DB Fishman

“Life’s a lot of fun. You have to remember that

and you have to keep having fun.”

- Warren Zevon

With thanks to Dan Holloway. Nikul Patel and Megan Graieg

for the necessary kicks.

All words and photography by DB Fishman.

Let It Be Known Then

Buy The Ticket

Do you follow?

vectors

Base note

This is about the Ircam Newsletter,

so you are probably concerned.

hope

Installation

The Spanish Butcher

Cavalcade

Pull of Vacuum

Serene Gas

transmission

Digging Suburbanite

The Passion of the Palm Trees

Redbone

On the Victory granted Feminism

You’ll Never Live As Long As A Legend

Staring Into Sun

boundary

Installation Art II

Children’s Games

homeland

Not Happening

Freeway

The Brighton Street Races

Driving Home for Xmas

Installation Art 3

Everything is blue and green

These continuous things

Take The Ride

monolith

Buy the Ticket

The meaning of rock & roll

is transcendence

The meaning of life

is survival

.

2013

Do you follow?

The same questions will be asked

And you will be forced

to confront yourself

And you will be forced

to triangulate

Where you stand

On everything

from racist politics

To haircuts.

And are they really different?

2013

Taken verbatim from ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better’, Guardian interview with

David Lee Roth of Van Halen, 2/2/12.

Base note

I want to take the static Of the background radiation Exhalation of the universe Caught on untuned TVs and Loop that shit to a Multilayered blizzard of the Hiss that fills the air Inside my lungs, swims Over my vision, vibrates Inside my wrists, I want To amp it up to Shaking eardrums Making awareness Unavoidable of this Omnipresent screaming.

2013

This is about the Ircam Newsletter, so you are probably concerned.

I wonder what’s happening in IRCAM right now

Pierre Boulez’s avant garde institute

I wonder what tinkering in those underground rooms

What innovation, what developments, what thoughts

This modernist hive for concepts and for software

Creation – Transmission – Research

Opened its interdisciplinary doors the year punk broke

Electroacoustic technology of art

Notes scattered into binary of algorithms

Cello notes extended to infinity

Voices, disembodied, calling out from outside nature

Sonorous, lonely tones haunting the hallways

Sounds caught from the air, decontextualized, reordered

Management of the movement of sound in space

Buskers on the hot paving stones outside

Perhaps an ambient hum of drives processing

Discord! Cacophony! Audio processed to be

Uncanny from unrecognisable origins

Waves of synthesised, designed sounds

Painting so far beyond past canvas

I wonder what’s going on in IRCAM right now

Under the cloak of Parisian night

2013

Installation

I mean it’s crap,

Obviously. The

Bovine, stumbling

Figure in ill-fitting

Dinnerwear clambering

Over the lawns of

A country house

Out of breath

Blown up

To a panting

Superhuman

The details, his

Face erased by

Advancing through

The years, the

Bright screen

Fills the white

Room with motion

Slowed to tidal grey

Looped & hazed

In static but

Stood staring,

Face lit in the

Rolling projection,

He saw the figure,

His father, brought back

In his work: Infinite

Purgatory.

2012

The Spanish Butcher

These cut-out hearts sit Small, red and pudgily self-contained Next to the folded white Blanket rolls of tripe, beneath Buffed glass, each attached On either side to a Pale, fanned lung Ready to fly them to Heaven. 2012

Cavalcade

The rusted palette fork Dragged across the uneven Paving stones Pops and rumbles like Carnival drums’ sound Echoing off the walls

2013

Pull of Vacuum

The way the fibres

of clean, white linen

Call out to drink in

fresh red blood

2012

Serene Gas

Insert a shunt into my bloodstream For dazzled hopes to paddle in I want to recline right across this sky And rest these tired bones over drifting clouds Given enough time everything is temporary.

2013

Digging Suburbanite

That heavy silence inherently stencilled ‘residential’ The fences, gardens, trellises, ramshackle but presentable An evident safe haven set back from the traffic From the centre’s crowds and revelry a place where nothing happens In each contained unit, furtive rooms lurk behind uncurtained windows lit from some light deeper inside or the television’s lapping blue; neighbours parties sounding through the walls The gathered ornaments less showy than a record, artefacts left modestly in sill corners A quiet rests over the streets capturing, containing broads strips of becalmed grey sky, bisected by passing flight paths Where you can stand in the road, tracing the cracks worn in the tarmac, watch the slumping course of hedgerows, these understated borders And you can hear nothing but

slight birdsong on the indifferent breeze and the steady warm pulse of trains passing at a distance lulling the neighbourhood to sleep; Comfort the anaesthesia we inhale as relaxing, we harden to the faster currents, to anything not routine and familiar to these idyllic flat-pack pop-up eddies that run a thread the length of the country – and could be anywhere across it - this launchpad and steady- state; Home. 2013

The Passion of the Palm Trees

We walk in corridors of privilege As the red sun burns the blue sky Dipped in imposed luxury The ledger is not clean. 2013

Redbone

Space travel makes the heart weaker Muscle wastes with no gravity to pulse against So kiss ferociously Sex positive Love like this is Your last day on this planet- I want to take to somewhere And do something, because This is the rushing progress Of neon lifeblood against The harvesting explosions of blades.

2013

On the Victory granted Feminism

Picture the scenario: You have been put in prison, Just on the cusp of adulthood. There were warnings, yes, But never any real reason Or justification given For all those years hemmed in By instruction, firmly Confined by restrictions, until Voices called for change and Eventually came the rioting And at the same time as The authorities appeared to Heed the demands, You had a child… Now watching her run Up and down the Redecorated corridors Allowed to dress how she likes (within reason) To eat what she likes (within reason) To be who she likes (within reason) You wonder, in noticing That she doesn’t, What this building is now. 2012

You’ll Never Live As Long As A Legend

He has a reputation to maintain The big man must be seen to give it large Even with his youthful exuberance long past The audience needs its talisman So it’s a dab of momentum on the fingertips A little kickstart - though spark plugs are burning - For one more surging leap of faith, as the sallow skin turns slack And the heart muscle’s ripping to shredded beef.

2013

Staring Into Sun

The post-sun-warmed blue Film across my vision The click inside my Injured knee Beneath the ceaseless Surplus rushing past, a Silence is forming At the centre The streak of blood in my spit Fingertips can count my every bone A blindspot of null space with each blink An emptied blister in a strip of pills When you remove Work and sleep Life is just mere intervals Between brushing your teeth

2013

Installation Art II

‘yarn bombed’ trees, lampposts, bikes bound in bright twine a softening of the built environment the palimpsest of graffiti strung walls stripping streaks of cleaning bleach just one more layer the past of sun-worn, rain-torn poster remains club nights, campaigns, celebrations clinging against the wind the opening hours of the shopping arcade by the shutters, bolted to the wall in stainless steel initials gouged deep in long-set concrete patches entrenched testaments to opportunity cracks running through rain-soaked concrete blocks great murals of interminable infinity in the concrete underpass’s shadows filled with sprouting weeds in dripping black spray paint the wall reads ‘YOU ARE ABOUT TO GET KILLED’ this patina we create of damage & scraped additions posterity through interference a permanent record, testimony; when we are gone They can judge us by our leavings

2013

Children’s Games

The children run around outside Chasing each other down, screaming ‘I’m not even playing!’ one yells ‘I shot myself in the head!’ ‘That doesn’t count’ another shouts back ‘I don’t care!’ he says. 2013

Not Happening

Just after we moved south ‘Round the corner from our drab flat Was a bridge underneath which ran the railway At dusk the glowing signal light By a bend in the track would Offset the evening sky and I was going to take a picture And call it ‘Take a look up the railtrack…’ After the line in that Proclaimers song But that view from the bridge Was facing further on down the line And that pretty much said it all. 2012

Freeway

One after another ad infinitum The broad metal boxes flow Over a hump in the road In equal & endless pace, as if On a conveyor chain, each with A spot of darkness, stationary, Anonymous and malignant In the driver’s seat Like a clot. 2013

The Brighton Street Races

Here on this island’s lowest coast as pier lights cycle over still seawaters An Englishman’s home used to be his castle but prices have increased a premium on real estate so now his kingdom comes on four wheels Larger than life deep colour polished candy sheen The extreme beasts of car dealers sitting open thumping, flashing for poorly hidden awe in this Antisocial clearly societal configuration of a social gathering Spectators line the promenade, the street, the track figures clustered by their cars; the air thickens with the billowing clouds of incinerated rubber, cars turned starships in the smoke etching the tarmac with their deep, black strokes Parading dressed in hazard lights for handbrake turns, drifting, quarter mile sprints Back & forth on the waterfront, buzzing civilians caught in the firing chamber feel briefly the pressure of pending acceleration as

Better than a fairground the scene becomes a pantomime; the heroes making daring turns, villains fishtailing, so the audience step back to applause & collective intakes of breath, laughing at the fleeting appearance of a police van This is showmanship, where driving isn’t dangerous – just contextual, head-on face-offs paused with self-imposed traffic direction; it’s irrelevant how close a crash seems when these close balletic passes never impact The Mitsubishi engine roars trigger more sensitive alarms, the soundtrack bumping clear along the seafront head-nodding syzurp rap chopped & screwed from another southern coast And beneath the strafe of backfire and screech of sustained wheelspin and past the last line of prom lights before pure, empty nothing Music & horns ring out across the dunes bass booming like a heartbeat over the waves 2013

Driving Home for Xmas

The Christmas pilgrimage of the young professionals Grey swathes of rain lashing down the windows Of the soporific morning motorway services Beneath Jeremy Kyle’s admonishing gaze Hung from the ceiling, mute, in the states; Four pound for a toasted cheese sandwich.

2012

Installation Art 3

Row after row of round red Balloons inflating, from small to Full, swollen size, steadily rising To their peaks, before Slowly shrivelling and Sinking back down To the ground And on the wall behind In big golden glitter letters is Written the summation: THAT’S LIFE!

2013

These continuous things

I wanted to see the throes

of the kids there

just taking over.

I wanted to go in and

out of rooms and over

the balconies and swimming pools

these continuous things

so, yeah

there was like a mile of

people at some points.

It was hard

it was chaos

it was cool

it was very much like you

would imagine it to be.

2013

Taken verbatim from ‘Spring Breakers, a riotous take on modern America’,

Guardian interview with director Harmony Korine, 30/3/2013.

Take the Ride

The meaning of life is that

it ends

The meaning of rock & roll

is transcendence

2013