a company of vagabonds

Those we like are tales of conflicts, woven at the handlooms of epos and mythopoesis, adopting the mechanisms, styles and manners of genre fiction, biopics, militant reports or so-called micro-history. Novels that process raw materials found in the gloomy zones of history, real stories told like fiction and vice versa. Recuperation of forgotten events, at the core or at the margins of which our plots can unfold: 'Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.' (James Ellroy, premise to American Tabloid ). The important thing is keeping light-years of distance between us and bourgeois fiction: the real protagonist of history is neither the Great Man nor the monadic individual; quite on the contrary, it is the nameless crowd of second and third leads and, behind them (or through them) the nameless and swarming multitude of events, destinies, movements and vicissitudes: 'In the fresco, I am one of the figures in the background. At the centre standthe Pope, the Emperor, the cardinals and the princes of Europe. On the margins the agents, discreet and invisible, peeping out from behind the crowns and tiaras, but in fact supporting the whole geometry of the painting, filling up its space and, without making themselves conspicuous, keeping those powerful heads at the centre of the composition.' (Q's diary, first sentence). We want to tell the constitution, emergence and movement of multitudo. Multitudo has nothing to do with the mass, which is a homogeneous block to be mobilized or, alternatively, a 'black hole' to be sounded by opinion polls. Multitudo is 'a horizon of overt corporeality and savage multiplicity. A world of interlacements and physical combinations, associations and dissociations, fluctuations and materializations which,according to a perfectly horizontal logic, actualizes the paradoxical cross between causality and fortuitousness, between tendency and possibility. This is the original dimension of multitudo. ' (Antonio Negri, Spinoza sovversivo).

The WuMing Collective

COMING SOON

THE EIGHTFOLD WAY: The Technological Application of Serendipitous Indeterminacy.

Colquhoun's Patented PERIPATETIC RANDOMISER for the Pleasurable Negation of Spectacular Space.

AND ALSO

Colquhoun's Patented EROTO-PRECIPITATOR for the Pleasurable Negation of Libidinal Tension.

Used in tandem they could constitute a revolutionary new take on 'Fucking in the Streets'! (see 'The Sixties')

For more details e-mail me at: the_blackdrop@hotmail.com

FAVOURITE PLACE

Rosneath Point.

Part of the attraction of Rosneath Point is in getting there. You take a train from Glasgow Central station to Gourock (30 minutes), jump on the ferry to Kilcreggan then hang a right. Keep walking (about a mile) until you reach a place of desolate pine tree's, shelving rock crashing into the sea and endless amounts of washed up stuff.
I found this wonderful empty place by a combination of accident and design as I perused a map of the Clyde Estuary trying to identify those bits on any map which are indicated by the most opaque of signs. In this case nothing but some tree's and an unexceptional piece of shoreline. On the face of it and according to 'them' , here be nothing much to write home about.
What the map does not tell you is that this unintentional dumping ground for all the crap in the Clyde is subsequently empty of people. As you build your fire from the tangled piles of sea-bleached tree's and sip your bottled beer (still cold from the shop!) you suddenly realise that you have'nt glimpsed a soul for two hours or more. If, like me, you spend most of your life in a large and noisy city the sudden sense of isolation goes straight to your head! Soon you will find yourself playing with all that seaborn junk in a completely lunatic and highly satisfying manner. (I have a blurred and badly exposed Super 8 of me and two friends playing with a found doll and some lighter fuel.)
This is the kind of place where spontaneous nudity will take place at some point. Best not venture into the water though.

contact: the_blackdrop@hotmail.com