Suite Incense

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One day I found a videotape.

We postgrad students had a 'common room', ie. a cluttered, smoke infused room for general storage of whatever things didn't have storage space of their own...plus some chairs.

Under one heap of stuff, I found an unmarked VHS video cassette. And on an impulse decided, "Whatever's recorded on this tape, I'll re-edit into...something."

The tape contained four short, silent films, made by a previous student. They were dance-based, used christian imagery, and had not so much a gay subtext as a gay...text.

I quickly put together four bits of simple music - including one of my first attempts at rapping, called 'Heretic' - and worked out some permutative algoithms to edit the video to.

The result was "The Incense of the World", a pun on "The Sense of the World" - an impenetrable postmodern art criticism book by Jean-Luc Nancy, that we were all supposed to pretend to have read. That and, er, religeous incense.

Now over a decade later, having a masters degree in art history hasn't notably improved my life. But the incidental byways in the process of getting the qualification...they're worth having.

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