A POEM!
{FREE VERSE….ish }
I Collect ALL things; I represent multitudes (of Lps and books and cds); I am reparative; I give all these phantasmagorical lovely things their rightful place in eternity; I save the traces of precarious capitalism.
These “objects” whose variegated, tenuous beauty trails a skein across the centuries.
My Vox Turnabout and Saga vinyls; Fitzcarraldo covetously-yearned-for editions(blue series; white series)
Vox was (is? as a residuary body?) a large, independent record company from the 1930s to (sketchily) now(“Musical Concepts”. conceptualised in a semi-museum of old, arcane recordings).
They specialised in obscure composers, even more twilighted orchestras (the Westphalian Symhpony Orchestra…), which really existed (but behind the Iron Curtain); they created a niche for young-sublimating-their-sexual-orientation-gays, inter alia, devouring their 99p Turnabout label(from Woolworths and other outlets) in the 1970s. Devotion to their shrine is a recherche practise, available to the chosen few…..Talking of ” a la recherche” their symbolic symbiosis (between repressed gaiety and a directed-outwards predilection for collating and collecting said artefacts) is clear: at the time; but, even more so, NOW, as the past-however troubled (and amidst Covid multiple angsts)- re-asserts itself: lost loves (some un-achieved; an aching space of non-realisation); prior to coming out as gay(a subscriber not only to “Gramophone” magazine but to the plenitudinous, ripe riches of THE GAIETY): thus they served their purpose ( a sort of Proustian substitution process), YET
and yet {more Poetry…}
I paean/I pain in a joyful-sad hiraeth to the old record player (33/78 needles) on the chest of drawers in my first”digs” yng Aberystwyth, Coleg Prifysgol Cymru; the camp, shining Turnabout covers; the radiant clattering playing of the great Michael Ponti: Raff, Litolff, Reinecke, Rubinstein, Moscheles, (Clara{sic})Schumann, Thalberg, the litany goes on endlessly; collected, PAIN-stakingly then, and now, still,till the true collector’s orgasm was attained: completism (I now have-I am almost sure-every officially {and some others:P} recorded work by Ponti)
Here are some visual aids: i have my memory; u may not not be cognizant of what a Turnabout Lp was/IS; “who is Michael Ponti”?(he is alive-just-I have spoken to him on the phone, a shadow of the giant he once was…)
This is important: these are the detritus of ANOTHER bargain label, even murkier in that it INVENTED pseudonymous nomenclatures, culminating in the JOYCE HATTO scandal… please read it as it expounds/lays bare the whole (benjaminesque) constellation of multiple hauntologies: command economy Soviet Communism, the bye-ways and haunts of failed, fringe capitalist enterprises; and last, but certainly not least, “Hilda Wobbler” and “Wilhelm Havagesse”{I kid you not}……..
As (free market) capitalism TEETERS on wobbly legs (much like the spacious vibrato in the putative Wobbler’s voice), I recall these spectral but beautiful remnants….
INTRA-TEXTS:
WHAT IS COLLECTING; AND WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE?
THE PURPOSES OF A GAY/LGBT/QUEER ARCHIVE AND THE RECORDING THEREOF. BY STEVEN BENSON
MY COLLECTIONS/ARCHIVE OF GAY MALE LITERATURE/CULTURE/ARTEFACTS/PHANTASGAMORIA:
GAY/LGBT/QUEER ARCHIVE. PART 2. “MAY 1988”. “OUT IN ART”(GMP, 1986).BY STEVEN BENSON.
GAY/QUEER TRACE/ARCHIVE/CONSTELLATION. A PHOTO MIMESIS. BY STEVEN BENSON
and
STAGES:
1.Sublimation/substitution of the artefact(go all Lacanian and call it the fetishisaton of the –repressed-yearning for a man’s penis:P!) for the real thing or the representation thereof{not JUST the penis lol: the whole richness that is gay male culture….}.
2. the ACHIEVEMENT of that (self/socio-cultural-political actualisaton) and said plenitude.
3. (took twenty years…) the bringing TOGETHER of substitution/representation and the DIRECT ACTUALITY (un-recreatable, even in ecriture cuir….) of all that FULL-ON WHOLESOME GAIETY
towardsutopia 