For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

lower incisors to retrieve even a vestige of what should have
been – could have been – glorious, complete Brazil nut. Next,
the walnut, halved, conjures the thought of a laboratory
mouse’s exposed brain, opened to the probing electrodes of
a demented Harry Harlow acolyte. SHRIVELLED. A lunatic
twitch on the mouse’s face when the brain is poked with a
dental instrument or a cocktail stick. The experiment justified
as revealing conclusive proof that a walnut, half opened, is a
perfect representation of a mouse’s brain. This does not wash.)
(The solitary eye of Polyphemus, rendered in Black-Figure;
elsewhere in the blockbusting show, the same eye, blinded.
Incredible detail in
its ruin!, you remark.
(Occasionally, the
three-disk-multichanger
midi hi-fi
(Aiwa) would
swallow a CD
and you’d have
to take it to the
hardware shop to
have it retrieved
by means of
invasive sur-
gery. Tom Zé’s
‘Estudando O
Sambo’ was taken
more than once.
When returned,
disgorged, you could
have SWORN there
was an extra instrument playing at the hellish climax of
‘Má’; an extra filter applied to the miasma, one that revealed
that the thing was actually ALIVE with crawling, treacle
movement, or something subliminal, backwards, etc.)))
MISERY GUTS.
[...]
Would you mind checking the mole on my shoulder?
It feels different today, somehow. Shifted, in some way... I
don’t know – would you just take a look? The shoulder feels