Looking for a kiss by Richard Cabut
Richard Cabut is author of the novel Dark Entries (Cold Lips Press, 2019), editor/-writer of the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zer0 Books, October 2017), contributor to Ripped, Torn and Cut – Pop, Politics and Punks Fanzines From 1976 (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Growing Up With Punk (Nice Time, 2018).
His journalism has featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, NME (pen name Richard North), ZigZag, The Big Issue, Time Out, Offbeat magazine, the Independent, Artists & Illustrators magazine, thefirstpost, London Arts Board/Arts Council England, Siren magazine, etc. His fiction has appeared in the books The Edgier Waters (Snowbooks, 2006) and Affinity (67 Press, 2015). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee 2016. Richard’s plays have been performed at various theatres in London and nationwide, including the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden, London. He published the fanzine Kick, and played bass for the punk band Brigandage (LP Pretty Funny Thing – Gung Ho Records, 1986).
Looking for a Kiss — Descendants of the Decadents
Sometimes a person’s life feels like one long introduction – when is it going to properly start? The truth is, sometimes it never does. The introduction will have to suffice (Looking for a Kiss)
At the start of Looking for a Kiss, Robert, the surrogate acid tripping author, wonders if having a plot would be better. In the same way I’m wondering whether actually just reviewing the book would be better. Like Robert am I too lazy? Too scared to attempt a systematic breakdown of the novel. Is my ego getting in the way of the truth? In other words, do I have a pre-given point to prove? And isn’t Cabut’s notion of Positive Punk about thought in becoming? The relevance of this is simply that these are all questions that LFAK seems to spurt out. I did find myself wishing there was more of a plot and more seedy local details to build up a Sickert-like patina of low-life recent Camden history but then I thought that is terribly predictable of me. Books help me sleep see. I have been thinking about how my desire to be understood is getting in the way of being understood. Let go and feel it. It is predictable to want the handrail of the story arch to guide me safely through a transformative story. It’s no coincidence that the protagonists of LFAK are tripping from the start. They are already outside the bounds of cause and effect. This is how digressions are allowed to seep in. I love how Robert marvels at the stream of multi-coloured piss emerging from underneath Marlene who is crouched making full use of her bondage trousers’ inventively designed zipper. The revelation they each share is not the rainbow spectrum of the piss but how it cascades into the canal – how everything merges together. This feeling of immersion in the interwoven tapestry of the cosmos is material vitality and NOT, I stress, the paranoid apophenia of separating ideas (signs) from experience.
Punk did not start out as a sign of a style but the propulsive potential of style soon captured the collective imagination. I have always felt averse to style and instinctively put this down to style being a thing of a thing rather than the emergence of a living creative force. A style puts an over-emphasis on the visual interpretation of aesthetic, I reasoned. Lately, however, I’ve come around to trying to understand where this drive towards style emerges from. This shift was triggered when I came across a painting, Pornocrates, and instead of thinking oh here’s another transgressive act of pseudo-rebellion as style, I thought wow that is really something. It is utterly Positive Punk. In the spirit of Cabut’s vision of Positive Punk, I remained open-minded and was rewarded with synchronicity. LFAK has an acid sex fantasy involving a girl with a pig’s head and the painting’s alternative title is Lady with a Pig. The immersive and visceral sex occasions in LFAK are possibly examples something I would previously have turned away from as stylishly transgressive but that would be to miss the point. A drive towards the transgressive is about an intuitive desire to shape another mode of being where feeling, rather than conceptual order, becomes the core of the cosmos. By turning towards the Decadents, a whole alternative history of art opened up to me and all the works I dismissed as posey seemed imbued with a more noble pursuit of attempting to once more generate actual difference. Difference is the excess outside and within the bounds of what Massumi calls the Empire of Like (Parables for the Virtual), where we find our location by one thing being like another thing. The point about transgressive art is that it is seeking beauty where beauty needs no frame of reference.
The internet keeps us busy. Keeps us distracted with the game of patience. Clearing the decks. Stops us feeling. It is also useful for research and I now know Richard Cabut’s latest novel can be read in light of his seminal Positive Punk article written as Richard North. I understand (I think) his frustration at how his vision of Positive Punk became reduced to Goth. A label like Goth is far more easily disseminated by the systems of the Empire of Like. Positive Punk’s meaning of immersion in creative emergence is shed leaving only the word - Goth. LFAK is a way of using fiction to explore the imaginative truths found in the original NME article, which itself uses a partially fictional framework. As I was reading the novel, I found myself thinking this writer is not like a critic; this is too deep into the realm of “thought in becoming”, of favouring formation over pre-given form, to be something a critic would write. “I never wanted to be a critic” says Robert of his fictional job at the NME. It’s hard to come across as opinionated when you’re following thought in becoming. From what I’ve read (ahem) an acid trip can give access to the temporal substance of the cosmos. Likewise LFAK seems to make lived experience feel tangible. As previously mentioned, the books central voyagers are on an acid trip for most of the story. I get a felt intensity to consider how ritual (writing is a ritual says Robert at one point) can equally create a region for experiencing the embodied moment where form and content become enfolded into each other.
The instinct, ritual and ceremony are rising again in everyday life (positive punk NME)
Some of the discussion around punk in LFAK flows back to the Situationists and the Spectacle. There’s a sense that the Spectacle has taken the idea of the transformative potential of becoming an individual and turned it into a sign of individuality. Being an individual is a complicated business approached cerebrally. Capitalism is sold through the idea of the individual’s freedom to achieve their dream. So, what is so different about the creative energy of the positive punks? My own feeling is that the missing bedrock is feeling or what I hesitatingly call the affective terrain, I don’t want to be screwed, thought Marlene, and I don’t want to feel anything. Robert thought: I want to be screwed, and I want to feel something.
I first encountered punk as a child it will therefore, always be the realm of older more experienced folks. As a boy I had an army surplus bag with the words academics kill written on it. No one in my family, ever fessed up to writing it. Ironically it was in books, often considered objectionably academic, that I found a life-line for my intuitive belief in material vitality. A belief in sensation, speculates Simon O’Sullivan in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, can liberate us from the shame of being human. This could be a way into immersing oneself in LFAK’s, frankly juicy, sex scenes. No holds barred. Much of Cabut’s writing seems to address the idea of historical truth and imagined truth. The books protagonist, Robert goes further and senses that truth is in formation rather than pre-given form. If we look at Deleuze and his rather avuncular yet energising inspiration, Alfred North Whitehead, we discover an invitation to access an expanded mode of understanding via expression rather than communication. Whitehead argues that human thought in the developed/civilised modern world has become bifurcated and because of this expression has become seen as a saturated subjective experience in response to the primary material of logical scientific truth. Cabut’s original article on positive punk instinctively uses a fictional setting partly because it feels more immediate but also because it blurs this divide between the subjective and the objective. It is an attempt to open up a more experiential mode of understanding. It speculates that factual truth is not more true than fictional truth and that truth itself is experiential rather than conceptual because everything living is always in becoming. For centuries we have insisted on a form of truth that kills in order to divide and conquer. The energy North (Cabut) describes in his original article brings to mind the Élan vital of Bergson and A N Whitehead’s suggestion that creativity is the one universal of universals in the cosmos. Whilst I believe this aesthetic ontology is always available (let go and feel it) I did get a sense that LFAK is about how Positive Punk remained as an introduction to itself. This longing is the conceptual mind turning the lived experience into a sign or snapshot. By the end of the book, I was left with a sensing an atmosphere of ambivalence regarding Robert’s hopes for creating a culture based on creative immersion but his sadness sessions are something I found uplifting and will give a try,
“However, he did learn that the associated feeling of desperation could be alleviated and transformed into something positive by creativity, which is the magical process of giving something of yourself to the world.”
The emphasis placed upon the occult and mystery by positive punks stems, I speculate, from a desire to reimagine an aesthetic mode of being and meaning making. Early in the book Robert feels like quoting Gramsci but decides against provoking Marlene’s cynical wrath. Marlene is her own and everyone else’s worst critic. Gramsci’s suggestion that the workers and those dislocated by capitalism need to generate an alternative culture to the bourgeois hegemony is a clue to the powerful spirit of punk that animates Cabut’s ideas. (Positive) Punk is, perhaps an aesthetic ontology. As a child of nine in 1977 I have now grown to regard the punk of that era as manifesting an energy that intuitively took up Deleuze’s suggestion to “take everything and make it matter for expression”. The reduced nihilistic aspect of punk perhaps grew into oi and it is against this dead-end stasis that Cabut contrasts Positive Punk. Punk was never meant to be entirely destructive but a means of perturbing the habitual mode of doing things within the communication model. The communication model insists on art and music as delivering a pre-given idea of beauty. Positive Punks are, I speculate, folk who sense that this relaying of pre-given form is what is happening throughout bourgeois communication culture. The idea of something that is like something else is far more effectively communicated than the emergence of difference. The emergence of difference is not a hippy trope but a fact of life. Punk was an intuitive drive to perturb the stasis and generate something creative that immerses us in a feeling from which imagination and ideas can emerge. Even as a nine-year-old I was struck by how the Sex Pistols had woven us all into a real-life story and how the newspapers themselves had become part of an unwinding interwoven tapestry. I’m told real punk happened in 1976 but my actual mythopoetic punk happened in 1977 the year of (the) Jubilee. Of course, this situationist approach has been more neatly packaged as a form of viral marketing but then it was part of an explosive material vitality. Isn’t it funny how quickly something that was attempting to cut up the historicised version of the human experience becomes the subject of a taxonomy of originality?
To label Cabut’s novel as a punk novel would be to limit its scope as a piece of writing. I’m only half way through (I’ve now finished it) but already there have been some rich seams of insight. How does experience become torn away from the idea? Robert gazes at a framed photograph reflecting on how it had formed its own form of truth removed from the actual occasion, he wanted to smash the photo to see what was inside; to discover how it works, how the camera’s gaze had alighted and then moved on from this sacred moment of reality,
Image is a key factor in how the Empire of Like transmits likeness with discarded meaning. It’s how punk loses its magic. The cut-up aesthetic of punk took the pre-given communication of signs and made them materially vital. Those words, material vitality, I picked up from Simon O’Sullivan and make such a lot of sense of the felt intensity punk released in my childhood self. I digress and this too is at the heart of Cabut’s meandering approach. The layout of Camden itself and the canal flowing through it takes the place of a storyline. I’m tempted to say that the acid-fuelled sexy digressions make this a punk Tristan hand Shandy. Is it being lazy to not construct a plot thinks Robert who is imagining a story unfolding partly acid inspired but partly as an embodiment of the writing process itself. It is an exhilarating device. There is a curious thrill in how Robert (the writer) and not Cabut (the author) gets closer to inhabiting the embodied moment as a way of being. It’s as if the fictioning allows us to cut ourselves some slack and take a break from reporting back to the human mind’s command module. For Robert the imagination is interwoven with visceral experience rather than the refuge of the intellect. Robert also senses that felt understanding doesn’t reject the intellect but that ideas emerge from within a realm of feeling,
“Robert watching the scene and himself write about it felt as though he was blurring the line between observed and sensed experience.”
Although there are tantalising reminders of cinematic manifestations of punk and the effects of alienation on a fated romance, Requiem for a Dream perhaps, LFAK is not like any other novel exploration of punk you will ever read. Its big bad acid waves have crashed into the halls of my memory palace and their tides are ebbing and flowing. The sex scenes (did I mention them?) celebrate punk's belief in sensation (I speculate) and are pants down the sexiest I’ve ever read. The book never took me to a cosy fictional place but it did create a genuinely visceral embodied realm blurring the line between observed and sensed experience. In a subtle way Looking for a Kiss is a brilliant piece of contingent alchemy because Cabut realised the nihilist stylists had forgotten how meaning comes from feeling. The vortex of the post-modern loss of any meaning came about because we climbed onboard the secular double-decker (experience and concept) and left the affective realm. No more immanence anymore. Modernist writing’s rejection of beginning middle and end can be about revealing the truth of life’s cut up nature but in LFAK Richard Cabut has recaptured the unremembered base ingredient of feeling. It is a book that uses the process of creating fiction to open onto a glimpse of what it means to seek meaning through a culture with feeling at the centre.
Tastes vary and I was initially disappointed to find that Robert North doesn’t cite the Damned as having sown the seeds for the new Positive Punk. Smash it up remains the single most affecting record I’ve ever owned. It expresses an intensity of feeling. The penny is now dropping, however, and I see how Robert’s sexual adventures at LFAK’s climax (sorry couldn’t resist) are part of the grammar of Positive Punk’s turn towards an embodied experience. The Banshees and the Ants are sexier than the Damned (sorry Dave et al) who appealed to my prepubescent auto-destructionist but not my blossoming libido. The new celebrity-bourgeois double decker system is founded on a continued separation of concept and experience, which allows instant and convenient upkeep of hierarchical structures of class-ification. I say this not as an ideological stance but as someone who handled Never Mind the Bollocks in the windowless dining room where his sister furtively smoked B&H and realised that a belief in sensation was freedom from the shame of being human. Of course, I didn’t know the words then. Ideologies can only be defined by separating concept from experience. Ideology is the currency of the Empire of Like. The creative drive and emergence of difference found within the embodied moment is the political frequency within Cabut’s vision of Positive Punk. Ultimately Looking for a Kiss feels like a requiem for this dream but leaves me spaced out and staring at the glowing embers wondering if they might just reignite,
“SO HERE it is: the new positive punk, with no empty promises of revolution, either in the rock'n'roll sense or the wider political sphere. Here is only a chance of self-awareness, of personal revolution, of colourful perception and galvanisation of the imagination that startles the slumbering mind and body from their sloth. Certainly this is revolution in the non-political sense, but at the same time it's neither escapist nor defeatist. It is, in fact, "political" in the genuine sense of the word.”
Review by Mikey Georgeson
