some kind of love

by Richard Cabut

Play the same song endlessly – a spectral lounge tune with a neon crawl – under hot velvet dabs of light that don’t quite refuse to vanish.

Situations do arise. Fractured moments like mirrors tossed into empty rooms.

Somewhere, a loft full of film reels, cracked looking glass, and cold espresso cups. A woman with all the energy of a dismantled insurrection chews ice and whispers about pirate queens and forgotten anarchists.

Love? A shifting frequency. Sometimes it drifts back, laughing at the wreckage it made.

And we become stories we didn’t author: luxury rebels, devotional nihilists, lit-scene bricoleurs with gold-threaded insecurities.

Elsewhere, the market disdains, but the shoes remain imported.

Also, everyone’s posing for a camera no longer there.

And a pose held too long becomes a confession. No?

I’m reading late letters from manic prophets – speed-bled missives about trauma as genre, sound as wound. Bleach-haired saints of collapse recounting fantasies written in the margins of scripts never shot.

The language breaks and we swim in its pieces. Sure we do. Sure.

Assassin-ghosts of forgotten sects, paragons of the deep online, pain-dancers in red booths.

All of us taking a holiday in the bardo – while Kathy Acker reads Great Expectations, lying about studying linguistics. It all feels like fucking Susan Sontag.

Either way, the camera stays rolling.

The contacts list is a spiritual map – psychics, herbalists, trauma doulas, ghost hunters, taxidermists.

But, no one calls.

See that body sleeping sixteen hours and night and day under designer blankets, dreaming of underwater empires and schoolgirls with knives.

Rent-dreams, debt-ecstasies, carefully maintained ruins of the self.

Pain reframed as aesthetic. Aesthetic reframed as pathology. Soul exhausted from stylization.

Somewhere else, a bookstore stocks life-size cut outs of dead thinkers. Someone tries to explain why Dostoevsky and/or Lou Reed still matter with a mouth full of blood and ambition.

So.

Art is nothing without myth.

Sex is nothing without projection.

Pain is nothing without choreography.

And taste is a lie. Intimacy the final image:-

A person floating between rooms – just caught between channels. No audience. No resolution.

And one more thing before we start falling  –

It all hums like a stolen amplifier at the bottom of a swimming pool.

The smell of wet nylon in the lens of an abandoned camera.

Lipstick on a guitar pick found in a dream.

It borrows rain from other people’s weather.

It smokes without permission – Gauloises, menthol, anything that burns sadly.

It’s the secret bruise under the American smile.

It’s a photograph that refuses to be developed.

It’s truth, emotionally detonated – if you can stand it? Can you?

It flirts with nervous collapse.

The echo of a belt buckle thrown on linoleum.

Performing sensation like a religion.

Its passport stamps read Paris-Berlin-Rome, but its real address is the pause before you unzip something you shouldn’t.

It vibrates between document and apparition.

It contains no scenes, only the spectral afterimages of scenes:

a cigarette; a belt unfastened; a photograph developing itself in the dark.

The text performs the gesture of autobiography while deleting its subject in real time.

It insists that emotion is an obsolete technology.

Celluloid, sweat, unresolved desire.

Both liberating and devastating.

It is

Disappearance as Product.

And the artist commodifies his own vanishing act.

It was filmed once –

in a fever-dream of Fassbinder and cheap late-night television,

where angels and hustlers shared the same spotlight.

Because

Poetry should vanish – and being unseen is the only visible thing left. Like a pulse under a layer of static huh?

Living in an age of anaesthetised scroll. People can’t tie their shoes or thoughts.

So, let’s splash paint and language like gasoline,

then light a match.

Until action becomes the only narcotic.

Look!

A meme dissolving mid-scroll.

A sculpture sweating in half light.

A sound poem leaking through headphones,

looped with feedback and half-formed desire.

Call it a nervous system trying to talk itself into existence.

An algorithm with a heartbeat.

A collage of unclean images,

each trying to remember what feeling felt like before everything was archived.

Living on receipts, in comment sections, on candy wrappers,

sprayed across the window of a closed gallery.

You can hear it on an empty frequency,

just after pirate radio fades,

and before memory restarts.

A shadow pretending to dance.

A long exposure of regret.

A hotel hallway between two affairs.

A kiss that keeps losing its subject.

Listened to by

Insomniacs. Taxi poets. Lovers who forgot the script.

People too tired to be ironic.

Curators of their own breakdowns.

Hating

Autobiographical traps.

Blank irony.

People who mistake confession for connection.

Knowing

That belief and cynicism are the same addiction.

That performance is the only honest narrative.

That the modern world hums in the key of detachment.

That good poetry should never end cleanly. Or start.

Looking for

Freedom without an origin story.

The stillness between which refreshes.

The sense of duty to the complicated present.

A kiss, obviously.

Made

In a kitchen painted with ghosts of Joan Wallace.

In tunnels of static.

Under a lunar lamp.

It is

Art as detour home.

With spent nods.

Art throws on its coat,

and walks back into the rain.

*****

Curatorial Commentary: Richard Cabut

 “Untitled (Melancholia), attributed to Warhol’s shadow.”

Provenance:

Recovered from a smouldering storage unit near the Rue du Faubourg.

Medium: Language, recycled. Anonymous marginalia, found in the gutter of proof copy.

Condition: Distressed but luminous.

Previous owners: Ghosts, amateurs, and readers who preferred myth to memory.

Influences: Film – A Door That Opens Inward, anonymous, Berlin, 1974.

Neural Static #3, an installation consisting of unread messages.

Loop audio: distant traffic, the sound of someone failing to leave. Some kind of love.

Audience Profile: Ideal observers include people who only measure love by signal strength.

Unfit observers: Optimists, diarists, anyone who still uses bookmarks.

Display Guidelines: Install in a dim corridor between two contradictory exhibitions.

Provide a faint odour of camphor and wet concrete.

Do not label the exit.

End Scene in Minor Frequency

Photo of Richard Cabut

BIO: Richard Cabut is a London-based author, whose CV includes sisters books, the popular work of modern literature/poetry Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances – ‘subterranean scenes, picturesque ruins, neon glowing, Chelsea Girls, the damned, the demimonde, the elemental, being on the edge of being pinned down by our ghosts’ – and Ripped Backsides (both Far West Press), a dreamlike, dislocated and fragmentary situationist drift through the noir cities. Also, the Freudian 80s cult novel Looking for a Kiss (PC-Press), which has been adapted for screen. And, Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books).

He’s also a journalist – ‘NME, BBC, anarchy’, as he says – a former punk musician, a cultural theorist, playwright and long-time chronicler of the underground. See more at richardcabut.com.