Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times
Softday have created a new live improvised sound art work in response to the text of Sean Taylor's 2011 sound poem Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times. The sound poem is augmented by a new acousmatic composition created from specific data sources relevant to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, toxic banks and global recession. Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times addresses the malaise and meaninglessness of contemporary democracy - in what kind, we may well ask, of a democracy are we living in? It is a pertinent and urgent question that has to be addressed, and addressed courageously. The fantasy of a united and neoliberal Europe has been undermined by the collapse of economies in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, followed hot on their heels by Spain, Belgium and Italy. These near bankrupt economies have become experimental laboratories of our future. We know now that the global financial meltdown at the end of 2008 brought an end to the utopia of global market capitalism and heralded the rise of a quasi-redemptive cultural capitalism where consumer guilt and environmentalism are nervous bed fellows. As we approach a political zero point or end time for capitalism, what now of the cherished values of liberalism; freedom, welfare and security?
This performance was dedicated to Irish Ship to Gaza
Dancing at the Crossroads at the End Times from Mikael Fernström on Vimeo.
video excerpt
Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times!
Bookkeeper man
Monsterous parasite man
Dancing at the cross roads of the End Times
Gift smile man
Truth speaker who has the balls of the people
Tribal Leader going forward man
Pinstripe man
Boardroom woman
Doublethink woman
Supporting the deception of the industry man
Barely modern man
Not quite postmodern man
Of ideologically induced stupidity
who talks to professional woman
Searching for the Absolute,
Absolutely!
Emerging like a pernicious infection among the many ghost estates
To the negative equity home of
Bricks and mortar man
Vested interest man
in love with someone man
Man oh! man oh! man oh! man!
Woman who knows
BMW woman
Values baptized by the Catholic Church woman
Tolerating intolerant man
bearer of Celtic tiger cubs woman
midewife to the institutions of the state woman
knitter of aran balaclava’s woman
for credit crunch rioter woman
waiting for the collapse woman
'An Bord Snip Nua' believer
Cyber recession warrior
Washer of the hands of private bank debt
Keener of a bankrupt corpse,
Whose funeral pyre flames, stokes the fear of a black economy
Gathering of the blue rinse brigader's
Whose prescription lenses ignite archimedean fire in the belly and anger in the heart of a generation
The silver revolution will be televised!
The silver revolution will be televised!
Shrugger of shoulder, supper of surrogate pints
Sphincter policeman with gaping jaw
Banjaxed citizen, bar stool Anarcho-capatalist,
Tribal loyalist,
Exuder of revolution, waver of red flag
Receptor of empty Marxist Leninist rhetoric
Lacking the language to articulate our un-freedom
Blinded by the ideologically induced stupidity of the market
Waiting for the tooth fairy to leave shiny new euros under an expectant nation's pillow
On a soiled bed abandoned in an overcrowded virtual ward
Attracted by the same old gang of walking wounded
Bending over to take our medication legs akimbo
Financial vertigo
A ritual IMF fisting, a national plundering
The watered eyes of a nation beyond hope,
Beyond regret, beyond shame
Fucksake at least pretend you are interested!
Pin-striped wizard beyond isolation, revisionism, speculation, and angst
Sowing the seeds for a double dip recession
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah what’s that downward spiral?
Double-double dip
Funky, funky, yeah, yeah, double double, dip
Downward spiral
Double double dip, tipping, default double dip
Temporary blip!
Under a sheaf of malodorous economic reports the stock markets crash ever downwards
Boardroom covens, shadow governments, stir the cauldrons of fear, anxiety and rage
Drowning in a NAMA wine lake
Suffocating embrace, suffocating a political solution, suffocating the barren ground of self belief
Slave in service to an economic psychodrama, state of shocked disbelief
Our children’s futures mortgaged
Generation emigration, the only route out of the present,
A final solution from our past
Despair is not the only sin.
Paying off the gambling debts of indigenous and European barrow boy bankers
Meticulous Greek rioting,
Meanwhile on the Short Strand the Peace Line barricades burn
Waterford Krystalnacht for a sectarian holocaust
Spilling into a world that knows no meaning
Uniform man, balaclava man
Who prepares the shrouds for the dying
Cursing the silence of the dead
And over incontinent Irish skies
Flying first class on extraordinary rendition circuits
New generations of migratory extrajudicial Wild Geese
On ghostly flights to black sites that don’t really exist
From Gander to St.John to Uzbekistan
To a global spiders web of secret destinations
White shirt stewardesses from Air CIA
Explain the duty free system at Shannon Airport to Islamic radicals
A mile high club of enforced disappearance
Boarding cards for the stateless
Bye, bye American pie man
Destroyer of the rule of law
Destroyer of dreams,
Destroyer of responsibility,
Destroyer of democracy
Fast tracked planning permission for corrupt developers
Selling fraudulent towers of Babel in boom and bust watery bog holes
Talking investment portfolio shite
Out of every gaping orifice at once
High anxiety property ladders for the nod and wink opportunists
A devil’s brew of Government sponsored tax breaks
A short and curlie's instant credit line
A Golden Circle of sharks, spivs and shysters
A golden handshake
A pregnant skyline of calcified cranes
A cacophony of silenced alarm bells
A MasterCard of the vanities
A chimera for a lifetime of onerous mortgages
A Texas Hold 'em for future societies
Of negative equity man
Property bubble collapsed developer’s tail spinning like drunken kamikaze pilots,
NAMAKAZI, NAMAKAZI, NAMAKAZI!
Looming monuments to delusional rulers of air
Of horrors that just can’t be made up
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Fuck youse, fuck youse, fuck youse!
© Sean Taylor 2011