Tender as a Ghost: The Blunt Diaries

In 2001 I was leafing through the detritus in a bucket chucked under a table in one of those emporiums that literally (not literally) groan with the weight of a thousand unwanted memories. It would be fair to say that my life had taken a turn for the worse a month or so before that time and I was dealing with a lot (A LOT!) of unresolved issues, most of them to do with my would-be wife and a series of incidents of mistaken identity in lifts. My life was in the gutter, yes. And gutters stink. (I often wonder why this came as such a surprise to me). Having my head jammed in that bucket as I lay suppurating under a table, forcing ghostly tears out of vestigial eye-ducts, actually represented a significant improvement in my day-to-day activities at that time, and in retrospect it was a turning point so significant in my life, that it has taken me over ten years to realise it.

Here's what happened (this bit is quite long and is not really about anything, certainly very little relating to the album in the title of this post. If you want to know more about that, there's a couple of sentences at the end. I wouldn't take them out of context though. This means therefore that you either read this long-winded and tedious exposition of something that is of probably little interest to you in the vain hope it might improve your understanding of a collection of hastily written words about an album no one is frankly going to listen to, or you go do something else (drink port, rinse your elbows, practise that new knot, for example)):

With my head in that bucket I inhaled deeply, aiming to numb the panic attack I think I was having, and as I did so I felt the fetid dust tickle inside my sinuses and experienced a feeling I hadn't had since childhood. My childhood. I'm not sure what the feeling was, or even if it has a name. Probably not. Suffice to say, the panic receded and was replaced in my mind-hole with images. Images of things. Calm things. Clowns, velvet razors, anagrams on Sunday afternoons, crêpe . I'm not sure how long I lay there. If you told me a week I wouldn't be surprised. Equally, if you told me just a few seconds I wouldn't be surprised either. I really don't know is my point. After however long it was, I extracted my head feeling pleased I'd resisted the urge to walk away still wearing the bucket like a pointless helmet.

I looked at the bucket then reached into it with my arm and hand and extracted what I assumed had been the cause of my Proustian reverie. It was a small bundle. All string was all over  it and around it and hanging off it. I bit through the string, my strong youthful teeth tearing the ancient fibres apart, and spat out the remains wildly (in retrospect I'm not sure why I did this). I found I was holding in my hand a collection of prints. Hazy, undefined, momentous, transient … these were words I'd use to describe the images, although I'm not sure how I'd use them all in one sentence. Call it intuition, call it the instinctive workings of an enormous and febrile intellect, call it what you will, but I knew I held in my hands something of astonishing cultural import(ance). I emerged from under the table in a state of liquid ecstasy (quite literally (not literally)), my hands and feet and other extremities all out of  control in a spasmodic and frankly delightful manner. I threw some coins at the man (both tiny and ursine) and staggered home.

There is a book to be written about how, after months of painstaking and largely fruitless research, I began to stumble on the smallest clues as to the origin of these prints, and how I eventually pieced together the narrative surrounding their creation. If I had an advance from a publisher and a lot of time I might write this book. I have neither however, so will sum it up in a short sentence: I had found the last known works of the forgotten photographer and visionary Linda Blunt. Ten years later of course, the work of Linda Blunt is studied in every university in the land, ‘Bluntian’ is a recognised aesthetic, and exhibitions have opened in major cities across the world showing Blunt’s work (who can forget at the Mori gallery in Tokyo how the exhumed and animated corpse of Linda Blunt was used to welcome visitors. It was truly hilarious).

Although Blunt went unrecognised and unloved during her lifetime, eventually dying cold, naked, and penniless (I assume) sometime during the seventies, her place in the great pantheon of imitable artists is now assured. She is the spiritual godmother to movements such as distinguished pre-representationalism, Kajagooism, and depressed colonism, and her influence across fashion, music, art, geography, french and literature can only be overstated if you try reasonably hard. She means many things to many people, but she means something quite extraordinary to me. Her works tell me of all the possibilities of what it means to be a human. In my dreams she speaks to me, her words coming down a spidery silver filament from the heavens. They are what make me get up in the morning. They make me question and the they give me answers. They guide me and they heal me.

I don’t need fame and accolades – some people choose to recognise my part in the Linda Blunt story, others don’t. It is up to them. I used to think all that mattered was that I had Linda Blunt’s work, and that no one could take that away from me. I used to think that, that is, until I listened to The Blunt Diaries by Tender as a Ghost. The shock and disgust I felt as I listened to this album was indescribable. It was like having my heart ripped out (does this count as a description? In which case, maybe it was describable). How dare these little turds trample over everything that is holy and sacred? I’m guessing one of them studied Blunt at college, roped in some friends, flung random instruments at them and decided that was enough work needed to record an album. Linda Blunt’s diaries can be used for many things, but I suggest in future people think long and hard about shouting them over the cacophonous wailings of maladjusted foetoids. Did it make me sick? Perhaps, but what’s it called when you start throwing up pieces of internal organ?