| IRREGULAR #01 Mainstream Premiumisation: Some initial thoughts... Publication, JohnFrumPress, 2006 |
| Composed as a collage of fragments appropriated, interwoven, recontextualised and rewritten into aparroted mockery of our time. It incorporates detourned elements of; religious pamphlets, politicaltracts and texts, Scientific journals, marketing and branding documents, fly posters for voodoopractitioners, Witch Doctors and astrologers, biblical texts, polemics and diatribes. The result is part parody, part critique, a confounding, disorientating and sometimes contradictoryrhetoric that blends the bombastic pseudo science of the marketing document with the occult snake oilclaims of backstreet witch doctors and the hectoring soap box denunciations of the political tract. That's all that matters; that's our oneimperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down.As to the persons who had blackened their faces, and disfigured themselves for the purposes of concealment, and had attended the meeting... it turned out that ten of them were spies sent out by themagistrates. These spies were the very ringleaders of the mischief, and incited the people to acts thatthey would not otherwise have thought of. We are called upon to challenge injustice.Why haven’t you torn it up yet? LINKS TO IRREGULAR #02 The voice of Frum DOGGERLAND, An Analysis of retreived archival material Submerged Territories |
| Waiting for Cargo JohnFrumPress takes its name from the mythical bringer of material riches in the cargo cult phenomenaof the Melanesian island of Tanna in the New Hebrides. “In early 1940, there were signs of disturbance, exacerbated no doubt by a fallin copra prices.Meetings were held from which Whites were excluded, as were women. These meetings were to receivethe message of one John Frum (spelt sometimes Jonfrum), described as a 'mysterious little man withbleached hair, high-pitched voice and dadin a coat with shining buttons.' He used 'ingenious stage-management . . . appearing at night, in the faint light of a fire, before men under the influence of kava.' Local men built model airplanes and landing strips atop hills, in order to attract theplane traffic theysaw flying over the island... and the great loads of goods they knew were in the cargo bays of the airplanes. This airstrip consists of a cleared mountaintop overlooking the “real” airport at PortMoresby. The ritualists hope one night toentice a cargo plane to land at their airstrip, and thus help usher in the millennium. The cargo cult can be read as a tragicomic metaphor, an inadvertent but incisive mockery of thesemi-mystical beliefs, contradictions and self-delusions inherent in 21stcentury life. By collecting, collating, collaging and parroting the detritus of the world we live in, the Irregularattempts to extract, amplify and ridicule the absurdities of the conditions and compromises that we takefor granted. We are all to some extent tending futility and waiting for cargo. The truth about the world, he said, is that had we not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of itsstrangeness it would appear to us for what it is. A hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, atrance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, amigratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field isunspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning JohnFrumPress are: purveyors, publishers, curators and collators of the vernacular, the irregular and theinsurrectionary in a variety of forms and formats including but not exclusively; Tomes, diatribes, tracts, polemics, monologues, editions and monographs. |
| Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of 'Cargo' Cults in Melanesia(London-MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), PP. 153-9iiScenes from Gualtiero Jacopetti’s pop documentary Mondo Cane, filmed in New Guinea in 1959iiiCormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening’s Redness in the West |