MODEL AIRCRAFT MUSEUM AUTISM ASPERGERS Paul Wady

FEEDBACK AND CONTACT: modelmuseum@gmail.com

HAVE A LOOK AT THIS VIDEO LINK:

http://london.indymedia.org/videos/5852

LUKE, EDITOR OF ASPIRE MAGAZINE FOR AUTISTIC PEOPLE AND I, INTERVIEWED NOVEMBER 2010. I needed a shave!

Initially this was my first attempts at a concept album, my so called 'Simulacra' project. Now it is entirely known as The Model Aircraft Museum, an Autistic world in itself. Welcome inside. Everything is entirely done by me, with all my own photographs too which have been taken in locations in Liverpool and London, France and New York.

I got my diagnosis for Autism in 2004, so I am telling the story of a real Autistic person from my own life, and that of so many others I am close to and know who are 'on the spectrum'.

My I EXIST CAMPAIGN Podcast is now on Youtube. Made for the National Autistic Society. It's at the bottom of this site.

TOUCHING THE SUN is the 2nd collection of songs and it's up and running on Myspace. You can find the link below. Also, there is a series of essays that go with the songs. The 3rd collection is called The Aerodrome and I have not bothered to put them up yet. Some are here and on Touching the Sun.

(Just don't ask about the photo's...)

http://www.reverbnation.com/themodelaircraftmuseum

This link should take you to The Terminal Beach collection on Reverbnation. I had wanted to write a soundtrack for J G Ballard's short story since the early 80's. Here it is. I recorded the whole story but with no copyright, I can only offer the music. Cut n paste. Thank you.

THE MODEL AIRCRAFT MUSEUM.

Paul Wady, 2007.

(I like to believe that I record in the 'Metamatic' genre that John Foxx invented. I try to follow the rules he set down for himself, of minimalism and economy.)

This all started with a series of letters sent to the National Autistic Society between 2006 and the present day. A mature Autistic man was campaigning to purchase the now empty former main branch of his small English town's library chain, and turn it into a Model Aircraft Museum. He never seemed to find out who owned the place. We received a trickle of letters. He would write in block capitals on an envelope, a few sentences begging for financial and organizational help, then fold it up and put it in another envelope. I also spoke to him on the phone a few times.

BINARY. When he was a child, he could not sleep, on account of the Obsessive Compulsive Counting in his head. This is what it was like for me in Junior School. I really did complain to my Mother I couldn’t turn the counting off. I used to do a lot of daydreaming probably themed around this sequential obsession, and I now know I manifested all sorts of stereotypically Autistic traits. Normal for a wierdo.

Some of us ended up on different generations of antipsychotics, particularly for Adhd. Don’t ask what they did to their bodies in the long run. Personally I didn’t know I had Autism until recently, by which time I hate to think what such drugs could have done to me.

UNWANTED ATTENTION. The Aspie follows Mary through town. Within, he is as we hear, but in reality, he's getting into trouble. We received a letter asking why 'they' not let him see his girlfriend Mary. It was written in his in usual block capitals, upon the back of a magistrates letter that said he had broken the terms of a restraining order, presumably taken out by her.

They used to be called ‘Crushes’. Now its Sexual Harassment. Unrequited love is a general fact of life of people who cannot relate but can feel very, very intensely. So far more Aspies than you hear about get into experiences like this. Since the majority are male, its wise to be careful around my kind.

You may think it’s an issue of immaturity, but how do you have those essential grown experiences when you cannot relate? (Just realized that this song could as well be a woman following a man, or a man a man, or a woman a woman?) (This could be so much better but I move on and on

.bugs me. SO need to redo this one.)

MARY WILL COME BACK TO YOU. Oh yes she will

. What do you think the woman who took out the restraining order was called? (If she heard my out of tune voice on this song, I reckon she would do one for me too.)

Finally finishing the thing, it turned out to take 8 minutes to do the thing justice. Taught me how to sing and play this one. Should not have written that. So this is the small one. Phew. I do a proper version live, which has three verses and that is that. Then I put in a panned psychodelic lead melody. Evolution is unstoppable. Autistics are populating the world.

THE MODEL AIRCRAFT MUSEUM. The Aspie stands in front of the great building, and we see him there. Here at last, the dreams become real. The great dark empty building earths his mind into the ground and he connects himself with our collective reality. If he could only make it happen, he could interface our world to his mind by externalising it. Then he could actually touch it, see it, and others would experience his vision.

THE POLICE VISIT. (TAKEN DOWN. NO ROOM.) He told me on the phone that the Police had visited him, accusing him of trying to perpetrate a fraud on people. He'd been trying to sell t shirts advertising "BATTLE OF BRITAIN MUSEUM". So I asked him how many he had. He'd done 3, and the rest "where in his plans", and he was waiting to set the museum up in order to create them properly.

Someone from the Nas visited his home, and only found 2 or 3 model aircraft in his home. He was waiting to do it, to own the building. Only then would he set the physical aspect of his ideas up. Only then.

An Autistic can repeat events and experiences over and over again in their minds, as if the traumatizing event is trapped in their heads. Ocd. So the words of the Police echo around his mind, over and over, as with Binary which reflects the same kind of obsessive, looping experience.

SOCIAL SKILLS. (TAKEN DOWN IN FAVOUR OF STOP THE NOISE FROM THE 2ND MYSPACE SITE, TOUCHING THE SUN. GO LOOK.) This is a 'rough' simple two line song with faultering lyrics, which is more like what The Aspie would actually produce I'd reckon. We received a request for Social Skills training in work. The list to be 'helped with, to learn how to do' was more or less an description of what most people want to develop to lead the adult phases of their lives. Having relationships, learning how to iron, how to get and hold down a job, about 15 items in the list. Many Aspies have this android like view on human life. They want to upload the necessary softwares and protocols in order to carry out the tasks of love, happiness and feeling. Just like in The Matrix films.

STOP THE NOISE. (FROM THE 2ND MYSPACE SITE YOU SHOULD LOOK AT TOO, TOUCHING THE SUN.) This was inspired by a picture in an art exhibition by the National Autistic Society in 2009 of pixx and things entirely by Autistic artists. It was this marvelous canvas divided into 9 square rooms, with the Aspie woman artist painted crouching in the middle of it all, suffering because she could hear everything going on in the flat's around hers. This isn't finished yet. I never got my pal to scream. Not yet anyway. I need to sort out a screaming woman. Anyone interested? Locked in a room with a recording machine and Paul Wady? Should be easy?

I DON'T KNOW. (Taken Down. Miserable thing anyway.) This song is about an inevitable moment if you are a really High Functioner, the type who does not get diagnosed until after he's had a few of these moments.

For there comes a time in a relationship when the Neurotypical you are sleeping with realizes you simply cannot 'feel' deeply the way they do. They kind of attack you from the heart, 'freaking out' passionately at someone who is more like a machine than a lover.

Trust me, they cannot help it.

At this point I introduce The Aspies older brother, a higher functioner. So we have glimpses of that world too.

TOUCH. Ah. The story behind this turned up a few years ago. There is an Aspie somewhere in England used to have a job. Mature male. He developed an obsession with touching people's legs. Ended up unemployed and banned from public transport. C'est La Vie baby.

ONLY TELL THE TRUTH. This ditty makes reference to certain phone boxes that the magnificent Mr. Solo amongst others were exhibiting their visual art works in, back of the Royal Academy last year. This song is about one way my Autism manifests itself. My uncomfortable and not very practical urge to tell everyone everything all the time. Yet I don't know what responses are genuine, and which are training and simulation of real feelings. Hmmm.

DON'T TOUCH ME. Kind of speaks for itself, the arch Autie and Aspie complaint that physical touch is like being electrocuted. Personally, I act like i've been tazered. I made two other versions after this then realized the first one was a perfect statement. Metamatic lives

. TOUCHING THE SUN. Only two tracks and the vocal, but I am so proud of this song. A poignant tale of love not to be. It is made of two stories, one someone else's, the other mine. I still like Roses, you know. Lovely flowers. Strong.

I'D LIKE A GIRL. Alone, The Aspie longs for a Lady. So many of us are in this situation, unable to relate to others. Is it such an unusual thing? In many ways, we all share so much, albeit in such unique ways.

A SILENT MOVEMENT OF NYLON. (Taken down. Ask me to reinstate it?)A tribute song to a band that was around Liverpool in the early 80's, using both it's title's. Boys, if you are out there, this one is for you all. A simple repetition of the same phrase, three different tracks of it. A celebration of flanged, strobed white noise so filtered it plays notes without needing oscillators. The band would understand. (Frank still needs to turn the volume up. Ian Baker rules. x)

Paul Wady (London. Bloody thing won't let me change from USA. NOT CODED BY ASPIES, OBVIOUSLY).

LOOK AT THE 2ND MYSPACE SITE TOO: www.myspace.com/modelaircraftmuseumtouchingthesun

Every band I have ever read up on, sleeve notes and Myspace site, don't tell you how they made their music. If they are Synthesizer based, they shroud the business in mystery, thus selling themselves as 'profound' and something special. I personally think this is a bit, er, well, I'd rather tell all and explain what the songs are about - which means they need some depth in the first place - and how I made them. Nothing amazing about me. I just try and tell stories with rhythmic noises.

I love synthesizers because of the timbres and unique sounds they can make, together with the divine sound of pulse width modulation going slowly in and out of phase, a little chorused. Love it. The soaring sine waves, the strange beauty of a carefully tuned filter. That, and I can't play anything but a keyboard. (Play the fool?)

HARDWARE ONLY. No mixing effects apart from a delay line on top. No computer programmes.

Moog. (Oooh. Like having a live-in Mistress.)

Virus. (Evil polyphonic simulacra of an analogue synthesizer. A city in itself.)

Alesis Delay/effects unit.

Akai Sequencer. (The Wadlortron. After the Mellortron.)

Whirlpool AWM1203 Washing Machine. (This is not a joke. You have to spot it's brilliantly effective contribution.)

Big mouth.

Recorded on a Tascam portastudio & Zoom box. Hans Asperger.

PRIMARY INITIATION, the start of it all.

The physical manifestation of a dream, a music project that was born in my imagination around 1980. For twenty seven years it came and went in my dreams, the figure in the long blue coat, alienated and alone, singing songs that couldn’t exist, telling stories that were no more than feelings. Things that didn’t belong in the world.

No musical ability. No capacity to learn or to do it acoustically. No identity save the fraud of Neurotypicality. Simulacrum.

But then came my diagnosis for Autism, and a friend and I spending 5 years making the Paul Wady Experience music that you can hear, here, on Myspace. Without these events, The Model Aircraft Museum could not have had self-awareness, have understood what it really was. Alienation, self-centered experiences, but not a perfectly valid identity. Well well.

It took time to develop the sound I wanted, about four years from when my friend and I started recording in 2003. I found it difficult to take myself that seriously as a musical person anyway. My light and guide was John Foxx, in his album Metamatic. I simply never stopped listening to it over all the time since it first came out. But I didn’t want to do impersonations of that.

Like John, I imposed limits on my project. It is meant to be music that can be reproduced on stage by three musicians with synthesizers, one linked to a sequencer, and myself singing. No need of any computers.

I noticed that synthesizer bands tended to overcomplicate things, with huge amounts of things in their music due to what technology will allow you to do now. The machines are no longer the circuitry they were. Now synthesizers are computers, perfectly synthesizing now old analogue synthesizers. Like Kraftwerk in their green screen imagery, I venerate and idolize the old technologies that were cutting edge when I was a child in the 60’s and 70’s. I remember excitedly talking to a representative of the British Computer society once, as he demonstrated an analogue non-volatile memory unit.

This extraordinary unit recycled the same sequence of information over and over again, so you added binary into it and extracted when you wanted. I reckon he thought I was quite insane in my perception of his ancient hardware, but it was the romance of the Thermionic valve, the power of the transistor pnp/npn sandwich as the single point in a huge system that made things happen. The glow of the cathode in the dark, like the old amplifiers and televisions I knew before solid state took over.

The old synthesizers were beasts that detuned and frequently crashed no matter how glamorous and expensive they were. Thomas Dolby – who is totally on my wavelength (That should be, me on his) said he’d owned all of them at sometime or another and via soft synths on computers. Nonetheless, his most recent tour saw him take several antique signal generators onstage with him. Aha.

You see, there was something about that vision on the oscilloscope of the data bits going around and around, fuzzed and slightly unfocused, single line images of information. I envisioned them as the smallest components of some huge artificial intelligence, from the time when the film The Demon Seed showed the world a computer the size of a main branch public library – with circuit boards as big as high book shelves.

It was like something alive, something thinking yet not human. That alienation, not feeling or being anything like a person in its deliberations and actions. Mechanically perfect in its precisions, decisions and existence. Solid-state beauty.

Back in the late 1990’s I saw an exhibition by the artist Tatsuo Miyajima. I found myself standing in an exhibition hall facing a wall of a thousand light emitting diode seven-segment displays, all independently cycling up and down yet part of one huge number. A mechanism dedicated only to counting, with no pragmatic purpose. Simply the mechanisms doing what they were made for. Counting. Counting. Counting. Cycling over and over. It was beautiful.

This is what moves me, in my autistic alienations, obsessive compulsions and bonding to things from long ago, which few paid any attention to as I did. The mechanism as art, as beauty, as a living thing.

Simulacra of life, copied from copies to the point of being original entities, as if from nowhere.

HE DREAMED OF MACHINES.

Lines.

Beautiful sequences, lines running into others, angles and corners. He dreamed of the cubes and shapes, the rectilinear systems grouped together in their mutual assistance. All conspiring towards the great purpose of the assembly. Machine, mechanism, device.

He lay there in the dark, absolved of his life. Floating in dreams.

Sometimes he felt like the surface of the moon. All those craters, all those impacts. A heart beating sweetly, its love pounded by the world. The stars shone over head and all around, and the black and white mechanism lay silent and flawless in its symmetry on the moon of his dreams.

He would love a million times brighter than anyone if he could. He would find her, and she would glow in the dark with the radiant bloom of his affections. But she did not exist, and he was there now floating over the great grey orb of the Hasselblads, the Apollo exposures. His life was sometimes nothing more than fragments of other records, often images recorded on film.

For in his day the digital was in its infancy, and the infinite resolution of the film emulsion ruled all, determining the conscious and unconscious images of generations. He would live to see the rise of the pixel, the usurption of the machines and their grids of information, bytes of reality pixilated into form through larger and larger groupings.

He would. But just not now, as he floats over the great city of his lunar machine.

WHITE NOISE AND WATER.

The wall is covered with falling water. He stands there frozen, the white noise of the falling enveloping him. The hypnosis of the flow across the fine grid patterning of the wall in front of him.

Water falling down, about 10 feet high and a good 30 across. An open-air display. Black marble at the base. The noise is like a gas pouring out of the structure, cloaking him from the world.

With his sensitive hearing, its like a sea, diving into a great wave that does not stop pouring over and around him. Drowning but always breathing. Frozen and witnessing. Sheets of water pouring down, no ending to it.

He could stay there forever, watching for when the surface breaks slightly, curves of air scarring the moving surface. Then the water closes and the wall of liquid continues, unbroken.

Pouring down, sheets without end but not of any material. A wall of molecules, loose, odourless, perpetual motion.

He loves it more than he can understand. It is something completely in harmony with himself. We could have a home with walls like this, surrounding a central spot where he could stand, sit, be still. Always.

GRID.

His soul was cold, cold and systematic and alive. He walked the earth absorbing the grids all around him, pavements, roads, wires overhead. Linear.

He’d seen a Myspace profile on a woman called Claire. He’d heard her music and seen the message. Now, in the dark, the sea exploded by the side of the promenade as he walked and walked up the concrete. No sleep for him that night, driven by a song.

Vision of the woman, art deco bubble hair, those dark eyebrows and the eyes that stared at him. He left the machine and traveled to Brighton, where he had never been before.

More lines, the public seats underneath a canopy. The bars of wood aligned with the railings by the sea. The round nodules that linked each length of metal. Cylinders, tied together in solid bonds. Going on and on and on.

The loop recording taken from the machine. The same song over and over again, the piano and the high hat. Claire’s voice, over and over. The ecstatic loop of Obcessive Compulsive Disorder – the payoff of Autism. How beautiful to be held in an obcession. How perfect the symmetry of the loop.

I WANT YOU ONE LAST TIME…I WANT YOU ONE LAST TIME…I WANT YOU DOWN MY LEGS…I WANT YOU IN MY HEAD…

Sweat from the back of the driven man, boots marching to the rhythm. Perfect feeling of weightlessness, walking, walking, euphoric in his stride. Soaring now, into the game.

Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire.

The sea winds blow the side of his head. Staring ahead into the tunnel of the lines. Someone he will never meet in his life, for whom he has a passion beyond anything she could ever personally experience without feeling fear.

No one around but him. But that is okay, because he is going somewhere if you look at him.

Isn t he?

ALONE, FROZEN AND STILL.

The adrenalin died down.

He sat there on the cold bench, mercifully warmed by the summer breeze from the rising sun. Hunched over with tired muscles, the passion of the nights walking sustained him. Shivering, he stared at the paving stones of the Brighton seafront.

Lines with small green growths, dark scars in the paving stones, breaking them up. Lines framing the tiny worlds, landscapes composed of blackened chewing gum and smudges of dirt, dirt, unknowable things. The surface of a flagstone like a map of a world.

Two police officers standing over him. One trying to communicate, the other he could relate to. A young blonde woman, hand on radio at her shoulder, squinting at something away from them all, perhaps something her eyes could never focus on.

Voice of the other, the man trying to relate to him. Soon money spent on food, find a café. Then the beach, the treasure of stone to be aware of, the sea of shingle and rock and pebble to count, to be drowned in the numerical sea of objects good for nothing but counting.

Not even counting them, just being within them, falling asleep in the warmth with the water roaring as the tide moves out. Shifting into dreaming in a bed of a million tiny objects.

THE COLD MOTION OF STRANGERS.

He left the city and the Policeman asking who he was and did he have anything to identify himself with. Of course he did, and he told the man that we would be leaving that day. His interface skills to the world were good enough to keep people outside enough that he could continue on his own.

Now flying away on the train, he saw the woman he’d heard on the machine. He saw the policewoman with blonde hair, staring grimly away, felt her body beneath the black uniform and armour. Imagined intimacy, a pastiche of flesh and sinew, whilst the carriage speeded and speeded, his tired body carried faster than he could walk, love always tomorrow with someone he didn’t know.

His eyes were cameras, peripheral vision flooded his mind with motion and objects came towards him, always to linger a split second before going, unable to remain, a world he did not connect with forever coming and being and going.

Every object was a friend, everything he saw a world, a universe he thought he could understand but never touch, at the most not really, not usually.

Sometimes people forced their way into his life. They touched him, spoke to him, meant things he thought he understood. Sometimes they liked him, family loved him, but usually it was the cold motion of strangers around him he preferred. Always traveling but no destination. Always moving with no wish to arrive.

The train carried on and on. The people around him absorbed into their own worlds, reading, staring, watching the same. For a while, everyone was together, cold steel warmed by heated wires, tungsten elements and neon tubes illuminating, bombarding with so many particles of light he’d love to count.

Feeling of motion, shifting his eyes to enjoy the blur of objects passing at speed. Was the train standing still and everything else in motion? The carriage was warm. No sea breeze now on his red skin and aching head. Motion at speed, the cold motion of the long machine, rails screaming and passengers dreaming and a world going past, never known but seen, so much seen. Like the only real intimacy he’d ever known, passing strangers, drunk, at parties.

One day, he’d find a train that never actually arrived, just carried on, at speed.

OBTUSE URGE TO ORDER

Order is just within grasp. He sat there knowing that here in his room, in the council flat they’d given him, he could just reach out and change everything. But he didn’t.

In front of him the grids emerged. The sequence of things to move, the tidying of the room. Chair, table, papers, objects, old plates and cups in the kitchen. The use of the old hoover and the water flowing over the cutlery, the heat generating steam, the boiler roaring into life next to him as the liquid flowed around his hands.

Never hot enough. Boiling his skin off. Germs survive. A sea of infinite micro organisims. The Mandelbrot paisley spirals with tendrils growing tendrils in curves and shapes appearing before his eyes. A vast plane of living creatures all so tiny but surviving, feeding, multiplying.

The hot water in the sink, dissolving grease and flowing around and around. Eddies and currents, a huge mathematical system inside a small space. Vectors and motion and direction. The kitchen sink full of washing.

Sometimes the old wallpaper with its lines and roses hypnotised him, and he sat there watching the dust in the daylight as the patterns became infinite, rolling from the plane of the floor over his head into the beyond of the ceiling. The wall expanded sideways until he was a tiny amoebic thing, faced with the vastness of the linear expanse in front of him. A living room wall.

The vacuum cleaner could be too loud, and he’d put on the ear protectors. The dust made him sneeze and invaded his space too aggressively. His nose, mouth, eyes. Too much too little to see or deal with.

He could not really understand why he sat there, inanimate. He stilll ached from the night in Brighton, the music that Claire made replaying in his mind, looped over and over. He needed another nights sleep. He needed to reframe the day and go from a better position. He needed love and sex because he had urges. He needed to have a brain operation that made him empathetic.

He didn’t need anything. He didn’t get depression any more, not for years. He didn’t take antipsychotics when his friends in the social groups did. They did beta blockers for the pain of being alive.

So he sat there in his flat, and he remembered the girl he’d spoken to so once who told him what depression was like for her. She was so beautiful. Young and fit and haunted.

She said, “I am like a haunted house. I stand there and the world sees me and feels allsorts that I don’t. Men adore me and women hate me, people try and be nice and relate and its all crap.

I’m a big haunted house that feels the wind blowing around it, cold painful chills. I am old and empty and full of dead furniture. I wear pretty dresses and dance barefoot and die all the time. I hurt people because it’s the only thing to do. I don’t exist really.”

She did not appear in the social group again, and the woman who ran it didn’t want to talk about her again. But one woman who always went tutted when he mentioned her, and said she was schizophrenic and got sectioned.

The Aspie didn’t find the woman attractive. He really truly saw something in what she was saying, something else than himself. Dark and flashing negative light of black fire. Frightening.

Maybe there were some things worse than not tidying the flat?

THE SAMURAI IN GOLD.

He found the masks at the end of a long speeding walk, and plunged into the overdose of images, trying to hold the entire British Museum in his mind because he didn’t know how to relate to taking in information, really. He’d try to read everything in the ‘quality’ newspapers because the Guardian and the Times were quality, only to get lost in the paragraphs and lose concentration, as if dyslexic.

But for now, he was elsewhere, in the Japanese armour section of the British Museum.

As he saw nothing but Focke-Wulf, Mustang, Messerschmitt and Hurricane, he came face to face with the masks. Hideous images, contorted to frighten, some with make believe beards and moustaches made of real hair, centuries old now. A simulacra of a demon worn on the face of a man who intended to kill as much as he could in order to validate his own possible death. A horrible vision that only the bloodlust of a young man could see as beauty. No creation, caring or construction. Simply the demolition of body, extinction of mind, the ruining of flesh.

He stared for a long time at the masks, becoming still, seeing into a hollow face instead of being one in the sight of so many people’s feelings, the world within them knowing intimacy, love making and sharing.

These cold metal masks, so full of energy. Whole armour suits shielding humans from others. People whose feelings where entirely one single sentiment. What worlds did they live and die in, years and years forgotten now. He felt the armour encase him, the plates surround his form. A second skin to hide in, that would resist touch and repel assault.

But most of all he felt her inside with him, whoever she could be. For he was losing Claire now but could bring her back if he wanted. The day was late and the dark drawing in, and alone in front of the shell’s of killers, he felt cold folded steel pierce his body and slice him into a thousand lacerated chunks on the floor, her naked feet gently sifting through him. Skin on skin. Blood moving through the membranes. A world he had never known but could always see around him.

Stare. Stare at the empty eye sockets. The screaming mouth with no tongue. Feel the energy of male assault, the eroticism of battle. The fight for life.

These men had known friends, lovers and peace. For him, there was only the masks, and nothing underneath. Except a dream, a feeling he could taste, of love.

MACBETH PUB, JULY 2010. First time performing in a proper venue. Oooh.

Signal Lost

Stars – for the Astronomers.

Only tell the Truth.

Overture to Touching the Sun.

Wrongplanet

Touching the sun

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WORLD AUTISM AWARENESS DAY FILM 2ND APRIL 2009

Autism Speaks posted a film called I AM AUTISM online which was universally found to be offensive to us Aspies, so I started the fightback with this: