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Dacing at the Crossroads at the End Times.

Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times,
November 4.TULCA Arts Festival, Galway

Dancing at teh Crossroads at the End Times

Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times

Softday have created a new live improvised sound art work in response to the text of Sean Taylor's 2011 sound poem Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times. The sound poem is augmented by a new acousmatic composition created from specific data sources relevant to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, toxic banks and global recession. Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times addresses the malaise and meaninglessness of contemporary democracy - in what kind, we may well ask, of a democracy are we living in? It is a pertinent and urgent question that has to be addressed, and addressed courageously. The fantasy of a united and neoliberal Europe has been undermined by the collapse of economies in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, followed hot on their heels by Spain, Belgium and Italy. These near bankrupt economies have become experimental laboratories of our future. We know now that the global financial meltdown at the end of 2008 brought an end to the utopia of global market capitalism and heralded the rise of a quasi-redemptive cultural capitalism where consumer guilt and environmentalism are nervous bed fellows. As we approach a political zero point or end time for capitalism, what now of the cherished values of liberalism; freedom, welfare and security?

This performance was dedicated to Irish Ship to Gaza

Dancing at the Crossroads at the End Times from Mikael Fernström on Vimeo.

video excerpt

 

Dancing at the crossroads of the End Times!

Bookkeeper man

Monsterous parasite man

Dancing at the cross roads of the End Times

Gift smile man

Truth speaker who has the balls of the people

Tribal Leader going forward man

Pinstripe man

Boardroom woman

Doublethink woman

Supporting the deception of the industry man

Barely modern man

Not quite postmodern man

Of ideologically induced stupidity

who talks to professional woman

Searching for the Absolute,

Absolutely!

Emerging like a pernicious infection among the many ghost estates

To the negative equity home of

Bricks and mortar man

Vested interest man

in love with someone man

Man oh! man oh! man oh! man!

Woman who knows

BMW woman

Values baptized by the Catholic Church woman

Tolerating intolerant man

bearer of Celtic tiger cubs woman

midewife to the institutions of the state woman

knitter of aran balaclava’s woman

for credit crunch rioter woman

waiting for the collapse woman

'An Bord Snip Nua' believer

Cyber recession warrior

Washer of the hands of private bank debt

Keener of a bankrupt corpse,

Whose funeral pyre flames,  stokes the fear of a black economy

Gathering of the blue rinse brigader's

Whose prescription lenses ignite archimedean fire in the belly and anger in the heart of a generation

The silver revolution will be televised!

The silver revolution will be televised!

Shrugger of shoulder, supper of surrogate pints

Sphincter policeman with gaping jaw

Banjaxed citizen, bar stool Anarcho-capatalist,

Tribal loyalist,

Exuder of revolution, waver of red flag

Receptor of empty Marxist Leninist rhetoric

Lacking the language to articulate our un-freedom

Blinded by the ideologically induced stupidity of the market

Waiting for the tooth fairy to leave shiny new euros under an expectant nation's pillow

On a soiled bed abandoned in an overcrowded virtual ward

Attracted by the same old gang of walking wounded

Bending over to take our medication legs akimbo

Financial vertigo

A ritual IMF fisting, a national plundering

The watered eyes of a nation beyond hope,

Beyond regret, beyond shame

Fucksake at least pretend you are interested!

Pin-striped wizard beyond isolation, revisionism, speculation, and angst

Sowing the seeds for a double dip recession  

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah what’s that downward spiral?

Double-double dip

Funky, funky, yeah, yeah, double double, dip

Downward spiral

Double double dip, tipping, default double dip

Temporary blip!

Under a sheaf of malodorous economic reports the stock markets crash ever downwards

Boardroom covens, shadow governments, stir the cauldrons of fear, anxiety and rage

Drowning in a NAMA wine lake

Suffocating embrace, suffocating a political solution, suffocating the barren ground of self belief

Slave in service to an economic psychodrama, state of shocked disbelief

Our children’s futures mortgaged

Generation emigration, the only route out of the present,

A final solution from our past

Despair is not the only sin.

Paying off the gambling debts of indigenous and European barrow boy bankers

Meticulous Greek rioting,

Meanwhile on the Short Strand the Peace Line barricades burn

Waterford Krystalnacht for a sectarian holocaust

Spilling into a world that knows no meaning

Uniform man, balaclava man

Who prepares the shrouds for the dying

Cursing the silence of the dead

And over incontinent Irish skies

Flying first class on extraordinary rendition circuits

New generations of migratory extrajudicial Wild Geese

On ghostly flights to black sites that don’t really exist

From Gander to St.John to Uzbekistan

To a global spiders web of secret destinations

White shirt stewardesses from Air CIA

Explain the duty free system at Shannon Airport to Islamic radicals

A mile high club of enforced disappearance

Boarding cards for the stateless

Bye, bye American pie man

Destroyer of the rule of law

Destroyer of dreams,

Destroyer of responsibility,

Destroyer of democracy

Fast tracked planning permission for corrupt developers

Selling fraudulent towers of Babel in boom and bust watery bog holes

Talking investment portfolio shite

Out of every gaping orifice at once

High anxiety property ladders for the nod and wink opportunists

A devil’s brew of Government sponsored tax breaks

A short and curlie's instant credit line

A Golden Circle of sharks, spivs and shysters

A golden handshake

A pregnant skyline of calcified cranes

A cacophony of silenced alarm bells

A MasterCard of the vanities

A chimera for a lifetime of onerous mortgages

A Texas Hold 'em for future societies

Of negative equity man

Property bubble collapsed developer’s tail spinning like drunken kamikaze pilots,

NAMAKAZI, NAMAKAZI, NAMAKAZI!

Looming monuments to delusional rulers of air

Of horrors that just can’t be made up

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Fuck youse, fuck youse, fuck youse!

© Sean Taylor 2011