ZANG TUUMN TUMGN IN PRINT “advertising says: the body is a business”

Full page advert for ‘Power of love’.

Transcription:

Open the special pink envelope and it’s all…FOR THE FAMILY…What can you read into this?

I’m caught up in the dance…I stumble, fall…That does it, I’ve got to finish the stinking bastard! Bzing! He’s down again…I’m going to smash his kisser!…So he can’t talk anymore…I’m going to smash his whole face…I punch him on the ground…He bellows…He gurgles…That’ll do. I dig into the fat on his neck…I’m on my kness on top of him…I’m tangled up in his bandages…both my hands are caught. I pull, I squeeze. He’s still groaning…He’s wriggling…I weigh down on him…He’s disgusting…He squawks…I pound him…I massacre him…I’m squatting down…I dig into the meat…It’s soft…He’s drooling…I tug…I pull off a big chunk of moustache…He bites me, the stinker!…I gouge into the holes…I’m sticky all over…my hands skid…he heaves…he slips out of my grip. He grabs me around the neck. He squeezes my windpipe…I squeeze some more. I knock his head against the tiles…He goes limp. He’s soft under my legs…He sucks my thumb…he stops sucking…Phooey! I raise my head for a moment…I see my mother’s fae on a level with mine…[1]

The secret of talking and saying nothing… because there is nothing personal to say, the absence of any inner life, the mechanical soullnessness of daily routine…The Smiths and the Martins have forgotten how to talk because they have forgotten how to think; and they have forgotten how to think because they have forgotten the meaning of emotion, because they are devoid of passion; they have forgotten how to be, and therefore they can ‘become’ anyone, anything, for, since they are not themselves, they are nothing but other people, they belong to an impersonal world, they are interchangable.[2]

PRAYER:

Give us light upon the nature of our knowing. For the illusions of the sane man are not the illusions of the lunatic, and the illusions of the lunatic, and the illusions of the flagellent are not the illusions of the alcoholic, and the illusions of the delirious are not the illusions of the love-sick, and the illusions of the genius are not the illusions of the common man:

RESPONSE:

Give us light that we may be enlightened.

PRAYER:

Give us light that sanem we may attain to a distortion more acceptible than the lunatic’s and call it truth:

RESPONSE:

That, sane, we may call it truth and know it to be false.

PRAYER:

That sane, we may know ourselves, and by knowing ourselves may know what it is we know.

RESPONSE:

Amen.[3]

THE THIRD SINGLE BY FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD…EASED OUT OF THE SHADOW OF THE DOME OF PLEASURE…TELL THE ONES YOU LOVE AND HATE ABOUT ‘THE POWER OF LOVE’…

“leave the rest to the gods”

(Island logo)

suck

(Frankieman logo)

suck

sing

(ZTT logo)

suck

Footnotes

  1. Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1936/1966) ↩
  2. The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco (Commenting on) ↩
  3. A Resounding Tinkle by N. F. Simpson (1957) ↩