (she has played Red Riding Hood for Korine before) play the eponymous freaks, and it’s hard to imagine how they managed to fit that job around bringing up the baby. Probably not the new bride’s dream? “ I had to do a lot of convincing” he laughs “because these characters were very sadistic.”

The desire to do what he wants and play by his own rules seems to be a constant pre-occupation. Even Dogme bent over backwards to accommodate his Julien Donkey-Boy into the corpus, despite the hidden cameras, directorial credit and seemingly non-diegetic sound. With the new film, the concept was more simple: the film was basically a concept. “You could almost make the argument that it’s not a movie“ says Korine. “The thing was for it to closely resemble a found artefact or an old VHS tape that someone had buried in a ditch somewhere.” (At the director’s Q & A later that night he ups the stakes by mentioning a blood-stained ziplock bag, so maybe he does do director-shtick after all).” I wanted to make something that worked on its own logic” he continues, “the only rule was that it had to be shot on VHS and edited on VCRs.”

Rewind to the 1980s and video was the hot platform; the shabby voyeurist technology encapsulated by Soderbergh’s Sex, lies and Videotape and reprised by ‘80s kid Korine in Trash Humpers. As one of the first to get to grips with the VHS cameras, he talks lovingly about using tapes over and over again. It’s unsurprising that he is sanguine about digitalization and what he sees as the lazy aesthetic currently in fashion: “Everyone is so obsessed now with clarity and pixels and high definition. I think there’s something hypnotic and beautiful about the fog of analogue… about forcing yourself to squint a little bit and work to see what’s behind the image.”

Chance and spontaneity are harder to stumble by these days when Blair Witch and assorted Hollywood disaster films like Cloverfield have schematized the confessional, home movie aesthetic for their own ends. But for Harmony at least, laissez-faire seems a natural stance. When it comes to the theory behind the new film, for example, he denies all knowledge: “We woke up, we walked around. I don’t like to analyse. I don’t like to know why I’m making things and where the impulse comes from. I don’t have much curiosity, I’d rather not know. I’d rather just create.” Now Harmony is visibly squirming on the velvet pouffe: “The only time I ever think about this shit is when you people ask me! It’s public psychoanalysis!” And the cackle is back.

Like Jean-Luc Godard, one of his recorded influences, Harmony is suspicious of words. At one point he says that his favourite dialogues are “the Buster Keaton films, when they don’t speak” and he also name checks the Wizard of Oz, Pee-wee Herman and John Huston’s Fat City – all of which make perfect sense when you think about the Loony Tunes tone of some of his work. Instead, he’s into ambiances and emotions, possibly because, as he once said, “no one remembers the plot.”Trash Humpers is exemplary of his disinterest in any kind of linear narrative — an iterative loop of moments, linked by song but not by any development or character arc (once a humper, always a humper, it seems). “I feel the same way I did when I was 15 “ he says. “It’s not that I ever set out to destroy plot, it’s just that what has moved me about movies is specific moments, scenes and characters. Something intangible, that you can’t necessarily articulate. Very early on I thought why would I use the same three act structure as everyone else? I could throw them in but it would feel forced. I don’t think like that and I don’t feel life is like that.”

WERNER GETS THE BACON

With the life that he’s had, it’s unsurprising that Harmony naturally shrinks from the worldview promoted by most mainstream film. If his childhood resembles any film, though, it might be Todd Browning’s Freaks, which would certainly explain the continuing appeal of offbeat characters to the director – from the cat chasers in Gummo to the truly terrifying child preacher who rides the humpers on leashes in his latest. The way Harmony tells it, he lived in a freaky Eden, until the jaded world pointed out his friends looked weird: “I spent a lot of time growing up in carnivals, travelling with the circus. I always got a great energy there. I never thought of them as freaks until other people started pointing it out.” He still can’t explain his attraction to them – “Why do you see someone in the window and think they’re beautiful and someone else disgusting?“

Capturing the offbeat poetry of life is the stock in trade of photographer William Eggleston, whom Harmony interviewed recently. He seemed interested in Eggleston’s work as a social document of the Tennessee everyday life, of brands and food stores that no longer exist – even if the maestro and his disciple refused to get too nostalgic. New York is certainly different since Harmony’s Kids supposedly showed life how it is, but as he explains it, his work is more about a leap of the imagination than any faithful ethnology: “There’s certain things in the world that you want to see. Maybe they exist in real life, maybe they exist only partially. What you’re left with is this desire to make those images exist so that’s what [you] do. “You photograph them, project them, putting them in a certain context. [You] create a story, a world.”

Harmony makes a lot more sense once you know his own context. His father was a documentary-maker who made portraits like Mouth Music (1981), a record of the carny barks and ? This influence can be seen in Trash Humpers – which is almost a musical – and also in the cut-up mix of Harmony’s record. Does he have any plans to record any more? “I’m a very terrible musician” he giggles, embarrassed. “You must be among the five people who have heard my record”. But just before we met he was apparently discussing the possibility of another musical collaboration even if “We keep goofing around” is all he’ll admit to. Also on the goof agenda is another art show planned for next year in New York. Harmony’s art has already been displayed in gallery contexts but seemingly most has not: “I’ve accumulated a lot of work over the past 15 years that I’ve never shown.”

It’s clear that Harmony has great expectations and he feigns confusion when confronted with the reality of people walking out of his films or – perhaps less dramatically—the cult niche that his work seems to have fallen into. In a response worthy of his pal Herzog he claims that people misunderstand and walk out on his films “because they’re so great. Most of those people don’t know how to take in such greatness. There’s so much emotion, it’s too intense.” Although he recognises that the readymade audience of the film festival circuit is an ideal place for someone like him, particularly with the changing climate, his real aims lie elsewhere and the bravado is just a dime store mask for vaulting ambition. For a second it becomes clear that the director really does just work with what he knows, and that in a parallel world he could just as easily be making Mean Girls to tween acclaim. It’s a compelling image that coats the saccharine emotion of the real world with the real emotion of Harmony’s weird world: “I’m always a bit delusional. I always think this [the next film] is going to be a humongous success that plays in the shopping malls and that Miley Cyrus and all her friends are going to start singing songs about the movie. Moment by moment, layer by layer, I’m always disappointed in the end that it’s not the case. “

Washed Away By the Tide

A short way into my interview with Julien Temple, we notice a middle-aged suit at the table behind us who’s engrossed in a copy of a recent Iggy Pop biography. “It’s the wrong one,” Julien says as he dismissively shrugs. He should know. He’s the self-appointed guardian of punk history–which is archived in his music videos and slingshot documentaries–and carries unpublished biographies of punk heroes inside his head. He can remember the climax of the Iggy video he directed: Pop’s trousers around his ankles. There's also the time he recalls seeing Iggy backstage after his disastrous crooner re-invention, defiling the assembled Arista records’ WAGs by pissing over their fashionable ankle bracelets.

The tidal anecdotes are apt as I meet Julien to discuss his forthcoming Dr Feelgood film, Oil City Confidential. Growing up in the weird biblical wake of the North Sea floods, the band’s killer R&B hooks and mythic vision of Canvey as the oily “Thames Delta” briefly made them heroes, only for the tidal wave of punk to wash them back again into the ignominious Essex swamps.

Julien Temple

Vice: Oil City Confidential is the “prequel” to the Sex Pistols’ corrective The Filth and the Fury and the Future is Unwritten, a portrait of your friend Joe Strummer. Does it set out to reclaim Dr. Feelgood as punks?
Julien Temple: I didn’t set out to make a trilogy of films; I just feel that punk goes back thousands of years. What happened in London in ’76 and ‘77 was already brewing in response to the hippie thing, which had actually been as pure as punk in the mid-60s, but had become diseased. Canvey, where the reality was so different from the hippie dream, was the ideal launching pad for ideas about how to blow away the omnipresent smell of Afghan hounds. Dr. Feelgood got Johnny Rotten jumping up and down and Joe Strummer buying a Telecaster to form a band.

What about the pub rock tag they have?
I love the fact that pubs were actually anathema to Wilko [Johnson, Dr. Feelgood guitarist] because he didn’t even drink. It was just a circuit where you could get a crowd. They were more like Kabuki than bearded country rock guys. They really did feel like they’d come to rob the takings from the back office rather than play the show.

Why did you make the film?
I like the idea of showing a number of them back-to-back, eventually. I’m hopefully working with the Kinks next and want to join the dots of this slightly invisible cultural map. There’s nothing more to say about the Beatles and they weren’t that great in the first place!

There’s more of a sense of place than some of your other films. Did you know Canvey before?
I knew it from the Feelgood myth. It’s the nearest beach to the East End and there’s that transplanted villainy. They’d bury the bodies in the mudflats and say, “That’s my fucking plot,” rather than buy their bungalow. The whole place had a lawlessness but also a strange holidaying vibe that is now nestling under the dark shadow of the south’s biggest oil terminal. There’s a weird sense of scale, the bleakness of the marshes and the romance of what childhood would have been like for someone like Lee. It was another time in a place where you could be pirates and vikings and things that you can’t really be anymore.

The band’s image is inseparable from that landscape.
Their creativity was to escape their surroundings by imagining a way out and then making that real, which is a fantastic alchemical trick that I recommend.

Or the effect of the petrochemicals?
Toxic clouds are inspiring, yes.

Did you know that Wilko was so Kurtz-like? He’s a great protagonist.
I knew he was likely to be fucking nuts, but didn’t quite realize the extent of his madness. He’s like Blake, a Cockney visionary. We’ve been through the same things too – music, India, acid. I was into English literature; he’s one of the UK’s six Early Icelandic scholars. There is a campaign for him to be the successor to Patrick Moore on The Sky At Night.

The poetry within him–and within punk’s stridency–is what interests you?
Politics without a gesture to poetry is meaningless. This is political like all my films, but hopefully provocative in a willow-the-wisp way. I like the fact it’s about a band that almost made it but were washed away by the punk avalanche. I had a cartoon in the film where Johnny Rotten vomits across Heathrow Airport and washes everyone away like the parting of the Red Sea. I should have kept it in.

Yeah, you really should have. Was the lack of archive footage of the band inspiring or just difficult? I suppose it didn’t exist because you hadn’t shot it – unlike with the Pistols and the Clash?
I like the chance of something arriving in a brown envelope. If you’ve pulled the only evidence out of a dustbin, the bad quality of the shot becomes very moving. The worst time I ever had was with Glastonbury because I had so much footage. I got into this nightmare chamber of possibilities and lost the plot!

You seem OK now.
I’m having a different problem with the Detroit film I’m doing. To tell the story of the city that pioneered the 20th century – first cars, first mass production, first to fail – you need more than an hour. It’s about how bad cars have been for the human spirit. It’ll be on after Top Gear I hope!

Given your interest in these kinds of things, it’s hard to imagine how you’ve coped with some of the big budget stuff you’ve had to do, like S Club 7 videos.
I’ve done music videos for money, but I did the films because I wanted to. I’m lucky that Absolute Beginners [the big-bucks Patsy Kensit musical that caused a studio to collapse] wasn’t a huge success. I’d be washing out the jacuzzi with Dettol as we speak. I regret the idea that I couldn’t work for a long time because of it though. I was an exile in Reagan’s America.

Is it a thankless task mediating both the desire and fear that musical icons have over the telling of their stories?
It can be a very controlling environment, absolutely, like that film blowing sunshine up Mick Jagger’s arse. That’s what he wanted, which is insane. It makes him look like a complete gyp! You can’t be over-awed, that’s the thing. With Dr. Feelgood it’s good because you’re almost making Spinal Tap. They didn’t exist for most people. One of my greatest moments of enlightenment was after The Filth and the Fury, when all the young kids came to me and said, “Wow! Who were those actors?” They thought the whole story was a fiction – which was sad, but also fantastic at the same time.

Wilko Johnson and the 100th incarnation of Dr Feelgood are both still on tour.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

It was unlikely that Werner Herzog’s re-visitation of the Abel Ferrara cult classic Bad Lieutenant was ever going to be as funny as the directorial war of words it provoked back in 2007. With Ferrara in the anti-remake corner crying “Burn in Hell” and the hubristic Herzog in the other howling “fight the windmills”, the stage was set for the kind of epic battle of wills that are Herzog’s stock in trade.

The result is about as fascinating and appalling as the ludicrous preamble suggested. In his documentaries and films Herzog puts extreme men in extreme settings and it’s the same story here as he parachutes Nicholas Cage into a post-Katrina New Orleans, leaving him to sink or swim. The title does the director no favours. Not only does the colon set the ominous tone for a brainless Michael Bay style thriller, more weirdly it also claims a relation that exists only in Herzog’s imagination. For although he took time out from fanning the Ferrara duel to claim it wasn’t a remake, having apparently not seen the original, it isn’t the “sequel” he suggested either. An unrepentant diversion that drains the source of the grit and religious guilt, this ouroboros of a film bites itself in the tail so that nothing remains of the neglected political coda but a puff of smoke from Cage’s crack pipe.

The content as far as it goes involves Cage’s investigation of the murder of a Senegalese family — but that flimsy alibi is soon submerged in favour of a druggy dérive through the unmoored landscape. In that interzone of lizard lounge psychosis and debowelled alligators, no one is more reptilian than Cage’s shagged out cop McDonough. One minute he is hooking up with dealers to get a fix, the next planting props to make the evidence speak. Lizard, Cage, lizard, Cage: who needs the machinations of the Kuleshov effect when Cage was never that convincingly human in the first place? Even the penguin in Encounters At The End of the World portrayed “existential crisis” more convincingly than he does here.

His baggy, elongated McDonagh (in every way a stretch from the original Harvey Keitel character) is instead all about smutty job satisfaction. “You just gotta love it,” he comments after a particularly stealthy backdoor apprehension, proving that you should never count your chickens. They might congratulate themselves on their hatching. All in all, though, his to-camera winks are fair enough: the non-stop girl and gun bender is hampered only by a limp acquired during the opening heroics and the pesky CCTV at headquarters that confounds open plunder from the evidence lockers. As for the football player who defies his financial speculations, that can be “arranged” — if not by the law then at least by fate, which makes a series of out-of-field interventions late in play. The real-life corruption that ran rampant in post-Katrina Orleans was obviously not quite real enough for the director, as all drama here comes thanks to a series of deus ex machinas that make a mockery of Keitel’s parallel gambling habit. Never mind Harvey, your antagonists will probably just like mellow eventually. Or is that just Cage’s Snake Eyes?

Before you accuse Herzog of selling out though, it’s worth considering that he’s probably so contrary as to have directly set out to rebut almost every point of rapture in Roger Ebert’s creepy 2007 love letter to him. Sex and chase scenes: 90 minutes’ worth. Entertaining violence: the leitmotif; see particularly the scene where Cage cuts off the oxygen supply to a geriatric while delightedly rounding “YOU are ALL THAT’S WRONG with society!” Romance: why else is Eva Mendes putting out like a sub J-Lo? As for the artificial endings you’d be hard pressed to find a more tritely circular conclusion than the smiling graduation to sergeant that puts paid to McDonough’s days as a Bad Lieutenant. If détournement was Herzog’s plan, it’s a shame he proved so deft a maestro of the vehicle; somewhere along the line the prey has erased its tracks and the predator is looking about, confused. Still, all is not lost. Had Herzog been on this kind of trip back in the Antarctic, even the stray penguin would have been rescued by the fortuitous passage of a Greenpeace convoy. And besides, why juggle semantics like “laughing at” and “laughing with” when laughter is the only possible reaction? False dichotomies start to seem a bit dour when Herzog is having this much fun.

Trash Humpers: The Title is Literal

Harmony Korine has dubbed his new trashcore romp a “found object” – something you might stumble across during a good bin rifle, although, after the film, you might have to sidestep perverts exploring their erotic potential. Regressing via the conventional Mister Lonely to the territory of Gummo’s hermetic misfits, it follows a crew of geriatric burn victims in Jackass-style seedy japes. Already likened to John Waters for its paean to trash, the lo-fi VHS (transfigured by 35mm) comes replete with playback commands and ‘80s platform game aesthetics.

The plot (or not) is a series of repetitive vignettes – plastic babies dragged about a suburban wasteland on makeshift leashes and every conceivable structure smashed with a hammer, cueing a danse macabre over the corpse. Punctuating the cast’s stream of conscious deliberations on the monstrous (like the funny lifestory of conjoined twins Eng and Chang) and touching musical odes to the lonely, there is the ever-present acuity of Korine’s wind-up cackle.

Much like Todd Browning’s Freaks updated for the confessional youtube generation, the weirdest thing remains the human “truth” within the beast. Despite the ethos of wilful crappiness (reaching a nadir in the band’s blatantly fake party-shop prosthetics), the film makes Jerry Springer’s suburbia look like the fake. The result is less monotonous than hypnotic—something sentimental in the evening gloves and half-recalled yoga postures of the be-wigged matriarch (Korine’s sister) and even the cheap communion of the eponymous trysts.

Dictator of Style: The September Issue

Film is not very good at inhabiting the diaphanous folds of fashion. Recent reports from Venice on A Single Man, Tom Ford’s directorial debut, suggest that fashion might make a slicker transition to film. In any case, while master photographers and designers routinely gesture towards the life outside the shot—the model mid-leap caught in a microcosmic motion picture, the aspirational silhouette that sells a metonymic life—even directors like Robert Altman (Pret-a-porter) can’t resist a certain celluloid reductio ad absurdum when it comes to fashion. Whether, as with Bruno, style is mere parodic wallpaper or, as with The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty, the florid backdrop to a coming-of-age tale, mainstream film and television stumble on the “problem” of clothes, treating couture as a ludicrous visual remainder. As though there was a secret prohibition on direct touch, the only films to influence fashion are not about it: Liquid Sky, Blade Runner, Breakfast at Tiffany’s or manifold Marlene Dietrich vehicles.

R.J. Cutler’s documentary of life behind the covers of US Vogue is certainly not oblique. At the best of times it feels like editor Anna Wintour has endorsed a pre-emptive biopic strike against the naysayers, cementing her profile on the grounds not of aesthetics, but of good business sense. Unfortunately, in the filmic time lag between Vogue, 2007 (the run-up to the magazine’s largest ever September Issue) and 2009’s recession, it has become harder not to flinch as thousands of dollars' worth of shoots fly out the window to the twitch of Wintour’s discontent. On a personal level, however, this only re-enforces the formidable editor’s black appeal: her line in dismissive downward glances and lacerating one-liners makes her fictive doubles look like hysteric ingénues. No one plays Anna like Anna. Much of the film’s content and most of its humour derives from her fatigued attempts to deal with the avant-garde excesses and repetitious fetishes of her creative underlings. Eastern European models: so samey; Mario Testino’s equine concept for the Sienna Miller cover shoot: mmmm, but Anna wants the Coliseum money shot. It’s hard to resent a woman who is so uniquely gifted for the simultaneous harshness and whimsy of her habitat. But it’s also hard to completely root for her either.

Doubly shielded from the plebs by Chanel and blacked out car windows, accessorized with Starbucks and deceptive floral twinsets, she is admittedly more of a star than her model pawns. But by the time her co-directors and corporate advertising cronies have finished with the soundbites, it’s a relief when her daughter gestures that there might be “something else” to life beyond what’s hot and what’s not. And so there is: after the syncopated irritation of the opening credits, the documentary makes an even-handed if inevitable attempt to probe the psychology behind the pout. What humanity there is here does not, however, belong to Wintour, but to creative director Grace Coddington. Less of a fool than extra large editor-at-large André Leon Talley, she nonetheless incarnates the same fidelity to fantasy which saves Vogue from descending into pure commerce. Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between The War Room, Cutler’s documentary of the political power-play behind Clinton’s ‘92 presidential campaign and Vogue’s cutting room—Coddington’s romantic vision vying with Wintour’s cut-throat decisions. Sticking to his favourite template, Cutler’s attempt to transpose Clinton’s politic motto “it’s the economy, stupid” onto colour-blocking and Rococo never quite seems to hit the mark.

Business, however, can surely be the only reason why the visibly unimpressed directors suffer celebrities like Miller to grace their covers. Much is made of Vogue’s early concession to the peculiar paradox of these figures with no innate style who are nonetheless required to embody and re-sell style. As the first editor to see the craze coming, Wintour has obviously ushered in something that fundamentally bores her. Those who aspire to Miller’s toothy appeal might then cringe to see the unsubtle redress the actress receives with her photoshop makeover. Still, at least she has a smile to go with her fillings. Once the familiar “banality/pleasure in shoes” paradigm has been subtracted from the equation, the art of fashion seems to consist in elegantly beating back the hollow tide of tills.

The Radical Ambiguity of Tom McCarthy*

If Zadie Smith is to be believed, the future of the avant-garde lies in the hands of artist and writer Tom McCarthy. Through his novels and the parodic/splenetic interventions of the INS [International Necronautical Society], he ceaselessly returns to questions of death and space—poaching in the fissures of the symbolic and political like an agitprop pathologist. Having once before paced the “epistemic disaster zone” with Tom as a student of his Catastrophe course, a curious desire for repetition drew me back to the brutalist confines of London’s Barbican.

Let’s ease into things gently and talk about something nice: death. Here in the Barbican’s “concrete island” I can’t help thinking about Ballard and his recent demise, something he had of course rehearsed many times. How did he influence you and did you ever meet him?

R.I.P. I went to a talk and asked him a question. That doesn’t really count as meeting him, I suppose. I think the guy was a genius. He was the only contemporary British writer that interested me or had any kind of influence on my work. The thing about Ballard is that he’s a great writer without being a good writer. I mean he’s not Nabokov or Updike. He doesn’t care about prose and texture of narrative. He’s almost a conceptual artist and in fact The Atrocity Exhibition was originally a catalogue for a show at the ICA. That overlap between visual art and literature is something that I’ve experienced a lot in my own work.

There’s also a big similarity in the forensic interest.

Crash was a huge influence on Remainder: that totally traumatic logic. For Freud and everyone else, trauma is intimately linked with repetition and Ballard gets this. Not just Vaughn [the anti-hero] but every character in every novel of his just does the same thing again and again. He’s like the painter Morandi or Warhol, where the repetition becomes the subject. Even at the level of prose, I imagine writing Crash he had a car manual in one hand and a medical dictionary in the other, both open at the index page and he was going down the list—“His spleen was splattered over the… windscreen wiper and his gallbladder was wrapped around the…”

Binnacle!

And on and on: this incantatory state of repetition. Vaughn does re-enactments of car crashes of the rich and famous and his big goal is to do the über-crash that would be a transcendent new combination. Vitally he gets it wrong so the one genuine event in that book—an event and not just a re-enactment—is this accident. So it’s got that brilliant first sentence:


“Vaughn died in a car crash today. He’d had a million crashes but this was his first accident.”

That structure is in "Remainder" too, when one of the re-enactors finally trips over a non-existent kink in the carpet.

Yes, during the bank robbery. I was thinking directly of that. It’s the only event in the book, apart from the disaster that started it—you never know what that is. The script going wrong produces the genuine event, not just a repetition. When I “met” Ballard, he’d given this talk and I shot my hand up at the Q&A session and said that I thought Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote. This guy goes out on the highway and re-enacts moments from the tv of the day—trash, twopenny novels. He says “I’m going to do that bit in Don Belianis of Crete, page 94, where…” Ballard was really charming. He said, “That’s a wonderful theory and makes complete sense. I’ve never read Cervantes. I don’t read proper literature.” That’s not true—he’s obviously read Conrad really carefully, for example.

But it’s nice to think that the avant-garde is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.

Yeah but it’s always a bit disingenuous isn’t it? Joyce said he never read any of Freud, which is nonsense—Nabokov too. They’re covering it up when clearly they’ve both read “The Wolfman” [Freud’s famous long-running case file]: they’re very indebted to that.

At the Freud Museum recently I saw that the Wolfman’s wolf paintings are themselves hidden behind a flat screen tv.

How dumb. How weird. How… appropriate!

In contrast one could say your role as an artist and a writer is to conduct a sort of “unveiling” that brings to mind semiology. Are you into Roland Barthes?

When I was 18 or 19 he was my total hero and in the book I wrote about Tintin [Tintin and The Secret of Literature] his S/Z is the main codex. I love the whole cross-disciplinary side of Roland Barthes, Derrida and so on. These are people who a century earlier would just have become novelists—would have been Balzac and Flaubert. At the time when they were coming up in France this philosophy/ anthropology/ politics had become the most exciting place to do your discourse and although I always just wanted to be a novelist, I’ve always been excited by other modes like visual art and philosophy. I wanted to find an arena that manages to combine all those and coming of age in London in the mid-90s, art had become that. It’s so broad and it’s not just about drawing or painting. Remainder was first published by Metronome, which is an art press. None of the main ones would touch it.

Related to that I wanted to ask you about your writing versus the INS. I know the latter has very strict rules. I was wondering if it had ever occurred to you to eject yourself since after Metronome you signed a pact with Film Four and Vintage?

Ha! No, because the people that were ejected were not ejected for publishing with the big companies. My next two books are coming out with Cape and Remainder is with Vintage [»Random House»German Conglomerate] in America. It wasn’t that they signed to them, but that they wrote the books those people told them to write and became copywriters. Anyhow that wasn’t me that was the executive council, to whom I’m not entirely answerable, so...

I think you should. Because anyway it’s full of quotations, the INS, it’s almost autonomous.

Yes maybe there will come a point where I will be ejected. The council could evict us all: no one knows who’s actually running it anymore. These things tend to schism. There was this guy “Richard Essex” who kick-started the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) in the ‘80s. He wanted to get splits going really quickly so he announced that the different parts of his personality were splitting. He had the Nashist wing and the Debordist wing and his own schizophrenia was a schism within his one-man movement. I thought that was good. His arm would go off in one direction…

Stewart Home was involved with that, wasn’t he?

Yeah. Stewart’s very interesting. He was writing manifestos and starting movements way before me. With the INS, in about ’94 I lived in Berlin and the NSK [Neue Slowenische Kunst] came to town. They were an alliance out of Ljubljana, Slovenia and they had Slavok Zizek, Laibach and some other artists who configured themselves as a formal avant-garde. They had their official philosopher and their official rock group—everything was dogmatic and they were very reactionary in their demeanour. They had a 3-day event, but it wasn’t billed as a festival. They declared a state. At the time when Slovenia didn’t exist as a state, you had to go in advance and get a visa and your passport stamped with these jackbooted, uniformed people checking you on the way in. There was a press conference and all the German journalists were saying “Are you left or right?“ and they were going “Well that’s a stupid question.”

Yes. It seems to me the INS cherry picks the best elements from both left and right. It’s got the fascistic element, but then you also learn from your mistakes.

They dovetail anyhow. When we were doing the “transmission, death, technology” hearings at Cubitt that set up the ICA radio station show we looked at the McCarthy Un-American Activities Committee photos because we wanted the room to function in a certain way.
Then we looked at the Stalinist show trials and it’s the same! If you look at a figure like Marinetti, in order for him to move from being an ultra-leftist to a fascist, he doesn’t have to change anything. He’s already both. In a way there’s a bigger question about politics in art in general. I find art that just declares a position and advances that is always really banal and really bad. Art is good because it enables what Claude Lefort calls “radical ambiguity”.

That might itself be the manifesto of postmodernism. Like yours – which implodes because it contradicts itself. Political manifestos are more one-sided. But actually even Marinetti and the futurists had clear enemies: the symbolists, the Venetians, the English. Barthes hated the bourgeoisie. Who do you think your enemy is? Haven’t we all learnt about ambiguity by now?

Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions. This confessional, self-assertive tone that dominates publishing. Not what dominates contemporary art, despite the sentimental valorisations of someone like Tracy Emin—although even she actually takes this whole avant-garde tradition and overwrites it with self-confessional expression. But on the whole I think art is classically not that. What dominates mainstream media culture and literary culture is psychologising: the kind of discourse where the self is never put into question. There is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate.

Your novels eschew mainstream, “psychologically rounded" characters. There’s obviously that influence of the Nouveau Roman.

Or they start with the world. First there is the world, and language and structure and technology. Actually I don’t think that’s necessarily an avant-garde thing. I think that’s what proper literature has always understood. That’s what Shakespeare is about or the Greeks; Oedipus and Antigone experience their subjectivity as a kind of trajectory through space, networks and legal systems.

Of course the nameless “everyman” narrator is also a literary type—the anonymous voice which can’t find its subjectivity. Would you be afraid to have “proper” characters?

No, in the new book that’s out next year, C, there’s a main character and the book is all about him. His name is Serge and he’s not some postmodern construct, he’s a person. We follow him from birth to death. Again what drives that book is technology, so while he’s being born his dad is trying to invent radio, trying to get the patent before Marconi. It’s all about communication systems and stuff so his whole subjectivity hovers around mediation—or the experience of his own experience. That’s what the book’s about, and that’s what life’s about: we are all mediated!

Okay! The difficulty of being authentic in “Remainder” is precisely that of living quotation. The narrator is living other people’s gestures and not even doing them as well.

So’s everyone else! That’s what he realizes when he watches the cool kids in Soho, striking their poses. He just knows it and has endless money to work through the implications.

That state of being too self-conscious to act is one of your tropes: being unable to have an existential crisis because you’re laughing at yourself for having an existential crisis. It reminds me of Jean-Phillippe Toussaint.

I’m writing a long piece on him right now—he’s brilliant. I read The Bathroom when I was 25 and then never re-read it. At the Forum for European Philosophy I read a bit of Remainder and someone in the audience said “Have you read The Bathroom? You know there’s a crack on the wall…” and I remembered.

Exactly: and one that he obsesses over. That crack actually has a literary pedigree. It’s in Sartre and it’s also the crushed centipede trace in “La Jalousie”. So it’s literary déjà-vu and not just déjà-vu?

Yes, I was really conscious of it. That whole building [in the novel] is called Madeleine Mansions, like the madeleine in Proust and the house setting is like Huysmans’ Against Nature. Even more I was thinking of Ionesco’s only novel, Le Solitaire. This guy gets loads of money, holes up in a flat and just watches the world explode while he’s still on the same glass of expensive wine. Or in Grabinoulor by Pierre-Albert Birot there’s this really good scene where the hero notices a clock on his mantelpiece that’s not quite straight and when he tries to straighten it, he realizes it’s not the clock but the mantelpiece. He tries to straighten that, but realizes it’s the floorboards, then the foundations of the house. He tries to dig up the street. By the end he realizes the earth is not right: it’s magnetic. He’s causing earthquakes and tsunamis. There’s this escalation from one tiny detail.

The ripple effect.

Yes. If you start with a crack on the wall you only take four escalations before you’re killing people and stuff. There were a million things I was thinking of—Hamlet for example. He can’t experience authentic emotion, he’s too aware of the mediations and all the precedents. He even re-enacts his father’s death scene at one point. I was very aware of those things and folding them in, but at the same time I didn’t want it just to be a set of references. You don’t have to have read any of that.


The madeleine thing must surely also be Hitchcock and “Vertigo”, to which re-enactment is completely central?


Totally. I’ve just finished working on a film with Johann Grimonprez called Double Take about Hitchcock. Johann uses a story Borges wrote twice about meeting his own double as a window on the Cold War. He got me to adapt that with Hitchcock instead, which becomes the film’s monologue. Hitchcock is a genius. I watched all his films in my early ‘20s, and especially Vertigo: he [James Stewart] becomes aware of the repetition, but that doesn’t stop it happening.

It also leads to the fatal ending, which is what happens in your work, whether matter gets in the way, or whatever. It’s the attempt at mastery that goes wrong that interests you.

It’s got to go wrong otherwise it’s real fascism! There has to be a fray in the tapestry or you’ve just got the police state.

Because it seems that the people that are scared of non-being and obsessed with it at the same time are fundamentalists! Like in Conrad’s “Secret Agent”.

Yeah. I grew up in Greenwich and I used to skateboard around the Observatory [the setting of the novel’s terrorist attack]. About four years ago I did this art project about it with Rod Dickinson [Greenwich Degree Zero]. We reconstructed that explosion but we made it a success! The interesting thing is that there are endless newspaper reports about the actual event, but they all get the details slightly differently. It’s so contemporary because the guy that did it—Marshal Bourdin—was a French Jew, an asylum seeker and a refugee. All the newspapers afterwards could be yesterday’s Daily Mail if you just replaced “Jew” with “Muslim”. They’re all saying “We’re a tolerant liberal society but if people come here and start bombing us then…” We just remade all the newspapers but we changed one word here or there. We made a film with a really old crank camera and got a guy to dress up as a policeman and another a Georgian gent and run towards the building. It was post-produced in Soho to be on fire. The Hayward bought it—it’s in their permanent collection, but not on display.

It’s in the crypt corroding everything else!

In the crypt or behind the tv screen. It turns out that the day after that explosion the Lumière brothers premiered cinema. There’s this link between them. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the first rocket bomb falls on the meridian in Greenwich Park. And it’s got a piece of porn inside. Verloc in The Secret Agent runs a porn shop, that’s his cover. Pynchon was obviously plugging into that, remixing it.

Speaking of porn, have you heard about Nabokov’s son Dmitri inventing a vision to ratify his decision to sell his father’s last novel to Playboy?

I didn’t hear about the vision! “Don’t worry son, it’s what I want!” Apparently when Kubrick’s Lolita was being cast, Dmitri claimed to be the casting director and just screwed loads of young actresses on the casting couch. It’s appropriate. And the title—The Original of Laura—makes me think about how actually the whole of Lolita is a trauma re-enactment, because she has an original: the 12 year-old girl who dies when they have unconsummated sex. The whole book is an attempt to get the hit he never got and she’s like Madeleine in Hitchcock: the substitute.

Can we talk for a second about catastrophe, one of your fetish subjects? I’m interested in how the course you taught went wrong towards the end when you attempted to make the students draw up a manifesto. I thought perhaps the problem was one of meta-language and symbolism.
Occasionally you’d get a voice saying “But remember how many people died!” and there’s that aporia between the real event and its symbolic mapping, which particularly interests you. Is there a gap for you? A disaster, it seems to me, is a “real” disaster and a symbolic disaster.

That bit in Remainder when he wants to re-enact the drug dealer’s death is where he tries to close that gap. Society’s way of dealing with it is for the police to come, take forensic photographs, clear away the blood—erase everything. The hero says “No, that’s not enough. It needs more attention than that." It’s ethical, despite his psychopathic thing. He’s committed to the event. I hadn’t read Levinas then, I read it after. But I thought yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Levinas talks about the death of the Other as being an absolute command. Your own subjectivity is breached open by that ethical encounter. You have to return to it, can’t resolve it or move on. You don’t have to solve it, because it’s unsolvable. I suppose in the book one could say the whole machinery of re-enactment is his symbolic order. But he’s just lying on the street looking at cigarette butts, wondering did the victim see it from this angle, what did he think about? The thoughts become less concrete and he slips in and out of consciousness. That’s an attempt to close that gap. It’s important. People’s death isn’t only significant in what it “means”.

But with disaster, there’s a real resistance to discussing these kinds of questions in anything other than a humanist manner.

But humanism is the problem in the first place! I went on the Today programme to talk about Marinetti and they had a Labour minister in before and their first question was “But wasn’t he a fascist?” I thought well it’s not dodgy Italian artists torturing people in Guantánamo, in Abu Ghraib! I think in a more abstract, philosophical sense, to put the human and the self at the centre of an ontology is deeply problematic. It’s why I love the whole continental tradition through Levinas and Derrida who just turn that on its head.

It might be going out of fashion though, that passivity in Levinas and so on. Zizek and Badiou for example are looking for something else, something more pro-active. They toy with things like God and Communism as a structure rather than as content. Death is that too for you isn’t it, a structure?

Yes it’s a framework to talk about other stuff. I set up the INS because I wanted to have what the German critic Enzensberger calls a "post-historical avant-garde". A slightly ironic, dysfunctional or reactionary group is more interesting than an original one perhaps, especially now. And then I was reading the stuff we’ve been talking about. It seemed to make sense. You have to fetishize something right? Marinetti fetishizes technology, Freud dreams and so on. Death is the main thing that runs through the philosophers that I admire so why not make that the fetish subject? It’s ridiculous as well.

The absurd is obviously a massive part of what you do. Your novels are funny although they’re about all this stuff.

They’re really silly, which is something I like. Another influence on the absurd thing in the INS was the AAA [Association of Autonomous Astronauts]. They were brilliant, their whole thing was serious—“Why are we taking the whole military-industrial complex into space? Why is it all about Nasa? Why don’t we take imagination, artists? Why don’t we have sex in space?” They would release all this stuff that looked scientific but was obviously totally bogus, about sex experiments and stuff. One of their mottos was “Only those who demand the impossible will realize the absurd”.

In “Men In Space” you take Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism with Václav Havel [playwright; first Czech president] who is obviously a very symbolic figure for the weird union of art and politics. Beckett dedicated his play “Catastrophe” to Havel and Havel in turn talked about how Czechoslovakia under Communism had been in a mode of waiting for Godot. You went there didn’t you?

I lived there for two years, from ’91 to ’93, just after college. Artists were running the country: it was amazing.

Situationism was really fashionable then…


Totally fashionable, but they were playing catch-up. All their artists were trying to be Warhol, the situationists or Yoko when she was good in the ‘60s, doing happenings, tipping paint over themselves and climbing up buildings naked. And again it totally failed. They thought they were going to get something genuinely new and autonomous and they got Starbucks like everywhere else. Now it’s sad, it’s basically a puke bucket for Ryanair stag parties.

One thing I think unites you and Situationism is the accent on tactics, on a sporting use of space and time.

Oh sport is a huge thing. Phenomenologically-speaking, I think there’s three modes in which being in the world, being towards death and so on is most intensely staged and I’d say that’s war, sport and poetry. There’s all that stuff in Remainder about cricket, watching it, re-enacting, reading it. I’m a big cricket fan.

It’s a literary thing! There’s Beckett, and Harold Pinter.

I never got into Pinter, he’s a bit Beckett-lite, a bit Little-England. Beckett’s writing about death, time and being and Pinter’s talking about family. I don’t want to badmouth Pinter. It is really literary, cricket. It’s about repetition and citation, archives, time and geometry. So are football and tennis. Nabokov was into tennis. He was a tennis coach for a while.

Teaching nymphettes?

That’s right, teaching fourteen-year old girls to pick up the ball.

R E A L L Y S L O W L Y

Most writers who write about sport are in the CLR James tradition. They use it as a metaphor for politics and post-colonialism, which it is. But what interests me is the kinetic aspect. Zadie Smith was good on that in her article in the New York Review of Books. I haven’t read that other book she was talking about, but I’ve got it—Neverland. Have you?

No! It certainly looks confessional. It is interesting though that there are these two novels, doubling each other but coming at questions of space, identity and so on from radically different perspectives: a symbolic conflict for literary space. Where one comes to a conclusion, the other drifts endlessly in circles in the sky. That trope is familiar from quite a bit of recent literature.

The end of Infinite Jest [David Foster Wallace’s satire of North America] is unresolved like that; someone with his head stuck to the window, trapped, and watching the disaster happen. I was really influenced by that for Men in Space: the endless loop of unresolved stuff is more interesting than an ending. Toussaint wrote this really interesting piece that’s 7 pages long, but Minuit or Gallimard published it as a book. It’s called La mélancholie de Zidane.

It must be an influence on the film ["Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait"]?


I wonder. Toussaint’s whole thing about that red card and the headbutt in the World Cup is that it was the fear of finitude. Zidane had said “At the end of these ninety minutes I will never play again. This is it.” He didn’t want the end to come, so he tripped it, short-circuited it by getting himself sent off, which is brilliant. He also says the card wasn’t red it was black, for melancholy. Really interestingly, Toussaint was in the stadium and says like everyone else he didn’t see that episode because they were all watching the ball. It slows down and a whistle blows and nobody seems to understand why it’s stopped. They’re running back to something in the other half, conferring with the linesman and the red card comes out. There’s a scream in the stadium, when they saw what we all watched on tv, the headbutt. The whole stadium gasped in horror when they watched it back. Even in the stadium it’s about the repetition, it’s interesting that the great event, you don’t see, even if you’re there.

Speaking of which, what happened to the film of Remainder? Has it been credit crunched?

It’s going into production later this year. It’ll be directed by Pavel Pavlikowski [My Summer of Love]. The screenplay is by John Hodge who did Trainspotting and all those Danny Boyle things.

Choose death…

Choose repetition! I’ve read the screenplay, it’s really very good. The first meeting I had with them they said “Who would you like to see directing it?” I said “David Lynch! Harmony Korine!” They said “Absolutely not!” They want to make an intelligent mainstream film, a Fight Club or Donnie Darko. There’s a certain vocabulary you have to have in a mainstream film. So the American girl now is a major character.

Oh no, not a Love Interest!

Yes! She says “Stop this re-enactment madness!” and so on. It’s what you have to do; I got their logic. They don’t want to make a low budget art film that 4000 people at the ICA will see who’ve already read the book. They said “We want to make a big film. Popcorn. All that! Millions of people will see it and they’ll go and buy your book Tom!” If I were directing it, it would be the trip—an hour and a half version of the tripping on the invisible kink. They have done good things though, scenes where you see a re-enactment happening and the camera pulls back to show the people with walkie-talkies and clipboards and keeps on going back for as much CGI as their budget can manage. The only demand I had was that I have to be an extra: I’d like to hold the clipboard.

Houellebecq and Hitchcock have done that, been extras in their own films.

Houellebecq’s first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was brilliant. It seems to have gone a bit downhill from there.

He’s into cults now—they feature in both “Atomized” and “The Possibility of an Island”. Doesn’t that appeal to you? I mean it’s just on the other side of repulsion with the materiality of the world right?



Cults are really interesting. The guy I did the Greenwich project with looked at cults a lot. He did re-enactments of Jim Jones’ sermons, the Jonestown Massacre guy. It had the miracle cure in it. He would always call someone forward and say “You’ve got cancer.” He would bring it out of their body—a chicken liver or whatever. He did it in the ICA to an invited audience, editing together 10 hours of transcript of Jim Jones’ speeches. There was a bit where Jones is going “You are selected. You are the chosen people. You understand the meaning” which are the original words, but it becomes about art—what you’re willing to believe. Cults are good…

Maybe for the next novel?

Actually my new novel is going to be called Satin Island, like a mispronunciation of Staten. It’ll be about illness and creaking matter. I think it’ll start with an oil slick. Nature is totally boring until it has oil poured over it—the condition of beauty being loss. When you see those birds covered in oil, they’re like statues. I like the idea of vinyl and protozaic slime, covering, wrapping things and the whole Tarkovsky thing [Stalker] about the polluted zone being the place of magical transformation. It couldn’t happen outside of that. The one I just finished, C, is going to come out next year. I haven’t started this new one yet. It’ll have zombie parades in it.

You’ve just done a talk about parades. What is it about them?

In Remainder the narrator talks about going to a demonstration and joining in. He can’t remember what the demonstration was about. It comes from Yeats’ "Meditations In Time of Civil War" where he’s watching this parade go by and they’re shouting “Vengeance for Jacques Molay!” and he joins in even though he doesn’t know who that is. Zombie things started in 2001 or so. My brother lived in Paris and there were these rollerblading things.

Pari-Roller!

They got 10 000 people. The Mairie had to create a new type of event, which they called an MSP – a “Manifestation sans Plainte” [A Point-less Demonstration] which is brilliant. Demonstrating, but not for or against anything: no complaint. I think it started in Toronto, where someone decided to have a zombie parade and march around the streets. There were about 200 people, then the next year 5000, then 10 000. Now it’s franchised to 20 different cities. That seems to be the logical extension of the MSP because zombiedom is just re-enactment without content.

---END TRANSMISSION.

*


The novelist Tom McCarthy, not to be confused with the filmmaker or motivational speaker of the same name. They are of no interest to us here: they are too literal.

Karl does Canderel - Sinning Through Gratuitous Asceticism

Karl Lagerfeld lends his sleight weight to Canderel. Begs the aesthetic question of whether it is in good taste to take your portable 'edulcorant' with you to the club.

The promo-website opens with the Post-Wildean nostalgia: ‘The greatest sin is to not give in to pleasure”. And forthwith, Karl proposes slimline sweetener dispensers decorated with one of five ‘peches mignons’ (“cute sins”). The intellectual framework of the campaign is as rickety as a supermodel in Westwood heels, threatening to dissolve sickly on the tongue like the ersatz sugar it is. How cutely subversive to distract your appalled taste buds by the visual “feast” of Karl’s lurid 80s’designs.

How much hedonistic pleasure can fit in a 0.1 calorie tablet? To indulge in nothing: who thought the king of bling would be the new Nietzche?


Les 5 Péchés Mignons de Canderel, here.