My Dearest Darlings I will spare you platitudes or excuses for my prolonged absence, all you really need to know is that I am back; at least for now, you may despair of my intermittent presence on your social media news feeds or perhaps you could not possibly care any less, though as you will see if you have been bothered to cast you dead eyes over my blog my manifesto is almost complete, so to spare you repetition I feel that I need to bore you less. So I shall as a consequence only comment when for some inexplicable reason I feel the need to evacuate the contents of my brain into the vastly over populated internet. If only to exercise my ability to write a sentence that may for some short time entertain or distract you from the never ending doom that is your ineffective and paltry lives.
Today I was struck by the visual juxtaposition of cultural news stories regarding the historic sale of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ for 120 million dollars and the fact that Adele has outstripped ‘Thriller’ from the highest selling album record set by Michael Jackson. The Scream is a depiction of the existential angst of humanity, the silent scream at the universe, an ineffectual protest, a flaccid decry at what humanity represents. It has become an iconic image sullied by commercial representation on mugs to tea towels to pencil cases and museum carry alls. The desperation and terror of this iconic image has been diluted beyond all recognition into a pleasant and quirky eccentric perpetuation of art and artists.
Only the occasional trail blazer has embraced this horrifying painting and presented it to a wider audience, the iconic antipodean beauty Dame Edna Everage once used the iconography of this famous painting in a fabulously breath-taking outfit. No one since and I suspect no one ever shall again attempt or even bother to communicate the true undeniable terror of this painting to you the naïve and undeserving public,. Though now it has sold for an astonishing amount of money the media has unsurprisingly presented it to you; as financial approval is the only approval that really matters to your society. At least there will be an echo of the raw visual power of ‘The Scream’ presented to you via the gutter press. Once again there is an opportunity that the undiluted depiction of a visceral spiritual hell may filter through to you in order for you to stop and embrace the utter ineffectualness of your futile existence.
The voluptuous beauty and sultry voice of Adele dressed perpetually in black with sixties style bouffant and well blended eye shadow has in her earthy way expressed to you some of the superficial emotional traumas of your existence to a non-offensive and relatively pleasing pop beat accompanied with a sultry vocal. The epic success of this young woman has in part been down to her apparently authentic performance at the Brits a couple of years ago. You have drawn her once damaged now healing vocal chords to your cold faintly beating hearts, her unpretentious elegance combined with her estuarine accent does not challenge your rank, she does not cause you to ask questions regarding your cultural position as dullard or plebeian, she communicates that you are fine being the almost adequate non-thinking humanoids that you are, the absolute opposite of ‘The Scream’ which silently and hauntingly challenges you to question the very essence of your short existence on this pain filled and moribund planet.
A singer with an audible singing voice versus the silent visual depiction of human pain expressed with a gaping mouth, both cathartic, both financially endorsed by your society, both iconic, neither wins, as both are valid but each reflect the idiosyncratic specificities of the era that they were created.
With Love Ms Coco LaVerne
