found here, [soundcloud]

I listened to Ed Atkins’ Soundcloud reading of his text, Old Food - a nearly 2 hour excursion of folk song and staccato-poetic spoken word. I expected it to be an unflinching acoustic barrage of linguistic experimentation on my ears and a marathon expense of processing power for my brain, and I was 100% vindicated. Holy moly, what an exhausting ride. Something about me absolutely loved it though, which is probably why I subjected myself to it in the first place. If you’re unfamiliar with him as an artist, he also works in video and installation, producing pretty much what you’d imagine if you listen to this. He’s also having probably the biggest influence on my own art practice at the moment.

Below are some live-recorded thoughts [with afterthoughts in square brackets]:

0:02:16 - Don’t be fooled by the start. Yes it’s beautiful and poetic throughout, but man does it change. You slowly realize you’re being buccaneered along at light speed. What’s going on? A lot of food and minute description read as if it’s a coherent language. But whoa it is not. “Tuck and fuck and a steel ladle.” [this staccato experimentation of the English language was the primary hook for me]
A remembrance of a very old time? “Our banner read OLD FOOD and could be read from solitary.” (<-- TITLE ALERT!! and nice relevance for our current times [this year of our lord twenty-twenty when lockdown measures reined supreme]). This doesn’t sound like a familiar or appetizing world. I don’t think I’d like to share this memory. It’s all disgusting but oddly alluring. “Solemn black pubic dew.”
He has a nice voice.
It’s an old story, of what feels like a childhood, but could not at all belong to anyone ever in history. At least I hope not.
Cutting and preparing, chewing and eating, relating to each other, to his own family, to community; gross, bodily, abject. Kind of like a Michelin chef from the Middle Ages recalling their childhood longingly and without shame (smashed mom’s head in until she made some fucking sense; “we’d shit on the elder if we felt like it.”) Food plate descriptions are used as metaphors for something else - a hyper focus on the taste, texture, and composition, the sensational relationship with food. Erotics and sex enter occasionally.
Jarring juxtapositions.
Sometimes a sentence makes sense and it just fucks with you.
So much description. Pure poetry….like, playing.
00:15:00 - starts to lose steam...voluptuous descriptions slow. Sentences resume a recognizable cadence and structure, but holds onto nonsensical references. Turns toward the bodily grotesque (shitting, and fisting, anal this, etc.)
“human marinara”
Nonsensical world-building, anachronistic whimsical abjectness. “Alton Brown” [<-- NAME DROP]
“Those days we knew how to eat a witch: with gloves on and in one go. Other nights we’d just torch a village to bake an apple.” [this turn towards a coherent couple of sentences was jarring, and I didn’t understand it at the time, but in re-listening it looks like a useful nugget...the flames were described as devouring progress and minors alike, where the narrator (who performed the torching) “strained to see results in a baked apple.” This happened too fast to register, but it seems now like an awareness of a desolate politics, built around the extraction and instrumentalization of people and communities towards the production of consumable goods...ones which don’t live up to their promise? Notably, though, the narrator doesn’t seem as disheartened about the burnt people as the disappointing apple...also hard to ignore the obvious biblical reference of the apple symbolizing knowledge here]
00:23:00 - Suddenly sincere and coherent: “Dear Hannah, Thank you for saying your tremendous nothing, and doing nothing. Thank you so much for absenting yourself entirely.” Someone’s a little bitter here, for having just torched a village...
People are food and food are people. To eat is to love is to fuck is to violate. Everything is everything. Nothing feels sacred anymore, except the gastronomic love of food.
00:25:30 - Really focused on how to light a bbq, here. This part actually makes sense. Well, it started out that way. These instructions are far too long to still be about a BBQ...
Lots of “tits” - of camels, or tomatoes, etc.
Another song! 27:45 (“feed the birds tuppence-a-bag”) it’s lovely, and reverberates a power about a woman….Hannah?? [forgot to mention this text actually starts with a song as well. These seem to mark the passage into a new chapter??]
Moonlight water cut with cock.
ANECDOTAL! That’s the word I’ve been searching for. I guess this sounds like an apocryphal anecdote. Also...poor granddad.
His words have a way of making the disgusting sound delicious, or the delicious disgusting...words usually only used for delectable high-class culinary descriptions, but engineered towards people, sex, and rotten cannibalism.
Melancholic longing for a bygone age. Have the words misremembered? Or was it sinful and corrupted all along. Can a moral compass change to no longer be able to adopt an old perspective, only construe it through sin? [I may have been losing my mind here.]
00:37:00 - “The next day we all focused on ….” [I appear to have now lost my ability to finish thoughts.]
As if gastronomic vernacular could cleave history into a digestible loaf. Attractive, repulsive, melancholic. The past always has a golden consumptive hue, no matter its violence and disgust. Dear granny, granddad, Hannah and yourself turn into instruments of digestion and… [I became infected with Atkins’ style of prose.]
Carnal relations - with self, others, world…
Erasure of boundaries and perversion of social conventions - relations fixed around transgressions with one another, mutual consumption. All consenting, these things are recalled as if universally accepted.
Food holds redemption? Also sex / libido
Times gone past - dark history. Starting to get an understanding maybe.
00:46:00 - a return to opening structure? [true for maybe a minute.]
00:50:19 - taking a break [this was me needing a break, not the text. The text rests for no one].
“Everything sounded to the pit of your stomach” [sounded like a self-aware descriptor.]
“Where we’d slash at it with a long knife….wounds would widen with heat in time and in a field in a ditch, we’d cringe with that dying fish, writhing very desperate. Presumably not wanting to die it was looking at the sky. I put my ear to its strange mouth to listen to what it had to say, but it said nothing. Not that there was no sound at all coming from its mouth but that it didn’t say anything. Whatever it had inside of it went unsaid forever” [language and articulation in the construction of meaning and connections to each other?]

Sombre, pain and not being able to articulate what’s inside, ever present threat of death

Soldiers eating kittens, it was necessary...Lush turned to grey
Mom’s accidental yoghurt - exclusive manuka...antibacterial, giving benediction to the toddlers, in hell in the womb, delivered by shining red claw. “But they ate their way out of the world inside of a bad night.” This feels to be turning more concretely towards eating/consumption as an allegory for the ways we relate to each other and understand the world. Language is itself a tool for consumption.
1:08:00 - Another song! ---maybe 3 lines only? The history of the world -- those below serving those up above -- those above serving those down below…
“Hannah literally carries everyone”...“The woman carries the pestilence and dies alone” - a growing recognition of the unequal roles played by women in this society...being the source of sustenance and also dying often and without reason.
1:10:00 - “everything was radically pre-distressed by some nameless paizan, a menial horror graft elsewhere.”
1:11:00 - “We watched as a woman’s native sweat percolated aluminium emulsion to bloom ivory; slimed ruination - the pits. Aged global hyper colour resumed belief, but in what? We imagined a cabal of ad executives dry humping in the dark.” - Consumption secreted as ideology, the purview of advertising.
“And then we’d pose naked, and they’d envision our wretched ambition withering.” I don’t know if I’ve listened long enough to now understand his weird language or if he’s becoming less opaque about the underlying themes of this work…
Teeth and diet are changing, it seems - sandwiches allowing for a moment of contentment, how easy/simple it was to feel okay.
Things are stupidly easy to make!
Becoming weak by starvation?
Giggly chip pleasure. Food as source of energy, exhausted in work. Easy and quickly spent.
A semi-messianic encounter with a raw carrion, kicking it to tenderize, horseflies about? Got a sense of the divine...Cosmic gastronomy...angel scrag like Murano sponge sugar
“Auto-cannibalism seemed more virtuous and somehow easier or so.” … especially when faced with a personable baby. … a detailed description of cutting off his own limb using scissor contraption requiring 3 persons to use and much time in between chopping. Then everything became computerized…
“So instead we’d lavish our time on our sexual whims and linger deep felt hatred for all kinds of authority, also knowledge acquisition abstract sensations of inherited specialness…” - I don’t know what the hell this is about.
Boarded up the windows, hidden things inside, listening in to things outside our heads, looking everywhere but mirrors….(lack of self-reflection or awareness? - this feels a bit on the nose…)
1:25:00 - I need another break
1:25:30 - Song (are the melodies progressing into the more contemporary?) this one follows the Wizard of Oz tune - if I only had a heart, then into Shakespeare (Romeo + Juliet)...
This is going into dishware
“We imagined we fucking deserved to be this low” - yeah, the tone has definitely changed. Less rosy remembrance than shit got real and life sucked
An awareness of his own body or history…”previously we used to…” a reminiscence within the broader recollection
1:30:00 - meat pie recipes - “We aren’t sick we’re miserable, Hannah would say.” -- actually begins to describe a recipe for flat-meat cake...these recipes sound like real ones and would probably be actually delicious. Now I don’t feel bad for wanting to eat what’s being described. But I’m anxious about being lured into his descriptions.
Lots of boiling.

Though, to be honest, he doesn’t sound very happy describing these recipes...sounds a bit pained and fraught. (Hannah describing this?) Or maybe it’s because Ed Atkins is on an hour and a half of reading this aloud to an audience that he sounds pretty tired with all this.
“An easy win for mom, the working mom, blasted by the temp jobs” - capitalist (?) labour is becoming increasingly prominent
A puddle angrily trying to write itself [this was about a plate of tagliatelle, I liked the description]
Had a son turned into a horse? A son who tried to cook but is shitty at it? This mom killed the son. This part was fucking weird...even weirder than the rest. Felt like it came out of nowhere.
1:38:00 - “For 4 long years we squatted on minus 12, the live-work rut of 50 stories kst’s” - Founded a bakery there? Making rotten bread that could be sold to those below and so on…
Now we’re given a sense of location - a quasi dystopian metropolis...“Anyone higher up than minus 2 had at least some access to hot milt and suds”...Hannah would scramble up in the tiers, bartering bread for medicine and spices. We also get a sense of why Hannah was important.
A market at minus 6 - people even had toilet and language (basically lives). [a more explicit allusion to cultural products as being real capital which can affect quality of life and freedom]
They had lost their eyes having lived underground for so long?? Eyes were deputized by tight little dots, tight little holes. New punctuation was unreadable...Social stratification, where everything fetid and putrid trickles down. This feels more sci-fi fictional poetry now, compared to the start. Description of dystopian biopolitics.
“Nearly everybody spent lots of time trying to sell their own leaking oils, not knowing how in the hell to replace them. And being bewilderingly poor.” [took a while to introduce this grand allegory of labour - something people would extract as capital, a seemingly infinite resource, but dependent on the market and generally worthless resulting in one dying with stockpiles of it beside them. Still venerated as something essential to their being by those in mourning.]
1:41:15 - “...I think maybe someone or some official body collected those remains and did something with them and the bottled oils that was respectful. Sentimentality that was covering for - jesus- just the profound hunger that felt like a brother conjoined inside of you.” [yeah.]
Sandwiches are completely and barely utilitarian and bland. Like a dinghy. [these are not given the same gastronomic descriptive care as earlier.]
1:43:00 - lol, talking about biting your own cheek. I relate to this.
1:45:00 - last song? “Nothing’s going to harm you” -- ok this is a Barbara Streisand song...that was lovely
HEY! Now he has a toilet.
WHOA….a big clue I may have missed here. I was zoned out, thinking about my own project and then he described something about humans turning into vampires. (I remember him mentioning a memorable phrase about tucking your hair behind your ear and crooning your neck and swaying so that a vampire would bite into you...or something).
1:48:00 ---ok this is a long one. Uhh….words meant fuck all to their carping tummies (Summer now). [re-listened: “Summer. Words nutritional nothing, despite the quality of the writing lyric meant fuck all …. In the gripping epic...busted up their already bullied pancreas...pancreatitis laid waste to their already wasted guts...this and that….and arrived all of a sudden with a live cultural ethos turned horribly easily into incontrovertible morality. As a consequence, everyone turned into vampires.”]
Everyday was forever, was a complete nonstarter...sounds like a description of a vampire’s day-to-day conception of time.
I don’t know what I think knowing that the protagonist of this allegory is a vampire, and this is all reduced to vampirism...is this a necessary pay off? Did I need that closure to their motivations? [after listening to this, it kind of felt like at some point midway though he felt the need to wrap it up in some overall narrative logic and suddenly became concerned for me as a reader/listener. What began as an open exploration of the language of consumption turned into a more convoluted post-apocalyptic story resting occasionally on tropes of that genre to make it all more familiar and accessible. Did he feel it wouldn’t carry resonance without that explicit tie? Where I read it initially as a self-sustaining allegory that seemed unconcerned with giving me full access, it ended up relenting on that principle to let me in. It was so committed to its own illegibility I felt a special privilege in listening and trying to discover what it all meant. But now that I’m in, I feel a bit cheated. On this count, I think it works best when not giving a fuck about your ability to decipher it and it kind of lost power for me once it lapsed into genre and explained itself. That said, I am of course in love with the allegory as a whole, Atkins has a unique power to produce such powerful evocative commentary. Lush gastronomic descriptors being applied equally to all relations within life have a weird way homogenizing it all - nothing is actually special. Things are only given privilege when language confers that status onto them, and people behave in accordance to mutually sustain that belief-system. It slips by through the veneer of normalcy but these relations could easily be unmasked as grotesque and disturbing if our language reflected that. Eating, shitting, fucking, loving, we’re all just consumers. And within that structure, our relations turn to cannibalism and where it eschews time and perverts history, the perceived immortality of the blood-sucking ethos of late-capitalism and neoliberalism turns our consumerist bodies into vampirical ones].
I blacked out, what just happened?
1:52:45 - What a fucking marathon.

patrick o'neill

artist

Magical Thinking / January 27, 2021 by Patrick O'Neill

i listened to 2 hours of ed atkins reading his text Old Food / September 27, 2020 by Patrick O'Neill