Pauline Boty – butterflying?!
Reading Adam Curtis’ blog on Occupy London Stock Exchange and the broader protest, with its clips and pics of Pauline and gang dancing in the mid-Sixties, made the thought of coming across images of Charles Fourier and gang [or just Charles!] dancing at any time peculiarly enticing!
Everyone seems to adore Adam Curtis and while what I’ve seen of his work is solid and unusual for mainstream media I find myself half a step behind, dancing to another tune -or rhythm. Essentially, I don’t look for redemption or revolution in programmes made for tv, hardly ever watched or watch it, excepting when there is a very urgent need to witness a distant event live -and before media gets their mouths and words on the actuality… [Saying so obviously entrains a double bind, to which I say; Pah!]
Anyway, here I will soon go again, grooving my way through Curtis’ oeuvre to really try to nail it! It’s not that there aren’t lots of positives about the work I know or have seen of course, lots to intrigue but just that I’m after concision, exactitude, blades and bone as opposed to good television [really not convinced about what that might be, strictly speaking]. Much better to spend more time again with Charles Fourier, as Curtis advocates himself at the end of his generous blog post on Occupy and its age-old demand for the Impossible in all its proper open-endedness…
Occupy and all that has generated it are a reminder of underlying actuality. Human time is slow with beautiful jags of change. When all the fizz of apparent economic success [when change simply equates with purchase] fades, there is the elemental actuality of putting one and one together, trying to eat two, transforming one and a half [sentences? breathes?] into something to believe in… whatever. A slower, ‘realer’ and more potent experience of things in which even the arguably satisfying fast food of tv ought to languish in preference to actually stepping over or out to welcoming, embattled shelves, picking up some Charles Fourier and sitting down to read…
Now that IS a radical thought!
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 