creating death and magic with lauren brown

I met Lauren at Interesting South back in November where she not only designed the stage and presented on How To Not Feel Like A Twat When Looking at Modern Art but also made the tea. Lauren is doing a show on Death & Magic later in the year and requested a poem for inclusion in the catalogue.

I asked Lauren to do 2 out of 3 possible activities for the research process. Despite being an artist, she avoided the one art-focused request and went for the musical and writing ones instead.

"Send me mp3s of 10 songs that rock with D&M goodness for you."

Lauren's Death & Magic playlist:
The Blue Lady (Outro) - The Nerve Agents
The Gallows Is God - The Distillers
Helicopter - Bloc Party
The Milkman Of Human Kindness - Billy Bragg
Suppose You Gave A Funeral And Nobody Came - Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Bullet In The Mattress - The Gadjits
Don't Lose Touch - against me!
Girl Anachronism - The Dresden Dolls
Mint Car - The Cure
Don't Look Back Into The Sun - The Libertines

"I'm interested in negative space. I'd like you to sit in front of your keyboard and hammer out what a world without magic and death would be like in a free-association, stream-of-consciousness prose flow. No editing or deleting. No pausing. Just a a continuous stream of words. For 13 mins 13 seconds."

no death, on and on and on. my ex boyfriends would never die, my parents would continue to live in nursing homes until the money ran out and I would have to send them out onto the streets to beg like strangers, pretending that I had never met them before and lying about the change I had in my pocket. my poor cat would be meowing at the door for all eternity. the mice would run around in a plague and the cockroaches. oh the cockroaches. if there was no death, I couldn’t stamp on them and have a smug little grin that, despite my belief in a reincarnation pay-it-forward system, I managed to exterminate the little bastards.

and about that reincarnation pay-it-forward system. without magic, I don’t think I could believe that I might, eventually, atone for sins, or whatever you want to call them. I also wouldn’t believe that breaking a mirror gives you 7 years bad luck and that not looking someone in the eyes when you say ‘prost!’ in germany results in 7 years bad sex. ok, so it’s not strictly magic, but it’s on the same level.

without magic, I might not believe in those happy little coincidences that happen without even thinking about it. in fact, I might have to believe, for every single second, of every single day for the rest of my eternal life (you know, remember, no death) that I was responsible for everything that happened to me. I like a bit of existentialism in my diet, but I think existentialism works because there’s death at the end of it. game over. you can move onto the next level if you’re wrong.

no magic and you’re in charge, buddy. or I’m in charge. and I can’t quite work out which would be worse. it’s like magic (and death) give you some kind of traffic light system. green lights, born; red lights, death; amber lights are those near misses where we thank god, or the universe, or the magic of santa claus for a chance to give it another run.

Now some random comments from me. It's been a long time since anyone has mentioned Carter USM to me. I love The Nerve Agents track - it has an icy, eerie feeling to it. And who doesn't like The Cure? As for Lauren's writing, I loved it. Like disappointment, we tend to think of death as a negative thing but Lauren seemed really uncomfortable in a world without death. But magic is the flipside, the requirement that makes life bearable. This heavily influenced the piece that follows (believe it or not).