Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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29.11.05 Games: Mr Gillen, Mr Jarry and Miss Bowles

Phonomancy: "Music is Magic. You know this already. You've known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever. How does something that's just noises arranged in sequence do that? No-one knows. It's just... magic. Everyone knows that. It's just that some realise that it's more than metaphor." Kieron Gillen on his upcoming series Phonogram, which I was lucky enough to see in very early stages. (2006 will be a good year for my tribe. Gillen - who more or less singlehandedly sparked a revolution in videogame journalism - also has a big, shiny hardback book coming out next year collecting the best of his and his friends' critical writing on games.)

Pataphysics: "The science of imaginary solutions, which will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one." Alfred Jarry. Yes, everyone goes through their Ubu phase at university, around the time when clove cigarettes seem - briefly and inexplicably - like a very good idea. But it's the simple, beautifully absurd concept of Pataphysics (from a rare Jarry story in an obscure journal) that has cast the longest influence over literature. From it we have Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), whose members' list contains some of my favourite writers, and Oubapo. There are precedents for this sort of formal gameplay: Diderot, of course, and even the Prince de Ligne (a personal hero of mine, the ne plus ultra of fopdom) writing letters back and forth to his mistress with absurd rules such as "no use of the letter A". But it took Mad Alfred to call the name of the game.

I took down the October mixtape as I needed free space to send a thing to this guy. A December one will be up soon, all 1920s and 1930s cabaret songs mixed with my usual exotica. Partially a sonic exploration of a very Weimar project I'm working on at the moment; mainly because Christmas makes me run screaming into the embrace of cynicism and decadence. You keep your tinsel and your eggnog, mein liebe herr; I only want glitter and absinthe.

( 7:11 PM )

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