Aéro Dynamik

 

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Sonata of the Sea. Finale, 1908

It was their second anniversary. Not of their wedding, mind, but of the night at the café near the beach in Brighton where Antoine had asked Bilinda if she would go out with him (in his silky Parisian timbre, nuanced with the regrettably false yet stereotypical presuppositions of a talented and sensuous lover). 

Later that night Antoine had sat at the foot of the bed while Bilinda slept, rubbing his eyes until they were sore as he swallowed the lugubrious epiphany that this was the apotheosis of his life. 

What a twat. He had just indulged in what - in his eccentrically transmuted words - was 'the pinnacle of heterosexual coitus', and yet all he could do was lament the thought that it might never be that good again. Yes, it was pretty good, but, twat. 

As an anniversary celebration, much to the initial disapproval of Bilinda, Antoine had arranged that they go skydiving, ensemble. Eventually she had come round to the idea, and so on the 22nd of August 2010 they found themselves sitting abreast several thousand feet in the air, simultaneously on the brink of shitting themselves. Unconventionally romantic.

The time came for them to jump. "So I look ready?" asked Antoine, smiling nervously at his dearest. 

"You could do up the flies of your jumpsuit."

"You might have reminded me of this earlier," tutted Antoine, his not-quite-perfect command of English leading him to infer that 'this' was some recurring malevolent problem. 

The petite silver aeroplane carved its solitary course across a cloudless sky, and the couple jumped hand in hand before splitting apart at twelve-thousand feet. 

At ten-thousand feet they floated closer together, still tied to their instructors, and at eight-thousand feet they kissed for a further few hundred. 

At however many-thousand feet Bilinda's parachute burst open above the emerald fields and chalky white oast houses of Kent, and she stared, exopthalmic, at the spiralling form of Antoine. At four-thousand feet, Antoine had become a black speck to her eyes, and at one-thousand he was more of a red blotch on the otherwise spotless rural expanse. 

As soon as she and her instructor landed she tore herself from her strapping and hurried, in tears, to where his broken body lay. Predictably, his parachute had never opened, and so she unravelled it from its crumpled package on his behalf to find the words 'WILL YOU MARRIAGE ME?' crudely spray-painted on the day-glo nylon. And thus, she took his limp hand in holy matrimony.

Devotion

SHIRO KURAMATA, GLASS CHAIR, 1976

'I'm just going to the loo' says Kylie. 
     She walks wobblily into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, balloon in one hand, canister in the other. While taking a piss, she fixes up a double balloon and sucks the whole thing into her lungs. Her mind, sight and hearing all throb as she inhales, and she forgets where she is. It is ecstasy.

     Letting the flaccid and empty balloon slip through her fingers and fall to the floor, she tilts her back against the wall and puts a cigarette between her wet lips. She clicks open the lighter and her head blows up.

     Twenty minutes pass, and Jason is prostrated on top of the black satin sheets wondering where Kylie is. Wet trusses of bleached white hair dangle before his sunny blue eyes. He rises from the bed, slips on a pair of black jeans and picks up the silver revolver before stumbling to the bathroom. 

     He finds her limp, naked and headless body slumped over the toilet, but still sitting relatively upright against the wall. Blood and grey matter squish between his toes as he edges tentatively further into the room. He affords his eyes time to ruefully peruse the scene before offering his verbal assessment of the situation. 

     'Deep,' is the lengthily uttered conclusion.

     He looks about him surreptitiously. He really needs to go himself but cannot bear the thought of touching the body. No one is about, no would know, so why not? With this in mind, he unzips and starts to piss, and a golden rainbow of urine glitters as it cascades between Kylie's legs into the bowl, shattering the silence of death in the room like a bullet through a sheet of ice. 

     A wasp watches Jason voyeuristically from his perch on the window. This precious moment is their secret. It is their single, shared, fleeting snippet of irrevocable solace before the advent of a new dawn of pain for both of them. 

    Jason looks about again. Again, no one would know. Justifying his actions as a lover's gift, he points upwards slightly so that the last drops fall onto Kylie's stomach, before shaking, swatting the wasp, calling the ambulance, putting the nozzle of the gun into his mouth and firing. 

FOSCO FAVALLI

Famous Paintings Explained

Beato Angelico - Annunciation, c.1436-45

This is the fresco that really put the 'beat' in Beato Angelico, and this aural accompaniment is strongly recommended forthwith. One of many reproductions of the annunciation that Fra Angelico completed in his lifetime, this is one of the most important to art historians today for not only does it prove that disco has been alive and well for two millennia, it also is highly controversial in that it contests the theory of immaculate conception. 

Followed by party-goers in the top left-hand corner of the painting, the angel Gabriel is depicted having just arrived to the party that the Virgin has thrown in honour of a new wardrobe that Joseph has just been commissioned to make for a wealthy local landowner. Note the disco lights on the ceiling, the portable mini Casio tape player on Mary's lap, and most importantly the dance moves - the Virgin demonstrates the classic Macarena, whilst Gabriel shakes his fingers as he gets down to the beat. 


The painting's controversial element comes in the small inscription that used to be in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting (before it was defaced by pious monks in the eighteenth century). The inscription claimed that there was in fact no immaculate conception, but conversely that at some point during the festivities frankincense was slipped into Mary's drink, leading her to think later that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth, and not the outcome of date-rape as Fra Angelico believed.

Vada Scoparti's Diary

ANSELM KIEFER - LOT'S WIFE, 1989

Sorry I haven't been in touch for a while. I've been busy with work, busy with partying and busy with getting busy. LOL. So I met a new guy. At first I was somewhat hesitant, because he is like, black, but actually he's quite a nice guy. And the rumours are true.* 

So anyway, we met at Baa Bar, and he started daggering me to that Kid Cudi tune. Turns out he's on my course, I know, right? Weird, cos there's only three black guys on the course so I'm surprised he hasn't noticed me before. Back to Baa Bar though, I think the clincher was that he had some fucking mega meow meow. 


*He's fucking hung.

Famous Paintings Explained

Gian Girolamo Savoldo - La Maddalena, c.1535-40, Oil on canvas, National Gallery

 

Returning to the sepulchre, this image captures Mary Magdalen in turning to see the barely clothed Christ who has just risen again. In this sensual, sexually charged depiction, the artist juxtaposes his own lascivious desires with a novel yet wildly misinformed interpretation of a verse from St. Luke's Gospel. The passage in question loosely narrates the point that the Magdalen emerges from the shadows of uncertainty to recognise the resurrected Christ, calling him 'Rabboni', the Hebrew for 'teacher'. 

However, due a monumental mistranslation somewhere along the line, Savoldo was led to believe that the Magdalen had in fact growled lecherously at Christ - 'Raaaar, bone me!' Recent X-Ray scans of the painting have uncovered some telling revelations, notably that originally Mary Magdalen had been portrayed removing her suspenders and readying herself to receive - which accounts for the fact that her left knee is raised up close to her face (and is not, as some critics have said, her right arm). 

The fervently pious patron rejected the image however, and so to save the commission Savoldo was forced to cover the Magdalen with the silver cloak seen shimmering on the canvas today. 

Ardent Speculation

'That's the main problem with the Trident Drizzler you see,' postulates Dave as he clambers out of the shower scratching his greying whiskers. 'With the T400 you don't get this kind of limescale build-up, but with older models I'm afraid things aren't so jazzy.' The latest in a long line of unwashed householders stares at him blankly. 

'How has my Eton education left me such a wet spanner?' Dave soliloquises as he restores the dripping tools to the Berlingo. And so he pooters along through Hammersmith on his way to the next job sighing as he passes a snake of voters outside a polling station. Alas! So many painful memories, so many heart-wrenching visions of what could of been!

'Fucking fuck!' concludes Gordon as he fumbles around for the tap. Having never quite become accustomed to blindness he has just taken a shit in the bath for the second time in a week. Downstairs Sarah is again twisting the knife in the Ed Balls voodoo doll to no avail. 

Nick on the other hand stretches his feet out over the desk at No. 10. He is on the line to Mark Zuckerberg and Myspace Tom to thank them for their unwavering support in his successful second campaign. Vince meanwhile downloads pictures of women in varying states of undress, their modesty preserved only by the occasional pocket calculator. 

 

ARTWORK (FROM TOP) -

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, GODDESS 13, 2006-7

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, TIGER, 2006-7

MARTIN DI GIROLAMO, SOLA ON HORSE, 2006-7

January

Vada Scoparti's Diary

There hasn’t been much productivity here recently considering that the majority of the writing staff has been sitting in the library sobbing into the pages of books on Renaissance etiquette. If you expect to me to apologise, stop. In fact, I really have much better things to do right now. To introduce to the fray is our new columnist - the sassy sashaying student soliloquist, Vada Scoparti. Hence: 

I indulged in a most unsavoury liaison at Vodrevs Tuesday last. He wasn’t an Adonis but I saw he was dressed well so, TVRs flowing (if it’s too complicated an acronym then you belong in the proletariat), I thought it apt to go home with him. Honestly I was absolutely out of it, I must have had literally a gram of meph on top of that, so one couldn’t very well be blamed for falling into so promiscuous a trap, nor if I make any minor discrepancies in this story (which I assure you I won’t). The house. Was. Filthy. Ohmygod - I had to leave the Kurt Geigers by the door simply because of the state of the carpet.

Making a god-awful semantic nightmare of ‘salacious’, among other lengthy words beyond his comprehension, he wooed me to the cesspit he called his bedroom. I stopped by the bathroom beforehand however. Now, who in their right mind lives in a cold house and doesn’t have a wooden lavatory seat? What am I meant to do with porcelain, let my buttocks freeze to the seat? I am not wont to such blue-collar displeasures.

I got over this. But then the shit really hit the pan: Sainsbury’s Basics toilet tissue. BASICS. 2 shitting ply. Ohmygod. What kind of despicable oaf expects me, of all people, to wipe with such dross? I kicked aside some filthy clothes, finished his drugs and took my leave, slamming the door and harumphing loudly enough that he got the message.

As a mark of my disdainful contempt, I did not flush. 

VADA SCOPARTI

FAMOUS PAINTINGS EXPLAINED No.2

Bill Hammond - The Fall of Icarus, 1995. Acrylic on canvas.

Tears of acrylic seep down the canvas, sliding desperately down the painting into a white abyss, eternal nothingness. The drips remind me of a desperate man clawing for purchase on a cliff face. Unsuccessfully. The painting is meant to represent man’s effect on these elegant birds’ habitats - they sit powerless in the dead trees as pollution melts their world away, a despairing view of hopelessness through watery eyes.

But that’s what Hammond wants you to think. What people don’t realise is that he’s actually one of Anna Wintour’s harshest critics. You see, Hammond has an unfounded and totally irrational hatred of her, but has disguised this for years behind the ingenious veil of worrying about climate change and all that la-di-da. All the birds are in fact sullen little Anna Wintours watching her aging face in the mirror droop down the canvas (her cheekbones). So in fact, the abyss is the irrevocable past, and the long trickles of paint are Wintour's looks cascading into it, where they will remain. Ouch. 

As in The Merchant of Venice - 'truth will out'. Other interesting revelations that have come to light this month include the news that John Flaxman's Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus (1810), contrary to its lengthy title, actually depicts the most bodacious happy-slap of antiquity - the famous 'diving bitchslap' pioneered by the Athenians in the 5th century BC (below). 

THOMAS

=\\ JUSTINE LAI //=

It could feasibly be argued that I'm turning into an old man at 20 given the way I react to some things these days. I thought I was pretty liberal, but sometimes I surprise myself. With this in mind, one of the main reasons I like the Californian Justine Lai's project Join Or Die is that it can be cheeky and provocative, but not so much that the paintings cause offence, or leave you pissed off for the rest of the day. No gratuitous bell-ends, no casual vagina and most importantly no kids with dildos for noses. No, I'm sick and tired of that kind of stuff, only there for shock - no artistic merit whatsoever. What am I meant to say at a Chapman brothers exhibition? 'Great, you went to the trouble of putting a cock on the face of a child mannequin.......so?' I can tell I'm going to get terribly sidetracked here - it's time for me to 'get my fuck on' as the late Tupac Shakur once put it, and so eloquently too. So without further ado: Fuck you, Chapman brothers. 


The same goes for Gilbert and George. Fuck you, Gilbert and George. How in the HELL did they get so successful? Am I so sad and boring that I can't see the funny side of two creepy old guys blowing up colourful photographs of each other's wilting genitals and calling the works things like Blood, death, shit, semen? Well really. 

Lai started Join Or Die in 2006 with the aim of painting herself having sex with every US president in chronological order, and it works. It's amusing, different and attractively and skillfully painted too. Furthermore, there isn't any unnecessary genitalia, which would ruin the charm of her work. Yes, they're actually nice to look at don't you think? God I sound old. Fuck that too. The following innuendo-laced quote is indicative of Lai's way of teasingly fingering the boundaries of good taste without feeling the puerile need to bend them over and force-fuck them (think Gaybert and Gay and and the Gayman brothers*)


"I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated." - JUSTINE LAI

*Had to do that to make myself feel less old.


THOMAS