Hugo Lucian Bou-Assaf

About

Writing about kinetics, touch – in the mode of violence and amity, liturgy, objects and pictures made by people / art art art, football and a pernicious form of empty joy. Currently working on a book in the spirit of Thierry Henry. 

The augury of a vociferous, and as of yet unaccounted for sensation, something that perhaps in the old days we would refer to as joy: 

Something brilliant is happening. Something brilliant is happening in a sweaty and iridescent polyester. It’s ridiculous really. The definition of what precisely, and furthermore precisely why this brilliance is of any considerable note could date back to a time in which the Appalachian mountains, as we now classify them, protrude from a singular mass of ossified rock at the western centre of Pangea. It could equally date forward, or thourgh-ward to a time in verdant N.W – a Nike total 90 striking boot levitates the football 20 yards or so with a buffering first touch, and the delicate volley of a finishing second. The idea of us looking at these things as two concurrent and simultaneous apertures. Layered ontop and underneath. Alternating between these two strange and perceivably inconsequential positions. 

As it goes, Thierry Henry scores and the Appalachian mountains are rent asunder by tectonic plate separations. It works something like this; a new continental plate, the moment it blisters, from the upper atmosphere of our planet to the eviscerating dark of the ocean floor – just splitting violently in half like a septum bone to become what would one day partly constitute the Scottish highlands. Out of the green pasture, Henry emerges – leaking through the penalty area, snatches the pass with a single touch and releases it on the opposite foot within a second – a release both delicate and intricate, one that sees the ball reunited with the back right netting of the Tottenham goal. Henry looks out into the crowd in Highbury plum coloured polyester, shrugging with his library shelf shoulders. Henry starts to scream as he runs, shaking his fists as teammates hoist over his back in jubilation.

Swine before pearls: 

All the movement, here oddly encompassing players and mountainous structures – as an engine of image. As an appeal to some circuitry in our fundamental nature. That we like these things, that we think they’re cool or we quite fancy them or we cannot do this whole thing without them. The joy they give us. Writing as a way into that place of great skepticism, regarding shame and regarding fear. In so far as we’re afraid and we’re unhappy without these images and the pictorial confirmation that things do work in these ways and are indeed abeyant to us – that there is great beauty in being touched, in running and moving and being and exerting onto a plane of existence that above all else, seems like it might just have been made precisely for you. The possibility in which we are invited to consider here is a phosphorus, semi-poisonous quality embedded in our joys. Entrenched into sustenance, into a diet or a substantiation or an aesthetic composite of forever.