Peter Shukie – Archaeologists of Now
When life decides that a city is necessary for a Sunday walk the eyes are opened more than the reverie of the moors. Things are revealed, especially if it involves a tracing of old haunts. Manchester say, like yesterday. In a vinyl shop, and suddenly, as always, aware that this is a different kind of life, where the cataloguers gather. There in the midst of the collectors of stuff, and that realisation, they ultimately have their day and that day is now.
Flicking through vinyl there is that familiar sense of a lesser history at the fingertips, of the stuff that remains from those wilder nights and those crazy people. That craziness of me too, and all of us there in a moment of life now passed. It always feels now past in record shops, now and past. Age, I guess, but not quite. They were always there then too, the collectors, the cataloguers, the archaeologists of now.
They gathered at the side of things, collector huddles searching the pulsing beat of a place or a moment for ephemera. Seeking the pieces of life they can place in boxes or on shelves and satisfy their need to own the moment they were never quite part of. If they were there at all. That’s the sad beauty of stuff, it is transferred, traded, stuff that collectors buy and sell and create lives that are not their own. I look through the Jazz section and remember that line from Gil Scott-Heron, about in every record store being stuck in the box named miscellaneous, then getting moved to the box called Jazz. And finding out that jazz means miscellaneous. Sure enough, he is in the box labelled Jazz. With him is Sun Ra, Nina Simone, the staples of John Coltrane and other accepted markers of jazz as genre. Despite the differences between them and the absolute awareness of how this is a segregation unnoticed but absolute, there still is a box named jazz and 95% of those in these boxes are black and American. Gil would not be surprised, he knew then cataloguers work to simple divisions. The boundary they seem to struggle with most is between the past, the now and the future. Maybe we all have this difficulty.
My youth living from a rucksack and 4-night weekends and multiple jobs in cities and towns around networks of squats and flats and bedsit rooms of enforced nomadism meant stuff just never got accrued. Self-survival means you find the best of a situation but really, one thing never regretted is a life without collecting stuff. Now with Nina Simone at New York Town Hall and Gil Scott-Heron live in 1986, on transparent white vinyl, I find myself in the dull sadness of it. I tried to remember what year I first saw Gil Scott-Heron, was it 1986? No, maybe ’87 at Dingwall’s and I held his hand as he held the mic out to the crowd and I danced with those beautiful spirits with park bench suntans and still untamed souls. And this silent sleeve contained none of that and I wished it would and know it could not. The moment back then was all there was, and no merchandise seemed to exist, or if it did not for us. Maybe at the sides were the collectors, they must have been there. Like me now, collecting the Nina Simone coming of age, her appearance at the Town Hall in New York. Before explicit activism, before Mississippi Goddamn, after a youth of perfecting the piano, and here now, after Ms Simone herself. None of the real meaning and only long ago echoes of life. Neither of these have great album covers, and I remember the Parliament albums I bought as a teenager just because the covers were so great. How Parliament and George Clinton brought cartoon power to my world and as living breathing sounds that I had to know alone, never once hearing others talk about in schoolyard or disco. Still, I was drawn in by crazy cartoonish anarchy and kept there by music that dug new channels of thought and invention. This was not stuff, it was part of a life of now and now alone and the impact of it was of body and mind, of dancing and thinking and moving that reflected both. The albums are long gone. Collections need a static space and plenty of it.
We left the record store and we considered going to the museum, the art gallery, but I had seen enough of dead stuff and wanted to move, to be around living and breathing people. I returned again and again to the archaeologists of now, how life as you age is curated by these stuff collectors and the aliveness of the wild ones, even my wild self, is suffocated by shelves of vinyl and boxes of pristine trainers.
Like cellophaned toys, boxed, unopened, the tragedy of a static life of curation. Tiny suburban warehouses hold many of these silent exhibits, bedrooms and backrooms and lofts in which pasts are recreated. Lives not of beats and rages and wanders but as fetish and commodity in frequently dusted cupboards. It lasts longer, this attempt at immortality. It also kills the point of life altogether, feels that way at least. They are in the ascendancy now, archaeological debris still there as museums of dance and terror while so many of the dancers are gone. Trainers that never ran down streets pursued by United or Albion, never climbed tress or bounced on unsprung dance-floors of cement. But neither are they ripped and soaked and thrown in bins and lost to the air of another lifetime. Dorian Gray efforts in footwear and dustcover sleeves. As the existentialists never said, Exhibits before Existence.
Maybe we do need stuff, Nina Simone still brings uplifting moments and movement in this body. Gil Scott Heron and Angel Dust shivers through nerve endings that may well be the same ones that sparked fluid dance and excited chatter in a London of East and North and now only history, mostly forgotten. There is a difference though, between sparks of memory and the reification of commodities. A clean distinction between those that sweat and pulse and others with white gloved separation of object from context. Like museum sadness that wipes over the soul with a velvet glove of missed points and emptiness, stuff without life is only ever nonsense. Our lives contorted by taxidermists of volcanic life do dangerous things, they suggest that the curation and the catalogue is part of the moment. No, they are nothing but seismographic reproductions of lives elsewhere -in other times and other places – and only if we recognise this can we allow life to be lived now. For one thing, the curation of stuff marginalises us from our own lives . False histories abound as others piece together stuff with the fog of memories from the famous and the things seem to the only voice heard. Ours are left outside, soiled and outside the cellophane wrappers. And things don’t mourn the lost dancers that remind us of our own perishable inevitabilities.
As we moved around and saw the smiles and the laughter, heard songs from pub stages and smelled the aroma of market stalls, I felt the rise of new life. It was good, it was the feeling of the past drifting to where it belonged. Dead and gone, and a recognition of all those tired reminders of another Manchester in their right place, in glass cabinets, glazed coffins of nothing at all. All that’s missing is cremation, but that is our own choice and we can let these pretend pasts burn away inside that crematorium in the soul. Live now, and enjoy searching through the past while knowing archaeology is only the joy of hands in the dirt, but never a finger on the pulse.
ManicWorld Magazine 