Impulse Archaeology 9781442627598

Table of contents :
Contents
It Will Happen
Shapeshifter
Reviewing Impulse
Savouring
My Old Impulses
Impulse
Mixmaster
IMPULSE: A Personal Peregrination through the Years of Its Life
‘It is difficult to tell if a magazine is in or out of control.’
Canadian Press
Drawings
Larry Dubin’s Music
BLONDIE: A TORONTO CONVERSATION
SITE
Andy Warhol Interview
BABY DOLLS
ONCE LIVING in a Healthy State of Paranoia
MR. LEATHER
DEVO
BUCKMINSTER FULLER
RICH PEOPLE
VEHICLES
ZERO TIME DATA HIDEOUT: ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET INTERVIEWED
VIOLENCE AND REPRESENTATION
Nina Hagen Interview
RAMPS
Rebel Without a Car
Case A-7
In Search of Inspiration
Shark Bait
Russ Meyer Interview
KRAFTWERK
Transcript
Of Virgins and Saints
Diary Excerpt
Diary of a Masochist
David Cronenberg Interview
Fear of the Albany Mall
The Victim’s Ball
The New Alliance
John Kenneth Galbraith Interview
Correct Sadist
Nuclear Implosion
Excerpts from the Memoirs of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden
Photographs
Voici Alcan
The Right Time
Framing Death: Fadi Mitri Interview
Self Portrait
WARHEADS 3rd Nuclear Powers Composite
I Saw on tv ...
Scenes of World War III
The Child in the Bubble
Coma
I Shot Mussolini
Miami Police Force
The Managed Landscape
The Site of an Imaginary History
The Orillia Opera
Jocasta
Small Diary of Suppression
Bodies Lie In ...
Tony Schwartz: Electronic Persuasion
Let Your Hand ...
Thank You Comrade Stalin for Our Happy Childhood
Funktionsumfahig
Speed-Space: Paul Virilio Interview
Tunisian Fever
The Duplex Planet
Shopping for the Real
Men Who Don't Drive
Fredric Jameson Interview
Certain Words
Panic God
The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter
John Waters Interview
Three Months of Distance
The Slut of the Normandy Coast
Impulse Interview
Conventional Warfare
I Talked about God with Antonin Artaud
Radio Interview
Blade Runner
William Gibson Interview
Coexistence?
Laocoon
safe
Cannibal Woman
Vanitas Wheel
Mimetism and Psychasthenia
The Black Dog
Ash Dome
Of Natural Crystals
HA! HA!
Northrop Frye Interview
Hell
Tiger Terry
William Burroughs Interview
Enough
Impulse Index

Citation preview

ARCHAEOLOGY IMPULSE

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ARCHAEOLOGY IMPULSE Eldon Garnet

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

©

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005

Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Printed on acid-free paper

∞

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Garnet, Eldon, 1946Impulse Archaeology / Eldon Garnet. ISBN 0-8020-8787-6 1. Arts, Canadian. 2. Arts, Canadian - 20th century. I. Title. NX1.I46G37 2005

700'.971

C2004-907189-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Particular articles have been reproduced with special permission and hold complete copyright: © William Burroughs / Estate of William Burroughs / James W. Grauerholz © Angela Carter, 1974 / Estate of Angela Carter / Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd. © Arthur and Marilouise Kroker © Hans Haacke / VG - Bildkunst, Bonn, Germany © Jenny Holzer / ARS (New York) / SODRAC (Montreal) 2003 © General Idea / AA Bronson © Gerard Malanga © Patrick Mata © James Wines / SITE, 1979

Andrew James Paterson’s ‘Men Who Don’t Drive’ was also published in Trans Mission 5, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 14-15. ‘Diary of a Masochist’ is part of Lynne Tillman’s short fiction collection, Absence Makes the Heart, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990.

Every effort has been made to secure the required permission to reproduce copyright material in this publication. Any omissions brought to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in subsequent printings.

ARCHAEOLOGY IMPULSE Editor:

Eldon Garnet

Managing Editor: Art Direction:

Janet Bellotto

Carolyn White

Editorial Assistants:

Mark Cirillo, Fumino Enokido, Denise Frimer, Sarah Kasupsi, Cherie O’Connor, Andrew James Paterson, Vanessa Robinson

Design Assistants:

John Del Guercio, Tiffany Ferguson, Josh Remazki, Jeff Simpson

Design Technicians:

Dino Di Maria, Marilia Ferreira, Tania Henriques, Tiff Izsa, Jamie McAmmond, Shelbie Vermette, Milan White-Garnet

Image Research:

Dustin Garnet

With thanks to:

Marc Glassman, Anne Dondetman, and Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

 Cover Photo: Eldon Garnet

Art Direction: Carolyn White

Assistants: Janet Bellotto + Darren Cerkownyk

Model: Zoe

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My Old Impulses

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Impulse: A Personal Peregrination through the Years of Its Life

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‘It is difficult to tell if a magazine is in or out of control’

IMPULSE ARCHAEOLOGY

Patti Hearst 17 Canadian Press Patti Smith 18 Drawings Michael Snow 20 Larry Dubin’s Music Lola Michael 22 Blondie: A Toronto Conversation James Wines 24 Site Eldon Garnet 28 Andy Warhol Interview Chris Burden 29 The Curse of Big Job Rodney Werden 32 Baby Dolls Tom Sherman + Robin Collyer 34 Once Living in a Healthy State of Paranoia Shelagh Alexander 37 Mr. Leather P.L. Noble 38 DEVO Interview Michael Kieran John Brown Krzystof Wodiczko Willoughby Sharp Philip Monk Patrick Mata + Cece Cole

40 44 45 49 53 55

Tom Dean 58 Donna Lypchuk 62 Chris Dewdney 65 Matt Cohen 66 Gerard Malanga 70 Lorne Fromer 71 Fred Gaysek + Andrew James Paterson 74 Judith Doyle Eduardo Galeano Lisa Baumgardner Lynne Tillman Eldon Garnet + James Dunn

79

James Wines John Bentley Mays Sylvère Lotringer David Lake Terence Sellers Jean Baudrillard Roger Peyrefitte Joel-Peter Witkin Hans Haacke Maurice Blanchot Sylvère Lotringer General Idea Nancy Burson Nancy Johnson Kathy Acker Jean Baudrillard Pierre Guyota

94

82 85 86 89

96 99 103 106 109 114 118 121 124 127 130 131 132 134 138 140

Eldon Garnet 141 I Shot Mussolini Brian Weil 144 Miami Police Force Alexander Wilson 148 The Managed Landscape Dot Tuer 152 The Site of an Imaginary History David Burgess 155 The Orillia Opera Liliana Heker 160 Jocasta Jeanne Randolph 163 Small Diary of Suppression Jenny Holzer 166 Bodies Lie In ... Eldon Garnet 167 Tony Schwartz: Electronic Persuasion Jenny Holzer 171 Let Your Hand ... Komar + Melamid 172 Thank You Comrade Stalin for Our Happy Childhood

Astrid Klein Buckminster Fuller Interview Chris Dercon Rich People Albert Russo Vehicles David Greenberger Zero Time Data Hideout: Alain Robbe-Grillet Interview Brian Boigon Violence and Representation Andrew James Paterson Nina Hagen Interview Andrea Ward Ramps Nicole Brossard Rebel Without a Car Arthur + Marilouise Kroker Case A-7 Angela Carter In Search of Inspiration Donna Lypchuk Shark Bait Christian Boltanski Russ Meyer Interview Marguerite Duras KRAFTWERK Interview J.G. Ballard Transcript Geoff Pevere Of Virgins and Saints Sylvère Lotringer Diary Excerpt Michel Foucault Diary of a Masochist William Burroughs David Cronenberg Interview Doug Walker Fear of the Albany Mall Leon Golub The Victim's Ball Simon Watney The New Alliance Carolyn White John Kenneth Galbraith Interview Ron Geyshick Correct Sadist Robert Flack Nuclear Implosion Roger Caillois Excerpts from the Memoirs of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden Joyce Wieland Photographs David Nash Voici Alcan Francis Ponge The Right Time Susan Speigel Framing Death: Fadi Mitri Interview Christopher Webber Self Portrait Tom Dean WARHEADS 3rd Nuclear Powers Composite William Burroughs I Saw on tv ... Eldon Garnet Scenes of World War III Louise Lawler The Child in the Bubble Impulse Index Coma

174 175 180 183 184 186 188 190 191 192 195 198 200 203 204 206 209 213 220 224 228 233 235 237 239 242 244 246 248 250 254 256 258 264 265

Funktionsumfahig Speed-Space: Paul Virilio Interview Tunisian Fever The Duplex Planet Shopping for the Real Men Who Don't Drive Fredric Jameson Interview Certain Words Panic God The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter John Waters Interview Three Months of Distance The Slut of the Normandy Coast Impulse Interview Conventional Warfare I Talked about God with Antonin Artaud Radio Interview Blade Runner William Gibson Interview Coexistence? Laocoon safe Cannibal Woman Vanitas Wheel Mimetism and Psychasthenia The Black Dog Ash Dome Of Natural Crystals HA! HA! Northrop Frye Interview Hell Tiger Terry William Burroughs Interview Enough

ARCHAEOLOGY IMPULSE

It Will Happen I went back and I went back trying to write the Impulse introduction. An ironic situation: never before in my life was writing difficult: I would tell others how to write, advising them to just let it

Polaroids from the Journals of Eldon Garnet

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flow, write: it will happen, try. And here 1979

I was unable myself.

History? But who remembers in honest detail. What I wanted to provide was not a chronological historical description, but a rough explanation of who it was that produced Impulse. However, that direction always led directly back to me: and I didn’t know if I was ready yet to write my autobiography, to let you know what actually transpired: all the sordid details. And, although there might be some denial here, I was never an egomaniac. I remember one glossy magazine out of Los Angeles called EgoZine, which only published material about the editor. Impulse may have been my vision, but it was not about me: I was just the inquisitive conduit through which the material flowed, and the keyword here is inquisitive. I wanted to know everything, everywhere. It was culture in the making. Impulse was primarily an artist’s magazine. I was an artist and everyone who was integral to the magazine saw themselves as an artist producing a magazine. We had to teach ourselves the skills of editors, designers, publishers: no one was formally taught, no one designed an issue of Impulse who wasn’t a practising, exhibiting artist. As the executive editor and publisher, I was not part of the established publishing world, but rather an artist who decided to produce a magazine as part of his art practice. It wasn’t that difficult a notion in the 1980s: I developed as an artist on Marcel Duchamp’s approach and 1960s conceptualism. The ’80s were infused with a post-Duchampian conceptualism: from the late 1960s on, Duchamp, the early conceptualists, and Andy Warhol made art the most expansive of territories. So, of course, a magazine was art not in terms of the commercial galleries and museums, but art on the street, in the public, and in the art, architecture, literary, film, critical, theoretical, technological, and scientific worlds: all at once and all together: the world of culture: from the Caves of Lascaux to computer production. My vision of Impulse was as impulsive as the world of the late 1970s, as expansive as the 1980s. We played to create a magazine of the era, in which it was both product and reflection: reflecting the cultural moment, by necessity a part of the cultural moment. The ‘we’ of Impulse is what kept it alive, active, able to continue its existence: a constant energy supply of individual talents working together. I might

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1979

1979

Impulse was primarily an artist’s magazine. I was an have been the spark, the centre from which an energy flowed, but it was a collective activity. I inherited Impulse, the small literary magazine, in 1974 from Peter Such, who had established it in 1971. Impulse at the time may have had no sense of design and style, but it did have one simple principle which I believed in: ‘Please do not send critical articles or reviews.’ Throughout Impulse’s history there were no reviews of exhibitions, performances, activities: only primary expression by cultural producers: as close to the voice of the artist as possible. Peter Such had published my poetry in the first issue of the magazine along with works by such future Canadian literary icons as Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, and Matt Cohen. In my youth, I was a hot young poet. Such had heard about my master’s thesis, a critical anthology of thirteen Canadian poets, each of whom had published at least one book, but most of whom had released many books from small Canadian presses. According to my master’s thesis, these poets were too radical to be published by the Canadian publishing establishment. My critical anthology manuscript was sent out for possible publication and duly rejected by the major Canadian publishers, thereby proving my thesis. Only Peter Such’s Impulse and Press Porcépic, recently established by Dave Godfrey, saw the necessity of publishing this anthology, and they did so, first as a double issue of the magazine and later, with a slightly altered cover, as a book, Where? The Other Canadian Poetry. As editor and novice designer of this critical anthology issue, the last poetry issue of Impulse, I always felt I had paid my literary dues. After Such gave me the magazine, complete with a rudimentary granting structure and a business manager, I abandoned the magazine’s small-press literary roots and turned it into a visual magazine. My first issue as editor/publisher/ designer was a monograph of the photographs of Fletcher Starbuck. All the issues produced after this photographic monograph were first and foremost conceptually and visually directed. At the time, ‘Expect the unexpected’ was my anthem. The first releases after the Starbuck photo issue were small glossy journals, probes into visual culture in which artists were invited to create art for publication in a magazine. Such artists’ production

was exemplified by Les Levine and Michael Snow. Snow used ten pages of one issue to publish out-of-focus Polaroid blow-up images of the introductory pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettel. Les Levine went even further, creating an entire issue of the magazine as proposals for sculpture, a series of photographs of a small outdoor party: ‘The following photographs are proposals for a series of sculptures with performers yet to be executed.’ The attempt was to take the form of the magazine beyond the expectations of a magazine, to experiment with the form of the magazine as container, to give the reader something unexpected. From 1975 to 1978, Impulse was known as a magazine of changing formats. I was obsessively interested in the notion of change and disruption. I was young, working basically alone, with a fuck-you attitude toward audience. Marshall McLuhan at the time, who liked Impulse but really did not understand me, described me as a ‘hopeless romantic’ after watching my early video work. In reality, I was a typical diehard avant-gardist, with dadaist tendencies: not an uncommon ailment of energetic artists in their early twenties. It was the logic of exploring the possibilities of the magazine beyond the prescribed expectation of a magazine that led to the release of Impulse as a longplaying record in 1976. Naturally, the expectation would be for an art magazine to produce an experimental sound work, something John Cage–like, or at least an atonal non-musical experience, or perhaps a spokenword record. So, if that was what everyone expected, I couldn’t do it: I had to push further, and what I edited/produced was an LP of the songs of Joe Hall. In retrospect, I can attribute my attraction to the work of Joe Hall as a throwback to the more poetic Impulse: his unique lyrics ranged from the deeply romantic to the absurd and silly: a distinctive poetic essence. Also, there was his outsider position. Few who bought Impulse would have heard of Joe Hall. The audience, whoever they were, and I didn’t appear to care, would assuredly be surprised both by the release of the magazine as an LP and the content of the issue. The last issue of the changing format era of Impulse was its release as a microfiche and a ticket to a screening on a specific date in Toronto or San Francisco of a Super-8 film. The issue and the film were titled Einstein’s Joke. The microfiche consisted of 108 stills

artist and everyone who was integral to the magazine saw themselves as an artist producing a magazine.’

from a Super-8 film which was shot, not particularly for projection viewing, but rather to produce a new invention: the film-fiche, a printed 4 x 6 inch plastic film consisting of a grid of 108 frames, 12 rows of 9 columns. The film was shot with the actors speaking a pidgin German and released with English subtitles. All the subtitle frames were included in the film-fiche. They narrated a joke which Einstein is rumoured to have told at many dinner parties, an absurd story that seems humourless and ridiculous except possibly as a moral take on, or an allegory for, the circular absurdity of life. It was an issue of a magazine as object, as concept, as joke on technological progress, on science itself. The screening of the issue as a film was a conceptual indulgence. With little advertising, the screenings of the films were only sparsely attended. An era of the magazine was conceptually complete. It was time for another change, a new direction, something no one would expect. And it was at this point that I began a collaboration with Mary Ann Hanet, a young and irreverent artist with a healthy disdain for painting and a well-developed Duchampian sense of the ironic. The history of Impulse can be traced through the presence of a number of talented and strong women. Mary Ann Hanet was the first. It was obvious to both of us that the most radical move Impulse could make at this moment, 1978, was to publish a magazine which didn’t change its format. It would be a magazine which looked like a magazine, something which could become recognizable over time as Impulse. We chose a format, 11 x 11 inches, square: we chose the grid to be our guiding impulse: we chose to leave the ’70s behind and enter the ’80s, which were still two years away: we chose the future over the present. So, in the fall of 1978, we released the new Impulse. We didn’t understand the divides between music, architecture, fine art, photography, food, limbo dancing, and poetry. Our concern was culture, and we were not particular about its form as long as it was primary material, not reviews of other people’s art, and was fresh and interesting. Together, in a small Toronto office at King and John Streets, we reinvented the magazine: a square just slightly smaller than the size of an LP dust jacket; glossy paper; an experiment ‘with the standard format ... touch the square ... the grid is intended to bring the

lines to tension to create what will transform the past into the present into the future ... the package which may absorb and transmit ... it is not a vacuum which asks to be filled but a structure, a grid ready for the images of the construction.’ It was this mandate which carried Impulse through the next three issues. These issues had covers consisting of only the reproduction of a blue-line printer’s grid, a large helvetica Impulse, and a coloured banner listing the issues’ contributors. The concern was culture: poetry brushed up against an article on teleculture, and semiological philosophy met robotics. Together Mary Ann Hanet and I designed Impulse: both artists selftaught in design. We were amazed that we would receive compliments on our fresh approach to Swiss design. We were naïve enough to have to research Swiss design to discover what were our supposed influences. Impulse in its new incarnation began to accumulate fans. Warhol just loved Impulse: ‘Whatever made you get this shape? It’s a beautiful shape, god it really is. Oh it’s really terrific. You have such nice paper.’ By the time 1980 arrived, Impulse had already published four issues in what we considered the 1980s. The format was established, a design sensibility was developing, Mary Ann Hanet had moved on, and Shelagh Alexander was the newest associate editor: the hippies were gone, and the punks were alive. Swiss design and modernism were replaced by the postmodern: the grid was still present, but it was quickly fading, the image coming to the forefront, the photograph filling the grid. I shaved my beard and moved on from existentialism and structuralism to cultural semiology. Shelagh was an early punk, when punk arguably still had elegance as an ingredient of its style. She had acquired her punk in England at the time of the Sex Pistols before they were corrupted by America. We lived and worked together on Richmond Street, editing and publishing the magazine out of an illegal artist’s loft. It was the beginning of the Queen Street West art scene, Toronto’s equivalent to the East Village scene at the time. For Toronto, it was an art scene driven, not by new commercial galleries, but by the Canadian engine of communications, in this case art magazines, which included Impressions, later to become C, Centerfold, later to become Fuse, and, of

1979

1980

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1980

1982

It was a scene motivated, not by mercantile concerns, course, File, General Idea’s self-promotional vehicle. It was a scene motivated, not by mercantile concerns, but rather a sense of cultural collaboration. The Impulse offices were a hundred metres down an alley from the Cameron House, Toronto’s newest artists’ bar and hotel. The loft was the perfect party space: open: there was a darkroom and a private, always closed, bedroom door. It was also a photo studio, where I shot my own work and many of the magazine’s images. International artists visiting Toronto often dropped by the studio for drinks and the latest issue of the magazine. Impulse launches were always accompanied by a large party in the studio attended by hundreds, body-to-body mingling. It was in this era that Kenny Baird became the designer of the magazine. At first, he worked as a design assistant under Shelagh Alexander but quickly became her co-designer. With her departure from the magazine, by the summer of 1982, he was the magazine’s prime designer. Shelagh, who was always prone to melodrama, left me and the magazine in cliché style, by going out to purchase a package of cigarettes and literally never returning. Her final contribution was as the model for the cover of the Summer 1982 issue, a photograph of a blindfolded woman pulling back on an empty bow, aiming upward into an empty sky. The Richmond Street years reflect Impulse’s expansion internationally in both editorial content and readership. It was not uncommon to find the work of the French thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard writing about ‘Nuclear Implosion’ or Paul Virilio on ‘Speed Space,’ or an interview between Impulse’s New York contributing editor Sylvère Lotringer and Félix Guattari. It was also a period of social concern: Impulse running an interview/dialogue between pro-abortionist Dr Henry Morgentaler and anti-abortionist Dr Bernard Nathanson; an article on ‘Psychiatry as Social Control’; or an artist’s work by Hans Haacke on Alcan’s pro-apartheid policy in South Africa. Impulse exhibited a continuous desire to reflect change: social, political, economic, artistic, cultural. It was concerned as much about the status of women as pop love songs; with neo-conservatives as the ‘Suicidal State’; and possibly did not really see the cultural difference between ‘Transborder Data Flow’ and ‘Art/Furniture.’ Impulse didn’t see itself standing outside of culture looking in, but rather was itself part of the

newest, the most lively, a creative participatory producer. We were a mirror in which we too were being reflected. It was a time before cultural studies had been institutionalized. Warhol liked Impulse because he saw himself reflected: an active purveyor of pop culture. The Richmond Street years of Impulse were radically changed with the introduction of Carolyn White. If Shelagh Alexander had represented the energy of punk, Carolyn White could be described as bringing sophistication to the look of the magazine. An artist who in her youth had produced the most difficult sculptural installations, she had a polite easy manner about her. In the winter of 1982, she joined the magazine as an associate editor. At Impulse the editorial and design processes overlapped and were seamlessly integrated. It was expected that the designer read and commented on editorial material. The visual representation of the material was an integrated part of the editorial process. It was a given that only by knowing the material at a fundamental level would a designer be able to express visually what contributors were presenting in their written or visual contributions. So it was only natural that after a very short ‘training’ period, Carolyn White, under the tutelage of Kenny Baird and German Vogue, soon became the magazine’s co-designer. At Impulse one generation freely apprenticed the next until the student could replace the instructor. If one traces Carolyn White’s design history in the magazine – and she was the longest running designer for Impulse – it is clear she inherited a visual history from the three other designers. If Alexander’s design can be characterized as rough, purposely jagged, then Baird’s design smoothed Alexander’s edges and applied layers. Baird liked to apply layer on layer of grey and spot colour onto and around the text, the page becoming a complex montage of shapes where the text sometimes showed through. White developed and contributed her own sensibility, maintaining the qualities of her predecessors while incorporating refinement, elegance, and a concern for the primary expressiveness of permitting the text and the image to integrate and complement each other. Impulse from 1983 until its demise in 1990 clearly reflects the Carolyn White sense of style and design, a product of the welldressed, polished, but edgy period of the mid to late

but rather a sense of cultural collaboration.’

’80s. Our concern with cultural analysis was expansive; we knew the world was international and demanded sophistication both intellectually and in the shoes one wore. At Impulse there was no cultural great divide between the furniture designer and the Jenny Holzer aphorism. The culture of Nicaragua was as interesting and as important as heavy metal music. Impulse integrated cultural content in its pages as much as those working on the magazine integrated functions: the editors switching freely to designers; the business manager expressing editorial ideas emptied of all the mercantile concern that should have gone with the job. Everyone was there, not to improve their corporate abilities, their monetary position, but for the art, their participation in a cultural activity, as one of the cultural workers producing a magazine. But in this creative environment, where everyone was allowed a voice, where the office was occupied by strong-willed individuals, harmony could easily dissolve into destructive disagreement: though this seldom occurred. I knew from the beginning that the running of a magazine demanded a strong central individual. Although I gave almost free reign for other individuals to create in and express themselves through the magazine, it was understood that in disputes, the final decision was mine. I would critique all designs on an ongoing basis; editorial disagreements were either resolved through consensus, compliance, or resignation. Impulse may have been my magazine, but it was generously endowed throughout its history with important, influential, and powerful editors. The most difficult and long-lasting was Judith Doyle, an intelligent, talkative, politically aware woman, who was also prone to debates. In many ways, she was my political foil. The 1980s were a time of political correctness: the feminists were powerful and active; the gay community was beautifully dressed and partying with AIDS at its back; race, class, and gender were everywhere in the art world. But Impulse always had the instinct to play against the new restrictions of political correctness: Impulse wanted more to be wrong than right. Judith Doyle would often frown on our impish antics. She was faithful to many causes, and Impulse gladly became the outlet for her writing. Her political interjections in the magazine were numerous as were her own lyrical, fictive writings. Typical and

topical were her articles on ‘Animal Rights’ and her ‘Chronology of Censorship in Canada.’ Judith had just returned from shooting a documentary film about a travelling Nicaraguan theatre troop, so that she was aware of and in touch with many of the current Nicaraguan writers. She was the editor for the Nicaraguan issue released at the height of the American attempt to control the popular Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s there were many who were involved editorially for one or two issues and some who persisted for years. Along with those already mentioned, there were Brian Boigon, Susan Speigel, Andy Payne, Gerald Owen, Alberto Manguel, Donna Lypchuk, Sylvère Lotringer, Lisa Baumgardner, Anne Milne, Willoughby Sharp, James Gronau, James Dunn, Joan Brouwer, Vincent Tangredi, Gary Michael Dault, Marc Glassman, and Andrew James Paterson, all of whom participated editorially. Some made major contributions, such as Susan Speigel, editing a double ‘Theoretical Architecture’ issue, or Sylvère Lotringer, who co-edited a special ‘Death’ issue, or Donna Lypchuk, who edited the ‘New City of Fiction’ issue, while others only participated for one issue as a contributing editor. It was an Impulse principle that the editors were not paid, the basic tone being set by the fact that as executive editor and publisher, I wasn’t paid. There was no budget for editors. Most often the only person paid was the business manager. Sometimes the designer received a fee. Writers were sometimes paid from Ontario Arts Council granting programs. Many writers and artists generously donated their contributions. Impulse was sold internationally. We had distributors and art bookstore outlets in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It took time and effort to establish this extensive distribution network, quite unusual for a magazine whose print run at its maximum was only six thousand copies. The capitalist equation of more sales equals more income did not apply to Impulse, as it still doesn’t for much of the art world. The more we distributed the magazine, the more it cost us. Imagine the difficulty of collecting money from the two art bookstores in Cologne which would sell ten

1982

1985

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1990

Warhol liked Impulse because he saw himself reflected; an active purveyor of pop culture.’ copies of Impulse on a consignment, return basis. If you wanted to manage payment and returns, someone would have to go directly to the bookstore or distributor and personally settle the account with the release of each new issue. The more successful Impulse became, the more readers we acquired throughout the world, the more copies we printed and distributed, the more money we spent, and the less, if anything at all, was available to pay the editors and the contributors. When Susan Speigel edited a double issue of the magazine on ‘Theoretical Architecture’ in 1986, she didn’t do it for an editorial fee, but because she saw the need for the idea of theoretical architecture to be given expression. Like all the editors, her desire was to communicate and disseminate information. When Mary Ann Hanet worked on the early Impulse, her only thought was to be involved. When Sylvère Lotringer, Lisa Baumgardner, and Willoughby Sharp acted as New York editors, they did so to help produce a new, active cultural voice. Impulse really was a not-for-profit artists’ magazine in the best non-capitalist sense: we looked expensive and rich, but it was all showmanship, the packaging of radical, new ideas in a well-designed container. Impulse received a design award from the Canadian Society of Graphic Designers for its ‘Culture of Nicaragua’ issue. We played off the codes of the capitalist mass market, turning them to our nonmercantile cultural ends; always doing what we weren’t supposed to do, looking good, but not in Hugo Boss, in suits of our own design. Impulse refused to just be normal, possessing to the end an innate Duchampian sense of old-school avant-gardism. When I was finally supersaturated with the stress and work which were part of the constant production of a magazine, each issue draining a little more of the life from my body, I gave Impulse away. Since I had been given the magazine, I thought it would be immoral to sell it. With a well-endowed granting structure from both the provincial and federal governments, with a business manager, with editors, and with distribution, I gave the magazine to Peter Day, an activist and advocate for contemporary art. Carolyn White and I escaped to Europe to celebrate our freedom, leaving no forwarding number, no possibility to contact us with any magazine questions. A month later, I phoned

Toronto from Milan to learn that two weeks before, Peter Day had committed suicide. I returned to Toronto to a magazine in collapse. It was at this point that I decided that Impulse was over. Peter Day had been working on the ‘One Word’ issue of Impulse, for which each contributor was asked to submit one word as their one-page contribution. As a final gesture, as an act of respect to Day and the magazine, we completed Day’s ‘One Word’ issue.

In 1990, after nineteen years, fifteen of which I had been editor/publisher, Impulse was over.

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Donna Lypchuk ‘It had a sense of the artist as subversive and each issue lived up to the publication's reputation as a shapeshifter, a seducer, and a mindfucker.’

Shapeshifter I was only twenty years old when I first got my hands on a copy of Impulse magazine. An image on the cover caught my eye ... that of a young woman with tousled black hair and fierce black eyes floundering in a swimming pool. Her black fetish high heels were caught in the tulle of her ball gown, and a rescue pitchfork was prodding her pale green flesh. Being somewhat new in town and somewhat in awe of the glamour of evil in general, I thought, ‘Now these are the kind of people I'd like to hang around with ... ’ I immediately submitted a short story to the magazine. It took about a year for the subject of the photograph, artist Shelagh Alexander, and the photographer, Eldon Garnet, to literally chase me down the street to tell me my story ‘Baby Snooky Come Back,’ had been accepted for publication. According to Shelagh, who later became one of my best friends, whenever I saw them on the street I would scurry away from the two of them as though they were stalkers. I finally allowed them to introduce themselves to me when we were trapped between floors in an elevator in New York. In the 1970s and ’80s the Impulse office on Richmond Street was the closest thing to a Warhol Factory–style hang-out that has ever existed in Toronto. No matter how hard they tried, other artists just didn't seem to have the knack for drawing out the eccentrics, the ‘pure souls,’ the ‘lost souls,’ and the viciously ambitious artists that Garnet possessed. This was partly thanks to Garnet's interest in multimedia projects and Polaroid photography, which seemed to encourage a very entertaining ‘acting out’ of every conceivable neurosis and fetish. The centrepiece of the Impulse studio was a vulgar naugahyde couch circling a pole, from which visitors could view Eldon's latest experiments, photoshoots, and gadgets. The staff itself was as interesting as Garnet's fabulous ’50s decor. There was the elegant killer blonde Joan Brouwer, who wore fishnet stalkings as a t-shirt and pounds of plastic jewellery. There was the incredibly talented Gloria Berlin, singer in Fifth Column, with her sweeping ’70s hair and her portfolio of beautiful delicate pencil drawings of butch girls on motorcycles. Artist Kenny Baird, who went on to fame as the designer of the Marilyn Manson videos, was the classic hot young boy in leather and chains. Impulse at the time was notable for its prodigious gay content as well as its way-aheadof-its-time proclivity toward role-playing, cross-dressing, and cerebral sex. Just about everybody who was a who's who in the Canadian art scene sooner or later ended up sitting on

the circular aqua couch at one of Eldon's parties or profiled in the pages of the magazine. The magazine itself was visually stunning and won many international design awards. The early editions boasted glossy, silky pages, were colourful, and had the dimensions of an LP. All of the layouts and photographs for the magazine were done in-house, so that everything in the magazine was synchronized to one theme. Although the magazine itself was an object of art, in retrospect, it is the content of the magazine that was truly staggering. Where else could you read original stories and works of theory by Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Angela Carter, Patti Smith, Gerard Malanga, Chris Burden, and Michel Foucault? Mixed in with this content were interviews with such notables as David Cronenberg, Blondie, John Lydon, and John Waters. The photography in the magazine was outrageous, always a bit provocative and with a bit of an S&M edge. Back issues of the magazine were riddled with the early work of Joel-Peter Witkin, Eldon Garnet, Shelagh Alexander, Peter Noble, Rodney Werden, General Idea, Jenny Holzer, and Christian Boltanski. Impulse magazine was an example of the Canadian arts funding system working at its best. Each issue was a ‘museum within pages,’ with the museum itself being a work of art. It had a sense of the artist as subversive, and each issue lived up to the publication's reputation as a shapeshifter, a seducer, and a mindfucker. It was one of this city's true avatars of the avant-garde and consistently produced and displayed original, stylish content that was recognized worldwide as an achievement. I was proud to be a part of its history and have yet to see even a whiff of any magazine or journal that has rivalled its editorial content since.

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Bruce Mau ‘ ... part of it was not knowing what the rules were and therefore not having the kind of boundaries and barricades.’

Reviewing Impulse Reviewing Impulse again, it’s just such an incredibly astute cultural survey. Anything like this has a particular feeling for what’s going on. When you see who’s in it, from J.G. Ballard and Maurice Blanchot to Hans Haacke, there’s an incredibly tight consistency in terms of what’s going on, what exists. It’s just a very particular viewpoint that wasn’t being produced very much. One thing that I was really struck by is how much we’re missing this now. This kind of sensibility is not floating around much these days. I remember when this stuff happened, because it was really striking. People from the Cranbrook Academy of Art design department, who came up to visit my studio, asked me to invite some people to talk about design and so I invited friends of mine who were doing interesting things. Greg Van Alstyne came – he’s now running our Institute without Boundaries – and I invited Carolyn White. Another designer was also there who was very unhappy about her profession and made it evident with her presentation. Then Carolyn made her presentation and she was absolutely the opposite. She was incredibly delightful and said, ‘Well, actually, I really started as a filmmaker and an artist and there was some design to be done, so I did it, and I really like doing it.’ And everything that she put out was absolutely beautiful. It’s the kind of spirit and sensibility that I really love and try to encourage in the studio. You don’t have to know how to do it at the outset; you have to know how to do it when you’ve done it. This will produce really interesting work, and if you look especially at Carolyn’s work, but also other work that was done through the magazine, part of it was not knowing what the rules were and therefore not having the kind of boundaries and the barricades. The approach to typography, for instance, is pretty amateurish at moments, but as it develops you see it shift to something really unique. In some ways it’s a kind of classic model, that people with something new to say, say it in a new way. Now if you look at the history of design, it’s not driven by style, it’s actually driven by something to say. When there are new things to be said, then new forms are generated to express that new sensibility. I realize I was really influenced by something that happened in Impulse – I didn’t actually understand it until I went back to review the magazine – but for me one of the things that

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became almost a kind of signature of our work was the contents page. We were exploring parallel lines, the idea of field composition rather than a hierarchical composition. It was objects in a field where each object had its own kind of place, that wasn’t before or after other objects, but actually existed in a fluid space and as a way of presenting the complexity of content. If you look through the whole magazine, it has a quality, it’s really beautiful. There are many things that you’re going to avoid if you’re trained as a typographer, but that avoidance becomes a limiting factor and you end up in the same place as everyone else. The transgressions, in the end, produce the newness, and it makes for an exciting thing. The interesting thing is that Impulse was using computers really early on. I remember you had the first Macs, using them for typography and stretching type. For a real hardcore typographer, stretching typefaces is offensive because it distorts the proportional relationships. For hardcore typophiles that’s problematic because they see you’ve sort of distorted the kind of beautiful proportions of the font, but on the other hand it produces something altogether different. This was one of the first magazines to use that capacity and give typography a much more dynamic kind of possibility. I think you saw after 1985 this kind of typography become much more broadly based. It’s difficult to know exactly where these things are coming from, but it was definitely the thing to see, it had such a distinct appearance. One other thing, especially in Carolyn’s tenure and to some extent Kenny Baird’s, there is a cinematic sensibility that really informs the magazine. One of the things evident at this session, when Carolyn was presenting her work, was that her references were not coming from design. The kind of things she was looking at were art, cinema, architecture. She was outside of graphic design, where a lot of people in the field, the things that they look at, sadly, are other designers so their cultural influences are the latest book of graphic design. What you see in Impulse is much broader, influenced by a lot of different cultural resonance.

Janet Bellotto ‘Impulse was like what the name describes: dashing with theory, jumping with imagery and throttled with individuals whose page/idea shines brilliantly.’

Savouring It is difficult to grapple with the historization of things; it’s slippery. If we are going to talk about Impulse, then what it did was come full circle: born as a literary outlet and put to bed with a one word / one page concept. On a random jolt at Impulse memories, the first impression rekindled by most is the square format; its succulent covers; text jumping off the page; stories contained and embedded in a time of utter decadence. Impulse – ‘the magazine of art and culture” – juxtaposed its content with current discourse networks and social formations. It aligned itself with an international cultural world, a ubiquitous attempt without an escape. Now looking at Impulse through the eyes of an anthology, simply put, it was a collection of ideas, and what we can now reflect on as a moment of the avant-garde. It’s compulsive. The motive for such a magazine came from between the gap, visioning the thoughts and concerns of the day, and in retrospect within a developing dialogue of cultural studies. It was also an era with a certain vibrancy of change buzzing around. It was forward-thinking. The thrust of stimulus came from a fresh scene in Toronto that was growing and becoming much more diversified. An activity of building was taking place – like a sponge taking in information, running with it, and wringing it out. Now it’s hard not to get stuck in nostalgia when looking through the pages of Impulse. So many great creators – be they writers or photographers – have passed. Just as the magazine could not contain everything that was sprouting in the scene at the time, this anthology can only try to give a glimpse into something that happened, something that has trickled into many sectors still active. Introduced to art through the late ’80s Queen Street Punk/thrash scene, I came across at OCAD library’s book sale a 1980s Impulse issue that boasted multiplicity and the existence of a thriving scene that was still relevant almost a decade later. Intersecting many fields, Impulse articulated an identity that was fun, gutsy, and resistant. Take, for example, an issue that has Impulse interviewing Ondine, who recounts telling Warhol the kind of power he has / the kind of man he is, and in the same issue David Hylnsky and Michael Sowdon discuss ‘3D perspectives.’ Flipping through Impulse’s glossy pages, it is also hard not to get stuck on names: from contemporary thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, to writers like the late Angela Carter or Lynne Tillman, to music coverage by Peter Noble. The magazine had churned a prolific

community, made by an eclectic group of writers, thinkers, creators, and philosophers. Impulse was inclined to follow a movement that fed on the consciousness of culture: a response to the doings of the world. Many of its contributors achieved what are considered milestones in cultural studies. Artists took responsibility for developing a format that included the established and the obscure on the same playing field, something that could not easily be repeated today. There was an impelling force that existed in the ’80s, and Impulse’s contributors, designers, and editors participated with enthusiasm, be it in modernity, postmodernity, or the further changes that transpired. The magazine inhabits what we recognize as cultural studies and can sit alongside some of the essential cultural anthologies. So if cultural studies originated from the margins to encompass the highs and lows that culture did not address, then Impulse too covered, like other cultural movements/structures of the time, what single ‘schools’ of thought lacked and what was being neglected at the time in cultural communities. At a glance, these stories that expanded over various territories – science fiction, architecture, sexuality, philosophy, visual art – were an expression of the rapidly changing state in which culture found itself in the 1980s. Computers were slowly creeping into the workplace. There was a movement of change – at least in the Western world – a development that faced leaps in technology and Ronald Reagan’s vision of Star War’s weaponry. Impulse divulged truths and fears about the various political, social, and cultural wars that were being faced, and continue to be faced and discussed today. Impulse was a catalyst in ways of seeing, reading, writing, and ultimately in ways of living. Beyond the various thematics explored by the magazine there was a deeper consciousness in which Vaneigem’s question can be raised: ‘Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?’ It may be true that writing a history can reconnect us to the world, but this collection is an Exquisite Corpse. Impulse was like what the name describes: dashing with theory, jumping with imagery, and throttled with individuals whose page/idea shines brilliantly. Something to be savoured.

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Judith Doyle ‘I see now that our shifty attention span scoffed at then is institutionalized as “interdisciplinary” now.’

My Old Impulses 'Impulse publishes primary expression by artists and writers, not reviews or commentary' – (our editorial mantra). Don't write about things or make pitches – just do something for us. Advocating the social function of art was one of my roles, but also wanting a writerly emphasis amidst art designers. And we all shared a documentary impulse. But we cared most about this idea of primacy, of new art in magazine format. And if magazine-specific artworks don't have a magazine anymore, at least some of our editorial obsessions have residual impact now. scratchy-picky / machine interfaces (Spring 1980)

Since emotional robots are being discussed at the moment (to be specific, in a new art school in Singapore), I'll point out that the cyborgs and robots we introduced in 1980 were emotional. As Norman White wrote, they had a ‘tendency toward physical and mental breakdown’ and ‘frequently [went] amuck [sic]. Flawed, sterile, unproductive, leaky, and anxious, these robots were laughing stocks. As Norman White continued, ‘There is nothing more amusing than seeing a cybernetic masterpiece casually walk into a wall.’ At Impulse, we liked to scratch and pick at sensitive places where bodies hook up and couple with technologies, sites of soreness and embarrassment. The body's ineptitudes, I would say, its fragility and proneness to breakdown, fascinated our contributors more than anything else. Buckminster Fuller’s interview in Spring 1980 is bordered by a strange quote from him: ‘I was born cross-eyed … While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four.’ Programming unpredictability (what we now call 'emergence') was debated (albeit confusingly) in Impulse in 1980. In my interview, Gordon Pask described how he programmed his ‘conversational machines’ by ‘selectively pruning’ an ‘entailment mesh’ of ‘all necessary topics.’ About this baffling project, he said, ‘There are some elegant biological solutions for problems which defeat serial technology.’ Internet porn, satellite signal theft, teleculture, emergent programming, and ubiquitous fax machines were accounted for well in advance in our pages, by Willoughby Sharp and others.

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pseudolexicons (1980–2)

Nothing was more fun than working with local philosophers and theoreticians as they transgressed their disciplinary boundaries. While academic journals required focus and footnotes, we delighted in genrebending sense memories. Philip Monk, Gerald Owen, almost everyone in the ‘Theoretical Architecture’ issues, Alex Pilis, psychiatrist Jeanne Randolph – all inspired my editorial euphoria, a textual lust, that comes from accompanying very bright minds on a walk to the edge of their envelopes. Dense, opaque, annoyingly intellectual, dizzy with yearnings, these ‘theoretico-fictions’ were the most fun for me to edit. the ‘fear’ issue (Spring 1982)

Fear was our constant companion in the Cold War then, as now. Through the fiction supplement of the ‘Fear’ issue creep the stooped, shadow-eyed medieval skeletals drawn by John Brown. This is among my favourite territories in our small world, populated by Eduardo Galeano's virgins and saints – delicate, succinct, mysteriously configured from sixteenthcentury Jesuit liturgy twined with ‘cuban dishes, african dishes, eco, olele, ecru, quimbombo, fufu, white rivers of rum and earthquakes of drums.’ To knock on a hotel-room door and converse briefly with Galeano, then take his exquisite manuscript, was my happiest moment as an editor of anything. hot and cold / wars (Summer 1982)

Social justice is not the first thing to pop to mind about Impulse, but we were a place where journalists and academics wrote more passionately and creatively than in the mainstream. Stanley McDowell, the Globe and Mail editor, died while writing on nuclear strategy for Impulse, and I completed his piece posthumously. He wrote of how bodies speak and are spoken to: ‘In El Salvador, today's equivalent to the slave trade is going on for all the world to pretend not to see. The army, the police and other hired guns of the ruling minority do the basic job of the Queen's Printer. They deliver messages from the rulers to the ruled. But they don't do it in words. They use a private vocabulary of torture, rape, and murder. As languages go, this one suits its purpose. Its sentences are short, sharp, and beyond appeal. Their meaning gets through

‘At Impulse, we liked to scratch and pick at sensitive places where bodies hook up and couple with technologies, sites of soreness and embarrassment.’

directly to the people they're aimed at. But for anyone else, translation is difficult.’ The language of terror is a topic that recurs in Impulse. Among our Cold War theme issues: melting ice, cold city fiction. The writers were freezing. As Tom Sherman warns in his text on 'healthy paranoia,’ ‘Don't trust your batteries … Learn how to stay out of your body and old age will be a snap.’ Our coldness was written beside the heat of Central America, of Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, of Cuba and shivering Cuban expatriates. As I write now, the wind chill factor is 35 degrees Celsius below; I remember how those Latin American texts were harsh rum, burning throats seized with cold. culture of Nicaragua (Summer 1984)

Though an editor for a decade, I was only billed as 'Editor' once, for 'Culture of Nicaragua.’ On my first trip there (with a Canadian contingent of artists), our warm host – the brilliant Argentine experimentalist Julio Cortázar – offered a text, a speech to 'cultural workers,’ that set the stage. A U.S.-financed counterrevolutionary war. On the other side, Sandinista political ministers and military officers known better as short-story writers, poets, actors, and playwrights (we interviewed many, and printed exquisite fiction by Sergio Ramírez, the vice-president). Their key adversary, Ronald Reagan, was also an actor (but this coincidence is another story). Cortázar passionately endorsed newspapers with literary supplements. I can't think of a major newspaper in the world now that does this. Poets' and fiction writers' access to a wide audience meant so much to him. And Cortázar was against a homogeneous revolutionary culture. He wrote: ‘For me, the least mark of thematic or formal uniformity would be a disillusionment.’ I roamed the nameless streets of Managua collecting stories and poems that Impulse printed in both English and Spanish. Nothing was written ‘for’ us. But we had most of the work for the first time in translation. In Toronto, we had one professional translator (Miguel Rakiewicz), but more often matched Spanish speakers with good writers. Poet Rhea Tregebov's skilled adaptation of Alejandro Bravo's ‘The Mambo Belongs to Everyone’ blends jaundiced humour

with harrowing details. ‘Mambo’ is the story of a cynical bartender (and dance snob) with the bad luck to serve a drink to a general a moment before his assassination. The bartender is horribly tortured by an oily interrogator ‘with that ridiculous little Havana nightclub moustache and the dark dark glasses.’ Misdemeanours of bad taste are stirred in a cocktail of stupidity, mediocrity, and excruciating pain; dictatorship is a culture of schlock, kitsch, and received cheap product. virus and landscape (1985–8)

The Cold War and AIDS shaped Impulse. Andy Fabo's lyrical ink drawings and Ojibwa author Ron Geyshick's Windigo stories speak of the chill of plagues. Alexander Wilson's speculations on Disney World track how 'nature' always is cultural. Alex – like so many of our contributors – David Buchan, Michael Balser, Tim Jocelyn, how many others? – died in the hot/cold war of AIDS. I recall in the early ’80s when Werner Arnold and I, working on the drywall of the new Impulse offices, took time out to create our first AIDS awareness ad for the magazine (it was called ‘gay cancer’ then). finally

I think now of our critics' complaints – ‘Why do Impulse editors seek unmakable architectures, fraudulent autobiographies, maps of ruins, accidentprone robots, fake space outfits, theoretical fiction, and dysfunctional photography? Why do they compile these in “theme issues” on the culture of revolution, the culture of advertising, the culture of death, and other weird cultural adjuncts? Do Impulse editors know about anything very usefully, accurately, or for long?’ Impulse was an odd accommodation, a house of cards, vestibules, lanais, gangplanks, cold storage units, picture windows, and rickety staircases leading to unbuilt rooms. But I think this is what new ideas look like. Many of Impulse’s new ideas are now in the built world, the interdisciplinarity of the academic mainstream, and in our everyday on-line life that was barely glimpsed in the late 1970s. What seemed incomprehensible has become ubiquitous. What is the magazine of the unbuilt now?

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Mark Kingwell ‘Impulse changed its shape, but it never stopped shaping the discourse.’

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Impulse First, consider the names, the conjuring all-star syllables of an art-historical moment: William Burroughs, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Wim Wenders, William Gibson – and that was in just one issue, Winter 1989. It was the first number after one of several design realignments, the magazine now smaller and slicker than before but no less vibrant. Impulse changed its shape, but it never stopped shaping the discourse. For a decade and more, it gathered the names together, the names, big and small, of art, film, fiction, design, philosophy, and everything in between. Wedged inside its bright covers, on coated paper sharply etched in black and white, the world of visual culture was explored, probed, celebrated. I have a stack of issues in my university office, a thick slab of colour and paper and binding. It rises from the table with satisfying bulk and variety, a totem of creativity. Or – switching metaphors – a treasure trove, an Aladdin's Cave of short stories, interviews, essays, drawings, collages, photo spreads, and art layouts. There is much to fetch the eye and heart here, almost too much, but somehow I keep returning to this single issue of Winter 1989. It sports a loud lime-green cover with five-inch-high purple lettering. That astonishing list of names runs down the left-hand side in Day-Glo red, ‘and more!’ promised inside. And along the bottom, in white agate type, another conjuring list, this time of countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, U.K., U.S., West Germany. West Germany, when there was such a place – just barely, and on its way into history. The feeling is eerie but unmistakable: an instant captured in the moment of transition, a pivot of history poised and posed, a zeitgeistlich snapshot. Where else were the collisions of thought and art, circa 1989, so well documented, so compellingly sent? Working in the liberating margins created by the weird, open-air internationalism of Toronto, where provincial somehow manages to meet cosmopolitan, Impulse charted the larger world by charting its own odd arc. It is the parent to newer local-international ventures (the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Alphabet City and eversharp Public in Toronto, sadly deceased Hermenaut out of Boston) and cousin to similar efforts in New York, London, and elsewhere (Semiotext[e], Zone, the briefly revived Edinburgh Review of the late 1980s). Winter 1989. It was a time when graduate students like me, would-be scholars stooped, not with learning, but with the burden of burgeoning dissertations and meagre job prospects – pre-stooped, as it were, always

already stooped – turned with barely suppressed delight to good-looking magazines that seemed to think the way we did. ‘Of course,’ you run fiction by Burroughs next to an interview with Gibson. ‘Of course,’ Wenders discusses Wings of Desire a few pages away from Bataille's analysis of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Before the term became fashionable, Impulse understood the loose organic unity, the brain-busting tensions and connections, of visual culture. An art magazine? Sort of. A film magazine? That too. A critical journal? Sure. A philosophical intervention into everyday life? Absolutely. Impulse’s jittery graphic design matched the eclectic contents in ways then just becoming common, the spreading influence of Neville Brody and Bruce Mau. It was itself a series of nudges, feints, and misdirections. The idiosyncratic typography, now so familiar, felt at once sophisticated and zine-y, fresh. It could, to be sure, also slide into the scattered and frenetic, a manic exuberance at the edge of sense. Letters were often squashed and stretched, sometimes to their detriment. There is evidence of more enthusiasm than expertise, a roughness around the edges that was, at its best, a sort of badge of authenticity, of playful seriousness. Today, now that September 11th, 2001, has become the pivotal date, the world-historical moment, 1989 no longer carries the same tang, the whiff of moment. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, the rise of a unilateral superpower – these enabling events, so crucial to what has happened since, seem like ancient history. As with all history experienced as news, they have receded too far, been overtaken by the insistent crush of the present. And if the memory of political events has stumbled so quickly, surely cultural memory, the flotsam of ideas and insights, making and talking about the life of the spirit, is even more fragile, evanescent. But no. If we are lucky, and attentive, words and images endure, at least for a while. Like the Lascaux images, they are shadows of ourselves that we paint on the wall, shadows of Impulses that say ‘we were here,’ that tell us something important about who we used to be. And so, about who we are, might be again, are still.

Chris Kraus ‘Everything about the magazine was in the mix, and “mix” was an incredibly important cultural act, and metaphor, for that era.’

Mixmaster The first smart thing that Eldon Garnet did when he redesigned the Impulse format to a glossy square in 1978 was to stop publishing Canadians. Before that, the received wisdom of ‘international’ magazines and journals produced in far-flung outposts like Australia, South Africa, and Canada was to round up a few strong international names in hopes that they’d legitimize and bolster up the local product. It’s not as if Canadians weren’t in the magazine, they were, but the magazine was completely international. The glossy square defined the magazine, and the magazine defined the ’80s. Concurrently an artist, editor, and writer, Eldon Garnet is a supremely visual kind of thinker. His invention of the glossy square determined everything that Impulse would, and wouldn’t, be. No more arte povera, no more minimalism, no more art-theory boys jerking off to structuralist phenomenology. With its cultural mix of music, fashion, politics, film, and art, wrapped up in a glossy cover, Impulse circa 1978 was a gravestone marker for the non-profit hippie ethos of the ‘70s. Everything about the magazine was in the mix, and ‘mix’ was an incredibly important cultural act, and metaphor, for that era. During the late ’70s in New York, artists like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and the theatre company Mabou Mines were devising chaotic spectacles, minutely scored into tracks of image, sound, gesture, and sub-textual thought. ‘Tracks’ was the name of a popular uptown music club, and directors saw themselves as studio engineers of spectacle. Meanwhile in the South Bronx, Curtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash were making ‘mix’ more literal, scratching sound from turntable needles, dovetailing fragments of old melodies to make them something new, cacophonous and explosive. ‘Mix’ was expression mediated, finally, through technology. That a non-profit, state-funded publication from Toronto, Canada, could pull this all together in a magazine was a kind of miracle. Yet retrospectively, it is Impulse’s very national identity that gave the magazine its charm. Just as Gloria Steinem decided in the 1990s that New York-based Ms. magazine could best serve as a clearing-house for Third World feminisms, Impulse offered an analytic perspective on international (i.e., mostly American) hip culture that could not be found in similar magazines in America. Impulse covered all the usual suspects who appeared in U.S. art and culture magazines of the era: William Burroughs, Nina Hagen, Jenny Holzer, and Glenn Branca, to name several, but differently. Less mired in New York’s insider codes, Impulse posed questions that were rarely asked in other publications. With nothing much to lose, the editors were not afraid to

exhibit curiosity or show their politics. Impulse is the only art magazine that consistently covered abortion rights, Latin America’s civil wars, and First World military technology throughout the 1980s. Impulse stopped publication in 1990. Its end was just as muffled and mysterious as the ending of its era. Burnt out after fifteen years of editing, Garnet passed on the magazine to a friend, who edited one issue and then suicided. The magazine, as it was then, would not be possible in the present. Impulse was the product of the world’s last homogeneous scene, an avant-garde where everything that mattered then could be crammed together under one big banner. Zines, xeroxed and mailed out around the world by amateurs, came to define the 1990s, and these have been replaced by on-line blogs and websites. Impulse’s tight cohesive mix now seems exotic, like the twentieth–century city. What matters now, as Paul Virilio says, is everywhere and nowhere.

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Gary Michael Dault ‘Riffle through a random pile of back issues and be astonished at what you find’

When I first came upon Impulse, many years ago, it was a small literary magazine, presided over first by writer Peter Such (who initiated it in 1971) and, not long afterwards, by the mercurial, hydra-headed Eldon Garnet. Garnet was himself a poet then – and still is, if you think of the valences of primary making in any medium as incarnating the poetic – and a good one too. But despite Ezra Pound’s early modernist admonishment to ‘make it new’ and Garnet’s on-going willingness to try his best, poetry was a more or less conventional art, and, as a poet, Garnet’s sensibility was pushing at its limits. That sensibility finally pushed out into film, video, photography, sculpture – and Impulse. Almost from the beginning of Garnet’s epic tenure as editor/publisher of Impulse, the multimedia restlessness and protean fluidity with which his own work was imbued were deliberately visited upon the magazine. For one of its earlier issues, for example, Impulse came into the world as a microfiche card. (Does anybody remember microfiche? It was sort of an edgy, technothrill, carrying the whole magazine on a surface the size of a library file-card, and whatever the inconvenience to the reader – you had to repair to an elaborate microfiche reader in a library to peruse its miniaturized ‘pages’ – the rewards were there, in the radicalized, formal appropriation by the avant-garde.)

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IMPULSE: A Personal Peregrination through the Years of Its Life I remember one issue of Impulse from around this time (it was sometimes called Im(pulse) then, as if to give a greater semantic range to its quickening energies) that took the form of a long-playing record – entirely devoted to the music of a cultish Toronto-based rock/blues singer-composer named Joe Hall. The record – and it was a great one – was the issue (vol. 5, number 2, 1976). It bore on its sleeve a gritty black-and-white photograph of Hall taken by his friend, the equally mysterious and allusively named Fletcher Starbuck, to whose photographic art Garnet had devoted another earlier issue of Im(pulse) (vol. 4, number 1, 1975). The Fletcher Starbuck issue was horizontally rectangular in shape, consistent with most of Starbuck’s photos, and contained forty-four of the photographer’s startling black-and-white images, most of which seem as fresh and inventive, in a sort of street photographer / Garry Winogrand / Lee Friedlander way, as when they were made. The Starbuck Im(pulse) is virtually text free. Just photographs. But in it there are two gleaming white pages somewhere near the middle of the book (for a book was what it was) where, in one line of large, bellowing black type, Garnet has proclaimed both Starbuck’s aesthetic independence and, by culling the line from Moby Dick, has alluded to the odd fact of Starbuck’s Melvillean name: ‘I will have no man in my boat,’ said Starbuck. Eventually, Impulse settled into the large, square Artforum format it would inhabit through most of the 1980s, eventually pulling itself into slight verticality toward the end of the decade and ending as an exceedingly handsome, glossy, beautifully produced magazine-artefact which measured a generous and indeed opulent thirteen inches by eleven inches (‘The square is history,’ wrote Garnet in his editorial for vol. 13, number 3, 1987. ‘It’s over. You can package and analyze it, it’s dead. Like Warhol, like Beuys, like Cary Grant’) and which, in any well-run society, would have won every design award going. The thing about Impulse is that it was run by artists – by Garnet primarily, of course, assisted by a changing phalanx of additional artists, designers, filmmakers, and writers – among them Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Shelagh Alexander, Carolyn White, whose skill as a designer lent the magazine much of its dynamism, Donna Lypchuk, Jeanne Randolph, Andrew J. Paterson, and, eventually, internationally located editors such as Sylvère Lotringer, of Semiotext(e) fame. The result was not only that the magazine itself looked unfailingly great – and it always did – but that

everything between its covers looked equally great: the editorial pages, the contents pages, the advertisements, the artists’ everything. But it was, of course, the writing – or more particularly the meta-writing, the text-generating, the écriture of the magazine – which made Impulse so important and which now keeps it, if archival, nonetheless culturally irreplaceable (it seems to me that the last twenty years of Impulse is a genuine locus of Archive Fever). Local Toronto writers and artists and other Canadian contributors did some of their best work for Impulse, the editorial freedom Garnet not only allowed but insisted upon serving to ignite everyone’s imagination to the point where being (to use Sartre’s phrase) ‘to freedom condemned’ never seemed oppressive, but irradiated one’s imagination with pure opportunity. It is only in looking back, as one can now do, that it becomes clear what a hot publication Impulse was. Riffle through a random pile of back issues and be astonished at what you find: Russ Meyer, James Wines, the late and sorely missed Alexander Wilson, the late and sorely missed Tim Jocelyn, Dot Tuer, John Bentley Mays, Les Levine, Eduardo Galeano, Paul Virilio, Judith Schwarz, Alberto Manguel, Roger Caillois, Francis Ponge, Northrop Frye, Alexander Pilis, and, well, the list is, as they say, endless. It is also more remarkable in retrospect than it even seemed at the time. The fact is, I think we were all too complacent about Impulse when it was with us – the way one sometimes is about a vivid cultural resource that is close, somehow, to home (I used to feel the same way about Marshall McLuhan when I was studying with him). But Impulse, it is now clear, was – and remains – astonishing. What wouldn’t we give now to have it back again!

David Liss ‘The Toronto art world never looked so plugged into the rest of the community and the rest of the world!’ ‘It is difficult to tell if a magazine is in or out of control.’ Surprisingly, this phrase is from a subscription ad in the Summer 1985 issue of the magazine Impulse. I say surprisingly because I find it hard to imagine that, in our current era of focused mandates, targeted demographics, and streamlined efficiency, a magazine editor would consider such an ambiguous statement to be a selling point. Hardly the affirmation of academic sobriety that would impress today's granting agencies and certainly not a branding strategy to instil confidence in potential advertisers or investors. That same issue contains, among others, articles on world expositions and the thenupcoming Expo '86 in Vancouver; the organization of Disney World; artists’ furniture and functional art; heavy metal music; an interview with the director of a film on oppression in Cuba; a theoretical challenge to the Holocaust ‘revisionism’ of Ernst Zundel; and four multi-page art and text projects. Art, furniture, music, architecture, history, literature, and politics in one issue. Advertisers included the Art Gallery of Ontario, Dufflet Pastries, Devah Hair Design, the Ronald Feldman Gallery and White Columns from New York, Art Basel, and a full back-cover ad by the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. Not bad for a small, local ‘alternative’ publication. The Toronto art world

‘It is difficult to tell if a magazine is in or out of control.’ never looked so plugged into the rest of the community and the rest of the world! It is not my intention in this piece to conjure a weepy nostalgia, though it is worth noting that the global and culturally eclectic scope of Impulse predated the internet and fully developed notions of ‘globalization.’ But, to neither flatter, criticize, celebrate, nor lament, it is fair to say that Impulse was reflective of its time: multi-disciplinary, spontaneous, highly charged, easily excitable, impulsive. I was introduced to Impulse around 1980 while a student at the Dundas Valley School of Art, just outside Hamilton, Ontario. Not unlike the instructors there at the time, my interest in culture extended well beyond the confines of visual art. Aside from learning how to paint and draw, I was also taking classes in video, photography, and installation and conceptual art. In between forays to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver, where new music, art, and fashion scenes were exploding, I was also actively involved with bands on the Hamilton scene. My informal studies and personal interests included the subjects of architecture, design, literature, theatre, dance, and politics, as well as other ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture. This was not unusual at the time. The vibe in the air was part 1960s utopian hangover, combined with a punk-rock impulse to smash all conventional categories and traditions to make way for anything new. There was still a sense that by taking matters into one’s own hands, or by combining the talents (or lack thereof) and energies of a good group of friends, it was possible to destroy the old by the mere act of creating something new; not necessarily something great, just new. In any case, I'm not so sure that the principal participants and contributors to Impulse aspired to notions of ‘greatness.’ From issue to issue, and in some cases within the pages of one cover, the magazine contained ideas and opinions, facts and fictions, that were informed, thoughtful, provocative, radical, stimulating, humorous, irreverent, pretentious, opaque, or obscure. Some articles still stand as significant, timely and timeless, while others seem to have no discernible point to make at all. Failed experimentation was part of the exercise, of course, not something to be feared. Authors, artists, interviewers, and interviewees included some of the most internationally important intellectuals and cultural practitioners of the day – Jean Baudrillard, Dennis Oppenheim, J.G. Ballard, Kathy Acker, John Waters, Nina Hagen, Patti Smith, John Lydon, and William S. Burroughs – alongside Torontonians such as

Northrop Frye, David Cronenberg, Jeanne Randolph, Donna Lypchuk, Fastwurms, and notorious punk lowlifes The Viletones. Some issues were thematically oriented under such headings as ‘Death,’ ‘Fear,’ ‘Theoretical Architecture,’ ‘The Culture of Nicaragua.’ Other issues were turned over to guest editors, perhaps the most significant being the ‘Death’ issue by legendary Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer, whose long-time association with Impulse lent international cachet and credibility to the project and provided a direct pipeline into New York's cultural circles. Glancing back through several issues, it seems clear that Impulse was both in and out of control, and riding that edge might prove to be its greatest achievement and legacy. With the advantage of hindsight, it also seems that when the mag began graphically dressing for success in the late 1980s (and charging an outrageous, at the time, ten bucks), it, and ‘the eighties,’ had run their course. I suppose, for better or for worse, the uncertainties of our current era have inspired a profound need for stability and control; for quantified and qualified information, gleaned and cleaned, highly specialized, rigidly categorized, and convenient to consume. It seems there is less tolerance for risk, adventure, experimentation, failure, messiness, discovery, Impulse. It is my observation, though, that Impulse magazine was prescient in contributing to the creation of a forum and context for an open frontier of globally interconnected and inclusive dialogue; a ‘web’ of communication, if you will, for all manner of issues and topics pertinent to the times, and beyond.

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V8 N2 Spring 1980 Cover Photo: Eldon Garnet Cover Design: Shelagh Alexander + Eldon Garnet V8 N4 Fall/Winter 1980 Cover Photo: George Whiteside Model: Leighton Barrett Cover Design: Shelagh Alexander Rat courtsey of Leslie Tice The Rat Mask was constructed by Michael Bridle for Video Cabaret/1984

V10 N1 Summer 1982 Cover Photo: Deborah Samuels Cover Concept: Eldon Garnet Model: Shelagh Alexander Wardrobe: Adair Brouwer Stylist: Jamie Hanson Make up: Candace Smedle Cover Design: Ken Baird Bow courtesy of Claire Dave V10 N2 Winter 1982 Cover Photo: Boyd Webb Cover Design: Ken Baird V11 N2 Fall 1984 Cover Photo: Eldon Garnet Cover Design + Model: Carolyn White V11 N4 Winter 1985 Cover Photo: Bernard Faucon Cover Design: Carolyn White V12 N1 Summer 1985 Cover Photo + Design: Carolyn White Model: Sydney Dinsmore V12 N2 Fall 1985 Cover Photo: Eldon Garnet Cover Design: Carolyn White

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1977 V6N2 p17

p18 V6N4 1978

ITH

M TI S PAT

1978 V6N4 p19

1978 V6N4 p21

: E I D ON

BL ONTO CON

N O I T A S R VE

R O T A

DEBBIE HARRY & CHRIS STEIN OF BLONDIE They have just gotten up — They’re not very awake. Chris lies on the bed, makes a couple of telephone calls. Debbie snuggles up, counterpane around her knees. D: The band has been around for 3 years — I’ve worked with Chris for 51⁄2 years. We’ve all played with a lot of people in other bands in New York — Ivan Krau, people like that. Our bass player went to Television. I started singing when I was very small — anything — singing with the radio, yes, I’d sing to anything. Just songs, nothing in particular. I like “Pretty Baby” on this third album. For me singing is both abstract and analytical at the same time. This was the first time I have enjoyed recording — I like stage work much better. I love the audience. I like to make people dance and stuff but it’s difficult in a small club. We played Toronto before with Iggy Pop. It was a good tour for us. C: Iggy and Bowie. They were great. D: Pretty much everything I carry I could wear on stage. C: All 300 lbs. of it! D: Everything I own! People give me lots of things. I got this bracelet last night. Some guy just threw it up to me. I got a dress in L.A. Sometimes I buy stuff. I bought a great shirt. Chris had one from Macey’s and I found one just like it so now we have matching shirts. We live together. How long is it now? We’ve probably only lived together for about 4 years. C: It’s our anniversary in October. It’s time to take some shots. Debbie is not sure if she wants to do them. D: We’re not supposed to be doing any photographs. I haven’t got any makeup on. Do I look terrible? She looks beautiful. C: You look fine. Go ahead. D: O.K. I’ll wear glasses — it’s safer that way. Yes, I like to see the photographs everywhere. It’s great. It’s good for publicity — makes us real legit. It’s sort of preposterous — it’s one of the biggest cliches. C: When we’re in London she’s going to be on the front of the, what is it? Something like the Telegram week-end colour supplement? Anyway, she’s the only singer to have her picture on the front except McCartney.

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D: I love London. It’s like a second home already. It’s great because of the punk bands and the kids are like street level kids. They like us but not the middle class adult people — with them we were like total outcasts. D: We have really devoted fans in London. Some stood in the rain all night. You remember those couple of guys? After a while you develop a relationship with people. It’s very satisfying. D: I just like to sing. Money motivates me but we haven’t made any yet! We owed … Can I say the terrible amount? C: Why not? D: Well, we owed over $100,000. We had to pay it back last year. Now we can start to make money — if we have a hit! We all write the songs — me, Chris, Jimmy, Nigel, Frank … C: As a band it’s sort of different. It’s not a particularly punk phenomenon. We like the Curse and the B Girls. It’s much more pop than punk. They are close to us. What they do is just like what we used to do. We used to have three girls. They are intelligent and they enjoy their craft. I think jazz is going to influence the pattern of music a lot — much more free forms — before it evolves into acid rock or whatever again; very free music as a backlash against all this. Like Jonathan Richmond is doing. We would like to do some acoustic things later on. Debbie doesn’t want to do any more photographs but agrees to be photographed with Chris on the bed. C: D: C: D:

We can do a Lennon and Yoko. Do you feel more secure now? We were mistaken for Paul and Linda once in Japan. Yes, that was funny. Or was it Hong Kong? It makes it a lot easier having Chris around. Sometimes it makes it more difficult but generally it’s easier. C: That works for me too. It does tend to separate us from everything else that is going on too. Our stage act has just evolved. It’s a group that is not entirely fixed. D: I’m a girl and singing lead — in that respect it has a focal point, but we never planned exactly how it would be. It’s just evolved. It seems to me that it’s getting better with the addition of Nigel and Frank, particularly Nigel. He has so much experience with groups. He gives us a lot of inside info — you know — This is how it is and that is how it is! C: This group is democratic. It would be a different type of thing if there was one particular leader. It’s probably a lot easier to be a dictator. Look at Patti Smith — she calls the shots and her band is really devoted to her so I’m sure they don’t object. We’re reading a book at the moment about Valery Panov, the dancer. It’s really nice. Anyway, he says how suppressed he was by the bureaucracy in Russia. Here there are just the same restrictions in a different way — people and cliques — it’s just as difficult to get art out in this society — Here it’s socially fucked up. D: It’s more a gamble here. But it’s the same really. You have to conform to a certain sound to get played on the radio. C: You have to be polite to people. You have to say what people want to hear. Cliques — ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups — it’s really heavy; not that much different from the situation in Russia except for the basic economic differences. D: I’d rather be here though! C: We’d like to do movies. D: We want freer music — more electronic music. We had a lot more electronics on the third album but they got eliminated.

C: There’s always a market for that kind of thing. It is a little more commercial, this album I think. Also the bass playing is the best bass playing on any of the albums. D: It really brings it together. Jimmy too. C: We found him when he was working in a hospital. He was studying to be an orderly or something — he was an intern. Debbie sits up on the bed. No more photographs. D: I got these shoes from Frederick’s of Hollywood. C: It’s a really gross store! D: Lovely sleazy stripper stuff. C: She has millions of shoes — it’s amazing. She’s definitely a foot fetishist. D: Yes definitely. The back of the album cover is everyone’s feet. C: Yes. I’d, forgotten that. D: He’s a collector. He collects everything. C: I used to collect comic books but they all got burnt in a fire last year so I gave up. We collect records a lot. I used to listen to everything: movie music, blue grass, country music, folk — all that stuff. I was musically aware before the Beatles happened. Like lots of people I was into Bob Dylan. Dylan has completely sold out. You remember when he first went electric? Everyone was screaming and booing and stuff. They were saying he had sold out then but he hadn’t even started. I don’t think he is concerned with any ideals any more. I think Marley is amazing — his stage presence. What he plays is ancient. He transcends music and entertainment. To a lot of people it’s just music. D: There are not many good places to play. In the El Mocambo it’s small and the sound is bad. The Masonic Temple is good — it’s the best kind of room to play. C: It’s hard to play CBGB’s although it’s great for what it was. In London we played the Rainbow, Hammersmith Odeon, the Roundhouse and Dingwalls. Dingwalls is a pit. The Roundhouse was excellent but they’ve closed it now. That’s a shame — it’d been around a long time. D: College and universities are the best. They’re the best equipped. Like in New York there’s a place called the Quando Gym. It’s the best place to play. It’s like an old part of a school that the Puerto Ricans took over. It’s a facility owned by the city and they have community affairs there, bingo etcetera. Sometimes they rent it out and we had a gig there — us and the Dictators and some other groups. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on publicity so we only got about 500 people but it was good. It’s got a full size stage with a balcony and everything. More people come to see them. They want to make a videotape. Debbie and Chris sit on the bed. D: We’re not supposed to do any photographs. C: You look fine. Do you want to go and put on some make-up? Let’s have some coffee. Anybody want coffee or something to eat? What’ve room service got? It’s amazing how they never know what you’re talking about. Yes, I’ll have coffee and a cheese omelette and what’s the soup today?. O.K. I’ll have a pea soup and a vegetable juice and some whole wheat bread. Did you get the pea soup?

LOLA MICHAEL 1979 V7N2 p23

SITE JAMES WINES

SITE, Inc. is a multi-disciplinary architecture and environmental arts group chartered in 1970 for the purpose of exploring new concepts for the urban visual environment. Although originally identified with a kind of public sculpture, the organization has altered its direction considerably since formation and is presently involved with subtractive, fragmented, and inversionist aspects of architecture. This work is a category of hybrid endeavor — often suspended between the definitions of art and architecture — and is usually characterized by social, political, and architectural commentary. These ideas have been variously referred to as radical architecture, anti-architecture, arch-art, etc.; however, SITE prefers the term “de-architecture” to describe its philosophical position. De-architecture is a general way of defining an attitude or means for changing standard reactions to the urban context by using inherent circumstances to alter and/or invert the original intentions of a particular situation. Whereas, for example, the commonly sanctioned view of architecture has been exemplified by a relationship between form and the internal motives of function, the work of SITE deals with a relationship between content and the external influences of social and cultural context. Or, described another way, rather than develop architecture as a formalist endeavor from the inside out, SITE’s ideas evolve from the outside in.

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Location: Hamden Plaza Shopping Center, Hamden, CT, U.S.A. Date: 1978

The GHOST PARKING LOT incorporates two essential ingredients of the suburban mall — cars and asphalt — and transforms them into another frame of reference. Twenty discarded automobiles are enveloped by the paving surface on various graduated levels, from full exposure of the body contours to complete burial. The concept deals with a number of factors in the American mobilized experience — the blurred vision of motion, the fetishism of the car, indeterminacy of place and object — and exaggerates them as the raw material for public art. Given the perspective of fifty years of Modernist tradition, it has become increasingly evident that the superimposition of complex “programs” on otherwise straightforward architectural problems is nothing more than an excuse for architects to play self-indulgent games with other people's spaces. In reality, there is nothing more practical in the conception of a building than a simple, rectangular, enclosure with the minimum of articulated space divisions, allowing the inhabitants a free and organic use of their own domains. Since a distrust of institutions appears to be one of the few consolidating forces uniting our society, a relevant architectural iconography now must serve as a reflection of this disenchantment and as a criticism of these declining institutions.

“However, the obligation toward the whole in an architecture of complexity and contradiction does not preclude the building which is unresolved. Poets and playwrights acknowledge dilemmas without solutions. The validity of the questions and the vividness of the meaning are what make their works art more than philosophy. A goal of poetry can be unity of expression over resolution of content. Contemporary sculpture is often fragmentary, and today we appreciate Michelangelo's unfinished pietas more than his early work because their content is suggested, their expression more immediate, and their forms are completed beyond themselves. A building can be more or less incomplete in the expression of its program and its form.” Robert Venturi Traditional notions of urban iconography are based upon specific symbols which, with continuous repetition, reinforce the image of the institutions they signify. SITE’s commercial structures completely invert the concept of a “corporate image” by reversing the appearance of institutional security. Formalism is simply architecture's way of avoiding imagination. The “form follows function” maxim was an absurdity to begin with, a fallacy which assumed that the state of service is finite and the only manipulative ingredient in architecture is form, when all evidence indicates that one person's function is another’s folly.

“And it is perhaps from the everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained, that we can draw the complex and contradictory order that is valid and vital for our architecture and urbanistic whole.” Robert Venturi Paradoxically, Mies van der Rohe's aesthetic of LESS has stimulated the economy of MORE. By eliminating all of the craft identified with “irrelevant decoration,” this objective in architecture has forfeited human energy in favor of industrial production. At this point in time the monumental/heroic/symbolic functions of architecture are dead and all efforts to perpetuate these purposes are pretentious and extraneous, no matter how skillfully conceived. We presently lack the cultural estate and unifying ideologies necessary to lend them any significance. The combination of functional expedience, rapid mobility, and general depersonalization of the urban/suburban environment has forced the individual to withdraw increasingly into the privacy of the mind. For this reason, the old purposes of architecture as form and symbol must now be replaced by an architecture of information and thought. Doing by undoing, adding by subtracting, beginning by ending — these, and other contradictions, are the substance of de-architecture.

“As long as art is thought of as creation, it will be the same old story. Here we go again, creating objects, creating systems, building a better tomorrow. I posit that there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a yawning gap. This seems sort of tragic, but what immediately relieves it is irony, which gives you a sense of humor that makes it all tolerable.” Robert Smithson Whereas International Modernist Design has been about formalism, functionalism, moralism, rationalism, standardization, and economy; SITE’s work is an endeavor to substitute the elements of ambiguity, humor, irony, inversion, fragmentation, disorder, sensuality, and ritual. The projects address architecture as art rather than design, based on the belief that art can more effectively respond to society’s subconscious rituals and impulses. Design, on the other hand, infers the existence of some practical problem to be accommodated on aesthetic terms — or, a compromise of art in deference to the expedient. Our monolithic institutions have become irrelevant because they have failed to accommodate diversity, because they have failed to respond to the disordered, idiosyncratic, everyday requirements of people. For these same reasons Modern Architecture has failed. It has substituted technology for human energy, super plan for advocacy development, service space for leisure space, system for spontaniety, formalism for fantasy.

Photo: Eldon Garnet

ANDY WARHOL INTERVIEW FRONT OFFICE 860 BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY. FEBRUARY 21, 1979. IMPULSE: Two minutes? A.W.: Yea. IMPULSE: Alright, why did you start Interview? A.W.: I don’t know. We started, I started the magazine for that girl over there, Brigid Berlin, and she decided she didn’t want it and we got stuck with it. IMPULSE: You didn’t start it for any esoteric reason? A.W.: No, she just wanted it. Her father was Richard Aberman who ran the Hearst Corporation. But now, ten years later, she’s back and working very hard. She does a lot on it. IMPULSE: You don’t see it as a vehicle of communication? A painting is one thing, but... A.W.: I was just trying to introduce new people who other people didn’t write about. That’s something we tried to do. New art, but mostly new people. New photographers. IMPULSE: But it’s obviously famous people. A.W.: Everyone says no one buys a magazine unless they know who they’re reading about and it’s sort of fun to meet older people ... Is this your magazine? What a great shape. Whatever made you get this shape? IMPULSE: The square.

p28 V7N4 1979

A.W.: It’s a beautiful shape, god it really is. What city up in Canada? IMPULSE: Toronto. A.W.: Oh it’s really terrific. You have such nice paper. I wish we could have gloss. IMPULSE. How come you can’t afford it? You should be able to by now. A.W.: We have sort of a big staff. They get paid a lot. We’re working to offset it by selling advertising ... This is really good, gee, can you sign it? (continued shop talk about magazines) IMPULSE: We really like to edit tight. Throw out all the crap. That’s why I wanted this interview to be in depth. A.W.: I don’t have any depth. IMPULSE: You don’t have any depth? A.W.: No, I don’t. IMPULSE: You don’t believe in in-depth interviews? A.W.: No, the kind I like you follow the person around … The kind of interviews all these kids are doing on underground television, not underground but cable TV, they’re so funny because they do bad camera work, which is kind of fun ... they repeat everything over again. Truman Capote writes for us now. He wants me to teach him how to use the tape recorder, so I have to get some tape and some batteries and teach him how because usually people who are doing their first interview the thing never comes out or something and it’s scary, you always have to have someone who knows. Well the last time I went I got involved, but actually I only went to hold the

tape … What time is it? Only because this girl is going to pick me up and take me to Elaine’s because they’re having a book party, it’s called Murder Elaine’s … Do one more minute? IMPULSE: On what? A.W.: On ties. We finally decided what we’re going to do with our extra canvas, you know, the leftover canvas after the picture is stretched, we’re making ties out of it. They come in strips and we make ties out of it. We thought we’d sell them at Fiorucci. IMPULSE: They’d probably buy them. A.W: We just can’t decide what to charge. What do you think anyone would pay for a tie like that? VOICE FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM: Fifty dollars. A.W.: Really, do you think they would? IMPULSE: Yea, for sure. A.W.: I don’t know. Let’s do some photographs between the twins. TWIN 1: What’s that? A.W.: That’s a tape recorder. Do you want to know what you sound like? T 1: No, not really. A.W.: This is being done for Canada. T 1: For what? A.W.: For Canada. Will you get pictures of us? IMPULSE: Oh yea, within a year. One more group shot. There’s not much light in here. A.W.: What kind of gum are you chewing? T 2: Carefree. There’s no more left. BOB COLACELLO: What happened to what’s her name? A.W.: It’s coming. The car’s coming. She’s coming with the car. It’s coming, the car, and the book party’s coming. T 2: When’s that party at Xenon’s for Sophia Loren? A.W.: I don’t know. Are we Invited? T 2: Someone told me about it, it’s this week or next week. A.W.: I don’t have it in my book. T 1: Call Xenon’s and find out when it is. I know it’s in February. I think it’s the 29th. When’s the 29th? Today’s the 21st. A.W.: Oh, is it? T 2: There’s no 29th. There are only 28 days in February. IMPULSE: Except if it’s a leap year. T 2: This year doesn’t have a 29th. Cause I’m moving on a Wednesday and that’s Ash Wednesday and the next day is March 1st. IMPULSE: What is Ash Wednesday? A.W.: Yea, what is Ash Wednesday? T 2: The beginning of Lent. A.W.: What are you going to give up for Lent? T 2: You don’t give up anything. You just don’t eat meat on Wednesday or something … or Fridays. A.W.: You’re supposed to give something up. IMPULSE: What would you give up? A.W.: Yea, what would you give up? T 2: A party or something. A.W.: Just a good party? T 1: There’s a party at the Studio Friday night. IMPULSE: What would you give up? A.W.: I give up a lot. T 2: Spending money a lot and making long distance phone calls. Do you know how much our phone bill is this month? $350. T 1: We’re not going to have a phone for a while in our apartment until we pay the phone bill because my mother’s making us pay for it. A.W.: You can’t live in New York without a phone. Why don’t you get a cheaper apartment? T 1: No, where, in Harlem? A.W.: Yea, then at least you could have a big phone bill. IMPULSE: Are you off now? A.W.: Yea, I’m just waiting for the car. IMPULSE: Go to church? A.W.: Every Sunday. T 1: Which church do you go to? A.W.: It’s just around the corner, it’s called St. Vincent’s. Ronny, can you do one more strip so I can give him a tie? T 2: What mass do you go to? A.W.: We go to the late one. IMPULSE: I like this one.

THE

CURSE OF

BIG JOB CHRIS BURDEN

In an extreme state of anger and frustration at what I perceived to be the art world's inability to comprehend my two technological projects, the B-CAR and the C.B.T.V., and having just suffered the loss of my girlfriend Alexis Smith, I purchased an antique 1952 Ford "rig" (a tractor-trailer combination weighing 16,000 pounds empty). In large bold letters the words "BIG JOB" were stamped on the chrome strips attached to either side of the truck's hood. The thirty-five foot black bat wing spray painted on either side of the trailer and the bent step bumper marking where a man had killed himself by ramming the back of the trailer in a small foreign car imbued "BIG JOB" with a sense of power and evil which I found irresistible. Using all the money I had, plus borrowing a thousand more, I paid the owner Jim Quaintance $3,000 in cash. With this huge truck I envisioned an almost endless series of projects that would free me from being an artist. My first plan was that I would drive to shopping centres with the B-CAR and the C.B.T.V. in the trailer and display them to members of the public for a nominal fee, much in the manner of an old fashioned road show. Another plan was that I would install a satellite receiving dish and transmitter, making the truck a rolling communication command post. I fantasized that "BIG JOB" would become the world's first mobile car factory: I would pull into a small Mexican village and produce the type of vehicle best suited for their specific local needs. I envisioned huge profits hauling antiques from New England, in a business partnership with my mother, and selling them to Hollywood decorators. Finally I planned I would take the truck to South America, and that from inside the moving trailer using a catapult ramp I would launch a small airplane that would fly ahead and attack each new border station thereby expediting my exit or entry across each international border. In fact, the truck was an obsolete wreck barely able to drive around the block. The tires were bald, the brakes and connecting air hoses in the last stages of disintegration. The electrical wiring hanging in a vast array of spaghetti-like confusion from under the dashboard would often start smoking whenever I turned it on. My energy for several months consisted of simply trying to keep the truck running and moving it from one side of the street to the other in order to keep from getting parking tickets. As I talked to more and more people familiar with the trucking business I realized that I did not possess or could never hope to obtain the various state and federal permits necessary to operate the truck legally. In fact, merely driving the truck was an illegal act, since I did not possess a trucker's license. At night I would have nightmares about driving the truck in small narrow Paris streets wondering if the next old cobblestone bridge would collapse. I would dream that I had parked "BIG JOB" on a steep hill and it would start to roll backwards. I would have to make an instantaneous choice between crashing into the parked cars behind me or rolling down the hill backwards and

hoping that I could swivel the truck at the bottom into a side street. The truck had turned into a giant liability rather than the fantastic asset I first envisioned. I decided to sell "BIG JOB". This proved to be extremely difficult but after many weeks of advertising I was finally offered half the amount that I had paid just six months earlier. Realizing that the truck was truly worthless and that I might easily lose all the money I had invested, I accepted this offer and sold the truck to Benny McBee. I rushed to the bank with the cash and to the Department of Motor Vehicles to notify them that the truck was no longer in my name. I thought that I had finally rid myself of "BIG JOB", but several weeks later I received a letter from the Los Angeles police notifying me that a warrant was about to be issued for me and that I was being sought for a hit and run accident. Apparently Benny McBee had been involved in an accident on the way home after purchasing the truck, had fled the scene, and had never transferred the truck's legal papers to his name. I appeared in person at the Los Angeles police station and talked to the detective in charge of the case. I explained to him that the truck no longer belonged to me and that I was not responsible for the accident. A few days later Benny McBee called to tell me that the serial numbers on the trailer did not match the numbers on the registration, and that it appeared that the trailer might have been stolen. I assured him that I had not stolen "BIG JOB," that I had simply purchased it from the former owner Jim Quaintance. I called Jim Quaintance and he assured me that it was simply a bureaucratic mistake, and that the numbers had been incorrectly transposed somewhere along the line. Several weeks later at 11:30 at night I received a phone call from an insurance investigator wanting to know the location of the truck so that they could assess an insurance claim that Jim Quaintance had lost $30,000 worth of trucking business because of the damage the truck had sustained when the small foreign car impaled itself on the rear step bumper. Benny McBee had still failed or been unable to register the truck in his name and the Department of Motor Vehicles still showed me as the legal owner. I explained to the insurance investigator that I sold the truck to Benny McBee several months earlier and that I had no idea of the whereabouts of the truck. The next morning the insurance investigator and an assistant came to investigate me. They asked me why I had bought the truck, was I in the trucking business, and how much I paid for it. Although I had done nothing wrong I felt that I had become guilty by association, and that "BIG JOB" possessed a curse which I could not get rid of. About a month later Jim Hanson from the Highway Patrol Investigation Unit came to my studio. I was not in at the time, but he left me a card requesting that I contact him. With much apprehension I called him. To my surprise he seemed annoyed that he was ever assigned the case, the trailer as far as they could determine was not stolen. He asked me a few questions, seemed satisfied, and told me that he considered the case closed.

1979 V7N4 p29

LOS ANGELES: DECEMBER 14, 1977 JUNE 22, 1978.

BABY DOLLS I’m in the beginning of breast development. I started to develop the core of my breasts and I’ve gone through all my psychological treatment to be accepted into it. It’s basically an assessment time, they’ll put me through tests and everything else from time to time to make sure I’m adjusting properly, because you’re born with the male organ and you’ve lived with it for 18 years and then suddenly it’s gone, it’s a big change. Well I thought about it when I was 14 years old and I inquired, and my doctor told me to come back when I was 18, so I waited the four years. I went through all the decisions to getting right down to thinking about it, and I looked around me, and seeing different people that weren’t really happy in the gay life and I found myself, to be gay was not as stable as it could be as a heterosexual, and I went back to him when I was 18, just after my 18th birthday, and they put me through testings at a medical centre, and I inquired with different doctors I’d seen in the past to ask what they thought, and they turned around and started me on the hormones, like they’ve accepted me into it and McMaster wants to follow me down to New York when I go for the surgery and send enough information to the government to allow a clinic to be opened out there. They start when they’re 22, 23, and they finish by the time they’re, oh it’s hard to say, 30, depending on how their finances are and how they go about getting the operation itself. Well I’ll be paying $4700, and that’ll include from my castration right up to one part of facial surgery. Well I can have anything done. I can have my eyes lifted and if I feel I’ve got small lids or something and, well, I’m intending to have my adam’s apple inverted and a touch on my nose, like, to take the bump out of the middle, like a lotta people say keep it, it’s character, but I can’t, I don’t feel it’s proper. Well, I’ve got a picture in my mind of how I should look when I’m finished. No, I’d fight it because I feel I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body, and I’ve a female outlook on life. I’ve always had the desire to cross dress, not get off on it sexually but psychologically, like, to be able to be, well, starting out as a young girl, then a teenage girl, then a woman, it’s a better feeling. If they were to say no to me I think I’d fight it, and if I couldn’t get it here I’d try for Europe and wait a few more years and get hormones from another doctor that would just prescribe me the hormones and let me go on my merry way. I don’t think I would have the nerve to do that because, well, the ones that do it under the table, there’s no guarantee that you’re gonna get the perfect female organ, or whether you’re not going to bleed to death or not, or the early ones, there was some done in Tijuana Mexico, and one of the girls just about died from infection, like she had her operation into being a woman, she just about died of the infection she was brought back to California and they fixed it from there, and there’s one in Hamilton that I know, a Hamilton girl, she’s been in for six major operations since she’s had the first one, and it’s just to correct different things that weren’t done right, like they had set the testicles up inside of her, which is a very old old way of doing it, like it’s from back in the 60’s, and they’re not supposed to do that anymore because the patient has to continually rise on the intake of female hormones to keep the male hormones down. Yeh, well it doesn’t stop it completely, but it brings it down to a point where it can be conquered, like level right out to a balance to where it should be in a woman without having to take daily injections, like it would be a six month thing and possibly up to a year. I think some of them are sympathetic, but some are just doing it for the money, and others feel like, you know, for the patients’ benefit, like, they’re doing it as a step toward mankind type thing. They’re just doing it for the money because they’re paid cash, like, you go into his office ten days beforehand with the one that I’ve heard of and known a couple of people that have gone to him you go in ten days in advance, give him $750 and the day he puts you in the hospital, well, into his little hospital-type clinic thing, you pay him the other $750 and leave, and, like, if it’s not done right he can turn around, if he doesn’t really think you’re really his cup of tea, he can turn around and mess you up just a bit to make it harder on you in life, and you’d have to turn around and pay more to get that fixed, whereas going legally, it’s a guarantee, there’s a written guarantee, and any extras that have to be added on, like if something heals up and closes up they’ll reopen it for nothing. Like it’s more less a service guarantee. Well the way they’ll be doing me is the castration will be done, the testicles removed, and then I’ll go down four days after that, back down to surgery, and they’ll take what’s left of the penis and use that to form the outer part, and there’ll be a hole more or less bored through me and my scrotum will line it, and that’ll be more or less the cavity, and they’ll use plastic surgery to make touch-ups and everything, and make it look real, and then the scrotum has sensitivity because it’s a membrane and it will give me what I will feel as an orgasm, it won’t be all psychological ... Well, once the testicles are removed, like, ejaculation pretty well stops, like excreting

RODNEY WERDEN

anything, like, it won’t be just a psychological thing, there’ll be some physical in there, like the first one that was ever done in Toronto, she was taken into one of the institutes there that’s pretty well known for it, and they took her in and they just took everything off her and bored a hole so she looks like she has two anuses now. It’s nothing you know, dramatic looking, that’s if, you pay higher prices like I will, like the jobs in Toronto they’re just like a visual, like it looks like it, whereas the ones in New York, you can touch and look at it and it will look real. Right, more less something we have on you, whereas you have the gift of bearing children on us. I wanna wait, like I’ll probably wait five or six years after I’m finished my operation and experience life as a woman, and then I will, I guess, eventually marry and settle down if the right person comes along. Like I dunno, I find in the gay life there is so many of them, I guess when I go into being a woman there’s you know just going to be that one, I’ll feel so much better, it’s more stable. I know people that have been completed up to nine years. I know one very fortunate case that went across to Sweden 10 years ago and had hers done, and that was one of my teachers from a retraining centre, like she’d been finished and everything else and when I went back to school, which I’m still in my course now, they know about me and my future and they’ve talked to my teachers about it, and they’ve come upon the conclusion that if I can more less have a class with her once a week or something, she’ll sit and talk on the same level, there’s four of us down there ... Its bookkeeping, it’s basically somewhere to set me up in life where I can work as a woman in a woman’s job. I dunno, office work has always interested me, I’m not into factory, like, as far as I’m concerned no woman should have to work in a factory ... I’m for it, and then again I’m not, like, I like to be dominated, I don’t like to be totally independent ... basically, like, under the table doctors they come and go, and they’ve cleaned out quite a bit now that it’s being done over here, like when it was all done in Europe and further down in the States, like, more less not for Canadians there was a lot of under the table work going on here because it was saving people money, like a flight to Europe, whatever, and all this expensive surgery which was more expensive over there, because that’s how they treat - they treat them like a tourist, like, if they’re going to travel all this way and be willing to pay the money, so it’s thinned down considerably ‘cause there’s access to the States now, and they’re starting to open up clinics, but they have long waiting lists.... One institute in Toronto, they’ll tell you right now as it stands you’ll wait seven to eight years to fifteen years to be done, and I know somebody that’s been waiting for ten, and they’ve finally been accepted at one of the clinics here when they open it up. Canada is becoming more advanced, and they’re opening up more towards the subject itself. I don’t know, if I were a doctor working on that I would feel very gifted, and I would feel, you know, looking towards a person, like I’m doing them a big favour, a really big favour, if they’re happy with what they are, but, like if the person’s not happy with it, and if they’ve gone through all the testing and everything else and were accepted and its just they wanted to be dirty more or less, and say they weren’t happy being a woman, they were suicidal and everything, I wouldn’t feel guilty about it, I’ve known two sex changes that have turned lesbian and it’s all more or less attention-seeking, like they get noticed a lot more being like that rather than being a woman, like they find the recognition they’re looking for, because people are saying that was a sex change now she’s a lesbian.... No I don’t intend to, a lot of people say I should, you know, because being here for eighteen years less months here and there, it’s still, I don’t feel it’s necessary to leave the city, because they’re going to have to accept me someday and they’ll take me to be a woman.... Everything once I’m done is legal, like, I am a woman, the only place that usually doesn’t get to be an F is on the birth certificate in certain cases and, well, adoption agencies, they have to know more or less, they find out because adoption agencies keep a list of all trans-sexuals registered, pretty well, and as far as adoption goes, we can only have girls and so, like, if I go in there and fill out my forms and everything, and they accept me, they look on this list comparing my maiden name, which would be my last name, and find that I was once a man and they turn around and say, well, we’ll allow you a child but only a girl, because they figure my once being a man could have an influence on a little boy, could influence him to be a homosexual like I once was, or they figure if I take a girl they feel I could influence her to be the woman I’ve always wanted to be. I find that most trans-sexuals will look upon a little girl and say she’s going to be the woman of my dreams.... Most parents are like that, they want their children to do this and that, and then the time comes when the child says look, I’m not doing this or that, like, they begin to live their own lives.... Yeh, with castration the voice heightens, and if any extra is needed they

tighten the vocal chords, which is just like a tonsilectomy it’s a very minor surgery.... Yes, some do look sickening, they stand out, like they’re very flamboyant, if I get recognized, when I do, I’ll get recognized as a woman, like, somebody can come and say you’re a guy, and I don’t care if it’s on the middle of the street, I would be offended enough to turn around, well, I would say ‘well you prove that’ ... They look like a woman with very masculine features.... Well, silicone as far as I’m concerned, I’m only having the one spot in my breasts, and that’s to keep them firm, and as far as anywhere else on my body, I figure if I’m going to fill out there naturally it’ll go through the hormones.... There’s two or three I know that run around in the streets in these gaudy clothes that I would only wear to a disco type thing, like these open-back dresses and spikes, and it just doesn’t go over well in public, and stage make-up, pretty well, it’s better more less for an evening type thing, like it would be like a woman walking downtown with a silver evening bag and a formal and silver shoes, pretty well, I’ve seen a couple like that ... cross dressing, it was all done on a psychological basis, like, I didn’t get off sexually on it, I got off more psychologically ... I was caught a couple of times, they just figured it was a passing phase, like, they were like most parents, very protective, saying, well, at least my father was not your, not ... you can’t be gay ... he was always trying to make me a man, and like I was hanging around Wayne, never going around with girls, that was a friend of mine who was gay too, we lived next door to each other for thirteen years before we, well, Wayne moved, and I was no longer there, I moved out of the house on my own.... They always thought of me to be queer ... my father’s accepted it, he’s taken it to be you know, if it’s going to help me in life, make my life happier, it’s me that has to live it not him, and let me live it in a happy way, so ... well when I come into the house he’ll sit there, he won’t talk to me like outspokenly, he will if the rest of the family is around, but, like, for me to go up there and have coffee, I’ve never done that, just to go up and visit, I have to be with somebody else in the family because my father to me was always the image of the breadwinner, he wasn’t really the fatherly image, and when he did find that I was as he called it, going a bit queer, he tried to make me the man he wanted, and it didn’t work because it only made life rougher on me ... a head mechanic for the bus service, and, like, he’s always over dominating other guys and I guess that has an influence on it ... when my mother was alive she seemed to protect me, more, she protected me from my father, she wouldn’t let him hit me that much, she would do the hitting if she could help it and she really didn’t like to hit me, she always felt I was different I guess, because I did project what I was going to be at an early age, because other relatives have said, well we always thought way back when that you were different, my family’s very, I dunno, ancient, to put it in plain English, they’re back in the times where they try to avoid thinking that ... well, that was one of my father’s questions, like what do we do with you once you’re finished, how do we introduce you again ... a friend of the family’s that you haven’t seen for years, and I said to him, all you have to say is I’m a cousin from out west, like that would be possible to do, they don’t necessarily have to know what happened to me as I once was a boy, I could’ve moved down to the States and they would be up there, like, most of my relatives like, all my relatives will know ‘cause that’s something you can’t hide from them, and I don’t want it hidden ... well my cousin and my aunt are basically the only ones, they live up outside of the city, up, going towards Kitchener way, and they have offered me the money, they’ve set me up financially, when I had contacts to do it myself they set me up with it financially, because they figure if it’s the only thing left to do, which there is, because psychiatry won’t work, I’m homosexual and I’m not happy as a homosexual, but I can’t live a heterosexual life in the male body with my female outlook on life, it wouldn’t go over well ... they figured that they gave me my, and it’s there as soon as I need it ... she said, well, when she said to me she was going to give me the money. I said no and refused it, and she said well consider it an advance on the inheritance, and, like, I know myself, like she’s got money in the bank that she always has there for herself like, for fixtures around the house and such like, and I think it would come out of there than the savings.... It’s the money with her, like, her parents have accepted it and they don’t care what she does anymore, and they just won’t set her up financially, and Sidney, he’s working enough just to get them around because they’ve just started up again, he said once he gets going he’s going to start saving money and try to get a bank loan and get it done for her. In a state of gender limbo an eighteen year old male talks of his imminently scheduled sex change. The audio interview recorded in January, 1978 was spontaneous and is unedited except for the elimination of my questions. Skinning away the man, washing off the blood his focus eliminates present and past - intent on becoming the woman of his own dreams. 1979 V7N4 p33

ONCE LIVING In a Healthy State of Para n oi

a TOM SHERMAN

Keep an eye on everything and everyone. Don’t trust your mother. Don’t trust your batteries. Watch what you eat. Charcoal filter your drinking water. Learn how to stay out of your body and old age will be a snap.

of my silent breathing will no longer support my blind faith in discovery. My desire or invention no longer follows logic. As far as I’m concerned, I have to give up. It’s my decision to assume control. I’ve decided to get out.

Remember, even in your silence, you are still more quick than dead. It’s midnight. It is noon. The mailman is at the door. The phone rings Quiet as a mouse. Common as a housefly. You who choose to exhibit again. It rings and rings. Longer and longer. The sound of the dark green leaves early in the morning. I imagine. The traffic moves. The self-control. Keep your lips buttoned tight forever. trains go by. The sun comes and goes. A rain. The moon I imagine Professionally speaking, living in the city, tangled up in media crossing the sky. The start of another day. The light floods the room. deception. Building careers on hype and long range projection. The cloudy whites covered wet and rolling. The legs are wooden. The Looking into the future for ‘up to the minute’ political forecasts. hands heavy, the fingers cigarette-stained. I’ve stopped drinking. The Everyone should know by now, no one can be everywhere at the same bottles are dry. My urine is yellow. I spit in the toilet. Mouth white. My time. No one can be totally aware. Screen your incoming traffic hair is brown. My beard is grey. My back is asleep. I can feel my chest. carefully. Be selective or you’ll fry in the overload. These blanket My back is there. statements are for the victims of the front page reflection. I awaken. Here comes the night. I touch my lips. My mouth is open More than one of my friends have told me I’m paranoid lately. I always and dry. My tongue is swollen. I see inside. My stomach is yellow. My want them to explain what they mean by the word when they stick it wrists, my skin is grey. My tongue is white. I’m close now. I’m in to me, whether or not it is a bad thing to be a paranoid should always control of the silence. It’s ringing now. I was right to stop running in be up for discussion. I’m not certain it’s a negative thing. If I’m place. Now I’m running backward, relieved to have hit the slide. Here paranoid, I’m just trying to avoid the major traps. I know it’s a crime I go. In the sound of the trees. The shadows playing on the walls. to be wound tight with self-restrictions. Don’t I owe it to myself to Nothing is lost, nothing gained. I’m sorry to be waiting for you like keep my eyes open for an ambush? I simply refuse to ride into the this. Sure, we could celebrate our consuming interests instead. canyon if I know there are bad guys waiting for me on the ledges Excepting, of course, my cowardly exit. What kind of special goodbye above. I’m not stupid. But that doesn’t rule out my being too smart for would relieve my conscience? I don’t know. I don’t feel you. I can give my own good. If I felt I had any control over what happens to me, I you nothing. It has nothing to do with you. Pushing hard, I just can’t wouldn’t be so pessimistic. I know I can let the whole thing go. I can give. It’s too late to pull out. Off this page into darkness. With little sit around on my ass, and it will quiet down. I can let it all go. My life pattern to discern. With no lesson to uncover. Dropping off soon. will stand perfectly still. I can stop eating. I can stop answering the Without a break, I cry. Shit, the tears flow. I didn’t want the tears to phone. I can stop paying the rent. I can wait for them to come and get fall. I tried to hold them back. Dropping onto my chest, the clear tear me. I can quit. Right now, I’m absolutely at a standstill. I would rather drops. I hear myself breathing. I feel the clear water of my eyes strike not continue. Am I thinking about taking my own life? In control, I my chest. cease to breathe anything fresh. I shut out the lies. I take possession of my own mind. In the silence of my home. My room is dark and I want to. Listen, here comes the end. I want you to know. I feel you cool. It is summer, warm with the trees sounding so green in the see me. I sit; you walk around me. My eyes are dry now. You talk as wind, so fresh. My stomach is empty. I don’t want to drink. I’m not you circle. I want your words. Talk to me. Walk around me, but talk to going to turn on the TV this afternoon. I don’t believe any of it. me, please. Here it comes. You are in trouble. Listen, open your eyes. Nothing exists outside my tired body. Slouched in my chair, I’ve Face the music. Cash in on your mistakes. Make money playing collapsed into the spiral of my dreams. My respiration running down around with your life. Be careful in passing. Me, I may register your and off. I close my eyes to see what I can see. There is nothing. No opinions, indeed. My ears, they’ll never close forever. No way, I colours. No contours. When they come for me, when they finally look learned over the years. They can’t stop me now. No way, I have me up, I will be moaning blue, in rhythms cold without sense. Missing learned to reach for the stars. I never thought I would live this long. life before my body runs out. Skipping along the path of no return. I Must be hell to overshoot the mark. Left standing in space, I’ll never don’t care one bit. You don’t matter to me. Whether you read all of this believe in another life. You hear me right. My mind is closed forever. or not, I don’t give a shit. You mean nothing to me. Here I am. Come I’ve made up my mind, yet I’m still short of heaven. I hear you and get me. Don’t try to make me stand for anything. I long to rest, thinking, just shy of laughing. In my face, I hear your breath. You told assured of a second thought. I don’t see a way out. The clear channel me you thought a life was worth a bundle. You touch me. I’m cold. 1979 V8N1 p35

ROBIN COLLYER

MR. LEATHER

SHELAGH ALEX ANDER

getting dressed up to go to a mr. leather contest. no it’s called dressing down. can you tell that i’m a girl? no, you look like a cute boy. oh no it’s wrinkled. i hate wrinkled clothing. they’re going to say: hey look at that chick in the wrinkled shirt. agh. i wouldn’t worry about it too much. maybe i should take a bag. you should.

CHICAGO ‘79 1979 V8N1 p37

DEVO duty now for the future goes from our corporate anthem and works its way into the altruistic genes which, in turn, finishes off with a ride on the redeye express/strange pursuit is a devo love song/if you noticed we dealt with love more than once on this album/strange pursuit was actually inspired by those little magnetic dolls . . . those japanese toys where they have a magnet in the mouth with a boy and a girl doll/the heads either attract or repel/triumph of the will is more your classical greek love song/you can imagine businessmen in togas sitting around in the parthenon listening to it over the musak system about 1,000 years ago/we don’t give advice/we just offer information/it’s important and relevant . . . it’s information people should be aware of . . . it’s what’s happening in the world/it’s the sound of things falling apart . . . a need for people to work together rather than to carry on with their individual consumerism and their waste of energy on a planet that is shrinking . . . a planet where we have to be more and more responsible for our actions/when people absorb information it is an altruistic method/the other choice is for them to attend a Ted Nugent concert and listen to his interviews after the show where he brags about killing at least three different animals which are compiled on the endangered species lists . . . those are the alternatives/devo feel people should use their grey matter because it’s important to think about certain things/we are much more concerned with getting a reaction, positive or negative/there are some kids that will never get into our music beyond its audible beat . . . there’s nothing you can do about it/there are many people looking for directions to take/a lot of young kids want to know where their place is in the future . . . and what we say is for them to think of themselves as part of a world community, to consider themselves part of something bigger/there is high devo and low devo . . . people who are beating each other in gas lines is low devo/the type of society that japan engulfs is high devo which is recognizing the forces of de-evolution in relation to what the world is made up from/altruistic genes is a phrase that sociobiologists came up with where you pass on your genetic code, not through the means of reproduction, but, through influence . . . by being a positive influence on your culture/the way we feel about going out on the road beating the shit out of our bodies every night, 25 shows a month, when, what we’d rather be doing is initiating simulcasts by satellite time . . . can you imagine what we’d be in for if an organization like McDonald’s got hold of it before we could?/we think entertainers should be held responsible for what they produce/take any of your commercially successful mainstream rock’n’roll groups for example . . . when they do a totally computerized album that’s just a rehash of the computerized album that they did the first time around which is just a totally cloned out version of all the ideas that have happened in the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, they should be held responsible for it instead of being rewarded for it/people unintentionally fool themselves when they think man is the centre of the universe and mankind is evolving into a highly technological state where you can go out and buy whatever you want/people think whatever they select is just one of the benefits of freedom . . . devo think that’s sick/we’ve expanded our scope of influence by being in a band . . . we couldn’t have done it any other way/I mean, music has a very large audience . . . larger so than art gallerys for example/when we first started devo we actually thought by this point in time video discs would be happening, where in reality it’ll be another year or so/we always thought in those terms, and we did our first devo presentation, we were planning on it to become a video disc/we think in both video visual and audible audio terms, that way the actual musical notes that you’re playing come to be much less crucial, but, the message which it carries has more impact/it’s sort of like a technique of regulating your musical interpretation of ideas/the first step is for people to become conscious of where they are, of what they’re doing, where their place is and what is going on around them/to be aware of the fact that a car which is twelve feet long or whatever, is using up more than their share of energy on this planet/it’s when they realize there’s a reason why you turn off

your hot comb an extra hot comb an extra minute earlier/people have got to understand that human beings aren’t the centre of the universe and they should stop thinking in that respect/if they could quit thinking they were the most important things in the world, they could look around and discover they are in fact, part of something much bigger/we don’t relish critics who dwell too much by trying to interpret our ideas which they consider to be a philosophy or some kind of religion/it’s just as bad to be categorized on that kind of level/people can’t observe without being excessively subjective/if all the guy can acknowledge is people go to a devo gig just to jump around, y’know, it’s better he thinks that than try to throw in stuff he doesn’t even understand/we get a lot of different responses to the same concert/when we played a gig in San Francisco, I read three reviews where each critic typecast in a different way . . . I never knew devo were dangerous, going downhill and the music of the future at the same time?/sometimes, people who attend our gigs get pretty strange/I can remember 110,000 hippies beating each other up at knebworth last year during our set/they were acid rock fans who were only there to see genesis and the starship/we came on right after the atlanta rhythm section finished doing this boogie set where they had this big fat guy waving this, y’know, mammoth flag/meanwhile you could hear all these english hippies yelling stuff like get it together, right on and yeah, yeah, yeah/when devo came on they completely lost it/after we did a couple of songs they were throwing anything they could get their hands on/they were hitting each other and they would get pissed and fight even more/they were really fighting it out, y’know, it looked so good/it was like playing hell/who knows what drives some people to come to concerts, but, they come and get up at the front of the stage and just go psycho/there’s another interesting thing about audience interaction . . . things get thrown on stage by people who claim that they’re well meaning, y’know, it’s like “devo!” here comes a wine bottle . . . lookout/when mark goes into the audience, the spuds at the front of the stage think he wants to be injured or something/virgin records wasn’t even interested in us until they found out that bowie wanted to produce us/then they had this thing worked out with bowie that it had to be a seven album production deal/his lawyers had it fixed that he was going to collect 4% of our royalties/after we arrived in germany, david was in real bad shape/he was so sick that he couldn’t make it to the studio most of the time/we finally agreed there was no way that we were going to sign a deal like that/virgin records actually convinced us they were sympathetic and they wanted to help us stay alive, y’know, do things to make devo something big and important/something with an influence rather than being just another art band which fizzles out/we thought virgin were going to protect us/they told us there was no problems, we were signing with them and they’d fight warners/the truth of it is they made a deal with them/we ended up with this real shit middle position having two record companies that were both pissed at us for doing our own contract rather than working through lawyers and a manager/we had de-punk mentality about signing a recording contract at the time because we did it all ourselves/eno was not only a political choice, but he loaned us 30,000 dollars to do the first album/we probably set a record for being one of the cheapest in production amongst the major releases of that year/with our second album, duty now, our producer ken scott couldn’t believe that we brought the album in for under 150,000 dollars/we cost about 70,000 dollars and he just couldn’t believe there was an album that cheap which he produced because he’s the kind of person who likes to sit around and eat pizza in the studio at 175.00 dollars an hour/it just won’t be another album . . . next lp has got to be a major departure/for us it will be the statement we’ve been talking about in interviews through the past/we’ve done our two albums that are as close to rock’n’roll as we are going to get/next platter will be music for the eighties . . . it’ll be healthy robot rhythms for doing your calisthenics to///////////stop/

p.l. noble

1979 V8N1 p39

I was born cross-eyed. Not until I was four years old was it

BUCKMINSTER FULLER INTERVIEWED BY MICHAEL KIERAN

GIVEN THAT WE ARE KNOWLEDGEABLE AS WELL AS SOCIAL HUMAN BEINGS, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES OR ADVANTAGES BECOMING AVAILABLE TO US? I don’t really get your question because we had an enormous amount of technological advantages in operation long before you were born. I’M PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN HOW, AS ORDINARY PEOPLE, CAN WE MAXIMIZE OUR ADVANTAGES? Humanity has almost nothing to do with the technology they have. You personally had nothing to do with developing the transistor. You had nothing to do with developing the camera you’re using right now. These are products of private enterprise. Or they’re products of enormous government enterprise getting ready for war. The people have really nothing to do – they don’t design the automobiles and when it comes to problems of today, for example energy, people have nothing to do with the kind of fuel that, they use. They have nothing to do with adapting the equipment. Humanity is very much a victim of the decisions of others. SOME OF OUR MOST SOPHISTICATED TECHNOLOGY IS DEVELOPED BY THE MILITARY AND IT AFFECTS EVERYDAY PEOPLE -

Right. HOW DOES THAT CONTEST OF WEAPONRY FIT IN WITH YOUR IDEAS? Well I think that obviously they don’t fit in. One is exactly the opposite of the other. We continually say we can’t afford things, and particularly enterprise says we can’t afford that, we’re not gonna make money. Then we get to where they say that the enemy is going to use this, and the politicians say to the people – buy or die – so they say we’ll buy whether we can afford it or not. We get these enormous programs with the kind of money that is really necessary to initiate technology. The kind of money which is not forthcoming except when humanity is scared to death, scared of war. Today I don’t think humanity’s quite so scared, so other kinds of decisions might be made one of these days, but that is how the great momentum did get going, with the military being able to afford it. The everyday people could not afford it, and I say that people are not technically literate enough to be able to make very good decisions about such matters. DO YOU FEEL THAT IT’S REASONABLE TO EXPECT THAT IN THE FUTURE HUMAN CONCERNS WILL EVER COME BEFORE MILITARY AND ECONOMIC CONCERNS? If they don’t, humanity’s all through on our planet. You’ve really given me the biggest question we can

have. We are here on our planet for some very good reasons. We’re a very complex design, and we’ve been included in the design of the universe. We’re not supernumerate to the universe, and we are here for our minds, not our brains. We’re here for our minds, not our muscle. So unless the human mind really comes through and begins to control affairs, unless humanity really uses its mind to make decisions about doing things logically, not out of fear, I think we’re all through on our planet. In other words, I think we’re in what I call a final examination. And I think in order to talk about the future we must go all the way back and know how humans happened to be on our planet. Remember that humans are born naked, absolutely helpless for months, hungry, thirsty, curious. They have to learn by trial and error, no other way, how to satisfy their hunger and their thirst. We had humans making those kinds of decisions long long ago. Took them a long time to invent words to be able to tell the other person what their experience was, and where the food was. Then we got all those words, and then we began having the written word and could carry on experience from generation to generation. We’re now at a point where we have an extraordinary vocabulary, we have enough information to really make it, where we have literate people, and we have the capability to communicate to each other around the world. We’re now at the point where we’re supposed to graduate and start making some really good decisions in our minds. I say I want to know why humans are here. If I want-

farsighted. My vision was thereafter fully corrected with

p40 V8N2 1980

discovered that this was caused by my being abnormally ed to get any good answers about anything regarding the future, I would ask how and why are we here. Common to all lives and all history is problems, problems, problems. We’re here for problemsolving. We don’t get to a utopia where there are no problems. If you’re any good at problem-solving, you get worse problems to solve, so we’re here as local information gatherers, local problem-solvers in relation to the maintenance of the integrity of an eternally regenerative universe. Nature does not take a chance on just one egg in the basket. She has always had many alternate circuits – failsafe. We may really flunk out in the final examination – whether or not we really can make sense on our planet. It is now highly feasible. That within a ten year design revolution, if we took all the weaponry and converted this to essentials of peaceful existence, within ten years we’d have all humanity living at a higher standard than we’ve ever known, simultaneously phasing out all fossil fuels and atomic energy. We’d find then that all the big businesses, all the big governments, all the big religions, are founded on the basis of the fundamental inadequacy of life support – you join our party and we’ll give you a better chance – we can’t guarantee anything – but you’ll just live a little better. So we’re at a very critical point where if we use our minds, we’ll exercise our option to make it. There’s ample to take care of everybody. We really have four billion billionnaires. As far as technology goes, as far as knowledge goes, and we are not exercising that, (we’re really beginning to practice how to make scarcities and how to keep manipulating humanity), if we don’t find a way, as human beings, by being really very intelligent and looking at what we really do know, then we can’t ever become comprehensively literate about what our chances are, realize we do have an option that we may exercise. I’ve now been around the world 46 times. I’ve been at over 500 universities and colleges around the world, so I know my young world very well. I find they’re not interested in nations anymore – sovereignties. It’s like blood, and with 150 nations we have 150 blood clots making it impossible for us to have a circulating system. In ten years we’re going

to have to give up all the nations, all the sovereignties, or humanity is probably going to perish. ESSENTIALLY, ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC?

and they didn’t know they had it. So they say they feel better in my optimism, it’s absolutely touch and go as to whether they’re going to make it

I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. I’m really a very hard realist. I am an engineer, I have over 300 geodesic domes around the world today. I am completely familiar with the problems of research development, getting things going. So I’m not optimistic, though I think optimist or pessimist is

HOW CAN ORDINARY PEOPLE GET A REALISTIC WORLD VIEW, A COMPREHENSIVE WORLD VIEW? I don’t think you can reform the concepts and opinions of humanity. I’m now 84, I want you to

Proposed air-conditioned Geodesic Dome, two miles in diameter

off-balance. And as I say, I’m a very hard realist and as a hard realist I know we have an option, and I know that because I am an engineer, I am able to deal with the invisible technology and understand the way atoms are behaving, so that to know that we have an option is not to be pessimistic. I’m famous for being mistakenly called an optimist because I tell people they have an option

understand how I was brought up. I was seven years of age when the Wright brothers first flew. I was brought up to think that it was inherently impossible for a man to fly. How crazy can you get they thought, man will never get to the North Pole or South Pole. All those things, all of them completely wrong. Now, each child born successively is born in the presence of less misinformation, more

lenses. Until four I could only see large patterns, houses,

trees, outlines of people with blurred coloring. While I saw reliable information. The young world is more and more aware of the invisible reality of electronics, things that the older people can’t see and tend to ignore. The kids are very aware of the invisible reality. I’m getting letters, not many of them, but they do come, from eight and ten-year-olds that have been born after humans got to the moon. How they find me to write to I don’t know, but they do, and their syntax is perfect for grown-ups. They say that if man can do anything he needs to do, why don’t we make this world work. It’s coming through, a young world that sees these things. So what you and I talk about is going to be heard by that younger world and really not by the older world. IS THE BASIS OF MOST OF YOUR WORK MORE AND MORE FOR LESS AND LESS? The very essence of it. What bothered me back in World War I was to learn that the working assumption was that it had to be you or me. Every one of the ideologists says the following: ‘You may not like our system personally, but we’re convinced we have the fairest, most logical, most ingenious way of coping with less, inadequacy of life support on our planet. Those who disagree diametrically with our method of coping can only resolve by trial of arms which is a fit test to survive.’ We’ve spent over 6 trillion dollars to buy the human capability of expert destruction. What hit me, and hit me so hard, was the lesson of doing more with less, the capability which the public didn’t understand because it was invisible. Some day we might do so much with so little, we might be able to take care of everybody. Infact, we would find that ideologies would become obsolete and it would not have to be you or me, there would not be the ideology of war ever again. We would not have to ever again rationalize selfishness, my family is depending on me, it is right for me then to cheat this other family. All that would be completely unnecessary to really demonstrate to man that there is enough. My statistical experience suggests that it is now feasible to take care of all humanity with a design revolution to be accomplished within ten years.

IF YOU HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLORE THE HIGH FRONTIER PERSONALLY TO GO INTO SPACE, WOULD YOU GO? I’d like to point out to you that we’ve never been anywhere else, we are on a spaceship a very tiny little one, going around the sun at the rate of 60,000 miles an hour and in our galaxy we’re revolving in a spiral at almost 750,000 miles an hour. We couldn’t be more in space young man than we are. We’ve got this egocentric idea that we are the centre with the sun going around us. We are not standing still, we are a little tiny, beautifully equipped spaceship. We are always in space. WHAT IS ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY? Electronic democracy is the following. The Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, one of the most powerful committees we have, met in full and asked me what kind of world government we would have. And I said we will not really have a world government, we will have something like city management, not elected posts but people who want to be in management of affairs, who are doing it pretty well voluntarily and have to compete in order to qualify to be in that kind of job. The Russians and the United States are now being extraordinary in the satellites. They are equipped with sensors to spy on one another, we have a sensor which can differentiate at 100 miles out between a goat and a sheep. These sensors will be used. We also discovered most recently that the brain gives off electromagnetic energy. We know today that every human being has an electromagnetic field, and this field, unconscious to you and I, is dominated by the positive and negative. If we dislike what’s going on we feel very uncertain and fearful, we have a very negative field. If we’re feeling quite delighted because something is just right, we have a positive electric field. You and I can’t see that, but it can’t be deceived. One may say I’m going to do this ’cause I know what my boss wants, but that’s not what I really feel. The field is telling you what you really feel. We’re then going to have propositions made to humanity. Now this is what we’re going to do and is

our plan regarding this energy problem. There’ll immediately be reaction around the whole world. Sensors on satellites will pick up their response and will know immediately what the majority of humanity would like to do, whether they’re for it or against it. We will then do whatever the majority says. Unquestionably, the majority makes some very bad decisions, but within a very short time everybody will see that it was a bad decision, the readout will be humanity changing its mind. This is like cybernetics, there’s no such thing as a straight line, physics has found only waves. Steering to the right, steering to the left, and gradually beginning to steady as we’re better informed by having humanity able to consider total humans, total universe. We’ll gradually realize this is the only way the thing works.This is what I mean by electronic democracy. It’ll be the first democracy in the history of humanity. HOW DOES ONE PERSON WITH THEIR OWN NEEDS, AND RESPONSIBILITIES ACCEPT THEMSELVES AS ONE MEMBER OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY? Number one, by saying we are in this invisible world but the truth is not invisible. The truth is the truth, whether it’s visible or not. If humanity really has an integrity, then once humanity’s been successful and we’re willing to share with others, really motivated more by love, then everything will be independent of political systems or anything else. Political systems are not being tested, private enterprise is not being tested, humanity itself is being tested right now. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT CYBERNETIC DEVELOPMENTS, THE DEVELOPMENT TOWARDS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? I think humanity long ago made a great error in what they call animate and inanimate. Both were physical. This game says inanimate is cold, hard as stone; animate is beautiful, warm, soft flesh. Everybody would agree that the atom is completely inanimate. What is inanimate is getting clearer and clearer because they are now saying you consist entirely of atoms and atoms are completely

or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four. Despite my

two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye inanimate, so you have nothing to do with the life of those atoms, they just happen to be arranged as a very beautiful piece of apparatus. What we now know is the physicists at the beginning of the century said physical is all energy, and energy is associated with matter, and energy is associated with radiation.Whatever is physical will move a needle either electromagnetically or gravitationally, whatever is not moving a needle must be metaphysical. We’ve now discovered whatever life is, it doesn’t move any needles, in other words life has never been physical. It is metaphysical. It is concepts,life is an awareness and the awareness is an utterly abstract affair. We’ve been making a mistake, assuming that we were physical. I’m going to give you an example of something that you and I often experience. We have a friend who says they have another friend just like you, you’d like each other very much. But somehow he can’t get you two together. There comes a day when your friend says “I’m going to call up my other friend and introduce you on the telephone.” He does that and you like the other person. She calls you, time goes on, and it turns out that the girl you have never seen is in the same kind of activity you are. You call her up, you get to be more and more friends. Years go on and you never see each other. Finally other friends all die off and your greatest friend now is this person you’ve never seen. In order to be sure that nobody gets in the way, you have a separate telephone, a red telephone called Joe. That’s all you ever saw. Every one of us is really a selfrebuilding, transceiver device, we never were physical at all. We are utterly metaphysical, that’s why our minds are everything. We’re dealing entirely in pure principles all the time. CAN WE REPLICATE SOMETHING THAT IS METAPHYSICAL? CAN WE CREATE AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, EVEN IF WE CAN’T GET A HANDLE ON REAL INTELLIGENCE? No, there’s no such thing as artificial intelligence, if nature permits it, it is natural – it may be unfamiliar – but if nature doesn’t permit it you can’t do it.

Certainly as you know and I know, we can put information in the computer and receive it. To put in a whole lot of information and put in patterns of information is not artificial intelligence, we use our mind to put it in.

and turns it into something you market. We all have this ingenuity – how to exploit. What’s the newspaper doing? It’s exploiting the know how that is the news.

DO YOU ENVISION THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN INFORMATION MARKETPLACE?

I call that an opinion and I’m not really very respectful of opinions. I have a definition for the word science – science deals with experimental evidence. I like the following definition given by Eddington, that science is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience. Now when I talk about art I don’t know how to express that in the sense of experience. I really don’t know. I like e. e. cummings, he said poetry is not what you think, it’s not trying to talk. Everything in life is trying to make you say things the way everybody else says them. He said poetry is what you feel, not what somebody else said. But the point is that it’s the most difficult thing to do, to get down to how you feel, so poetry is very much part of art. You don’t even have to use words other people have given you. Ralph Waldo Emerson has said that poetry is saying the most important things in the simplest way. What cummings is saying is something very different – how do I say to you something about how I feel? It has nothing to do with how anybody else feels at all. What is the absolutely unique experience that I’m having? So that’s the nearest I can get to really talking about art. It’s really not what the subject is, or what the artist’s painting is about, but rather how he feels about it.

Of an information what? MARKETPLACE? Marketplace? YES, A MARKET PLACE WHERE INFORMATION IS BOUGHT AND SOLD AS A PRIVATE GOOD? Well, they do exactly that today and some of the big corporations have been able to monopolize a great deal of the know-how. For instance, all the atomic bomb development originally in America got to the point where big business was able to persuade the American Government that they, that Government, had the duty to protect big business, and they had the Government turn all of the atomic business over to them. They probably didn’t understand anything about it. So that big corporations were able to monopolize the nuclear scientists, they’ve been able to monopolize a great deal of what you’d call know-how, and they sell that know-how to the Government one way or another. You could buy this guy to reveal a secret or something very, very important, so in effect they’ve been marketing and dealing in the metaphysical as a commodity for a very long while. You pay a university so many thousands of dollars a year now to be able to give you some information.

WHAT IS ART?

O.K. THE LAST QUESTION I HAVE FOR YOU ISN’T REALLY A QUESTION, IT’S A TOY. THIS IS A TOY CALLED SIMON. Yeah. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY WITH IT?

CAN YOU ENVISION THE OPPOSITE OF THAT, IN WHICH ALL THE INFORMATION IS FREE? All the really important information always has been free, but humanity takes that which is free

No. I haven’t got the slightest interest. I really don’t. I don’t really like that kind of stuff. I don’t like card games either. I don’t like games. I find life is so much more interesting than games. Nobody can invent any game that compares with life. For me.

new ability to apprehend details, my childhood’s spontaneous

JOHN BROWN

RICH PEOPLE

Photo: John Brown p44 V8N2 1980

- he liked his job - he liked the secretaries - he liked the business district - he thought his employees respected him - he liked his car, a cadillac, but thought it was time for a new one, one that would better reflect his success - he loved his wife and the two children - he liked living in the exclusive waterfront apartments - he was proud to live there - at least he was doing his part to keep the downtown core alive - he was spreading his wealth - like all rich men he had a small cock - a good thing then that his wife like all rich women was a tight old cunt - his children like all rich children had small brains - they said duh a lot at their rich parties with their rich friends - he and his wife went looking for a new car together - they wanted a rolls - they went to a rolls dealership and looked at the cars - he kicked the tires, kicked the tires of a rolls royce - the salesman brought them some wine and cheese, no coffee and donuts, they weren’t buying a ford - the salesman didn’t even have to be good at his job cause they were so stupid - they decided they liked the silver one - he didn’t want the salesman to think he was an easy mark so he held out for a full tank of gas - they got it and drove home in their new rolls - the kids were excited about the car and wanted to learn how to drive - he sent them to the city’s most expensive driving school - they were very patient with stupid rich people - the course was at least two weeks longer than ones for normal people - one instructor said it sometimes took extremely rich, therefore extremely stupid, people a whole week just to learn how to put the car in gear - none of them ever drove standards - his children learned to drive - it took a long time but eventually they became safe responsible drivers - they always stopped at red lights and went at green, sometimes they had trouble with the yellow - they never got speeding tickets - one night the whole family went to the drive-in but they were too stupid to put the speakers in the car, so they all watched t.v. in the back seat, then they all went home and went to bed.

KRZYSTOF WODICZKO

VEHICLES

SILA GLOSU MOWCY STERUJE PREDKOSCIA POJAZDU.

POJAZD JEST NAPEDZANY SILNIKIEM ELEKTRYCZNYM I PORUSZA SIE TYLKO DO PRZODU.

THE STRENGTH OF THE ORATOR'S VOICE CONTROLS THE SPEED OF THE VEHICLE.

THE VEHICLE IS PROPELLED BY AN ELECTRIC MOTOR AND MOVES IN ONE DIRECTION ONLY.

p46 V8N2 1980

POJAZD PORUSZA SIE POWOLI RUCHEM PROSTOINIOWYM, JEDNOSTAJNYM I TYLKO DO PRZODU. AUTOR CHODZAC TAM I SPOWROTEM PO PRZECHYLNEJ PLATFORMIE POWODUJE JEJ RUCH, CO POPRZEZ SYSTEM PRZEKLADNI I LINEK POWODUJE OBROT KOL I JAZDE DO PRZODU. POJAZD JEST PRZEZNACZONY WYLACZNIE DO UZYTKU AUTORA.

THE VEHICLE MOVES SLOWLY IN UNIFORM, STRAIGHT-LINE MOTION IN ONE DIRECTION ONLY. THE ARTIST, WALKING UP AND DOWN THE TILTING PLATFORM, CAUSES A SEESAW MOVEMENT; THE ENERGY THUS GENERATED IS TRANSMITTED BY A SYSTEM OF CABLES AND GEARS TO THE WHEELS WHICH, IN CONSEQUENCE, DRIVE THE VEHICLE AHEAD. THE VEHICLE IS FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF THE ARTIST.

V8N2 1980 p47

RUCH LUDZI PORUSZAJACYCH SIE PO KWADRATOWEJ POWIERZCHNI PLATFORMY POJAZDU JEST WIELOKIERUNKOWY I SWOBODNY.

RUCH TEN WYTWARZA ENERGIE, KTORA POPRZEZ URZADZENIA MECHANICZNO-PNEUMATYCZNE UMIESZCZONE W PODLODZE PLATFORMY PRZETWARZANA JEST NA OBROT KOL.

POJAZD PORUSZA SIE POWOLI RUCHEM PROSTOLINIONYM I JEDNOKIERUNKOWYM.

MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE OPERATING ON THE SURFACE OF THE LARGE SQUARE PLATFORM OF THE VEHICLE IS FREE AND MULTIDIRECTIONAL. THE MOVEMENT GENERATES ENERGY WHICH THROUGH MECHANICAL AND PNEUMATIC SYSTEMS INSTALLED IN THE FLOOR OF THE PLATFORM IS ACCUMULATED AND TRANSMITTED INTO THE ROTATION OF THE WHEELS.

THE VEHICLE MOVES SLOWLY IN STRAIGHT LINEAR ONE-DIRECTIONAL MOTION.

p48 V8N2 1980

ZERO TIME DATA HIDEOUT: ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET INTERVIEWED

circa 1971

Contributing editor Willoughby Sharp interviewed Alain Robbe-Grillet recently in New York City. M. Robbe-Grillet is one of the chief spokesmen and originators of the “nouveau roman.” His prolific writing has included criticism, film scripts, Last Year in Marienbad, and the influential novels, The Erasers, In the Labyrinth and Jealousy. His most recent novel translated into English is Topology of a Phantom City.

1980 V8N3 p49

WS: Your work is based on a totally new conception of matter. Not any Freudian conception, or any Newtonian conception. Your intellectual conception is more derived from modern art and science, more specifically, contemporary physics and cinema. (laughter) I want to start with that reference to physics and cinema. AR: Well, we’ll talk, and when we talk, we’ll see. Barthes said that. If you need any explanation, you’ll have to go to him. The word ‘truth’ in art cannot help but shock me. There is no such thing as truth in a text for example. When someone comes to see me and asks about the truth in one of my texts or movies – what does it mean? – I cannot answer those questions. Because I question the very notion of truth. The fact that Barthes said that is very interesting. But I don’t have to bother with whether it is truth or not. On the other hand, this was written quite a long time ago – 25 years ago – and I don’t know whether Barthes would say the same thing today. I don’t think so anyway. I have a scientific training. My training isn’t literary at all. I was trained in math and biology. WS: In Paris? AR: Yes, in Paris, but not in the Paris University – in a State school. As you may know, in Paris, we have Superior or State schools which produce state engineers. One of these is the Institute Agronomique.

AR: I was then in Martinique. I went back to Paris. WS: You went back to Paris in order to write, you chose Paris to write? AR: Well, I chose Paris for various technical reasons. My parents were living in Paris, so I could have a room in their house – things like this. It was more convenient that way. But I also stayed in the country not far from Paris. WS: At that time, did you have any friends who were writers? AR: No, none at all. All of my friends were scientists, so there was absolutely no group pressure. WS: What did your friends say about your starting to write? AR: I don’t know, really. I must say something. I was a very good engineer. I was very interested in all of those problems, and I had embarked on a very good career. I would probably have become a famous researcher. On the other hand, the tropical climate did not agree with me, so people said I came back home because I was sick. WS: When you began to write, did you have something special in mind to write, something specific, or did you just want to write?

WS: What year was this? AR: I wrote the entrance exam in 1940-41, then I stayed and studied there from 42-43. My training was entirely scientific. When I graduated, I was hired as a Charge du Mission, a research position, at L’Institute National du Statistique. I was in charge of agricultural statistics. I worked there for three years, then I moved to another job – in an agronomical research institute, on tropical fruit diseases. This is also based on statistics – all that biological research is based on statistics too. I worked for them in Africa, in Martinique, in Guadalupe, and I was especially responsible for the banana tree diseases. So I only began writing much later – I was already 30 years old when I started to write, which means that, quite suddenly, I abandoned my job in order to write novels. I don’t know why, really. WS: Was that in Paris?

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AR: I didn’t have any literary training. On top of that, I didn’t know the ideology which was then in power in the field of literature. By which, I mean I didn’t know what was expected from a novelist. I had no idea. I had read, of course, a certain number of books, which fascinated me. Kafka, Faulkner, Joyce, but when I started to write, I thought I was writing a kind of literature which could represent, for the twentieth century, (for the nineteenfifties), what Joyce and Faulkner represented for the 1920’s and the 1930’s. WS: You had a very great ambition. AR: Well, of course. But there was something I was absolutely unaware of – it was the fact that the literary critics in power in France at the time, (I’m not speaking about Barthes, who wasn’t anything or anyone at that time), the critics in power, the people writing in papers,

reviews, etc. All those people were expecting from me – from anyone, from a novelist, from any kind of writer – something completely different. WS: What were they expecting? AR: Nineteenth-century type literature. My ancestors were Joyce and Faulkner. They wanted my ancestors to be like Mauriac, that is to say the novelists who were still writing the type of literature of the past century. And it was only after I had published two or three books that I was able to understand more precisely the difference between my projects and what society expected of me. It was then that I wrote some theoretical essays in order to explain myself. Not that the other writers were mistaken, but they were the guardians of a certain order, and I was there to upset them, not at all to please them. Then, everybody started to talk about my scientific training. People said, well of course, it’s because he’s a scientist… WS: Yes, but is it true that you started with the idea of reforming literature? AR: No, not at all. I didn’t even know that literature had to be reformed, since the French writer who fascinated me then was Raymond Roussel. I didn’t know that he had no public at all. I didn’t know that he did not belong to the literary milieu. So, I was reading Raymond Roussel, and for me that was French literature. I was writing as his descendant. And this appeared to be prerevolutionary, precisely because all those ideas had been refused in France by the critics in power. After that, I realized what I was doing was not only being a descendant. But of course, for me, those novels of the 1950’s are descendants, descendants of the type of literature which came just before me. Starting in the 1960’s, 1970’s, I think that a far greater revolution happened in my writing. Unfortunately, my best-known books are those of that first period, because they are more easily re-integrated into the history of literature. For example, La Jalousie, which was totally refused at that time. Now, you can see in this book a treatment of the psychology of the jealous person. Do you understand? It’s possible now, but then... WS: Yes, I read the book. Is it being reissued, is there a vogue for the book La Jalousie?

AR: Oh yes, it has been reprinted. WS: Yes, together with the article by Barthes, which is also included. AR: I haven’t seen that. But, what is even more bizarre is that the article by Barthes was written later, and on something else, something called Les Gommes. Of course, the article is very important. But, you know, Barthes didn’t like La Jalousie very much. (laughter). What he wrote on Les Gommes – he doesn’t think it really applies to La Jalousie. WS: He said somewhere – I can’t find the exact page – that your work of 1967 was completely destroyed by the critics. He said that they rejected everything. AR: Oh yes, yes. Take this book La Jalousie for instance. It was published in 1957, and it was completely refuted by the critics. I was of the impression that I had produced a very firm text, a strong text which would convince everyone. But it was refused. It reached a point where all the articles written about it were against it. There wasn’t a single one that was for it, and the book did not sell at all. I was already a well-known writer, and the book sold only about 500 copies in one year. but this book made its way after that. From year to year, it won a certain public. Now, several prints have been made – in the U.S., in Germany; it’s been translated into 30 languages and in every country it keeps selling. Right now, in France, they sell 10,000 copies a year. But only 500 copies in the first year. (laughter). WS: Do you think this book becomes more contemporary every day? AR: Well, this book created its own public. It was geared towards a public which didn’t exist yet, so it had to create its own public. This is very important to me. I think that a modern work must create or invent its own public, not address itself to an existing public. The work is a creation – a new creation of the world. WS: Who is doing that? The artist or the work? AR: Both, but mostly the work. This creation of a public is also a sort of recuperation, which means that the book now is explained, it has lost some of its violence. It’s much less violent than it was 25 years ago. Stendhal

never had a public in his time. He hasn’t got a very big one now either. Anyway, he said ‘I’ll be understood in 30 years.’ And this seems strange to me, because 30 years later, Stendhal’s work has lost most of its initial violence. I think the big moment for a book – for a work – is the moment when it upsets people, when it displeases people. It’s at the time of its creation, when the book is not liked and cannot find a public. 30 years after, as Stendhal said, it has a public, but by then the work is already digested. My new novels, for instance, are rejected again. Like Souvenirs du triangle d’or for instance. This is a new novel, to which I give a lot of importance. Well, it was refused by the critics. I even got abused in the papers for it. WS: Has it been translated into English? AR: No, not yet. But there is a contract for it with my publisher, Barney. He’s a very good friend of mine. WS: You’re quite satisfied with him, aren’t you? Has he done a lot for your career? AR: Oh yes, he did a very important thing for me. He maintained my book in the bookstores. Do you understand what I mean?

about the movie a little bit. About the movie, and about the book. This movie was made in 1960-61, and at this time what we call in France the New Novel had already appeared, which means that I already had a kind of success with my book Dans le labyrinthe, Butor already had quite a bit of success with his book L’Edification. By then Nouveau roman had become something fashionable, but it didn’t sell as well as it does now. I can say that it was a fashion, but a fashion without readers. More a newspaper fashion. Some kind of an intellectual fashion. Anyway, it was mentioned in fashion magazines like Elle for instance. So, when the movie Marienbad came out, something funny happened. Nobody wanted this movie. The distributors said that they would never show it ... this movie was really cursed. I think it stayed in its box for about one year. Nobody wanted to hear about it, and then suddenly it appeared. WS: Did it happen in the States? AR: No, in France, I’m not sure when it was released in the States. But anyway, for the first year, it couldn’t be seen. Then, quite suddenly, it became something fashionable. For instance everybody was playing the little game with the matchsticks. WS: Why, how did it happen?

WS: Yes, I understand. He made sure, on an everyday basis, that your books were there on the shelves. AR: Yes, that’s it. He made sure they were there, and reprinted when needed. I can go to any bookstore – well, maybe not all of them – and look for my books, and they’re there. And this is very important for me, ‘cause I can see what happens to some of my friends like Butor or Sarraute who were published by other publishers – something strange happened, and their books have disappeared. And they were all published at the same time. My friend Barney was very useful to me, and to my friend Beckett because he maintained our books in shops even at a time when they were not selling well. WS: I’d like to ask you a question about your movie Marienbad. Do you think the public appreciated the movie as a complement of the book? AR: At the time, the movie wasn’t very well liked. The public didn’t understand the movie, they couldn’t understand what it was about, so I would like to speak

AR: Well, it happened for many reasons. For instance, in Paris – but also in New York – fashion is something very important. I think that it was Cocteau who said "Great poets need fashion", or maybe he said that "Great poets need snobs." Yes, I think that’s it. So, it became important that it became something fashionable. Because, even if the public doesn’t like it, people will go to see it because it is fashionable. And this is very important. WS: As a writer, how do you spend a typical day? AR: I work for the whole day, and for several days in a row. I can’t work in a coffee house or a bar. I can’t work early in the morning, like for instance Faulkner, who would write in the morning, very early, then have the rest of the day for other things. I have to work in the country, I won’t see anyone for days and days, and then I spend the whole day writing. WS: What about the telephone?

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AR: Almost nobody knows the telephone number for my little house in the country, so there are very few calls.

AR: Oh, yes. Everything by hand.

made a script from it. I completely refused. I want to write directly with the script, I want to work with the camera, editing, I want to do the cutting myself, etc. And Resnais agreed. He said he was very open but even if he respected that, I must say he put a lot of his own personality into the shooting.

WS: Have your recent movies been seen in the US?

WS: In what sense?

AR: I’ve shown one recently here in NYC. And one is in Los Angeles. But they haven’t been shown commercially: This photo is of a movie I made in 1974. It is of a woman breaking eggs on top of a picture by Yves Klein. So, you see, it’s a tribute to Yves Klein. (Laughter). I’m also a painter.

AR: In psychology for instance. The character played by Delphine Seyrig in the movie, is not like any female character in my novels.

WS: Do you write everything by hand?

WS: When did you start painting? AR: Oh, quite a while ago when I was a young man. but I don’t paint enough now, I really paint very little. WS: How did you start Marienbad, your first movie? AR: Well, it wasn’t my first movie. It is the first movie which was filmed, but before that there was another project called L’Immortelle which was filmed in Turkey, well before Marienbad. But L’Immortelle was delayed by a revolution in Turkey, the president of the council was hanged. I think this was in 1962, so while I was waiting for things to improve, I started working on Marienbad with Resnais. It was only after that I finished filming L’Immortelle. If you wonder why on earth Alain Resnais asked me to do Marienbad with him, it wasn’t him who asked me, it was a producer. Then, everything happened very fast. Resnais decided I should write, not a screenplay, but what I call a decoupage – a shooting script. Resnais accepted it WS: Was it based on something you had done before? AR: It was completely new. As you know, I never make any movies from my novels. I’ve always refused to do it. WS: Why? AR: For me, a novel is made of words. And a movie is made of images and sounds. A completely different story. Other film directors and producers wanted to work with me. For instance, Antonioni, Rousseau. But they didn’t want to accept that I worked with a script. They wanted a story. Then, they would have cut that story and

WS: Were Delphine Seyrig and Alain Resnais lovers at that time? AR: Well, I don’t know, it they became lovers, it doesn’t seem very well chosen for them. (laughter). These people have very strange sexual habits. WS: You yourself, you’re married aren’t you? AR: Yes, of course. I was married in 1957, the year I published La Jalousie. And we still get along very well together, though I must say she has a very independent life alone. I must also say she has an independent sexual life. WS: Is she a professional? AR: What do you mean a professional? WS: What does she do? What’s her business? AR: She’s a photographer. She takes photographs during the shooting of movies. She took all those photographs I showed you. WS: It seemed that your career started with a big boom, then you became a little less active. But after having talked with you, I think that it is quite the opposite.

AR: Yes. That period (1955-1965) was a very favourable period, for invention, for subversion, for innovation. Revolution was quite fashionable at that time. That ended in 1968. What we call the 1968 revolution in France was not a beginning. On the contrary, it was a conclusion. This conclusion, in fact, was the end of the interest society had in us, for those new experiments. But, this is on a superficial, journalistic level. On the level of the general public, as I said, I sell more books now than I did then. WS: You appear to have a very regular progression – one movie every few years. AR: Yes, but I must say that there were movie periods and novel periods. 1974-75 – two movies. After that, one novel in 1976, one novel in 1978 ... novel periods and movie periods usually don’t overlap. The more recent films have quite an important public in France – there was some scandal in those movies; in the US, there is no cinema for that type of movie, so even if famous actors perform in those movies, or if they are produced with a lot of money – those movies make the money afterwards. There is a public, in France, in Italy – but in the US, the distribution system is not made for such movies. Either your films are commercial – which is strictly story-telling, or you have the ‘underground’ movies. They’re shown in galleries, clubs, universities, museums ... in France, we do have an intermediate category, where you can see Godard, or myself, or even Marguerite Duras. They are produced in a commercial ways, and can be shown in the same commercial theatres, but they do not respect the same rules, they do not tell the same type of story. They are in the type of cinema we call Cinema d’art et essai. Let me give you an example. There was a young man, German-Swiss, by the name of Schmidt. He made fantastic movies. One was called La Paloma. There, it was regular theatres. Here, it couldn’t be shown. WS: What are you planning for your immediate future?

AR: Of course it’s the opposite. I became more and more active. There was quite a lot of scandal during my career, I must say. But, I can explain. I know why you have this false impression. It is because at that time in France, from 1955-1965, people were talking a lot about the artists. Every artist. In the movies, let’s take Godard. Everyone was talking about Godard. Now, Godard would like to make other movies, but is not allowed to. WS: It’s difficult for him isn’t it?

AR: The last movie I did was in 1975. Since then, I’ve published three novels. I think one of them was translated into English – Topologie d’une cite fantome. You can find it. If you read that book, you’ll see what I write now. This type of book is even more bizarre than what I did before. Why am I less popular now? Why are people talking less about me now? It’s because I’ve become some kind of a classic. As if I already belong to the past, as if I belong to the history of literature.

T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E O R I G I N A L F R E N C H B Y S Y LVA N E H O U R D E B A I G H T

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VIOLENCE AND REPRESENTATION REPRESENTATION AS SURROGATE VICTIMAGE

PHILIP MONK During the early years of pop art, Andy Warhol took newspaper photographs of violence and icons of movie stars as subjects for his silkscreen paintings. There were car crashes, race riots, suicides, and electric chairs caught in the casual indifference of newspaper print, and, at the same time, as if by contrast, the calm, hieratic close-ups of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. The conjunction shows more than mass fascination with these two types of media imagery. More than an opposition, there is an essential tie between representations of disasters and icons. (The middle term between disaster and icon, condensed in Warhol’s paintings of Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of John Kennedy, shows that death can be represented only as the catastrophic, and its violence displaced by the iconic.) Whether we are engaged in reading an image of disaster or an icon, the impulses are the same. One image does not serve to attract and the other to repel. Against our expectation, we find a covert attraction to disaster as well as a violent reaction to an image of beauty. The chaos of violence finds ambivalent response in the formalized expression of the icon. Violence is not only attracted to the iconic; violence directs representation. Human violence, once recorded, is perceived and dealt with collectively, as a representation. Violence is not simply a disruption within the orderly; it is a mediated effect; it is not passively received, but actively produced by artist and spectator within representation. In our daily lives, we usually see violence in a representation – in movies, on television. Or we “witness” it on television news or in newspaper photographs, filtered through recording devices. In movies and television, violence is ordered and introduced by the plot; in the news, by written or verbal commentary. A newspaper photograph, presumably, is a primary “unmediated” representation of violence. Scanned by a matrix of dots and reduced to the indifferentiation of the newspaper page, the image and its meaning must be secured by a caption. This lack of clarity in the reproductive process, its noisy indistinctness, reflects the reduction of difference (and hence the possibility of meaning) that violence introduces into the orderly. Before representation (if that truly exists), violence is unarticulated; it is without limit. Society orders itself and functions by differentiating, by establishing the limits of inside and outside. Consequently, a limit has to be set to violence which seems a forceful entry of chaos into the order of society; and that limit is a representation – a substitution of one mark for another: the mark of representation for the mark of violence. A community uses violence, creates an economy of violence, to mark limits. And if the raw newspaper photograph, while signaling violence, cannot adequately effect it, in a failure to cathect the reader, then violence must be directed to where it helps construct another image.

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While violence may help the artist form an image, it also structures the viewer's response to an image. Violence may be most apparent in a hieratic face or figure – an icon; in front of such depictions, a scene of violent rivalry is enacted. In an image, an artist imitates a figure; in front of that image, the viewer imitates the artist, but mirrors the image, i.e., imitates it. René Girard describes the violence that arises through mimetic or imitative rivalry: “If one individual imitates another when the latter appropriates some object, the result cannot fail to be rivalry or conflict. Such conflict is observable in animals; beyond a certain intensity of rivalry the antagonists tend to lose sight of their common object and focus on each other, engaging in so-called prestige rivalry. In human beings, the process rapidly tends toward interminable revenge, which should be defined in mimetic or imitative terms.” Rivalry is a result of imitation and mimesis derives from theft. Girard, in his Violence and the Sacred, sees the origin of society and all cultural forms in murder. Recoiling from this original divisive violence, a community creates a set of prohibitions which includes a mechanism for redirecting violence outside itself. This is the role of sacrifice based on the substitution of a scapegoat. Repeated in ritual and communal crises, this arbitrary substitution protects the community by deflecting internal violence to victims outside itself or on its margins, victims unable to be revenged. Emulation become rivalry, when one appropriates the object or desires of an other, leads to conflict which spreads through the community. To end this interminable revenge, representing eye for eye and tooth for tooth, is the function of the scapegoat, because the scapegoat cannot be revenged. The scapegoat must resemble the person it substitutes (which it represents) in order that the violent and vengeful impulse be satisfied. This is mimetic function of the scapegoat. But, at the same time, the scapegoat must be different, recognized as different, in order that it not be confused with the original object and continue the chain of vengeance. It must represent the violence that afflicts the community, allowing the community to differentiate by excluding what is different: the violence of the other. Representation is a marking preparing for exclusion. Marking is a stigma, which allows the surrogate victim to be identified as different; it sets the limits of exclusion; and it locates the marks of violence for sacrifice.

The structure of mimetic rivalry persists in advertising. There is no necessary connection between the advertisement and buying the product – mimesis that leads to purchase, an identification between seeing and having the object. Rather, the man or woman in the advertisement is identified with the sacrificial scapegoat. To prevent a break in the chain of buying because of a disastrous disruption of the system, the mimetic figure substitutes for the internal violence of that system. The violence of production is deflected to an image. Advertising does not direct desire toward consumption as much as create a model that mirrors and reinforces the violent construction of the body through the socialization of work. For any society, we expect to find a relation between the representation of violence, the image of the body, and social control of the body.

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Two desires on the same object – the advertising figure's, which signals the desirability of a product, and the reader's – leads to mimetic rivalry. This may ensure capitalist competition, but it ends in violence. To allow that conflict to work (as religion recoiling from original violence developed an economy of violence) and at the same time not to lead to actual violence, capitalism changes its mimetic model, year by year, creating new representations and limits. Mimesis leads to violence, and diffuses violence. Fashion is essentially mimetic, and sacrificial: its figures are marginal and excluded. Society chooses its figures to create its representations and be models, while at the same time violently excluding them. Art, fashion, violence erupt at the margin: the new is the monstrous other.

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK MATA AND CECE COLE

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Nina Hagen has emerged from behind the Iron Curtain to rock 'n' roll stardom throughout Europe. The striking twenty-five year old singer/songwriter is now a citizen of the free world and has a West German visa. But her home, she says, is "Not on this earth." With record sales of over half a million in Germany alone and two LPs for CBS International, she is planning to conquer America. Miss Hagen speaks English with a thick accent, and she began talking about her early days in the East. “I was twenty years in East Germany. In school I had lessons in Marxism and Leninism, powerful lessons in Communism, in our history and that the Soviet Union is our Big Brother. It's really fucked up. It's a very schizophrenic feeling for the children, that they have to be very revolutionary and part of this organization where you learn to sing songs about the Proletariet Revolution. It's a little bit of madness. "Television is very much public relations for the old country. The films are always propaganda. There is no art and there are no New Waves, never.” Nina however, is definitely of the New Wave variety. Her shocking pink hair is a mess of dreadlocks and her fashion is a mixture of second-hand, military and Woolworth's. Hagen gained her liberty soon after her stepfather, a famous folk singer, was banned from East Germany. (Of her real father, Nina says only, "He is a sleeping pill addict. In the War he was always in Nazi prisons because he's half Jewish. I have no contact with him.") "When I was ten,” she recites with deliberation, "there came a man into my mother's life and his name was Wolf Biermann. He was a political enemy of the country and he was very critical of the whole system. He made theatre pieces, songs and records, but he was not allowed to release them in the East. So he made them for the West and everyone was knowing him, East and West. "One day it was possible for him to perform a big concert in the West for CBS. Every station was carrying it and it was going for over six hours. On the next day the East German government wrote in their papers that he was not allowed to come back in their country anymore because he is destructive. Too revolutionary. "It was November '76, and I started to write a letter to the government that Biermann is part of my family and that he is very important to my profession as a singer. He is my idol. And I told them they have to let me go. If they didn't let me go, I would become the second enemy like him.” Nina was already famous in East Germany. She had been singing around in different groups and writing some commercial songs, hoping to get a chance to go to song festivals in West Germany or Switzerland. "This letter was my big chance. I was allowed to go. Many of my friends did the same thing and they are all out now." Free in West Berlin, Nina joined a political rock/theatre band. Together they toured for half a year and made her first album, 'Nina Hagen Band.' She soon became dissatisfied with the group, "They had some good ideas and I thought it was possible for them to come on a new trip with me. But they couldn't change and they couldn't follow my ideas." The second album, 'Unbehagen,' (which means Ill At Ease) with the same band, was made largely to fulfill her contract and she split from them shortly thereafter. She explains, "I had to make the best of it. I had to follow them because it's a male chauvinistic musician trip and I wasn't strong enough." Both albums are sung in German and contain high-energy rock and roll, some operatic ballads and a touch of reggae. Nina's vocal quality can change at a moment's notice from the harsh gutteral orders of a Fraulein Gestapo to ethereal highs of a mad angel in some heavenly choir. "I am a good imitator," she says, "so I found out this opera voice very early.” Nina is not shy about expressing herself. In a song called 'Bow-wow' she growls: “I'm your doggie/bitecha in the leg/and in the balls/piss all over ya/shit on ya too/shaddup!/.” 'Nina Hagen Band' has a version of the Tubes' classic 'White Punks on Dope' called 'TV Glotzer,' which means 'TV Glue' and is about Hagen's experiences in the West. "I freaked out about what they have here," said Nina. "Chewing gum and rubber candies and the whole thing. Of course I was smoking a lot of pot and things like that; and so, I freaked out! I started to be a television addict because it was in colour. I was twenty-one. In the West, I found television in colour, hashish, marijuana, and candies and I became very fat. I moved to London where I met Arrianne (lead singer of the Slits) and she was treating and fascinating me so that I would stop eating and stop this lazy trip." "Then you got into aggression?" "No. That was coming later in Holland, where cocaine is so easy to get. It's an addiction too." While Nina was in Amsterdam looking for new band members, she made a film with Hermann Brood,

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her ex-lover and Holland's hottest rocker, and Lene Lovich called 'Cha Cha. ' “It was a very funny time and I was very happy, but the film is not so good. It's about Hermann Brood. It's his story and it's his film and I just play a part in it. The film is very heroin lazy because he is ... an addict.” Nina gazes at Ferdinand, who has been seated across the table. “I like Amsterdam, something happened. Amsterdam is a very holy town somehow... In the way that you can hear them ... and feel them. “Who?” “Your friends from home. The voices from the Twilight Zone,” she said seriously. (Not Rod Serling?!) I started singing the show's theme song. “No,” Nina interrupts. “Not them. Not the bloody ghosts! The real angels. You hear them! You can speak with them in Amsterdam sometimes.” She giggles. Dutch born Ferdinand Karmelk is Nina's beau of one year and guitarist of their new band. He formerly played with Hermann Brood. When he and Nina met it was love at first sight. They tattooed each other's names on their arms, and then took off to the Residential Treatment Center at Broadhurst Manor. There Ferdinand was able to kick a junk habit of five years through Neuro-Electric Therapy. Now the two of them are in the U.S. putting together a band for Nina's first English language record. “What would be the greatest thing in the world for you?” Nina answers without hesitation, “That I could have a small talk with Jesus again.” “Again?” “My fist meeting with Jesus was on my first LSD trip. I was in Poland illegally. I was pregnant in the fourth month, and I was taking my first LSD trip because it was destiny. It was just the right moment, otherwise it wouldn't have happened because Nature brings you things. Nature also brings you bad things, but it's always good from Nature. Otherwise, everything would be hell ... and that's madness! So anyway, I was eighteen and I took it with some friends from Poland and then, I was going mad after a while because I had pain in my stomach and it was going up to the brain and back to the stomach and there was no help. It was just madness. It was just hell and I thought this was forever. 'Now I am in hell forever!' This was really terrible and it was too bad. It was painful and I was alone and it was madness. And Jesus was calling my name,” she said with the utmost sincerity. “NNNNiiinnnaaa, NNNiiinnnaaa.... I'm coming!” Ferdinand teased. “No!” she exclaimed. “He was saying 'Nina,' just like that and I was hearing! Aha! There is somebody, thank you! What can I do, What can I do? And then He said 'Just die, give it up. Otherwise you will never lose this pain.' And I said 'Zank you! Okay, I'm gonna die!' And then I was afraid when I die ... when I'm dead. But I was in hell and dying was the only way out. And I was just relaxed, because He was there and I was feeling Him. There was such a strong feeling of love, I never had before, and this was the solution. The answer to everything, of my whole fucked up existence. And then I died, and I turned around and I saw Him sitting there, in the corner. He was so happy that I found Him and it was too much! I felt this big, big love for me and for Him, and it was the love between a brother and a sister. He was sitting there flashing love. It was not sexual, it was free and wild. And I could ask Him all that I wanted to know. He was showing me very special things. I was asking very many questions and I was getting answers to things I didn't know before.” (Maybe she knows something..) “Will there be a big war soon?” Nina raises her fist. “Africa must be free! That is why I have dreadlocks. To show that I am part of them.” “What are your political beliefs? You've said you're a Communist.” “Yeah. I think Communism is paradise. Because there is no money there is everybody on the same level, and you can only be there and stay there when you have no private thing. When you are the whole thing. When you are them all, when you are not anymore part of the universe, when you are the universe. At this point you give up your whole ego trip and identity.” “But is there freedom for rock and roll in Communism?” “In paradise, yeah.” “Is it possible?” “That Communism is paradise, yeah.” “But does it exist?” “Noooo,” she moaned. “Yeah,” looking up, “Up there...at home. But not on this earth nowhere.”

RAMPS TOM DEAN

I guess we were never too enthusiastic about the foot, seeing how we’ve always been so enthusiastic about replacing it with the wheel. That’s progress. If the eye offends you pluck it out, if the foot offends you dump it for a wheel. It’s necessary to be the enemy of your own body, to war with your self: that’s just an evolutionary device built into our structure. We’re designed for the conquest of self. The creator becomes obsolete as a consequence of his own artifacts.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SHANNON GRIFFITHS AIR BRUSH: RICK FISCHER

Ramps are stairs in obsolescence, in their vestigial and symbolic form. The ramped stairs are like an atrophied limb, a form that has outlived its function but is retained as a nostalgic and decorative convention, like fake pillars to either side of an entrance. Ramps imply that anyone who doesn’t have wheels is crippled, that anyone who still uses their body is obsolete. Ramps say you’re useless; wire yourself to a telephone and then maybe we can talk. Ramps say you’re a cripple unless you’re wired, you’re a cripple because healthy folks have wheels. This is not to say that ramps are inhuman but rather that they herald a new life form. We mutate to accommodate our own artifacts, our own culture. Our architecture, always utopian, demands that we alter our form. Heaven on earth is always a nightmare because it’s at odds with our nature. Ramps accommodate the wheel, our culture, rather than the foot, our nature. Wheels are cultured feet. But when we replace a function we don’t necessarily cut it off; it may be stylized and kept around as a pet. We keep the feet around like pets. In its highest military decadence the step, the basic human unit, became the goosestep, function becoming style and a perfect image of the fascism of form, the discrete and halting human fraction resolving in its death throes into the machine. In our more liberal context stepping reduces to the mush of jogging. But the step by step prize for the 80’s must go to Terry Fox, in pain, one foot flesh the other prosthetic, hop-stepping it down this 3600 mile strip of asphalt made for the wheel, followed by police cars, support teams, the media, streets lined with cheering crowds…

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Cripples are a product of culture, of the mind. Without the moral, medical and technological support of the mind a cripple simply could not exist, as is witnessed in the wild. So in this sense also the mind becomes the enemy of the flesh. My generation can expect to live longer than any generation in history, and can also expect to occupy more wheelchairs than any generation in history and occupy the largest geriatric ward in history. A greater and greater percentage of the population will come to be crippled. My generation is going to be building a lot of ramps because we know we’re going to need them. We’re looking forward to being sutured into a wheelchair. Ramps are the first monument to an obsolete form. Obsolescence becomes more evident in space, where ascent becomes meaningless. The human form, when it enters space, when it succeeds at last in its ascent, becomes obsolete. The mind becomes the nucleus of a life form not strictly related to the body itself, a life form more appropriate to the condition of weightlessness. The value system of the foot is clear and absolute. The mind in contrast is capable of great sophistry: it can blur the territory between good and evil, up and down. The mind, left to itself, without reference to its feet, doesn’t know up from down, doesn’t have a value system: has no moral qualms because it is not material, is insubstantial, inconsequential. There is nothing so liberal as the mind. Nothing so transparent, so willing to change its habits. Not that we won’t still have values, but they’ll be to former values as ramps are to stairs. Ramps are the stair as myth, the dimly remembered stair, rarified and Platonic. Something that flashes by the window of your BMW on the way to the airport. Like the cartoon of a stair, a stair wearing gloves, or the first step of a Walter Foster method for drawing stairs. Take away that clutter of verticals and horizontals and you get a stair reduced to its bare essence, the inclined plane of our ascent. The stair is an abstraction of the body. Like many cultural artifacts it embodies us, is a metaphor. It articulates the vector between the ascending mind and the proceeding body, the vector compromise between our forward directness and our upward directedness. The slow and plodding ascent: stairs articulate the difficulty of ascent after the Fall. The major form of sloped plane we encounter in nature is the mountain. A mountain is seen as an inconvenience, a blemish, and is often held as something sacred, or challenging, or beautiful. Mountains are both exotic and alien: as such, ramps are

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disorienting, and also exciting, an anomaly and a challenge. The pyrmids, a direct culturalization of the Holy Mountain, are one of the most dramatic uses of both stairs and ramp. Stairs are a little less alien because they resolve into a familiar and reassuring shuffle of floors and walls. This corresponds to the constant effort of our culture to resolve the world into verticals and horizontals, floors and walls, complementing the vertical body and its base. Ramps and stairs go up. Everything about up I like. The birds, the rockets, the buildings. Up is best. Except for the occasional subway or fire escape we build stairs to go up, not down. Stairs are about ascent. In dreams the head and the foot are at the same level. But when you get up it’s always a scramble, trying to keep up with that head-in-the-clouds. Our head is always in the clouds and our feet are always looking for the nearest inclined plane to get to where the head is. If we walked with our minds we’d always be at the top of the stairs. But as it is, though we perch at the top of the stairs, seeking nests, safety, more real estate or a view, we know we’re really just visiting the heights. Stairs reflect the struggle of the feet to accommodate, a little, the weightless aspirations of a mind embedded in flesh. Wheels are created in turn by a mind, to alleviate a little further the horror of its body’s own inertia. Stairs, like the teeth of a saw, have an intimate relationship with the world. They are a texture, as opposed to the hard and polished surface. The untextured ramp is more alien, more distant and authoritarian. Ramps convey power, where stairs are humane and liberal. A ramp, because the human detail has been erased, is immediately monumental. It implies closure. It says use the telephone instead, or just stay home and watch TV. Monumental staircases read visually as ramps, because the human detail is reduced to insignificance, a scarcely visible surface texture, a striation on the face of a massive inclined plane. This inclined plane is the compromise of a wall and a welcome mat. It implies authority and closure while still serving the symbolic function of entrance, access. It imitates the Holy Mountain. Thus monumental stairs are used in fascist architecture, government buildings, cathedrals, banks, courthouses, and by all those who would convey a sense of greater than human power. A stair is like a section of a cogwheel in a simple machine. The person ascending is the moving part, engaging with the teeth of this primitive device to propel himself upwards. In the escalator the cogs themselves are the moving part. The metaphor is no doubt unallowable, a little too schizophrenic, but I would like to describe

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the stair as an early form of artificial intelligence, since it retains the memory, in its form, of human scale and aspiration: and voices that memory, when it engages with a person, in human ascent.

Airbrush - Ernst Zundel Studios

They say that there are no drums in heaven. The corollary is that there is never an absence of drums on earth: an infinite series of discrete parts but never the seamless cloth. Stairs reflect that rhythmic cleaving, the discretion of the human step. They represent a basic unit of human measure. The ramps, in contrast, present a disembodied scale, corporate and cerebral rather than individual and sensual. They reflect the continuum of the wheel’s motion as opposed to the halting step. Ramps are very fast stairs. They’re the express lane, and stairs are for clunkers. Ramps are modern because you can see them faster, you don’t have all that distracting detail to look at, all those steps. Warhol’s 15 minute fame means your image has to be simplified so it can be read in 15 minutes. The most brilliant synopsis wins. From granite to aluminum, iron to electricity, or from the toll of church bells to the whine of an electronic beeper. The drums get so fast they’re just a blur. The human step accelerates into a high pitched whine whose fractions are below the threshold of human resolving power. The big beat of matter becomes the UHF of culture. We are the first life form to develop appendages that exist at another scale entirely to ourselves. On both temporal and spatial scales we now engage with appendages that live in a different dimension, entirely beyond what our sensory apparatus can apprehend. Culture becomes as bottomless and ineffable as nature. There are no steps in heaven and never a lack of them on earth: God is one, man is divided. Our halting step is the stigmata of the Fall. For some reason I can’t figure out, nature never came up with the wheel as a means of transport until she did it through us. It’s interesting that the snake too moves with that seamless unstepped motion: there are no steps for the snake. Heaven on earth is always a nightmare because it s at odds with our nature.

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REBEL WITH OUT A CAR today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the death of james dean by decapitation resulting from a violent car smash — inside I am sad. I am blue and serious like the shadows and sockets of james dean's skull —

I knew James Dean personally. Her name was Susan. We went to highschool; majored in candy machine vandalism. She was totally fucked; always crying in her coffee, and writing things down in a little notebook. Her nose was cold like a puppy bitch's, but she was constantly running a fever; the Ms. magazines piled sixteen issues high under her bed. Every six days she had her period again; it ran down her leg and into her shoe, but more than anything else, the automatic girl on the birth control pill wanted to have a baby; she didn't care by who. She had a machine gun and a mouth full of snow, and didn't give a fuck about school, or psychological realism. She lit matches on her zipper; thought about being a rebel. Susan was into Joan of Arc. She came to school, one day in the winter, head completely shaven, complaining that her skull was sore and cold. She feared the wrath of God and was prepared for it. Hanging from her girl guide belt were a bottle opener, a roach clip, a pair of scissors, and the key to her jewel box. She was fat and starving and dressed like a man in black leather chain mail (male); spiritually smug. Susan had a boyfriend. His name was Skippy. Skippy was tall, thin and white. He stood mesmerized like a rabbit before Susan’s headlights. He had Audrey Hepburn’s lips. Skippy stammered and wore construction boots. That was because he was an adolescent and still growing. He wrote down everything Susan said. He always had an erection; it strangled in his pants. The other boys nicknamed him “hormone.” “Whore-moan.” His lips were so red and trembling, he was often accused of being exactly like a girl.

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Skippy wanted to spend his life making presents for people. There was no place for him. He would construct little gifts, wrap them carefully in toilet paper, and mail them to strangers. Once, he dipped a Q-tip in ketchup and sent it to a girl in an envelope marked, “Kitty Tampon.” She never spoke to him about it. Skippy and Susan held hands. One day they were going to “Blow this two bit town, baby,” run away to Toronto, make careers for themselves as artists, and live happily ever after in a caboose.

DONNA LYPCHUK

Apparently, you could buy a caboose real cheap from the CNR wrecking yards in Toronto. “Skippy,” Susan explained, “is really a woman with a penis.” They were so much in love, and they loved children. Susan lived with her little cousin Brent. They took Brent everywhere, especially for car rides in the country. Brent used to watch them neck. Susan thought it was very important, that Brent, at an early age, should be informed about sex. He could not grow up, sheltered and ignorant,

like Skippy did. Skippy, apparently, did not know where “it” was, and this made their sex life hell, so Susan showed Brent where her vagina was, by laying a mirror on the bathroom floor and letting him have a good look. She did this so that Brent would not be confused when he grew up and finally started mating. Skippy thought this was a good idea, because their sex life was hell, and he was depressed because he could never find “it.” The rumour at school was that Skippy could never find “it” because Susan was so fat. Skippy became lost in the different flops and folds of flesh; he did a lot of poking around. It was impossible to fuck a fat person properly, but conceivably a lot of fun if you were a woman with a penis. Another rumour was that Susan was raped when she was fourteen, and that Brent was really her little son brought up incognito by her parents as her cousin, and that Skippy was very kind and sympathetic, and going along with it, just like Joseph was very kind and sympathetic when a beam of light shot down and impregnated the Virgin Mary, and little Jesus was brought up incognito as a human being when he was really supernatural. I never believed that story, but still there was Skippy, Susan, and Brent, going for car rides in their modern presentation of the Holy Trinity “au naturelle.” At school, Skippy and Susan used to wave and smile at me. “Hey Sailor!” I’d call. They thought that was funny. That was back in the days when I thought I was a French prostitute, but they thought I was a dolphin. Then, Skippy decided that school was no place for him. He had mailed an Oreo cookie to his “Man and Society” teacher, and the teacher did not relate to that concept. “Cannot function in a learning environment,” the teacher wrote on Skippy’s computer print-out report card. Being the philosophical young man that he was, Skippy decided to go out into the world to get a real education. He was going to travel. He dropped out of school, and left in a car one day. “Good-bye,” Skippy had said, choking as if he could feel the fingers Susan wanted to put around his throat. “I love you. Don’t cry for me, and I know you won’t because you’re such a sensible girl.” “Good-bye, Skippy,” Susan had replied, fiercely, tears burning in her eyes like pissholes in the snow. “I love you.” She cried for days after, dropping crumpled kleenexes in her wake like a bride’s maid drops carnations. Months passed, and Skippy did not

return. Susan dropped her lost carnation. Snow fell. I was sixteen; spiritually impoverished. I decided that I needed to develop trashy morals to go with my clothing. In a rare moment of teenage bravado, I approached Susan in the smoking area, and asked her for a cigarette. She looked at me contemptuously, blowing smoke through her nose, and said, “I bet you don’t even smoke.” She was right. How did she know? She was so mysterious. I thought about it all day. The next time I saw her, I asked again. She said, “Sure. Sure you can have a cigarette.” She didn’t give me one. I was in love. That year I won the puppy bitch award for unqualified and affectionate adoration. I followed Susan, wagging my tail in dumb servility at the promise of a cookie. I placed myself strategically: it was like flower arrangement. I posed around the school, in the smoking area, by the radiator, on the stairwell, hoping that she would find me, standing in one of her places like a statue in her niche. Standing very still. I knew if I moved, she might not ever find me. She took me by the shoulders and shook me. I was a silly, hysterical whore; she slapped me across the face. There was something she wanted to tell me, but she couldn’t put it into words. Say it in French. “C’est la vie.” I peeled my nail polish off in boredom. It’s all around us, dear; it’s called “life.” “It’s out to get us,” Susan thought, her eyes bulging like Howard Hawke’s conception of a terrified Negro. She spoke through clenched teeth; I thought it was monosodium glutamate poisoning, but she thought she was a gangster. It was her new image; really tough. She was going to save me from myself. I was my own worst enemy. Yeah, I needed protection. I was just a stupid dame with a bubble gum smacking grin. I was so “high school.” I had Audrey Hepburn’s tits. I wore too-small T-shirts that exposed my belly button. I was too easy to talk to, and I fell off sidewalks. Susan took me everywhere with her, trying to teach me a sort of streetwise sophistication, but I was a lost cause. Still, she pressed me against her; I was her baby sister. Post-Auschwitz in the school cafeteria; a Nazi bitch floor hockey expert, a big peroxided blonde with mean Endora eyes called Susan a “bull dog.” I tried to stand up for my friend, said, “Life is not a shopping mall.” The girl called me a “little shit,” twisting the skin on the back of my hand. “Who was I trying to impress?” She shook her

charm bracelet at me in fury; bestial “Blue bells, cockle shells.” It was never going to be my turn. I was an “ever ender.” The girls were so mean. Susan called them nasty names. Once, she pulled up my pant leg, and shook her head. “Only F.N.P.’s shave their legs,” she said. An F.N.P. was a Fabulously Normal Person. An F.N.P. sang in the choir and chewed smelly gum. I knew that French prostitutes looked lousy with hairy legs under their seamed stockings, but then again, I didn’t want to be an F.N.P. Susan looked at me sideways, like a smart, cross-eyed cat; she was always slipping me sly looks. They meant, “This is guerrilla warfare,” but nothing was happening. I didn’t know what Susan was fighting for. I just wanted to be on her side. We used the buddy system. It was supposed to be foolproof, but I was drowning. Susan was buoyant; she floated like a beach ball. I swam through the dirty, distressed seas of her personal concerns. Everytime I touched her, she drifted further away. Her nodding, bobbing talking, talking head was always just out of reach. It was the battle of the planets, only this was no movie, this was for real; an angst ridden November night; our first quarrel, a violation of the silent blue majesty of the sky. Susan was Saturn; I wondered and wondered about her in imperfect circles, a pale, wan, nameless moon. “Was I her friend or what?” To reassure her I mouthed old lyrics, reminded her of how we had sat on her bed, crouched under the covers, while her father moved anxiously behind the wall, worried, wondering what we were doing; his feet eclipsing the shaft of light at the bottom of the door. Susan cried about Skippy, but a kiss on the nose fixed that. Her father threw us out of the house; I was a bad influence, and we had to meet in the snow. We hated the snow. It was arrid and cold, and the other person’s breath hung in the air; shadowing conversation. It was so cold, that when Susan smiled, she had blood on her teeth, and groups of small boys threw iceballs at us, chanting, “Lesbie friends! Lesbie friends!” She accused me of hating her dog. I said, “You’re paranoid,” but it was true. I hated that dog. It’s name was “Beau Regarde.” It was of indeterminable sexual origin; big black and hairy, with blood shot eyes, and sloppy oversized paws. Susan fed it banana popsicles, and kissed its ugly salivating mouth.

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At night, she was Vampira; leaving last night’s luncheon between the sheets as evidence; a mess reminiscent of Lady Macbeth and her damned spots. She hated men. Her father called her a pig; she walked around stuck and squealing, with her entrails hanging out of her chest for everybody to see. Once a month, she was overcome by dark rantings of nature; women everywhere screamed of bondage and parental rejection, wrote and raved of vulnerability and needs, while Susan helplessly bared her fangs, and laid down on her bed to bleed. I was afraid to take her home. She said, “‘If you had any pride, you’d kill yourself.” The greed dripped from the corners of her mouth; I was ashamed. I told her that every night, I watched the evil evangelist on T.V., and if something didn’t happen soon, I would disappear; that it was true I had disappeared already; I was already someone else. A big fake, caught up in the Rapture, like the evil evangelist had said. She said, “Don’t talk to me that way; I’m not listening.” There was an ice chip in her eye. I gave her an ice cream headache. She wanted to go home. We went to a party. Susan pushed a girl down a flight of stairs. She closed her eyes, and I thought she was going to fall. She stretched out her arms, as if she could fly, and pushed. It was like slow motion. The girl fell down the stairs, and cut her arm on beer bottles. “You did that on purpose!” the girl cried. Susan shrugged. I knew that Susan did that because the girl was a F.N.P.; I understood. Susan was split. She came in two colours only; black and white; inside out. She called me, “a little dolphin.” That was because I had big brown eyes, and came in shades of grey. I thought she was schizophrenic, and that was very romantic; glamorous, like Liza Bright and Dark. She was like a cat up a tree, who wanted down. All I had to do was think of Skippy, his erection strangling in his pants, and Susan putting up with his deficient male ego, and the son of a bitch leaving, probably forever, in a car, and I would get sentimental. It was so tragic, but there was no sense in crying. Susan was a sensible girl. I loved that sentimental crap, but Susan would fight for more books in the library if she could. We were passionate friends. Then, she broke my baby finger. inside I am sad; there are fingers around my throat. tears gather on the surface like black and

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shiny streets; my head is cold, my skull is split; I would like to cry, but I cannot. I knew james dean personally, but it’s just that when she broke my baby finger, I knew things were completely out of control — NOBODY WAS DRIVING THE CAR! Susan slammed my fingers in a drawer while I was searching for a pair of scissors so she could cut my hair. I wanted to look like Joan of Arc. She broke my baby finger. It was because I misunderstood. She slammed my fingers in a drawer, and her eyes were full of tears. “Why did you do that!” I screamed, but I didn’t understand anything. She laid down in a corner of a room, her coat over her

head, and refused to speak to me. My fingers were pink, ridged with fine lines of grey below the first knuckle, and I couldn’t move my pinky. I sucked my pinky, the entire cold walk home; it was grey, frozen and stiff like a little corpse. A little dead dolphin. Later as I was soaking the stiff little dolphin in warm water, trying to feel the pain of it, the doorbell rang. I went to the window. She rose up out of a snowbank; a sad, dark, voluminous shape. For a moment, I thought it was Beau Regarde. She threw a snowball at the window and walked away. We never really spoke again. She made me too nervous. Susan never took it personally; just passed in the hall.

The last time I saw her it was Banshee Susan, whooping it up in the parking lot; laughing and screaming and pushing retarded children down a hill. The retarded children were on holiday; they had come to visit the shopping mall in a bright yellow bus that was parked nearby. The children swarmed the smooth, slippery sides of the snowbank; noses dripping, rubber boot buckles flapping; digging the snow inside their cuffs with icy fingers. Those who made it to the top were thrown down the hill, all mucus and mittens and bloody chins. Susan yelling, “I’m the King of the Castle,” and the supervisor standing at the bottom of the hill, snorting cold air through her nose like an angry pony. Susan stomped the snow, beating her chest like Tarzan. She called the supervisor a “retard,” and soon, all of the children were chanting and calling their supervisor a “retard,” while the woman danced at the bottom of the hill, retrieving money, mittens and hearing aids out of the snow. Susan was smiling her crackerjack smile. She was wearing a huge red coat with black shiny buttons, and smoking an Export A. Her head was bare, her skull was cold; the sky was blue, but she was seeing red; the children were falling; screaming and whining like the sirens of a police car, but it wasn’t alarm; it was joy.

I am sad wondering what it would be like to die without a head like Skippy or Susan; just now, standing here by nobody's wall, I was thinking about going down to the wharf and saying hello to some of the sailors; like nobody's dolphin, I was feeling my sore, cold head, thinking about how when I was a little girl, diamonds sparkled with real joy, real feeling, but now, as tears gather in the apex of my eye like a piece of glass that twinkles in the light for a moment; an ice chip that sparkles like the jewels of the cracked windshield that spread in a cruel summarative smile across james dean's twisted headless body when he finally smashed —

Case A-7

CHRIS DEWDNEY

The patient, a male chartered accountant approximately 42 years old, was brought to the attention of the psycho-surgery ward after complaints from both his wife and female employees at his office of aggressive sexuality. The triggering incident involved exposure and attempted sexual assault terminated by pre-coital orgasm. His medical history included a frontal lobotomy enacted some six years earlier, apparently by his own G.P. The patient's extremely flat emotional response indicated a more extensive ablation than perhaps the G.P. had expected. We diagnosed extensive bilateral destruction of the frontal and pre-frontal lobes with lesions in the temporal lobe resulting in a host of behavioural problems including hyper-sexuality. General physiological responses were good, heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tone. However, hypothalamic stimulation elicited a severe seizure preceded by a rage response in which one of our laboratory assistants was attacked. Fortunately the patient's head was held firmly by the stereotaxic brace and the ensuing seizure caused him to relax his grasp on the assistant's throat. After the seizure he exhibited a catatonic response with profuse sweating from both the soles of his feet and his palms. The entire sequence was accompanied by penile erection, culminating in orgasm at the end of the seizure. After consultation with Dr. Delgrado and Dr. Hofstedder we decided upon an amygdalectomy followed with a behavioural modification program. Post-operative responses were good excepting gross incontinence and some difficulty in articulation. This could be explained by minimal destruction of some of the tissue surrounding the amygdala. After a refractive recovery period we inserted chemitrodes into the septal area in order to facilitate the behavioural modification program. Initially the patient was shown a pornographic film picturing heterosexual intercourse and related activities. He was minimally aroused by the film and achieved tumescence gradually. He was encouraged to masturbate to orgasm and when the monitors indicated a pre-orgasmic state a depressant was injected into the septal area concurrently with an electric shock of fairly high voltage. This therapy was repeated twice daily for four days. After these sessions he was encouraged to rip up pornographic photographs which were actually ‘stills’ from the movie. He did this energetically, indicating a high motivational response to the therapy. At this point in the therapeutic program the cooperation of a 17 year old prostitute was obtained. She agreed to try to seduce the patient after being informed of the circumstances. As a precautionary measure we implanted an afferent motor chemitrode into the patient, utilizing a tiny radio receiver which could be activated with the usual paralytic consequences from an adjacent room. In a private laboratory prepared for this purpose the girl talked to the patient while lying next to him and gradually seduced him into allowing her to perform fellatio upon him. After several minutes of this procedure not only did he fail to achieve an erection, but an incipient rage response necessitated use of the motor chemitrode. All subsequent tests were equally rewarding. The patient was released two weeks after the amygdalectomy. Post-operative follow-up a year later revealed that the patient had separated from his wife and had lost his position at the office. He had no recurrence however, of the hyper-sexual episodes and had adjusted to life in a private rest home without incident. 1981 V9N1 p65

IN SEARCH OF INSPIRATION MATT COHEN

hen Leonardo da Vinci, at forty-two years of age, made his famous pilgrimage in search of inspiration, all of Italy threw itself at his feet. The earth declared summer and erupted in a dazzle of blossoms and fruits. Every grain of the rich soil swelled itself up with dew and panted for his carpeted foot. Young women had always worshipped him. Now, hearing of his crisis, they spent each morning cleaning away the eyes of other men, each afternoon pressing flowers to their dubious skin, each evening praying that they would become perfect enough to be his muse. And at night — at night they dreamed of satisfying desires the poor ascetic Leonardo never could have imagined. Boys and husbands too: the boys anxious to be soldiers guiding his war machines, even fodder for the cannons he so cleverly constructed. And their fathers, they were just as ready: old notes, inventions that had not quite worked out, observations kept secret from spying neighbours

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— all of these were crowded to the attention of the master. After all, the old women dreamed, why not me? Anyone touched by the hand that painted the madonnas must herself become beautiful forever. When Leonardo made his famous pilgrimage, all of Italy held its breath. Finally he met a young woman. Others would have called her unexceptional. Leonardo, roused from his boredom, desired her. She had shoulder blades like angel’s wings. “Be mine,” Leonardo sang. By a miracle, she responded. She turned to him and opened her soft velvet mouth into a perfect O. And then she sang back to the heart-struck Leonardo. Alas, she sang longer, flew higher, slept deeper. Leonardo, watching the happy dreams of his beloved, grew jealous. Soon he began to perform his dissections again. At night, underground, skin parted to the touch of his expert knife. History knows no hand that was more certain: each finger had its own eye. By morning the smell of spent lives had settled like

mist on the stone walls of the mausoleum. Leonardo, exhausted, would climb away from his secret, up the stone steps to the perfectly balanced ash door. Wombs opened to his steel. A foetus image was carved into the cells of his brain. Outside the sun rained yellow brandy on the streets, the sky’s deep blue washed the beard of Leonardo. At home his young mistress slept, her skin warm and virginal, her dreams sweet as clouds. When Leonardo da Vinci, at forty two years of age, made his famous pilgrimage in search of inspiration, the whole of Italy threw itself at his feet. But a few months later, when his mistress deserted him, Italy had forgotten about Leonardo. Again he set out on foot. He walked the roads at night, daring the cold mists; the melancholy light of the moon shattered on stone fences and filled his eyes with white despair. The priests preferred the simpering Madonnas of Raphael, the muscled heroes of Michaelangelo.

La Giaconda saw him coming. She had a closetful of satin gowns, a face full of smiles. How long had she been waiting? Leonardo da Vinci: la Giaconda. Even her priest thought she was a witch. La Giaconda: Italian born again. Again and again and again. La Giaconda would be born again but what about Leonardo? Like the old men he laughed at, he too would become old. Like their useless inventions his inventions too would become useless. La Giaconda saw him coming. She was married to a Florentine merchant whose hobby was drawing. Drawing! Imagine it: the husband of the Mona Lisa standing above her bed, looking with sharpened pencils at the twisted sheets, the ivory skin, a full and perfect calf exposed as if for an operation. The half-leg, the sleep-smoothed face, the curls rumpled by love and wine: these he preserves in thick, ragged lines. She wakes up, she stretches, she rises naked from the bed. Through her husband’s mind passes the image of a clumsy Venus. For a moment her perfect eyes focus on him. His pencils do not fall from his hand. The light of the future does not explode in his brain. He does not imagine mountains in the background, clouds in the sky. He does not see the Mona Lisa. She saw Leonardo first when he was walking in the twisted city of the market, following one of his beautiful grotesques, an old man with a smooth skull, a nutcracker nose, a chin that bulged with the grunts and groans of the devil. Sometimes he would stop in a doorway to quickly sketch a swollen ear, the jaw revealed by a new angle or a burst of light, the tiny eyes from which all divinity had fled. Pencil in hand he was standing, raising his eyes from pad to the grotesque, when she entered the square. She moved slowly, her hands crossed on her contented belly, her crippled foot dragging with every step. His eyes circled nervously around her. She stopped and turned her head. But the eyes of Leonardo refused to find her. Stones of a collapsing building, spices piled in a wicker basket, bolts of foreign cloth all gain the centre of his evasive gaze. And on each crumbling stone, into every weave of the cloth, pounces the mind of Leonardo: laws of gravity, laws of smell, rainbows of lightwaves striptease to his clairvoyant genius. The future rushes like gravel through the mind of Leonardo: apprehended, then forgotten, distracted. Leonardo, oh Leonardo: where lies the heart of

Italy’s greatest mind? La Giaconda has heard about the heart of Leonardo. She has heard that it lies tangled in the shadows of the brain; that it is tiny and bright red, bleeding with self-pity; that it is as cruel and sharp as the heart of a hunting falcon. She has also heard that Leonardo has no heart at all. That Savanrola himself publicly denounced Leonardo as the perfect evil man for the New Age. The man who would dig idols from their graves and make new ones himself, carving gods out of stone like the young Michaelangelo. She has even heard that the heartless Leonardo shuns women for boys. But that is too common, she can hardly remember who said it.

II om Fe r na ndo , t he hus ba nd o f t he M o na L i s a , w a s a jealous man. Even his careless pencil had discovered that his wife was beautiful. When he had married her he had hoped that her crippled foot would turn away the eyes of other men, but by the time she was ready to be found by Leonardo her face was already famous throughout Florence.

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La Giaconda denied her suspicious husband’s accusation that she took lovers, but one afternoon while entertaining a certain gentleman in an indiscrete way, she heard her husband coming up the stairs to her private parlour. Desperate, she told her lover to hide in an antique carved trunk. Her husband came into the room while his wife stood at the window. In her hands, tightly clenched, she held the key to her just-locked secret. Her husband asked if she was alone. “Save for you, my Lord,” La Giaconda replied. “Then why,” pursued Dom Fernando, “are there two half-empty balons of brandy on the floor.” “I was thirsty.” Dom Fernando stepped threateningly towards her, and as he did La Giaconda, with her back to the open window, dropped the key into the street. Later that day, after she had consoled her husband on the same cushions where she had entertained her lover, La Giaconda went outside to look for the key. Unfortunately, it had been taken away by the street cleaners. It is said that the smile that then came to her face is the same smile that Leonardo captured in his famous painting.

III La Giaconda has recognized Leonardo. Leonardo has had his visions of the future, jotted down all science, in his mirror handwriting, into notebooks it will take a thousand students to decipher. “Leonardo.” One word that he doesn’t hear but the soft voice fills the street. The beautiful throat of La Giaconda pulses. The silk skin beats with the passing of her life. Leonardo turns in the silence. He feels the sun spilling out of the sky. Finally he lets his eyes settle on the throat of La Giaconda. Her heart catches fire. She has seen the light, and it is shining on her.

hat was it like for Leonardo to paint the Mona Lisa? It was another task to be done, another inspiration that might never be completed.

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What was it like for Leonardo to paint the Mona Lisa? On the first day his old cynical fingers touched her courtesan’s cheek: the skin near her eyes was tinted by the sun, down flecked into a fine gold only his eye could see, only the tips of his own surgeon’s nerves could feel. Paint the Mona Lisa? Only love could support such a crippled inspiration. And to love her, Leonardo knew

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he would have to desire her. Only the sight of her blushing under the hand’s shadow could fix her to the eye. First he measured her face onto sketchboards. The distance from eye to nose, from eye to ear and ear to mouth: every feature was examined and put to the tape — the distance copied in notebooks, the ratios figured and listed in long columns. At night, in his studio, Leonardo examined the numbers of the Mona Lisa. The way others learned to love their horses, the statistics of their favourite gambler, Leonardo learned to love the fractions of the Mona Lisa. Her mouth, for example, the soft red bow that he had more than once felt giving secret kisses to his fingers as Leonardo — calling out to his assistant — took the measurements from her face — her mouth was smaller than the mouth of Helen of Troy, but larger by a full quarter than the mouths of Greek s tatu e s , of the sexless Venus he had unearthed only a month before meeting La Giaconda. Would he paint it as it liked to be — wide and generous, wanting to exchange a kiss or a smile — or should he show how it looked when he tried to stare her down: a prim reddish bow, drawn back but complacent, a fake smile that announced La Giaconda knew how to love the Creator without loving the brush that He wielded.

IV nd imagine the Mona Lisa. In her twenties already, no longer young, her beauty a new and unexpected flower that had risen up from her crippled foot, spread through her legs, in-flamed her womb, reddened her blood and laid a blush on her most secret skin. Imagine the Mona Lisa. Nipples burning against the silk that restrained her small breasts, pulsing throat caught between the heat of the sun and the cold stare of Leonardo: yes, she had heard of his secrets, of the dead animals that he kept in his studio, of his long and crazy experiments with flight. And most of all, she had heard of his dissections. Dead bodies, with their souls still trapped in purgatory. Leonardo’s knife digging into their sins. Leonardo’s knife carving babies from the bellies of their mothers. Leonardo’s knife drawing out nerves as thin and white as silk threads, nerves pinned over his window like a living, shrieking curtain.

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Imagine the Mona Lisa: inventing Leonardo. She dreamed him first. No longer young, her beauty an unexpected flower, the Mona Lisa liked to walk slowly, slowly to disguise her limp, through the back streets of Florence. The fame of his beauty had come before him; the fame of his beauty and of his grey-green eyes that saw every tiny movement of an insect’s wings, magical eyes that looked at a tree five hundred paces away and saw the very veins of the leaves. Oh Leonardo, Leonardo: before La Giaconda you were clever, but the Mona Lisa made you great. She dreamed him first, and then one day she saw him: broad shoulders, strong supple arms, hands with long muscular fingers, hands that moved with such speed and grace she was reminded of his fame with the lyre; but most of all she recognized his face — a high domed forehead, eyes overhung with heavy blond-gray brows, beard sprouting luxurious and long, mouth sour and turned down. We imagine the Mona Lisa: she invents Leonardo: his clairvoyant mind foresees us all. Looking back in the rearview mirror: a great widening highway to the sky of Leonardo’s genius. And what was it like to look out at the world through the mind of Leonardo? Like children scrambling nervously round the edges of a huge marble hall, we investigate the skull: more than four and half centuries dead, its brain long consumed, eyes turned to daffodils, tongue rooting long chains of grape leaves, brandy aged two dozen generations. Leonardo’s world: sensuality without love, violence without passion, colour without meaning. Leonardo’s world: cities to be built, birds to be caged and tamed, horses to gallop in great clouds of dust, and so much blood that even the sunsets run scarlet with the inspired music of Leonardo’s war machines. We imagine the Mona Lisa: her skin screams silently and shrinks from the touch of the heretic Leonardo. By the time of the first sitting she already knows about his towers of death, his executioners’ machines, his studio filled with dead animals waiting to have their secrets picked. By the time of the second sitting she has found out his favourite obsession, the desire to fly, the crazy rednosed blacksmith who insists he will flap his arms for Leonardo. She has even heard about the machine itself: the flying machine that resembles a bat. Each wing consists of five fingers, as in the hand of a skeleton, multi articulated, bending at the joints. Four wings, working crosswise, covered in white starched taffeta. Stirrups for a man’s feet, straps so that the blacksmith’s huge shoulders can be harnessed, a rudder

with feathers that spread like the tail of a duck coming to water. By the time of the third sitting her skin’s alarm has begun to unwind. She looks forward to the touch of his fingers, closes her eyes and prays that his whole palm will stop against her offered lips. Now she wants to run her tongue along its creases; she has recently memorized the tongue’s paths on her own palm, and by kissing Leonardo’s she intends to divine his past. At these sittings her husband is sometimes present. When Leonardo enters the house Fernando bows so low he is afraid the painter will see inside the dirty collar of his shirt. Leonardo: it is an honour to have Leonardo inside the home. It had been said that Leonardo had lost his inspiration, that for years he had finished not a single painting. Now there was a new Madonna. Every sitting he drew sketches, paced and measured her, inspected her face as if there were new noses waiting to be discovered. Dom Fernando knew better. His own wife. He had painted her asleep on the bed, drew in her bath with her crippled foot covered by water and her neck rising out of the perfumed surface like a swan’s neck reaching out for the sky. That, Dom Fernando thought, that was a picture: it was hung in his own private study, but now that Leonardo was coming to the house every day, Leonardo the great genius who had fled to Florence from Milan, perhaps it should be moved so the great man’s vision could settle upon it. Leonardo sees Dom Fernando watching him. There is nothing interesting about this husband. The face is entering middle age, it is not old enough to be unique, but it is thirty years beyond its last morning of beauty. The belly sags wine and soft bread over the tightly pulled trousers. The sleeves of the tunic are cut short to reveal arms of white dough in which the muscles try unsuccessfully to rise.

V he Mona Lisa wakes up. She raises her hand to where the sun has pooled on her neck and cheek. She is sleepy, still lost in dreams that are, like all her dreams, unremembered. Her hand settles. A finger stops at the corner of an eye. Sleep has melted soft as beeswax: two things are suddenly certain. First, that she has become under the hand of Leonardo one of those blind stone statues that sit in courtyards, heated by the sun and decorated by the excrement of birds.

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Second, that she is aged and is waking eighty years old, hot and gummy in the last days of her life. That afternoon Leonardo comes without his assistant. Very slowly and for the first time he sketches her face onto the canvas that might finally become the canvas of his most famous painting. Her husband, Dom Fernando, grows bored with Leonardo’s slow work. He leaves, La Giaconda knows, to drink and play cards with the wealthy businessmen who are his friends and fellow patrons of the arts. He has been bragging to them that Leonardo himself is creating a portrait of his wife. They, who plotted to unseat the Duke of Milan and drive Leonardo to Florence, say that Leonardo never finishes. If your wife resembles a Madonna, they say winking, for it is not her virginity that has caused La Giaconda’s small renown, perhaps Michaelangelo will do a bust. The maid closes the door; she does not have to be told. Leonardo approaches to inspect a detail of the light. His eyes turn to her and she sees her own reflection, the reflection of her own smiling face and the mountains crowding in behind. And at the same time Leonardo sees her: the Mona Lisa. Behind her face glows a soft green light. Time rushes like water underground. Leonardo hears the sound of his own dreams, the sound of the future. Looking at the Mona Lisa, Leonardo feels the walls of the room go stiff: light freezes in the long hollow between window and door: his eyes are fastened to the throat of the Mona Lisa and he sees, suddenly, the silky skin shudder and pulse. His heart jumps with the movement of her throat: a note of fear he has not experienced since he first did his secret dissections. Once, he remembers, he reached into the chest and took out the heart itself. Trailing veins and arteries it sat in his palm, a rare and frightening tropical fruit. As it warmed in his hand the mysterious terror warmed with it. A nerve of his own, he whose nerves were steadier than the tides, jumped and he thought for an instant that the heart — it belonged to a criminal who had been hung for robbery and heresy — seeking its own revenge, had sprung to life once more. “The heart of a hanged man,” he wrote in his diaries, backwards in his mirror script, “is a machine still marvelous to consider.” For days afterwards even the animals he had captured as pets, his private zoo of birds, voles and

lizards, were strangely affecting. And in the room where he fed them he felt his own heart hurting, as though they had all been condemned together.

VI ut desire for the Mona Lisa, Leonardo did not yet truly feel desire. “Tell me your dreams,” she once said to him. By now it was custom that they be left alone in her room. The trunk in which her unfortunate lover had been locked was still in its place, beside the sofa on which she liked to stretch out; and even after its fumigation the Mona Lisa liked to remember the voice of her lover and to rest her hand on the cleverly carved designs of the chest, the intricate animal heads entwined in their divine dance. And feeling the round painted eyes between her fingers, lying on the cushions between posings, she asked the maestro again: “Tell me your dreams.” “My dreams.” Leonardo, not young, his beard already silvered and his high forehead doubled from his youth, tried to remember how it was he had actually been persuaded to start this worthless painting, how it was he pretended not to notice that this vain doxy of an illiterate merchant was drooling on his fingers, fluttering her over-large eyes, constantly adjusting her boring bodice downwards. “I dream of machines.” “Machines? What sort of machines?” “Flying machines.” Of course Leonardo had not told the whole truth. The machines in his dreams were sometimes for flying, but often they were for nothing at all: they were just pure machines, enormous collections of geared mechanisms, one gear leading to the next in a gaudy contraptual jumble of toothed wheels turning, arms projecting and flapping, water shooting through hollow pipes. Machines whose sole purpose was to exist. “I would like to fly,” said the Mona Lisa. “I’ve always wanted to fly.” “You have?” Leonardo asked, incredulous. “Yes.” The Mona Lisa stretched her arms, putting one over the scroll of her divan, and the other along the back. Thus she sometimes posed for her lovers before they bored her. “Fly me,” said the Mona Lisa. Leonardo stepped back. Memories of the brief summer with his angel began to escape, then his heart slammed shut. The Mona Lisa saw that she had made a mistake.

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Words like these would have inspired her detestable husband, her unfortunate lover, her many and tedious suitors, to breach her in one eager leap. Leonardo — was he a child or a god? — stood like stone. It was too late to turn back. “Fly me,” she said again. “Make me fly.” Leonardo stepped forward. The Mona Lisa smiled. He was, after all, in her power. “Like that,” said Leonardo. “Exactly like that.” The voice froze her. She could feel her face going into a mask, the corners of her mouth barely turning down in disappointment. In her eyes stayed tears halfformed by desire. Only the electricity in her skin disobeyed his command. It twitched and hissed like summer lightning, sent a thousand searching fingers down her dress. Leonardo’s eyes glowed like new volcanoes. They were turning her into a witch’s effigy pinned to the board. He crossed the room but she was unable to help or resist as he took her shoulders in his hands, forced her to sit up, hands and fingers interlaced, so that even while she was swooning with the touch of him he was forcing her into the simpering position of one of his virgin mothers. Then suddenly he puts his thumbs on her eyes. Her lashes struggled beneath the weight, eyeballs cramped. “Madonna,” Leonardo said. Finally the voice was gentle, a hypnotic lover’s voice. Through her skull streamed violent and fiery reds; and then, for a moment, she thought she saw the manger itself, the true Madonna with the infanta at her breast, smiling as God’s love sucked through her. “Yes,” Leonardo said, the voice still gentle but falling in pitch, dropping like the voice of a mesmerist, like the voice of Savanrola, dropping into the new fresh lake of their own understanding. Then his lips were against her own, his beard swarming into her nose and cheeks. He smelled of perfume, garlic, and the secrets of dead bodies. He was squeezing her head between the palms of his hands, thumbs still pressed against her eyeballs, and she felt for one small second that she might actually lose her wits altogether, might go right into Leonardo’s mind and become one of those insane grotesques who littered the streets of Florence. She could feel her skull beginning to crack and buzz: in one more second her hair would have turned white, her flesh wrinkled, her eyes emptied into the black soul of Leonardo. “Yes,” Leonardo said, “thank you, that’s exactly what we want.”

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RUSS MEYER INTERVIEWED BY LORNE FROMER

My mind was swimming with images of amazing women; outlandishly endowed, aggressive, predatory, and never satisfied. The films surpassed my wildest fantasies — a cinematic smorgasbord of erotic delights served up piping hot on the silver screen. Norm’s is a typical California coffee spot, one of the worst places I could imagine for an interview. I’d envisioned myself sipping a drink beside a pool in Beverly Hills, admiring ‘The King’s’ taste in exotic scenery. As soon as I entered the restaurant I recognized Russ Meyer — a husky-set man in his mid 50’s, with a set of bushy eyebrows that set him apart. I introduced myself, and Russ began to apologize profusely for missing yesterday’s appointment. We found a table and before I could even press RECORD...

RM: I’m working on an autobiographical film titled The Jaws of Vixen, using cuts from old films edited and juxtaposed. It will provide lots of sex and violence, in a tongue in cheek manner. Hopefully the audience will find it amusing, rather than looking upon it as some sort of documentary of what my films were about. The danger one faces with a film like this is to be personally gratified. I’d much rather approach it on the basis of where I fuckedup, my frailties, and shortcomings. I think people are interested in where others have stumbled and where they have failed. In spite of the success I’ve achieved in the film community, I’m looked at askance. That was overcome to a large degree when I went to Fox and made a couple of films there. It was delightful to have gone to the mountain, you know, at Zanuck’s request. LF: Which films did you make at 20th Century Fox? RM: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Seven Minutes, based on Irving Wallace’s novel. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls turned out to be quite the cult film, despite the lack of support from Fox, who 1981 V9N1 p71

were very much ashamed of it. I find it amusing, and at the same time sad. You make a film that the public wants very much to see every time it’s shown. Even though the prints are terribly scratched, they keep turning out in hordes. The basic reason that it’s held in contempt by Fox is that it had an X rating ... and that’s a no-no ... it’s just beyond the comprehension of those people. LF: Russ, where do you find those women for your films? RM: There’s not that many of them around. Most of them are strippers. Almost every girl I’ve used is what I call a premiere stripper — a girl who made a lot of money ($2,000 - $3,000 per week) stripping. LF: So these girls have already had a lot of experience in show-biz?

P H O T O : L O R N E F RO M E R

RM: They’ve fucked a lot! They’ve fucked a lot of men, and they know how to fuck. That’s the main reason for their being in my films, aside from their large overbodies. They’ve been with all sorts of lousy shit heads, Their whole life has been provoking men. They’re bright women, ringwise like a fighter. They’ve had a lot of knocks, been taken advantage of, and they’ve taken advantage of a lot of men. They’re cockteasers, provocateurs. They make a production out of fucking. These types of women really appeal to me,

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and I think other people have the same fantasy. That’s what gives me the courage to go on. I live my fantasies with my films. To be competitive with major films should cost millions of dollars, so competing with them in the some marketplace is gratifying ... and now with the newest film going on television ... right in Hollywood’s backyard ... all those big tits and olympic fucking ... I can just see it in Beverly Hills. LF: Do you see your films as a carry-over from Vaudeville? RM: I see them more as an extension of the comic strip. I suppose if Al Capp had his say, he would have made films somewhat like mine; with dumb muscular men with I.Q.’s of 37, and outrageously cantilevered ladies, who are the smart ones, and the sexually-aggressive partners in any relationship. LF: Do you get a lot of flack from men about that? RM: From men? Oh no, I think men like sexually aggressive females. LF: Don’t men object to being portrayed as dumb hulks? Women react when they are portrayed as the dumb broad sex-object. RM: It’s unfortunate that there isn’t more reaction. I would welcome it, because reaction like that breeds controversy. LF: Do you receive strong reactions from feminists

about the way that women are portrayed in your films? RM: Not enough! I do everything I can to bait them, but by and large they all like my films. They realize it’s all a big put-on. But I remember one college screening where quite an attractive woman ran screaming down the aisle shouting, "You ought to have a stick of dynamite shoved up your ass". The whole audience erupted, and she ran out sobbing. That was the most dramatic encounter I’ve ever had. I reached her, I really got to her. I remember going to Yale with a friend of mine. We tried to get some feminists to debate with us. We finally had to hire them at $100.00 each. LF: Was Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens the first film where a narrator was used extensively? RM: I’ve always had a summation at the end of my films, to point out where all the characters went wrong ... not where they went right, but where they failed. Too much good is a bad thing! In the film Lorna, for example, everybody has a hell of a good time sinning and funning, but somewhere along the line they have to pay the piper. In those days it wasn’t really the censor you had to worry about ... but the legal bodies and church people. This was an opiate that the Church just couldn’t handle. So we made a morality play out of it. In the end the girl

would turn into a pillar of salt for having turned around, and looked back ... and there was the chorus and the righteous preacher who would thunder out invectives. And she died, you know ... so it was all right. Now today, if I did the same film I would have her cheat, and debase, and have great fun throughout the film. If the husband was a cuckold to begin with, he remains so till the end — fucking around and having a good time. You can do that today, but back in 1960 you would have had problems. So I’ve always chosen that recapitulation at the end: always tongue-incheek. In the picture Cherry, Harry and Raquel, I added a great statement on the evils of dope. I don’t know if you saw Reefer Madness, but they intentionally set out to make that film as a serious statement about the evils of dope, realizing that they were also exploiting it to make money. In Cherry, we come right out thundering about the proliferation of dope in our society, dragging the young people down. That’s an example of where you can make a statement and immediately draw gales of laughter from the audience ... the demon weed! So my point is this: there are times when one has to be his own censor. There was one case that was so ludicrous ... whenever a girl’s pussy was in a scene, we used a motorman’s punch to physically eradicate it. We did it as a joke, but that’s how the film was released. When you punch each frame you can’t be that precise, so you end up with this white hot ball of fire on the screen. LF: Was Vixen actually shot in Canada? RM: No. In the beginning I went up to Canada and shot totem poles and seaplanes landing, but most of the film was actually shot in Northern California. LF: I remember that wonderful short scene of the Mountie putting his pants on after a roll in the grass with Vixen. How did the Mountie enter into the story? RM: Oh, we thought it was a good sight gag. They objected to that scene in Canada, and wanted it cut out. The Mountie represents such purity, I thought he deserved a good shot! Why not? The RCMP wrote to the FBI requesting the scene be cut ... not an official request ... but we stood fast. LF: How would you evaluate today’s market for independently produced, sexually-oriented material as compared with the 60’s? RM: I don’t think there is a feasible way of working in these days of multi-million dollar hype and television rights. The market has been

shot down by increasing pressure from newspapers, local censors, and official bodies. The most damaging are the newspapers that refuse to print an advertisement for x-rated or non-rated material. I’m glad I was able to get in there when I did and make my name and my money before they realized what was going down. I think very few people will be making films like I make — buffoon-oriented, tits and ass, jokey sex — simply because the market isn’t there any more. The thing I have to fight now is becoming establishment. Unless sex becomes something very special ... why should anybody go see it? What is changing is the cassette market, cable television and the videodisc phenomena. We’ve just concluded an arrangement with ONTV to broadcast Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens and Cherry, Harry and Raquel at 3:00 AM. So we’re now hitting people who would not normally go to the theatre, people over 33 who are now buying cassettes. However, I don’t think that filmmakers can shoot strictly for the cassette market. I think a film has to be a box office success to be a success in the cassette field. LF: What about your infatuation with women endowed with such oversized bosoms? RM: Obsession is better. They’re the kind of woman that I like personally — my hang-up, my fantasy, my perversion, my obsession, my shortcoming, and my fortune. The basic trademark of my films. LF: How would you describe the most influential woman in your life? RM: Well, my mother has been extremely important to me. She allowed me a tremendous amount of freedom in everything I did. I can recall the days when I was using the family bathtub to develop the girlie pictures I was working on. Of course she had an enormous bust …

Even though Russ kept talking, for me the interview was complete. Russ Meyer is composed of the fibre success is made of. He has pitted rugged individualism and perseverance against the moral structure of our society, and can walk away a winner. He has climbed to the peak of the mountain and amassed a fortune ... all at the service of his lifelong fantasy — to make films with the most gorgeous, buxom actresses in America. … if I wasn’t so crazy about big tits I might have made the definitive art movie ... but in the final analysis I’ve had more fun. 1981 V9N1 p73

PHOTOS BY: ELDON GARNET

anarchic activity. That is why we have our own studio, right from the beginning and now. AP: I think you use history very nicely. Again, that comes back to referentialism. RH: Yes, but the projections that we pick up, again from Italy, the Futurists, or the futuristic Germain Bauhaus type of situations are concerned with technological activity, rather than artistic fantasy. We are more into industrialized productivity. We work in the studio every day. We don’t always make music, and I said we record only when we feel like it. But we work at it because we make our own instruments and our own equipment: which you will probably see tomorrow night. , AP: You will install your studio on the performance stage? RH: That’s right. We have our studio broken into its components and we bring them on stage. We actually play studio. We never say we play music. It is more like German sound. EG: What is your view about your current place in history? You seem to have specific ideas about the

KRAFTWERK AP: I’ve followed Kraftwerk for a number of years, and I’ve always thought that architecture was in your background. I can tell you used to listen to the Beachboys and the Doors, but what music do you listen to now? RH: Anything. We listen mostly to ethnic music from anywhere in the world. And we listen to machines. Sometimes we just switch on all our musical machines, and we listen to them. Then we walk away and keep them running. We go somewhere else. AP: You’ve got the tape running? RH: Sometimes, but not all the time. We don’t record so much; we only record when we feel like recording. In 1971 we set up Kraftwerk and Kling Klang Studio. We rented some space in an industrial centre in Dusseldorf, next to a railway station, and we soundproofed it. We can work 24 hours if we wish. We started there with a small Revox recorder, and over the last 10 years we have developed our equipment. But we record very little. FG: Is that because it is so easy to program the equipment? RH: Yes, but it is also psychological, because we only record when we feel like recording. It is more like a state of mind. Otherwise you end up with a load of p74 V9N2 1981

tapes. Tapes are historical. The moment you finish recording them, they become historical. You end up with too much of an historical thing. We try to forget a lot of the music we play. AP: That contrasts with what many other people do, which is to run up backlogs of tapes and keep coming back to them, saying, “Maybe I can edit that into this.” That is a different form of production. RH: We are more interested in the new blank tapes we just purchased. They are really blank, and it gives us much more space to make something. Some of the music – we find, like the pocket calculator thing – we found them at Christmas when we were walking in the department stores. We bought some, went to the studio and plugged in, and it came very quickly. AP: The pocket calculator overdub on that particular track is quite authentic. The Japanese version of that is very big in New York. A far cry from the last album, which, underneath it all, was quite Italian. RH: Italian? Yes, why not? Red Brigades also. EG: Why Red Brigades? RH: Because we are the musical Red Brigades. I think we have a very determined point of view. We find the musical world is very history oriented, laden with history, with tapes. We want to project a more

Andy Paterson, Andy Paterson,

historical and political context of your music. Where do they fit in? RH: Into, I think, anarchic politics. EG: I don’t really see it as being anarchic, because of its definite structure. AP: Well, to me, pop music is very rigid and I frankly find it a fascistic form. RH: There are many forms of music. There is not one music. In Germany, when our culture was finished after the war, British or Anglo-American culture was brought in, and only now in the 70’s or 80’s is there a new renaissance of German identity and culture. The reference point is more to electronics and classical music than to what you call fascistic rock music. FG: What about romance in your music? RH: I think it’s more a technological romance, especially with computers. We work with video as well as audio tape. We also have computer tapes, computer programs, all kinds of things. AP: To me a monophonic synthesizer, because it is dealing with one note, by necessity implies rigid things

Garnet, Gaysek interview Ralf Hutter EldonEldon Garnet, Fred Fred Gaysek interview Ralf Hutter

like chords, as opposed to a patchwork synthesizer where you can make, say, pure noise. RH: But music is just organized noise anyway, so it makes no difference. There is no difference between music and noise. Like a tuned car symphony. Autobahn is like cars in tune. FG: Do you think you’re giving the correct picture when you take industrial noise, machine noise, or the noise of the autobahn, and throw it back in an organized manner — a drone? Perhaps it is replacing something, a perception perhaps, in the German culture that was destroyed after the war? RH: It is a romance, of course, a romantic thing, and at the same time it is pure because of experience. We’ve done over 300,000 kms while touring from one city to another city, as nobody. That’s actually my gray Volkswagen on the cover of the album. So it is a mixture between realistic things and romance. We always fluctuate — sometimes we stay very realistic and sometimes we get carried away. FG: I find there is so little that is emotive in the music. The choice of sounds, for instance, are bald. They are not resonant sounds. You know the kind of richness you can get out of some synthesizers. RH: We never go for that. To us it’s over the top. It’s

done by people who actually empty themselves and who want to protect their own emptiness with overindulgence. I like people who can play one note. We cannot always do it. I’m not saying we are very good at that, but we try to say as much with as little notes as we can. FG: What about the human voice in your music? In Computer World that broken voice at the back of the cut was very clever. Human qualities, yet a talking machine. RH: We have a voice computer, we have automatic singing. Florian does a lot with that; he works with a mathematician who we took away from a big company. On the weekend we took him away from that, and now every weekend he is doing certain things with us. That is an artificial voice, and then I do the human voice, then we are also using language translators and all kinds of things. FG: What about using more language in your lyrics? RH: We always write everything in German first, of course. We are very much into internationalistic language. We do it like in films — a synchronized version. Because we record on only 16 tracks, we leave 3 tracks for different languages. We record German first and then we make synchronized versions. That leaves 12 tracks for the music, because 1 track is for computer programs. We had some Russian and Japanese for the first time. When we were back in Dusseldorf, we recorded in Italian because we toured in Italy. FG: Do you find you attract political interest in a country like Italy? RH: Of course. Everywhere — in Germany, France, especially in Continental Europe. Pop music is fascistically controlled by Anglo-American music, and Continental Europe gets a whole new aspect of itself through our music or European music. EG: What do the German people regard you as, politically? RH: Oh, we are close to what is called the anticulture, or anti-authoritarian culture, unofficial culture, whatever you might call it — as opposed to the opera houses which are state controlled. AP: And yet the name Kraftwerk means power plant. RH: Yes, or electrical energy. AP: I find the music to be in favour of the work ethic. Putting your albums on and going about my business. You make good music for phone calls, typing, whatever. The content of what I say or type is entirely up to me; it isn’t dictated by your music. I use your music like a drug, a little bit of stimulus. There is no ideological content in the pill; the pill is a mere energizer. RH: We are very much into energy. If it makes you do certain things, that is a compliment to us. We also know that certain music, especially electronic music, can make you very sleepy and lazy. EG: Do you want your music to direct people, to 1981 V9N2 p75

motivate them in some way? RH: Not in any way, like do this or do that, but we are certainly into positivist energy. AP: At the best of times, your music, by using a surface familiarity, stimulates productivity, as opposed to music that people sit around listening to, under the delusion that they themselves are doing something new. All they are doing is listening to somebody making a few million dollars to say absolutely nothing. RH: We also get this feedback from England with all the new electronic groups coming up, and in Italy, Germany… AP: All these Neo Romantics would not exist without you. RH: In Germany there’s a lot of new groups, and they started electronically. We started as young boys with classical music, because of our German bourgeois background, but today they are starting directly. The first instrument they ever play is electronic, and I think that is what we predicted. FG: You used the word anarchic, but at the same time you say you feel yourself to be building as opposed to tearing apart or removing. I wonder if that is a correct self-perception? RH: Maybe the word has a different context here in North America. Maybe we shouldn’t use that word because it has been over-used. We never use the word love, for instance. Constructive is much better, and productivity. That is what we come from, productivity. EG: There hasn’t been much anarchy in Germany; in the North American view, Germany has been fairly clean lately. Has it become more controlled, or is it loosening up? RH: I think that there are two things at the same time, two lines going simultaneously and in conflict. Germany is not a uniform country, so certain things are going on in Bavaria and other things are happening in Berlin. Germany is very schizophrenic. Law and order is very strong on one hand, and yet there is much initiative on the other. I think we are facing a very difficult future. EG: What type of future do you see? RH: I think the conflict is getting tighter and tighter. I see a lot of things happening in Germany, and in England it is going on all the time. A lot of people in England said it would never happen there because of the Queen, which is ridiculous. AP: What forces do you see clashing with each other? RH: Those who are in control — and the individual, self-organized, constructive, living organisms, or whatever you call them. EG: Your music seems to be a combination of both. RH: We look to this conflict. It’s in everybody, even ourselves, because we can get easily seduced, like you said, by fascistic tendencies in being part of the music business. When you see four people on stage and 4,000 people in the audience, it is basically p76 V9N2 1981

EG: If a robot takes over a factory job, it makes it more human. It frees the human for other functions. RH: That’s the point of view of control over the robot. AP: Whereas to give the robot helpful suggestions might be better than control. RH: Right. We are co-operating with our machines — a friendship. Like small children we take them to bed with us. We spend so much time with them and they are our friends. Otherwise, we would not be able to do it. By treating machines friendly, they treat you friendly. They give that back to you. EG: So in your stage show, the machine becomes a personification of you? RH: We are all together — it’s a man/machine — it is not man and machine. It’s very hard for me to say all these things with words because I find words so historical. We work so much in sound and vision that I have difficulty with words. Saying what is really happening. You know Faust from Goethe? “What you have written in black and white you can take home.” But that is incorrect. It’s like tapes — what you have

Nuremburg. There is no question about this. EG: There is also the dehumanizing element. In your stage presentation you’re not there a lot of the time. Do you find this dehumanization positive, or is it undercutting the individual? RH: We are more into realistic things, or the uncovering process. Those songs that we wrote on robots or showroom dummies or models are about our own self-existence. EG: So the robot becomes the projection of the human? RH: It’s a certain aspect of our existence, it’s very robotic. The word robot comes from the Russian robotnik (worker), and that’s exactly what we are. It’s our existence and context. We don’t put values on it, like in school, where you learn ‘this is correct’. AP: You want us to do the thinking. RH: In a way, yes. EG: The robotic mentality can be a positive, futurist view of the world. RH: It is just our existence. We are working like sociological scientists; the robotic existence is really what we feel, what we are doing, and what we are. There is a certain aspect of black humour to our whole thing.

done on tape you can rely on. But that is not true. EG: I see Kraftwerk as being the successful electronic band; I don’t know where you started from, but now you have this elitist position. You are on top. Do you have that sort of feeling, that you are now on top of something? RH: On top of what? EG: In a sense you consider yourself a worker, but in another sense you are bourgeois. Look where you are staying — in this hotel. I wonder if you worry about these contradictions? RH: In a way, yes, but in a way no, because we don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything to me if there are mirrors on the wall here or not. If it is important to you, we could go somewhere else. If we play tomorrow in a concert hall, I don’t care. AP: But the concert hall has to be able to hold al I the equipment you have. RH: Yes, but we can always change that. It’s just a temporary thing. When we started in Germany we had a Revox machine, a cassette recorder, cheap things. In

Germany, there was no music business, so we did everything ourselves. We drove into a youth centre somewhere, and we carried our stuff with our own hands. I drove my own Volkswagen. It’s only now, at this moment, that we have a special physical manifestation of what we do. But we are not into the equipment or anything like that. We are not into hardware, machinery per se. EG: I think you are like a cultural establishment. Do you see utilizing your position for political action, in any sense? RH: Yes, I think so, I think you can make something from nothing. We come from Germany, which is like a musical nowhereland. EG: Could you change things in Germany with your music? RH: Yes, I think we do. I mean, not ‘I’, but things coming up, it’s more like, biologically, small things coming up everywhere — people taking over houses, people taking over music, people taking over culture. AP: How would you feel if I told you that I constructed a new neutron bomb with your music in the background. RH: You didn’t! AP: No, but I think I could. Not that I have that

scientific knowledge, but when I’m typing overtop of you, frequently it doesn’t have that much to do with what I’m typing. Once in a while I hear in your music something that might sort of influence me, like, “Oh, The Model is the best Doors song I’ve ever heard in my life.” And maybe I’ll reflect on a period out of which the musical language you’re using comes from. RH: The Doors took a lot of their music from Kurt Weill, from a German reference, and we are more from the cultural blank. At one point in Germany, we had an everyday cultural thing happening: this was in the 20’s, after that the people who were involved were either communist, socialist, or Jewish. These groups had to go, so Germany suffered a cultural backlash. After the Nazi period, even the right wing or the middle had to go, and there was nothing. We refer more to the first group. We grew up without any older people at all to ask for anything. We spent a lot of time talking to records. FG: Now that you’ve accomplished a certain amount of work, you’re getting the equipment that you want, you’re getting exposure for your work, you’re getting the technical expertise to assist you in making what you need, do you feel that your responsibility is increasing?

1981 V9N2 p77

RH: Definitely, and sometimes I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to appear as somebody who knows everything. We want to appear as people working in electronics. EG: You keep talking about the individual making small changes, like citizen groups. RH: That is happening in Dusseldorf, Berlin, and at the same time corporations get more and more corporate. It’s scary sometimes, it can be very violent, it’s close to a civil war situation. FG: Do you feel any need to express your personal fear in your work? RH: Maybe in the next album, it is coming up very strongly again… FG: Don’t you think that eventually you are going to have to commit yourself to using language to make a very specific statement, very specific points. RH: We do that. FG: That is difficult for me, as a listener, to agree with. If I were to have a criticism of your work, it would be that it is not specific. It is minimal, the tools you use, the texture — I can sense a determination at work, but a specific content or a specific statement, aside from making a romance of the machine or expressing a

p78 V9N2 1981

positive attitude, is not there. EG: It’s like a building. What kind of building do you want to build? RH: I couldn’t build any buildings because I care more about what is happening on the inside of the buildings than setting up another one. People are always asking, “Is this pop music, is this electronic music?” They are into categorization, and we are more into sound. EG: You aren’t using your responsibility properly then, because you say you are interested in sound and not ideas. RH: I don’t know the words. It is more psychological dynamics that put you in a state of mind to do something. We are not telling somebody to stand up, sit down, go left, go right. If I want something, I can make it. I don’t listen to music, I make music. That is another attitude that we want to project. EG: So the attitude is to do things. When people listen to your music, they want to do things. RH: I am very flattered that that comes across, because we actually never said “do”. I think that by saying certain things, there is a tendency of, “Oh, yes he said it, and that’s done already.”

TRANSCRIPT JUDITH DOYLE

The funny thing is, you can remember right up to the last split second before; I can still see the other car at the moment we must have been hitting it. Then maybe the second before the impact hit me and nothing after that. It’s strange, it’s just not there. Immediately after the impact I was unconscious for about half an hour; I know that just from being told. I woke up, and I knew that my back was broken but it was a ‘no’, not a feeling of nerve pain. That all comes later cause you’re in shock. You wake up, and you know that you have pain. You don’t feel pain, but you know you have pain, and can tell where it’s coming from. I knew it was my back. I held my hands in front of me, because I had tunnel vision. I moved my fingers. Then I knew I was paralyzed. The feeling was not pain.

It’s like knowledge, like there’s someone in California right now who’s in real pain. It’s sad — but I don’t feel any urgency to rush out and do anything. The first thing is that under shock like that, you really differentiate yourself from your body — your body’s just this toy, and it’s too bad it got mangled up. You do and don’t feel pain, I don’t know how it works but you know that you’re in pain, and you can also guess pretty well the degree of the pain, whether it’s intense or not. I knew it was intense. But it’s not happening to you directly.

It’s very distant, it’s not as painful as if you had pain right now, like if you smashed your thumb in a door. You know what it’s like to be around someone who’s in pain, you think ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do something.’ It’s not like that.

Because of the shock. However your body mechanisms work, the pain’s rerouted so that it’s very distant. Like a memory or a dream; it’s close to a dream. Except not that strong. 1981 V9N2 p79

Partly because of the shock and partly because of the tunnel vision, the air, for a certain margin around you, has exactly the same amount of pain as you do. It's peculiar because it’s the only time in my life I’ve experienced that. It’s like the pain was in a certain physical region which you could put on a map; because my body had been put into that region, there was pain in my body. But it had very little to do with my body, perhaps nothing at all. The exact feeling is like having your body wrapped in cotton, except it wasn’t restricted to my body alone, it was also that region of air. It’s a very precise region, slightly larger than one human body. You might even be able to fit two in there. You go through your body bit by bit, first you locate where the pain’s coming from, if it seems to have a centre, if it doesn't, what must be causing the pain. First you find that problem then you check out other parts. I could feel that one leg was worse than the other. It didn't feel more painful, just more distant and more like air than the other leg. My hands felt least like air, my hands and head. The brain was organizing things. Very slowly and calmly. Totally calmly. You learn ‘this is leg one, this is leg two’ — there’s a difference between them now. There's a very extreme difference between the legs and the hands. I could tell exactly where my back had been broken; it tapered off the further away you got from that in any direction. You distribute your body, but now according to a different way. The pain was already located, and it becomes the principle for your life, for your body being there, for all your knowledge. Your narrative story. When I got put in the ambulance they drove me to an intermediate hospital and, because of the distancing thing, more than anything else, it all happens like a movie — it’s exactly like a movie. The way that colours in a movie are stronger than they are in life because there’s nothing to compete with them. The mood especially of movies seeps in, almost as strong as a dream. This thing is happening, but it’s not really happening to you, even though it’s filmed from the front seat of a car p80 V9N2 1981

and it’s driving fast and you can feel those sensations. You have a problem with whether it’s happening to you or whether you're watching it. The colour goes into you, in an odd way. You have tunnel vision in a movie theatre and you have tunnel vision when you’re in shock. There’s a cone-ness. It might be a foot wide, and infinitely long. On the other side, it’s just like a film theatre — it’s black. Your sight — I don’t know why it closes down. Your sight also loses intensity. Right now, when I look at this wine bottle — I fasten on it. You possess it, you grab it or something. The gaze you have then is very non-committal. It moves across all things equally — your own body, the ambulance, the RCMP guys, the gravel. It’s like being bored. All things are equal. Being here as opposed to being there makes no difference. And it’s a beautiful feeling. It’s like gliding. They took me in for X-rays at this intermediate hospital and it was still like being in a film. All these machines are moving over you — your relationship to technology is just fabulous. You see these mythical machines and they’re doing all kinds of things. You don’t know if they’re going to save the patient or not. You’re not even as excited as watching a film where you want the patient to live, where you’re pulling for him. In this case, you move over all things equally and the patient will either live or die and the machines move and they X-ray you….

When you’re in shock, it’s like one of those really rare moments you have. It's abstract, and very pleasurable. Later on, you don't have a body, you just have a knot. It's like a muscle. You just have this intensity of pain and that’s all you’ve got. Eventually your whole body is destroyed except for this little bit up in your brain where the pain seems to be emanating from. In fact, it’s not the case that people deal with you, and people deal with you through machines. It’s people deal with you and machines deal with you. Machines are much nicer, much more like when you have shock. That’s exactly the sort of intelligence they have. It’s not that they couldn’t care less about you, it’s just that they don’t particularly care. They’re more pleasurable, their motion over you, they’re more gifted, they’re less involved with you, so you don’t have to be as involved with your pain either. I recall that the most when they did some sort of X-ray that had video display. I was looking inside my body by looking at the video screen. That was the most nauseating, amazing moment because I didn’t expect them to show me that. The Doctor said ’do you want to have a look?’ so naturally I just turned. You turn and you see a video display of inside your body, and they’re moving around, up different routes and things. It was a canal system.

With the machines, it’s like you being already a drawing. I saw a lot of the X-rays they took of me. That’s not as interesting because there’s nothing going on; there’s just the data. But it’s like that, it’s like you’re already an X-ray. As the shock wore off, the pain would come back more and more intensely. Time would slow down and become really irritable. Everything grated — the existence of a chair as separate from you, or a fly on a window, the sound of air in the room — was all pain, everything was pain. Everything having a separate existence of its own was a pain. People totally disappeared when I was drugged. They came back as the drugs wore off, then as the pain got very bad I couldn’t keep them in existence any longer. I had to use all my power to concentrate on holding back — no, that’s not right either — on staying organized. It’s not that you can block out the pain, but you can keep yourself organized. You can hold onto a self or something. It seems to have to do with discipline, just the form of discipline, not discipline toward any goal. I guess that when you’re helpless, you’re passive and it washes over you. When you have the discipline — even when what you’re organizing is not the substantive content that you want — you still have a measure of authority.

The funny thing is that even when you’re helpless, you’re not. Even when it knocks you right down to the floor and you’ve got no more resources to draw on, you wind up still having something — it’s not really a self, but a discipline. Even when you’re helpless, you’re helpless. The pain always inhabits a particular body and a particular person and I always felt at those points, if I could only totally destroy my name, I would destroy the pain too. But you can’t. There’s just no way you can get rid of your own history no matter how badly you try. FROM TRANSCRIPT, A PERFORMANCE AND FORTHCOMING HARD PRESS PUBLICATION. 1981 V9N2 p81

OF VIRGINS AND SAINTS EDUARDO GALEANO

THE AYMARA MOTHER OF GOD 1583/Copacabana He crosses Lake Titicaca in the reed boat. She travels by his side. She is dressed for a holiday. In the city of La Paz they gilded her tunic for her. On disembarking, he covers her with a blanket to protect her from the rain, and, with her bundled up in his arms he enters the village of Copacabana. The rain pelts down upon the people who gather to receive them. Francisco Tito Yupanqui enters the sanctuary with her and uncovers her. They put her up on the altar. From high above, the Virgin of Copacabana embraces everyone.

ANCHIETA 1593/Guarapari Ignacio de Loyola pointed at the horizon and commanded: “Go, and set the world on fire.” Jose de Anchieta was the youngest of the apostles who carried the message of Christ, the good news, to the forests of Brazil. Forty years later, the Indians call him baby-face, the man with wings, and say that upon making the sign of the cross, Anchieta diverts storms and transforms a fish into a ham and a dying man into an athlete. Choirs of angels descend from the sky to warn him of the arrival of galeons and of enemy attacks, and God raises him from the earth when, kneeling, he prays. Rays of light emanate from his weak body, burned by the hair-shirt belt when he whips himself, sharing the torment of the only-begotten son of God. Brazil will be grateful to him for other miracles. At the hand of this ragged saint, the first poems written on this earth were born, the first Tupi-Guarani grammar and the first works of the theatre; mystery plays which transmit, in the indigenous language, the gospel, mingling native characters with Roman emperors and Christian saints. Anchieta was Brazil’s first school teacher and first doctor, and was the discoverer and chronicler of the animals and plants of this earth, in a book which describes how the feathers of the guaras change colour, how the peixe-boi spawn in the eastern rivers and what the habits of the porcupine are. At the age of 60 he continues, founding cities and building churches and hospitals; he carries the main beams, in the manner of the Indians, on his bony shoulders. As if summoned by his pure and impoverished radiance, the birds seek him out and so do the people. He travels far without complaining, refusing to allow anyone to carry him, across these regions where everything has the colour of heat and everything is born and decays in a second, in order to return and be born; fruit which becomes honey, water, death, seed of new fruits: the earth boils, the sea boils, on a slow fire and Anchieta writes in the sand, with a stick, his poems of praise to the Creator of incessant life. p82 V9N3 1982

She will avert plagues and sorrow and the bad weather of February. The Indian sculptor carved her in Potosi and brought her from there. He worked on her for almost two years so that she would be born with the proper beauty. The Indians were only allowed to paint or carve images imitating European models and Francisco Tito Yupanqui did not want to violate the prohibition. He set out to make a Virgin just like Our Lady of Candelaire, but his hands had fashioned this body of the high plateau, ample lungs anxious for air, a large torso and short legs, and this wide Indian face with thick lips and almond eyes that gaze sadly upon the wounded earth.

MARIANA DE JESUS 1645/Quito A year of catastrophes for the city. A black ribbon hangs from every door. Invisible armies of measles and diphtheria have invaded and levelled everyone in sight. Night collapsed into dawn and the volcano Pichincha, the king of snow, has erupted: a great vomit of lava and fire has fallen on the fields, and a hurricane of ash has swept the city. “Sinners! Sinners!” Like the volcano, Father Alonso de Rojas discharges fiery blasts from his mouth. From the glittering pulpit of the Jesuit church, the golden church, Father Alonso beats his breast which reverberates while he weeps, screams, and cries out: “Accept, 0 Lord, the sacrifice from the most humble of your servants! May blood and my flesh expiate the sins of Quito!” Then a girl at the foot of the pulpit rises and serenely says: “Me.” Before the people overflowing the church, Mariana announces that she is the chosen one. She will calm the wrath of God. She will be punished for all the punishments that her city deserves.

Mariana has never pretended to be happy, nor dreamed that she was, nor slept more than four hours a night. The one time a man accidentally brushed her hand, she fell ill, and with a fever for a week. From the time she was a little child, she decided to be the wife of God and did not offer him her love only in the convent, but in the streets and in the fields, not embroidering or making sweets and jellies within the peace of the cloisters, but praying on her knees on thorns and stones, and looking for bread for the poor, medicine for the sick and light for the night people who live in darkness from the divine law. At times, Mariana feels called by the murmur of the rain or the crackling of fire, but the thunder of God is always louder: that God of anger, a beard of serpents, eyes of lightning, who appears naked in her dreams to put her to the test. Mariana returns to her house, lays down on her bed and prepares to die in place of everyone else. She pays the pardon. She offers God her flesh to eat and her blood and her tears to drink until he becomes dizzy and forgets. Thus the epidemics will cease, the volcano calm down, and the earth will stop trembling.

BLACK VIRGIN, BLACK GODDESS 1696/Regla

At the docks of Regla, Havana’s poor relation, the Virgin arrives, and she has come to stay. The cedar carving has come from Madrid, wrapped in a sack, in the arms of her devoted servant Pedro Aranda. Today, September 8th, this tiny village inhabited by artisans and sailors, and always smelling sweetly of seafood and tar, is having a fiesta: the people are eating delicacies of meat and corn and beans and yucca, cuban dishes, african dishes, eco, olele, ecru, quimbombo, fufu, while rivers of rum and earthquakes of drums give welcome to the black Virgin, the Little Negress, patron saint of the bay of Havana. The sea is covered with coconut shells and sprigs of basil and a wind of voices sings while night is falling: Opa ule, opa ule, opa e, opa e opa, opa, Yemaya The black Virgin of Regla is also the African Yemaya, the silver goddess of the seas, mother of the fish, and mother and lover of Shango, the warrior god, womanizer and trouble-maker. 1982 V9N3 p83

MARTIN DE PORRES 1939/Lima The bells of the Church of Santo Domingo are tolling. By the light of the candles, bathed in icy sweat, Martin de Porres has delivered up his soul after a long struggle with the devil in which he was aided by the most Holy Mary and Saint Catalina Virgin and Martyr. He died in his bed with a stone for a pillow and a skull by his side, while the Viceroy of Lima, standing on his knees, kissed his hand and asked him to intercede on his behalf, that he might be granted a tiny place up there in heaven. Martin de Porres was born of a negro slave and her master, a high-born gentleman of pure Spanish lineage, who did not get her pregnant just to use her, but to apply the Christian principle that in bed everyone is equal before God. At 15, Martin was given to the convent of the Dominican Brothers. Here he experienced his trials and miracles. They never ordained him priest because he was a mulatto; but embracing the broom with love, he swept the great halls, the cloisters, the infirmary and the church every day. With a knife in his hand he shaved the 200 priests of the convent; he tended the sick and distributed clean clothing smelling of rosemary. When he found out that the convent was suffering shortages of money, he appeared before the prior: “Hail Mary.” “Full of grace.” “Your worship, sell this mulatto dog,” he volunteers. In his bed he would lay ulcerous beggars off the street and pray on his knees all night long. The supernatural light would make him white as snow; white flames would emanate from his face when he crossed the cloister at midnight, flying like some divine meteor, heading for the solitude of his cell. He would pass through doors and pray, kneeling, at times in the air far above the ground; the angels, carrying lights in their hands would accompany him to the choir. Without leaving Lima, he consoled captives in Algiers and saved souls in the Philippines, China and Japan; without moving from his cell, he rang the angelus bells. He healed the dying with rags soaked in the blood of a black cock and powders of toad, and through incantations learned from his mother. With his finger he would rub a tooth and relieve pain and would transform open wounds into healing scars; he would turn dark sugar white and extinguish fires with his gaze. The bishop had to forbid him the performance of so many miracles without permission. After matins he would undress and beat his back with a whip made of ox nerves, tied into thick knots at the end, and while he was tearing the blood from his body, he would cry out: “Vile mulatto dog! How long must your sinful life last?” With eyes pleading and tearful, always begging forgiveness, the first dark-skinned saint of the most white Sainthood of the Catholic Church passed through this world.

Translated by:

C. Eileen Thalenberg

These texts are taken from Eduardo Galeano’s forthcoming book Origins (Los nacimientos) to be published by Siglo XXI and released in Mexico and Spain. Origins is the first volume of-the trilogy Memory of Fire (Memoria del fuego) which will be completed in the coming years and is intended to narrate “the entire history of America through small moments in time.”

p84 V9N3 1982

A psychiatrist told me I am making a game out of painful memories of a childhood spent in a wheelchair (confinement), with rheumatoid arthritis and Lupus (pain). Early this year it had become a form of meditation and release. Several times, I modeled for questionable people who got carried away and kept me prisoner, confined for days, injured, force-fed LSD, and frightened terribly. I know I must seem crazy, but those experiences put me in touch with a fear so primal, they stand as the most liberating and self-revealing moments of my life. Bondage removes one’s identity. One becomes a thing, tormented by one’s own body. Maybe that’s the name of the game — I feel trapped in this body, this life. I want OUT.

Lisa Baumgardner

I pull my sleeves up high and examine my damaged lower arms. The veins have broken, and I am clearly marked. A wedding ring still on my finger, the train begins its way back to New York City and my vision is blurred by tears. My hair is damp from a last-minute bath and I am somehow pulled together by that last quick desperate shot of vodka, to stop my sobbing. I don’t know why the dreadful excruciating bondage, the ugly humiliating horror of it, attracts me. My tears are real, they are not to arouse sympathy. My soul aches. E. and D. are my friends now. D. is naturally beautiful — with little makeup, she is a madly desirable demon. I try to reach her, to kiss her — it’s for her that I submit to the pain, the bondage that seems endless, that goes beyond my screams of pain. I do it because I realize now that I love her. I am going back to New York, to my nothingness, and there is no one who could reach me in my abysmal sadness. I have failed. I was not able to submit, to bear the tight cutting ropes without tears, pleading, fainting from pain and cut-off blood circulation. I have failed, and I am returning to my nothingness, my fashionable parties full of talented, noisy people, too jaded to raise an eyebrow to my wounded face and arms, my torn ragged hair, my withdrawn agony. (Later . . . ) I have slept for an hour. My painful visit seems barely to exist — some distant adventure that won’t call me back — for awhile. The train rocks me. It is a black night and I have no home. I return to Manhattan to go to a party, to look for a place to sleep. Life is unforgiving in many ways. E. is rough with me, but D.’s bondage is cruelest. E. is more humiliating. If I beg to be untied, he says he will allow it only if I jerk him off or perform fellatio. His semen chokes me. I gag and cry. I feel sorry for every boyfriend I’ve mistreated, me tough bitch – if only they could see me now, reduced to a groveling piglet, bound in disarray, submitting to pain whose memory awes me. D. feels compassion for my plight, but her ministrations are the most fearsome and appalling. She tapes my mouth shut, collars me, tightens a leather blindfold, and secures a hood over my head. I am suffocating, blind and terrified. The knots grow tighter with my struggles — my skin burns and I cannot scream for help. The scream is a fire that scourges my body from inside, there is no release, no release, no release! Each time they trick me with their “friendship.” So soon I find myself their bound, submissive plaything. How I long to serve D., but my only reward is to clean the sole of her shoe. D., your lips are red as fire and I would burn to ash at your touch.

(Diary Excerpt) 1982 V9N3 p85

DIARY OF A MASOCHIST

LYNNE TILLMAN

Remember when you pissed on me in San Francisco? You waited at the bottom of the stairs; it was dark. I came down the stairs and you crouched there, leaped on me, hit me, tried to stick it in me. C. was upstairs. You pissed on me, I turned over and tried to absorb the piss. C. had been scared you’d destroy her work, ruin her films. Don’t worry, I said defending you, he wouldn’t do that. In Phoenix you said I was Kissinger because I couldn’t explain a line in H.’s story. “I was eight when I had my first affair.” You told me you tried to put your hand on your aunt’s cunt when you were five. I didn’t call you Tricky Dick for that. Kept me up all night long in a Phoenix motel room, calling me Nixon, all night long, TV on, your eyes holes in your head. I made phone calls my invisible thread for sanity. Back at the beginning — but there’s no way to compare beginnings and middles and ends in — Amsterdam you put your cock in my hand and said my cock is yours. You had been my friend for three years. You held me all the way to NYC, and our first night fucking, worried that my sister would hear us. I thought that was strange but already I was gone and thought if you were concerned, probably you were just more sensitive. In Buffalo you got the flu. Your hands turned red, you cried and wanted to go back to Holland. I nursed you; in the morning you told me my breath stank — I was eating less and less. I dream two men are watching us as we lay in bed. I go up to them (they are very tall, I am barefoot) and demand that they stop. I tell

you my dream and you say they were in the room and you saw them too. You warn me against S. in Pittsburgh. I dream about your wife and how I’ll be isolated again in Amsterdam. I run the bath in the dream and it overflows. I swim in its pool to turn off the faucets and my mother is angry with me for making love with “a married man.” We are not making love. That’s what you decreed in West Lafayette, Indiana. There we are at Purdue University, showing films to cheerleaders, and in the Purdue Guest House, you tell me you don’t want to make love with me because it deteriorates our relationship. We show the films, eat Chinese food, you can’t understand why I’m upset. I sleep alone but every night you get into bed with me, then leave again. In the morning you beckon me to you and kiss me. The phone rings. You say I’m glad because we were being drawn in again. I want to go, you can do the trip alone I say. You say you’d blame me and so would everyone else. Next day you’d act ok, the day after, it’s murder again. We get to Minneapolis. A Hyatt Hotel. I write in my diary that I can’t resist my desire for your tongue on my cunt. As I undress in the hotel, thinking of you and sex, I look out the window and notice a man on the sidewalk, beating off, watching me. We change hotels. You say you’ve been keeping yourself from me frantically. You don’t want to come, don’t know what to do with the feeling. You want me to come — you start me, you stop me. You piss on the floor in your sleep. I tell you in the morning and say I’m not angry. Your wife would’ve been you say. You wake me in the middle of the night and stand at the foot of the bed and say I feel I am eating myself up. You are eating me and biting me so hard my skin turns blue and red. You bite me on the cunt and I ask you to stop. You say it hurts you more than it does me. I look at my shoulders after one of our sessions and think, the stain of you lasts so long. The bus ride to Omaha with Chicago blacks. One calls himself a professional fucker and puts his hand on my thigh. We change buses in Omaha, get a bus all to ourselves. I’m ready to fuck you in the toilet, going Greyhound. You say your wife would be shocked. We don’t. Get to Cheyenne. I buy boys’ cowboy boots. We play pool and some man promises me a silver dollar. A whore tells me there are two ladies rooms, a nice one and a nasty one. She asks Which do you want. We both laugh, we’re in the shit together. You say you don’t like my body, but you like making love with me because I’m more skilled, more exciting than your wife. I dream a man who is crippled tries to lure me to his floor #9, and I want to get out at #4. Somehow I am forced to glide past him. In Boulder we meet B., the filmmaker. You tell him he’s afraid to die. B. says he made his wife choose making art or marrying him. B. kisses me on the forehead. Feels like the seal of approval and the kiss of death. I dream four babies are placed in a plastic box as a work of art.

In Boulder we come and fight. Our host hates me, thinks I persecute you, until the last night when he sees. He apologizes to me and I defend you. I understand you I say to our host. On our way to San Francisco. 15 hours to Salt Lake City where we register as man and wife. You tell me again never to have any expectations, any needs. We’re in the Palace Motel. On to Reno. I read “But also all journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” You write a letter to your wife. I ask why you’re so much clearer now about the situation with your wife. You say because you are with me now. You say you’re not turned on by me. San Francisco. C.’s house. I dream about prostitutes and in the dream you say it’s better to be a prostitute and not married. C. and I are not married. You hate C. and try to turn me against her. You tell me she’s in love with me and can’t love me. C. tries to put up with you. You go mad; she screams at you but you’re too gone and I’m scared, everything’s collapsing. We see W.’s films and you tell him one side of the screen is brighter than the other. It’s such a crazy thing to say, I wonder if you’re right. This is the night you pissed on me. In the morning you tell me you knew what you were doing. C. tries to help me and says you’re going crazy. I can’t admit it to myself. She takes us to the bus and we go to Portland. We make love in Portland. Over Chinese food you talk about your wife, your kids. We are interviewed about film for a radio program. You tell me you were C.’s victim. The next morning I tell you how my father hurt me and you say you’ll never betray me. I do the show like a champ. Two days in NYC alone. Am down 15 pounds and I can’t sleep or stop talking. I show G. and S. 8mm. films

of our trip. The hotels, the bath water, you lying asleep in bed, views out windows to streets, an American flag, endless miles of America from a bus window, C., desert, mountains, bathrooms, lamps, snow, room after room. There’s money just for one of us to do the show in NYC, to fly there and back, and besides, you’re scared to death of flying. The morning I’m to go, I awaken in your arms and we begin to make love. Your cock was hard on my ass. You enter me from the back, the front, then pull out. Let’s have some tea instead you say. I cry and you accuse me of trying to make you feel guilty. Your wife phones me from Holland. I fly to Vancouver; you meet me and do not look at me. I ask you to return to your wife. I try to ignore you. We argue in front of our host again. Our host asks us to stop. We stop and you ask me what I want to drink. Surprise me I suggest, smiling. You say you don’t think you can. There is a party. Everyone seems so normal. I cower and when I dance see you watching me. You say only your wife can dance well. You say I should seduce my partner. You watch everything. We leave the party and in a French restaurant become friends again, get high together, go back to the party and fall asleep in the midst of it. Your cock is again hard at my back and I don’t move. I feel nothing. You ask if I’m comfortable and I lie, Yes — and you? You say it’s none of my business. The Dutch are supposed to be good at business. You put my hand on your hard cock and thank me for the birthday present I gave you, a fish, a jade fish. It is the end of March. We’re tourists in Vancouver and taken places. Sado-masochism feels out of place in this young dusty town, only 75 years old. Drunk 1982 V9N3 p87

Indians fall out saloon doors into our path as we walk at night. Our hostess is pregnant.

you love me. You tell me you hate me because I lack passion. You tell me my pain hurts you more.

I write to J. who should have been on this trip — “each day a dream flies out the window.” You read the card and question me three times. I refuse to explain. I know you will take your revenge when I’m weaker.

Finally we leave L.A. and are heading toward Texas to stay with my other sister, the one I haven’t seen in years. I am nearly able to consider leaving you in Phoenix, the morning after you called me Nixon and Kissinger. Instead I try to exact promises of good behaviour. The motel we’re in is on Van Buren Drive. I take a valium and sleep on the floor. You put your hand on my cunt and I push it away. You tell me you love me, I’m a fascist and you hate me.

On the bus again, going to Los Angeles where I’ve never wanted to go, you start the day by asking me Why are you more hysterical? You’re afraid I’m cracking up because I use my hands and gesture more. I ask that you leave me alone. You imitate my movements. Medford, Oregon, another fight. This time you say I’m claiming you by writing in my diary. The letters I once wrote you are fraying in your pocket as we eat dinner and you insist I stop writing. I keep notes of our film shows. You tell me you don’t need notes, that you’ll remember. After dinner I vomit; an enormous shrimp salad, the portions are so big in America. A friendly waitress with a ribbon in her hair served us drinks while we fought.

Just one motel more. We stop in Atlanta. Pizza in the Underground. I push you away two times when you get into my bed drunk. The third time I let you enter me. The last time.

Get to El Paso, midway to my sister’s place; we stay at the Hotel McCoy. I fall asleep but you keep waking me during the night. The next day, passing Fort Stockton, a notice at the gas station reads Dean and the Fat Boys — Dance tonight. I write it down to enjoy later.

We get to NYC and stay at N.’s. I sleep near the door, on the floor. You get the couch. We have dinner at my sister’s, where we began our trip, and you pick a fight with us about Joan Little’s defense. You talk about it for two days. N. gets upset watching us. One morning I phone KLM and make a reservation for you that night. You agree to go and we buy gifts for your family. I phone your wife and let her know you’re coming. N. takes us to the airport and after you’re out of sight, I start laughing with her. Louder and louder. Can’t cry. Now that you’re out of my life, there’s a weird hole as big as the La Brea Tarpits we saw together. I feel like one of those animals stuck there.

My sister and her boyfriend meet us at the bus station. They’ve come from a party and are in a good mood. We have a beer with them and are taken to her home. You and I sleep together again.

Days pass and I fly to Florida to see my parents. There’s a message waiting from you: it says you’ve arrived safely. I get a bad sunburn and my parents buy me clothes. I fly back to NY with my mother’s cousin

Back with a family, my niece and nephew, my sister, a cat and a dog. I sleep in my niece’s room. You get the guest room with the TV, so that you can smoke and drink all night. The third night you drink a quart of Vodka and tell my sister you’re not attracted to me. You tell her she’s your type. My sister walks out. Your wife and her sisters had the same lovers, at the same time. I talk to you some more, then give up. Wake my sister and cry. She thinks I’m crazy and you’re drunk and mean.

who says my mother was always too much in love with my father. I have to go back to Holland and I’m scared to death. I imagine you apologizing to me and things going back to normal. I see a therapist who says I don’t have to let you know when I’m arriving.

Before we board the bus to L.A., you say Let’s be friends. You throw your arm around me and I think about Amsterdam, before all of this, and can’t believe that fucking can breed such bad results. C. meets me at the San Francisco station on our rest stop. I am still defending you. C. is still my friend. F. comes with her to say goodbye. This time, as I board the bus for L.A., I feel I am voluntarily committing myself to a concentration camp. The first night in L.A. at the Hotel Cecil, a death camp for the poor who live in the strip outside the wealthy. We get a room with a bath and no stopper. A room with numbers marked in black ink along the edge of the doorframe. Cigarette holes in the carpet and a TV chained to the ceiling. Here you try to fuck me again and can’t. It hurts you. You say we don’t fit. I never know if you mean physically or not and you won’t tell me. We fall asleep watching TV: a live wedding, a prayer drama with Raymond Burr and a policeman telling us about the latest criminals. The next day we are picked up and taken away to the hills, to E.’s house, to art, to lizards in the backyard. I feel privileged, just out of the death camp, then adjust quickly. The Governor lives down the road from E.’s house and two secret service men are always there. We sleep together in her house; I always try to sleep alone, you always follow me. Sunday night your cock is all bloody. You refuse to see a doctor. I phone B. and S. in Amsterdam and see blood on the phonebooth wall. An uncircumcized cock sometimes has that problem which is nameless in our litany. I have no one to get information from and am shy about asking W., a Dutchman in L.A., to explain why your cock is bloody. I taste blood in my mouth. More arguments with filmmakers about film. The East Coast vs. the West Coast. We play chess, you make me play. I write long letters that I can’t send; you send yours to your wife. I wonder what E. thinks, we’re up all night. I try to stop you from biting me on the cunt. Neither of us wants to have orgasms now; and even with a bloody cock, you still try to fuck me. You tell me over and over how much p88 V9N3 1982

I sleepwalk through the next day. You ask me if I want to talk about last night and I say no. I mean it. I have no choice. I have nothing to say. Later that night you talk to me about your wife, the film co-op. I listen and say things, then go to sleep in my niece’s room. I avoid you. The dog gets hit by a car. I see her go under the wheels. It’s a disaster the whole family can share. The dog survives. I don’t want to leave my sister’s house. Back on the bus with you, I know I don’t stand a chance. 56 hours to NYC. We’re almost broke.

I land in Amsterdam and J. meets me. The first time I see you we meet with M. You’re cruel and M. is shocked. He says he thought you’d never treat me like that. You phone me and call me Toots, say you don’t understand what’s wrong. The last time I set eyes on you we do some film business together. I’m trying to get out clean. You drive me to S. and B.’s and tell me you love me and that I don’t understand. I look at you and ring my friends’ doorbell and go inside. One year later, I’m in NYC and you write me that you nearly killed yourself in a car crash and now you’re even more beautiful. I don’t believe you.

PHOTO: E. GARNET

CRONEN B E R G ELDON GARNET and JAMES DUNN talk to

DAVID CRONENBERG.

David Cronenberg is a Toronto filmmaker with an international reputation for making horror films which are cinematically artful, thematically insightful, and very scary. He has been described by John Carpenter (The Fog, Halloween) as being “better than the rest of us put together.” His early features — Rabid and Shivers — established him as a director who could succeed at the box-office. His more recent films — The Brood and Scanners — have been included on the Top Ten lists by two critics from the Village Voice. Cronenberg’s latest film, Videodrome, which he is currently editing, is scheduled to be released in August.

EG: What’s your fascination with genre? DC: Well, I’m not particularly fascinated with genre. I don’t go to see every horror or science fiction film made. It’s just that when I start to write, that’s what comes out. The fact that most of my films are in the horror genre is just an accident. It’s just what happens. I don’t know if Videodrome, which I just did, is going to be classified as a horror film or not. I don’t think of it as a horror film at all, but it does have particular aspects of horror. I like other kinds of films as much as I like sci-fi or horror films. It’s not like a John Carpenter situation, where he wanted to make science fiction and horror films since he was two years old. For me, it just seems to be what happens when I sit down to write. EG: Where do you get your ideas? DC: I think they come into my typewriter. It’s a very valuable typewriter. They claw their way out. JD: Do you think all your ideas come out of personal experiences — a fear that you have, or something that’s inside you? DC: Well, not necessarily fears. All my films are very

personal. When I was a kid there was a magazine called “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” and I preferred it to “Astounding Science Fiction,” which was really hard core sci-fi — very technology oriented and interested in extrapolating future trends in science and technology. That never really interested me. I always liked the other magazine better because it was on more of a fantasy level. By fantasy I don’t mean Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. I mean worrying more about the metaphorical value of your imagery rather than worrying about whether it was likely to be accurate. It turns out that a lot of the things which I’ve invented are things that in fact are being developed. But that wasn’t my intention, and I’m not the kind of person who in 20 years would say: “See, in Rabid I anticipated this kind of plastic surgery.” That is not what I am trying to do. So when I talk about the genre — and we are talking about two that overlap, science fiction and horror — it functions on a level of imagery and metaphor that is very deep, very primal. And by its very nature, the audience goes into a horror film with this willing suspension of disbelief that you don’t get if 1982 V9N3 p89

you go into a film which announces itself as being very realistic. EG: When you write, do you develop your metaphors to control the audience, to control their psyche or their emotional state? DC: I don’t really do anything with that sense of control. I am not a very calculating filmmaker. It is exciting when the audience jumps when you figured they would and when they laugh at a joke. But to me, that’s not any more calculating than a poet who seeks to evoke a response, however ambiguous it may be. So I really don’t think of it in terms of calculation. To me that’s too mechanistic. EG: So you’re not that conscious of evoking fear in the audience? DC: No. EG: Carpenter uses music very heavily to evoke certain emotions. DC: If you saw the two of us in separate editing rooms or separate mixes, I’m sure you’d hear us say: “I want a heavy music sting on here because there isn’t enough punch on the screen, and I think a little sting would give it a little jump … a little punch.” That’s the nuts and bolts of making a movie. I mean, you use music to evoke different dimensions in a scene, and by putting rock music on one scene and orchestral minor mode music on the same scene, you get a very different scene — that’s craftsmanship, that’s something else. JD: Do you think that your process is always visceral? Music might be craftsmanship, but it also seems visceral. DC: No, I am talking about knowing how you’re making a film. I think I am very intuitive and visceral in my approach to filmmaking. It doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the more technical aspects of filmmaking. I was just reading a long interview with Paul Shrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, and his approach to writing is astonishing. First he breaks down his film in page numbers — “Okay, these are the characters. This is the information we have to convey. I think that is a page and a quarter.” And he gets his whole script that way. But it is a strange approach for me. I’ve never written anything on demand, so I wouldn’t know how I would react under those circumstances. For me there must be that visceral, intuitive, instinctive connection or else it’s just not right. And it’s very tangible, it’s not at all abstract. When it’s not there, I feel it. EG: Do you allow your personal feelings to dictate your metaphors, or do you let the incidents in the film dictate the metaphors? DC: It all works together, and at different times different things take precedent. You try to think of the film as a whole, finally. Even if the film started as just one image, you may end up with a film that may no longer include that image. That’s very conceivable, because somehow it has taken on its own life, and it has squeezed out the original image. It turns out that the dynamics between p90 V9N3 1982

the characters and the narrative have carried you somewhere else. For Videodrome, I’m not perceiving the editing as a process of sticking the stuff together that I shot. I’m still writing the film, I’m still creating it as I edit. It can end a lot of different ways in the editing room. EG: Do the metaphors in your films become an analogy for political content or for some other type of statement? DC: Not consciously. No. I’ve talked about myself as being very apolitical, but in a sense I’m not, and in fact some of the amusing political interpretations of my films by French critics turn out, in a strange way, not to be inaccurate. For instance, Shivers takes place in a very middle class hi-rise where this disease first starts to spread. So they said I was talking about the malaise of the bourgeoisie. At first I laughed, and then I said, “Well, they’re not wrong.” Experientially, when I lived in that same tower, I felt the sickness and I wanted to get out. We all hated it by the time we finished shooting, and it made me want to run screaming naked through the halls and attack someone, just to shake up the incredibly stifling claustrophobia that was there. So I would say that there are political dynamics to my films, but in terms of politics as I think of it, which is, “Who do you vote for?” I’m not political. They still involve concepts like fascism and democracy but more on a personal level rather than any larger order. JD: What triggers the ideas for your films? DC: The films start in many different ways, sometimes literally from a dream image. Videodrome started from a neat little plot possibility, and then it went totally bananas from there into some totally different space. Even I didn’t anticipate where I was going to end up when I started it. It started with a very straightforward little movie of the week premise — it could have been a neat little thriller if we had taken the opening premise and followed it somewhere else. So it doesn’t seem to matter where it starts. JD: Your method seems very suitable for horror in the sense that it is a subconscious means of filmmaking. As opposed to Costa Gravas, who starts out with a conscious political premise, any political statements that you make seem to come out of your subconscious dealings. I get the same feeling from Romero. I’m sure he never thought of the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead as an overt political symbol. DC: He has a very practical, pragmatic approach to filmmaking, and I don’t think he thought of the shopping mall as an attack on the consumer society until afterwards. I don’t have much respect for the other way of going about it. If you are going to illustrate a point, I think a documentary film is the way to do it, not a fiction film. And even Costa Gravas isn’t making those films anymore. I heard that his last film was a romantic comedy. EG: Did you ever consider making a musical? DC: Not a musical. EG: What are your fantasies, then?

DC: I’m making exactly the kind of film I want to make right now. I have a musical number in Videodrome, a stage show with six dancers and costumes, which I enjoyed doing. But you’ll eventually see that it is thematically tied in to the rest of the film. There is a lot of humour in most of my films, and in Videodrome, particularly, there is a lot of humour that isn’t even black humour, as in Shivers or Rabid. I really like this movie. I think it’s going to be really good. And rather than thinking of it as a genre piece, I think that it is going to be very hard to categorize, because it is so sexy. I think it’s nice to evade the genre. JD: Do you see a difference between sci-fi and horror? DC: Oh yes, there is a huge difference between sci-fi and horror. Science fiction is concerned with anticipating future trends in technology, sociology and psychology. JD: Where does a film like Alien fit in? DC: Alien is a horror film. It is not one iota a science fiction film. The fact that it has space ships means nothing. That’s all art direction. It’s basically the ghost in the haunted house or the monster in the boat. It’s an old, old story. The trappings are different, but it’s not anticipating the future. Alien is a horror film as far as I’m concerned. JD: Recently it has struck me that science fiction seems more concerned with societal problems, whereas horror still seems more rooted to the individual. It seems that horror always fixates on the point at which the body becomes separate from the mind. That’s why it hits us at a gut level. DC: Yeah, that’s pretty broad, but I suppose it’s true. I think sci-fi is an entire approach that’s really different. Even a movie like Zero Population Growth is a classic example of taking something that everybody was talking about in those days and saying, “Well, what would happen if it suddenly became law that you couldn’t have children. What would that be like?” That’s very much a sci-fi approach to that kind of material. You could take the same material and make a horror film out of it, but I think your approach and your concerns would be very different. EG: Are you afraid of death; what are your fears? DC: I’m afraid of just about the same things that most people are afraid of. I’m not particularly paranoid, but I think most people look upon aging and death with some apprehension. Actually, aging so far hasn’t been too bad at all. I’ve rather enjoyed it, but I can see where it might get to the point where I wouldn’t. And death ... I think that philosophy, religion and science all devote a lot of energy to death. I worry about the future of my children, and other very middle class things. EG: No heavy nightmares. DC: No, very rarely. JD: So many people have written, “Well, Cronenberg’s making money, but is he making art?” DC: That’s been turning around lately. There is a certain

critical recognition that’s coming down. It’s hard, but if you have to choose between: 1) critical recognition without being able to make any more movies because you can’t find backing for them; or 2) some kind of commercial success first and critical recognition later, I’d rather do the latter. As someone said about acting, “If you’re not acting, you’re not an actor.” I don’t feel quite the same way, because to take on a picture for me means a year and a half to two years, especially if I’m writing it myself. I make sure it’s something I can live with for that long, because if I don’t enjoy it and don’t have any feeling for it, I’d have to make an awful lot of money to make two years of wasted energy worthwhile. EG: Do you feel you might compromise and change your films in any way to make them more commercially viable? DC: It depends. Here you are, you’re going to show your movie to an audience — after all you are making a movie for an audience — and you sit there feeling that the pace is wrong, that it’s really slow and boring in the middle. As soon as I feel that, I want to do something about it. It’s not directly related to money, although the end result is money. Once you’ve shot it, you lose your objectivity, and you then look to an audience to give you a response so that you can re-experience the movie. If somebody comes up after a screening and I ask, “Did you understand this,” and they say, “No, I completely missed that,” then I get worried, especially if it’s someone who is not an idiot. So you have to ask, “Is it my fault or did this guy fall asleep? Why didn’t he get it?” And that’s where the nuts and bolts come in. If one of my movies doesn’t work to my satisfaction, I try to make it work better. I’ve never felt that I’ve compromised myself in any of my movies. If some of them aren’t good, then it’s my fault. EG: Do you ever feel you have a social responsibility to include certain notions or ideas in your movies? DC: Never. To me that has absolutely nothing to do with making movies. In fact, I went on CBS to talk to some Moral Majority types about responsibility as a filmmaker — “Do you think your films are making people depraved and psychotic?” I wish! I only wish they were that effective. But in fact, as a filmmaker and an artist I don’t feel that I have any social responsibility whatsoever; I think the two things are totally antithetical. As a citizen I have social responsibility. As a parent I have social responsibility. As a filmmaker I have social responsibility, but only in the sense that I make a contract with Universal Pictures to deliver a picture at a certain time, and I have to fulfill that contract. As an artist, I have no social responsibilities of any kind. JD: What about the people in New York who made snuff films? Wasn’t that the point at which the question of social responsibility became very clear to a lot of people. DC: No, I don’t think so. In the first place, it’s very

interesting because Videodrome is about snuff TV. At least, that’s what the opening premise is all about. But in fact, I’ve never met anyone who knew for sure that he had seen an actual snuff film, because how could you really tell? I mean, I could make a film, and I would defy you to tell me that it is or is not in fact actual death that you are seeing. So how do you know? I think the original snuff films were fake. Of course, if you kill somebody, that has nothing to do with filmmaking. You’ve killed someone. You’re a murderer. And that has nothing to do with art or filmmaking. So to me, that’s a whole other question and one that comes up a lot with documentary filmmaking. The morality of documentary filmmakers has been called into question from time to time. I read an interesting article about a film in which the cameraman actually gave the order for execution. He said, “‘Wait a minute, don’t shoot that guy,” — this is in Africa during some war — “I ran out of film. Wait till I reload.” So the guys waited, he reloaded and said, “Okay, now shoot.” So that takes you pretty heavily into the realm of morality and social consciousness. But in making a fiction film, your relationship with your actors and what you ask them to do — your morality as a voyeur while you are on set telling people to do a mock or a real love scene, or asking an actor to do something dangerous — functions on a different level of responsibility, one that is unconnected to the effect which a film has on society. To me, when you’re talking about a snuff film, you’re talking about a film that

knows that it is showing sexuality and death together as something which people want to see and may possibly want to emulate. JD: That charge of emulation has been thrown at you. DC: I’d like to see somebody make somebody else’s head blow up just through his own use of mental ... EG: I’m getting a headache already. JD: I like your defences against those charges, specifically, your notions about how horror films function socially, confronting people with the things that really bother them, their most disturbing fears. DC: Technically my position is that I feel I don’t have to defend my films in terms of social responsibility. Beyond that I do feel they have a function. These dark things of human nature will be expressed in one way or another, and film is one way to do it. JD: It seems that horror is a way for people to work through things for which there is no other outlet other than to kill somebody or to go through something really horrible. EG: Basically, your question is, “Is the film catharsis or emulation?” DC: Well it’s obviously not emulation because ... JD: People don’t go out and suck other people’s blood after seeing vampires. DC: No, people don’t do that. I think the question of emulation really has more to do with children, and that is a whole other area. I don’t believe in censorship for adults who are not insane and who are therefore licensed 1982 V9N3 p91

to drive cars and other potential instruments of death. I think that there should be categorization, and that there should be censorship for children partly by the state and partly by parents. Yes, I think there are movies that should be banned for children, but there’s got to come an age where you can see anything you want and society doesn’t tell you what that is. I just can’t see Mary Brown telling me what I can’t see. All those arguments are so ludicrous. It varies so incredibly from country to country — the things that are censored and the things that are considered dangerous. JD: What about catharsis? Do you think your films

nature of the life force and what it is to be human and alive. Therefore, in art and fiction you are interested in the extremes, because they illuminate things even though you might not want to live in those extremes. That’s why I’m interested in people who are obsessed, or who drive themselves to extremes, even though I don’t feel that I’m obsessed. I’m obsessive from time to time in my work, but there are a lot of accountants who are obsessive, so that’s not necessarily creative. I think of human beings as being a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical — both of those things having their say at every moment that we’re alive, both of those

really work that way? DC: Oh, yes. EG: Is it personally cathartic or is it cathartic for the audience? DC: Both. It’s cathartic for me in the sense that any creative act is cathartic by its very nature. Making my films is certainly cathartic. But it’s not an obvious thing, because there are a lot of people who work in the film business to whom it’s just work. EG: In some of your movies, like Scanners and Shivers, you seem to have this force coming from within that motivates and drives your characters. DC: I think in some ways I’m trying to deal with the

things always in play, completely intermixed in some ways. I start thinking that what I’m doing isn’t really a horror film at all. It’s some kind of metaphysical passion play or something, and that’s why I don’t think of it as necessarily being part of a genre. The approach of people like Carpenter or Romero, I think, is much more down to earth and pragmatic — to make a movie and scare people. That’s fine, but it’s not the way I approach it. I don’t set out to make a movie that is going to scare people. I’ve never done that. EG: You don’t set out to manufacture fear? DC: Never. Not at all. I didn’t think of Scanners as a scary movie. People were really freaked out by its overriding

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paranoia, but I didn’t think Scanners was either suspenseful or scary in that “jumping out of the corner and making you twitch” sense. EG: What about The Brood — those growths that appear outside the body? DC: It’s hard to show growths inside the body unless you start cutting people open. I think that people alter themselves. It’s in the nature of human beings to try and change themselves and to change their environment when there is no natural human environment. Downtown Chicago may be man’s natural environment. It’s not the woods, I’ll tell you that. Go out in the woods and see how well you like it; as soon as you get there you start to make changes, you make clearings so that the insects aren’t there, you try to do something so you can be warm when you want to be and cool when you want to be. Humans are unlike most animals in that we not only alter our environment, but we alter ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our modes of perception. As one of my characters mentions in Videodrome, “There’s nothing real outside our perception of reality,” which is an old philosophical saw, but it turns out to be true. Humans are constantly altering the world, so I’m taking it to extremes to illuminate it. I show what happens when people start to change their bodies, growing new organs that do other things. When it goes wrong, these things are pathological; when it goes right, it’s like Scanners, where you have new brains that can do new things that the old ones couldn’t do. EG: Your films themselves seem to be working towards altering our mode of perception. DC: Well, that’s an interesting point, because when people ask me what I’d like my films to do, or what I would like to contribute to film, I tell them it’s my own sensibility. I’d like to crystallize a sensibility which would add a different response to social situations and phenomena in general — a Cronenbergesque, Cronenbergundian sensibility. EG: What would that be? DC: It’s still developing; it’s not over. Certain friends of mine cut clippings out, and they say, “This is definitely a Cronenberg situation or a Cronenberg image.” That pleases me, because it means that it is possibly happening. When you go with your little creative threads, your vision starts to emerge, and it’s a sort of undervision — a force that makes things coherent in a way that they tend not to be in the real world. JD: Do you ever worry about inhibiting or incapacitating people with your films? DC: Desensitizing them you mean? JD: No. But instead of confronting people with their innermost fears, you end up inhibiting those fears that, if untouched, will explode in some form or another. For myself, I find that there are certain fears that are so latent in me that I find it hard to even watch horror movies. DC: Yeah? What? JD: Mostly fears about myself. I think the monster is

never really something outside ourselves, as a lot of people like to think. It’s something inside of ourselves. I fear a lot of qualities about myself, and those qualities manifest themselves as monsters. For instance, a psychic once told me that I was really a person of excess and that I had learned to control that. So all my fears of the monster are really fears of being innately greedy, totalitarian, or other horrible things, and horror movies bring out a lot of those fears for me. I think there’s always a fine line between where fear is freeing you and where it’s imprisoning you. Repulsion is a good example of that. A lot of women who saw Repulsion couldn’t stay alone in their apartments for years afterwards, because they’d see hands coming out of the walls. To me, that fear had become incapacitating and, thereby, destructive to them. DC: That’s like people saying that they couldn’t take showers after they saw Psycho. That’s a small price to pay for the liberation of the unconscious. No one ever said that art wasn’t dangerous. And it’s the same with psychology. One of the things that Jung always stressed was that Jungian analysis was a dangerous thing; that it could, in fact, lead you to some very dangerous places, and not everybody should go there. It’s the same with a horror film. Robin Spry is a Canadian filmmaker who says he can’t see my movies, though he really wants to, because he gets too tense. Well, I don’t tell him he should, I don’t say he must. When people tell me, “I can’t take horror films because I get too tense and they make me crazy,” I say, “Great, don’t see them.” That’s why I say censorship is ridiculous, because I know very few people will walk into a film that overwhelms and shocks them. I don’t think anybody walked into Scanners thinking they weren’t going to see violence or were going to see a movie that didn’t involve tension and angst of some kind. I think it’s important that films be advertised honestly in terms of what they are. Given that it says, “Warning, this film has violence and bad language and sex and rat fucking,” you know not to see it if you don’t like those things. Everybody is different, and there’s some people whose sensibilities are such that they can’t cope with the energy that’s released in a horror film. It’s certainly interesting that it raises questions for you, but I wonder why contemporaries of yours have no trouble. JD: I think they must be more at one with themselves, somehow. DC: Maybe, but I’ve gotten much more sensitive to movies involving children in peril since I’ve had kids. I used to be able to take that very easily, and in The Brood I do it myself. But I’m much less likely to watch something that deals with children in peril now, as before I was not crazy about movies which put animals in peril. I’d find it easier to see a movie in which a psychotic killer slashed up teenage girls than one in which a psychotic killer went and killed dogs because of the reality factor of animals. Animal actors are not the

same as human actors, who supposedly know what they’re doing. Right now, I’m just not interested in confronting my fears about my children’s well-being, because I’m aware that I’m worried about violence being directed towards my children. So even though I don’t expose myself to it, it’s not that I can’t accept it. JD: I think that extreme empaths tend to have a great deal of trouble with horror films, because there are so many tense and disturbing situations created. All their channels get overloaded. DC: Sure. If you come out of horror films with your ulcers bleeding into your shoes, then I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to see them. JD: What kind of an effect do you want your films to have on an audience? Do you want them to somehow become liberated from a particular fear or phobia? DC: I don’t know, my reactions while I’m making a film are very complex. Even in the creation of something horrible — something that would be terrible if it happened to me or to someone I knew in real life — there’s a certain delight in creating something because it’s for a film. Mark Prent must have a terrific high when he’s creating his monsters, because it’s a creative act and it’s exciting; that in itself is a lot of positive juice. I think that people should come out of my films exhilarated — not depressed. I’ve seen the odd, strange film that wasn’t depressing, yet was a bad film because it was just such a downer. Day of the Locusts was like that for me. It was a bad film, not because it was depressing, but because something about it made me not want to see films or make films anymore. I’ve seen films that are depressing yet exhilarating, for instance The Holocaust. For me, something that’s really powerful and artistically right is somehow never totally depressing. Tragedies were never depressing, and they were also supposed to be cathartic. Technically, that thought of Hamlet or King Lear is real depressing, from beginning to end it’s just bad stuff piled on bad stuff. When my films are working right, there should be a lot of juice and exhilaration being generated. I think that’s true of the genre as well. EG: I can’t see musicals myself. DC: I hear Pennies from Heaven is a very depressing musical. I want to go see it. JD: I have trouble watching melodramas lately. I get too tense. DC: The news really bothers me. I try not to read the newspaper, because that really gets me down. That’s not redeemed by artistic merit of any kind. EG: So what’s your next movie? DC: I don’t know, but I can feel it bubbling away inside of me. It’s a very exciting phase, because I have no idea what it is at all. I just know there’s something there. JD: Thinking about the hi-rise in Shivers, it seems to me that the rationale behind that film is to shatter middleclass complacency. I think that all the great horror films, such as Hitchcock’s The Birds, have keyed in on this. DC: I don’t think that’s unique to horror. I think it’s just

the tone of horror which is unique. Any artist is always pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, or saying, “This is reality as I perceive it.” I think that’s one of the general provinces of art to do that. JD: It seems one of the particular elements of horror is to try to control our emotions in society — certain emotions are appropriate in certain places. The whole reason for needing a Frankenstein is that we have a raw emotional being inside of us who doesn’t work by logic — who is purely emotional — and we’re very afraid to let that Frankenstein out. Horror films force us to confront that emotional part of ourselves. DC: What did you say your upbringing was? One of the things that horror reveals is the reality of death. I think art in general reveals things to people which either they don’t perceive themselves, or would not perceive unless it’s crystallized in one object, whether it be a sculpture or whatever. It’s not necessarily negative stuff, but horror does deal with negative stuff because that’s what it’s about. JD: Do you think it would be possible to make a positive horror film? DC: Sure. Far be it for me to say that death has no positive aspects. I think that death has some very positive aspects. EG & JD: Like what? DC: Well, it’s one way of getting away from it all. People do commit suicide and there’s reason for it. I find suicide fascinating because it’s an interesting decision in terms of what to do with your life. I don’t know that I would want to live forever. Imagine what a problem it would be if people lived forever, aside from all the silly stuff about over-population and not enough food. I think there’s reason for constant regeneration, including the human race. When you have children you notice it — you’re not as afraid of death when you have children. I’m not thinking of immortality here, but it was always interesting to study history because of the way kings and emperors were always totally obsessed with the question of the succession of their blood. It seems that Shakespeare’s tragedies never end with death, but with some sort of renewal and regeneration. So it is that the new king or new order always gets a little bit to say before the play is over and gives you the feeling that things are going to continue, having been cleansed. So while death is not completely negative, it’s a huge reality that people have to deal with. There’s that whole mystic idea that life is nothing more than preparation for death, and there are some societies and cultures in which the way in which you die is extremely important. In North America, this approach seems strange, because it is such a death-denying culture. To a North American, Japanese culture seems very death-obsessed. But then you start to realize they’re not wrong; that there’s something to that which is innate to human beings. It’s not such a strange way to approach life at all — to be that concerned with death. There are a lot of mysteries to be dealt with. 1982 V9N3 p93

FEAR OF THE ALBANY MALL JAMES WINES/SITE

It’s the Rockefeller project up in Albany, where the government sits. It’s the quintessential victory of fascism. In a sense, it’s what Hitler’s dream was about — the totally ordered space where pedestrians keep their eyes trained on the pavement. You feel as though you’re being watched from massive structures. The windows are small enough and reflective enough that they become millions of eyes which make you focus on the endless pavement. There is a sense of being lost in the space with no identity, and a feeling of helplessness.

The fascist dream was a mammoth urban space, out of scale. The Greeks were never out of scale; they always dealt with human scale. The Hitler idea was to take the classic or the Roman and magnify it to a scale that was absurd. Mussolini did the same thing. Or rather, both of them would have done the same thing if they’d had more time. Interestingly enough, the Albany Mall is that achievement. When you scratch corporate capitalists, you find they have pretty much the same idea. They want your eyes on the pavement; they don’t want too many diversions to and from work. In a sense, you are supposed to take that route, that passage from place of dwelling to place of performance, without dawdling along the way. This will ensure that there’s no way to commune in that space.

It’s situated right in the centre of the city. They tore down a whole neighbourhood, so all the poor people were dislocated. That’s always part of it — you have to dislocate. It’s just one concrete slab as far as the eye can see. There are massive, faceless towers on either side. They claim that people congregate and are happy there in the summer, but the truth of the matter is that people will accept anything they are given. Starving people will eat their own excrement to survive; this place is probably the equivalent of that. The people have no place to go; they are condemned to that choice. But in even the slightest inclement weather, they avoid it like the plague. They flee it.

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The first thing to do was to move the bed — not an easy job for a creaking windmill of a man, battering at the bed with his shrunken arms, and sans one hand to boot. And, my old body aside, there was the bed itself, the oak and iron fact of what they had given me to sleep in, borne up on four quartz balls grasped in griffons’ claws, holding its place against me. But I grunted through most of that night, the one after the invitation came, then, defeated, crumpled in a heap of old flesh on the floor, fretting about all the games I did not play which would have given me the strong arms I needed for the job. I fretted — I am destined for the fretters’ circle in hell, I know it — but then I noticed, from my vantage on the floor, what had escaped my eye earlier: the space between the tiles and the bed’s iron undergirding was larger than suspected, so perhaps the bed would not have to be moved after all. I gauged the gap at about three hands, just big enough for the old ferret’s body I haul around to slip into and work within, just. My hatred of games, and my hardships, had been all for the good, I concluded: had I possessed muscles larger than the strings I use to make the engine work, or the fat that comes to more successful men, I should never have been able to pull myself under the bed, and begin the work I had to do. First, prying up the tiles under the bed, slower to do with only one hand and a stump, but I had time; and the tiles came up, square by square, and were neatly stacked by the wall, in the shadow the bed cast. Then my five quick monkey’s fingers, aided by what spoons I had been able to cadge from my benefactors, began the more tiresome work of picking and putting aside the crumbs and clods of gray loam — carefully now, lest the crumbs reveal to friendly visitors what I was up to. I spooned it all out, this dirt, and the shards of pottery and such dropped by untidy denizens of this cellar before it was paved, and disposed of it all by night in the squalid garden they had given me. Thus was my hiding place dug, where I lie now, swaddled against the cold ground in blankets my benefactors will not miss, writing in the thin light that leaks through the contrivance of sticks and tiles covering my oblong hole, here, just under the edge of the iron and oaken bed they gave me. The soft lead hisses on the page, and I shall have to stop when my benefactors, the police, come for me, and call my name, and bring me the beautiful costume — I shall stop then, and wait until they have given up wondering why I am not sitting on the bed’s edge, all washed, clean and happy. And when they are gone, I shall go on writing in my hiding hole in this left-hand, looking-glass scrawl, until I judge it safe to come out, or until they find me. And if they find me, will I lose this clawed left hand, and be left, like certain cripples, with only jaws to hold my pencil, until they take my old jaws away? I should not like to be forced to find some new vise of flesh or bone for my pencil. Toes? No, not toes — too easily pruned away. Armpit? Anus? Some yogic contortion of the neck and shoulder? I wanted to ask such a question of the old Friend of the People on the day he was arrested and thrust into the vast stone death-cell where I, and all the others, waited for our ends. The police — the same little men with oiled hair and dapper shoes who had done the Friend of the People’s bidding, snatching prisoners from their beds to feed the Machine — the police now held the Friend and Hero by a collar, like a fat old dog, while one of their number read a little document setting us free.

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At first, the gray heaps of the condemned, and I among them, could not fathom it, thought it a comic entertainment, given us by the People’s Friend on our dooms-day. As the official read on, the truth began to leak through the shroud of my despair: in the night which I believed would be my last, the secret wheel at the heart of things had turned, raising our fortunes and bringing low the Friend (now the Monster), who was to be the death cell’s only guest — this thick, absurd little man standing haughtily apart from us in his dog collar, eyes bright and black as nuggets of coal, stomach still ample beneath his robin-egg blue coat. The gray rags rose and began to shuffle past him, and out the door, spitting at him as they went, yet he did not flinch, or show any signs even of noticing. For my own part, I tugged at the sleeve of his beautiful blue coat, now smudged with blood and gunpowder, and I whispered: Monster! When you had my right hand cut off, it flopped to the torture chamber’s floor, and lay there cupped and quiet, like a white, bloody frog. Before I could ask him my question, the police, my liberators, pulled me away from the thick little man and took me to another dark corner of that prison, where I was given a block of bitter soap, fresh towels and clothes, and instructions to wash and clean myself. From this corner of the state’s infinite prisons, I was trundled, blinking and stumbling, into the sunlit stadium, and up on to the great dias where the new People’s Friend was addressing deputies of the nation. He turned to me, this corpulent man with a face as gray and coarse as concrete, and called me to his side. He poured a verbal libation of fire on the dreadful name of the Monster, then commanded the deputies of the nation to cheer me, their ally in the great struggle whose precise nature wasn’t clear to me, since the deputies’ cheers drowned out the People’s Friend when he named it. Grateful nonetheless, I

THE VICTIMS’ BALL p96 V10N1 1982

Following the execution of Robespierre on July 28, 1794, and the cessation of the Terror initiated by him, a number of jubilant bals des victims were held in Paris. A victims’ ball is featured in a memorable passage of Abel Gance’s film, Napolean. This fiction may be read as a criticism of Gance’s cinematic hymn to great men; or it may not.

v

John Bentley Mays for ANTANAS SILEIKA

pushed up into the air my stump, with its two short lengths of bone sticking out like pan-pipes, and waved it while the cheering went on and on. Then the people were silenced, and my Friend promised me a pension and a medal, and a sash to wear it on, and he called me a patriot. A sash! I was taken back in one of the Friend’s black cars to my cellar room, where I found my pencil. I speculated for days about that sash. My writing may have been ugly — the looping, backward script of a hand learning to write — but what I wrote were lovely things: of state occasions in the future, when I should be called upon to appear wearing, emblazoned across my chest like a heraldic device, the sash the People’s Friend had given me; the immunity ‘it would give me from the jeers of children, when I wore it in the narrow streets outside the room. Though humped like a seamstress from too many years at my desk, and wizened from my studies, no longer would I be taunted as a scribbler, a magpie who picks and steals bright words from the world to put into my damp nest below the street — not I, who would be adorned with the sash of the Peo-ple’s Friend.

At last my pension began to arrive by post, each Monday. But where was the sash? After several Mondays spent waiting for the postman to bring me the gift, I decided to go to the People’s Friend and tell him: with your pension, I am able to afford skate with browned butter once each week, and, every other week, a portion of beef with gherkin and beetroot salad; but I was promised a gift greater than skate and salad. So on a certain Tuesday, I put on my long scarf and my rusty, long black coat, my best, and steamed out the door like an ancient black train, and up the moldy stairs that lead from my room to the level of the street. I surged angrily from the last stone step onto the sidewalk, busily rehearsing my speech inside my head – until splashing into a brook of blood, running down the gutter of my street. Pulling my shoes from that red, sticky tide, into which they had gone almost ankle deep, I noticed it was not an ordinary draining: it pulsed and ebbed, broadening and hastening with each coarse shout of a crowd gathered above, out of sight, in the direction of the city square, then thinning when the shouts died away. Curious as to what this might mean, I followed the blood upstream,

1982 V10N1 p97

through the twisting streets of my shabby district, to the open square where the mob milled like a single animal on great padded paws, opening its mouth to roar each time the Machine nipped off another head, uncapping for an instant the spring that fed the red stream I followed. The damned stood quietly at the bottom of the pedestal on which the Machine stood, but the Friend of the People did not seem to notice them, so intent was he on the whizzing descent of the blade, the quick crack of bone, the quivering and wild squirting of blood. Friend! I shouted to him, clawing aside the mob in my attempt to gain his attention. Friend, I shouted again, waving my stump so he would recognize me. Where are the sash and medal you promised me? He did not see me, but I did not go unnoticed by the mob. Aristocrat, one woman snarled. Atheist! screamed another, and more curses followed upon these, until a large gaggle was quite distracted from the spectacle of the Machine, and I began to be afraid. But, just when I thought I would be delivered to the mob’s wild snatching and tearing, a squad of policemen with oiled hair and dapper shoes pushed their way through the crowd like a blade passing through soft tissue and muscle, and placed me under arrest as an enemy of the Friend of the People. Miserable and in chains once again, I was thrust into the dim prison beneath the city to await trial — a place familiar to me, dim and huge, where the doomed drifted and moaned like wraiths until they were taken away, or murdered before our eyes as warnings. At first, most of us were blasphemers of the People’s Friend. But there were not enough of us, it would appear, so the police began to bring in others — the diseased and dying and mad, children who stared dumbly at their hands and old women whistling stupid tunes through their drool. On the good days, some of us — why some, not others, not myself, I cannot tell — were taken away quietly and fed to the Machine. On other days, however, a corner of that squalid room would be cleared, and the mob would be let in by the police to have their way, and execute justice on those who somehow had become criminals by squirming out from under the universal laws of reason. Armed with hatchets and iron bars, our tormentors stalked the heaps of criminals and lunatics and dim-witted children, electing one at a time to be dragged into the arena, then clubbed and hacked to death. When the defenders of the People’s Friend tired of their sport, they dropped their tools, leaned against the heap of naked, slippery flesh, and gorged themselves on the wine and cakes brought them by the police, who otherwise stayed quite clear of the stench and filth of our apartment. But the more our tormentors killed, the more the police brought. Neither the murderous Machine, which throbbed like a great heart at the city’s centre, nor the less tidy methods of our visitors could consume the fresh hordes of consprators, blasphemers, paralytics, free-thinkers, cripples, maniacs, and eccentrics being carted from every district of the city and piled into our midst, to await the pleasure of our visitors, or the feeding-time of the Machine. Then one day the police came in and clubbed to death our tormentors, heaping them up in a well-lit corner. A tiny policeman, who was helped to the top of that heap of slimy flesh by his comrades, read a long and florid document saying that the will of the people had been expressed at last, and the Beast had been cast down from his high place. The days of horror were over, he told us, dispelled like fog by the rising sun of the People’s new and more true Friend. He decreed our freedom, we who had been damned by the Beast. And death to all who sought to harm us! From my place in the square, I watched as the Beast, who had not given me my sash and medal, was marched to the Machine and there destroyed. His body danced a wild, last dance when the blade fell, and his heart expelled his bitter, black blood in great arcing spurts over the crowd. And so they all died, all who had served him, except the police, of course, who later presented to us the

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People’s new Friend. He shone, as though made of thin paper and lit from behind with dozens of candles, and he made very long speeches about justice and liberty. Not being one for speeches, preferring my own interminable writings to anything that comes tumbling *into my ears from a world I dislike, I inched my way to the back of the crowd, then slipped down the street to my room, tucked under the street still stinking of the blood shed by the Beast, now mingled with the blood of the Beast himself. My pencil danced on the paper that day, and in all the days that followed, as I watched out my dingy window the changes being rung. I saw the big cars, formerly banished by the Beast, now roaring by the window, carrying the dandies to their various delights. Even the cheap tarts of my district began to sport plumes and jewels like nothing anyone had seen since before the Monster or the Beast - in face, since before the secret wheel began to turn, changing everything. As it had been, so it was again, I found: the actors played the streetcorners, juggling cabbages stained with red ink and calling them aristocrats’ heads — or did they say democrats’ heads? would it have made any difference? — to the great delight of all the children. Wiser now, I watched, and wrote down everything I saw, and was at peace again. Then the invitation came, edged in silver and blue, and bearing at the top in deep silver stamp the name and honorifics of the new Friend of the People. The cream card announced a great and gala victims’ ball, to which I was invited by the Friend himself. Designed as a general celebration for all who had suffered at the hands of the Beast, it was scheduled to take place in the dungeons beneath the city, where we had been held and tormented. Ah, I clucked to myself, so now they want me to dance for my liberator! Me, who creaks and wheezes, they want for his entertainment, this incandescent man who glows like a lantern and has won the hearts of the People! I am sure it will be a fine occasion. The walls will be washed clean of the blood and other fluids of the former guests, so the happy dancers of the victims’ ball will not be reminded where they themselves are tending. (Yes, I have learned something: I have learned about the secret wheel, and the hungry god who turns it.) The new elite, once mere food for the Machine, will reign that night in that ball-room of delights, and hail the Great Democrat. But who will remind them of that more perfect democracy beneath their feet — the vast limepit under the prison’s floor, in which all the mutilated corpses of partisans, aristocrats, guilty and innocent, thugs and nuns have been indiscriminately swept? There are three things which are not touched by the hidden god’s turning wheel, though not one of the merry-makers will believe me on the night of the victims’ ball. The first is the Machine, which knows nothing of ideology, and refuses to discriminate among what sorts of food are brought it. The second is the police, whose ungreedy eyes watch everything without passion, even as my old eyes do; who, on the night of the victims’ ball, will be taking coats at the door, playing in the orchestra, providing the casks of wine to make all who have suffered forget their suffering — and watching, and waiting, always doing that, forever aware (even when others are not) that the Machine can go without food for many a day, and perhaps even be almost forgotten; but then it awakes and wants more, and then it will recruit some new servants to feed its appetite. If most of us tend to forget the Machine, the police would not. Would that they could forget me! Because I know they will not. I am here, in the shallow grave I have dug for myself, writing with this stubborn left hand, and this is the third thing that will not turn along with the god’s wheel. I too will think and watch, and listen to the little, hungry god at the dark heart of things, speaking to me of his plans for those who will dance at the victims’ ball — to me who has learned to listen, and found a place to do it, in my tiny grave beneath the tiles, listening and waiting in this darkness until the end.

THE

NEW

LLIANCE An Interview With Félix Guattari By Sylvère Lotringer

Félix Guattari is an anti-psychiatrist and political activist whose writing helped register the impact of May 1968 in France in programming terms. There with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, he published Anti-Oedipus (Vikin Press, 1977), Kafka and Rhizome (Minuit, 1975), Mille Plateaux (Minuit, 1980). He also published Psychanalyse et transversalit (Maspéro, 1972), La R volution mol culaire (Recherches, 1977) and L Inconscient machinique (Recherches, 1979). Felix Guattari took an active interest in the Italian “autonomist” movement and helped initiate the wave of free radios in France on the wake of “Radio Alice” in Bologna. Deleuze and Guattari’s On the Line (which includes “Rhizome”) will be published in January 1983 by Semiotext(e) as part of a new ‘Foreign Agents’ series. ` This interview by Sylvère Lotringer is the second of a series meant to explore “post-political” alternatives at a time when a potentially explosive international situation urgently requires new instruments of political analysis and forms of organization. Paul Virilio’s “The Suicidal State” was published in our last issue. Jean Baudrillard will be next. The translators are Arthur Evans and John Johnston.

I have never considered ideas, theories or ideologies as anything but instruments or tools ... As tools, they can be changed, borrowed, stolen, or used for another purpose. 1982 V10N2 p99

Sylvère Lotringer: There’s a lot of talk in France nowadays about the “end of politics” and the “end of the social.”1 But obviously the social has not evaporated, and politics continue each day to produce its effects. Yet there is a visible and growing disaffection with what until now has constituted the major political and ideological issue: the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs. The antagonism is once again hardening up, but it’s becoming increasingly clear for a great number of people that politics, in its best acceptation, no longer happens at that level. At what level, then, does it happen? And how can one reformulate political action in a time of decline for Marxism as an instrument of analysis, and in a time of bankruptcy for “real” socialism (socialism as it was implanted in the Eastern countries), as opposed to what some continue to call (optimistically perhaps) the “possible” socialism? Félix Guattari: I have never taken seriously the notion that we have outgrown Marxism and that we are now on the verge of a new political era. I have never considered ideas, theories or ideologies as anything but instruments or tools. Whence this expression, which has had a certain success and has since been used by Michel Foucault, that ideas and concepts are all part of a “tool box.” As tools, they can be changed, borrowed, stolen, or used for another purpose. So what does it mean, “the end of Marxism?” Nothing, or only that certain marxist tools are no longer working, that others are in need of review, that others continue to be perfectly valid. Hence it would be stupid to junk them all. All the more so in that re-evaluating these concepts means re-examining them — exactly as a re-evaluation of Einstein’s theories includes a re-examination of Newton’s. One can’t say that Newtonianism is totally dead. We are dealing here with a “rhizome” of instruments; certain branches of the rhizome collapse, little sprouts begin to proliferate, etc. For me, Marxism in general has never existed. I have sometimes borrowed or adapted some marxist concepts I could put to good use. Moreover, I like reading Marx. He’s a great writer. As an author he’s unbeatable. SL: And is politics unbeatable? FG: I’ve never confused politics with “politicking”. So a certain bankruptcy of politicians’ politics doesn’t upset in any way what I had tried to designate by the concept of “micro-politics.” Politics as I understand it, simply cannot be inscribed on the same surface at all. It concerns the relationship of large social groups to what surrounds them, to their own economic set-up, but it also concerns attitudes which run through the individual’s life, through family life, through the life of the unconscious, of artistic creation, etc. SL: The “post-political” era, then, is not the end of politics but rather its inscription on new surfaces. FG: It obviously does not mean that there’s no more politics. In the same way, when Jean Baudrillard says that there is an “implosion” of the social, I don’t even know what he’s talking about. Let’s simply say, that the social no longer expresses itself in the usual configuration of forces. SL: The confrontation no longer involves left and right, or the struggle for power between the workers’ movement and the bourgeoisie ... FG: Let’s not even talk about the workers’ movement! The situation has become much too complex to conceive of it in these terms. We now have to deal with immense masses of people who have nothing to do with any definition of the working class. I don’t mean that there are no more relationships of force, simply that the powers of the State, capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy can no longer handle the situation. We are currently in a phase of considerable turmoil, a phase one could call pre-revolutionary, although I’d rather define it as a “molecular” revolution where virtually no one can control anything anymore. SL: What exactly do you mean by “molecular revolution”? FG: Let’s take as an example the period of the end of the Ancien Régime in France and in Europe. It’s very difficult to get a clear picture of the situation. The fall of the Bastille is just the tip of the iceberg. The Ancien Régime was, and had been for several decades, a society well along the road to total collapse. A certain way of conceiving the law, religion, the body, filiation, the family, time, literature — all that was moving, changing, bursting at the seams. It took some time for the bourgeoisie to pull themselves together and redefine what could be their new grounds. And it took even more time for the workers’ movement to find something around which to gather and to establish itself in a relationship of force. SL: Now that the bipolar class relationships have ceased for the most part to be operative, and with them a good deal of the Marxist analysis of society, how does one go

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about recognizing the ways in which the molecular revolution takes form in our society? FG: First of all we must stop claiming that there is no more “social”’, that it no longer exists and that nobody gives a damn. We should at least try to recognize the nature of the phenomena we’re dealing with, try to recenter the focus where politics has migrated, where the situation has become critical, difficult to get a grasp on, to attach a meaning to. Secondly, we should put into question all of the so-called political instruments at our disposal, and that goes for the forces of world capitalism as well as for the forces of contestation still striving to establish another kind of society or purpose for life on this planet. What is complicated in all this, it seems to me, is that a sort of complementarity or symmetry has been established between a current of dogmatic Marxists and ossified social-democrats who are incapable of recognizing the radical change in the conditions of contemporary life on the one side, and on the other side a current that derives largely from the positions of Milton Friedman and others, and which tends to say, with the total fatalism of Voltaire’s Candide, that things being as they are, they cannot be otherwise, and that in any case capitalism is a better world — an analysis that can be disastrous in its applications, as we have seen in Chile. As analysis, however, it is not without merit since it implies a re-examination of questions one had thought resolved, to wit-that the working of the capitalist market, in spite of all its trash and its horrors, is less catastrophic than certain centralist planification which lead to total failure. We have seen rich agricultural countries collapse into total famine. As far as I am concerned that doesn’t mean, far from it, that we must choose between the two, but that capital itself doesn’t go to the end of its potential. It’s obviously not a question of making capitalism even more capitalist but of diverting and orienting in another way the powers of deterritorialization borne by capitalism. I am in favor of a market economy, but not one geared only on profit and its valorization of status, hierarchy and power. I am in favor of an institutional market economy, one founded on another mode of valorization. Instead of being more capitalistic, we want to make an anti-capitalism within capitalism. Thirdly, we should be ready to connect anything that could initiate a new sequence of events: snow-balling sequences, little glimpses of events which right away slap you in the face, like May 68 in France. Since no revolutionary war machine is at present available, and there is no way to get a good grip on reality, then the collective subjectivity is, so to speak, “tripping”: from time to time it has “flashes”. It sees things, and then it stops. There was the “autonomist” movement in Italy. Today, there is the collective vision of the threat of war facing Europe, of nuclear devastation. And then there is Poland — and we pass on to other things. But it’s all going to come back. All these flashes don’t mean that there is a total incoherence in this subjectivity, but simply that an effort is being made to perceive something which is not yet registered, inscribed, identified. I believe that the forces which in Europe now rally around the peace movement are the same which, in other phases, will rally around the ecological movement, around regionalist movements, around X number of components of what I call the molecular revolution. What I mean by that expression is not a cult of spontaneity or whatever, only the effort to not miss anything that could help rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society. SL: Was the Italian experience only a “flash”? FG: The Italian experience is linked to the fact that the structure of power in Italy was largely behind the times in relation to the other European nations. The economic integration has become so marked in Europe or in the world that the discrepancy with Italy became more and more striking. With the absence of a state economic policy, and the widespread embezzlement among Italian society, marginal sectors of the economy have paradoxically come to play a considerable role in the economic mechanism, including in the Italian balance of trade. Thus a kind of “society without a State,” to use the formula of Pierre Clastres, established itself in the middle of structures otherwise controlled from the point of view of state power. On top of that, while the left has slowly withered away in other European countries since the Second World War, a very powerful configuration of forces in favor of the left has maintained itself in Italy — although it has been totally incapable of being anything else than an adjacent accomplice of the Christian Democrats. In the meantime Italy has known a cultural effervescence without precedence characterized by an immense collective work of publication, of translations — which now make the Italians the most intellectual people on earth. It will take decades before we realize that our Age of Enlightenment is happening not in France nor in the United States or in Germany, but in Italy. And those people have a double-edged intelligence, both theoretical and practical, which consists of trying to grasp the seeds of mutation

at work in this society. Instead of considering their situation from a negative point of view, as a step backwards, as a lack to be remedied in the wave of modernization, through the integration of up-to-date industrial techniques, the Italians understood that what used to be considered a social deficiency could become one of the most positive characteristics for the future. After all, why not consider that a certain kind of discipline, of separation between work and leisure, between intellectual and manual work, etc. — has become pointless? Why not envision instead another form of valorization, which they call “auto-valorization”? Of course, they collided immediately head long with all of the conservative forces, beginning with the most conservative of them all: the Italian Communist Party. SL: The Italian experience has been rapidly sabotaged by the dogmatic oneupmanship of armed groups. It became easy for the Italian State to eradicate the Autonomia movement by accusing it of having been the “brains” behind the Red Brigades. FG: These schemes of armed struggle have had a disastrous effect on the movement. They furnished the powers-that-be with a perfect pretext for eliminating those mass structures of somewhat vague outline which constituted “internal colonies” capable of surviving by practicing passive-active modes of resistance, such as the “autoreductions.”2 SL: Do you think that the autonomist “flash” can resurface elsewhere? FG: It is bound to, for the need to reformulate the political stakes is felt not only within developed capitalist countries, but everywhere. In France, we’ve already benefited in small ways from the Italian experience: our fight for free radios took off directly from them. Union leaders in France learned from them that certain demands were no longer in tune with the present struggles ... That the Italian Autonomy was

SL: And the other elements of the Polish situation, the self-help aspect for example, doesn’t that tie in with certain intuitions of the Italians? FG: I certainly think so. But, from another angle, that ties in also with those weaknesses adjacent to all such intuitions. There’s a lesson to be learned from the events in Iran as well as in Italy or in Poland, if one paradoxically tries to nail down the synchronic traits of these three situations: there won’t be any lasting change so long as this type of struggle doesn’t go beyond national boundaries. It may prove to be very hard and painful, but I always considered preposterous the idea that the kind of revolution which occurred in Italy could have drastically altered the power situation there. SL: In a sense, the level of these struggles is always above or below that of national structures — in internal colonies and alternative networks, as in Germany,3 or bigger, trans-national crystalizations. FG: Yes, I agree. SL: How do you think these extremes could connect? FG: I’m afraid they won’t until more drastic situations develop. I’m fairly optimistic about the prospects for political and social action: I find recent revolutionary crises much more mature and promising, much richer in possibilities of expression everywhere. I fear, however, we still have to go through catastrophic crises before we get there. I believe that both the East and the West are going to experience military dictatorships and very hard fascist regimes. SL: Do you agree with Paul Virilio that we’re now confronted with a tremendous growth in military power and a reinforcement of the scientific-military complex at the expense of civil society? FG: Let’s take a closer look at what this analysis seems to apply considering the

I forsee in time (in a rather long time) a revival of the American-Soviet complicity and the rise of an international police force ... American capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy have too much to gain by getting along and compromising. wiped out proves nothing at all. From time to time, a kind of social chemistry provides us with a glimpse of what could be another type of organization, much less molecular, much less atomic, which would result in another type of equilibrium, very different from previous models. SL: We also see this social chemistry at work in much more ambiguous situations, like in Poland, where paradoxically religion has become a motor for change. FG: In Poland we are witnessing a violent rejection of bureaucratic society. People cling to religious ideologies — does that make it a religious phenomenon as such? Yes, but we should enlarge the definition somewhat. In other countries like Iran or the Middle East, such phenomena are expressed in other ways. For the moment, there is no common semantic feature through which these movements could recognize and support each other. I believe, however, that we should dare draw an “integral” for these various subjective movements in as much as the live forces of society are incapable of having a hold on the inner springs of change. SL: For the moment, then, there are lots of molecules, but no revolution. And when a revolution occurs, as in Iran, it’s once again somewhat “archaic” motives that mobilize the people. FG: Solidarity isn’t an archaic phenomenon, it’s a new form of struggle. There aren’t many countries where suddenly 10 million unionists arise out of the blue. SL: Paradoxically Polish unionism surges up in the East at the very moment the trade union movement in the West is losing steam. FG: It’s not because Solidarity is called a union that it actually is one. It may be an altogether new structure, more apt to take into account everyday problems. If Solidarity had been a regular union Walesa could’ve worked out a compromise and avoided the mess. But it’s a kind of union that cannot be manipulated. The people don’t follow. That doesn’t mean that it’s an anarchistic organization either. SL: It’s a form of unionism which immediately asserted itself on the political level. FG: On the global level, yes, but also on a micropolitical level. Solidarity takes care of what’s happening in the street, in the food lines, etc.

deep crisis Russia’s going through right now. Does it mean, however, that power in Russia is on the verge of falling into a kind of Bonapartism? Does it imply that the disarray of political structures in the USSR is bound to give the military establishment total control over Soviet society? The hypothesis could well be corroborated by spectacular events in Poland, but they are misleading. We’re not presently witnessing a take-over by the military establishment, but a whole series of social forces and antagonisms which involve the Church and bureaucracies of all kinds. SL: Russia has renounced developing its internal consumption for the sake of a protracted arms race — both in conventional and nuclear weapons. FG: It may well be that the military establishment in the Soviet Union forms a backbone strong enough to withstand current crisis. China presents the same phenomenon with the Lin-Piao line. This line represented the minimal consistency of Chinese society at a time when Maoism was verging on total collapse. So it’s true that everywhere, in Africa as well as in Latin America, the role of military establishments has substantially increased. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that a mutation in the major developed countries (either capitalism or bureaucratic socialism) will put them simply and squarely under the aegis of military “machines”. And therefore I don’t believe that international relations will be wholly defined by this antagonism. SL: But isn’t Reagan himself busy dismantling the edifice of the “welfare” State while dramatically reinforcing the American military potential? FG: In the USA, one thing is for sure: the Kissinger-style conception which envisioned relationships of power in international affairs as a function of local situations, contradictions and specific socio-historical “singularities,” is progressively becoming outmoded. It’s as if one sort of diplomacy was being phased out to make room for a purely strategic frame-reference — with a peculiar Manicheanism inherent to the cowboy mentality of Reagan and his cronies. SL: This Manicheanism actually seems to serve everyone. FG: Exactly. One could conclude that a true symmetry does exist between the two super-powers and that we are presently witnessing a profound change in the

1982 V10N2 p101

international situation. But I don’t think so. At present, the movements of social transformation indeed lack coherent and collective political representation, but so does capitalism. International capitalism is undergoing a real trauma as well. It has a hard time coping with the consequences of its own structural crisis. On strictly economic grounds (monetary, oil, etc.), it somehow manages to come up with solutions, however difficult or dangerous they may be but on the political level, it offers absolutely no perspective. In the final analysis, it has no policy whatsoever concerning the development of Third World countries, in Asia, in Africa, or Latin America. Countless disasters — human, ecological, etc. — now affecting entire countries do not really go in the direction of, nor benefit, an integrated world capitalism. International capitalism has not been able to manage the violent crisis which involves whole populations, masses, working classes, farmers, Third and Fourth

a still undefinable, but very real, demand for another type of society. Also crucial is the fact that the peace movement, like the ecology movement, can snowball in no time, by-passing purely national boundaries. It took only a few months for the anti-nuclear movement in the USA to reach nation-wide stature. The doomsday vision probably ties in to a profound change in the political sentiment of the population at a time when all the avenues of the future appear blocked by the maneuverings of the super-powers and by the muddle of the ideological opinions we used to depend upon. It’s been quite some time since we’ve witnessed such a mobilization of energies. FG: I also see emerging there an idea which, if it were to materialize, could yield enormous power — the idea that American missiles don’t really protect us against Soviet missiles, and vice-versa. Politicians keep telling us: if you’re not protected by the American nuclear umbrella the Russians will come. Let them come! They are already

... the Russians will come. Let them come! They are already in such a mess in Poland, not to mention Afghanistan, that the extra burden of Germany, France or Italy would prove fatal. World countries. As a result I don’t believe that the current phase of American capitalism and Soviet antagonisms is anything else but transitory. On the contrary, I forsee in time (in a rather long time) a revival of the American-Soviet complicity and the rise of an international police force. SL: Do you think that we’ll soon witness the negotiation of a new Yalta? FG: We’ll end up with a new distribution of zones of influence, meant to force the planet into a North-South axis and soften the East-West tensions. American capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy have too much to gain by getting along and by compromising. That was also, incidentally, Schmidt’s intuition which he shared with the socialdemocratic tendencies in Europe. SL: Politics is also a way of avoiding war, or of pursuing war by other means. Human intervention and decision-making power however, are becoming more and more incapable of preventing a nuclear holocaust of a generalized conflict. FG: I love science fiction and Dr. Strangelove schemes, but I don’t believe at all in the scenario of a nuclear war. There’s going to be a war, yes, but what war? The same war that we’ve known for thirty years. When you consider the wars in Chad, or in El Salvador, or in Guatemala, from the point of view of human suffering — wounds, torture, deaths from starvation — what is all that but war? Can we hope for a worse outcome? There’s going to be wars like these, but everywhere. Fragmented wars, always ambiguous because they deal with local problems while serving the cause of an international police force. The example of Vietnam is spectacular. This interminable war which continues somewhere in Cambodia, at the outset it was a popular war, a war for the liberation of South Vietnam...But like all popular wars, it soon became the arena for the super-powers, and it was China and the Soviet Union who finally profited from it. The final outcome — the Pot-Pol experiment, monstrous, disastrous results for the populations — nowadays these wars are always won by the super powers. SL: There are wars that cannot be won, even by super-powers. And that’s a new phenomenon which shouldn’t be ignored in spite of the increasing number of fragmented wars. FG: Obviously there is a risk, and the unconscious collective sensibility which permeates peace movements does perceive the danger. But these movements today are quite different from pacifism as it developed during that magnificent period which preceded the First World War. Socialists then advocated the demoralization of the army — of their own army. If such an idea were to spread now, it could work wonders. SL: We should not underestimate the — so to speak — “positive” effects of the nuclear threat. To begin with, the new movement isn’t just backed up by the socialists or even the left. And it’s not only fear — the great bourgeois fear —which is being called upon. In Germany the movement is already pulling together many heterogeneous, and often conflicting, elements — citizen’s initiatives, leftists, Christians, ecologists, conservatives and conservationists. I perceive in it the loose contours of an original form of political action expressing in the collective unconscious

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in such a mess in Poland, not to mention Afghanistan, that the extra burden of Germany, France or Italy would prove fatal. Fantasies keep piling up, and then one says: “Enough is enough.” SL: For the moment, we have very few ways of putting pressure on the USSR. After all, dissidents there are being persecuted, and peaceniks prosecuted. In the Western camp, however, paths of action are not altogether lacking. In spite of appearances, and the policies of the Reagan administration, Europe may not be first on the firing line. Moreover, it’s not certain that it is in Europe that the peace movement can exert the most effective pressure. If the movement were to gather the momentum in the USA — where the military-scientific complex is much more in the open and information on nuclear weapons circulates more freely than anywhere else — if a real political intelligence were to shape up among the America peace movement, that could prove to be of paramount importance. FG: I entirely agree. That would become possible when people would begin to realize that they have allies in Russia, in Africa, everywhere, and that a new alliance is possible because they have common enemies. It’s that, I think, which is behind your proposal. SL: The pacifist movement is actually a mosaic, a collage of many colors which doesn’t fit into the traditional political mold, which doesn’t follow the logic of partisan politics. That corresponds roughly to what you said about molecular revolutions, even if the modalities are somewhat different. This mosaic in formation keeps moving — elements form in one place, migrate elsewhere, reappear in strange new forms, contradictory forms even ... FG: Let’s do a little science fiction also, just for fun. Imagine Russia is in a mess, even ten times weaker than in Poland. The relationship of power would change entirely if everyone felt that the political and military-industrial structures of the Soviet Union were beginning to crumble down. Imagine they have two more Polands and two more Afghanistans on their hands ... SL: Do you think this is likely to happen? FG: The Russians have got themselves stuck in the same wasp’s nest as the Americans in Vietnam. It’s going to go bad for them. Further, it’s not out of the question that an armed conflict erupts in Poland. No Eastern bloc country has yet been exposed to armed resistance. This is a crucial point. SL: Solidarity always opposed armed resistance. Paradoxically the Church assumes a moderating role with regard to the deep aspirations of the population. FG: Armed resistance may eventually flare up, and with it a lot of problems. I’m not saying that it’s the solution, but we’re getting close to the point where the crisis in the Soviet Union will become practically unavoidable. 1. An allusion to Jean Baudrillard’s thesis as developed in In The Shadow of The Silent Majorities, Semiotext(e)’s ‘Foreign Agents’ series, January, 1983. 2. See Italy: Autonomia, Semiotext(e), 9, 1980. 3. See The German Issue, Semiotext(e), 11, 1982.

JOHN KENNETH The notion that one cannot have a bigamous relationship with several countries seems to me an inappropriate parallel to marriage.

G A L B R A I T H John Kenneth Galbraith was born in Southern Ontario and become an American citizen in 1937. One of the world’s foremost economists, Galbraith’s renown is due not only to his seminal published works (The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State) but to a remarkable personal history. A Democrat, Galbraith worked as presidential adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson, Johnson and the Kennedy brothers. In 1941, under Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration, he was responsible for fixing the price of virtually every product sold in the United States. An ambassadorship to India followed, after which came numerous prominent teaching posts. Galbraith is currently Paul M.Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard. David Lake conducted this interview at Galbraith’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

W hat is your view on current economic relations be-

tween the U.S. and Canada?

G: I have no sympathy for the way in which American economic policy at the present time is affecting Canada and Western Europe. Our commitment to monetarism has caused a good deal of suffering here. The exportation of high interest rates causes problems outside the U.S. So, I have a good deal of sympathy for the way in which the Canadian government and the governments of Western Europe are protesting it. Q: Your background gives you a certain historical overview — how would you compare FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan? G: The three are very different men. Roosevelt was a man of diverse capacity and intelligence whose reputation was made by the two great events over which he presided — the Great Depression and World War II. He was able to meet both those challenges because he had an enormously practical sense of action. He would listen to a wide variety of proposals but always settled on the one which had the greatest promise. This

was true in the Depression and in the War years. He combined great responsibility and passion. I’ve said many times that Roosevelt envisaged himself as a landlord of a great estate who felt personally responsible for all living on it. That’s how he saw the United States. Kennedy was also a man of high intelligence and strong conmitment. He became president at a time when government was large and presidential leadership had much less scope. Roosevelt governed as an individual, Kennedy governed as the head of a great organization. Both had a strong vision of what they believed the U.S. should be, and stressed responsibility with regard to the American relationship with other countries. It’s not surprising that Roosevelt was as much a hero in Canada as he was in the U.S. Kennedy was also equally regarded in both countries. I will not comment on Ronald Reagan at any length. I am not a supporter of Ronald Reagan. He represents a much narrower segment of American society. His government is less compassionate, less concerned with the individual. One of the basic policies of the Reagan administration is that the poor aren’t working because they get too much income and the rich 1982 V10N2 p103

aren’t working because they don’t get enough income. That’s a proposition which I don’t find wholly satisfactory. As we have mentioned, the Reagan administration’s economic policies are causing hardship among our friends. Also, the confrontational tendencies with the Soviet Union frightens people, because it is altogether too dangerous in this day and age. Q: What does a president have to know about economics? G: That varies. A president must have a sense of right and wrong — a sense of magnitude. Kennedy once told me that in scientific matters, including atomic energy, he didn’t have to understand the scientific details but he had to understand enough to know whom he could trust. I think this is true of economics. Kennedy had knowlege of economics thanks to a good deal of reading and early study. Johnson perhaps had a better sense of it after years of exposure to the subject on Capitol Hill — he knew who to trust and who not to. I think it’s fair to say that Reagan has lacked that sense, or he wouldn’t have been captured by supply-siders and monetarists. He would have recognized the inevitable conflict between those who want to expand the economy by reducing taxes and those who want to control inflation by a monetary policy that works only as it contracts the economy. He would have seen that trying to combine the two is like trying to swim upstream. Q: What about the impact of leadership on the economy? It often seems that economic theory dismisses psychology. G: I have never doubted that the effect of psychology on economics is exagerrated. People talk about creating confidence when they haven’t got anything else to talk about. When jobs are available and profits are likely, the economy will expand. If policies are not good, no amount of economic cheerleading will make them better. It is a myth, particularly with businessmen in government who are supposed to be hardheaded, that favourable speeches and forecasts with displays of enthusiasm will be self-fulfilling. Q: Forbes Jr. of Forbes magazine has said this of economists: (they) “were immersed in their theories to a point where they were so happy with the way their theory worked that they lost touch with reality. If their theory didn ’ t work it was society that was wrong, not their theory. ” G: There is a choice between good economics and bad economics. Good economics respects history and circumstance. Bad economics pursues an abstract theory. It was an abstract theory that led the current government to believe they could control the modern economy and all its complexities 104 V 10 N 2 1982

by controlling the money supply. It was an abstract theory which led the government to believe that by reducing taxation and restraints on the affluent they could get a big expansion and output. That was guidance by abstract doctrine. Q: What are your feelings on the prominence of monetarists? G: There is no question that Professor Friedman is one of the great advocates of all time. Monetarism is an attractively simple idea — leave everything to the Federal Reserve. It is an idea to which a great many people are susceptible; if something worked in the last century or the century before, it will still work. Monetarists have not accepted the changing role of large corporations, strong trade unions, farm organizations and OPEC in modern society, but they have the advantage of nostalgia on their side. Q: To what extent should wages and prices be controlled? G: Any sensible policy must be eclectic. You must keep a modest control on bank lending, which is to say you don’t abandon monetary policy entirely. You must have a proper fiscal policy, and that means you don’t have large deficits as in the present day. Also, you must put a restraint on the wage-

price spiral. As far as prices are concerned, I would confine restraints to large corporations. With respect to wages, I would confine controls to large trade unions. That would set a pattern for the rest of the economy. Given this combination, I believe the modern economy can be made to work. The Germans, Austrians, Japanese and Swiss have shown that this is a perfectly plausible policy and have been following it in one form or another for years. Q: Many economists subscribe to the theory that you can have unemployment and inflation together. G: Stagflation is caused by excessive reliance on monetary policy. It works only as it creates idle capacity and unemployment and one still gets price increases. If you rely on monetary policy you are going to get some continuing inflation and some continuing unemployment. Q: Some Canadian economists believe that nations overemphasize the need to control inflation. They are of the opinion that we should all inflate together. G: The economy can accomodate itself to inflation increases more easily than is imagined. Yet, I have never been reconciled to the idea of having large degrees of inflation. Society should keep a contract with people who save and want to look after themselves in the future. Q: In the post-Vietnam period it seemed that inflation in America just went out of control. But there were contributing factors which we have since been able to pinpoint, such as the advent of OPEC and the tremendous influx of returning Vietnam veterans into the job market ... G: Oh, I don’t think that was a factor. Q: OPEC certainly was one. G: OPEC had a certain role. But OPEC was everyone’s alibi. When people in modern government are trying to shift responsibility from themselves, their most wonderful discovery is OPEC. Q: It seems we can’t balance budgets anymore. Lately the argument has been leveled that our capital base is not sufficient to support social welfare programs and transfer payments. There’s a feeling that we ’ ve been too liberal in the past. G: I think capitalism has survived because it has shown a certain humane response to the poorest of

its people. Once one has created the social welfare system one doesn’t go on adding to it indefinitely. But the entrenchment of a sense of social responsibility for the poor reinforced by income has been one of the greatest achievements of modern times. No one should be apologetic about that. Q: What role should government play in agricultural research? G: A large amount of technical and scientific work must be done by government or it will not be done at all. One can rely on the telephone company to do research in relation to communications; one cannot rely on the average farmer to do the necessary research for improving agricultural productivity. I have long felt that the governments of the industrial countries, by putting a floor under farm prices, supply a certain measure of security for investment. This plays an important role in productivity. There is no industrial country which allows the free market to work for agriculture and I don’t think there is likely to be an example too soon. But, I do not agree that the free market is the source of the greatest efficiency in agriculture. I believe the great agricultural gains in productivity have come from the security minimum prices provide to investment. Q: In the last little while we have seen the emergence of the agribusinessman — the man who runs his farm in a suit and tie. G: This has been going on for a generation or more as the scale of agriculture has increased. One of the notable manifestations has been large gains in productivity — much larger gains than those experienced in the manufacturing sector. The average farmer today is unquestionably a better businessman than he used to be. Q: Russia is having trouble with agricultural productivity and, at the same time, is having problems with economic development. Is it possible for an economy to industrialize and provide consumer goods without having a solid base in agriculture? G: Certainly. There are very successful industrial economies with little in the way of an agricultural base, including some — like Hong Kong and Singapore — with none at all. But I think it is fair to say that agriculture under socialism is still an unsolved problem. There is little doubt it works best when you have individual entrepreneurs who are rewarded by their own diligence and intelligence and are penalized by their own failures. But the collective and state farms in the Soviet Union have never been able to develop an incentive system comparable to that of free enterprise. The Soviets have also been slow in recognizing the extent of the fertilizer revolution — particularly nitrogen. They have a problem getting fertilizer into use at the right time in the right volume. Of all changes in North American agriculture the Nitrogen Revolution ranks as one of the most important.

In our modern corporate economy people are brought to a high executive position when they have five or ten years to go before retirement.

economies such as that of the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Western Europe and eventually Japan. A preference for leisure develops, as opposed to a preference for goods. An old economy will never have the same commitment to work as a young one does. On the other hand, there are adverse factors that have had an effect on productivity. Production is reduced by a policy of controlling inflation by high interest rates — that’s directly against investment — and a policy which involves idle plant capacity. With idle capacity you do not add new capacity and new capacity is almost always more efficient. Productivity is also impaired by shortterm planning. In our modern corporate economy people are brought to a high executive position when they have five or ten years to go before retirement. The whole emphasis is on short-term, on the time they have to make their mark. Corporations are always thinking about the last and the next quarter’s earnings.

Q: There has been a switch to superseed, which the oil companies have helped to promote. The worl d ’ s farmers are switching to high-yield hybrids which may or may not be immune to plague, whereas past strains are more resilient. G: I suppose there might be risk there, but I would have difficulty agreeing. I’ve seen this problem at close range in India and I would say the newer hybrids’ nutritional value is worth the potential risk. Q: Currently there is tremendous concern about the productivity of the North American worker. Two colleagues of yours, Messrs. Abernathy and Hayes, have written much about the drift of the American corporation towards the short term planning cycle. They feel long term commitments to quality and the development of the worker are needed before we can compete in world markets. How do you assess this situation? G: Productivity will inevitably decline in the older

Q: Is there any way around this? G: Less reliance on monetary policy would obviously be good. Productivity would profit by a combination of high employment and stable prices. I would like to see an emphasis on long-range planning, where people are brought to executive positions at an earlier age and are responsible for longer. Q: Economically speaking, the tremendous amount of money spent on American arms seems doubly dangerous: first, because it diverts money away from other areas of the economy, and second, because the outlay is inflationary ... G: I would agree with the first. Certainly we have suffered in the past in comparison with Germany and Japan, because we have been using our capital resources for arms, while they were using theirs for civilian industry. This is a real danger as far as the future is concerned. It involves a further sacrifice of our industrial leadership. We get back to the question of productivity. I would be somewhat less concerned with the inflationary effect because this is going to be concentrated in a very narrow range of industries, where the economic effects will be limited. There will be inflation but it will be heavily based in the narrow sector. Q: Everyone has a prediction as to when we are going to emerge from the mess: what is yours? G: I don’t have one. Economists answer those questions not because they know but because they are asked. It is essentially a political question. If we were to change policy in the next two weeks by banning further tax reductions, having a sensible military expenditures policy and getting trade unions to freeze wages while corporations freeze prices for a year, the economy would take an immediate turn for the better. However, I do predict that none of that will happen. V 10 N 2 1982 105

TERENCE SELLERS

Fetishism A fetish is an object that radiates a 'magical' field. It has no qualities of its own, or rather, its essential reality is held in abeyance, during which time it acts as the vehicle for the essence of the Superior. Whatever belongs to a Superior is not merely a shoe, a scarf, a garter, a letter – it is the Superior for the fetishist. Such objects become sex-objects for the masochist, who cannot release his desire in the presence of the one who permeates these items – unless she is wearing them. He can only express his desire with a secondary source. Why a person becomes fixated on leather, rubber, nylon or satin; upon panties, boots, one particular dress or a style of trousers is not the inquiry here — but that they do to the exclusion of all other forms of sexual stimulation, is a subject for serious study by the Superior. For these fixations periodically require a recharging through contact with the Superior. If the slave fondles and adores his favored item too long, without a renewing infusion from the magical source, p106 V10N3 1983

the thing returns to its original and for the slave false and empty character. A stocking, for example, becomes a kind of rage permeated with his own effusions. A fetishist is basically a sentimentalist. A little pair of worn-out shoes, a stained handkerchief, a withered bouquet or empty perfume bottle all have extraordinary value, in that they tap a memory. Recognize however that the memory your torn nylons evoke in the masochist are not only resonant of you and your recent violence, but are icon of a person and possibly an entire series of events whose memory disposes him to a satisfaction so profound we may not wonder that the fetishist cannot be dissuaded from his fixation. For he kisses not only your shoe, by the medium of the shoe he kisses you and your cruelty towards him; he kisses all the shoes that ever dominated him, he kisses the shoe of distant memory that first dominated him and at last he may kiss the wearer of that first shoe: his first beloved. Perhaps this was a parent or parent figure, in which case the fetishist has anaesthetized the force of a taboo desire by swivelling before it

a 'ridiculous' (and so to the observer, diverting) desire: the worship of an inanimate object. Most fetishists come to the Superior with their tastes already set. The propensity of his mind to associate the sexual with the inanimate assures the Superior she may very well introduce him to another fetish. This would be instigated with the design of binding him to her in the present. The Superior effects this by substitution of the one preferred fetish for another. One begins by teasing the slave with his favorite item, and when you have his attention quickly interposing the new material for his worship. Tell him he may not touch or look at his favorite until he humiliates himself with the new, that he must make this transference to the imposed fetish before his old acquaintance will be renewed. This may take a long time and requires the Superior’s constant supervision and merciless insistence. But it can be effected. What of the fetishism for parts of the body? The Superior may not be pleased to consider that in the slave's excision of one part of her body for consideration he effectively 'inanimates' it, separates it from her and her responses. In cases of fetishism of the breast, leg and so forth it is exceedingly important that the slave be denied and frustrated in his indulgence ninety-five percent of the time, so he is forced more and more to consider the Superior in her entirety. During the training the Superior requires the slave's attention to be totally riveted upon the adored object. Let us say a Master wishes his slave to worship his thighs; the slave is then designated 'Slave of the Thigh. The naming of the slave simultaneously gives the slave that part of the body, and takes away from him the possibility of ‘possessing’ another. Everything associated with the thighs is thereafter of great concern to the slave. If the Master has a toe, foot, calf, knee and thigh slave, these five will be responsible for putting on and taking off his pants, each smoothing the material over his cherished area, none permitted to trespass on another's territory. Once the fixation has jelled through repetition of a ritual – that might involve washing, massaging, gazing, perfuming, kissing, paying compliments

and so forth – the Superior begins to mete out punishments suitable to the slave's function. He will be forced to be present while another slave pays homage to his favorite shoes, or the foot. Most of the tortures will consist of the denial of favors once graciously imposed. The slave begins to beg, a sign that the fetish, like a stain, has taken. A severe punishment involves the slave being locked away for hours with only a photograph of the beloved object.

The Shoe In sadomasochistic practice the shoe vies with the underwear as most commonly fetishistic. Many slaves desire nothing more than to lie on the floor, to act as rug, footstool, or faithful dog so as to be in constant proximity with the shoe. For the masochist the foot is not as erotic as the shoe, in that the shoe is a secondary source; its very unnaturalness, its distance from the Superior gives it its erotic value. One curious aspect of the worship of the feminine foot in high-heels is that

a woman thus shod cannot walk very well– she is quite vulnerable on her stilts. Yet at her most 'tippable', her leg muscles their tautest, she is her tallest and most treacherous. For the spikes are weapons and will protect her, a well-aimed kick will castrate. Freudian symbolism equates the shoe with the female genital, by virtue of its shape and hollowness. From this one may see the foot as a masculine appendage. So is the shod foot a consummation. The spectacle of a silk stockinged foot sliding in and out of a tight shiny leather stiletto-heel pump may suffice for a year’s worth of ‘shameful’ paroxysms. The slave stares at this symbolic perfect fit, of foot in shoe, and adores it as something ineffable, quite greater than himself. He ‘knows’ it is very dirty and wrong of him to wish to have sex – it is impossible – which is why he passively, happily enjoins the shod foot to kick and trample him. The heel of the stiletto is often regarded as a phallus. The slave is often interested in sucking upon it and being sodomised by it. At the other end of the spectrum is the naked foot, a terribly weak little thing, that inspired in the Orient a cult of foot-worship. The foot was crushed to a lust-inspiring smallness and near absolute inutility; bent nearly in half to create a type of sub-vagina, a fold actually used by the male: so that the woman walked on her genitals, and not very far, at that. Women manifest a fetishism for their shoes that men ordinarily do not. I Collect shoes and possess many pairs I have worn past any cognition of their original beauty. For some reason I cannot bear to throw them away. As well I favor tiny shoes, size three and four for women. I cherish besides a few pairs of my grandmother's spike-heels, all possessing for me the qualities of heirlooms. Each seems indissolubly infused with a heritage of feminine power. Stamped forever in my mind as proof of an undying and faithful love are the red spike-heels with bronze feathers my grandfather gave my grandmother on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It is a fashion rule of thumb that a good pair of high heels will retrieve any outfit from boredom even slovenliness. The masculine foot attracts devotees by virtue of its grossness, its thick immobility and strong odor. The filthier the construction boot, the blacker and more massive the motorcycle-boot, the more menacing the man. The finality of the male's heavy tread, like the staccato clatter of a nervy high-heel, by the very extremities of masculinity and femininity they evoke impress the slavish mind with his vague and therefore ineffectual sexuality. Slaves may be seen to wear 'neuter' shoes, dull 'casual' shoes, soft and ‘sporty’.* However any shoe will do. One may be inexplicably aroused by a man’s rather small foot in a supple, foppish Italian moccasin; and a woman in flat, thick-soled well-laced brogans gives off (for some) an irresistible air of horsy imperiousness. The logic of foot-worship stems from the foot being the lowest part of the body; the slave as a low species therefore feels most comfortable in its presence. We have cast him underfoot and he is too spineless to rise — nay fears to, lest the weapon that is the cruelly shod foot rise against him. But there is more than this literal explanation. In ancient symbolism the foot represents the subconscious mind, the darkest and most mysterious of our faculties. To beseech mercy of the foot is to ask of the subconscious release from the obsessive demon of unrequited sexual desire. The slave applies to the source itself, then — and in a more powerful being than himself. He would not think of kissing his own feet. The slave begs his Superior to let him pay homage at the altar, at the foot, in hopes of receiving a sexual favour which is rarely granted. He in time fixates entirely upon the foot itself, and offers it countless sacrifices. Foot worshippers are the most devoted of slaves, the most abject and touching. In another context it was believed that in the foot of the king resided all his power, so that the foot-servant was charged with a near-mystical responsibility to relieve the very source of the kingdom's power from all onerous and mundane duties. His feet were never allowed to touch the ground. A European aristocrat's foot-servant replaced his Superior's feet with his own, and ran the tiresome errands. Still in another culture were the feet as well as the heart of one’s slaughtered enemies devoured to absorb their courage.* The foot is what takes a path, what carries one forward. The superior’s foot *The Sex Life of the Foot and Show, by William A. Rossi, W.P. Dutton, 1976. *The Golden Bough: Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet, by Sir James G. Frazer, New York, Macmillan, 1951.)

is not admired for this forthright quality, but is curiously still, made holy and perfect by the fetishist, shod in binding shoes reminiscent of the satanic hoof. Here we chance upon the resonance of the static and death– worshipping aspect of sadomasochism.

Stockings and Socks Male slaves, and I would venture to say men in general, are fascinated by the hosiery of women. Assuredly the stocking is the most ephemeral article of clothing a woman can wear. The stocking's combination of silky invisibility with delicate restraint quickens the slavish heart with its tantalizing irony. The flesh of a woman's leg is made firm, uniform and tense by a stocking. One can read in fetish magazines descriptions of women whose hose always seem to be pulled up and fastened so taut they are near tearing. This 'bondage', heightened by the skyscraper stiletto, does not, unlike the bondage of the slave, render her weak and vulnerable, but makes her tense and vicious. The very painfulness of the extremely high heel ensures one a reservoir of useful irritability. Those who worship stockings often favour sheer black stockings with seams, or black fishnet hose, resonant as they are of 'forbidden women'. Masochistic women whose Superior has a stocking fetish will wear white, through the Superior in her nurse's role will also wear white. In the former white represents virginity and innocence, while in the latter white is for hygienity and the strict purity of the authoritarian woman. Often those who have a fetish for stockings are merely entranced by the silky feel of the garment. They will purchase stockings to play with, and may wear them around the house, luxuriating in the feel of the nylon or silk sliding between their legs. The sound of one stocking swishing against the other as a woman walks inspires violent excitement in the fetishist. Feminists have a favorite cliché that represents the ultimate in degrading co-habitation with the male: they have to wash his socks by hand. If a woman will uncomplainingly do this she is truly submissive - or victimized by him, whatever the slant. The footwear of the male is malodorous and contact with it humiliating. The male or female slave of a Master will worship such filthy hose to prove they will do anything, that they adore his very loathsomeness. This practice impinges upon scatology. Short white ankle-socks are representative of the child, and the slave-girl is often dressed in them to emphasize her childish ways and helplessness. In a strange case of regression a slave arrived with a special pair of pale blue booties a former Mistress had knit for him. Their being forced onto his feet was the highlight of his bondage session. The imaginative Superior may devise all sorts of games with stockings and socks to give the submissiveness of the slave stronger and more bizarre resonance.

The Myth of Leather

TITLE GRAPHICS BY MARY MARGARET O’HARA ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEFFREY BRETSCHNEIDER

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Enclosed in heavy saddle leather, torn from the flanks of bulls, one is assured of a psychic as well as a certain physical invulnerability. What is more laughable than the weak of chin strutting in ill-fitting leathers? As comparably pathetic is the rich matron mincing in flimsy pastel and beaded hides. For it is not mere material, like silk or crepe de chine. Denim vies for a place on the throne near it, but it is too common, too cheap. Leather is inaccessible for a number or reasons, the one in main force being: it is the aegis of bestiality. A certain modern aesthete once remarked on the repulsive atavism of wearing another skin next to one's own. The ability to carry this emblem of the animal nature is the mark of a superior individual - it is a kind of overcoming - if he wears it well. Black is the absolute sonority for the evocation of the oppressive sexual brutality of the satyr, the devourer within, whose senses unreined are the most destructive in existence. The restrained violence of the tanned and tamed hide we celebrate, let it stand as the cloak of imperial power as once did purple, unfurled cross chest and loins that do not flinch from saying: I impose my sensuality upon you.

“The equalizing of European man is today the great irreversible process: it should be accelerated even more.” – Nietzsche

Jean Baudrillard isn’t a philosopher, not even a sociologist. Can you still call “sociologist” someone who wants to put the social to death? So who is the author of The Mirror of Production (Telos, 1975), The Political Economy of the Sign (Telos, 1981), In The Shadow of The Silent Majorities and Simulations (Semiotext(e)’s “Foreign Agents” Series, 1983)? Is he the dark prophet of the New Era or, as he ironically calls himself, a “metaphysician”? Metaphysicians don’t usually spend much time reflecting on consumer society, on media, on terrorism or the nuclear threat. But the tendencies at work in our society obviously fascinate Jean Baudrillard – whatever tendency he himself may have to proclaim the end of what attracts his attention.

NUCLEAR IMPLOSION JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Translated by Phil Beitchman The nuclear is the apotheosis of simulation. Yet the balance of terror is nothing more than the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has crept from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. The nuclear cliff-hanger only seals the trivialised system of deterrence at the heart of the media, of the inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is made for us. The slightest details of our behaviour are ruled by neutralised, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those which regulate “game strategy” (but the genuine equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum which dominates us all and reduces all “ground-level” events to mere ephemeral scenarios, transforming the only life left to us into survival, into a wager without takers, – not even into a death policy: but into a policy devaluated in advance.) It isn’t that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyses our lives. It Is rather that deterrence leukemizes us. And this deterrence comes from the very situation which excludes the real atomic clash – excludes it beforehand like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. Everybody pretends to believe in the reality of this menace (one understands it from the military point of view, the whole seriousness of their exercise, and the discourse of their “strategy”, is at stake): but there are precisely no strategic stakes at this level, and the whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction. 1983 V10N3 p109

p110 V10N3 1983

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

INTERVIEWS /

Deterrence excludes war – the antiquated violence of expanding systems. Deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable or involving system. There is no subject of deterrence anymore, nor adversary, nor strategy – it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like that of Troy, will not take place. The risk of nuclear atomisation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of arms – but this sophistication exceeds any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nonexistence – to the installation of a universal system of security, linkup and control whose deterrent effect does not aim for atomic clash at all (the latter has never been a possibility, except no doubt right at the beginning of the Cold War when the nuclear posture was confused with conventional war) but really the much larger probability of any real event, of anything which could disturb the general system and upset the balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy. It circulates and is exchanged between the nuclear protagonists exactly like international capital in that orbital zone of monetary speculation, whose flow is sufficient to control all global finance. Thus kill money (not referring to real killing, any more than floating capital refers to real production) circulating in nuclear orbit is sufficient to control all violence and potential conflict on the globe. What stirs in the shadow of this posture, under the pretext of a maximal “objective” menace, and thanks to that nuclear sword of Damocles, is the perfection of the best system of control which has ever existed. And the progressive satellisation of the whole planet by that hypermodel model of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear installations. Pacification doesn’t distinguish between the civil and the military: wherever irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, wherever the notion of security becomes absolute, wherever the norm of security replaces the former arsenal of laws and violence (including war), the system of deterrence grows, and around it grows an historical, social and political desert. A huge involution makes every conflict, every opposition, every act of defiance contract in proportion to this blackmail which interrupts, neutralizes and freezes them. No mutiny, no history can unfurl anymore according to its own logic since it risks annihilation. No strategy is even possible anymore, and escalation is only a puerile game left to the military. The political stake is dead. Only simulacra of conflict and carefully circumscribed stakes remain. The “space race” played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. This is why it was so easily able to take over from it in the 60’s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently in a mode of “peaceful coexistance”. For what is the ultimate function of the space race, of lunar conquest, of satellite launchings, if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellisation, whose perfect embryo is the lunar module: a programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance? Trajectory, energy, computation, physiology, psychology, the environment – nothing can be left to contingency, this is the total universe of the norm – the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail which is law. A universe purged of every threat to the senses, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness – it is this very perfection which is fascinating. For the exaltation of the masses was not in response to the lunar landing or the voyage of man in space (this is rather the fulfillment of an earlier dream) – no, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of their planning and technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of programmed development. Fascinated by the maximization of norms and by the mastery of probability. Unbalanced by the model, as we are by death, but without fear or impulse. For if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still tops a perverse imaginary, then the norm fixes, hypnotizes, dumbfounds, causing every imaginary to devolve. We no longer fantasize about every minutia of a programme. Its observance alone unbalances. The vertigo of a flawless world. The same model of planned infallibility, of maximal security and deterrence, now governs the spread of the social. That is the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here, too, nothing will be left to chance; moreover, this is the essence of socialization, which has been going on for some centuries but which now has entered into its accelerated phase towards a limit people imagined would be explosive (revolution), but which currently results in an inverse, irreversible implosive process: a generalized deterrence of every chance, of every accident, of every transversality, of every finality, of every contradiction, rupture or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm and doomed to the transparency of detail radiated by data collecting mechanisms. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not even have their own end: neither has lunar exploration, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth lies in their being models of simulation, vector models of a system of planetary control (where even the super - powers of this scenario are not free – the whole world is satellized).1

SYLVERE LOTRINGER

DROPPING OUT At a time when the French Socialists are finally back to power. it may sound inappropriate or unfair to talk about the end of history, or the end of politics. Are the French Socialists too exhausted or their hands too tied-up to measure up to the event? But what is an event in a history that is dropping out of sight? However paradoxical it may sound, especially with regards to Jean Baudrillard, a case could be made that everything of importance in French culture has originated much less from Marx and Freud, those great founding fathers, than from a kind of orphan of an event – obsessing and enigmatic: May’68. At last in the land of structure and of political centralism, the event preceeds the reflection upon it. Since then it has spurred much thought, of course, even if this reflection upon the event sometimes seems to turn its back on all that this revolution – which wasn’t one – was supposed to have represented: spontaneity, anarchy, revolutionary romanticism. May ‘68 took everybody by surprise. It swept down on France like an avalanche, and it disappeared almost immediately, mysteriously, practically without leaving any traces behind, consuming all the answers. But it has invented a new question. It is to this question that Jean Baudrillard, like some other French thinkers (with whom he is not always in agreement), explored to the point of putting into doubt all the certainties upon which we relied: our social system, the possibility of political action, our sense of history and even the very reality of our society. How can an event escape the logic of politics? JEAN BAUDRILLARD: Politics has functioned classically in terms of distinguishable contrasts: the left or the right, as elsewhere the true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, etc. Now at a given moment the energy of a situation has ceased to depend on this kind of dissociation. It is no longer the dialectic of the two terms which organizes things, but the fact that the forms go their own way – but crazily. It is this which I call the “ecstasy of forms”, their own self-enchantment: this is the truer than true, the falser than false. A form runs amuck in a kind of logic which precludes all reserve, retreat or recollection like cancer cells shooting forth on their own organic course. This logic seems more interesting to me because it corresponds more to the evolution of things today. SYLVERE LOTRINGER: And where do you see this logic currently at work? JB: In the world of fashion which illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. Fashion depends on no

OF HISTORY

This hypothesis seems appealing to me because Canetti talks not about an end but about a passage, or rather what I would call an “ecstasy” in its primal meaning: a passage at the same time into the dissolution and transcendence of a form. SL: Did May ‘68 succeed in transcending politics?

aesthetic judgement. It’s not the beautiful opposed to the ugly, it’s what is more beautiful than the beautiful. The obese, that famous fat American, is not opposed to the skinny one. He is fatter than fat, and that is what is fascinating. Fashion is the ecstatic form of the beautiful, its absolute formalization. It functions by means of unconditional transmutation of forms. Ecstatic forms can be very static and cold; sometimes they can be warmer, more enchanting. Fashion can exude this kind of “hot” ecstasy. There is a splendor of fashion, beneath which we can see at work an uncontrollable, objective rule of the game. A rule which conveys the objective irony of fashion. SL: Can fashion serve as a model for politics? JB: Fashion has always been at odds with politics. The way it operates cannot be negated by any system of this kind. You can’t oppose fashion politically to politics. It is a ritual which cannot be programmed. SL: Must all political rituals necessarily be programmed? JB: Unpredictable forms — forms that resist formulation and judgement — are of course much more fascinating, and therefore terribly dangerous for the powers that be, because they are no longer possible to control. These are what I call seductive forms. At a given moment a category or a form can no longer be articulated — that is, described or represented. It can no longer enter upon the scene of representation; it turns back upon itself and taking that turn its speed is vastly accelerated. Suddenly you have gone into a situation of weightlessness. Fascism was something like this, which is why it has remained inexplicable in political terms — as caused by the class

struggle, capitalism. etc. SL: Does May ‘68 partake, in its way, in this kind of snowballing of forms? JB: There is something in May ‘68 which escapes our historicity. I’m not saying that it came from another planet: it is a strangeness come out of the logic our own system generates, but not from its history. SL: You often evoke the end of history, once in a while you also throw around provocative formulae: the end of production, of the social, of politics. Have we really reached the point where all these stakes have ceased to count? Has the time now come to consign everything that made up our reality to the wax museum? I’ve often felt myself that it’s difficult to finish with anything. What allows you in the final analysis to say such things? JB: I don’t know if it’s really an end. The word is probably meaningless in any case. For there to be an end, you would have to have linearity, and we’re no longer so sure that there’s such a thing. I would prefer to begin, even if it seems a little like science fiction, with a quotation from a recent work of Elias Canetti. It is possible, he said, and the thought is painful for him, that starting from a precise moment in time the human race has dropped out of history, that without even being conscious of the change, humanity suddenly left reality behind; in fact, we wouldn’t have been able to be conscious of this event. What we have to do now, continues Canetti, would be to find that critical point, that spot in time that we have been blind to; otherwise we just continue on with our self-destructive ways.

Reject the evidence: with satellization, the one who is satellized is not who you might think. By the orbital inscription of a space object, the planet earth becomes a satellite, the terrestrial principal of reality becomes excentric, hyperreal and insignificant. By the orbital establishmenst of a system of control like peaceful coexistence, all terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy. All energy, all events are absorbed by this excentric gravitation, everything condenses and implodes on the micro-model of control alone (the orbital satellite), as conversely, in the other, biological dimension everything converges and implodes on the molecular micro-model of the genetic code. Between the two, caught between the nuclear and the genetic, in the simultaneous assumption of the two fundamental codes of deterrence, every principle of meaning is absorbed, every deployment of the real is impossible. This is why nuclear proliferation increases neither the chances of atomic clash nor of accident — save in the interval where “young” powers could be tempted to use them for non-deterrent or “real” purposes (like the Americans did on Hiroshima – but precisely they alone were entitled to this “use value” of the bomb, while all those who have since acquired it are deterred from using it by the very fact of its possession). Entry into the atomic club, so amusingly named, very rapidly removes (like syndicalisation for the working world) any inclination towards violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censorship, self-deterrence always increases faster than the forces or weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country with the flick of a switch makes it impossible that electrical engineers will ever utilize this weapon: the entire myth of the revolutionary and total strike collapses at the very moment when the means to do so are available — but alas, exactly because the means to do so are

JB: It is a prodigious effect, a kind of pure object or event, the first event that I can think of that is situated on the other side of that crucial point Canetti is talking about. Past this point, you can no longer manipulate effects through causes. SL: You can always manipulate causes among themselves. Nietzsche was well aware of this (and had to pay the costs of his insight) — that the cause of an event is always imagined after the fact. The cause is added to the event in order to regulate it, or regularize it — to keep it within bounds. After that jolly May, we were treated to the curious spectacle of causes racing after effects that had become ever more elusive. But no explanation has succeeded in diminishing one iota the pure surprise of the event. JB: That pure event which comes like a fatality without explanation or referent. From now on you can no longer attribute things to clear causes. The event is an object which derives its overwhelming necessity precisely from its being isolated and disconnected, as is the case with a catastrophe. This is a necessity well beyond any rational finality. This kind of event of word or being, which absorbs all attempts at explanation, which comes across as pure evidence, alien to any causal or final order, or which is more final than the final, that is fatal. May ‘68 is a fatal event. It is an event that we have been unable to rationalize and exploit - and from which we have been able to conclude nothing. SL: It outraced everybody. JB: When the effect goes faster than the cause it devours it. I could easily see the “speed-up” analyzed by

available. This is deterrence in a nutshell. Therefore it is altogether likely that one day we shall see the nuclear powers exporting atomic reactors, weapons and bombs to every latitude. After control by threat will succeed the much more effective strategy of pacification by the bomb and by its possession. “Small” powers, hoping to buy their independent strike force, will only buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the atomic reactors we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear system institutes a universally accelerated process of implosion, it congeals everything around it, it absorbs all living energy. The nuclear system is both the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of systems controlling all energy. Lockdown and control grow as fast as (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of modern revolutions. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear system. Energies freeze by their own fire power, they deter themselves. One can’t really see what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could possibly be behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own hereafter neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, non-explosive forces – except the possibility of an explosion towards the centre, or an implosion where all these energies are abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle towards a minimal point, of a reversion of energies towards a minimal threshold). 1. Paradox: all bombs are clean — their only pollution is the system of control and security they radiate when they are not detonated. 1983 V10N3 p111

Virilio from this angle, as an attempt to accelerate faster than linearity can handle. Speed is different from movement. Movement goes somewhere, speed nowhere. SL: May ‘68 is an event that had no consequences. JB: There is a certain power in the fact of being inconsequential. Behind the political revolutionary, historical scene and also failure, there is the power of an event which manages to absorb its own continuity and makes it implode, which succeeds in swallowing its own energy and disappearing. We witness the annihilation of causes. Those kind of things alone are exciting. SL: May ‘68 is an event without cause. As soon as the effect leaps the chain of causes, the event takes off. It outraces any effort to understand or to master it. At this point, its trajectory becomes properly incalculable.

L: French socialism has done everything to present itself as the heir of ‘68. But it is a cause without energy or vitality. It barely succeeds in being the parody of its own history. JB: What is intolerable about May ‘68, its hard, indestructible kernel, is the event’s sheer gratuity. It was produced like a destiny, beyond the point of political vacuum that socialism inhabits now with a commemorative ceremony at the Pantheon, a military parade of the 14th of July and all these thundering social measures that come 50 years too late. SL: The ecstasy of socialism is a simulation that is ashamed of itself, a world without surprise or secret. History at last suited to itself.

that God is dead, or that history is dead. It is not a tragic end one that would be highly charged with emotion, an end that you could mourn – for in that case there would be at least something to be done about it. Things have just been progressing in a certain direction, then suddenly there is a curve in the road, a turning point. Somewhere in the historical, political, even psychological scene, the real scene, where you had rules for the game and some solid stakes that everybody could believe in has been lost. SL: Why was it lost? JB: I’m not about to be explaining things. That’s fiction. History has stopped meaning, referring to anything –

JB: May ‘68 has remained indecipherable. It has been the forerunner of nothing. You might wonder then what remains when one has tried everything in an effort to explain it. Perhaps a kind of “secret” is involved here. There are fundamentally two kinds of secrets. The obscene form of secret involves a saturation of the event with explanations. The other kind of secret involves something which is not hidden, and therefore cannot be expressed directly in words. It is this second kind of secret which makes the event somehow innocent. SL There is also a secret of Fascism? JB: Yes. The secret lies in this total autonomy of a story, a form, an event that can no longer be described in a logical, coherent and acceptable manner, but which runs totally wild. Past a certain threshold of inertia, the forms start snow-balling, terror is unleashed as an empty form. There comes about a swept-away effect, an effect that feeds on itself, and like Fascism, can become the source of immense energies. SL: Fascism is, above all, an effect of panic. So it needed at once a scapegoat in order to exorcize the fear of the abyss. JB: Panic is the catastrophic form of ecstasy. I say catastrophic in the almost neutral meaning of the word, in its mathematical sense. It is one of the effects of ecstasy, of the strange response of the object-world to the subjectworld, of an utterly external destiny which comes as absolute surprise and whose symbolic wave collides with the human world. So what do you do with this kind of event? Do you allow your life to be changed? Ordinarily when something like this, something surprising occurs, you try to comprehend it as a subject, to fit it into your own subjective pattern. But here you have had to renounce precisely this quality to channel all your subjective energy back onto the object. SL: The event becomes a reflecting object, an imaginary mirror sending each one back to his own fantasy without ever letting itself be touched. There are no children of May. JB: The event has been eclipsed without leaving a trace, except this secondary effect of parody, this second or third hand product made to occupy a political scene that has been utterly absorbed and destroyed: socialism. p112 V10N3 1983

JB: Yes. Nothing to do with the happy hypersimulation of fashion. It’s the cold side of ecstasy. Its ecstasy is to be truer than true. It creates a kind of dizzyness, an effect of escalated truth. As a model, it’s pretty sad and tawdry. Socialism realizes, hyper-realizes a model which no longer has any veracity, or any original passion. SL: The socialists are setting up a stage-decor in trompel’oeil to hide the fact that socialism has disappeared. Like history, it has no real substance, nor any particular meaning. It is no more than a shadow of itself. It is no longer seductive. It is no longer anything to worry about. JB: History is now in a state of simulation, like a body that is kept in a state of hibernation. This is a kind of irreversible coma where things continue all the same to function, and eventually can even seem to amount to history: and then surreptitiously, as Canetti has it, it is possible that everything which has happened since that point in time would no longer be true. In any case, we would no longer be in a position to decide on its truth or falsity. SL: The end you talk about then, that would be rather the end of all finality — together with its exacerbated, empty parody of a resurgence. JB: I would prefer not to play the role of the lugubrious, thoroughly useless prophet. There is no end in the sense

whether you call it social space or the real. We have passed into a kind of hyper-reality where things are being replaced ad infinitum. SL: Societies with no history have mythology; we, on the other hand, have turned mythology into history. If we now are able to cease believing in this history, if we can put its very reality into doubt, it may be because history has had a lot to do with faith. JB: But what then does it mean to believe? To believe would be all the same, to maintain a kind of subjectivity that would guarantee the solidity of things and serve as a criteria for meaning. If sense is dependent on belief then we remain trapped irremediably in the realm of the imaginary. What interests me instead, but I’m not so sure you can still call it history, is the possibility of a pure event, an event that is no longer tied to the existence of a subject and hence is no longer available for manipulation, interpretation or deciphering by any historical subjectivity. SL: Can the subject then be totally short-circuited by the event? JB: The problematic of the subject involves the postulation that reality can be represented, that things give off signs which guarantee their existence and significance – in short, that there is a principle of reality. All of that is

now collapsing with the dissolution of the subject. This is of course the well-known “crisis of representation.” But just because this system of values is coming apart, which also supported the political and theatrical scenes — that doesn’t mean that we have been left in a complete vacuum. My position is by no means a nihilist one. If you explore the terrain of value in order to root out its last vestiges, you are left, on the contrary, in a situation that is even more radical. The radicality is to arrive at isolating in things, all that makes for interpretation, all that weighs them down with sense, all that over-determines them with meaning. SL: So then what is left, once you have gotten rid of this

What strategy could we adopt that would take into account these situations where the subject no longer has a valid place? JB: A strategy of the object. A kind of objective irony. Do you know the story of Beau Brummel? He travelled a lot, always accompanied by his servant. One day he arrived in Scotland. There were many lakes, one more beautiful than the other. Brummel turned to his servant and asked him: “Which lake do I prefer?” Having to choose is really a bore. That’s what servants are for. That’s not what counts in any case. Power – Knowledge – Will, let those who invented these ideas take responsibility for them. It makes perfect sense to me that the great masses, very

class itself. I see all of this as a profound reversal of strategy on the part of the masses: they are no longer involved in a process of subversion or of revolution, but in some gigantic devolution from an unwanted liberty – with some evil genie behind all of this. SL: Insofar as we can conceive of a reversal of strategy, the political stakes are not entirely a dead-letter. JB: I see no strategy being possible, except that of an object which no one could claim. SL Do you see an object-strategy in the rising to extremes projected by Paul Virilio — the military class devouring civil society before disappearing in its turn on its suicidal course? JB: The calculation of Paul is to push the military to a kind of extreme absolute of power that can ultimately only cause its own downfall, place it before the judgement of a God and absorb it into the society it destroys. He carries out this calculation with such an identification or obsession that I can credit him only with a powerful sense of irony: the system devours its own principle of reality, outbids on its own vacuous form until it attains to an absolute end or limit, to its ironical destiny of reversal. I myself am not so interested in military “hardware.” In the “software” rather. It’s rather in its form that his idea seems valid to me. I think the strategy of irony is to let the system collapse on the thrust of its own energy. Not being able to fight it directly, all you can do is rely on a logic of provocation. SL: Dare the system to destroy itself! Politics in that case could only survive in its own disappearance.

burden of sense? JB: Much less than we would have thought. All the traditional systems of value in terms of energy, for example, now seem to teeter on the brink. SL: Your analysis recalls though in many ways that proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the AntiOedipus; leaving representation behind, rejection of the dialectic, critique of meaning. etc. You part with them on the terrain of subjectivity: they fragment the subject, you abolish it; they make of desire the basis of becoming, you see becoming as involving the annihilation of desire. JB: I couldn’t care less about desire. I wouldn’t know any longer where to put it. I neither want to abolish it nor to take it into account. What bothers me about desire is the idea of a force or energy which would be the common source of all these fluxes. Is desire really involved? In my opinion, desire has nothing to do with it. SL: Well then what has? JB: Things just don’t happen anymore dialectically. These are no longer situations where a subject is involved: they happen all by themselves, without any mediation, by a sort of instantaneous commutation. SL: Do these events respond to any objective criteria?

snobbishly, delegate to the class of intellectuals, of politicians, this business of managing, of choosing, of knowing what one wants. They’re joyously getting rid of all those burdensome categories which no one, deep down inside, really wants any part of. That people want to be told what they want is certainly not true, that they really want knowledge is not evident either, and that they desire to want it is also by no means clear. The entire edifice of socialism is based on that assumption. SL The objective irony would be the careless manner in which the masses get rid of their responsibilities, turning power back to its fantasies, knowledge to its obsessions, will to its illusions. The silent majority, as you see it then, is not the accomplice of law and order. Its silence is rather a silence of death. The masses play dead: and this stubborn silence, this insolent reserve, would sanction the end – excuse me, the disappearance of the social. JB: Exactly. No one wants to bother about these problems. The great systems of information relieve the masses of the care of having to know, understand, be informed, be up on things. Advertising relieves people of the care of having to choose, which is perfectly human and understandably a torment. As to power, it has always seemed ironic to me to delegate it to someone: this is like catching it in a trap, and this trap closes on the political

JB: What I think will occur is a transmutation of all forms and the consequent unfeasibility of all politics. In fact, I don’t even see on the political level what would be equivalent to forms running wild, except that we would probably have to construct another theory of the media as agents provocateurs of an oversupply of information, of an annihilating ecstasy making of the substance of traditional political debate a gigantic abyss. SL: Wouldn’t the critique of media be, in the final analysis, the ghost they carry with them, an echo of complicity which the media must utter in order to justify its existence? For there to be mystification there has to be somewhere a standard of truth. JB: There remains behind all of this a certain symbolic claim to truth. The media are denounced as a fabulous distortion, but where does the distortion come from? If you put the media into the system will-choice-liberty, you can’t do anything more with them. You can only say they push the political subject back into total alienation, say that it is power which manipulates, etc. Let’s eliminate the idea that media mystifies and alienates. Enough is enough.

ETCHINGS BY GUSTAVE DORE

1983 V10N3 p113

On this day, September 16, 1926, 1 have arrived at the respectable age of seventy. Since I came to Taormina on the day of my twentieth birthday, it has now been half a century that I have been living in a most undeniable paradise. I have been so happy here, I have done such marvellous things, and this blissful place owes me so much that I thought I would mark this jubilee by beginning to write my memoirs. My memoirs are not for historians. They can be of interest only to voluptuaries and artists. They are the testimony of a life devoted to the cult of beauty, and an act of gratitude towards a country and its people.   

I was born in the chateau of Volkshagen, near Wismer, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklemburg on the Baltic. My father, an officer and a baron, died shortly after my birth. My mother, already the widow of a certain Mr. Raabe, remarried very soon afterwards, to another baron by the name of Hammerstein. From her first marriage there was only one girl — my dear Sophie, the guardian angel of my days in Sicily, who, single like myself, lives with me here. I was the only child of the second marriage; and from the third there were two girls, one of whom married and died in childbirth, while the other grows old alone in Berlin. Thus, after us, there will be little to show for three marriages and two barons. At least there is something to show for the Baron von Gloeden! Due perhaps to my delicate health I was rather shy by nature. The family doctor did me the favor of believing me to be feebler than I was. Declaring me lost if I stayed in our provinces any longer, he decided that a lengthy sojourn in Italy would have a salubrious effect. My stepfather, who never got along very well with me, was the first to hasten my departure. Nothing could have pleased me more. I was in love with beauty and Italy was its home. Gifted as a painter, I dreamt of making a career, and Italy was the school for painters.   

EXCERPTS FROM THE MEMOIRS OF

BARON WILHELM V. GLOEDEN

BY ROGER PEYREFITTE

P H O T O G R A P H S C O U RT E S Y O F L U C I O A M E L I O G A L L E RY, N A P O L I p114 V10N3 1983

I asked Virgilio to show me the ancient Greek theatre of Taormina. I remember the emotions that took hold of me as soon as I had penetrated the dark vaults and emerged into a semicircle bathed in moonlight. There was not a soul, and yet we seemed to be eavesdropping on I do not know what strange rites and enchantments. The theatre still had its circular wall and we climbed up the galleries of which the niches and portals remained, although the tiers had been torn off the slopes. Suddenly, all that I had been admiring since my arrival here spread itself out before my eyes, only in a wider expanse and with greater splendour. I sat on the grass to contemplate the spectacle as it must have been some two thousand years ago. Without a doubt this was the one place in the world where it was possible to savour perfection most perfectly. So I was not surprised that it had never inspired a good painting, and that the drama of Nausicaa, which Goethe meditated under this horizon, never got beyond the planning stage — it was one of those projects too perfect to be realized. But I could murmur the lines from Oedipus at Colonnus which the Greeks must have recited here and which must have been meant for just such a setting: “0 stranger, you are here in the most beautiful abode in the world.” I had better company than Goethe and Sophocles. I had a Virgilio who did not even know what a Virgil was. But he understood the incantations of the shadows and the silence, and the hour which I spent that night in the most beautiful abode in the world was the most beautiful of my life. My mind was made up: I would live and die in Taormina.   

Wanting to provide Virgilio with a means of earning a living, I had him take photography lessons in Katania. This art, then in its infancy, had aroused my young friend’s curiosity and appeared to him to be in some way the reflection of my own. I bought him a camera; he photographed the entire village. As he did his work at my place, it was from him that I in turn learned the profession that I had him learn. One day I made a photograph of some village boys playing completely nude around a fishing boat. Not without apprehension, I sent it to a German magazine, and, as a way of cocking a snook at my countrymen, proudly signed it in the manner of a real painting: W. v. Gloeden fecit. I expected, if not a rejection, then at least a reduced reproduction. Imagine my surprise when, on the contrary, I saw my little fellows prominently displayed! They undoubtedly had some effect, because orders started coming in from all sides “for plates of the same genre.” Obviously, my path lay before me; all I had to do was follow it. Having already unveiled the beauty of Taormina, I was now going to unveil that of its young natives. I did not easily arrive at the perfection of this branch of my art which was to supplant all others. The number of plates I destroyed! To create an artistic nude it is not enough to festoon the head or arms of the model with flowers. That is easy enough to see from the works of my colleagues, for it was not long before I had imitators coming here in droves. Frankly, I must say that their efforts never failed to amuse me. Their ephebes must have been paid by someone who was an enemy either to Taormina or to ephebes. Strangest of all, these were my own models, and I never paid them . Yet it was for me that they reserved the elegance of their poses; for others they merely presented the caricature. My Italian rivals were quickly discouraged and their plagia-

rism remained without result. But there was one German who attributed my mastery to Germanic virtues. What is more, he was my cousin and a baron like myself. His name was Pluschow, and he had established himself in Rome. After a year of open and honest competition he admitted defeat, and we divided the world between us: it was understood that he would do the girls of Italy while leaving the boys of Sicily to me. On a beach recently I saw a woman tourist taking pictures of a group of children, when one of them announced solemnly to the others, “When I grow up I’m going to get myself photographed nude, just like grandpa.” I was amused by this unwitting hommage to myself, but not without a touch of melancholy. It reminded me of a distant past, when the grandfather of today dazzled me with his fifteen years. Still, I was gratified to know that in setting up a gallery of youth I had also set up a gallery of ancestors. With the co-operation of time, that now makes some two or three generations of nudes. All of which goes to show that moral latitude does not necessarily have an adverse effect on the propagation of the species.   

To pose an ensemble of nudes is not an easy task: one is forever treading a fine line between the ridiculous and the indecent. But I believe that I have acquitted myself well enough within the limits which I set myself. My clients had sufficient taste to content themselves with these limits. Nevertheless, there have been those who have asked me whether I had not something a little cruder to offer them. “What” I told them, “Do you have no imagination?” Then I let them see the photograph which is in my estimation the most suggestive: the bust of a young boy, his head

wreathed in jasmins, clutching a bouquet of flowers to his breast. It is all in his gaze, which is slightly lowered and even difficult to make out, although easily guessed. It is a miracle of innocence and perversity. “What a horrible man you are!” a visitor once told me, “You could make angels blush with a picture of a boy’s first communion.” No praise could ever have pleased me more. For mine is the art of suggestion, which, it seems to me, is the be-all and end-all of all art.   

It is time to mention two individuals who apart from all question of sentiment occupy an important place in my life: don Giuseppe, the parish priest of Castelmola, and don Manuele, the parish priest of Letionni; both of whom were at one and the same time good companions and good priests. Besides the beautiful tourists who were often seen en route to their parishes, both don Giuseppe and don Manuele maintained regular liaisons, or rather actual unions, in the villages, hamlets and farms which they served. Don Manuele had four or five children while don Giuseppe boasted of having eighteen. Nature is generous in Sicily and they would have thought they were committing a sin by not responding to her wishes. Need I add that their children also become my models? Only once did I see don Giuseppe and don Manuele scandalized. They had learned that a simple goatherd who took communion every Sunday was fornicating with his goats and had not once thought of mentioning it in confession. This was also the only occasion we ever had for a little argument concerning the moral order. I defended the goatherd by pointing out that the scandal was in them and not in him . “Beware,” I exclaimed, “of making him conscious of a sin he does not even know exists. You would be turning him away from a sacrament that helps him to live. So what if he pours out a little too much love on his goats! What pope, what saint, has a purer heart than this goatherd?”   

Perhaps the young visitor who entered my studio that day really believed that he was protected by his incognito, but I had no difficulty recognizing Crown Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia. He was seventeen years old and I admired not only his gracious demeanour but also the courage he showed in crossing my threshold. Afraid that his father could do me some harm, I was tempted to return the Prince to the bosom of his family then visiting Taormina. But I would have been failing the gods who were offering me such an easy prey. Ordinarily I begin by showing my landscapes and then the “Sicilian characters.” This time I rushed things a bit. I showed him the collections of nudes straight off, as if I had no others. And so I got my revenge on the Hohenzollerns when I saw this one blush to the tips of his ears. He did not flinch, however, but just kept turning the pages of the album with equanimity. Not that I for one minute doubted that this was the real object of his visit, but I had wanted to defy as much as to satisfy him. For the rest, I was not unaware of the necessity of being bold with the young so that they will learn to make themselves agreeable. I was amused when young August Wilhelm attempted to darken the veil of incognito between us by telling me that he was a painter in search of subjects. Was he emboldened by this lie? Certainly he began turning the pages more slowly and dwelling on the details. His mouth was watering. After all, it did run in the family: a number of his ancestors could have called themselves honorary citizens of Taormina. Finally, without looking up, he said, “Are these local models?” I bowed. “They are at your command — Your Imperial Highness.” That was the first time I ever assumed a role other than that of photographer, but my debut was brilliant. The Prince was no longer blushing. He turned towards me, and he smiled. That was his reply. Continuing to look through the albums, he lingered a long time over one of the pictures, examined the following ones, then came back to the first one. His eyes met mine. We understood each other.

Although worthy of him from the point of view of aesthetics, the Prince’s choice was a little strange from a social point of view. Since my models range from shepherds to patricians — patricians of Taormina — a son of a Kaiser might be expected to choose one of the latter. Unfortunately, his choice did not even fall upon a shepherd but a young cobbler. The Prince, moreover, did not show the least sign of displeasure at this, and so at my place the next day he was at last able to compare the photograph with the original.

But my country was not the only one to pay tribute to this foolish evil. From here I have seen them all arrive, all the illustrious exiles of European morality: Fersen, already named, and Oscar Wilde, and so many others. Their misfortunes remind me that our distance from the Middle Ages is one of appearance only. Prison has replaced the executioner, but it is still for a crime that does not exist.

It would have been futile to hide the identity of his admirer from the young cobbler. With great dignity he accepted the honour which had befallen him, and never had I had better occasion to testify to the natural nobility of a citizen of Taormina.

I have always loved French literature and, among the works of contemporaries, I place none above those of Anatole France. My enthusiasm persuaded me to decorate my studio with one of his portraits to hang side by side with that of la Duse, another object of my admiration. A Frenchman, touched by this hommage, promised to pass it on to the writer who he happened to know personally. I got together a few photographs — land-scapes and character studies — and begged the visitor to offer them to him.

Amid the pomp and circumstance of his departure for Germany, August Wilhelm had only one regret, not to be able to give his friend a beautiful present. “Princes never have any money,” he told me. However, he was sure to be able to find some in Berlin with which to discharge his debts of heart as well as those incurred by his choice of photographs, among which that of the young cobbler figured most prominently.

  

Some weeks later I received a carefully sealed packet from our embassy in Rome. The covering letter limited itself to informing me that it was being forwarded on the orders of the Imperial Palace. It contained the complete set of photographs which the Prince had taken with him. The other side of this pleasant little story is that of von Krupp. Passing by on a cruise, the richest man in Germany stopped off to compliment me on my work. At the time he was looking for a place for a summer home, and, having at first thought of Morocco, which was just then coming into vogue, had really wanted to tell me that I had decided him on a preference for Italy. For a while he toyed with the idea of establishing himself at Taormina; perhaps it was his misfortune not to have done so. There are certain secret virtues here which protect against scandal, and Krupp would doubtless have been spared the fate that awaited him at Capri. But it was there that he went, drawn by his fantasies about the Emperor Tiberius. I stopped there once on a voyage to Naples and was aghast at his manner of living. He was turning the island into a factory of voluptuousness, as though he were turning it into another of his cannon factories. He was much too envied to permit himself with impugnity to revive the “Roman orgy” which, even for the Romans — and Tiberius was no exception —always came to a bad end. Krupp believed that he had found a hiding place when in fact he had kindled a conflagration. The solitude of Mount Zirotto would have been safer. Taormina has, moreover, certain virtues of moderation from which Baron von Krupp might have profited. What could not fail to happen, happened. The new Caesar of Capri was violently attacked by the opposition papers in Germany. Photographs of groups of nudes were published, taken, so it was said, at his own villa but which were, in reality, taken by me in Sicily. Krupp returned to Essen and killed himself. I was amazed that he would not have thought it more grandiose to do away with himself in Capri. Probably he wanted to leave the glory of all the apparatus of an imperial death to another: Fersen — laid out on a bed of purple surrounded by torches, his face made-up, and a light veil just barely covering his naked cadavre. The Krupp affair was the first of such scandals that rocked Germany, and which, reaching higher and higher, did not leave even the entourage of the Emperor untouched. While pitying these unfortunates, victims of laws that promote blackmail, I confess that I feel myself obliged to say a Suave mari magno....

It was therefore a wonderful surprise when a year later I was informed at the Hotel San Domenico that Monsieur Anatole France would be visiting me the next day at suchand-such an hour. While I was captivated by the simplicity of his manner, his words had an elegance worthy of his writings. Our conversation remains one of my most flattering memories, and the most beautiful page in my golden album is the one which bears his signature. Since he had heard my talents as a photographer of masculine beauty praised, Anatole France was curious to see my work. I spread my albums before him, although with less boldness than for the son of the German Emperor. I was afraid that he would exercise his irony at my expense. Above all I was afraid that he would diminish the work of a lifetime right before my eyes. Instead, he looked through it all very calmly as though he were looking at a collection of stamps. From time to time he raised his head with an expression on his face that I will never be able to unravel. “I was not aware that you were directing an enterprise of such magnitude,” he said when he had finished. “It is a veritable religion that you are reviving here. In broad daylight you are putting back on their pedestals the gods that have been overthrown.”

Taormina has many masons for erecting a statue in my honour. I know very well that the development of my art coincided with that of the tourist trade, but I flatter myself that the most interesting of the tourists came on account of me. In a world dedicated to hypocrisy and lies I lit up the beacon of Taormina. And Taormina proved herself worthy because I prepared her for it. Like Augustus in Rome I found a city of brick and left a city of marble. I do not claim the honour of having built all the hotels. But on the facades of the beautiful villas I seem to see, in lieu of the names of the architects, W. V. Gloeden fecit….   

In the beautiful gardens of the cemetery of Taormina where I now take my daily walks, I think back on a poem of Goethe’s entitled Ganymede, whose title character as well as whose subject would seem to be situated in Taormina. Is it not this garden with all its phantoms which seems to have dictated it? Upon your breast I repose, yearning. Both your flowers and your herbs Are pressed against my heart. ... My spirit draws me up on high While clouds bend towards the earth, Clouds bending towards nostalgic love, Towards me! Towards me! With a laugh I told him that I was just doing the reverse of St. Pancras, apostle to Sicily, who upon disembarking at Taormina overthrew the statues of the pagan gods by the mere sound of his voice.

Just as I have had generations of models, so have I had generations of clients. Which should put the lie to the currently prevailing opinion that generations succeed but do not resemble one another.

“What I am saying is very serious,” Anatole France continued. “In restoring antique Greece to us, you also risk restoring to us her morals. Those morals were inspired by the nakedness of the palaestras, and the naked-ness of your images could have an equal effect on our own, although I would not say on my one. I love the Greeks, but I am past the age of palaestras.”

Most frequently it was the real connoisseurs who derived a mischievous glee from telling me that their names should not be unknown to me. If, on the other hand, I made the discovery on my own, I kept it to myself. There was one incident in particular that taught me to adopt this prudent attitude.

The visit of the most famous writer of France to the German photographer of Taormina was the symbol of a world which places questions of art and the spirit above those of national frontiers.   

Of all the visits I have received, that of an archbishop must have been at once the most surprising and the most unexpected. The fastidiousness with which he installed himself at the Hotel San Domenico in the company of a secretary who was altogether too pretty, immediately put him into the limelight. He came from Hungary and was not only an archbishop but also a count. When he officiated at the mass in an embroidered chasuble and mitre, with his all too pretty secretary serving as acolyte, it was difficult to determine just what he was trying to represent, titles or religion.

Towards you, towards all of you, my friends! (The Baron von Gloeden died in 1931)

A young Englishman, who came to place an important order, begged to see my golden album. When he saw the name on one of its pages he suddenly changed colour. “That’s too much.” he screamed, and angrily pushed the book back at me. “My father, too!” With that he countermanded the order and walked out, slamming the door behind him. I was amused by his anger. Did it set his teeth on edge just because his father had liked green apples before he did? Besides, had he looked a little further he would have found the name of his grandfather as well.   

I have seen my albums paged through by many an august hand, either glorious or charming, but never before had I seen them leafed through by the hands of a prince of the church. In his way of looking at them my visitor reminded me of the gravity of Anatole France. He seemed to be totally absorbed in hearing the confession of a discretionary case and to be giving it his absolution. Then, turning to his young secretary, he handed him the albums, say-ing, “Choose what you like for yourself.” And engaged me in a conversation about the situation in Central Europe.

The list of all those whom I have not already mentioned would be too long. How many writers, sages, and artists have passed through my studio! But if I were to mention Kipling, it would be assumed that he was not interested in the same things as Oscar Wilde, and that I did not show him the same albums. Similarly, I see no point in detracting from the universal esteem that Richard Strauss and Marconi enjoy in the eyes of the world. But since I must finish with names, I will allow myself the minor glory of ending with the name of a king. My king might have been the King of Cambodia, but he contented himself with delegating his orderly, whereas His Majesty the King of Siam came in person. Which proves, in any case, that I have made my way even into the courts of the Orient.

  

  

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH AND EDITED BY HANS WERNER

1983 V10N3 p117

JOEL-PETER WITKIN p118 V10N3 1983

Penitente

Angel of the Carrots

The Sins of Juan Miró

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ARVIDA ALCAN FACTORY AT JONQUIÈRE IN THE SAGUENAY Work in the tank chambers allows workers to contract certain respiratory diseases as well as Osseous Fibrosis. Their risk of cancer increases and it is possible for them to suffer from “Plaques de Pot”, red spots covering the body. 1983 V10N4 p121

Norma, produced by the Opéra de Montréal, with funds from Alcan. Alcan’s South African affiliate has been designated a strategically important “key point industry” by the South African Government. The company’s black workers went on strike in 1981.

p122 V10N4 1983

Stephen Biko. Black leader. Died from head injuries incurred during detention by South African Police. Alcan’s South African affiliate sells semi-finished products to the South African Government, which can be used for police and military equipment. The company does not recognize a trade union of its black workers.

Less than ever does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or AEG yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let’s say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

Moins que jamais une simple reproduction de la réalité nous renseigne sur la réalité. Une photgraphie de l’usine de Krupp ou de AEG ne nous dit presque rien sur ces institutions. La réalité proprement dite a glissé vers le fonctionnel. La réification des rapports humains, l’usine en l’occurrence, ne révèle plus ces rapports. Il devient donc nécessaire de “construire” quelque chose d’artificiel, de fabriqué. Bertold Brecht

Lucie De Lammermoor, produced by the Opéra de Montréal, with funds from Alcan. Alcan’s South African affiliate is the largest aluminum fabricator and the only aluminum sheet roller in South Africa. The company is training 8 apprentices out of a non-white workforce of 2300. 1983 V10N4 p123

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M AURICE B LANCHOT n the absence of the friend who lived with her, Judith opened the door. My surprise was extreme, inextricable, certainly much greater than if I had met her by chance. My astonishment was such that it expressed itself in me by these words: “My God! Still a face that I know!” Maybe my decision to walk straight up to this face had been so strong that it made the face impossible. But there was also the embarrassment of having come to confirm on the spot the continuity of things. Time had passed, and yet it was not past; that was a truth that I should not have wanted to place in my presence.

p124 V10N4 1983

MAURICE BLANCHOT

I don’t know if the surprise in this face matched mine. Yet there was clearly such an accumulation of events between us, of extraordinary facts, of torments, of incredible thoughts and also such a depth of happy oblivion that it was not at all hard for her not to be surprised by me. I found her surprisingly little changed. The small rooms had been transformed, as I saw right away, but even in this new setting, which I was not managing to take in yet and which I did not like very much, she was completely the same, not only faithful to her features, to her appearance, but also to her age—young in a way that made her strangely resemble herself. I kept looking at her, I said to myself: So this is why I was so surprised. Her face or rather her expression, which hardly varied at all, remaining halfway between a most cheerful smile and a most chilly reserve, reawakened in me a terribly distant memory, and it was this deeply buried, very ancient memory that she seemed to be copying in order to appear so young. At last I said to her: “You really have changed very little!” At this moment she was next to a piano I had never imagined in that room. Why this piano? “Are you the one who plays the piano?” She shook her head. Quite a long time afterwards, with sudden animation and in a reproachful tone of voice, she said to me: “But Claudia’s the one who plays! She sings!” She was looking at me in a strange way—it was spontaneous, lively, and yet out of the corner of her as eye. This look—I don’t know why—hit me to the very quick. “Who is Claudia?” She did not answer, and again I was struck, but this time I was so struck, as though by some misfortune, that I became uneasy about this look of resemblance she had that made her so absolutely young. Now I remembered her much better. She had the most delicate sort of face, I mean that her features had a sort of playfulness and extreme fragility, as though they were bound up with a different look, a look that was more concentrated, interior, and that age could only harden. But that was just what had not happened, age had been strangely reduced to impotence. After all, why should she have changed? The past was not so far back, and that couldn’t be such a great misfortune either. And even I—how could I deny it?—now that I could look at her from the depths of my memory, I was uplifted, taken back to another life. Yes, a strange agitation came to me, an unforgotten possibility that cared nothing for the days, that shone out through the darkest night, a blind force against which surprise and grief could do nothing. The window was open, and she got up to go and shut it. I realized that until then the street had continued to run through the room. I don’t know if all that noise bothered her; I think she wasn’t paying much attention to it; but when she turned around and saw me I had the sudden feeling that she was only then seeing me for the first time. I admit that this was a remarkable thing, and even more, at the same moment, I felt—still in an unclear way but already acutely—that it was partly my fault: yes, I

saw right away that if in some sense I had escaped her notice—and that was perhaps odd—I had also not done everything I should have done in order really to show myself to her, and it was much less odd than it was saddening. For one reason or another, but maybe because I myself had been too busy watching her quite comfortably, something essential that could only happen if I asked it to happen had been forgotten, and for the moment I did not know what it was, but forgetfulness was as present as it could be, so much so, especially now that the room was shut up, as to allow me to suspect that outside of that there wasn t much here. This was, I must say, a discovery so disastrous physically that it completely took control of me. As I was thinking that, I was fascinated by my thought, and eclipsed by it. Well, it was an idea! And not just any idea but one of my proportions, exactly equal to me, and if it could be thought, I could only disappear. After a moment I had to ask for a glass of water. The words “Give me a glass of water” left me with the feeling of a terrible coldness. I was in pain, but completely myself again, and more particularly I had no doubt about what had just happened. When I made up my mind to extricate myself, I tried to remember where the kitchen was. In the hallway it was darker than it should have been, and I realized because of this that I still wasn’t very well. On one side there was the bathroom that opened into the room I had just left, and the kitchen and the second room had to be farther on: in my mind everything was clear, but not outside. Blasted hallway, I thought, was it really this long? Now, when I think of how I was behaving, I am surprised that I could have made all those efforts without realizing why they cost me so much. I am not sure I even felt anything unpleasant until the point when, after an awkward movement (having perhaps bumped into a wall), I experienced an abominable pain, the most lively pain possible—it split my head open—-but perhaps more lively than alive; it is hard to express how it was at once cruel and insignificant: a horrible violence, an abomination, all the more intolerable because it seemed to come to me across a fantastic layer of time that burned in its entirety inside me, an immense and unique pain, as though I had not been touched at this moment but centuries ago and for centuries past, and the quality it had of being something finished, something completely dead, could certainly make it easier to bear but also harder, by turning it into a perseverance that was absolutely cold, impersonal, that would not be stopped either by life or by the end of life. Of course I did not understand all that right away. I was simply pierced by a feeling of horror, and by these words, in which my good faith still holds: “Oh no, is this beginning again? All over again! All over again!” Anyway, I was stopped short. Wherever it came from, the shock had caught me again so firmly that in the present moment opened up by it I had enough

1983 V10N4 p125

THE RIGHT TIME

space so that I could forget forever to find my way out of it. Walk, go forward—I could certainly do it, and I had to do it, but rather like an ox that has been hit over the head: my steps were the steps of immobility. These were the most difficult moments. And it is really true that they are still happening now; through everything, I must turn back to them and say to myself: I’m still there, I stayed there.

to me. At that moment I was near the window, I felt almost well, and if it was true that the daylight was waning as fast as it was mounting again in me, what clarity remained here and there was enough to show me everything without illusion. I can even say that if I was a little disoriented in that room, that disorientation had the naturalness of any visit to any person, in any one of the thousand rooms I could have gone into.

The hallway led to the room that was at the other end. Everything indicates that I looked terribly distraught, I went in more or less without knowing it, without any feeling of going from one place to another, filled with an unmoving fall, unable to see, miles from realizing it. I probably stopped on the doorsill. After all, there was a passage there, a thickness that had its own laws or requirements. Finally—finally?—the passage became free and, having forced the entrance, I took two or three steps into that room. Fortunately (but maybe this impression was accurate only for me), I walked with a certain discretion. Fortunately too, from the moment I had really entered, a little of that reality touched me. The afternoon, in the meantime, had taken a large leap forward, but there was just enough light so that I could endure it. At least I had that feeling, just as I recognized in the calm, the patience, and the very weakness of the daylight a wish to respect the life in me that was still so weak. What I did not see, what I saw only at the last..but I would like to be able to pass over all that quickly. I often have an immeasurable desire to cut things short, a desire that is powerless, because to satisfy it would be too easy for me; however lively it might be, it is too weak for the limitless power I have to accomplish it. Oh, how useless it is to desire anything.

The only vestige of anomaly was that the fact that there was no one there —or that I saw no one—did not in the least disturb this naturalness. As far as I know, I found the situation perfect, I did not want to see the door open and the man or woman who normally lived there come in. In fact, I did not have the idea that anyone lived in the room, or in any other room in the world, if there were any others, which did not occur to me either. I think that for me, at this moment, the world was fully represented by this room with its bed in the middle of it, the armchair, and its little piece of furniture. Really, where could anyone have come from? It would have been madness to expect the walls to disappear. Besides, I did not feel the emptiness.

As for this young woman who had opened the door for me, to whom I had talked, who from the past to the present, during an inestimable length of time, had been real enough to remain constantly visible to me: I would like to let nothing be understood about her, ever. In my need to name her, to make her appear, in circumstances which, however mysterious they may be, are still those of living people, there is a violence that horrifies me. This is the reason for my desire to cut things short, at least its nobler side. To pass over the essential—that is what the essential asks of me, asks of me through it. If this is possible, let it be this way. I beg my decline to come of its own accord. I saw certain aspects of the room very clearly, and it had already renewed its alliance with me, but I didn’t see her. I don’t know why. Soon I looked with interest at a large armchair placed at the far end of the bed (so I had taken several steps into the room in order to reach the foot of the bed); in a corner near the window I noticed a little table with a pretty mirror, but the word for this piece of furniture did not come

p126 V0N4 1983

Well, she—according to what she told me—saw me; she was actually standing in front of the armchair and not one of my movements had escaped her. It was true, I had remained next to the door for quite a few minutes, but not at all with that terribly distraught look I thought I had; rather pale, yes, and an expression that was cold, “fixed,” she said, which made it very clear—but this was a little troubling even so— that my life was taking place somewhere else and that there could be nothing of me here but this endless immobility. It was also true, I had taken a few steps; passing near the armchair, I had come to look with interest at the little piece of furniture, I was visibly interested in it, I had found that in some sense it contained the reason that justified my having come in. No, she was not surprised to see me so inattentive to her presence—because she too, at such a moment, was not at all concerned to know if she was present, because even though the fact of being flung back into darkness demands some sacrifices, she also took infinite satisfaction in watching me in my truthfulness, for I, not seeing her and not seeing anyone, showed myself with all the sincerity of a man who is alone. To contemplate the truth in flesh and blood, even if one must remain invisible, even if one must plunge forever into the discretion of the most desperate cold and the most radical separation—who hasn’t wanted that? But who has had that courage? Only one person, I think.

Excerpted from the beginning of Maurice Blanchot’s forthcoming novel, THE RIGHT TIME, to be published by Station Hill Press.

Photography has a unique relation to death since it can record the passing moment with a life-like intensity. What happens when death becomes the explicit subject of the picture? Does the function of photography become even more visible? How does the photographer react to the graphic presence of death? How does he frame it? Is the public taken into account as he positions his camera in front of the dead? Fadi Mitri, a Lebanese photojournalist had just returned from Beirut with pictures from the Palestinian massacre when Sylvère Lotringer talked with him in New York. The first photographer present in the Sabra and Shatila camps, his pictures figured prominently in the international press coverage of the event.

S Y L V E R E

L O T R I N G E R

I N T E R V I E W S

Sylvère Lotringer: How do people react to photographers in a war zone?

SL: If your parents or your friends were wounded, would you take a photograph?

Fadi Mitri: Photojournalists are never popular. Imagine your own family: there’s an air raid, there’s shelling, you’re trying to rush your child to safety, or take him to the hospital because he’s been wounded, and you have a crazy photographer standing there, clicking with his motor drive.

FM: I haven’t considered it, nor do I want to. None of my parents or relatives have been wounded. There’s been one incident where I knew a person who died. She was in pieces. I have a picture of that girl. I could only recognize her by her size, her clothing, her shoes. The top of her head-everything above the eyebrows were gone. No head.

SL: Exploiting the situatio

FM: Exactly. This is horrible. You’ve got to make sure that it does not affect your work, try to keep it aside. You’re there to take the picture, not to be a Red Cross and help. SL: Do people understand that?

FM: They will never understand.

SL: How did that happen?

FM: During the early days of the invasion, for a whole month there were air raids by the Israelis. People were just driving on the main highway connecting southern Lebanon to Beirut, the capital. There were six lanes, three on either side. The Israeli jets bombed the highway. Each bomb makes a big

F A D I

M I T R I

hole approximately 24 feet in diameter, 9 feet deep. If you were driving, and they dropped these bombs on you, you’d be plowed into the ground, as were hundreds of bodies. SL: Your friend was driving?

FM: The whole family was in the car. The coastline was on the right, the mainland on the left and the highway in between. The driver ran toward the sea. The rest of the family ran toward the mainland for safety. He was the only survivor. It was luck. You never know where they’re going to drop a bomb. SL: Did you take a picture of the family?

FM: I took a picture of the girl when she was pulled out from the rubble. I just took it and got out very quickly because they often throw time bombs which

FM: You frame the picture. When you look in your viewfinder, you don’t really see what the picture is about. Very few people do. You have to rush back, process the film and send them to the wire service. SL: If you hadn’t taken the picture, you may not have seen anything. But when you finally see the picture, do you actually feel the emotion you hadn’t felt when you were on the spot? FM: On June 6, I was driving with a photographer for SIGMA when the jets bombed the main highway. We saw it all in front of us. So we just ran. I tried to tell her to be careful. There are time bombs. She said: “I know what I’m doing.” Then they pulled out the friend of mine, with her brains out—and she froze there, physically. I had to grab her by the arm or she would have kept on staring at the dead body. It hit her very quickly. If you want to do this job never get your feelings mixed up with your work. You’re supposed to be neutral. You’re a photojournalist covering facts. You can’t afford to build hatred in your system. explode fifteen or twenty minutes later. So even after a big air raid, you have to be very careful if you walk around to take after-math pictures They use these bombs so they can kill more when help comes. These bombscluster bombs—are banned by the Geneva Convention. They’re American—made, supplied to Israel, and they’re being used in the war. What difference does it make if you kill someone with a cluster bomb or if you kill them with a 155 mm. Houser shell or phosporous bombs? When a phosporous bomb hits your skin, there’s nothing you can do. You rub it, it burn’s more. You put water on it, you sizzle more. The Israelis used it on a hospital for the mentally retarded. Also on Mother Therasa’s home. SL: Do you think they did that purposely? FM: It’s never done on purpose. Mistakes do happen but it’s crazy to use these bombs. There are pictures of mothers with their babies burning, running around in the streets. There’s nothing like seeing your own baby burning in your hands. There’s nothing you can do. It’s a horrible thing, to see people close to you killed, and then to photograph them. Do you take the picture or do you help the wounded? You always wonder. SL: Do you think that sharing the same danger makes it more legitimate to take a picture? FM: No. I mean, you toughen up after a while. You don’t think any more about your feelings. You’re a photographer. You just go out there and you get the picture. SL: What was your reaction when you took your first picture of wounded or dead people? FM: I didn’t feel any thing. But later, it hits you—shit, this is a dead body. It was a human being just like me. Then you see lumps of meat of being put on strechers. You see hands, feet, heads. They try to match them, to see which belongs on the same stretcher. SL: When you are behind a camera, do you stop thinking and just keep shooting? p128 V10N4 1983

SL: Do you think the effect on the reader is the same as yours when you first see your picture? FM: Of course not. The reader sees it in New York, sitting with his coffee in the morning. You see it under totally different conditions, laying in bed or seeing it in real life. SL: How did you manage to be the first photographer on the scene after the massacre? FM: When we went to the camps on June 16, we didn’t even know there had been a massacre.

…you toughen up after a while. You don’t think any more about your feelings. You’re a photographer. You just go out there and you get the picture.

they took up positions around the camps, as did the Phalange—the Christian militia which took part in the massacre. They were surrounding the camps and wouldn’t let anybody in or out. There was a curfew in the area. Nobody could wander around. SL: Could they possibly not have known what was going on inside?

SL: Was it the first day of the massacre?

FM: They’re one of the smartest nations. They know how to handle things. They must have realized. And it would stink very soon.

FM: No, the second day, early in the morning.

SL: How did you get in?

SL: Were the Israelis outside?

FM: I just walked in from the back. There was nobody there. There were lots of land mines all around. It was like a ghost town walking through there. You had to go down by the stadiums, then downhill to Shatila, then up to Sabra camp.

FM: They had arrived on Thursday the 13th. On Tuesday the President of Lebanon was assassinated. On Wednesday the Israelis invaded West Beirut in order to hit the leftist-terrorist bases. On Thursday and Friday,

SL: What did you see at first? FM: I saw the bodies of two elderly men, one shot at close range in the head—big holes—the other in the back. And they had booby-trapped the bodies with hand grenades, so if you came to lift the body it would explode. SL: Do you think the Israelis had anything to do with that? FM: It’s a very confusing situation. You don’t go around shooting a woman, tying her hands up, maybe raping— she had nothing under the belt—and then slaughtering her. Just putting a blade in and cutting her neck. You don’t do this. SL: I doubt the Israelis would do that. FM: You doubt it. I also doubt it. There’s more hatred from the Phalange. Everyone is blaming the Israelis—there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have taken part in fighting the Palestinians. But the Israelis didn’t do the dirty work. They got someone to do the messy part. They sort of stood there and shot flares in the air. Then they opened the camps, and they let bulldozers in to pull down all the

You have to be in between, indirect. You have to make death glamourous. You have to make it look good and attractive, even the goriest part.

houses. You could see bodies just hanging between the rubble, women, children in their own houses, cars upside down. They didn’t care. Then they gathered them outside the houses and they just gunned them down. Everywhere there were heaps of bodies. SL: Was this still going on while you were there? FM: No. It was all over. The blood was still red. It was Saturday morning. SL: You were the first one to get there. FM: The first. The second journalist arrived around eleven o’clock. People were afraid because the Lebanese army surrounded the camps and didn’t allow anybody in, not even the experts. So it was very difficult. If you took pictures and got them out of the camps, then you had made it. I never knew there was a massacre there, I didn’t know what a massacre was, even when I had photographed all these dead bodies. To me they meant nothing. Then three days later, after I read about massacres, it hit me: this is a massacre. Have you ever seen one yourself?

FM: I went too gory sometimes, but it was there. If the neck is broken, you take close-ups. You have to shoot a lot because you don’t know what people want to see out there. SL: You knew that some pictures were not publishable? FM: I knew very well that these close-ups would never be published. The aim is to put the message across to the outside world that war is gory, without showing the gore of it. That’s the challenging part. SL: Without showing the gore—why? FM: People don’t want to see gory things. They won’t absorb it. They won’t understand it. They cannot accept it, cannot take it. They keep the idea out of their minds. Then, as a journalist, you haven’t succeeded in putting your message across. You have to be in-between, indirect. You have to make death glamourous. You have to make it look good and attractive, even the goriest part. People hate to face the facts of life, people dislike that. If you beat around the bush slightly, you get them where you want. SL: As soon as you make it look glamourous, it’s not the fact anymore. It becomes information. Then any picture would do. FM: Still photography is difficult. You don’t have sound or movement, as you do with films. In a war, you have the destruction factor in the background. The foreground is the human factor—the typical shots: a man running with a baby in his arms, dead bodies piled up in front of houses or people living for weeks outside their bombed houses. SL: Whenever I look at pictures of wars in Afganistan, Lebanon or El Salvador, they always seem to come up with these typical, interchangeable shots. FM: It’s always the same thing. That’s the human factor. You’re not making the woman run with her baby; you don’t ask the jets to bomb that area to set people in the right kind of motion. Things are really happening. But it’s up to you to choose the right subject, frame it right, with the right angle in order to put it across to the outside

world. The picture has to explain. SL: So shooting a wound from up close wouldn’t do. FM: No. It wouldn’t be a human factor. A close-up of someone’s slaughtered body doesn’t tell anything. It could be anyone, anywhere. SL: Do you know in advance when a picture is not publishable? FM: Yes, often. It depends what your market is. It depends on the editor. A leftist magazine, or a rightist paper will publish arms, limbs just lying on the pavement, burned up babies. But an international magazine like Time or Newsweek can’t do that. SL: Even if it were the Russians who had committed a massacre in Afganistan? FM: A gory picture will never be shown because it doesn’t sell. SL: You’d anger the reader because you’d force him to react?

SL: No.

FM: Yes, I suppose so.

FM: You see, I don’t consider that I had seen a massacre. A massacre we read about in books. I just saw the aftermath.

SL: Does the reaction vary according to the culture or the situation? In Lebanon, for instance, is the degree of tolerance to violence higher?

SL: You saw it as a series of isolated incidents. FM: The first day I stayed for an hour, walking around on my own. For three days I kept taking pictures of the aftermath. SL: Was there anything there that you didn’t want to photograph? FM: No. I did the opposite. I wanted to know how these people died. I got involved in it and I started lifting up this woman’s body. She was shot in the back. I had to see it. I couldn’t believe all this violence. SL: Did you find anything too gory to be photographed?

FM: In Lebanon they publish very gory pictures. SL: They’re not afraid of seeing wounds? FM: Once you’ve seen one ... A few days ago I walked into the Burger King on Lexington 2 a.m. A man walks in and has an argument with someone else. He grabs him by the neck lifts him up, sticks a gun in his waist and shoots him. In New York. The guy goes poof, falls back, there’s blood everywhere, everybody panicking. SL: Did you take a picture? FM: No. 1983 V10N4 p129

p130 V11N2 1984 General Idea’s 1984, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, June-July, 1984 / The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, October - November, 1984; Stedlijk van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Holland, November - December, 1984; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, April - June, 1985; Musee d’art contemporaine, Montreal, September - October, 1985

W A R H E A D 3 R D

N U C L E A R

P O W E R S

C O M P O S I T E

THIS IMAGE WAS MADE IN PROPORTION TO THE NUMBER OF WARHEADS AT THE DISPOSAL OF EACH OF THE FIVE POWERS. IT IS APPROXIMATELY 57% REAGAN AND 43% ANDROPOV. 9,775 7,226 64 64 80

U.S. (REAGAN) USSR (ANDROPOV) BRITAIN (THATCHER) FRANCE (MITTERAND) CHINA (XROPING)

SOURCE: NUCLEAR WEAPONS FREEZE COUNCIL. CAMBRIDGE, MA. 1983

N A N C Y W I T H

R I C H A R D

C A R L I N G

B U R S O N A N D

D A V I D

K R A M L I C H

1984 V11N2 p131

p132 V11N3 1984

NANCY JOHNSON 1984 V11N3 p133

SCENES OF WORLD WAR III :I won’t accept the norms I’ve been given. (Explaining to others): We’ve decided to rebel: :If I can’t get Lamb into my arms because we’re too poor, I’ll go off adventuring: :Wars are raging everywhere. Males dumber than non-human animals’re running the economic and political world. I want. What do I want? Is it wrong to want life? :The liberty for love, the liberty for instinctual roamings, the liberty for friendship, the liberty for hatred, the liberty for fantasy: all of these have faded. :Civilization and culture are the rules of males’ greeds.

TH E WAR ROOM

K

ATHY

A

CKER

and they all ran. Would they be able to escape increasingly abnormal nature? THE SUN WAS no more than a degree or so above the horizon, where it stays when it is the end of the world. From the still-heated surfaces of the water — not thoroughly cooled by the former blackness — a slight low mist begins to rise; hovering; a mist so thin it is invisible to human eyes, yet strong enough to make the pale sun indistinct and brighter, hot. The edge of this disc touching the longer more elliptical slate of the ocean turns it darker, into a frown: our ocean is now deeper, and hints, in this brooding, of the real presence of evil. :The second underground nuclear test took place on a small island somewhere in the South Pacific. Prehistoric monsters were born returned. Blue geysers rose up. The monsters were coming back now because culture and/or humans had been erased. :At this time a typical American family was sporting in one of the lovely blue lakes near the island in question. Dad heard the first sounds of the quake. He looked around: all objects unusually, abnormally were rolling. One of his Japanese kids started to scream for help. The lake boiled up. What, they inwardly questioned, is happening to us? As an answer, daddy shot his rifle into the blue sky. His little boy was riding a plastic horse float up and down the boiling waters which were now a monster. Dad grabbed him away from the evil sexual water

: In the distance the Japanese people were watching this abnormality. White mists rose. :One of the Japanese was a space scientist. Evil men overturned his private home. His closest friend chased the criminals into their car. But unconsciously, they had left tiny grains of an unknown substance that looked like sand on the space scientist’s floor. :”Why have criminals invaded this home? Will they also invade our bodies and soil and sky as the Hiroshima bomb tore us apart?” :Exhaustive analysis revealed that the sand-like grains had to be from a thirty-miles-below-the-seabed stratum or from Easter Island. : “Has evil always been part of human nature? And is nature evil?” :That is: Now that we and our world’re at the edge of destruction, we have to figure out what evil is. : If everything including us were evil, evil wouldn’t be a problem. Since evil’s a human problem, nature, naturally, isn’t evil. So the young Japanese scientist, Mr. A., can make a robot. Then the criminals returned to his home, killed him and his friend in order to own the robot. Were the criminals always after the robot?

Ov five :CSeaSee-topia is an island. All the Ctopians wear white. Overlooking a weirdo lake, an EasterIslandlike statue gazes down on five dancing girls. This is paradise. :Why is Ctopia paradise? Because humans use nuclear weapons, whereas the Ctopian populace want to keep their waters breathable. They’ve now realized they have to fight to destroy humanity in order to erase nuclear weaponry. Since they desire to kill all humans, the Ctopians are evil. :Already, with all this nuclear waste that’s in our air, the poisons that have had to filter down even to the very core of Earth have turned Ctopia red, then blue; then, poisoned, Ctopia in turn, naturally had to pollute the world above her. There’s no getting rid of poison except via destruction. So the Ctopian government sent Megalon the Monster up here to eradicate us. Since Megalon’s primary cause is human violence and human violence’s finally powerless, Megalon, being a mirror, was an insect. :Actually the young Japanese scientist isn’t dead but is now (along with his kid) bound up in ropes in the back of the human criminals’ truck. These human criminals and all human criminals aren’t Ronald Reagan and the post-capitalist money powers who have put Reagan into power because human evil finally is indefinable and unknowable to humans. Zoom the truck moves on. The truck is moving toward mysterious Easter-Island-like-island. Megalon The Insect is standing there. Waiting. Is there no escape from all these different forms of terror, of evil? Mr. A. runs away. But escaping doesn’t solve problems. Because of what you’ve done, The Insect conflagration disintegration destruction erasure lobotomy control dispersion is destroying everything. Total destruction is rational because it comes from rational causes. Why are human beings still rational, that is, making nuclear bombs polluting inventing DNA etc.? Because they don’t see the absolute degradation and poverty around their flesh because if they did, they would be in such horror they would have to throw away their minds and want to become, at any price, only part-humans. Only Godzilla who not only isn’t human but also wasn’t made by humans therefore is unidentifiable and incomprehendable to humans can give the human world back to the humans. :Planes shoot at The Insect. Huge, The Insect stomps on the planes. Blues and reds, from explosions, own the sun. The two monsters, being nonhuman, are mindless. The two monsters, the future rulers of our world, have the following conversation: “Anti-rationality.” “In the modern period, exchange value has come to dominate society; all qualities have been and are p136 V11N4 1985

reduced to quantitative equivalences. This process inheres in the concept of reason. For reason, on the one hand, signifies the idea of a free, human, social life. On the other hand, reason is the court of judgement of calculation, the instrument of domination, and the means for the greatest exploitation of nature. As in De Sade’s novels, the mode of reason adjusts the world for the ends of selfpreservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it that material of subjugation. Instrumental or ossified reason takes two forms: technological reason developed for purposes of dominating nature and social reason directed at the means of domination aimed at exercising social and political power.” “This tendency, predetermined by the drive for selfpreservation, now pervades all the spheres of human life: this exploitation or reduction of reality to selfpreservation and the manipulable other has become the universal principle of a society which seeks to reduce all phenomena to this enlightenment, ideal of rationalism, or subjugation of the other.” :The monsters created from human beliefs and acts will no longer follow human orders. :Throughout the Second World War, the United States was planning, then actually preparing (for) its role in the future post-war world. If there is to be such a world. Emerging militarily and economically unrivaled from the Second World War, America was uniquely and fully able to impose its hatred of nonmaterialism — its main ideal — on the remainder of the world. This belief in total materialism is or intimately connects to economic hegemony, for the economic base of this new order is large export markets and unrestricted access to key materials. :Americans, having learnt from the British, inflicted this order by eliminating trade restrictions via the creation of the OAS, establishing organizations such as the World Bank and in 1944 the International Monetary Fund to stabilize currencies, opening international banking institutions to aid investment, and developing backward areas. International finance (that is, American finance) is a war strategy, a successful one, which the Japanese copied. :The interests of these banks and companies are truly global, for the United States controls, or believes it controls, (does “believes it controls” mean the same thing as “controls”?), the globe. Thus the multinational corporations form an integrated economic system which must be protected: this “Cold War.” In order to maintain “The Cold War” or economic control, we Americans believe (have been taught) the following ideology: “The domination or control of the political institutions of any American state by the international Communist movement, extending to this Hemisphere

the political system of an extracontinental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American states, endangering the peace of America . . .” (the Caracas Declaration, a 1954 amendment to the Monroe Doctrine). :An amendment to this amendment: “I have the most conclusive evidence that arms and munitions in large quantities . . . have been shipped to the revolutionists . . . “ :American General Smedley D. Butler: “In 1914, in the interest of American oil companies, in Tampico the transfers of Mexican prisoners were common. None of the shifts were allowed to talk. Around five p.m. each Wednesday we selected the transfer prisoners. We led each of the men, one by one, to the infirmary, to the doctor. There was no need to give any man a garment to shield him from the cold. In the infirmary, our doctor told the prisoner, each one privately so the prisoners couldn’t by comparing notes understand what was happening to them, that the prisoner was being sent to another camp so was now being given an injection to protect him from the radically poorer conditions of this new camp. The shot was only a sedative.” :“These sedated men were then driven by lorry to the Tampico airport where they were put into one of the navy’s Fokker airplanes. At a certain point over the Gulf Stream, we dumped the prisoners out of the plane. They were still alive. You can understand these weren’t normal drownings. The attitudes of the drowned people showed that they fought against the sea: the finders could see the despair on their faces. Fish had usually by now mutilated the bodies. A number of the dead men had severed hands. Most of the dead men were nude. Sometimes they wore briefs. One body had been packed in a nylon bag.” :“The dead prisoners were people whom the Argentinian government had known or suspected were subversive or ‘left-wing’ because they were spreading ideas ... contrary to Western and Christian civilization.” :Somoza Garcia persuaded Sandino to withdraw his arms. A few days later, picking Sandino up as he left a dinner at the National Palace, Somoza Garcia machine-gunned him to death. In 1956 Rigoberto Lopez killed Somoza Garcia. Then Rigoberto Lopez wrote the following poem:

wea bre hum kill

poi

Ov five The seed of your sperm Sandino blood

wea bre hum kill

ashes our ragpickers’ buildings our blood Blood multiplied blood is rain. The victims’ blood covers all eyes is the future

poi

destroys all people murder. The crime of Cain. Then peace’ll rain olives and trees peacocks’ squeals lift and fall all dashed. Able to feel. :Able to feel. :Three men are talking. These are the men who cause war. One of these men is wearing what I see as a Renaissance-type hat or else he has geneticallyflawed hair. Since his right eye is larger than his left, this man is smirking as his shoulders curve inwards. Except for the hat unless it’s hair, the man’s naked. :A short person who has deformed that is loopy fingers faces him. All of these men who cause war are deformed, therefore recognizable. :Another of these men, light-haired, since he’s looking into a handmirror, ‘s a female. She wears an armless white T-shirt. :Almost directly in front of her but slightly to her right. This man is ugly. This man has ugly monkey lips. Black greasy hair is dripping down his neck. A white toga, which signifies the highest form of human culture knowledge and being-in-the-world in our Western history, is hanging off of his hairy ape-flesh. Since reality/my seeing can’t be clear, he’s either eating a halfpeeled banana and/or holding a cross. One of our rulers is a monkey and/or a high religious figure. :These hideous monsters being in the sky being above all other people are controlling the world Our Father Who Art All men’re created. :The ape monster looks down at these territorial holdings (us or the world): acres after acres of clear fields streams running a few trees: Nature. I can’t tell the difference between tree and tree-shadow or treeimage. Nature is either a reflection, or else nothing. I’m a reflection or else I’m nothing. :The humans’re both dogs and skulls. Both humans

and dogs need to eat and feel heat. The skulls don’t need either. Human-dogs eat and feel heat in a kitchen. This kitchen is a den of iniquity. Whereas a den is the province of men, women control kitsch but there are no women among the human-dogs or maybe the human-dog whose face is anonymously or nauseously also approaching-skull (simultaneously eitheror life and death) is male and or female and it no longer matters. Since a broom’s sweeping hisandorher bald pate, heandorshe is a which. The dog who stands up like a man stares at the broom and behind him a male skull laughs, but at what is he laughing? Another humandog pisses on the floor because they’re bums pissing in concrete doorways. This isn’t scenes of war this is war.

:Then, what is nature in this world? One of the humans who’s fat and female bears a stick, her banner, over her left shoulder. Dead babies hang from her stick or banner. Likewise, the earth is dead: The soil is barren. The hills behind are barren. The sky is barren. The sky is always nighttime.

:The paw on her tit shows the big dear’s making love to the women. That is: he wants to fuck the woman. Since his horns are beautiful, since he’s horny as hell; horniness or lack of love is Hell. Being a beast, he’s bigger than all the humans: now animal is superior to human. The woman who’s holding a baby, all babies should be dead whenever they open their mouths, is looking at him with longing because he’s deigning to desire her. Since the old crone who’s almost disintegrated into a skeleton, who’s in front of the woman, is holding her baby which is a skeleton (it must have opened its mouth) up to the monster, he must be a guru or a leader. The moon pukes. One of the old bitches who’s behind the monster has half-way become a skeleton.

:What I see I am: since I can see only roughly, almost unforms, I only partly am.

:What world is this? Behind the monster, the Virgin Mary and her cohorts exist. The Virgin Mary and her cohorts are palely fading away and don’t have facial expressions because they don’t have faces. All the other beings who all worship The Beast wear togas because they’re classical. Dead children’re lying between the classical humans. This human world is human religion and culture.

:The only foliage in this world occurs around The Beasts’s horns. :This world is sick. Why? No reason. :Since there’s a monster in it, this world’s sick; since this world’s sick, there’s a monster in it. Human understanding can only be circular; humans can’t understand much.

:The perception of wartime. :A dog sticks its head over a barricade. You can’t tell what the barricade is. The only event you see and you can see is the dog’s head. :”Woof.” The only language you hear and can hear is “Woof”. : I thought I was at home. I thought I was lying in my bedroom by the moors. Because I’m weak, my brain becomes confused, and I unwillingly unconsciously screamed. Don’t say anything. I’ve got to have someone. So stay with me. I don’t need someone: I’m alone. I hate solitude. I need — so I can be in paradise. I dread to go to sleep now: my dreams shock me: I don’t sleep anymore. Oh, if I were only but in my old bed in my old house! And the wind sounding through the gables sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel — the moors, the solitude come straight down to my heart — let me be alive! I was no better than a wailing child.

BAUDRILLARD

he most original form of today's epidemic is no longer the primitive form, it is the second, reactive form of its antidote, of its counterpart, of its dissuasion. It’s no longer sickness which proliferates, it's hygiene. It’s no longer peril which proliferates, it’s security. It’s no longer the bacteria which multiply, it’s the antibiotics. It’s no longer the criminal mentality which abounds, but the police mentality, and all the powers of detection, of prevention, of dissuasion, that spread their net of repressive anticipation over states and minds.

T It is not unreasonable to say that the extermination of men begins by the extermination of germs. For man, as he is, with his moods, his passions, his laughter, his secretions, is himself none other than a dirty little irrational virus that troubles the universe of transparency. When all is expurgated, when we have put an end to viral processes, to all social and bacilliform contamination,

If we then separate ourselves from an original fatality of the sources of death, it’s to get closer to a collective obsession of life, of health, of hygiene, of dietetics and of biological and mental therapy, of purification which is unreligious but just as ritualised, of bodies and of environment, which present exactly the same characteristics as the old epidemics of death. In the rage to wipe out the sources of sickness, it’s the opposite contagion, the proliferation of beneficent elements, of fecundity, of vitality, of security, of the visibility and the transparence which risk becoming deadly to the human race.

 The great deadly epidemics have disappeared. They have all given way to one alone: the proliferation of human beings themselves. Overpopulation constitutes a kind of slow and irresistible epidemic, the opposite of cholera or the plague. We can still hope that it will stop by itself, once sated with living beings, as did the plague formerly once sated with cadavers. But will the same regulation reflex act on the excess of life, as the one which acted on the excess of death? For an excess of life is even more fatal.



JEAN

THE CHILD IN THE BUBBLE then there will remain only viral sadness, in a universe of deadly cleanliness and sophistication.

From the savage child to the child in a bubble. The latter, protected from all contagion by immunized artificial space, and whom his mother caresses through glass partitions using plastic sleeves, and who laughs and grows up in his unearthly atmosphere before the eyes of science — that’s our modern wolf-child, the experimental brother of the savage child brought up by wolves (today it’s done by computers). And Doctor Itard’s delight at impressing upon the first one a sense of sin and punishment is only equalled by the glorious satisfaction of the modern doctors at having brought the

child in a bubble to an "IQ slightly above average". For that, today, is the distinctive trait of a human being.

 The aseptic is the biological form of transparency. And today, the elimination of germs awaits all domains (spatial, social, medical, psychic). The child in the bubble is the prefiguration of the future in all areas: the cosmonaut of the medical space of the body — in fact it’s NASA that offered him his diving suit — he is the symbol of an airtight existence, supplied formerly by bacteria in the laboratories or particles in the cyclotrons, but which is potentially our own existence: more and more, airtight compression like records, airtight conservation like frozen foods, airtight dying like victims of relentless therapy. Airtight thinking and reflecting as illustrated everywhere by artificial intelligence.

 The growing cerebration of machines is likely to bring with it the technological purification of the body. The human body will be less and less able to depend on its antibodies, it must be more and more protected from the exterior. The artificial purification of all milieux, of all atmospheres will compensate for deficient internal immunological systems. And if they are deficient, it is because an irreversible tendency, called progress, moves toward dispossessing the body and the human spirit of its own systems of initiative and defence, transferring them to technical artifacts. Deprived of his defences, man becomes eminently vulnerable to science. Deprived of his fantasies, he becomes eminently vulnerable to the profusion of artificial images. Deprived of his germs, he becomes eminently vulnerable to medicine (I dare not evoke the domain of spirit and thought, where the weakness of antibodies has progressed even faster, and therefore become vulnerable to all ideologies, all epidemics of truth and idiocy — we will soon have to make them too airtight, and guard them from all miasmas — a task which greatly occupies cultural and political institutions).

 It is not unreasonable to say that the extermination of men begins by the extermination of germs. For man, as he is, with his moods, his passions, his laughter, his secretions, is himself none other than a dirty little irrational virus that troubles the universe of transparency. When all is expurgated, when we have put an end to viral processes, to all social and bacilliform contamination, then there will remain only viral sadness, in a universe of deadly cleanliness and sophistication. Thought being in its own way a network of antibodies and an immunological defence system (a stupid analogy deep down, but which ideological biology imposes on us), it is also haunted by deficiency. It will be progressively and advantageously replaced by the cerebro-spinal bubble, free from all animal or metaphysical reflexes. Our brain, our body itself, have become that bubble, that expurgated sphere, that transparent envelope inside of which we take refuge, disarmed and overprotected, like that unknown child, doomed to artificial immunity and perpetual transfusion, and to die the moment he kisses his mother.

 To epidemics, to contagion, to chain reactions, to proliferation, we owe both the worst and the best. To metastasis in cancer, to fanaticism in politics, to virulence in the biological domain, to rumour in the sociological domain, including audio-visual rumours in the news, we owe the worst. But the process of chain reaction is an immoral process, beyond the good and the bad, so we also owe to it the best. The possibility for certain processes, economic, political, linguistic, cultural, sexual, indeed theoretical and scientific, to surpass certain limits of the senses and proceed by immediate contagion, by static and superficial electricity, according to the laws of pure immanence among things, and not according to those of their transcendence or their reference — the possibility of chain reaction constitutes both an enigma for reason and a marvellous alternative for the imagination. Let us simply consider the effect of fashion. It has never been elucidated. It is unintelligible, bane of sociology and aesthetics: it is a contagion of forms and of spirits, a miraculous epidemic, where the viral collective chain reaction competes with the logic of distinction..

 The pleasure of fashion is certainly cultural, but doesn’t it owe more to that immediate consensus, shining through the game of signs? The styles also go out like epidemics, when they have ravaged the imagination, and when the virus gets tired. The price to pay, in terms of wasted signs, is exactly that of the epidemics in terms of lives: exorbitant. But everyone agrees to it. Our social marvel is that ultra-rapid surface of the circulation of signs (and not the ultra-slow one of the circulation of meaning). We love to be immediately contaminated, without thinking about it. That virulence of signs is, so to speak, as disastrous, as deadly as that of the bacillus of the plague, but no moral sociology, no philosophical reason will defeat it. Fashion, like many other processes, is an irreducible phenomenon because it takes part in exactly the sort of senseless, viral and in some way a social mode of communication, which only circulates so fast because it sidesteps the mediation of reason. The logic of difference, of distinction, could not alone explain that: it is too slow.

A cancer cell divides

he child in the bubble is the prefiguration of the future in all areas: the cosmonaut of the medical space of the body — in fact it’s NASA that offered him his diving suit — he is the symbol of an airtight existence, supplied formerly by bacteria in the laboratories or particles in the cyclotrons, but which is potentially our own existence: more and more, airtight compression like records, airtight conservation like frozen foods, airtight dying like victims of relentless therapy. Airtight thinking and reflecting as illustrated everywhere by artificial intelligence.

T

1985 V11N4 p139

p140 V11N4 1985

THE FIRST BIG DREAMS that you have are archaic dreams, repetitive dreams, dreams of sound that come from the ocean. You dream a lot of the ocean in the sub-coma; it’s always there. I know that many people around me dreamed of the ocean. Everything comes out of the ocean: the sound of the ocean (but with a sort of mechanics), things that happen in the ocean: rocks that collide in the ocean, schools of fish that crash into the thickness of the ocean. You hear not only the external noise of the ocean but the internal noise of the ocean, which is audible from the exterior, from the beach, as if there were enormous amplifiers in the ocean. I think it has to do with the fact that the sound of a resuscitation room is really a marine sound. It’s an area of the hospital that’s very special, the area of death and intensive care, an area where there is great activity: where there are frequent shifts and reliefs. It’s a very difficult place for the nurses and the aides. In fact, since no one sleeps (unless they're in a coma) because it’s impossible to sleep — everyone howls. You feel this movement of the tide, successive waves: everyone comes in, everyone goes out. It’s like the ocean, but at the level of the waves. There is also the sound of the machines that regularly turn themselves on and off — a sound like the breathing of the ocean. The ocean is the origin of life, and there is a reason why we are reborn. Like an infant that floats in the embryonic fluid. When we can begin to dream, we bathe in the first element of life. We retrace the whole sonorous path, the path of the birth of life, of the birth of the idea, of forces superior to man, then of gods that we can adore and beseech. Ultimately, it is the entire history of humanity; that’s why it snaps, and that is why we come out of it mentally shattered; we are saved but shattered, and we have seen extraordinary things. I often have very surprising dreams, since earliest childhood, but there is no comparison between those dreams and the ones I had at that time. They were the dreams of a fetus in its mother’s belly.

E

G

LDON

ARNET

An accident in history. A bloody plane crash, a volcano erupted, a manifestation of a cultural error, a destroyed man.

S

I

HOT

MUSSOLINI A

N

E

X

C

E

R

P

T

Really, it’s not worth it. Getting up. No, not a chance of success. A hopeless fantasy. What are we going to accomplish? Nothing. My body doesn’t see the necessity of exercising the extra strength to walk from the bed to the table—I can lie here as well as sit there. I’d rather not. I shouldn’t. She tries to tell me there is still the possibility of a development, a mark yet to be made on the hysteria of history. But I am too tired. But I don’t want to stare at the ceiling. But I won’t get up. Nothing, I say.

Ugly news. Massacre at McDonald’s. A man goes berserk with shotgun, rifle and handgun, killing 22—children, women, men. Shooting anyone who moved and the wounded who moaned. Used metal-penetrating bullets. A Vietnam vet. The largest domestic massacre in U.S. history. An insane man, no intelligence to the act, no premeditation, no purpose, just an ugly moment in history. Instantly I want to forget his name and the stupidity of his actions. But at the same time, here is the portrayal of a complete cultural desperation. A forty-year-old man, fired from his job — a security guard. Likes guns. Argues with his wife. Tries to find her at McDonald’s and in the epicentre symbol of junk, kitsch United States becomes a human bomb wreaking illogical, random and violent death. The executioner of all those who eat at McDonald’s. “I’ve killed a thousand and I will kill a thousand more.” Trained by his country to kill for his country he kills his country. And a police sharpshooter through the window — one bullet in the heart — killed by his country.

She grabs my arm, holding by the wrist and shoulder, pulling. Quickly stuffing pillows behind my back. At least she has me sitting. Balancing a tray on my knees—spoonfeeding me tea and well-cut corners of dry toast. How long can a man live on tea and toast? One more act. Once again before I die to enter history. Once: a fluke, an outside chance—twice: reputable, marks of consistency—three times: to leave a significant contribution. But how? Not to be forgotten. Scratching deeper into their memories, against the rock.



To harness the strength of this energy, to have it to manipulate, to create within the destruction. Why commit a nihilist act of terrorism against a random sampling of the most average members of a society — what statement can be made other than a blanket condemnation of the entire culture — no incisive critique — no intelligent challenge only advocacy of extermination. Rather, one must be more specific — one cannot attack from the middle — it’s like throwing a small rock into a reservoir in an effort to destroy a dam. Attack with precision, at a vulnerable point, where there is the potential of reverberation; the single action at the point where a chain effect can begin. Carefully. Surely. With all the raw energy directed. Yes. Exactly what I must do.

 It is an act of necessity — a moral imperative. Those who call it tyrannicide — how do they know — have they ever hated evil? Have they ever seen a sore on their body festering, oozing — the smell of death, rot — and you have to remove the sore — no choice. In your destruction there is no love of this evil — you are not a part of the sore in its removal. It has no pride this canker on my neck. A symbolic gesture of moral necessity. One cannot live with a sore of this depth. It feeds on my pride. In the Ukraine, 1942, a beautiful Autumn morning, sunshine, a line a mile long of men, women, children, babies, naked, trucks driving away with their clothes, waiting to lie down in enormous holes, in the graves they had just completed digging, waiting to be shot by the SS. Two thousand Jews dead in two days. And Bressche saw it. Tried to persuade his commander to stop but was told coldly that Hitler’s headquarters was within 200 kilometres, they would simply send tanks and we would be 1985 V11N4 p141

DUCE MEETS

shot as mutineers — and now Hitler has taken away our honour. He had to be removed. The end. But if only the officers had rebelled and others had heard, taken pride. How many lives might have been saved? To have died at the beginning, not to have failed a year later when the Allies bombed the train of uniforms and ruined the attempt. Then again a year later when someone moved the briefcase in the bunker. And Hitler in defeat escapes. Unpunished — master of his own death.

“Pedro gave me his gun and I had to shoot her first—covering him, screaming.”

No, I don’t want to hear your arguments for or against tyrannicide — the Catholic attitude, the Protestant attitude. But why did Bressche1 return to the front with his pack of explosives and fight for the Nazis, losing a leg, fingers, becoming crippled?

“Toast?”

1. He said it was a moral imperative. Bressche, the perfect Nordic hero, blue eyes, blond, six foot tall, was chosen by a group of military conspirators to model a now uniform for the Fuhrer — 1943 — to throw himself on Hitler and hold him down until a small bomb hidden in his pocket blew them both up — hopefully taking Goering and Himmler in the same explosion. Bressche maintained this was not to be an act of courage but rather of necessity.

 But what is this action? Again I am sitting in a corner. The room is dark. The sun has set. But I will not sit here in the dark waiting for daybreak, I simply flick a switch and turn on the light.



The waitress throwing the bill down on the table does so with more than her usual disdain. I don’t feel uncomfortable sitting in this greasy restaurant with this hyperactive girl who appears to be carrying on a low volume monologue — is my hearing gone or does she move her nervous lips and not emit a sound? She is dark, thin to the point of unhealth, I’ve finished my toast and tea and she has only taken one small bite from her chocolate donut, from the icing, picking at it with her fingers as I talk. “I shot Mussolini.” “Who?” she asks. “Mussolini!” “Oh, him. I thought he’s been dead for years. They didn’t shoot him — they hung him by his feet — him and a whole lot of others — I’ve seen the pictures.” “That was later, after he was dead, after I . . .” “You really believe . . .” “. . . shot him in the chest, He opened his shirt, bared his chest and said — his last words — ‘In the heart.’ — and what else could a man do? Looked him in the eye . . .” “Are you sure. There’s this famous picture — everyone standing around and a row of bodies hanging by their feet. Maybe — you can’t really see their faces.” “And if the gun hadn’t jammed . . .” “So you didn’t really shoot after. . .” p142 V11N4 1985

“You’re not the one I read about. Someone else. A rebel officer in El Salvador who escaped the death squads. Living in London and is trying to recruit volunteers to help him overthrow. . .But you don’t even look like him—younger, with a moustache. Want another tea, I. . .” “Alright.”

FUHRER Signor Mussolini leaving Munich station with Herr Hitler

“No. Just another tea would be fine.’’

 “And what is it we should be doing?” “Which is exactly the point. What should we do?” “One action?” “Well, at least, a number of small movements which add up to one.” “Something visible.” “Something which adds up to history.” “History, yes. But not merely another destruction, but something…” “An action.” “…which creates, begins the process of, a future.” “Improvement.”

Murder at McDonald’s

“But what?” “Of course, it’ll come.” “There has to be something.” But what and where? Could we do it in England, in London? It didn’t seem possible. So confined. Restricted. Developed. An old world fixed in its ways. The economy could be considered bad, unemployment high, but it wasn’t completely bad, new hamburger restaurants were opening every day. No one was starving in the street. Violence was low. Too secure, too developed a country. Not here. “The Third World.” And we spent the afternoon together in the British Museum— probably at the same table where Marx had sat a hundred years before, researching, writing, critiquing—trying to find the right country for our intervention.

 I don’t feel well today. Barely enough energy to raise my head from the pillow, I want to get out of bed. Noon. Told her we’d meet in the restaurant. But I just want to sleep. There is no pain only a fog, a drowsiness. Close my eyes. Sleep returns. I want to meet her. Two short weeks after our initial meeting it has become a custom. Every day at noon we sit for three, four

occurs at least once a week and sometimes the attacks are barely separated by two days of active grace. She will understand — I’ve warned her. During our two weeks of meetings I was free of attacks—every day free of the oppression, a blessing, a welcome surprise. She will wait drinking coffee by herself and tomorrow return for our meeting. We are both waiting for each other—an unequivocal need which cannot be erased by the absence of one day. I close my eyes and float in an emptiness, in an absence. Not the pleasure of rest but an obvious training, a trial run. I must hurry. Sleeping uncomfortably.



How soon history forgets; the fickle collective unconscious is really an occasionally awakened unconsciousness — life for most is a haze of events which flashes endlessly creating a dense blanket under which we doze. Do you remember such and such? Who? Yes, oh him, I remember, just forgot his name. What was he supposed to have done? Didn’t he die violently? hours ordering tea, toast and sometimes soup, overtipping the waitress so she won’t sneer the following day. Our plans are growing steadily, but not today. I close my eyes and the world continues to spin. I open them and I am surrounded by a haze. Nothing I can do but attempt to ride out the storm of my body, hope that I have the strength to hold on until the evening and a better tomorrow. It has been occurring more often — this distancing, this absence, over and inside my body. Not daily yet, that would be death — the end while still alive. At first it was only occasional, like waking after an uneasy night, half rested, more exhausted than when I went to bed. The first time it was frightening — the exhaustion total, the entire day had to be spent lying in bed. After it occurred a few times the fear dissipated but the discomfort, the irritation at the inability to function was frustrating. Now this state of forced convalescence

How soon history forgets; the fickle collective unconscious is really an occasionally awakened unconsciousness—life for most is a haze of events which flashes endlessly creating a dense blanket under which we doze. Do you remember such and such? Who? Yes, oh him, I remember, just forgot his name. What was he supposed to have done? Didn’t he die violently? They ran his car off the road at night, made it look like an accident. At his funeral all of Athens — all of Greece from Macedonia to the Aegean islands — took to the streets, sweeping the air with a relentless, obsessive roar of grief: “He lives, he lives, he lives.” And he did live for that day in Athens in the hearts of two million, the people, all the streets mourning the murder of a hero. At the church, beside the grave, the priest dripping gold and precious jewels, chanted “Eonia imi too esou. May your memory be eternal.” But who is this man that the tyrant in power had murdered? A man who has become part of history, but we do not know his name. If I said Alekos Panagoulis would you shrug your shoulders or nod yes, him? In Greece where he fought and died they would remember but not here. History prefers to stay at home, holding firmly to the ground on which it occurred. A local hero for a small town is one of a thousand others in a city, barely a moment in a country, internationally completely invisible.

 But here was a man who tried to kill a tyrant and failed. The bomb under George Papadopoulos’ car barely killed the automobile. What had failed? The charge? The timing? The executioner had pushed the plunger a third of a second too late — the intervention of fate, of chance. The tyrant lived to capture and torture the man. And eventually make him a hero, a martyr. But when the tyrant was eventually defeated and the power partially returned to the people the hero’s actions no longer needed to be remembered. While the same tyrant remained there was a need to remember but with his defeat the process of forgetting began. And some time in the future when the martyr is necessary again, when another tyrant is strangling the people his name will be squeezed from memory, his actions resurrected to serve as inspiration. But he failed to kill the man, is this what they will remember, or will it be the hero’s death for opposing the tyrant with a proud arrogance and tenacity? And in another city, in another country a man like ourselves will be remembered at the appropriate moment. As we were only allowed our few first moments, so after our deaths, we will be allowed a brevity in future’s memory. 1985 V11N4 p143

W E I L B R I A N She was in room number ten, ground floor, rear building. She had been dead for two or three days in the small room with the windows and door shut, and it was over a hundred degrees outside. Ed took a deep pull on his cigarette and looked off into the distance as if in deep thought.

MIAMI POLICE FORCE His name was Ed. “Good friends call me Fast Eddie; used to drive trucks coast to coast, never slept. Now I run this place.” The rooming house consisted of two buildings, one behind the other, separated by a courtyard with an old rusting car in the middle. Used to get a lot of Jewish people down here," Ed said stopping to light a cigarette. “Used to stay all winter.” The detective laughed and said: “In this neighbourhood, that sure must have been a long time ago. Probably around the same time they still had dinosaurs and cave men around here.” She was in room number ten, ground floor, rear building. She had been dead for two or three days in the small room with the windows and door shut, and it was over a hundred degrees outside. Ed took a deep pull on his cigarette and looked off into the distance as if in deep thought. Sure I smelled it; just thought it was another one of those stray dogs, et some bad garbage and crawled un’er the porch an’ died. Get a couple ‘a them a year, you know.” The detective walked out into the courtyard to the rear building. The cop standing in the doorway of room ten was smiling; the detective asked him in Spanish what he thought was so funny. The cop replied in English, “It’s a perfect night to get stuck guarding a stinker — I got such a bad cold, I can’t smell a fucking thing.”

From down the hall and upstairs, the sound of five different radio stations could be heard, all trying to play louder than the others. There was dried blood all over the door and on the floor and walls in the hallway. No one had seen or heard or smelled a thing. Fast Eddie, who had followed, now tried to peek his head into the doorway to get a look. “Kind of people I got staying here tend to mind their own business.”

where they were when this happened, and they all say the same thing: “I was in the bathroom.” Twenty people in the fucking place, and they were all in the bathroom, including the bartender. They just all come out of the can and find this guy, lying on the floor, with two bullets in his head and ejected casings all over the fucking floor. And my wife wonders why I never learned how to stop chewing my fucking nails.”

The detective told Fast Eddie to go wait outside, and don’t go driving coast to coast because he wanted to talk to him later. The detective turned back around and said: “All this fucking blood, and a fucking stinker on top of it, and no one seen a fucking thing. God, how people live. Got a bar over on Haggler Street, some low-life Mariel joint. Get a murder in there every month or two. Shit, there’re so many bullet holes in those fucking walls, you can’t ever tell which are the new ones or the old. Forensics keeps a xeroxed floor plan of the place. Every time we get another call they just pull it out and change the location of the body. Every time I show up there, it’s just like this shit; very sorry, but nobody saw or heard anything. You line everyone in the place up against the wall and ask them, one at a time,

The forensic technician came from his car carrying a large, plastic, fishing-tackle box, in which he kept his equipment. On the side of the box was pasted a bumper sticker — a new public relations slogan the city had put out — MIAMI IS FOR ME, it said. The technician opened his box and handed out charcoal fume masks and ammonia capsules in case the smell got too bad when they moved the body. The medical examiner arrived; she had a young district attorney with her. He had been sent out as part of his training, to watch the M.E. This was his first murder scene. He followed her inside, returning seconds later, white and choking for air. He said he would wait in the car. 1985 V11N4 p145

…the moon was full and, over the last six hours we had been to one rape, two stabbings, and one minor shooting. The shooting would have been worse if the victim’s wife had known how to fire a gun with a little more accuracy.

The room had been ransacked. You could see what looked like an arm, blown up like a balloon, sticking out from the pile of clothes that covered the rest of the body. The pile of clothes was removed uncovering the body, and when the M.E. finished, everyone went outside for some air. The patrolman with the cold was sent out to get some coffee. It was now four in the morning; in about an hour, the sun would be coming up, and it would be another day. Sitting in some old chairs on the porch and smoking cigars to try and keep the smell (now in everyone’s clothes) away, the detective talked: “I found a lot of religious stuff in there — crosses, Bibles, little plastic Jesus figures . . .” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Here’s a money order made out to that T.V. evangelist, comes out of Dade County, I think.” p146 V11N4 1985

bite out of a warm donut. “When I get cases like this, I wish life was just like it is on that fucking T.V. show, HAWAII FIVE-O. I’d send one of those fat, suntanned fucking Samoan detectives out in the yard and he’d pick up some dirty, fucking rock, crawling with worms. We’d get the cleanest, mother-fucking finger print you ever saw off that bastard, and solve the case. Only break we got is that this fleabag-joint is only two blocks away from the only all-night donut shop left in the city of Miami. At least my fucking donut’s still warm.”

Fast Eddie was leaning against the junked car in the yard. The detective yelled at him to come over. “She ever have any visitors?”

6:00 P.M.

Eddie paused and looked off into the distance again as if he was having, or trying to have a deep thought. “Well, there’s a boyfriend usually come around each month when her disability cheque come in. He sticks around a few days till the cheque is gone. then he gone, too. In between him, there’re other men, but they never stayed more than the night, or part of it, if you get what I mean.”

His mother later recalled, he had spent most of that Saturday at home watching T.V. with his brothers. As his mother began to cook dinner, he went upstairs to dress for his date that night with Maria. He put on a new shirt he had bought and was saving for this night. On his way out, Jose stopped in the kitchen and kissed his mother good night.

A car door slammed in the street, and the cop with the stuffed-up nose walked into the yard carrying a box full of hot coffees and fresh donuts. The detective took the lid off his coffee cup and sat sniffing the fumes for a minute. He looked up and said: “We ain’t got shit on this case unless we can make some prints.” He took a

11:00 P.M. We pulled the police car out of the garage and headed for the highway.

We had just taken a call for a stabbing in the Southwest end. Rick leaned back and settled deeper into his seat. He was well over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. It had been two months since my last trip down to Miami, and Rick began filling me in. “You missed a triple up in the Grove last month. Ex-Miami fireman turned doper. Found him, his girlfriend and a business partner, all lying in a pile on top of each other in the living room. Each shot once in the head — half a million cash in a briefcase in the bedroom. Oh. I almost forgot the best one, two fucking black kids up in Overtown with a million dollars.” As he started to tell the story, the voice of the dispatcher came over the radio. “296, take a thirty-two. Man shot 829 Flaggler St.” Rick hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and said, “You see, look in the sky, full moon tonight. Man, every time we get a full moon those fucking natives go nuts.”

town, the worst ghetto in this city. So this squad pulls them over. They still got over seven hundred thousand dollars in the trunk of their car. Fucking kids bought everything they could think of and then ran out of fucking ideas. What are they going to do, go invest it in high yield mutual funds or some shit like that? Well, they arrest them, and the story comes out in the paper, and sure enough the next day, fucking doper walks into the precinct and says that was his car got stolen by those kids. They ask him what was in the trunk and of course he isn’t going to say a million in cash ‘cause they would have the I.R.S. up his ass before he could sit down. So he says two thousand dollars. So the city said fuck it. They gave him his car and two thousand dollars, and the city got a donation of seven hundred thousand dollars”.

4:00 A.M. 3:00 A.M. They had been to a restaurant and eaten, been to a club and danced, then stopped at another little Cuban place for some coffee and cake. It would still be two hours before the sun came up, so they drove down to the beach and parked. Within a few minutes, Jose was consumed with trying to unfasten Maria’s bra. He never saw the two men approach the car. The man who opened the door and pulled him out was very large. His partner who pulled out Maria was much smaller. The large man said, “You fuck with me you’re dead.” They made them get in the back seat of the car and lie on the floor. Jose covered Maria with his body and told her to be still, that it would be O.K. The big man drove. His partner sat in the passenger seat. Maria could not see where they were driving, but knew they must have driven for almost an hour. Finally, the big man pulled the car over and got out. Maria heard him walk to the rear of the car, urinate, then open the trunk of the car.

3:00 A.M. We sat in the car under a street light in the Southwest end. Rick put down his clipboard after finishing his notes on the rape we had just handled. A report of shots being fired had gone out a few minutes before. Rick pulled the car back onto the street and we headed in the direction of the call. “We’ll take a ride by and see what they got over there. Probably just another Cuban playing Dodge City. Anyway, I was telling you before about those kids in Overtown. They’re in the parking lot out at the dog track, looking for a car to steal. They find this brand-new Cadillac. Well, they steal the fucking car and when they get home, they break open the trunk and find a fucking briefcase with a million dollars cash. What had happened was, there were two dopers made this deal. They both go out and buy new Cadillacs, park them in the lot, and go into the track. One car’s got the money in the trunk; the other, the coke. They go into the track, exchange the keys and that’s the deal. The only problem is, these fucking kids unknowingly steal the car with all the cash. Well, they get rid of the car and start spending all this money. They buy all the fucking clothes, jewellery, stereo’s and T.V.’s they can get their hands on. Then they go out and walk into a Jaguar dealership and want to pay cash for a forty-thousand dollar Jaguar. Fucking sixteen year old kids! The dealer tells them to get lost, so they get a friend, give him a couple thousand dollars and he goes and buys the car for them. They give the next-door neighbour ten grand as a present and he splits. Fucking leaves town fast ‘cause he knows what the deal is. So one night, a squad pulls up to a light and looks over, and there’s these two black kids full of fucking jewellery, sitting in a forty-thousand dollar car in the middle of 0ver-

When the large man returned to the car, Maria looked up and saw he had a gun. Jose sometimes carried a gun in the car, keeping it either in the glove compartment or in the trunk, as the law required. He had a permit for it, and said it was good to have when out driving. Just never know where you might end up, he would say. The big man, not saying a word, reached over the front seat and pressed the gun against Jose’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered Jose’s forehead and exited just above his spine.

make me an extra print of the picture they took of him. Had that picture in my top desk drawer in the office for years, till someone stole it on me.”

4:05 A.M. Jose’s now limp body lay heavily on top of Maria and, when she felt the warm flow of blood from his head soaking into her shirt, she began to scream. The big man started the car and began to drive again. Maria still screamed. The smaller man now took his gun and, tapping Maria with the barrel said, “Shut up, bitch. You’d better stop all that yelling and start praying for your boyfriend. The boy needs it now.” They drove around Miami for another thirty minutes. They pulled up to a light, jumped out of the car and ran, leaving the motor running, the doors open, and Maria laying under Jose in the back seat. She slid out from underneath Jose. Grabbing his belt with one hand and his shirt with the other she pulled him up on the seat. She got out of the car. Not able to find anyone on the dark and empty street, she began to scream. A light went on in the house across the street. Someone looked out the window. Maria’s purse lay empty on the front seat of the car. The only thing they had stolen was her wallet. It contained five dollars.

4:35 A.M. 4:00 A.M. “By two in the morning the natives have already usually shot each other, or given up trying and gone to bed.” Rick paused for a minute to take a bite out of his hamburger deluxe. “Look at it, it’s almost fucking four in the morning and this is the first chance we got to eat anything. You know, I never believed in any of that astrology shit till I became a cop. Every fucking full moon they go off the fucking walls.” It was true; the moon was full and, over the last six hours, we had been to one rape, two stabbings and one minor shooting. The shooting would have been worse if the victim’s wife had known how to fire a gun with a little more accuracy. As we sat talking, a young waitress walked in the front door to start her shift. Rick stopped eating and looked up as she came in. He took a sip of coffee and said, “You see that new waitress? Great tits, she used to make porn movies before she got married. Married some big black guy. All my years, all I seen, never got used to no salt and pepper team. Anyway, she’s got great tits; gives me a fucking hard on everytime she waits on me." “Did I ever tell you about the guy we had one night at the porn theatre? They get a lot of hookers hang out in the theatre, jerk these guys off for ten bucks while they’re watching the movie. Well, this old guy’s in there and apparently some broad sits down next to him and starts rubbing his dick. They make some deal, he pays her whatever, and there they are sitting in the back row, and she’s sucking his dick like crazy. Then all of a sudden, the old guy grabs his chest and let’s out a gasp. She thinks he’s about to come, but the guy’s really having a fucking heart attack. She keeps sucking and he fucking expires right there in the theatre. Well, the girl goes and tells the manager, and they call us. I get there and, sure enough, this old guy’s sitting there dead as can be with his pants pulled down and his dick hanging out. I didn’t know what to do so I called the district attorney, and after he finished laughing, he told me he never heard of a law against sucking a guy to death. So we wrote it up as natural causes and let the hooker go. I had the guys in the photo lab

Rick had placed the radio on the table between us. Its volume had been turned down to an almost inaudible level. There seems to be a second sense cops develop after years of listening to the radio. No matter how much they are talking or how loud the restaurant is, when that one important call comes over the radio, they always catch it. Rick was in the middle of a sip of coffee, paused for a moment, put his cup down and said, “Mother-fucker, here we go. Did you hear that call?” I was still thinking about the guy in the movie theatre and anyway, the radio was too low for a person with normal ears to hear. Rick reached over and turned up the radio. The call came over again as it was dispatched to a unit. “492, respond to a disturbance; woman in the 200 block of Northwest 60th St. in the street screaming.” Rick looked at his watch. It was four-thirty; he turned the radio back down and said, “At this hour of the morning in that shitbag-neighbourhood, there’s going to be some fucking dead body not too far away. I don’t know why it always has to happen to me; tomorrow’s my day off. We get some fucking stiff at five-thirty in the morning. I’m going to be working this case till tomorrow afternoon. I promised the kids I’d take ‘em to some new fucking Walt Disney movie tomorrow when I woke up. I don’t know why these people always got to go killing each other at the end of my shift. If I catch the asshole who did this, I’m not only going to put him in jail, I’m going to bust his ass for making my kids miss their movie.” Rick reached down and turned up the radio as unit 492 called in their arrival at the scene. “Now just wait and listen to what they’re going to find.” We sat silently, both staring at the radio. 492 came back on. “Change that call to a thirty-one and request a homocide unit.” Rick stood up from the table. Reaching down to grab his cup, he took his last sip of coffee standing up. We paid the bill and walked across the parking lot to the car. Rick stopped and looked up at the full moon. “You know, sometimes I think every time the full moon comes out, we should set up road blocks and hand out bullet-proof vests to all the nicer tax-paying citizens of Miami.”

1985 V11N4 p147

© Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Walt Disney 1947

© Disney Enterprises, Inc.

THE

The Disney fiefdom operates outside the jurisdiction of most Florida laws. It generates its own electrical power and propagates most of its 250,000 species of flora. There are housing developments, a monorail system, a conservation area, artificial lakes and streams, freeways, parking lots, a “Wilderness Area,” ancient cities and shopping centres. Everything is in place, and yet where are we?

A l e x a n d e r

The Walt Disney World Resort Mark IV Monorail System

W i l s o n © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

L A N

THE ORGANIZATION OF WALT DISNEY WORLD RESORT

M A N A G ED

S C A P E:

From the time Europeans first sighted the North American landscape it has been the repository of innumerable visions of human settlement Edenic, utopian, millenarian, communist, apocalyptic. It has also been the site, particularly in the past 100 years, of a vast physical transformafion. Factory, farm, home, settlement: the relentless energy of modernization has left none of these forms untouched. The North American landscape, and our presence in it, continually take on new meanings.

© Disney Enterprises, Inc.

These shifting - and contradictory - responses to the land have displayed themselves in the monumental splendour of scores of trade fairs, expositions and amusement parks from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Inscribed in their very grounds is a popular history of the organization of landscape - urban, rural, suburban, utopian, collective, public and private - and of the tensions between real and ideal space in the North American imagination. A history of these expositions would need to take into account both their common project - which is linked to the history of advertising under commodity capitalism - and their historical and geographical pecu-

a complete reorganization of the landscape. The Disney publicists call the development a “total vacation kingdom.” It consists of a number of resort complexes, recreation and shopping areas and four large theme parks: the Magic Kingdom (Disneyland moved from California), and Epcot (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), which opened in late 1982, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Many observers of Disney’s parks have critiqued their elaborate infrastructures and the rigourous control these impose on the visitor. Yet Walt Disney World Resort marks a signal departure from Disneyland Resort. This newer Disney project’s inten-

Full-sized bust of U.S. president Reagan being sculpted.

THE

RUINS

OF

THE

FORUM

This new space is anti-urban. It is not the city, but the amorphous continuum of the exurb that is the dominant form at Walt Disney World Resort. Once nature is abolished the dialectical relationship between city and country evaporates. Monorails and freeways link various areas of the park as if they could be distinguished as city, suburb, country and wilderness. Yet each of these spaces is structurally identical to the others. Emptied of their historical functions, they can be told apart only by the themes they have been assigned. The city is never explicitly represented here, except in an archaic or primeval form. In an area of Epcot called World Showcase, ten foreign “countries” surround an artificial lagoon. Most of these are boutiques and rides tarted up with localized architectures – an Eiffel Tower here, a Chateau Frontenac or Japanese garden there. The human scale of these Old World townscapes makes for a visual comprehensibility usually absent from the modern metropolis, yet they are presented perhaps correctly - as nostalgic constructions, as a kind of human settlement no longer possible. In “Future World” the city is again absent. There are references to a Corbusier-inspired gridded metropolis - a few blinking lights seen from the car at the end of any number of rides, silent and timeless. These tableaux are not called cities but “Cityscapes” - would-be cities. The American suburb is figured here too, but in a similarly oblique way. Disneyland Park, which opened in Los Angeles in 1955, had popularized the suburban cloverleaf and shopping centre topographies in an American culture just getting used to the atomized space of what Frank Lloyd Wright - twenty years earlier - had hopefully called the “country-wide, countryside city.” In the fifties, there was still enough kick left in modernism for this idealized geography to contain meaning. Walt Disney World Resort still tries to draw on the pastoral energy of the American suburb, and repeatedly evokes the harmonious image of the model towns and planned communities of the early part of the century. Yet perhaps by the 1980’s these visions have been milked dry. L.A., which is the spatial paradigm for much of Disney’s work, makes considerable historical sense as a polemic against the traditional metropolis. Yet in our own day, I wonder if its central place in the dystopian imagination has not overshadowed its genuinely democratizing moment. The sets in the film Blade Runner, for example, are fascinating precisely as, for example, a critique of a social landscape Disney still takes seriously.

© Disney Enterprises, Inc.

liarities. Thus, Chicago 1893, New York 1939, Montreal 1967, Vancouver 1986, and so on, mark shifts in cultural expression, geopolitics, and the spatial organization of the North American landscape itself. Walt Disney World Resort, a 28,000-acre environmental installation in central Florida, presents its own peculiarly American set of problems which throw some light on the social organization of our lives. Here the tensions and oppositions that gave earlier fairs their shape are recast. City, country, public, private - these spaces have been wrenched from their historical and topographical referents, and given new meanings. The very scale of Walt Disney World Resort suggests its potential for p150 V12N1 1985

tion is to represent not only the Edenic, circular space of a fifties amusement park, but a new post-industrial, posturban space. Like airports and malls, Walt Disney World Resort is an appropriate spatial representation of transnational capital. It is at once every place and no place - on the land, but not of it. The Disney fiefdom operates outside the jurisdiction of most Florida laws. It generates its own electrical power and propagates most of its 250,000 species of flora. There are housing developments, a monorail system, a conservation area, artificial lakes and streams, freeways, parking lots, a “Wilderness Area,” ancient cities and shopping centres. Everything is in place, and yet where are we? All the forms of modern social space are present, yet deracinated and strictly managed. It’s familiar, but we feel like we’re on another planet.

If the vague and shimmering models at the Epcot pavillions are simulacra of city and suburb, the natural landscape of the park itself is likewise a “countryscape” rather than country. The artificial lakes at Walt Disney World Resort are made to look Caribbean, the woods like tropical rainforests or boreal swamps. This is the exoticized locus of the package tour, rather than the matrix of agricultural production and rural culture. Disney’s elaborate invasion of the future has cancelled rural space. At Epcot, food comes from laboratories and space stations. Agriculture is thus not only a corporate enterprise, but becomes a sphere of human activity that no longer has a place on the land. A kind of frontier regional planning is at work at Walt Disney World Resort. Development is dispersed in space. The monorails and expressways traverse great expanses of countryside and bring crowds of people to the various centres scattered round the park. But, just as the Disney countryside is a facsimile of the pastoral, so the various centres, once you get to them, are not centres at all, but immense and isolated homages to unsuccessful modernist projects like Brasilia, Chandigarh or Duvalierville. In vernacular architecture, it is the shopping mall that is the

physical negation of both urban and rural space. Malls are possible only when agriculture, energy and information have become one consolidated industry; malls also epitomize a complex of radical social changes which touch many aspects of our everyday lives from transportation to diet to sexuality and cultural practice. Most buildings at Walt Disney World Resort look, and function, like shopping malls. The market organizes public space; private space is an architectural adjunct of individual consumption. All other forms of street life have been banned - or replaced by signifiers of street life. In the historicized “Italy” and “Mexico” and “Britain,” for example, street musicians and theatre troupes give ambulatory performances that both open immense possibilities for a transformation of urban space and simultaneously reinscribe the event within a tourist paradigm of “days gone by.”

release valve for the gigantic ecological transformations of the park. The riparian Florida terrain never stands on its own; it is replicated as a golf course or parkway median. “Wilderness” is the name of a Recreational Vehicle campground.

Once the city is abandoned, so are the rich possibilities of a diverse and eclectic human settlement. A monument to a homogeneous and mass society, Walt Disney World Resort has been built on the ruins of the forum. Here, democracy is a function of the public opinion poll. There is little social and cultural diversity among the visitors to the park; the orthodoxies of the exhibits deny what little slips through.

In the North American imagination (or at least that of its colonizing peoples), the wilderness has always been the place of the other in the landscape. This peculiar vision of an unpeopled natural environment makes sense only when defined against historic notions of the city. The National Parks and Wilderness Areas were established a century ago as preserves of an animated nature, in all its virgin

The land is massively developed and then “renaturalized.” This process is often highlighted, even ridiculed. An intersection of a canal and a highway, for example, is constructed so that the canal - which carries tourist boats -crosses over the road on a bridge. Hedges are clipped into topiaries representing Disney cartoon characters. The Disney publicists call this process “whimsification” and it is the way that the park annexes nature, makes it into entertainment, and inserts it into the overall modern project of development. A reordered and rationalized nature “naturalizes” discourses of progress.

Each topiary figure is designed, grown and groomed by a special team of Disney gardeners.

The productive labour of Walt Disney World Resort - a figure for the multifarious economy of the city - is concealed underground. Exchange, interdependence, the struggle for power - all the everyday functions of the city have been hidden, or banished. Walt Disney World Resort further negates the city by omitting its playful, aleatory and communal dimensions. This omission is most evident in “Spaceship Earth”, the pavilion that is the symbol of Epcot. Spaceship Earth is a giant white sphere. Its central position and unmistakable allusion to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome suggest a phalanstery, a sixties pleasure pad, or at least an Oneida sitting room. Yet this building effectively has no interior. It’s a ride, with one entrance and one exit. The promise of pleasure within was a false one; the utopian locus of many oppositional cultures has been denied.

PROGRESS,

The organizing principle of the Disney universe is control. Direction must be given to the gaze of the spectator; visual perspectives, aural and olfactory terrains, the kinds of movement permitted - all reinforce and reinterpret the various strategies of transnational capital as they are represented in the thematic exhibits and the organization of the site. The map of Walt Disney World Resort - replete with freeways and rest areas - promises a choice of tours, yet the structure of the park virtually reduces all possible experiences of itself to a single prescribed one - a kind of spatial analogy of a monopoly capitalism that incessantly produces rhetoric about free enterprise. This regulation disguised as choice is accomplished by a sensory blanketing that renders the environment seamless. From the moment you enter the park and a voice comes over your car radio welcoming you to Walt Disney World Resort, you are never out of earshot of an announcement, a chatty narration or music. Signs, sewer covers, trash cans, plants, uniforms, colour schemes, architectures - all are co-ordinated, like a series of logos, and shift as you move from one area to another. This thematic and narrativized space is common in our society, but is seldom so rigourously applied as at Walt Disney World Resort. Consider the soundscaped shopping mall or the corporate megashow at an art gallery. The lighting and the linear arrangement of objects and the headphones we rent at the entrance map and script the gallery tour.

© Disney Enterprises, Inc.

NATURE,

dancing shamans. Here in the sterile other worldly space of Walt Disney World Resort, there suddenly appears an evocation of a collective and sustainable society. (References to native American culture first appears in Disney’s work with the release of Little Hiawatha (1937) and not again until the release of Peter Pan in the mid-fifties. This vision is conjured up elsewhere in the park, and is one of the few oblique references to the utopian projects of the sixties (and there are no allusions to the emancipatory politics of our own day). In a film entitled Symbiosis at the Kraft pavilion at Epcot (audaciously called The Land), a deep and resonant TV voice instructs us to “take charge of our technology” in order to avoid “pollution and the other mistakes of the past.” Walt Disney World Resort has transformed what was once an oppositional discourse about the land into corporate slogans and package tour decor.

COMMERCE

Nature is incessantly evoked at Walt Disney World Resort, yet the discourse of progress constantly works and transforms and subsumes it. The “Conservation Area”, is not so much a biotic habitat as it is a

immanence - something incompatible with the sordid and artificial city. And now, as these last vestiges of a primeval space have come to be developed in the Reagan era, so, conversely, American culture resurrects them in distorted form. Note, for example, the Cold War TV series Airwolf of recent years. Here Monument Valley and the great calendar settings of the American Rockies are the theme park headquarters of a topsecret counterinsurgency hit team. Now accessible only by helicopter gunship – and the imagination – these landscapes continue to dispense a mythic national identity to the defenders of the American soil. At Walt Disney World Resort, the National Parks are names of conference rooms at a hotel. The hotel is called the Contemporary. (All the hotels at Walt Disney World Resort have names like furniture: Polynesian, Sport, etc.) The theme at the Contemporary is American Indian. The building is shaped like an Aztec pyramid, a form repeated in the hedges that surround the parking lot. The lobby, the Grand Canyon Concourse, has a large mural of Navajo life: children playing with burros, families eating, bighorn sheep grazing. Turquoise and orange are the predominant colours in the decor. Bars are named after tribes, and have hieroglyphic wallpaper of squiggly snakes and

As an organizing principle, the “theme” has dominated the exhibition only recently. In the nineteenth century, displays encouraged encyclopedic knowledge. By the 1930’s, the fair-going public met with exhibits that were organized around a few central ideas. Entertainment, sensation, and spectacle had become the preferred techniques, and many of them were borrowed from the strategies of persuasion exployed by commercial advertisers of the interwar years. As the commodity began to insinuate itself ever more intimately into everyday life, advertisements and department store displays flattered, encouraged, remonstrated, cajoled - in short, increasingly managed - the consumer. The model rooms of the large department stores - which were very similar to the spatial strategies of the fairs and museums of today - invented an “architecture of merchandising” that eliminated physical and intellectual clutter and concentrated the clients’ attention on the commodity. What we see in Walt Disney World Resort is the recent history of capital relations inscribed on the land. All the spaces specific to this continent are named and replicated there, but replicated in a way that reduces them to a function of commerce. Walt Disney World Resort is our fullest representation of space-as-commodity. This is a relatively new landscape, one which manages not only production and settlement, but even memory and desire themselves. And like the ideas that inform it, it is also, quite literally and happily, a landscape with no future. 1985 V12N1 p151

THE

S I T E

OF AN

I M A G I N A R Y

istory: AN ENCOUNTER WITH HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM

“In every really great revolutionary movement, propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. Since propagation of a doctrine, that is, propaganda, has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to draw them (the people) over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous convictions.” HITLER, MEIN KAMPF

D

O

In January 1985, the Ontario government brought Ernst Zundel to trial under Section 177 of the Criminal Code: “Everyone who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for two years.” He was charged on the basis of two pamphlets which he had written and published through his Samisdat Press. The first tract claims that the Holocaust was a hoax; the second suggests that Jews, bankers, communists, and Freemasons conspired to create a secret and evil world government and that Jews fabricated the Holocaust in order to obtain reparation payments from West Germany. Section 177 obliged the prosecution to prove to the court that Zundel knew he was publishing lies with the purpose of inciting racial intolerance. According to prosecuting attorney, the “right to hold controversial opinions is not illegal. It isn’t even illegal to publish lies if the publisher believes them to be true.

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But to deliberately publish lies to the detriment of the country, is illegal.” The Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association would have preferred Zundel to be charged under the hate literature section of the Criminal Code. However, only the Crown may exercise this prerogative, an option it was unwilling to use. Only under Section 177 could the Association bring Zundel to trial. Once the charges were laid, the Attorney General of Ontario, Roy McMurtry felt it incumbent upon him to take over the prosecution by deciding the case was an indictable one. Politics, not legalities, motivated his decision. He could not afford to offend the Jewish population by denying grounds for prosecution. So, in 1985, forty years after the Holocaust, a Toronto jury was instructed to decide whether Ernst Zundel honestly believed that the Holocaust was a hoax. During the eight-week trial, an unprecedented daily reportage of the courtroom proceedings by the mainstream press, and Zundel’s remarkable manipulation of their presence, made a mockery of the original charge.

on the door said that despite the deaths, the Jewish community were determined to continue patronizing the restaurant without fear. But the place was almost empty. I felt Fear still there, everywhere. Sipping my beer, I wondered if my presence was an act of solidarity, or the perverse desire of a voyeur. In America violence is not advertised as a racial problem. When the lone gunman attacked a McDonalds in the southern United States with sub-machine gun fire, the press made little of the restaurant’s being a hangout for Puerto Ricans. In keeping with the “irrational” nature of the act, the McDonald’s was quickly bulldozed, and a monument to the innocent dead is being erected in its place. There will be no bullet holes left here as historical reminders.   

I lived with Germans in the South of France one year. They were expatriate Berliners, trying to escape a collective history, an exterior fascism located at the nexus of the state. One woman told me that she found my use of the words “nuclear holocaust” distressing. For her, the Holocaust has a secret, forbidden power – the power to shame, to implicate. When she was growing up in western Germany it was never mentioned. It was effaced, erased from the high school history curriculum. In fact, Nazi Germany as an issue never came up. When the movie Holocaust was shown on German television, she said, the villagers in her home town were horrified, distraught. NO ONE had bothered to mention this side effect of the great war effort of the Third Reich. Absent history? Mass disavowal? I am not predisposed to analyze. I took her at her word. It was her truth.   

For through the “eyes” of the media, the Canadian public found itself the unappointed jury at the trial of the Holocaust itself in a society that whitewashes racial conflict – a jury which would confront its own hidden prejudices. Like an inverse mirroring of the Vancouver Five’s “trial by media” for the bombing of a hydro power station and Litton Systems, the Zundel trial brought fascist ideology into the discourse of the average Canadian. Revisionism, like anarchism a year before, became a household word. History became a profusion of catchy one-liners.   

I have blond hair and blue eyes but I am of Celtic not Aryan descent. Yet when I walked through the Marais quartier of Paris, Jewish storekeepers hissed, and shouted that I should go home, home to Germany where I belonged. I felt guilty, soiled, complicitous in my look.   

In America, our collective obsession is with the Hiroshima bombing, not the Holocaust. After all, the mass murder of Jews (and anarchists, communists, homosexuals and the mentally and physically handicapped, and ex-mental patients) was a product of fascism, of Nazi ideology which is Germany’s problem. Our guilt lies in the disfigured and radiated dead, in our leaders’ desire to build a bigger and better nuclear war machine.   

I went with a friend to eat at a restaurant in the Marais quartier. Six months before, extremists entered the cafe at lunch hour and sprayed a predominantly Jewish clientele with machine gun fire. The bullet holes were still there, everywhere. A notice

Another German of this self-styled collective in France, the village rich kid of a small German village, had joined the Baader-Meinhof group in Berlin. He published pamphlets extolling their cause, and eventually became entangled as a hired spy of the German secret police, playing both sides with dexterity. His father had been a Nazi officer, he said, a psychotic who had terrorized his mother. I asked him why he had joined the Baader-Meinhof group. He replied, it was necessary in order to destroy the image of my father.   

In America, Sophie’s Choice popularized the Holocaust as the symbolic bond which sustains a doomed romantic entanglement between a concentration camp survivor and a “paranoic schizophrenic” who amasses material on the Nazis. The implication of this scenario being, of course, that only displaced immigrants and insane Americans could be obsessed enough to re-live the memory of such horror.   

In America, when the first A-bomb exploded at Alamogordo, President Truman received a telegram saying that the “little boy was born.”   

D.H. Thomas’s The White Hotel lauded as a powerful novel exploring the unconscious and the Holocaust, exploits the Nazi atrocities as a mechanism of narrative closure. It makes for a great fictional climax, this historical horror. For the last paragraphs, the woman’s imaginary delusions, and her three-hundred odd pages of psychoanalysis, become the terrifying reality of slaughter. Denying the woman the privilege of the imaginary, the novel forces her entrance into the symbolic structure, forces her death as a vision of a male bayonet stabbed through her vagina.

As a child I spent my summers on a lake in the heart of the largest Polish settlement in Ontario. Centred around the town of Wilno, this region of the upper Ottawa Valley became temporarily famous when a Toronto Star journalist came seeking vampires in its woods, reporting that bodies buried in the cemetery had stakes driven through their hearts. The townspeople always referred to our lake as the DP community. For years I never understood what these initials meant. I knew there were rumours that the German in the fourth cottage on the north shore had been an SS guard during the war. A Polish playmate told me that her father had been one of a few survivors out of the hundreds of thousands that entered the concentration camps. He never talked about it to the family, however, and he was perpetually, understandably drunk. A shriveled old woman two cottages down the lake had been interned at Auschwitz, but I spoke no Polish and the subject never came up. DISPLACED PERSONS. The tattered remnants of a war my parents never openly discussed. SO WHAT DO I KNOW OF THE HOLOCAUST? Visuals of emaciated bodies flicker momentarily through my mind. Like the Great Depression photograph of the sharecropper’s family standing in front of their tarpaper shack, this image has entered the representational field as a static icon of the past. THERE WERE NO GAS CHAMBERS AT AUSCHWITZ. WE ALL KNOW THAT. THEY WERE LOCATED NEXT DOOR AT BIRKENAU.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed in Nazi Germany. Marriage between Jews and “Aryans” was forbidden. Sexual relations between the “races” were outlawed. All Jews became “nationals” rather than citizens. This definition denied them the power to hold public office, to vote, and to display the Reich flag and insignia. The Nazis, apparently, were in some confusion regarding the technical definition of a Jew. Relations by blood rather than marriage were the touchstone at first. But towards the end of the war, such quibblings ended. Anyone with a hint of Jewish associations was deported from Germany for “resettlement.”   

It is easy for the South African government. The colour of skin is a much simpler, more efficient, gauge of distinction. No need to mark J on the black African’s papers before shipping him or her to a “resettlement” homeland.   

The Americans “liberated” the concentration camp victims in 1945, then returned home to their own version of “freedom” where the Deep South maintained a segregationist policy for another thirty years. The Americans returned to a country which tolerated the Ku Klux Klan while the Allies were busy trying German officers for atrocities called “war” crimes.   

On December 4, 1938, the Third Reich decreed that theatres, cinemas, museums, and recreational facilities were forbidden public areas for Jews.   

A friend who was a member of the Granite Club, an expensive private recreational facility in Toronto, told me there was a great deal of unofficial embarrassment in the 1970’s when a famous black singer hired to entertain for a gala event was refused entry at the front door by the guard because of the colour of her skin. Needless to say, this story never hit the front page of the newspaper.   

  

In America, when a bomb fails to detonate, it’s called a “little girl.”   

According to Ernst Zundel the Jews in Germany were luckier than the blacks in America. In his version of events, the Nazis used public money to build an exclusive recreational facility at Auschwitz, complete with a dance hall and swimming pool – to make the inmates stay a kind of extended 1985 V12N1 p153

In 1942, the Jews of the Third Reich were forbidden by decree to use public telephones, buy books, visit restaurants.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The National Film Board of Canada used footage from her film to construct propaganda newsreels to demonstrate the awesome terror of the Nazi dictatorship.

In a present-day provincial psychiatric institution, the use of pay telephones and visits to the canteen are privileges granted to the patient at the “discretion” of the professional staff.

Propaganda had become, through the Nazi’s theatre of power, a battle of photographic context, subject to the viewer’s manipulated ideological predisposition.

In December, 1941, the first permanent extermination camp opened at Chelmo, Poland. It was staffed by individuals who had gained experience in gas chamber techniques through the Nazi programme of euthanasia for the handicapped.

Yet despite the Nazis’ legacy of representation as simulation of mass delusions, Peter Griffiths of the prosecuting Crown counsel rose after the film to announce “that is the case for the Crown, your honour.”

THANK GOD ZUNDEL IS A LANDED IMMIGRANT AND A GERMAN. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO EMBARRASSING IF HE HAD BEEN BORN AND BRED A CANADIAN.

The defence counsel had no such illusions about the realism of the photographic image. Instead, he went for the jugular of the legal system’s structure, minutely cross-examining eyewitnesses of the Holocaust presented on behalf of the defence. Their sources were questioned, their credibility attacked, specific details on the location and measurements of the gas chambers were asked for. The scientific and legal world of empirical accuracy became entangled with the terrain of an historical interpretative discourse.

country club sojourn.

On March 1, 1985, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s self-proclaimed “National Newspaper,” published a large photo of a swimming pool. Ditlieb Felderer of Sweden, a defence witness, claimed he had taken the photograph at Auschwitz. A swimming pool for whom and where? It didn’t seem to matter since it has been distributed as evidence without context by our national newspaper. One might wonder why no opposing photograph was published by the Globe and Mail. A large, gruesome image of concentration camp victims culled from the considerable documentation undertaken by the SS during the war. But perhaps this newspaper is of the same mind as the newscaster who announced on national television that he wasn’t sure how many more pictures of starving Ethiopians the Canadian public could endure before it simply lost interest in the whole affair. The prosecution, however, brought in a U.S. Army film to the courtroom to demonstrate to the jury the horrors of German concentration camps. The newspaper reported that: The jury watched grim-faced yesterday as the film spared no camera angle or close-up in showing torture devices, mass-graves and pathetically skinny, stacked, and rotting corpses. SS officers were shown being forced into the woodsheds to confront mounds of broken corpses; countless individuals were shown so badly starved that they could move nothing more than their bulging eyes. German civilians recoiled in horror as U.S. officers guided them past exhibits of lampshades and paintings made with human skin and shrunken heads. There were countless close-ups of fly-covered faces caught by death in hideous grimaces. The scenes grew more hideous as the film progressed, concluding with film of U.S. bulldozers clearing numerous emaciated bodies into open pits at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

  

In the end, of course, it didn’t matter in the trial whether the Holocaust happened or not. The issue which was at stake was whether Zundel believed it to be a hoax. But in the meantime, no doubt, anti-Semitic Canadians were taking careful note.   

Outside the courtroom, in the streets, in front of a camera, Zundel proved to be the most effective mass media performance artist to hit Toronto since the Pope. Wearing hard hats (to signify alliance with the working man?), Zundel and his supporters stalked the reporters, and vice-versa. A cat-and-mouse game, a chicken-and-egg question: it was difficult to discern who was manipulating whom. The prosecuting attorney and the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association seemed to be the only ones who didn’t calculate the public’s desire for fiction, the media’s demand for consumable news. It was clearly a public relations fiasco. Until eight weeks ago, Zundel had been an underground kook, publishing pamphlets which no one in Toronto had ever heard of. Suddenly, his revisionist arguments were getting nationwide coverage. He became an overnight hero (of sorts) - a champion for freedom of speech. McMurtry must have been losing a lot of sleep.   

In the end, the Crown won its case. But it was a shallow victo-

The defence counsel, Douglas Christie, questioned Mr. Murphy of the U.S. National Archives about the “objectivity” of the film. Christie suggested that the U.S. government had constructed its footage to “convince the German people of the evils of their government.” Mr. Murphy replied that a different film, Death Mills, was made for screening in postwar Germany. The unstated implication of this remark becomes the suggestion that the film shown the jury was specifically produced to convince the American people of the evils of the German government. During the Second World War, the Allies “captured” prints of

Propaganda had become, through the Nazi’s theatre of power, a battle of photographic context, subject to the viewer’s manipulated ideological predisposition.

ry. Its closing argument was not only weak, but dangerous: Peter Griffiths concluded that Zundel’s unabashed admiration for Hitler and his inordinate desire to unify a divided Germany meant that the publication of his tracts was a deliberate steppingstone to the revival of a Nazi party in Germany. Fortunately for the Crown, Zundel is German. Would the same argument have held water with a jury if he was British, or American, or Canadian? The Crown’s arguments also seemed tinged with racist undertones. For is it only the German psyche which is predisposed to fascism? In the end, of course, it was the media, not the jury, that convicted Zundel. Canadians could not afford to absolve him of his falsification. After all the publicity, it would have meant a triumph – not for Zundel, but for the entire revisionist cause. AND AFTER ALL, WE KNOW THAT FASCISM IS NOT A CANADIAN PROBLEM.

Ernst Zundel shows up for his sentencing carrying a seven-foot cross with FREEDOM OF SPEECH tacked upon it. The Jews killed Christ, and now they are crucifying liberty.   

On December 3, 1984, a gas leak of methyl isocyanate at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed at least 2,000 people and injured another 200,000. The victims were inhabitants of a ghetto – an industrial ghetto, one of the thousands created by first world corporations to concentrate cheap pools of labour. An investigation has been launched, but no one seems to be able to locate the source of the tragedy, to position the blame. WHOSE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS ZUNDEL DEFENDING?

I was swimming in an Olympic-size pool, the size of pool which trains the master races for gold medals dangling from heaving chests. Green blue water soothed my sores. Diving deeper, I cleansed my body of the stench which wafted in the breeze. Suddenly, it was night. The water was not green, nor blue, but putrid black sludge, the blood of victims congealed. I had crept here, undetected, but HISTORY demanded its victory. For we all know the rules. No swimming in public pools without showering first. THERE IS NO PLACE FOR THE POLITICAL WOMAN IN THE IDEOLOGICAL WORLD OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM. THE RESURRECTION IS A MALE EVENT. GOEBELS

It seems that freedom of speech in our new world has little to do with what you say. Rather, it has to do with how you say it or who says it for you.

OO

THE

The Orillia Opera House is the town’s largest auditorium. Located at Orillia’s main intersection, the venerable

building

is

directly

adjacent to the Public Library and to City Hall. The parking lot is the site of a summertime farmers’ market on Saturdays.

RILLIA PERA

D

THE ORILLIA OPERA House scandal involved twenty-seven men (sixteen local, five from Toronto, and five from nearby communities such as Barrie) being charged with seventy-seven

acts

of

gross

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SECOND: Well carry on, you were saying that Orillia is a city on two lakes, a “four-season recreation area...”

hours a day and starting the video recorder when an illegal act took place.

FIRST: Um, right. Its famous sons include the figure skater Brian Orser, Frank Carmichael of the Group of Seven, and the humourist Stephen Leacock.

Alexander confirmed reports that two video cameras were installed, one to monitor activities inside the washroom’s two stalls and another to survey the area outside.

PROVINCIAL MEMBER: News, I guess the waterfront project that I just recently got $1.5 million dollars for from the province. As the provincial member I’d have to say...

The equipment was installed and operated with the help of Ontario Provincial Police, he said, at the request of city police.

YOUNG WOMAN, A SECRETARY: (overlapping, giggling slightly) I guess you’d have to say the Opera House. You know the scandal there with all those men? PUBLISHER: And of course there’s the scandal at the Opera House which no one can deny set the town abuzz to a greater degree than any other...(fading till freeze)

indecency. Their “crimes” were

PROVINCIAL MEMBER: Now if you’re interested in scandals and so on, well I’m just not prepared to talk about that sort of thing (fading) at all...

acts of masturbation, fellatio and



Court was told the acts included self-masturbation, mutual masturbation, fellatio and buggery. Much of the activity consisted of men masturbating in separate stalls while viewing each other through holes in partitions between the stalls. 

FIRST ACTOR: (to his sleeping wife) It’s so strange to confront as a physical, almost geological, reality the chasms of unknowing that separate people who live together as lovers, as husband and wife. Things that I’ve thought, hell, the things that I’ve done, that I wouldn’t dare, wouldn’t consider telling you.

buggery in the men’s washroom in

Crown Attorney John Alexander told the court that Orillia police had records of complaints about homosexual activity in the washroom dating back to 1976.

It’s like the life I lead is a landscape that I let you see through binoculars – so you think you see it in such detail, so closely, but all you know is what’s in the lenses.

the Opera House basement.

The washroom was monitored starting July 18, 1983 with a police officer watching the television monitor for about five

The purging sessions we have, of carefully selected humiliations from our childhoods, those humiliations that we now 1985 V12N1 p155

(couple on bed has just finished making love)

SECOND ACTOR: What’s the matter now? WIFE: Oh nothing, my mind was just wandering ... I had a weird day. SECOND ACTOR: Yet another weird day. You complain that we’re not close enough, not physical enough, and then every time we are, it’s like this. WIFE: I’m sorry, maybe I should have let on that it wasn’t a ... that I just wasn’t feeling like sex or somethi…if we wouldn’t hop from A to Z every time maybe... SECOND ACTOR: Middle age. They should tell the teenagers coming in their jeans at the sight of a naked breast that this is what they have to look forward to. KEVIN:

(clad in a heavy metal T-shirt. He is looking at a TV which is

showing a Culture Club video, indicated by the sound of Boy George

Frig! All they play on this show is this guy – gay I should say! What a fag!

singing Miss Me Blind)

FIRST ACTOR: Mind your language. You should no more use words like “fag” than “nigger.” KEVIN: Just look at him, though. He’s got more make-up on than Mum even owns. Look, he’s winking at the camera like Marilyn Monroe or somebody! FIRST ACTOR: I don’t see why he bothers you. If he wants to act in ways that are what you consider feminine that’s really his business. KEVIN: All right, you’ve made your point. I can tell this is going to be another episode of the Great Debate. It’s like you think everybody’s one of your students or something. I’m sorry if I’m not up to your liberal standards sometimes. 

The majority of men appearing in court Monday are long time Orillia residents, most of whom are married with children and considered “pillars of the community,” said defence lawyer Richard Clarke, who represented most of the accused. In almost all cases, lawyers for the accused cited massive publicity about the charges and subsequent public reaction as being devastating to the men and their families. Another defence lawyer, Mike Miller, said the crimes weren’t victimless, as was suggested by some people, because the families of the accused have been ridiculed and shamed. face and package for the light-hearted consumption of the other, those sessions, by what they leave out, the humiliations that still gnaw or jab, those sessions but point out this chasm. That turn me from the binoculars’ lenses to the huge missing parts of the landscape, to your blindness to the most private parts of me. These scenes, especially the early ones ... Some, I remember the pain or the fear or the shame or whatever I felt and none of the details. Some are there clearly, dark and awful. There are others that only became humiliating in retrospect, with my increased understanding. That man, boy really, only about seventeen, who minded me on Sundays when my family went to church, when I was so p156 V12N1 1985

young that my mum didn’t think it would do me any good to go along ... Only when I learned what the games had meant, where with dares and coaxing he got me naked beside him, had me touch his naked cock, kiss it and his lips, touch his asshole, and lick it (I still remember its smell) and to let him lick and kiss and fondle my naked body. I felt brave doing it, not ashamed. Aware only of crossing frontiers. I felt no guilt, until much later. And when with the same combination of coaxing and dares I got friends my own age to repeat these activities I felt grown up. Only much later did I acquire my self-loathing. 



The crimes weren’t victimless, as was suggested by some people, because the families of the accused have been ridiculed and shamed.

Both the local paper and the Toronto papers reported the number of men involved variously as twentyseven, thirty, thirty-one, and thirty-two. This prompted rumours that some of the men were sufficiently well-connected that they were able to keep their names from being released. In an interview with me, Police Chief Ken Boyd pooh-poohed any such suggestion, maintaining that any of the men who were to be charged whose names were unreleased were discovered unavailable to servers of summonses. 

FIRST ACTOR: (to audience) Police have this ability to instill fear, this way of knocking (staccato knocks heard). Even if you’re wide awake, it startles you like a ‘phone ringing at 5:00 a.m. I was fortunate, I guess, because I was home when the summons came.

and stood next to me, his eyes were on my groin. And he could see of course my um well he opened his fly and he uh took his penis in his hand and just held it ... It was nearly erect and he looked directly into my eyes and then I looked up from his groin and saw his eyes on me and um I could feel my penis becoming erect and I knew that he saw it too and um then, well, he motioned, he gestured with his eyes, he motioned to the stalls...and I um, I followed him. I had an erection that was rock solid. Well I followed him and I, we, only touched each other slightly, um occasionally, uh, and we masturbated, we each masturbated, ourselves. We ejaculated, and cleaned up and left. WIFE: And this ... this is what they’ve charged you for? FIRST ACTOR: No, that was the first time. They have charged me with three acts of gross indecency for some of my successive visits.

FIRST ACTOR: No, I told you I love you. WIFE: Yeah, you told me you love me. FIRST ACTOR: I need you now more than ever. WIFE: And what about Kevin? Will this be made public? (First Actor indicates “I don’t know.” with his arms and his eyes.)

WIFE: That could be hell for him. FIRST ACTOR: I know. (pause) I am sorry. WIFE: Yeah. So am I. (Second Actor is now drunk at a table, passed out) 

SECOND WIFE:

(to audience)

When I come in from the

WIFE: Oh, successive visits. The same man?

He asks me my name and I say that yes that’s right and he gives me this, and says that it’s a summons. Now my head is whirling. I’m trying to think of anything else it could be about. Then he tells me.

FIRST ACTOR: As a matter of fact I saw that same man one other time. By then I was more experienced. Sometimes I was alone. Sometimes I was the one to make the first move (pause). You would be surprised at how many men cooperate.

Did you ever notice what an evil sound the word “buggery” has? It sounds worse than murder, as bad as rape. It is not, I assure you, as bad as it sounds. But to hear it… “Buggery.” In the washroom of the Opera House.

WIFE: The same thing, the same “activity” each time?

SECOND ACTOR: I had this recurring dream. In it I was young, about fifteen. I was out in a field, in a valley near a house we used to live in. I slowly and furtively lowered my pants. Then, looking around frantically, listening intently, I jerked off. Then I looked up, just while I was coming, and there were all these people watching me...my mother, my kids, my wife, my boss...I could feel my heartbeat in my temples...

was alone all along.

“I felt brave doing it, not ashamed. Aware only of crossing frontiers. I felt no guilt, until much later.”

FIRST ACTOR: And my shirt is becoming drenched in sweat, my face bursting red… WIFE: Was that the police? What did they want? FIRST ACTOR: Me. WIFE: Oh, you’ve been speeding again, have you? Why don’t you just tell me when you get a ticket and I’ll remind you to pay it. FIRST ACTOR: (cutting her off) It’s not for speeding. WIFE: (with an effort, remaining calm) Well then, what do they want you for? FIRST ACTOR: You have to know that I really do love you very much. WIFE: And I love you, of course. What…what have you done? FIRST ACTOR: It’s hard to explain this. I’m – If you – (deep Don’t think that – I’ve been – For some time I’ve been – I’ve found myself drawn, um...Well I was in the washroom (pause) the washroom in the basement of the Opera House? Yeah, well one day last spring, maybe later, June, May? Um I was just sitting there and there was um this man. He uh watched me – He was watching me very intently – I’d never seen him before – He watched me while I uh “passed urine.” He was quite obvious about watching me. He um he came breath)

FIRST ACTOR: No, I was more creative than that. Adventuresome. Fellatio. (pause)

Buggery.

WIFE: (suddenly rather agitated, she has quit repressing it) What See the thing that - Look I can’t be this understanding. You I mean - how could you not tell me, not even let on? FIRST ACTOR: How could I have told you? How could I have “let on?” WIFE: You could’ve – I mean – I thought that we talked, I thought we shared something... FIRST ACTOR: How would I tell you that? How I didn’t - I mean it’s not like I planned it, like having an affair. Look I was sweating it out alone, but I don’t think I could’ve stopped; I always felt so bad afterwards, so scared during, so anxious before...I – I’m (pause) sorry. WIFE: It’s easy for you, you know you’re sorry. What am I supposed to feel? (shared short, sad laugh) I’m angry and I’m jealous – I’m actually jealous of a series of men who – do you even know their names? I feel alone. I feel I was sleeping in someone’s arms and I woke up to find he wasn’t there, that I

groceries, here he is, like he is so many of the nights he’s home, which isn’t too often, anyways here he is, in a stupor, with this in his hands. (takes summons from Second Actor). Now I recognize that it’s a summons right away, ‘cause he’s gotten a few of them for drinking and driving, a favourite pastime of his, anyways I think that that’s what it is, so I know better than to say anything to him when he’s in this condition, so I don’t even look at it until the morning. (Black-out) 

(His wife enters, takes summons out of the Second Actor’s hand)

WIFE: It’s only a matter of time until you kill somebody, when are you going to learn? Probably not till some little kid is on 1985 V12N1 p157

your conscience. (reads summons) What the ... Gross Indecency? ... this was – this is that thing, this was in The Packet ... (Second Actor responds “yes” by nodding)

WIFE: This explains a lot - no this is - I’ve gotta think about this... PHILIP: I was in Orillia about four or five times one month, doing background work for a bid – I work for an architecture firm. I went into the washroom in the Opera House quite innocently, I assure you. While I was pissing, this man came and stood next to me. MAN: (to audience) One time after I was a little used to it, a little brazen I guess, I came in, and this fairly young guy, not a boy, but young, good-looking...I came up to him and said “I’ve never seen you around, you from Orillia?” PHILIP: No. Toronto. I’m here on business.

ass, reaches his hands round the front, kisses his neck, then they face, and kiss)

PHILIP: (to audience) Then we went into a stall and sucked each other’s cock. (to man) I’ll be back in Orillia on Monday, maybe I’ll see you here around this time? MAN: Maybe. PHILIP: (to audience ) We didn’t. 

SECOND WIFE: It’s as if I’ve been raped, as if I’d seen my parents in bed, as if everything that I took for granted were vandalized, as if...Christ! What are you supposed to do when you can’t even say what you’re feeling as if? I can’t – It’s too close...I need time and space between this – between him and me. 

The population of Orillia is 24,000, which seems fairly large, and while I agree that it is technically a city, there is something different about the dynamics of this kind of scandal in a centre of this size compared, for instance, to Toronto. This is compounded because no sudden boom has shot the population up to that figure, and since it is off the main commuter highway, it is not a bedroom community but a real town. The moment I heard about the summonses being handed out, or of the names being printed in the paper, I knew lives were changing all over Orillia.

everything. It’s only a matter of time until he answers one. How’d you like him to find out that way? FIRST ACTOR: I said I’d tell him. WIFE: And what’d the lawyer say about the injunction? Is there a chance he can keep the names out of the paper? FIRST ACTOR: Well, he thinks there’s some chance or else he wouldn’t be trying. But there isn’t a precedent or anything. We’d better hope he can do something because school boards are not famous for their liberal attitudes and if it gets into the paper it’ll be pretty hard for them to ignore... (phone ringing interrupts)

WIFE: Get that. (shouting as he answers) We’ve got it. FIRST ACTOR: Look – Hey! Just leave us alone!

(slams down

phone)

WIFE: We can’t go on worrying about Kevin’s picking up the phone. Leave it off the hook and go in and tell him right now. KEVIN: (entering) Tell me what? FIRST ACTOR: (looks to wife for “go some problems I’ve been having.

ahead”)

Um…just about-

KEVIN: In the Opera House? Are you sure they were problems? FIRST ACTOR: Wait . . .how do you… KEVIN: I picked up that phone, too. WIFE: Kevin, we . . . FIRST ACTOR: We wanted…I mean I wanted to tell you. It’s just that it’s not very easy. KEVIN: I guess it was pretty easy in the washroom though, eh? WIFE: Kevin.



The Crown Attorney argued that the investigation was not an attack on homosexuality, but against the use of a public area for actions that would offend the public.

KEVIN: Look don’t tell me not to say what I want: He’s the one who’s fucked us all up. While he was fucking some faggot! Some other faggot, I should say. WIFE: That’s enough!

Although homosexual acts are “distasteful to most,” they are not illegal in private, he said, but “we must protect the public (from being) exposed to acts of gross indecency.”

KEVIN: Yeah, well you shoulda told him about that, eh? What is he some kind of fag-nymphomaniac, so possessed by desire that he can’t even give a shit about anything or anybody else?



FIRST ACTOR: I still love you, and your mother. Don’t do this.

(The lights come up on the Publisher sitting at a “desk” in a rolling

KEVIN: Well I don’t know about her, but I don’t really want a faggot to love me. (exits)

chair, the type that spins. He is quite spread out on it. He speaks quickly, nodding much of the time, as if by doing so he will be able to convince his listeners against their will.)

MAN: (Looking straight at Philip’s cock) It’s funny isn’t it how no one ever looks down, always straight ahead as if there’s something to be ashamed of...

MAN: Yeah, about fucking between strangers, who don’t even know each other’s name. (turns to Philip)

PUBLISHER: I guess it’s sort of natural, you know, for me to ... um “narrate” or I guess, “frame” this section, The Orillia Opera, Part Three: Printing the Names, because I...uh, was, you know, um...intimately involved in the decision-making process that led to the names being printed, weighing the trauma it would cause against the reasons in favour of...uh doing that. I want you to realize that (noticing a tableau of the First Actor and his Wife on the other side of the stage) I knew, I was aware, of this kind of scene.

PHILIP: That happens sometimes, I guess.

WIFE: You haven’t told Kevin yet, have you?

PHILIP: I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. MAN: I’ve heard a lot of stories about sex in Toronto. PHILIP: (shakes his cock, turns, zips, and moves to sink) Stories?

MAN: Strangers that are sometimes men.

(stalking eye contact

through mirror, Man reaches Philip, presses his groin against Philip’s

p158 V12N1 1985

FIRST ACTOR: I will. WIFE: He’s probably guessed with all the phone calls and

“Did you ever notice what an evil sound the word ‘buggery’ has? It sounds worse than murder, as bad as rape. It is not, I assure you, as bad as it sounds.



Those who appeared in court Monday to plead guilty included: W.C., 41, three charges, $600 fine or 30 days in jail; H. J., 56, one count, $200 or 10 days in jail; W.J. P., 45, six charges, $700 fine or 35 days in jail; W R., 53, two charges, conditional discharge; G.L., 46, one count, conditional discharge... A total of 77 charges of gross indecency involving homosexual acts were laid in August 1983 after a an 18-day police investigation of activities in the washroom. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The full names of the accused were published by the Orillia Packet-Times.) 

PUBLISHER: What would’ve really been hard on someone that age were all the jokes that were going around, you know people were saying they should re-name Mississauga Street “Vaseline Alley” and so on... FIRST ACTOR: How do you get a guy off the roof of the Opera House? SECOND ACTOR: You jerk him off. SECOND ACTOR’S WIFE: New rules at the Opera House: you’ve now got to use the rear entrance. OTHER MALE: Know why it’s so cold in the basement of the Opera house? All the blowers down there. SECOND ACTOR: What’s the only safe way to pick up your wallet when you drop it in Orillia?

ardized by the publication of their names and “crimes.” Probably the most precarious were the careers of the educators - teachers and a principal. A strangely anachronistic reaction was the early decision to put the men on “sick leave” pending their trials. Upon conviction several men were suspended indefinitely on the basis of a “moral turpitude” clause in their contracts. Their legal battles are still being carried on by their union.



Some of the men had a lot more on the line than others, in the sense that their very livelihoods were jeop-

SECOND ACTOR’S WIFE: I’ve got a job in Toronto. It’s a lot tougher living alone than I expected. I’ll manage. The thing about this whole thing, though, is the sudden change. Christ, I can date

The Crown Attorney argued that the investigation was not an attack on homosexuality, but against the use of a public area for actions that would offend the public.

CECIL W. TRIFFIN: As a straight male, I take exception to no names being published about the mess at the Opera House. I have known many in the past who had their names in the local paper. If they are not it leaves every male in Orillia condemned. I want to walk down our streets knowing I am not under suspicion by someone. If guys want to ply their trade why not go to Toronto where there are thousands parading in rallies, with their own church and gay pastor. No one would know. But in Orillia where people know so many, that is a different thing. We will all be under condemnation with this move on to keep the names a secret. The police have already put us in this position by saying that men from all walks of life are being charged. (letter to the Editor Orillia Packet-Times, September 15, 1983)

PUBLISHER: A little paranoid? Okay, maybe. my life by it: “before the summons” and “after the summons.” 

Now, I think a part of that was in the printing of the names. There were two basic reasons that we felt compelled to fight in court for the right to print them. First, as I think the judge put it in his conclusion, “Publicity is the very soul of justice.” I think that though he might be overstating it a little, he is basically right, that the fear of public censure is usually the harshest and fairest punishment and the best deterrent. Along with that, I think we always have to fight for the freedom of the press. Now the other reason we had to fight is a little more peculiar to this particular case, and it is simply the humane desire to see innocent persons not be punished, and that’s what was happening. You see, the cranks and yahoos had the names of the twenty-seven involved before we published them, you saw that in the scene. They had the twentyseven, and about fifty more who weren’t involved at all.

KEVIN: The guys weren’t as bad as I’d expected. It was sorta weird the way they reacted, like as if my dad had died or something. You know – like I could see them whispering and looking at me, like pity ya know? The coupla goofs who actually said something were almost like a relief.



FIRST ACTOR: You kick it to Barrie. PUBLISHER: They called the Opera House the Chateau-Gai, and so on, but after a little while this sort of thing seemed to stop. Once it spread outside Orillia, and it really did, for instance one Toronto columnist said something about how the really obscene thing about the whole business was that Orillia should have an Opera House in the first place, well when we started to get that treatment from outsiders the attitude really changed. Aside from the fringe of real red-necks, the town seemed to sort of rally behind these men.

somewhere. Kevin took the whole thing pretty well considering...

Before going to Orillia to do my research I had expected that the major villains of the play would be the publishers of the Packet-Times, and the Toronto papers the Sun and the Star, who had all fought in court against the injunction filed by some of the men which sought to keep their identities secret until a conviction. However, the Packet’s Jack Marshall argued that the names of the majority of the men were already known “by the cranks and yahoos,” however fifty or so uninvolved men were also suffering their telephone calls and snide remarks. A friend who lives in Orillia verified that, telling me an anecdote about a hairdresser acquaintance, who though openly gay faced no ridicule until the scandal, after which he was harrassed despite his complete innocence. 

FIRST ACTOR: Not much of a trial: Of the twenty-seven men charged with a total of seventy-seven counts of gross indecency twenty-six plead guilty. SECOND ACTOR: The one who pleads not guilty bases his defence on technical grounds, involving the electronic surveillance used by the police. We are fined, that being the sum of our official punishment. FIRST ACTOR: The teachers involved have been relieved of their duties. With our union’s help, we are fighting to keep our jobs. I don’t know what’ll happen, but I hope I can keep teaching

FIRST ACTOR’S WIFE: The thing I’ll never understand about this – and I’ve thought hard about it – but what is the attraction of the sex, this kind of sex? I certainly can’t picture two women doing this, in a bathroom, with a stranger. SECOND ACTOR: One thing that has always stood out like a highlight of my sex life, was this time with Catherine, before we were married, on a date in my dad’s Parisienne. She had had a drink or two, and just around midnight, while we were necking, she didn’t move away when I put my hand in her blouse. I got her bra off as well as I could, and I kissed her all over her chest...I went home with a stain on my pants and a smile that wouldn’t stop. A guy just doesn’t feel like that too often after he’s been married for a while. Some guys cheat, others bet their whole pay cheques on a horse race, most just try to forget that they had ever felt that excited about anything. FIRST ACTOR: I know that most people assume I’m a repressed homosexual who just couldn’t repress it anymore, but, well I don’t know...I love my wife and son intensely, if that affects the question at all. I’m staying with them and from what I’ve heard the other marriages have held together, too. 

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1985 V12N1 p159

iliana Heker was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1943. Her first book of short stories, Los Que Vieron la Zarza was published when she was twenty-three years old, and won the Casa de los Americas prize in Cuba. She co-founded the important literary magazines El Escarabajo de Oro and El Ornitorrinco. She has published two other books of short stories. Her work has never been translated into English before. “Jocasta” will be published in Alberto Manguel’s forthcoming anthology Evening Games: Chronicles of Parents and Children, Penguin, 1986. Introduction and translation from the original Spanish by Alberto Manguel.

JOCASTA p160 V12N2 1985

FICTION BY  LILIANA HEKER

W hen will night be over? Tomorrow all this will seem so foolish. All I need is morning when he will come and wake me, though God knows if I'll be able to sleep through the night. Just like any other child in the world, isn't he? Jumps out of bed as soon as his eyes are open and comes running very fast, otherwise maybe Mother will have gotten up already and we'll miss the best part of the day. Only at night can one believe something so monstrous; only at night, and I feel sick imagining him now, jumping on my stomach and singing Horsey, horsey, don't you stop, let your hooves go clippety-clop; just a little longer, Mommy. And how can one refuse, Just a little longer, Mommy, when he's playing; who would have the courage to say no, after he looks at you, with wanting in his eyes. No, that's enough, Daniel; it's very late. It's enough because tonight your mother felt filthy, once and for all, and now she knows that she'll never be able to kiss you like before, tuck you into bed, let you climb up onto her knees whenever you like; from now on it's

not right to demand that mother look after you alone and speak only to you, tell you stories, and nibble your nose, and tickle you so much you laugh like crazy, and we both laugh with your funny somersaults. He makes them up carefully, the imp, so you won't take your eyes off him, and then you forget the rest of the world. I do what I can. I told them today, I do everything possible so he won't be around me all day. They laughed; you know, it looks funny when you're stuck with me all day, watching each of my gestures, scowling like a miniature lover every time I pay attention to one of my friends. They call you Little Oedipus, and even I laugh at the joke. Little Oedipus, I tell them, gets furious furious when I'm in bed with his father; it's terrible. But it wasn't terrible, Daniel; nothing that happens beneath the trees in the garden on a lovely summer's day during a restful afternoon with a group of friends is terrible; your odd ways even add a certain charm; we can spend the hours talking about you without the slightest uneasiness. Of

course, my love; it's all right to want to be with Mommy, to enjoy her; she is young, she is pretty, she guesses our words before we say them and knows how to hold us in her arms and make us laugh more than anyone in the world; and she's silly, stupid, to feel so dirty tonight, to think that never again will she be able to stroke you, or let you climb into her arms. She'll put you away, in a school, the sooner the better. That's a lie, Daniel; it's the night, you know; it transforms even the purest things; loving you as I do becomes awful. But tomorrow it will be the same as before; you'll see when you come in, horsey, horsey, don't you stop, just like any day. Or did it ever matter? I'll let you jump in my arms even if they keep on talking, but that child, Nora; he doesn't let you out of his sight even for a second. See what I mean?, I said. But you kept on hugging my neck and putting your fingers on my lips, my little tyrant. You said, Don't talk, and then I explained: What can I do?: he's my little tyrant. Don't you

think you should do something? I do everything I can, I swear, but there's nothing to be done, and I pushed you gently, go on, Daniel, sweetheart, trying to put you down. But it was just another joke; like calling you Little Oedipus beneath the trees in the garden, when the hideous part was far away. They're funny words we use, we like listening to: That child is in love with you, Nora; or saying to them: He's jealous of his father, the little monster. Everything proper, correct, even saying: But get down, Daniel, you see Mommy has something to do; go and play with Graciela, sweetheart. So that which was to come later would have its place. Because, you know, I myself would have put you down, I swear it; because sometimes I do get angry and say: well Daniel, that's enough, and I carry you in my arms over to Graciela. Graciela, here's this little rascal for you to look after. I don't know if she liked the gift: before she used to play alone, quietly, and now she has to look after you, make the effort of holding you back because 1985 V12N2 p161

Of course, my love; it’s all right to want to be with Mommy, to enjoy her; she is young, she is pretty, she guesses our words before we say them and knows how to hold us in her arms.

p162 V12N2 1985

comes from seeing you make faces at her, this doesn't go out with the light. Because I knew you were looking at her: at her wicked and marvellous eyes, her black strands of hair falling this way and that, her pug nose, her naked legs all the way up to the forbidden place. You loved it, Daniel, you loved it. My God, why did I think something like that, how did I ever imagine she was provoking you with her charming cheekiness? Yet I know she was wicked, and that she was challenging me.We were fighting over you, Daniel. And she was so far away, so free and naked; alone and something to be jealous of, telling you: I can show you my legs up to where I want, I can eat you up with kisses, if I want, we can roll around in the grass, right there, in front of everyone, because I'm a little girl and you can see my knickers, yes, without people thinking things they'll just say: How lovely, look at them play, happy is the time when one can do those things; and you pull my hair, you tangle yourself in my legs, and I’ll lift you up, and we’ll both roll, both, because I’m nine years old and I’ll do everything for you, so you can have fun. She stood there so invulnerable, all odds on her side, sticking her tongue out at you and calling you with her eyes: Come, Daniel. You smiled at her. The others were still saying, That child, Nora, is really in love with you, but I saw how you smiled; I knew that in a secret way, a way I couldn't reach, you two understood each other. You knew how to say Yes to her, if she accepted you as her tyrant, and she answered, Yes, you are so lovely with your blond hair, your blue eyes and your unabashed way of being tender. So here I come to Graciela, you thought: she and I are the same and we love each other.You went, Daniel. You slid out from my arms without even looking at me; as if you'd climbed up on something like a bush and seen



you, the young gentleman, of course want to go with me but in the end, thank God, you stay there quietly and I can go back to my friends who are still talking about how strange you are. You see, I say, he has me very worried, I don't know what to do; I try to get him to play with other children but immediately he comes after me, running in circles around me like something demented; did you see how he kisses me? One would say he's making love to me, lecherous little rascal, and I must say that for his age, he does it wonderfully! And we all laugh because we are spending such a splendid afternoon. All except you, my poor Daniel; while we talk I watch you from the corner of my eye: Graciela is trying hard to entertain you, but you won't take your eyes off me. "What a devil, do you think he'll be alright with Graciela? He won't take his eyes off you....” Of course; you're fighting to get away and however hard Graciela tries to hold you back, she can’t. But, now you've freed yourself and are running towards me; the respite was brief; you've climbed back into my arms and here you are, and it's useless to try to get you down again. You'll stay with me, growing quieter and quieter, until sleep comes over you and I have to climb the stairs with you in my arms, half asleep, and tuck you into bed. Goodnight, Daniel. Goodnight, Mommy. But there are no good nights for Mommy, Daniel. Never any good nights again. Never again to kiss you and nibble at your nose and tell you stories and wait till morning for you to climb all over me and sing horsey, horsey. It is useless to wait for daybreak: there are things that neither day nor night can blot out. And today, maybe just a second before taking you over to Graciela and allowing everything to happen as usual, I thought: Graciela, that devil of a child, standing there, at a distance from us. Yes, that's what I thought: Devil of a child. Yes, Daniel, the shame of thinking that, the hate that

Sebastian behind the hedge, and gone off to find him. It's so easy when one knows nothing about betrayals, isn't it Daniel? One is in mother's arms, the best place in the world, wishing to spend one's life like this, huddled up, letting yourself be loved; one feels one would die if anyone tried to tear us away; and then Graciela appears with her devilish eyes, and sticks out her tongue, and rolls around in the grass, the best place in the world, one feels one could live like that, rolling around in the wet clover; nobody could ever stop us from playing together, from pulling her hair until she screams, from making her come running from far, far away to make me fly up in the air; laughing out loud at her faces that no one can pull as well as she does. They will never take me from her side; it's useless to watch us, Mommy; it's useless to feel like you can't take your eyes off me and that you can barely hide it with a smile from your friends when they tease: He betrayed you, Nora. Yes, all men are the same, and you fake a voice as if you were saying something funny but you're not even looking at them; you're still waiting for my eyes, just one of my looks to let you know that everything's the same, and you'll be calm again; so I can go on playing with Graciela but I still love you more than anything else. But if it weren't so? But if I loved Graciela more, Graciela who can lift her legs? And you can't. Who can yell like Tarzan. And you can't. Who can fight with me in the grass. And you can't. Who can smear her whole face with orange juice. And you can't. Who can kill herself laughing at the grown-ups all sitting there, looking so stupid. And you can't. So it's useless to smile every time I turn my head; and to make funny faces to win me over. I'm not amused by those faces; I don't even notice them. I don't see you even when you pass by my side. And you've passed three times now; and you've touched me; I felt how you touched me but I didn't turn around. And I know you make noises for me to hear and you sing that song about the bumblebee because I like it best. But I don't like it any more. Now you know. Graciela can sing much better songs, pretty Graciela, nobody will take me from her side even if it’s nighttime and we have to go to sleep. She'll come, earlier today than all the other days, with more cuddles and more promises. But I won't. And I won't. I'll resist up to the last minute; I'll resist up to the last minute; I'll scream and kick when Mommy wants to hold me in her arms. Yes, Daniel, you want to be with Mommy, of course you want Mommy to put you to bed. It's nighttime, can't you see? You must remember we love each other so much, Daniel. That I'm the best in the world for you, Daniel. You can't climb the stairs screaming and kicking that way; don't you see you are betraying me, my little monster who doesn't understand betrayal? Don't you know that Mommy does understand and that her heart aches and she can't stand letting you fall asleep in tears, remembering Graciela? I didn't want to hurt you, my darling. I didn't hurt you, it's not true. You fell asleep in peace and quiet and I'm sure that your having lovely dreams now. Only I am not sleeping. Only I'm afraid of the kisses I gave you, of the caresses, of the terrible way we both played on the bed till you fell asleep, happy and exhausted, thinking of me, I'm sure. And it's useless for me to repeat over and over again that I always kiss you that I always caress you, and that we always play, both of us, because my little Daniel must be happy. It's useless to say that little Daniel is happy now and he's dreaming lovely dreams; that he doesn't know anything about his miserable mother's ugliness. It is useless to repeat that night turns everything horrible, that tomorrow it will be different. That you will come running to wake me, and everything will be lovely, like every day. Horsey, horsey, don't you stop, let your hooves go clippety-clop. Like every day.

JEANNE RANDOLPH

SMALL DIARY OF

Saturday, November 2, 1985 “Primum non nocere.” It sounds so straightforward. “First of all, do no harm.” But it is impossible to live by this dictum. Harm can arise from inaction as surely as it can from actions inadvisably taken. Physical harm may sometimes bring a person psychological well-being. Psychological harm can sometimes result from a miraculous physical cure. A person can find a way to be hurt even when everyone around him is trying to avert it. The most hidden cruelty of all is to collude with a person who harms his own being. This is the sadism that keeps me awake while everyone else seems asleep. There is no living person to whom I speak of this sadism, and that is why I live in the past. Nineteen thirteen, TOTEM AND TABOO. Nineteen thirty-two, PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE NEUROSES by Helene Deutsch. Nineteen fifty-five, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ETHICS by R. E. Money-Kyrle. And this is why I begin this diary. I am keeping vigil, lest in my carelessness, I do injury at the very moment I am called upon to be kind.

SUPPRESSION “An obsessional neurotic may be weighed down by a sense of guilt that would be appropriate in a mass-murderer, while in fact, from his childhood onwards, he has behaved to his fellow-men as the most considerate and scrupulous member of society. Nevertheless, his sense of guilt has a justification: it is founded on the intense and frequent death-wishes against his fellows which are unconsciously at work in him. It has a justification if what we take into account are unconscious thoughts and not intentional deeds. Thus the omnipotence of thoughts, the overvaluation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional life of the neurotic.” Sigmund Freud, TOTEM AND TABOO

Sunday, November 3, 1985

“Their guilt seemed to have been first aroused in early childhood by certain primitive sexual wishes and to have subsequently become attached to, and so interfered with, many non-sexual sublimations.” R.E. Money-Kyrle

I remember how thrilling the anxiety of the first week of medical school was. Everyone was scared. They were scared they would flunk out, scared the other students were smarter than they, scared they couldn’t learn enough to be good doctors. This manifested itself in an attempt to identify those students who were somehow impostors, whose presence was unjustified. There was a need to designate someone as the least worthy, someone against whom everyone else could favourably compare their own value. One afternoon, four of them had gathered around me demanding my pedigree. I felt that their probing was a kind of inverted courtship in which they hungered to dominate me. They wanted me to submit to their need for a fraud. How I would have liked to tantalize them with the illusion that I was unworthy. I thought of exaggerations and lies that would make them misprize me, lies that would incite their lust for superiority. I wanted to arouse their bloodthirstiness and then gaze upon it contemptuously. This was, of course, proof that I was more unworthy than they could ever guess. When one of them said, “How could a woman apply for a place in medical school?”, I smiled meekly, silent as he continued, “What makes you think you should have a place when any guy who doesn’t get in can end up drafted? Is your career worth some guy dying in Vietnam?”

He grabbed one of the animals by its hind legs, swung it up in an arc, and slammed its skull against the table. “Unconscious, but not dead,” he said, and then began to explain other technicalities of the experiment. I didn’t stay until the explanation was complete. I ran out of the room.

Monday, November 4, 1985.

“Every child, especially in the OEdipean (sic) phase of his development, is faced with situations that evoke a direct conflict. ... In the boy, for instance, to disobey an autocratic father is felt as wrong because it arouses great quantities of guilt in which persecutory feelings predominate. But to obey this father may involve the desertion, not only in phantasy, but also to some extent in fact, of a defenceless mother. Then obedience too is felt as wrong because it arouses the other type of guilt in which the predominant feeling is depressive.” R.E. Money–Kyrle p164 V12N2 1985

And then there was the day they brought in white rabbits. As usual, I had not studied my lab manual the night before, so I did not know what the experiment was. I had simply arrived and assembled the apparatus, glancing back to the manual a sentence at a time as if it were a cookbook. There was not a lot of preparation to it anyway, just the hypodermics, the vials of acetylcholine, physostigmine, adrenaline, saline, the stop watches. When the bunnies arrived, the professor told us we would study the neurochemistry of cardiac rate and rhythm, and to do so scientifically the rabbits must be rendered unconscious through some other means than chemical sedation. He grabbed one of the animals by its hind legs, swung it up in an arc, and slammed its skull against the table. “Unconscious, but not dead,” he said, and then began to explain other technicalities of the experiment. I didn’t stay until the explanation was complete. I ran out of the room. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. Soon I heard the whistling screams of the terrified animals. And after a while the professor bumped through the door and stood before me. He ordered me to return to the experiment. “I can’t. I’m sorry,” I said. “Someday you’ll accidentally kill a patient,” he told me, “You might as well get used to it now.” He had sputtered this with bravado, like a man who knew he could never forgive himself. Beyond forgiveness, he was beyond punishment, he was a thing, not a soul, an object, rather, an object that would not recognize its own terror. An object that would not even foresee its own annihilation. As I turned to walk away he pleaded, “Please, please, I am the professor.”

“....protective acts performed by obsessional neurotics ... have been distorted by being displaced on to something very small, some action in itself of the greatest triviality.” S. Freud, TOTEM AND TABOO

less in diameter.” He informed us that lichenification predominated, moving his fingernail toward the fungus as if he wanted to flick off a piece of it. He addressed the fungus, never turning toward us. I didn’t stay until the lecture was complete. I glanced into the patient’s eyes and then I turned hastily toward the door. I didn’t say “Excuse me.” I didn’t smile reassuringly. I had paused to tap the doorknob three times before turning it, but I hadn’t looked back or said, “Thank you, good luck.”

Wednesday, November 6, 1985.

“If one of them (obsessional neurotics) undergoes psychoanalytic treatment, which makes what is unconscious in him conscious, he will be unable to believe that thoughts are free, and will constantly be afraid of expressing evil wishes, as though their expression would lead inevitably to their fulfillment”

Tuesday, November 5, 1985.

S. Freud, TOTEM AND TABOO

The patient had a fungus on his forearm. The fungus was big and red and purple and blue with little ridges and moist little patches. The dermatology professor was lecturing on the difference between bleb, vesicle, papule and hives. He seemed enraptured with the man’s arm, as if it were a miniature kingdom, with ponds, hillocks, dales and glades, a precious landscape. As he spoke he would pick at the epidermis. “A circumscribed, elevated, fluid–containing lesion, 5mm or

“....we can say that the more aggressive these suppressed wish-impulses are, the more severe is the super-ego....” Helene Deutsch One thing we all dreaded, working night duty in the emergency room at the Clarke Institute, was when the police brought in someone handcuffed

and claimed he needed psychiatric help because there was something about his violence that was not normal. Until proven otherwise, I believed the best course of action with a frenzied, homicidal maniac was to appear as delicate, helpless and innocent as possible. I believed that in doing so I would embody in my presence the desperate, vulnerable maniac soul, and the maniac, recognizing in me his own pitiful self, would, instead of attacking, want to protect me. One night the police

Thursday, November 7, 1985.

“All true guilt, as Freud long ago discovered, Is aroused by what is basically the same situation, namely conflict with the inner representative of an integrated parental figure. ... Those whose super-egos are predominantly persecutory will experience guilt, and of a predominantly persecutory kind, in situations where they are tempted to defy this figure or some external power which represents it.” R.E. Money-Kyrle

“....(There are) the sexual instincts and the destructive tendencies, which are then either directed against the outer world in the form of aggressions or else introjected, i.e., they turn against the ego as if it were an object of the outer world, so that instead of sadism (outwards) we have masochism (inwards).” Helene Deutsch

had presented such a man to me. He was snarling, coiling and uncoiling his body to thrust himself out of his captors’ grips. “You fucking bastards I’ll kill you. I’ll kill every one of you. I have the power to kill you. Evil is mine. I’m strong enough. Run, I will catch up, hide, I will find you. And when I get you, you’re dead.” The officers pulled him up to face me, so close I could hear his pulse. And, with that, the policemen let go of him. He made an alarming gnashing sound and grabbed me by the neck, his thumbs fitting snugly around my throat. I stood as still and prim as ever but I felt a fury of rage I had never felt toward anyone before. He then unfurled his hands and was led away. I followed soon after, savouring the purity of my untempered hatred. It was stunning how, if free of mercy, I felt especially free. This rage had a promiscuous quality, as if its victims would be a means to an end: violence itself. I walked to the ward and looked for him. I found him standing beside a stack of folding chairs, facing away from the light. “I’m so ashamed,” he whispered as we shook hands.

She loved what was disgusting. Once a week we met to talk about her compulsion, once a week for three years. I kept careful notes but I never once wrote down her symptom, for I could never bear to read it in words. She boasted that her symptom was uncontrollable, and I felt she bullied me into suffering the indignity of it vicariously. I didn’t want to hear of it. No one would desire to hear such things. Often I pictured myself demanding of her that she never mention her compulsion again, or else I would never cure her. I would try to imagine her response, her facial expression changing from eagerness to pain. Meanwhile she boasted that she was nothing, empty, and that everything she did was false. She was contemptuous of people who admired her facility with numbers, her singing voice, her imperviousness to insults. She told me her cardiologist had warned her she would have a stroke if her blood pressure went out of control. “He said to take a thiazide and he said to take Inderal. But I know when my blood pressure is up, and it’s not that often. I wouldn’t take the pills unless I felt it was going up. I would know. How can he know? He thinks the pills will help but what difference does lowering my blood pressure make? I would still have this compulsion.” But after a long time, when she began to get quite ill, she wept. She said that there was really only one thing she wanted, one thing she needed. “I want someone to have power over me, to tell me

what is right, to tell me what is wrong. I want an authority over me. I want someone to tell me when I am bad, not just punish me with all this freedom.”

Friday, November 8, 1985.

“The primary obsessive acts of these neurotics are of an entirely magical character. If they are not charms, they are at all events countercharms, designed to ward off the expectations of disaster with which the neurosis usually starts. Whenever I have succeeded in penetrating the mystery, I have found that the expected disaster was death. Schopenhauer has said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy....” S. Freud, TOTEM AND TABOO The fourteen-year old boy had an astonishingly pleasing face. He resembled a Mona Lisa with cobalt blue eyes and bountiful dark hair. He sat with his hands folded on the table, to which I had pulled up a chair for myself. The attendant who unlocked the room for us had vanished discreetly. “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. “It’s their idea to lock me up. I don’t need it.” “I understand,” I replied, “that there has been a murder.” “A little old lady died in hospital, that’s all,” he said. “From what?” “She was very old. She would have died soon anyway.” “What have you got to do with it, then?” “I didn’t kill her. I hit her and kicked her, that’s all.” “You must have hit her awfully hard for her to die.” “It didn’t seem that hard to me. She was old and stupid. Everyone dislikes those little old ladies when they get stupid and slow and all wrinkled and ugly. They don’t say so. I’m the only one who will come right out and say it. But I know other kids have said they hated them and would shove them to grab their purses.” “Listen, that was a terrible, terrible thing you did.” I leaned forward and moved an ashtray half an inch to the right. I asked him, “Do you think you need help?” “I don’t like it here in this kiddy-jail. Can you get me out?” “No. Can I ask you one more question?” “What?” “You say other kids talked about hating little old ladies. But what’s the difference between what they did and what you did?” “I’m the unlucky one. Someone caught me at it.”

1985 V12N2 p165

BODIES LIE IN THE BRIGHT GRASS AND SOME ARE MURDERED AND SOME ARE PICNICKING

JENNY HOLZER from the

SURVIVAL SERIES p166 V12N2 1985

ONY SCHWARTZ:

E Persuasion

lectronic

TELEVISION ANNOUNCER: In just thirty-five years television has emerged as this country’s primary and most powerful conveyer of information. The messages we see and hear are impossible to ignore. Advertisers spend a billion dollars a year to make us feel guilty about ring around the collar. It is why politicians will spend fortunes to show us a thirty second image of themselves walking on a beach. Now there are those who argue that a new sector of society, those concerned with social change, will have to learn to use media as well. That the old forms of social protest and organizing can’t compete anymore. That every group, whether it is promoting clean air or the equal rights amendment, will have to get access to the media, even make their own commercials or else they will have to see their point of view obliterated by opponents who use the media more wisely. To begin our evaluation, a visit with a man who is on the cutting edge of media for social change, a central character in the evolution of television as the great persuader. In the media business the recognized master craftsman in selling everything from soap to candidates, is Tony Schwartz.

ELDON GARNET: I’m interested in who you are, and what you have done. TONY SCHWARTZ: My name is Tony Schwartz, if the name tells you anything. I was born in midtown Manhattan sixty-two years ago. I studied advertising design. After the war, I got a job designing annual reports. A gadget hound by nature, I bought a wire recorder and started recording. It was 1945, and at that time there weren’t many folk music records, so I would record stuff off the air. Back then, the only way a person could hear himself was to get a disc cut. It cost about four dollars. The average folk singer didn’t make enough money to afford that. So, I began to record for musicians who wanted to hear the songs they were working on. I built up a collection of people like Burl Ives, Josh White, Pete Seager, Harry Belafonte – anyone I’d meet around. This gave me the idea of exchanging first wire recordings then tapes with people around the world. I put ads in foreign journals asking people to exchange with me. Eventually I collected material this way from about 42 countries. I made up my own programs in foreign languages. Later, I was a guest on a radio program, and I got a telephone call from a very wealthy man who, after he heard about my work, wanted to meet me. He offered to give me a few years off to do anything I wanted in sound. I decided to study the noncommercial musical life of my postal zone, New York 19, from the Hudson River to Fifth Avenue, 59th Street to 42nd Street. The music and theatre businesses, four of the five major record companies were in this area. The opera house was one block outside of it, and the largest church in the United States was across the street. It was a fantastic neighbourhood, with a tremendous amount of folklore, many

national groups, children playing games in the street, street musicians, jazz clubs, and barkers. Folkways Record Company heard of my work and the first record I did for them was of Children’s Games of the Streets. The art directors’ club invited me to speak about my hobby. They’d never been able to use real children in commercials. They’d always used older women to imitate them. The problem was, they approached the recording of children the same way as adults. That is, you gave them a script to read — but kids couldn’t read. I would take a child and say, “Let’s play a game. You say what I say.” I’d say a line and then he’d copy it and I’d get his charm. I’d have him do it four or five different times, and I’d cut out all his good lines, then call in an actor to read the in-between lines. Well, these commercials just blew the world apart. Overnight I was in a new business. I did all the Ivory Snow commercials, Johnson’s Baby Powder, Band-Aids, everything with children. I was typecast as Mr. Children’s Recordist. Later I began doing the sounds of places for Eastern Airlines, American Airlines, British Airlines and so forth. Within a short while I became known as America’s advertising world’s king of sound. I had a reputation of being talented, expensive, and difficult. Which isn’t bad, because when they came to me they were prepared to fight, pay money and get something good. I received a copy of McLuhan’s book, Understanding Media as a gift. I don’t think I finished more than twenty pages, but it just blew my mind. I instantly saw why I was difficult. The advertisers and I were both playing the same ball game but in different ballparks. They were playing in a print-oriented ballpark and I was playing in a sound-oriented one. McLuhan

knew of my records and he came over. He said he only had an hour to spend because he had to take a plane to Toronto, but he stayed three days. After meeting me, McLuhan said he had met a disciple with 20 years experience. We became fast friends. He asked if I would teach with him for a year at Fordham University where he had the Schweitzer chair. I taught the classes here in my office and McLuhan attended all of them.

ANNOUNCER: Tony Schwartz’s technique is to draw on people’s passions and fears. There is no better example than the famous Daisy spot that he created for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign.

TELEVISION AD The Daisy spots shows a little girl in a field counting petals on a daisy. As her count reaches ten, the visual motion is frozen and the viewer hears a countdown. When the countdown reaches zero, we see a nuclear explosion and hear President Johnson say, “These are the stakes, to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the darkness. Either we must love each other or we must die.” As the screen goes to black at the end, white lettering appears stating “On November 3rd, Vote for President Johnson.”

1985 V12N2 p167

PHIL DONOHUE: All of them trek to his door. He’s got a little cubbyhole in New York that he never leaves. He’s had Carter there. He’s had Teddy Kennedy there. Talk about power. You’re the mogul. You’re the person, Mr. Schwartz, that America ought to be terrified of. You shape public opinion. You decide who’s going to run. T.S.: I have done over 400 political advertisements, and worked on five presidential campaigns. I have become very well-known in the political field. My area of expertise is radio and symbolic TV. I’m not a cinema verite person. I don’t travel and I’m not a filmmaker as such. I basically deal with design and communication. I’ve written two books on this subject, The Responsive Chord and Media: the Second God. I feel, if we are working in politics and can affect people’s thinking and behaviour to a large degree in a very short time with an electronic medium, why not use this for social purposes? So I started volunteering for things that I felt were meaningful to the community. I used media to make the behaviour of the police an open social contract with the communtiy, to bring fire education to the public.

RADIO AD MALE VOICE: A fire breaks out on the first floor of a two family house. The woman quickly leaves to call the fire department. And two people die upstairs overcome by smoke. Do you know that a door is one of the best pieces of fire fighting and life saving equipment? And if you leave a room that is on fire, if you simply close the door it will help stop the fire and smoke from spreading too quickly.

saying that the schools were a major industry in this state that brought in much more money than the state would have to put in. The first year we received 38 million dollars. The second year we got an additional 50 million dollars. This year we’re going for more. As my reward they gave me an honourary doctorate from all the schools in Massachusetts.

RADIO AD Paid for by the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

MALE VOICE: President Reagan, how would you like to make more than a thousand percent profit on every dollar the government invests? Well, your economists are throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars, yes hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting back on student loans. They seem to think that education costs. What every college student, even though he’s not studying economics, knows is that education pays. The average college student earns three hundred thousand dollars more in his work life than a high school graduate does. The taxes that are paid on this income, directly and indirectly, would bring the government a profit of hundreds of billions of dollars. Now that’s better than any other investment anyone can make. President Reagan, don’t let your economic advisers make you look penny-wise and pound-foolish. Student loans are a small temporary investment that pay back hundreds of billions of dollars. Tell your advisers that education doesn’t cost us money, it pays.

E.G.: You didn’t charge them for this work?

Edmund Carpenter, Anthropologist

I’ve used media to shame politicians into saving a school that was closed down by the state; preventing strikes by service unions, including firefighters and the police. In Massachusetts, when I heard that the federal government cut out student aid, I found the head of the Association of Independent Colleges and I said, “I’ll do a campaign for you to get the state legislature to take over what the federal government cut out.” We shamed the state legislature into it,

T.S.: The cancer society was always showing images of lungs affected by tar and nicotine. I felt that I could do a spot for them taking the “educational” area into a new ballpark of emotions by using what I’ve learned to be one of the most effective means of social control in our day and age, and that is shame.

ANNOUNCER: The frontier of electronic persuasion was first entered when anti-smoking organizations enlisted the media to fight cigarette ads.

TELEVISION AD

S P O T



1 9 6 4

The audience sees two little children, a boy and a girl, playing in an attic. They are dressed up in their parent’s old wedding clothes. As we watch them in this familiar bit of children’s play, we bear the voice of the announcer saying, “Children love to imitate their parents…Children learn by imitating their parents…Do you smoke cigarettes?” The commercial concludes with the visual symbol of the American Cancer Society.

D A I S Y

You can actually condemn a man to death by shaming him. In oral societies, where the self, the individual, is defined collectively and where he derives his strength from the social structure, when he is denied access to that, cut off from it, he often dies. The secret of that is that they first condemn the man through ridicule, then everyone ignores him. Now, in primitive societies, you often find that there are individuals whose strength of character is strong enough to withstand the condemnation of society. But they generally flee. The result to society is then proof – no man is around who has ever defied the public condemnation. They are either dead or they are gone.

E.G.: I’m interested in the specifics of some of your campaigns. You mentioned you used shame or guilt to initiate action. What was your first guilt or shame campaign?

T H E

T.S.: I studied the role of shame in primitive cultures and found that the same conditions exist today, in that shame works in closed communication environments, small villages. You can speak to anyone anywhere and everyone everywhere in this country in less than a 60th of a second. We’re in a national village.

T.S.: Nothing. I work on anything that I’m interested in and if I can get money for it I take it and if I can’t... as long as they don’t legitimately have it, I don’t mind working for nothing. I’m doing work for the AIDS Medical Foundation. It’s a tragic sickness, and people know very little about it. The afflicted are treated like lepers. I’ve done commercials with the top medical authorities on how you really get AIDS, what you have to be careful of, to remove the fear.

with learned recall. In reality what functions most in electronic media is evoked recall. The industry has its theories and it’s stuck with them, stuck with certain habits of yesteryear. There is one approach called The Unique Selling Proposition. In print, if five companies make the same claim, each has a 20% chance of being perceived as telling the truth. Whereas if these companies all make different claims, then each has a 50% chance of selling. So, there was an unwritten law preventing any two companies from making the same product claim. Now in electronic media it doesn’t work that way because I could have five announcers read a piece of copy and you’ll say, I like that guy best. There are other factors that affect you. So you don’t need to go across to another position in electronic media, you can go deeper into the same position.

I find that advertising agencies tend to work in what I call “obsoletely the right way”. They are using yesterday’s theories and techniques for today’s problems and technologies. They are dealing with the principles of perception in a field where you need to understand reception. They are dealing

ANNOUNCER: So twenty years later we have the Pope of all people doing the voice over on your anti-nuclear war commercial. How did that come about? T.S.: Over the years people interested in the nuclear ques-

tion, have come to me saying, could we borrow the “Daisy” spot to show? I preferred to do something new that could affect people today. How could I bring the feeling of the “Daisy” spot back? Who could be the narrator today? I thought the one person that knows how most people would feel, who would be dedicated to the human aspects of this, would be the Pope.

The worst enemies of this type of work are the lobbyists because their stock in trade is to be nice to people you want something from. They feel threatened, they don’t want to attack, and in a social environment, the desire to avoid pain is much stronger than any anger.

TELEVISION AD TELEVISION AD Pope John Paul II: We are troubled by the development of weaponry exceeding in quality and size the means of destruction ever known before and the continual production of ever more powerful and sophisticated weapons. True that there is a desire to be ready for war. And being ready means being able to start it. It also means taking the risk that sometime, somewhere, somehow, someone can set in motion general destruction. It must be our solemn wish for the children of all the nations on earth to make such catastrophes impossible. The wish of Pope John Paul II. Brought to you by the United States Catholic Bishops.

ANNOUNCER: On June 12, 1982 there was an enormous antinuclear war rally in New York’s Central Park. Should have the organizers instead put their money into television ads? T.S.: They got millions of people to Central Park. They came from all over the country and it lasted for a day or two, and the cost of getting them there was close to thirty million dollars. If they had taken half that budget and put it into media, they could have controlled their communication. Twelve million dollars on television is as much as they spend on a presidential campaign.

Brought to you by the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association so the police and the public can better understand each other.

T.S.: I feel the quickest way to socially embarrass anyone is to make their behaviour public and ridiculous. You can go straight out and attack Reagan. I think Reagan ought to be attacked. He’s a goddam liar. Now, it’s dangerous to have a liar for a President and what’s even more dangerous is to have a President that doesn’t even know he’s lying. I felt this last political campaign was a disaster, so I made commercials to show how I would have approached some of the problems.

CAROLYN WHITE: You weren’t actually hired to do these ads for Mondale, you did them on your own. Did you send them to him? T.S.: I sent them to an assistant and they didn’t use them.

PROPOSED RADIO AD MALE VOICE: Did you pay your income tax last year? Most of us did. Who do you think paid more taxes over the last three years? A cleaning lady or five of the nation’s top military contractors? Well the cleaning lady paid more taxes in one week than most contractors paid in 1981, 1982 and 1983 put together. It’s hard to believe but they made ten and a half billion dollars in those three years. And you know what? They didn’t pay one penny in taxes. Now that is a fact. You see, that is the real Reagan tax plan and we have lived under it ever since he’s been in office. If you like the plan, re-elect President Reagan. If you don’t like Reagan’s plan, vote for Mondale. This information was carefully documented, researched and paid for by the Mondale for President Committee.

T.S.: I just wanted to show the Mondale campaign what they could have been doing. C.W.: When you put one of these social ad campaigns togeth-

MALE VOICE: Brought to you by the Mondale for president Committee.

er, it’s obvious the concept is yours, but do you also select the actors and write the final copy? T.S.: I do everything. I have an assistant who writes with me, who is learning my style . 1985 V12N2 p169



PROPOSED RADIO AD



T.S.: There are all sorts of problems that arise. People have to know how to be good clients and many don’t. An organization came to me when they wanted me to do some work, but they couldn’t take the idea of really coming out and fighting.













E.G.: Let’s say I am a social organization coming to you for assistance. What would your relationship with these clients be?

MALE VOICE: Take a moment to imagine that you’re a New York City cop, all right? You’ve just been sent to an armed robbery in progress at a supermarket. When you get there a man comes running right at you. He has a gun in his hand. You have no time to take cover. You yell “Police, Stop!” His gun suddenly swings towards you. What do you do? You’ve got a life and death decision to make. Is that man with the gun the owner of the store? Is he an off-duty cop or is he an armed killer? If he’s an armed killer will he drop the gun because he’s been caught or will he kill you? Remember you have less than a split second to make your decision. Do you stand there and ask him to drop his gun or do you shoot him and hope you get him before he gets you? If your answer was ‘Shoot’, did you make the right decision or did you kill the store owner or an off-duty cop? Well you’ve just learned what a cop goes through. It’s a decision he has to make in an instant and live with the rest of his life.

Now, an-off-the record comment of the President of the United States: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve found legislation that will outlaw Russia for ever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Nuclear warfare is a joking matter to Ronald Reagan, but the rest of the world sees it as hostile to the U.S.S.R.. That’s why we ask, Is Ronald Reagan someone to lead us to nuclear peace, huh?

C.W.: Do you ever use women in your ads?

PROPOSED RADIO AD

T.S.: Yes. C.W.: The voices I’m been hearing in the selections you’ve played all have a very similar sound. Do you use the same actor more often than others? T.S.: I use three or four people, but when you say similar sound, it’s an attitude that’s similar. C.W.: How would you describe the attitude? T.S.: It’s talking directly to people. It’s not pontificating. People want to be spoken to just the way we are speaking to each other now. E.G.: How do you make people feel guilty, especially politicians? T.S.: They don’t need to feel guilt. What they need to feel is that people will think they are shits if they don’t do this, or that what they are doing is anti-human.

MALE VOICE: Paid for by the Mondale for President Committee. When Pinocchio told a lie you could tell. Every time he lied his nose grew longer and longer. But let’s take a good-looking, friendly, humourous, rosy-cheeked fatherly man in his seventies who has years and years of acting experience behind him. If he tells a lie does it show? And how many people looking and listening to him are even willing to believe that this nice man might be lying? He said he never used make-up but his own autobiography says he did, so he had a little lie. He says he’s cut government spending, but actually he’s increased the national debt more than all our past presidents combined. So we have a big lie. Now we have to face two great dangers, the first, our President lies. The second, our kindly President may not even be aware that he is lying. Huh?

T H E

P O P E

S P O T



1 9 8 4

E.G.: Is the media pro-Reagan?

PROPOSED RADIO AD MALE VOICE: Did you hear that Reagan commercial the other day? The one where he claimed he’s cut spending? Well he has cut spending, for the hungry, the elderly, for dependent mothers, for student loans, and for cleaning up toxic wastes and things like that. And you know he takes credit for these cuts? But the other half is that we now have the largest national debt in the history of the United States and President Reagan has raised it more than all other Presidents combined. That’s the whole truth about Reagan and spending. Brought to you by the Mondale for President Committee. p170 V12N2 1985

T.S.: No. They’re pro-stupid. They just aren’t sharp. The media is very ignorant about many things. It took a while for the media to go after Joseph McCarthy. Finally Ed Morrow did, then everyboby jumped on the bandwagon. E.G.: You tend to end your ads with “Huh?” T.S.: I’m talking to people, I’m not selling something. E.G.: You are selling an ideology. T.S.: I’m trying to communicate to someone. You can apply selling to anything. Teachers are selling when they talk to their pupils. I’m more interested in communication than advertising. People say you shouldn’t sell candidates the way you sell soap. I wouldn’t even sell soap the way they sell soap. I’m trying to affect people, and to use their existing thinking in the process of affecting them.

LET YOUR HAND WANDER ON FLESH TO MAKE POSSIBILITY

MULTIPLY JENNY HOLZER from the

SURVIVAL SERIES 1985 V12N2 p171

p172 V12N2 1985

*THANK YOU COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD. KROMAR-MELAMID

Courtesy Strother/Elwood Art Editions, Brooklyn, New York

F U N K T I O N S U M FA H I G

ASTRID KLEIN

p174 V12N2 1985

A

PA U L V I R I L I O

n interview with

by

CHRIS

DERCON

When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast, it’s the means of seeing the antipodes live when there’s a game or of watching the Olympics in Los Angeles. But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, and a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information, science and “robotized” systems. Chris Dercon: An idea which comes up again and again in your books is that of the TV screen, the TV screen looking out on the world like a portable window. Enlarging on this idea, one could say the world is merely retransmitted by screens and satellites. What do you mean by this idea of the portable window?

Paul Virilio: I used this term in reference to architecture, because the problem in architecture is first and foremost one of doors and windows. It is not the wall which encloses, since a structure which cannot be entered is not a structure for man. There are three windows. There is the French window (door) which serves to effect an architecture, a place where man lives, be this a city or an apartment. There is the window which renders itself autonomous, the window as a place of light or looking – here we have an extraordinary invention related to a religious problem, the problem of the

S

S

P

P

E

E

A

D

C

–

cult of light, through the claustra, solar calendars, etc. The third window is the television screen...

E 1986 V12N4 p175

The image is sketched, then painted and coated, and it lasts because its medium persists. With the coming of photography, followed by cinematography and video, we entered the realm of an aesthetics of disappearance: the persistence is now only retinal. Despite the film used in photography and cinema, there is no longer any real “support.”

the videotape machine after recording, through information science and “robotized” systems. CD: You have spoken of the relationship between dromospheric space - of speed-space and an aesthetics of disappearance, in connection with the machinery of war. PV: Yes.

...So when I speak of a window, I mean this third window. I am speaking also of another constructed space, that of telecommunications and the new techologies. Another point concerns cutting out: you only have an image if there is cutting, for nothing is ever seen in its entirety. Everything is always perceived through a frame, and it’s certain this frame existed from the moment the first eye opened upon the visible field. This process continued with the framing of paintings, the frame of the photograph, and the frame created by the television camera eye. I believe when you talk of a third window, you are talking about a new frame, a sidereal frame, since with communications satellites and live rebroadcasts, the problem of the window becomes a macrocosmic phenomenon. But, this all stems from the very first window, the porthole drilled in the megalithic tomb. In these tombs there was a tiny hole to let the sun shine in. All this goes back to the beginning of time. That’s why I call it the continuation of a story, the aftermath of that first sighting. CD: The view through this third window might represent a catastrophe of perception, because as seen through it reality becomes blurred. We are living in this loss of the real, because we only perceive reality through images. How should we react to this third window, how should we question it? PV: As a first step we spoke of space; I think here we should

speak of time. The contemporary image is a time-image, even a speed-image. The first pictures were space images, and that’s what I refer to when I speak of an aesthetics of disappearing. I think we may come back to that in order to answer your question, but it really won’t be an answer. Until the invention of photography, there was only an aesthetics of appearance. Images only persist because of the persistence of their medium: stone in the neolithic era or in ancient times, carved wood, painted canvas.... Those are an aesthetics of immersion, of the appearance of an image which becomes permanent. The image is sketched, then painted and coated, and it lasts because its medium persists. With the coming of photography, followed by cinematography and video, we entered the realm of an aesthetics of disappearance: the persistence is now only retinal. Despite the film used in photography and cinema, there is no longer any real “support.” The sustaining medium is retinal pesistency because there is a persistency of the image in my eye that is this image in motion. Let’s never forget that. So I believe an aesthetics of disappearing is another world, another link to the real. It is a link to the real as fleeting, as uncertain. The real in an aesthetics of appearance consists of being the solid, durable, hard real - hard in both sense of the word, i.e., hard and aggressive. So I believe that reality was a reality of solidity, of real presence, as they say. With cinematography, with photography first of all and now with infography, reality is shown as fugacious, but I think that we, too are fleeting. CD: You have mentioned fugacity. Another very important p176 1986 V12N4

concept in the almost real functioning of the magnetoscope is that of establishing a program of absence. What is the relationship between the idea of fugacity and the idea of a program of absence? PV: I think the old image, the old reality, was a reality which

can be presented as a space-time reality. Man lived in a time system of his actual presence: when he wasn’t there, he wasn’t there. Today we are entering a space which is speedspace. Contrary to popular belief, the space we live in is a speed-space. This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming. We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have, I think, a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil – something pejorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today we are entering an era of intensive time: that is to say that new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinitely large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high-speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of Carbon 14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the “program of absence” that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second. No human being can be present in the intensive time that belongs to machines. Man is present in the average time situated in the long duration of historical phenomena and the short duration of his reflexes, of the “twinkling of an eye.” We can say the same for the cinematographer. Beyond sixty images per second you can no longer perceive anything. Here again, you see, the problem of space is central. The new space is speed-space; it is no longer a time-space, a space where time is manipulated. What we are manipulating is no longer man’s time, but machine’s time, which I call speed-space, or the dromosphere, meaning the sphere of speed. In conclusion, from my point of view, speed is not a means, but a milieu - another milieu, and one that tends to escape us. When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast, it’s the means of seeing the antipodes live when there’s a game, or of watching the Olympics in Los Angeles. But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, and a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through

CD: For you, one of the most important factors in this new time-space concept – let’s call it speed-space – is the strategic or stratifying development of war.

PV: Yes, insofar as war has always been the laboratory of the future. Because of the necessity to survive, and to face the possibility of sudden death, be it in ancient or new societies, war has always been the laboratory of techniques, of mores. I really believe this, and we must not forget it. War has also been the laboratory of speed. When Sun Tzu, the old Chinese strategist of several centuries ago, said that “promptitude is the essence of war,” he said it at the time of the cavalry. Now it is obvious that this saying is still true: witness the debate over euromissiles in Europe just a year ago. So, war is in fact the laboratory of modernity, of all modernities. And it is in this sense that it has been a subject of permanent study for me. It is also because I myself have experienced it. I lived through a war in my childhood, and it affected me deeply. Thus, war is not merely an amoral phenomenon, it is an experimental phenomenon inasmuch as it reverses productivity relations. War produces accidents. It produces an unheard of accident, which is upsetting the traditional idea of war. Substance is necessary and accident is contingent and relative! That is the traditional story of the return to the accident. In wartime the opposite is true. Here accident is necessary and substance relative and contingent. What are war machines? They are machines in reverse – they produce accidents, disappearances, deaths, breakdowns. I think war in this sense conveys something which at present we are experiencing in peacetime; the accident has now become something ordinary. CD: You have spoken elsewhere of the relationship of cinema to modern techniques of war. As you know, it is said of Viverstein’s films, and of all the products of Nazi cinema, that they were made especially for propaganda purposes. Is it not interesting to view these productions according to JeanMarie Pienne’s theory that technology is built upon the idea that there is no such a thing as death. So here’s an immediate connection between technology and the idea of heredity. Let’s not for the moment consider this idea of propaganda and this idea of the strategy of the image from the viewpoint of atavism. Let’s say that there is a paradox: technology and atavism, an atavistic technology. PV: I’m having trouble grasping your idea of atavism. I understand the word but I can’t grasp what you mean by it. This being said, I think we can talk of propaganda. During the Second World War, the German army with the American army – the French army was less advanced on this score – was to develop the “Peca” companies, the cinema companies created to follow the divisions. Films were regularly brought into headquarters to provide a direct vision of the front. This was because television, though it already existed, wasn’t ready to do this yet. The camera operators of the land army and airforce served as on-the-spot reporters where the war was actually taking place. But it is certain that the Second World War was essentially a radio-telephone war for the whole pop-

ulation. Nonetheless, we see Nazi regime dignitaries conducting research into colour as opposed to Technicolour. At the beginning of the war, agfacolour pictures were earthy and yellowish in hue, whereas Technicolour reds and blues were already bright. You have the Germans of the era saying, “Ah, those colours are distinctly better than ours, and we’re going to have to get ours to look much more lifelike.” I think this is important especially for propaganda. CD: Is there a difference between the idea of developing the cinema and the statues of Arno Breker? Technology is based on the idea that there is no such thing as death. It’s the same thing as Arno Breker’s statues. At that point, technology becomes atavistic. There is a paradox in cinema production. PV: Well, here I’ll begin with an anecdote about General Macarthur. When he was leaving his post in Korea, because he had planned to use nuclear arms but was refused and demoted, he said in his last official words, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” I think this expression is very cin-

Yes, I think cinema is a sort of porthole into the past, and this porthole is through the camera lens. Recording myself today is, I believe, to make myself particular to a time which will not be my own. Through this viewfinder, this porthole, people yet unborn will see me, but I have no way of seeing them. The arrow of time is reversed. And indeed we have here an event of the cinema, an event of this speed-space. We are no longer in time-space. It is, in fact, an illustration of what I was talking about earlier. We are in a speed-space: it is the recording capacities of a machine which will allow people of the future to see me. I had the privilege of seeing myself twenty years after, in my friend Eric Rohmer’s film “Le Marbre et le Cellulo.” I had been interviewed in 1965 and I saw a projection of this film in 1985. It had an awful effect on me, because to see this man who had existed twenty years before, to see him again today, was in a way frightful. It wasn’t a problem of the beauty of youth, it was a problem of identity – it wasn’t me. Not at all. That man quoted the word time-space continuum even, and that was the only word which allowed me to connect myself to him, for everything else – the clothes, the

D.W. Griffith visiting the trenches of Somme, circa 1917. He was the only military filmmaker allowed to go to the front in order to make a propaganda film, Hearts of the World. But in the combat that he hoped to film, the soldiers rarely saw action and Griffith was discouraged.

CD: Now that war takes place beyond the horizon, can we still speak of war or of a war?

It is true the new technologies allow the dead man to live again, allow the duration of what has disappeared. There is a sort of universal conservatory, when you watch an actor on TV. You can see Mussolini, Hitler, Jean Gabin, Claude Francois, live again. It is in fact a form of conservation. ematographic and very “disappearance-aesthetic.” It is true the new technologies allow the dead man to live again, allow the duration of what has disappeared. There is a sort of universal conservatory, when you watch an actor on TV. You can see Mussolini, Hitler, Jean Gabin, Claude Francois, live again. It is in fact a form of conservation. I’ve always been amazed to see to what extent cinema is a sort of temporal porthole, as if there were a porthole in time. To be able to write “War and Cinema,” I was looking at the archives of the Army Cinematographic Services at Fort d’Ivry, and I had asked to see films of the 14-18 war. I was chiefly interested in the fact I’d be seeing soldiers of that war in their youth, in their vitality, in their illusion – and they couldn’t see me. As if it were a time-porthole which reverses the arrow (the direction) of time. So I said to myself that now, perhaps, in looking through this lens, we’ll see people who do not yet exist. I have to ask myself that question.

bombings of the City of Nantes I saw those projectors, those tracer-bullets, those rocket parachutes tossed out of bombers to light up the bombing zone. It was a fabulous show of unheard of and even tragic beauty. It was Rome burning. So it’s certain the use of new technologies extended war to the totality of time, not only as in the past wars in summertime, but also war in wintertime. In antiquity war was waged starting in March, and then stopped in September-October. The new technologies have allowed us to wage war year round. But up until 1914 no one made war at night, they stopped at nightfall. Now with the new technologies, not only do they make war all the time, in all seasons, but non-stop, day and night. We have a totalizing phenomenon that is also a phenomenon we experience daily with live broadcasts from the four corners of the earth, which allow us to watch a festival or a ballgame. There is therefore a cancellation of the daytime. In the same way that there is a cancellation of time-space, there is a cancellation of daytime as a way of dividing up time. Daytime is no longer the astronomical day, it is the day of techniques. With astronomical daytime, chickens went to sleep when Man did. Today, chickens continue to go to sleep when the sun goes down, but men no longer do. When the sun goes down, electric light and television go on. It’s another time, another day beyond the solar day. I think that’s new.

tie, the hairstyle – everything was wrong. If I had known twenty years ago, I would certainly have said something else! CD: There is also another reversal, that of day and of night. Is

there a link to be made between the day-night relationship and the night bombings of the Second World War and the idea of night as a black hole, in “Star Wars?” PV: There is much to be said here. It is certain that technological war allowed us to continue to make war at night, in other words, we’re performing theatre. Then, after that, in 1914, 1925, those same projectors were used to pick out the planes coming to bomb in order to shoot them down. So here we have a whole light-war; tracer-bullets will be used to make night time shooting possible, and flares to light up the troops’ night chargers (flare revolvers and rifles). And I myself saw those special effects in the Second World War. During the

PV: Indeed, now they are talking of a trans-horizonal weapon – the term is a technical one. But I believe that war has never been linked to the horizon. It always was, even when geographical, a war of time. Its territory was always temporal. When Sun Tzu said, “Promptitude is the essence of war,” he meant war is not simply a problem of hills, valleys, and mountain passes which have to be defended, it’s a problem of time; hence, the invention of the cavalry. Cavalry was its strike force, the strike force of that time. Afterwards, it was the artillery which replaced this strike force. Every war is a war of time, and I think there have been profound changes, changes which brought about the invention of new weapons and which today are reaching a limit. Star Wars is also a war of time, but it is no longer the time of decision. If you take the history of decision in war, war was first delegated to commanders, great captains of the Middle Ages, then afterwards, with the invention of headquarters, the decision was concentrated in individuals – the Ministers of war, chiefs of staff, who concealed the decision. There was a phenomenon of concentration – the dispersal, the diaspora of decision disappeared. Then, with the Second World War, there was the creation of the general headquarters, a headquarters of armies and groups of armies, whose great strategist was Eisenhower. Here again you had a phenomenon of retention of power over a chief of general headquarters who made the decisions concerning a half a continent or half a hemisphere. With nuclear weapons, this retention of the time of war, of the time of decision, became even more concentrated in one lone individual, the head of state. Presidentialism in France is connected with nuclear power, the strike force. Presidentialism in the U.S., is similar, even if its origin is not exactly the same. Nuclear weapons demanded there be just one decision-maker. This, moreover, is one of the major handicaps to the creation of Europe: if we want a nuclear Europe, there will be no Europe, because we’ll never manage to agree on a President. In fact, this moment is in the process of disappearing too. The supreme decision-makers, Francois Mitterand, Reagan, Gorbachev himself, are in the process of disappearing. Why? Because now with Star Wars, transhorizon, and transcontinental weapons, the decision-time to fire will drop to a few milliseconds. With laser weapons which work at the speed of 1986 V12N4 p177

light, 300,000 kilometres per second, there’s no question of saying, “Mr. President, it seems that some rockets have taken off on the other side of the Atlantic.” No, they would already be there before you could say so. So now the formidable idea is taking hold in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., around the Star Wars debate, of the automatic responder, meaning the idea of a war-declaration machine. Why? Because man’s time is no longer the time of the speed of light. Man cannot intervene: he may have been elected and hold supreme political and military powers, but he does not have the power to act at the speed of light. Today a drama is being played out. But no one is talking about it, despite the demonstrations I participate in, despite Clifford Johnson’s court case, which has been launched in the U.S. A computer expert at Stanford says, “the new concept of firing on alert is a mad concept, for it delegates the declaration of war to a machine.” Now, constitutionally, the commander has no power to delegate. Reagan does not have the power to delegate the decision to declare nuclear German anti-aircraft searchlights. Second World War.

materials (satellites or MX missiles), and finally man, the supreme decider, is eliminated in favour of a responder which will of course be coupled to another responder. CD: Will the idea of speed-space instead of time-space influence the means of representation in the cinema and the artist’s image? PV: I think it’s already had an influence. We witnessed the shift from extensive to intensive time with cinema. We experienced it first with cinema of 16 images per second, then 24 images per second, then tracks, then reels; we had films which lasted a few minutes – I’m thinking of Méliès’ films, then we had films lasting half an hour, then films one and one half to two hours, which is the average length at 25 frames per second. With the new machines, today we are in fact playing with the subliminal. We are in the process of reducing the length of films to half or three quarters of an hour, but projected at 60 frames per second. We are going from the extensive films of Abel Gance and Eisenstein, whose films lasted up to ten hours, to the intensive film – the video clip or halfhour film. I think that there’s a movement here; more goes into speed-space, 60-image per second films than went into time-space, 24 frames per second films, but we are at the limits of the subliminal. We know that beyond sixty images per second there will be no more viewers, since nothing more will be perceived. Here, again, intensiveness is confirmed – the shift from extensiveness to intensiveness. It’s certain that artists, be they filmmakers or videomakers, use this. They play in this dromospheric space, in speed-space. I think special effects are one of the most interesting areas in cinema. I remember coming back when “Alien” was released. It was made and shown before “Star Wars.” I remember viewers, young people, coming in and saying ‘fasten your seat belts’. What they were coming to see wasn’t a story. It was a movement. They wanted to be carried away in the special effects. They were disappointed. Though “Alien” is a good film, it’s not one where you fasten your seat belts. It’s another film which tells a story about monsters, whereas “Star Wars” was a film where you fastened your seat belt. Now it seems to me cinema is fastening the viewer’s seat belts, via video clips, special effects, and through infography and synthesized images. We saw this in “Tron,” and other films. There is a cinema beyond the 24 frames per second one, a speed-cinema, which is no longer a time-cinema, a tale. I don’t think that’s bad. What is bad is that we lack a Méliès. Méliès was the inventor of telescopic effects, of montages of different temporalities. Today, it is unfortunately too commercial, and I regret the lack of a Méliès of electronic effects. CD: You say that we lack a Méliès, but the story has become less and less important. Therefore, we also lack a Roland Barthes, since without one, we can’t go on telling tales. What are the consequences of this?

war to a machine. For what reasons? Quite simply because a computer breakdown cannot be identified as the free act of an individual head of state. I think that between the commander of the Middle Ages and Reagan or Gorbachev today, and finally the automatic responder, it’s clear that promptitude is the essence of war. That essence of war eliminates man from the system. First the big battalions are replaced by materials, then big materials are replaced by very small, sophisticated p178 1986 V12N4

PV: That’s the moral position I’ve always wanted to avoid. It’s true that speed is a drunkenness, a drug – there’s no doubt. It has the same effects. You vomit, you get a headache, just as when you get drunk or take other drugs. That’s the negative aspect I’ve developed in my books. But I don’t think that anything’s ever totally negative. The world is not so simple. At one and the same time, it is dreadful, in that it causes us to lose the relationship to the subject. But it also teaches us about our fragility, our fugacity. That is perhaps the moral lesson of that which has no moral. CD: Then special effects become a homeopathic means, a vaccine. Is that why special effects have been so exaggerated, and that an artificiality beyond artificiality has been created?

PV: For the moment, it’s indeed the commercial system and therefore a system of facility. As for me, my preoccupation is that, behind speed-space, another relationship to the real is hiding. It’s just as humanistic, just as moral or ethical as the other. Only no one has yet been behind the mirror, behind that mirror. For the moment they’re playing the way they played with the first cinema, the first films. It wasn’t cinema, it was effects, effects you’d see at a country fair. They showed films at fairs. I think this is just a stage. CD: What remains to us is the idea of editing, of arrangement. The idea of original creation no longer exists, no longer counts. In that case, when we are editor-arrangers, do we have to create or exaggerate the artificiality, as we would the story? PV: The model is the speed composition. Now there is a very old model of speed composition and that’s music. Music has confused speeds in harmonics in an extraordinary fashion for a very long time, to use only Western references. Speed-compositions were very well developed, through Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc., in the universe of sound. Intervals of time were extraordinarily well developed and utilized. In the optical system, it hasn’t happened yet. Abel Gance hoped for it. He hoped to make the music of images, but I think the means of his time did not permit this. Transparencies and superimpositions were not sophisticated enough. Today I believe we are about to enter a time of compositions in optical speed and special effects. These are the rather spectacular aspects of this music of the eye. For the moment we just have vulgar things, but there’s a possibility here, which will or won’t be realized. We see the video clips being used for ads, and the films being made with fantastic special effects, but, alas, for the moment, we are not moving towards the realization of that potential. But it could happen, and I believe there will be a Guillaume de Nacho or a J.S. Bach able to do the same thing with pictures and light. The new techniques allow it. CD: Another consequence: in video and cinema, we’re seeing more and more violence and hard-core pornography. I’m thinking of the English expression ‘nasty video’. Isn’t there a desire for images which still have this notion of reality? PV: Yes, absolutely. Pornography is an example of retrogradation. The body only appears through obscenity. Now there exists this retrograde vision of the body. Personally, I think the word ‘obscenity’ corresponds to its etymology, which we often forget is ‘ill omen’. It is curious to see that Sun Tzu – who I quote a lot, as I believe his is the only philosophy of war – says ‘weapons are tools of ‘ill omen!’ I’d like to say that through unrestrained pornography, there is a return to the body, which is a lost body. This obscene body is not a body to come, it’s a lost body. It’s the equivalent of a cadaver, the putting to death of the body. I admit it bothers me profoundly. What shocks me in pornography is that in it, boredom is weeping. There are the tears of boredom, not those of pleasure. CD: Listening to you, you seem to be attached to the idea of the ‘Immaterialists’, of Lyotard – the possibility of developing a new idea of the material, of material representation. Do you think that the use of the term the ‘immaterialists’ is correct? PV: I’ve used that term for a long time, saying that war went from the material of war to the immaterial of war. That seems completely coherent to me. I feel we have indeed tended to forget everything that’s invisible. Now, with the aesthetics of disappearance, we are obliged to care about all things invisible. In the past, the invisible was present through religion and mythologies. When we read in the third epistle of St. Peter the sentence, “One day is…as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” we have a vision of relativity that was the

CD: You were saying that it’s important to ask questions. When does one see this change of solutions toward questions?

PV: I think it’s our generation. Our generation has to return to questions. Why? Because the preceding generation had all the solutions – the economic solution through capitalism and the consumer society; the political solution through Marxism or capitalism the military solution through dissuasion. All the solutions were there. Now we’ve seen the results and are experiencing the drama of these solutions, so I believe our generation must again find the questions, and that’s not easy. CD: The last question: what are the consequences of this dromospheric space, speed-space, for the workings of the city? I’m thinking especially of the difference between urbanity and suburbanity. Does it still exist?

vision of the whole of antiquity. Even if here it is expressed through Christianity, this vision of relativity was present in ancient history – the invisible peopled the world. The invisible world was an important element of reality. With the onset of materialism, of the Age of Enlightenment, of the political history of the 19th century, the invisible was, I would say, censored. It signified the old customs; it was an archaic vision. The visible and the material were privileged to the detriment of the invisible, as the deeds of society are not all visible. CD: This notion was aim to change the idea of the essence of being. PV: Certainly. Besides, it isn’t by chance that we are seeing a powerful return of religious ideologies. Personally, I’m religious, I am a Christian. You are obliged, as I’ve often said to non-believing friends, to reintroduce only the question of God, not the answer, which is a personal problem. If not, don’t speak of the immaterial. You cannot speak of the ‘invisible and immaterial’ if you continue to censor the question of God. When you talk of the Big Bang, of the creation of time and space through the theory of the Big Bang, you’re talking about the question of God. So, let’s call a spade a spade: the Big Bang is about God who has come back among us. And in fact here I think it’s one of the positive aspects of the new technologies. They reintroduce the question of God, and I mean The Question and not Khomeni’s or anyone else’s answer.

PV: It’s important to return to the city. To return to the city is to return to politics or to the political people. It’s not by chance that in Greek the city is called the ‘polis’. The city was created in a relationship to territorial space. It is a territorial phenomenon, a phenomenon of territorial concentration. Old villages are spread over a territory which is not a territory but a field, in all senses of the term. There is creation, from the old villages, through what has been called kinesis, of an urban territorial unit – the Greek citystate, to take a well-known reference. Since politics and the city were born together, they were born through a right: the creation of a territory or of an estate by right, being established, the right of autochthonism. There are rights because there is territory. There are rights and therefore duties – he who has land has war, as the people of Verde said. He who has rights in an urban territory has the duty to defend ft. The citizen is also a soldier-citizen. I feel this situation survives up to the present; we are experiencing the end of that world. Through the ups and downs of the state, the city-state, the more or less communal state, and finally, the nation-state, we have experienced the development of politics linked to the territory; always down-to-earth. In spite of railroads and telephones, we experienced a relationship to the soil and a relationship to a still coherent right. There was still a connection to territorial identity, even in the phenomenon of nationalistic amplification. Today, as we saw earlier with the end of time-space and the coming of speed-space, the polit-

or Latin America. It seems to me that speed-space which produces new technologies will bring about a loss, a derealization of the city. The megalopolises now being talked of (Calcutta, or Mexico with 30 million inhabitants) are no longer cities, they are phenomena which go beyond the city and translate the decline of the city as a territorial localization, and also as a place of an assumed right, affirmed by a policy. Here, I’m very pessimistic. I feel we’re entering into a society without rights, a “non-rights” society, because we’re entering a society of the non-place, and because the political man was connected to the discrimination of a place. The loss of a place is, alas, generally the loss of rights. Here, we have a big problem: the political man must be reinvented – a political man connected to speed-space. There, everything remains to be done, nothing’s been accomplished. I’d even say the question hasn’t been considered. The problem of the automatic responder we were talking about earlier, the legal action which Clifford Johnson is taking against the U.S. Congress, is in my opinion the trial of the century. The problem of rights there is the right of the powerful man, the last man, he who decides. Now, he too will no longer have the right, if he delegates his right to an automatic machine. We truly have here a political question and an urban question, because at present the cities are undone by technology, undone by television, defeated by automobility (the high-speed trains, the Concorde). The phenomena of identification and independence are posed in a completely new way. When it takes three hours to go to New York, and thirty-six to New Caledonia, you are closer to American identification than to Caledonian or French identification. Before proximity, there was territorial continuity. We were close because we were in the same space. Today we are close in the speed-space of the Concorde, of the high-speed train, of telecommunications. Therefore, we don’t feel conjoined to people, the compatriots of the same people – the Basques or the Corsicans. We no longer have the time to go to Bastia, because practically, we are closer to New York, because you can’t go by Concorde to Bastia. We have here a phenomenon of distortion of the territorial community that explains the phenomenon of demands of independence. Before, we were together in the same place, and could claim an identity. Today, we are together elsewhere, via high-speed train, or via TV. There is a power of another nature which creates distortions. We are no longer

It’s true that speed is a drunkenness, a drug – there’s no doubt. It has the same effects. You vomit, you get a headache, just as when you get drunk or take other drugs. That’s the negative aspect I’ve developed in my books. But I don’t think that anything’s ever totally negative. The world is not so simple. At one and the same time, it is dreadful, in that it causes us to lose the relationship to the subject. But it also teaches us about our fragility, our fugacity. ical man and the city are becoming problematic. When you talk about the rights of man on the world scale, they pose a problem which is not yet resolved, for a state of rights is not connected with a state of place, to a clearly determined locality. We can clearly see the weaknesses of the rights of Man. It makes for lots of meetings, but not for much in the way of facts. Just take a look at Eastern European countries translated

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in space, but in speed-space. Because of speed-space there are fellow countrymen participating in the same non-place who feel close, whereas one’s own countrymen in Corsica or New Caledonia are in reality so far away in speed-space, so beyond thirty-six hours or ten hours, that they are strangers and therefore desire their autonomy. There’s a logic there, and it’s a logic which poses problems. French

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had been unwell for a few days, first with an upset stomach, then with a sore throat, but I didn’t miss the weekly tour which began with a visit to the Bardo museum on the outskirts of Tunis. As I ambled from chamber to chamber at a comfortable distance from my coach party, the mosaics unfolded before my eyes in a chromatic blur, the details shifting suddenly into focus for an instant, as happens when a film frame jams in a projector. Here, a wild boar wounded by a spear writhed, its bared fangs smeared with blood; there, it was Bacchus riding a panther while, to the right, Apollo beckoned half-innocently to a pair of sirens. Unaccompanied, I found my way into a high-ceilinged room that once served as the reception hall to the Bey and his harem. These Moorish surroundings now housed a collection of gleaming marble statues so perfectly harmonious, so lifelike, they seemed the creation of antiquity’s gods. Like a magnet my hand was drawn to the knee of one of these ephebes. Engrossed in the intimacy of this encounter, I didn’t notice our guide was there – not, that is, until I realized someone was talkng to me. He spoke quickly, in a confidential tone of voice, “If I’m not mistaken, you’re staying at the Grand Azur in Hammamet. I have friends there. Maybe we could meet tonight at the bar.” Then, pivoting on his heels, he clapped his hands, calling the other visitors to attention. In his now clear, slightly accented French (he rolled his r’s in the sensuous manner of Arabic-speaking folk) Bel Gassem explained with a pinch of ribaldry why the vandals almost always mutilated the statues in the same places. “As you can see, they chopped off the nose, the right arm and the pecker, leaving two orphans.” At the last phrase, the hazel-eyed guide flashed me a lascivious glance. I caught myself blushing and looked away. It occurred to me then that this wasn’t the first sexual hint directed at me since I had set foot in Tunis. At the hotel, two of the younger waiters in my section of the dining room greeted me with no less than, “Enjoying yourself? So, how about a cozy fuck this evening?” Once I’d recovered from my initial shock, I decided to treat the hushed advance as a joke. I forced a chuckle, pointing to the menu. We didn’t stay in the museum as long as I would have liked; by around eleven we were strolling under an implacable sun, amidst the ruins of Carthage. The view of the Mediterranean was breathtaking, but soon my legs started to feel like cotton wool and I went to sit in the shade on the stump of a doric column. Eyes closed, I

By

Albert Russo

listened to Ben Gassem’s comments. His voice boomed in the still air, and in the pauses a muffled echo seemed to escape from the cracks of the ancient stones. It was an unlikely confrontation between history and life, a revenge of sorts, leaving no doubt as to what or who claimed the victory. By the time we arrived at the restaurant, I ached as if shards of glass were being ground beneath my skull. I staggered to the table nearest the terrace and seated myself opposite a girl I’d noticed at the Grand Azur’s Moorish cafe. After introducing myself, I asked if she had an aspirin. Luckily, she carried a pillbox with her. By the end of the meal I felt a little better, and could appreciate Helene’s tranquil loveliness at leisure. The freckles on her slightly tanned face conjured up visions of a wheat field in southern France, and her eyes sparkled like the shoals of a virgin creek. When the breeze blew in, it moved her mid-length hair in a golden-red choreography. Helene came from Bordeaux and had just finished a training course, qualifying her for a new career as a travel agent. This was a vacation bonus. We spoke of the land and its people, of the white and blue village of Sidi Bou Sad, of the harbour of Sousse and its Medina, and also of the sacred Moslem city of Kairouan, where the word ‘caravan’ originated, its two magnificent mosques and its famous carpets. “The desert,” she said, “is as fascinating as it is treacherous. I don’t think you’re ready for it, in your state.” In her gentle way she could be very assertive. When I asked her opinion of the Tunisian male, she replied with a smile, “Highly sexed and hampered by the weight of tradition. The women outside the larger urban centres still live in the Dark Ages. But the tremendous growth of tourism since Independence is bound to have an effect on the whole population.” An unguided visit to the capital’s Souk was scheduled for the whole afternoon. The sky had become overcast and the atmosphere was sultry. Helene and I left the throngs on the tree-lined Avenue Habib Bourguiba with its lofty French colonial mansions. Crossing over in the direction of the main gate, we bumped into Bel Gassem. He said he was on his way to see a relative in the perfume business and wouldn’t mind showing us around, insisting he was off duty, so we should consider it on a purely friendly basis. Helene accepted his offer with enthusiasm. I had an inkling this so-called chance meeting wasn’t exactly coincidental. It was just as well though, for my temperature had risen again and I was

in no mood for getting lost in the Souk’s winding streets. Here, a stone’s throw from the modern quarter, humanity went about its daily business immersed in the sweetish scents and pungent odors of Arabia, universe of almonds and lokums, of clove and sesame, of sweetmeats and glazed pastries. Stalls crowded one next to the other, displaying their copper and earthenware, their rugs, leather babouches and embroidered caftans, and men in European clothes chatted with their Jellabah-clad elders, while sipping on mint tea around narrow tables. The sky only appeared intermittently now, like slits of light, and I felt my ears buzzing. Was it a jinn? As I thought this, a lanky figure suddenly sprang from behind a mule-drawn cart and flung its horribly scarred face under my nose. Then the creature dug its claws into my arm. Bel Gassem, looking back in my direction at that same instant, yelled something harsh and gutteral in Arabic. Seconds later the creature had disappeared. “That was the ghost of Ali Baba,” grinned Bel Gassem as I rejoined him and Helene. “Thrills are the spice of life,” he said, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, adding, “they can be pleasurable too.” We’d been walking for about an hour, hailed constantly by eager merchants, escorted occasionally by young touts. A boy – he must have been ten at the most – deciding I wasn’t game, pointed a finger at Helene and said defiantly, “She good and juicy, when I big I wham her day and night.” Upon which he disappeared. We stopped at a jeweller’s stall and Helene tried on a pair of filigree earrings studded with coral. She liked them. So after she’d chosen a pendant to match, Bel Gassem bargained for her. It was half past two when we got to the perfume booth owned by our guide’s cousin. Behind the wooden counter were shelves laden with bottles of various sizes containing bath oils and essences. The cousin, a burly man in his mid-forties, made us sample a dozen of his heady concoctions. As he opened new bottles, Helene waved her free hand and said goodhumouredly, “What I really need now is a cool shower.” “Why,” Bel Gassem tamed on, “that’s just what I was going to do myself. Tawfik,” he said with a furtive wink, “I will give my friends a taste of genuine Arab hospitality. See you later.” The booth led to a narrow staircase. We climbed two flights up and walked by a succession of dimly-lit windowless rooms until we finally reached what Bel Gassem called the opium den. The carpeted floor was strewn with poufs and cushions. On a low table, next to

a tray of sweets and a pitcher filled with lime juice, stood a pair of hookahs. “You’ll find the shower – it’s rudimentary – behind that draught-screen,” said the young Tunisian. “Make yourself at ease, I won’t be long.” Our host soon reappeared and handed each of us a bathrobe. Helene showered first, then I did, and after me, Bel Gassem. Freshened up and wrapped in our delicately-scented gowns, we stretched around the low table, our backs propped against cushions. Bel Gassem prepared the hookah and invited us to

take a drag. “Breathe it in very slowly,” he cautioned, extending the tube to my lips, “as if you were sipping a vin brule or a grog.” I inhaled the smoke, letting the acrid particles settle in my lungs. At first, it had the effect of a potent cough medicine, it smoothed the wheeze that had bothered me since the other day. As the minutes passed my sight blurred; at the same time, I felt an intense heat surge from the bottom of my chest. The mouthpiece slipped to the floor, and when I raised my glance, Helene and Bel Gassem’s faces were so near, they looked blown up.

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my senses. He was all downy, and all sinews. Beads of sweat rimmed his pouting mouth, making it terribly desirable. For the first time since our encounter began, I was able to look straight into Bel Gassem’s eyes. Tenderness had invaded his pupils. For the first time I heeded my instincts, smothering his flesh with kisses, burrowing unashamedly into his most intimate regions. His balls had the firmness of unripened plums; their strong odor of musk made my head reel, and soon I found myself holding his throbbing cock between my lips. Without warning, he exploded in my mouth and invoked Allah. His cum was thick and spicy, tasting of curd mixed with honey. At that moment, I recognized Helene’s scent. We kissed above the glistening object of our desire, and remained clutched this way for a long time. That afternoon, somewhere in the back alleys of Tunis’s Souk, an adolescent dream had materialized. And we made love every single night in my bungalow at the Grand Azur. Nights of fever, nights of 1001 delights.

O

One hand undid the belt of my bathrobe, while another removed it. It was then that the two figures were revealed to me in their superb nudity. Helene seemed to have risen from a pool of milk. The slender young Tunisian rubbed her body with an unguent. His dark fingers massaged her breasts, drawing circlets around the nipples which, dilated, seemed like two delicately poised butterflies. Anticipating what those fingers were about to accomplish, Helene spread her thighs and arched her body. The sight of Bel Gassem teasing her oyster-like cleft sent sparks through my arteries. I rolled over on my side and pressed my lips against Helene’s. The mingling of our tongues had the delicious flavour of warmed marzipan. There are sensations that, once triggered, develop wings of their own. Our kissing grew more passionate as I felt a moisture closing around my now very stiff organ. This moisture slowly glided along my shaft, and all the way down, then remained there. I couldn’t see Bel Gassem, yet the thought of his throat sheathing me to the hilt set my skin ablaze, every pore a live entry. I was on the brink of explosion when he stopped dead, cupping my balls and pinching them with his fingertips like a playful cat. These were novel sensations to me; every one of Bel Gassem’s gestures seemed coordinated with the sole aim of giving pleasure. He abandoned me for a moment to lick Helene’s lovely cunt, so that she writhed in slow, gyrating motions. I joined Bel Gassem and we took turns tonguing her clitoris. Then, for the first time, he kissed me. The mixture of Helene’s juices and his own saliva in my palate was intoxicating. While I savoured the elixer, a distorted image swept through my mind of slaves in an arena. “Shall I resist or succumb to the love machine?” The question dissolved as Helene positioned herself over me, guiding my cock into her luscious warmth. We turned over, rocking gently, mouth against mouth, skin fixed to skin, in osmosis. All at once the outside world ceased to exist and it didn’t occur to me that the spell could be broken, or that I might experience a joy even more intense. Not until the tip of Bel Gassem’s tongue, coursing the length of my spine, operated its magic. I was floating, yet at the same time I could feel a distant tinkling of bells within the recesses of my bones. The music grew louder and a storm was gathering above. The tinkling became a deafening rumble and all of a sudden I felt sucked into the vortex. As I gushed into Helene, her muscles tightened around my cock, gliding back and forth, snugly, like bracelets of down. We sighed in ecstasy sealed by our liquids, exhausted and glistening with sweat, our flesh delirious. I had entered paradise and was lulled by the whisper of angels. I must have known such moments of bliss during my infancy, for my cheek instinctively sought the warmth of Helene’s bosom. Then suddenly I felt a tingle on my upper thigh. It was Bel Gassem again. He introduced a finger in the crack of my buttocks while his wet lips nibbled at my balls. Soon, his tongue flicked in and out of my crack until it found my hole. It was more than I could bare and I withdrew from between Helene’s loins. I barely had time to shift over. Bel Gassem was lying on his back, offering the spectacle of his beautifully shaped figure to my view and

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THE DUPLEX PLANET, a 15 page monthly magazine, features remarks by residents of the Duplex nursing Home In Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. Their comments are recorded by David Greenberger, Activities Director; he has published The DUPLEX PLANET for eight years. Each issue has a theme, such as dogs, mothers, embarrassment or bowling. “I ask them strange questions,” says Greenberger, “ridiculous, surprise questions…We have a national guilt about nursing homes. People hate to think about them. This is my way, as an artist, of making the place and the people in it more human to those who have never been touched by nursing home life.”

WHY D0 YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT? JOHN FAY: Now that’s a stupid question! Why? If I wake up in the morning, with God’s help, and think of the pretty girls walking by... (laughs)... Why do I sleep at night! JOHN FALLON: To get rested up for the next day. EVERETT BOSWORTH: ‘Cause I’m tired. JACK MUDURIAN: Beauty sleep is the first hour of sleep after

0N EYES FRANCIS McELROY: Eyes are the most important part of your body. If you have poor vision they recommend that you get glasses. And without eyesight, you’re lost. It’s the most important part of your body to have good vision at all times. And without good vision you’re lost – it’s a great handicap if your vision goes against you. Poor vision is next to blindness. ERNIE BROOKINGS: For all living creatures, the eyes are the basis of sight. ANDY LEGRICE: You see good, see pictures, see the paper, see that beautiful flame – that’s the dolls you know. It you didn’t have them you wouldn’t be livin’. FRANK KANSLASKY: There’s only so much light in your eyes and when you use it up you’re gone. Some people are blind, but there’s still a light in there. Where do you think the light comes from, your head? That’s why you sleep, to save the light. The light you save may save your life. Just like a lightbulb – if you run it

you fall to sleep. Then after that your beauty sleep is discontinued. You can’t fall off to sleep if you’re hungry. Your beauty sleep is your early sleep. The first hour after you fall off to sleep after you get into bed is your beauty sleep. After that it’s not. JOHN COLTON: It’s the most sociable time. JUSTIN STRASSINKUS: Close eyes. HAROLD FARRINGTON: It all depends on who you go to bed with, too. BERNIE REAGAN: Sometimes they go to bed early when there’s a woman in the bed. GENIE EDWARDS: Oh don’t even ask me! Sometimes I have a hard time sleepin’! GEORGE MacWILLIAMS: I never think about those things. It’s just a process of rhythm, same as any animal. They all have to take a rest and have to eat, even a dog. That’s the only way I can explain it. A process of livin’– same as any animal.

twenty-four hours a day it’ll be gone. There’s only so much light in it and it’s gone. You’ve got to be careful. The only good thing about it is you can buy another one. If you don’t want to buy it, steal one, that’s up to yourself. People steal lightbulbs – take it from one

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE NEW ARTIFICIAL HEART?

socket and put it in another. Sure, It’s yours, but it’s stealin’ – It was meant to be where it was. You’ve got to buy enough lightbulbs.

GIL GREENE: You can’t take the heart out of a dead man or take the heart out of a live man – he would die! If that were possible, someone that lost an arm or a leg, there are no moving parts – it could be grafted on. In other words, It would be easier to graft an arm or a leg, where there are no moving parts. Who are the doctors

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU DIDN’T HAVE SHOULDERS?

trying to deceive? BILL SEARS: I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

FRANCIS McELROY: The country would be lost.

ABE SURGECOFF: Well, he wants to live, that’s all I know. And he

ABE SURGECOFF: Nothing.

has to have it changed every six months to a year. They put it in

FERGIE: You’d have a hip if you didn’t have a shoulder. Hold on

and charge it up – it’s already charged and when you bring back

to your hips.

the old one it’s recharged. They give him liver extract and breath-

GEORGE STINGEL: Geez, you’d be a hunchback.

in’ tubes and then afterwards they have an excretion.

BILL LAGASSE: We’d be built another way.

EDGAR MAJOR: Well I never heard of that, until you gave me that

LARRY GREEN: You’d lose your head.

knowledge. That’s really something. I hadn’t known of it until you

WALTER McGEORGE: You wouldn’t have any arms.

spoke of it.

ERNIE BROOKINGS: Would it cause paralysis?

ERNIE BROOKINGS: It’s a very serious operation.

By D a v i d

G r e e n b e r g e r

DID YOU EVER HAVE A BROKEN HEART? HERBIE CALDWELL: Ya. I had one. Can’t say much. A girlfriend or somethin! I had a date with her and she run off and leave me I guess. Rosie Speares of Danvers. She looked pretty good, she looked good. We used to go out nights. We’d go to Salem or something. I used to give her presents, a ring or something I guess. Chocolates and flowers – pinks or something, I guess. It was a pretty good year. We’d go sportin’. Ya, I had broken hearts. I lost my mother two years ago – that’s a broken heart. Got me knocked out. WARNER DAY: My heart just wasn’t born with a will to succeed. That’s about my life story. KEN EGLIN: When I lost my mother. I didn’t give a damn anymore. Started drinkin’ and runnin’ around with girls. I just didn’t care. No girlever broke my heart though – you know me better than that. No girl could ever break my heart. They can break all these people’s hearts, but they ain’t break mine. I’ll never tell any girl I love her – I’ll never tell that to any girtl in my life. Only my mother. I don’t know what love is. They say to me, “I love her, “ and I say, “Okay, get married. Enjoy yourself.” And three months later they’re in court for a divorce and I’m sittin’ there listening and laughing, and they say, “Kenny, you were right. “ They say, “Kenny, you want to come with us on a date?” and I just go down to the Charles River. And down at Magazine Beach, I see guys sayin’ to girls, “I love you,” and I say, “‘You damn fools.” WALTER McGEORGE: The thing that wrongs you maybe doesn’t wrong everybody. They should call it obstacles of life. A tragic encounter. If I had my life to live over, would I do it the same? It’s hard to say. It’s food for thought. You could regret something but go ahead and do the same thing over the very same way. I wonder have I neglected myself or have I neglected my life. I don’t think so, though I probably have. But it’s an unregretful neglect. JOHN COLTON: I’ve been married. It didn’t work. That was years ago – Army days. It passes away. I’m not repeating it. Baseball’s the topic now. LARRY GREEN: Ya, it’s tough, I had a romance go sour. She left me. She didn’t get mad, just walked off. I don’t know why. She went down to Nova Scotia. I haven’t seen her for years. Her name is Dorothy. I think about her, about when I can see her. GENE EDWARDS: I guess so. I guess a lot of people have broken hearts. You know, bad things happen to them. I was put in a bad place for a while you know. It wasn’t a very nice place. I guess everybody has to have a taste of something bad. You can’t have everything perfect in this world. You’ve got to have a taste of something bad sometime so you know what it’s like. I know I had one. Mine lasted a year.

For a sample copy of THE DUPLEX PLANET ($1.25) or to subscribe ($6 for six months), write to: P.O. Box 1230, Saratoga Springs NY 12866. 1986 V12N4 p183

p184 V13N1 1986-87

Why are you looking at me like that?

Alfred Hitchcock came to me and said “Good evening”. In my delirium I

Nowhere in the realm of darkness is there to be found an entity

spoke to him of many events and speculations, of the Real, of Shopping,

considered more violent than the Vampire. Since the earliest periods of

of the Fall of Frankenstein, of the great Canadian landscapes of

recorded history Vampires have been known to emerge from the

Americaville. In my delirium Constantine Brancussi passed before me

shadows to cast a pall of dread as they preyed upon and terrorized

while cutting his endless column.

human victims. What has happened then in the twentieth century to

Why are you looking at me like that?

cause a gradual shift of opinion as to the nature of the Vampire. What

Facial expressions. You have facial expressions.

has happened to the history of continuous dread that lurked in the

I went shopping. Hand on my bag, eye on my wallet, ear on my watch,

cinema. What has happened to your history.

legs on the dance floor of Canadaville. What does count is the general

Why are you looking at me like that?

visibility of the Shopping Centre, of its signs, its landscaping, and the

What is it like to go shopping. To go to shops, to make purchases or

general contour of the building mass.

inspect goods, looking for the best bargain. And how do you shop for the

The word vampire first came under general usage in the English

real, how do you do this Herr Doktor. Someone who seeks out the real as

language some time during the eighteenth century. Some experts

a product, as perhaps a diabolical gift, as a surprise. Someone who

maintain that the actual origin of the word stems from the Magyar

seeks out the real that does not cost too much, that is perhaps on sale.

Vampir, or BlackMud, Black Alfred.

That is perhaps on sale because it might not be original, but close to the

As I walk down the Wing of my favourite Shopping Hall I see you

original, very close to the real, to the actual thing. But because it is on

walking the other direction. The likes of you I have never seen before.

sale, it is slightly less authentic. It is unreal but close enough to satisfy

Hush sweet one as you are the only one who knows of my secret desire.

yourself.

“Mostly swingers of theoretical film go in there officer”.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Why are you looking at me like that?

The story I am about to tell has never been told before. I hold this story

The Monster did not die, he lives and wants love. He moves your car off

close to me. I am full of fright as I speak to you. It is fear that paces out

the highway. He knifes your convertible hood. He pulls your body along

the real. It is fear that decides for me what is real and what is on sale. It

the asphalt. The event is recorded in the background of the painting. As I

is fear that composes my story. Six years ago I stood in this very house,

write, my delirium gets worse. I fall into the rear window of my own

calm as I now appear, weak yet happy, as I am now, appearing worn and

history. I am a detective for a shopping mall in Detroit City. As I mount

depressed, full of hope and now as I am in grief. Grief and terror for my

the escalator I am conscious of not being alone. I am shy and timorous,

life. I write as fast as my horrified hand will move. A painting stands

ready to melt into the shadows of the walls. If I turn my head, they are

with its back to me. A painting so deep and dark.

following me, watching me with the fearful awed curiosity of children.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Why are you looking at me like that?

How do you draw real cartoons. How do you do this Herr Doktor. I

The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend

stabbed myself with a drafting machine and in my bleeding delirium

them. Twenty years have passed and I have told but one other person. I

tell it now with reluctance. I ask nothing be explained away. A simple

ruptures my curtains, tearing them off, then floating into the air are

reading of my accounts will satisfy my quench for attention in this

shredded into bits of burning fabric until the fumes of this

matter. I could die before breakfast. She talked and I listened

Walpurgisnacht consume my own frail body.

spellbound. She talked until I almost believed she forgot my presence

I am posessed now. My mindful intruder turns to me in my mind. Turns

and only thought out loud. Familiar with all systems of philosophies and

to look at me and I, it. A body so terrifying I cannot describe the horror

analysis, she poured forth her thoughts in an uninterrupted stream and

of its assemblage. The apparition leaps outside at my throat, at my

still leaning forward in the same moody attitude with her eyes fixed on

corpuscles. I am drained with quick skill, left half dead with lack of

the fire, wandered from topic to topic from speculation to speculation,

blood. Jumping up, I run down the corridors of what now seems to be an

like an inspired dreamer, from practical science to mental philosophy,

evil house. Not my original Host’s architecture but some distorted

from electricity in the wire to electricity in the nerve. From Watts to

alteration of menacing space and terror. Darkness falls over me. I

Mesmer, from Mesmer to Freud, from Freud to Le Corbusier, Descartes,

remember a flight of stairs, barely touching the handrail, emotions

Stein, Wolf, and the Magi, the Mystics of the East, were transitions that

drained of any effect and a steep fall.

however bewildering in their variety and scope seemed easy and

Why are you looking at me like that?

harmonious upon her lips. By and by I forgot what link of conjecture or

When I awake, I am sitting in a shopping Mall. It is here that I begin

illustration she passed on to that field which lies beyond the boundary

shopping for the Real. Yet perhaps I am dead in a Skyscraper. I am

line of even conjectural philosophy. She spoke of the soul and its

sitting in a Barcelona Chair. This is the end. I can tell. Terror, Life,

aspirations, of the spirit and its powers of second sight, prophesy, and

Perspective, a vanishing cloak, I drift up to the ceiling and fly through

those phenomena which come under the headings of Ghosts, Spectres,

the planimetrical space of the operating room. I watch my own operation

Apparitions, movements beyond the grave and hauntings.

from above like some deranged Cubist.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Why are you looking at me like that?

Her voice continues to haunt my memory like a horrific picture plane.

Unable to move, I move about the isles of lush products. Unable to buy, I

Like a curse of the Vampire, a totemic constructivist nightmare. Fear the

converse with my self. Then suddenly a door opens and a monster

life be struck right out of you, out of Nosferatu, out of an assembly of

appears. A monster I know by the name of Nosferatu. I speak the words

body parts from car accidents, ready-mades of the flesh, scratch record,

of the monster. What a person impresses upon me most vividly is

continuous originals. A human is assembled. A human is constructed. A

precisely what I forget. Because it is of no importance. And therefore

human is constructed, a human is composed, is shopped for in the Death

leaves me. That is why the better part of my memory exists outside

Malls of Canadaville. Flesh joining alien tissue. I construct the ideal

myself, hidden from my eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is

body for my parents, for the boss of suburbia.

thanks to this oblivion alone that I can from time to time recover the

Why are you looking at me like that?

mortal body I once was, range myself face to face with the past events

I am lying underneath the thin veil cover of my host’s embroidery when

as my body had to face them, suffer afresh, because I am no longer

a sound then a stirring of my mind to fear passes through me. A wind

myself but a Monster.

VILLA AT GARCHES, 1927, ENTRY FACADE ARCHITECT: LE CORBUSIER

B R I A N

B O I G O N V13N1 1986-87 p185

MEN WHO J sat in the car, passively chainsmoking while P waited in the lengthy lineup. Suddenly an enormous van pulled up from behind. J quickly fastened his seat belt and leaned toward the windshield. The van driver braked suddenly. Anticipating the worst, J was surprised to see the driver walk amicably towards his door and motion for J to roll down the window. Nervously, J complied. “Didn’t he leave the keys in the car for you?” J looked at the man for a second, grinning sheepishly. “Yes he did. Could you please move the car?” The driver stared at J for a moment, then laughed. It had been a long time indeed since he’d met a man who didn’t know how to drive.

... The non-driver restricts him or herself to a relatively small geographical parameter—a ghetto. Some metropolises, for example New York City, are essentially a series of ghettos, in which particular types of businesses or groups of individuals tend to group together and then proceed to other groups. In such a ghettoized city there is little, if any need for an individual whose ambition is simply to ‘get by’ or ‘make ends meet’ to extend him or herself outside of his immediate neighborhood. But an active capitalist can seldom afford such smugness or snobbery. An individual on the make must be open-minded and accessible to all potential adversaries. The newer American cities, the cities west of the Mississippi or the cities developed in the midst of the gold rush fever, consisted of like-minded neighborhoods with a greater amount of space between themselves and their Eastern counterparts. Today those metropolises, whether Dallas, Phoenix or the prototypical Los Angeles, are essentially a series of subdivisions precariously linked by winding freeways. Business, in these modern metropolises, by definition transacts at a considerable distance from the home-base, and therefore ownership of personal transportation is essential to any commercial enterprise. In

p186 V13N4 1987

such a modern metropolis the economically active individual becomes a player; and a player without transport might as well admit defeat at the starting gate.

... The driving instructor is under no obligation to be literate in any subject other than driving. Yet he remains, whatever the narrowness of his knowledge and his interests, undisputable master of the road. For a no-longer youthful driver, it is extremely painful to have to obey such a person, one whose reading may extend no further than his driving manual. But to him, you are flawed by definition since you didn’t learn to drive as a teenager.

DON’T

rules of the road. Once the dream of car access or ownership has been achieved, the profession has no room for dreamers (those who more than occasionally allow non-linear thought-patterns to disrupt their narrative destination). Anticipation is indeed crucial to a good driver, but only anticipation involving elements contained within the field of immediate vision. Driving requires the suspension of all ideologies, obsessions, fixations, rivalries, etc. It has nothing whatever to do with theory, everything to do with practice.

... Drivers control narrative. They determine its

... J was prompted by his instructor to signal a left turn while driving through suburbia in his learner-designated Oldsmobile. “Easy on the wheel, J. Just relax please, his teacher muttered as J executed his tentative left turn. The suburbs are ideal training-ground for a beginner; there are more than enough stopsigns or side-streets to be right or left-turned onto and more than enough sudden turns at the top or bottom of a hill to instil fear in any fledgling driver. After successfully negotiating the subdivision with only one mistake (a nervous right-hand turn which forced the instructor to jump on the passenger-seat emergencybrake), J found himself poised to turn left onto a major street once again. When he snuck a glance at the street-names while waiting for the red light to turn, he realized that he had driven past the house from which he had run away at the age of fifteen.

... The boy who doesn’t learn how to drive upon or soon after reaching the legal age is deviating from the roles and behavior patterns which are expected of him. Although in modern suburban cities girls are also expected to obtain their licenses upon reaching legal age, boys are the ones who have been bombarded with carculture ever since leaving the baby-crib. The boy who doesn’t immediately run out and pass his driving exam cuts himself off from one of his contemporaries’ major reference points. Driving leaves no room for anything abstract, aside from an automatic memory-bank of the

point of departure, its route, and most importantly perhaps, its destination. Whether the driver is unflinching in his destinational certainty, (and therefore able to avoid such non-linear hazards as U-turns and lengthy detours) or uncertain, as long as he or she has control of the driving process the narrative objective will be safely achieved. Both affirmative and interrogative narrative demand control of movement. For the fugitive, the cop or the detective, all varieties of narrative hero are impossible to imagine without first access to, and secondly complete mastery of, that primary means of self-generated transportation, the automobile. A man deprived of such mastery is one condemned to be taken for a ride, condemned in other words, to exist exclusively in the passive voice.

...

DRIVE It had been almost a half-hour since J had been reprimanded by the driving instructor. At this particular moment in time, he was feeling exhilarated. It was as if someone other than himself were driving...as if he were flying. At the same time, he knew he was driving smoothly and safely. J didn’t even wince when the instructor, having complimented him on his right-turns, began to talk like a crusty old-timer. “You know, I’ve been teaching now for pushing thirty years and on the basis of seeing how shaky you were yesterday, I should’ve told you to forget about coming back today. Yes sir, young man, I should have told you flat out you were wasting your time. But see, its not so hard

now, is it? Pretty well anyone can drive when you get right down to it.” J smiled to himself. The old-timer meant well. He was trying to inform his pupil that he wasn’t a deficient human being after all. Then, just as J was about to remove his right foot from the accelerator pedal, in anticipation of the approaching light, he heard the nagging voice at his ear: “Off the gas, J, off the gas.” J’s face reddened. He was just about to do that. The instructor still didn’t trust him. He still considered him to be “a case.” He requested that the instructor stop jumping him; such tactics only made him nervous.

... Now J was tensed up and gripping the steering-wheel too tightly. The car began to

ANDREW J A M E S PATERSON

stand out in traffic. The instructor snarled at him: “I’m making you nervous?”

man’s work or enterprise. Now the wives and girlfriends had, in many relationships, become rivals to their men in the arena of capitalism.

Non-driving men have one reference point in common. They are all hopelessly urban. To be urban is to be overly refined.

...

...

J and Ms. M were the last remaining guests. Everyone else had managed to leave before becoming too impaired. J himself had managed to stay sober because he knew he would be getting up early the next day. Ms. M however, was quite another story. Tonight had been her occasion to celebrate and she had acted accordingly. Ms. M was in absolutely no condition to drive home. J regretted never having learned to drive. He recalled his teen-age fantasy of flying

The overly refined individual models himself after the ancient courtier. The behavior of the courtier was characterized by effortlessness (sprezzatura). Such a manner is obviously at odds with the practice of driving. Roads and freeways are hopelessly saturated with people intent on meeting deadlines. As the pressure escalates, the etiquette of driving (which is a populist rather than elitist activity) begins to disappear. Horns and signals become the dominant mode of communication. Tempers flare, rules are violated and the concept of urbanity, of civilization, becomes absurd and archaïc. A man who has cultivated a heightened sense of urbanity in a café or salon society has difficulty in adjusting to the cruel impersonality of a crowd, especially when the crowd consists of people behind the steeringwheels of cars. Such a man is likely to feel inferior to this crowd and subsequently falls back on his elitist sense of superiority. He is by nature a serious candidate for becoming too nervous to function effortlessly in a tense situation. An ultra-civilized man can only maintain his character by not participating in activities in which he is liable to lose control. During the second World War the myth about “nervous, hysterical woman drivers” was shattered. There were women driving trucks and tanks in the armed forces and, in civilian society, the number of women in the work force rose dramatically because the husbands were off in the trenches. To get to work the automobile is useful and frequently downright essential. That the accident rate did not accelerate rapidly testifies to the fact that women drivers are no worse than their male counterparts. When men returned home at the end of the war, they found many of their assumed roles had been usurped by women. Their discomfort was not only caused by the fact that they were now competing with women for jobs, or the role of the family breadwinner, or the use of the car in families which could only afford to own one car. Women were competing against men for money and power. Wives and girlfriends could no longer be assumed to be the passive beneficiaries of the

automobiles. He had imagined that by the time he had conquered his hyperactive nervousness, a scientific miracle would have made flying cars possible. Flying cars would solve the problems of traffic congestion by their capacity to pass either above or beneath the driver ahead. All those rules which had given his father such distress would be irrelevant. There would be no such thing as parallel driving, let alone parking. J grimaced at the empty room. His childhood dreams had indeed been ridiculous. If anything, the competition for space among flying automobiles would probably be even more intense than in the case of the earthbound variety. Ms. M was bidding him an abrupt goodnight and the heading off to her separate sleeping quarters. She was clearly angry that she couldn’t possibly ask J to drive her home. Not only did he feel useless—he felt powerless as well.

1987 V13N4 p187

ANDREA

WARD

SPEAKS

WITH:

FREDERIC JAMESON

ANDREA WARD:

Do you think that postmodernism is

AW:

In September of 1912, “human character” was

a symptom of capitalism or a critique of it? Is

said to have changed. Is there any phase or event

postmodernism a fake or a front (a facade) in the

that can function as the beginning of the

sense that it is a reaction or a distorted reflection of

postmodern condition?

Do you have a place outside of the culture of late

capitalism? Are you “Inside or outside the whale?” FJ:

The theory of postmodernism has to be seen

within a theory of world-system-culture. And, like any

modernity and the avant-garde? Ah, that’s interesting...architects say that it was

system, it implies spaces “outside.” In older forms of

Well, if you put it in those

the destruction of the Pruit-Igoe complex in St. Lewis.

society there were whole nations within nations. Each

terms, it has to he both. What one has to do initially is

It was the suicide of modernism, its failure. There are

class had its own apparatuses and developments

to get away from people’s conventional idea of a

all kinds of emblematic signs that one is tempted to

within its organizations. At a certain historical

power-based super-structure. That is one in which

cite as the beginning to this cultural condition. I have

moment, intellectuals found it possible to step outside

culture reflects a social base. This is implied in the

done a thing on the sixties where I talk about possible

their class-cultural domain. If a possibility of such a

word “symptom.” You must imagine the socio-

origins.

between

distance exists now, it is not so much a matter of class

economic system as a situation in which culture is a

postmodernism and the sixties is very problematic. I

as it is of other kinds of cultural molding such as

response. It then becomes more interestingly

think that there is some clear ending of something

gender and race. For instance, Lukacs could declass

complicated. But on the other hand, I think what still

around 1972-73 with the oil crisis and a whole range of

himself, remove himself from culture and for

has to be maintained is the last tenuated form of the

other things from local politics to culture. It has a lot

whatever

idea of the “autonomy of art”. Culture is always to a

to do with Lyotard’s “Master Narratives.” People all

Postmodernism simply implies that this critical

certain degree distant from these things and therefore

of a sudden cease to believe in the master narrative of

distance is greatly narrowed. This is why I am so

much of postmodernism, read differently, can be seen

the myth of revolution. Talking in terms of

amused when people say that I am attacking or

as an attempt to describe the situation, map it out. So

disappearances is in itself symptomatic. And talking

defending postmodernism. I do like it, I am inside of

the

read

in terms of “appearances” is a very decentralized

it. However, this does not mean that intellectuals are

postmodernism. It is a reading decision. It seems that

cultural phenomena. Nothing is enough to signify this

without new means and possibilities of critical

it can be usefully examined as a symptom of late

“multiple coming into being.” However, the modernist

distance. New kinds of thinking about this critical

capitalism. However, it can also be looked at from

project has key gestures, key works or key silences or

distance must be done. It is a great problem for the

other perspectives. I am not comfortable with the idea

sentences that somehow are emblematic. But yes, the

left today because “distance” is our only model of

that it can be simply decided that postmodernism is

moment around 1972-73 is somehow a crucial fault

political critique. Often people use the word

good or bad / reactionary or progressive. There are

line in the system if not immediately in the whole

“subversive” and I wonder what subverting any of this

never any final alternatives to these questions.

cultural realm.

would do. It is the hangover of an older modernist

FJ: FREDERIC JAMESON:

p188 V13N4 1987

AW:

alternative

depends

on

how

you

However,

relationship

sociopolitical

reasons,

denounce

“My work is meant to imply a whole series of levels o f e x p e r i e n c e s i n t i m e , s p a c e , c i t y, a n d t h e commodification of the unconscious. There is perhaps a certain novelty in the economic level of my analysis. However, there is a general resistance to talking about commodification and production.”

it.

Kansas, the land of theoretical silos, religious wrestlemania, and troops of voodoo-driven postmodern academic outlaws. I hauled Frederic away from yet another heavy delivery. Snuggled at the base of a thousand-foot oak table garnished with inset enamel American flags we poured ice-water into the frosted champagne glasses.

notion of critical distance. It needs to be

of social conditions must change before a genuinely

telling stories. It is an advanced and energetic form of

reformulated.

new kind of thinking appears.

conceptual criticism.

AW:

What is the relationship of your own work

AW:

Do you feel that the writing you do on

to the transcoding tendencies of postmodernist

postmodernism reaches a wider audience than your

theories?

older work, for example “The Political Unconcious”?

AW:

FJ:

If it is defined as a style, we are going to get tired

Yes, it would seem so because it intersects with this

of it and look for something else. If we perceive it as a

with abstractions. The dialectic is a way of going back

stuff I call “culture critique.” It comes into being

cultural logic, it seems less clear and more interesting.

to a form of experience. But, rather than producing

precisely because people feel an apprehension about

As far as modernisms are concerned, there are a vast

something concrete out of the suffusions of

what is happening around them. They want a

variety of artistic strategies that culture imposes to

generalizations or the suffusions of informations, we

diagnosis: “It’s the me generation,” “It’s narcissism.”

back them up. Our situation may be similar to the

would like to create a multiplicity of codes. Our

I think there is in this situation the possibility of

situation of romanticism where there was a long, long

intellectualization is one in which a whole enormous

historical thinking. Nonetheless let’s say the spiritual

period in which there were all kinds of interesting

range of private languages of ideological and

body tries to remedy these chemical deficiencies by

mutations and yet a fundamental logic remained. I use

philosophical codes become methodological brand

trying desperately to think historically. Culture

this notion of periodizing capital in “Mandel.” It is

names. One cannot simply operate or intervene by

critiques correspond to that attempt to get a historical

sort of a third stage of capital that presupposes a

waving a banner. At a heavy theoretical delivery, a

handle on a situation in flux. Without my planning,

series of mutations which are increasingly vast and

friend leaned over and said to me, “Isn’t Lenin

this kind of writing seemed to cut across these kinds of

global. These are all reponses to “crisis” in the system.

enough?!” Even if one thought so, this would not be

issues. It addresses people’s more general questions

If one can imagine a later crisis it is possible to imagine

the way to handle this. One must fight all these battles

about what is happening to them / to us in a cultural

a restructuration in an entirely new system or a

with one’s own weapons. Therefore I have this notion

and phenomenological way. My work is meant to imply

completely new kind of capitalism altogether. Maybe

that our business as intellectuals is “transcoding.” It is

a whole series of levels of experiences in time, space,

we can only imagine this as science fiction. At that

neccessary to learn all these codes to speak them. You

city, and the commodification of the unconcious.

point clearly we will have a new model predicated on

have to learn what you can say in one language that

There is perhaps a certain novelty in the economic

the idea of systematic change and systematic

you can’t say in another and be aware of what

level of my analysis. However, there is a general

organization.

overlaps there are and the points of linguistic

resistance to talking about commodification and

precision that blur. This is a more effective way of

production.

FJ:

We now confront a world obsessed and confused

How would you characterize the future of

postmodernism?

FJ:

handling language than a denunciation of it. In this Do you think that the nature of “ficto-criticism”

situation the dialectic is one code among others. There

AW:

is a sense of this in the Marxist intellectual situation

is successful in undermining the “corrective” power of

where one produces elements of a code line such as

criticism?

reification and commodification. These rarely do “Ficto-criticism” makes a lot of sense to me. It is

perform “transcodings” that are not properly and

FJ:

adequately done in other codes. On the other hand,

very clear that there has been a flowing together of

my thought is that the dialectic is and was never a

theory and criticism. It seems that theory can’t exist

“realized” thought or language. The dialectic is

without telling little narrative stories and then at this

anticipation of a new way of thinking. A whole range

point of criticism, criticism seems very close to simply

CERTAIN

Words Amid the very worst of times, the boldest nights of adora-

and the feeling of becoming, we move

concern and with pleasure. These words are revelations,

tion, tragic death, the softest skins, by the sea’s edge, clothed

onward in the intention of forms. It hap-

enigmas and addresses. We transform them following a

in a Utopian body and in ecstasy, we move through the tex-

pens that, in the middle of the night, we

method of approach which escapes our consciousness, yet

ture of words, skilfully between the blade-sharp corals of

wake up to reread a passage and to reen-

our consciousness gains new light from it. As women read-

Isla de las Mujeres. Clothed in a female body, by the page’s

counter women we desire. And as we

ing, we become the allusion of a text, its tendency.

edge we patiently, await a female presence. We turn the

reread the underlined passages, our chest

pages with wet fingers. We wait for truth to burst out.

feels an “indescribable” sensation that

What quickens us in a sentence or an expression is a deci-

keeps us awake till dawn. At dawn our

sion to be. So we bend forward into the text, hastening so

As we read from one text to the next, words circuit as if to

as to reach, in the heat of action, the deeds of our desire.

test our endurance around an idee fixe, around some

Every intense read is a scope of action in which we catch

images we have which only apply to us in the fictional space

unanimity taking shape within us.

of the version of reality we render ourselves. As we read from one text to the next, we fantasize about our desire to

Amid all the axes, the equations, the intoxicating audaci-

identify what stirs our enthusiasm and throws us into such

ties, and the light we come across, we move through what

an “indescribable” state of fervour.

we read, just as in theory we become what we desire. We move towards a subtle and complex woman who reflects

When this fervour comes over us, we say that we are capti-

the processes and the forms of thinking as it develops.

vated by what we are reading, and slowly/hurriedly we read

Words are a way of devouring the desire devouring us with

on towards our fate. Our fate is like a project, a life woven

comparisons that take us there where we become the

within by innumerable lines, some of them called lines of

appetite of science and the science of consciousness.

the hand holding the book. These lines innervate our body like a logic thinking through the senses. While immersed in

When with wet fingers we turn the pages, going from

our reading we recognize (being) the cause and the origin of

fright to ecstasy, we are confronting eternity, are we credu-

the faces and landscapes that surround us, for we allude to

lous or is eternity credulous and disbelieving before the

them as to a childhood, a desire, a tendency. While reading,

amount of bodies, of skulls, of orgasms; we are confronting

we hear murmuring, pleading, screaming; we hear our

mind is extravagant, it roams forbidden

the beyond of this totality and are becoming the precision

voice seeking its horizon.

realms we’ve no choice but to explore.

of desire in the unspeakable space of the brain.

I’ve been told that some women write at In what we read there are mauves and indigo blues, awe-

dawn when in this state. I’ve been told they

Truly, reading’s sensational effect is a sensation we cannot

some gazes, women attired in jewels and silence. There are

sometimes burst into tears.

express, except by underlining. The intimacy of eternity is

bodies experienced, there are disturbing apparitions. We

a story that we invent at every turn of the page. Reading is

open and close our eyes on them, hoping for some sounds

“I know the voice’s rhythms, I know its

always an intention of images, an intention of spectacle that

to follow or for a verbal exchange. All of our fervour floods

inflections. I know the adventure and

gives us hope.

into this exchange so that truth may burst out.

experience of the gaze.” This is what we gravitate to every time we read, incredu-

Amid the rhetoric, the logic of the senses, the paradoxes,

lous in front of the truth bursting inside us like a memory of shadows and of fervour. The words we notice apply to us with

N I C O L E p190 V13N4 1987

B R O S S A R D

Translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood

PANIC GOD

T

his is Jimmy Bakker and what the press love to describe as the “heavily mascaraed Tammy Faye.” Not just TV evangelicals brought to ground by a double complicity -- Jerry Falwell’s will to money and Jimmy Swaggart’s will to power -- but Jimmy and Tammy as the first, and perhaps the best, practitioners of the new American religious creed of post-Godism. TV evangelicism, then, is all about the creation of a postmodern God: not religion under the sign of panoptic power, but the hyper-God of all the TV evangelicals as so fascinating and so fungible, because this is where God has disappeared as a grand referent, and reappeared as an empty sign-system, waiting to be filled, indeed demanding to be filled, if contributions to the TV evangelicals are any measure, by all the waste, excess and sacrificial burnout of Heritage Park, U.S.A. An excremental God, therefore, for an American conservative culture disappearing into its own burnout, detritus, and decomposition. Jimmy and Tammy’s disgrace is just a momentary mise-en-scène as the soap opera of a panic god reverses field on itself, and everyone waits for what is next in the salvation myth, American style: Jimmy and Tammy in their struggle through a period of dark tribulations and hard trials on their way to asking forgiveness (on Ted Koppel’s Nightline show on ABC). As Jimmy Bakker once said: “In America, you have to be a little excessive to be successful.” Or as Tammy Faye likes to sign out all her TV shows: “Just remember. Jesus loves you. He really, really, does.” 

a s e l e c t i o n f r o m B o d y I n v a d e r s : P a n i c S e x i n A m e r i c a , e d i t e d by A r t h u r a n d M a r i l o u i s e K r o ke r, S t . M a r t i n ’ s P r e s s , N e w Yo r k

ARTHUR + MARILOUISE KROKER

1987 V13N4 p191

The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter F I C T I 0 N

Angela

Carter

was

born

in

Sussex, England in 1940. She has

written

many

novels,

all

of

which

have

recieved

considerable critical acclaim. Her prose lends itself to dreams, myths, metamorphoses, the unconscious and epic journeys of a highly sensual sort.

Here, we are high in the uplands. A baleful almost-music, that of the tuneless cadences of an untutored orchestra repercussing in an ecstatic agony of echoes against the sounding boards of the mountains, lured us into the village square where we discover them twanging, plucking and abusing with horsehair bows a wide variety of crude stringed instruments. Our feet crunch upon dryly whispering shifting sawdust freshly scattered over impacted surfaces of years of sawdust clotted, here, and there, with blood shed so long ago it has, with age, acquired the colour and texture of rust ... sad, ominous stains, a threat, a menace, memorials of pain. There is no brightness in the air. Today the sun will not irradiate the heroes of the dark spectacle to which accident and disharmony combined to invite us. Here, where the air is choked all day with diffuse moisture tremulously, endlessly on the point of becoming rain, light falls, as if filtered through muslin so at all hours a crepuscular gloaming prevails; the sky looks as though it is about to weep and so, gloomily illuminated through unshed tears, the, tableau vivant before us is suffused with the sepia tints of an old photograph and nothing within it moves. The intent immobility of the spectators, wholly absorbed as they are in the performance of their hieratic ritual, is scarcely that of living things and this tableau vivant might be better termed a nature morte for the mirthless carnival is the celebration of a death. Their eyes, the whites of which are yellowish, are all fixed, as if attached by taut, invisible stings upon a wooden block lacquered black with the spilt dews of a millennia of victims.

BY p192 V14N1 1988

ANGELA CARTER

And now, the rustic bandsmen suspend their unmelodious music. This death must be concluded in the most dramatic silence. The wild mountain-dwellers are gathered together to watch a public execution; that is the only entertainment the country offers. Time, suspended like the rain, begins again in silence, slowly. A heavy stillness ordering all his movements, the executioner himself adopts beside the block an offensively heroic pose, as if to do the thing with dignity were the only motive of the doing. He brings one booted foot to rest on the grim and sacrificial altar which is, to him, the canvas on which he exercises his art and proudly in his hand he bears his instrument, his axe. The executioner stands more than six and a half feet high and he is broad to suit; the warped stumps of villagers gaze up at him with awe and fear. He is dressed always in mourning and always wears curious mask. This mask is made is made of supple, close-fitting leather dyed an absolute black and it conceals his hair and the upper part his face entirely except for two narrow slits through which issue the twin regards of eyes as inexpressive as though they were part of the mask. This mask reveals only his blunt-lipped, dark-red mouth and the greyish flesh which surrounds it. Laid out in such an unnerving fashion, these portions of his meat in no way fulfil the expectations we derive from our common knowledge of faces. They have a quality of obscene rawness as if, in some fashion, the lower face had been flayed. He, the butcher, might be displaying himself, as if he were his own meat. Through the years, the close-fitting substance of the mask has become so entirely assimilated to the actual structure of his face that the face itself now seem to possess a partially coloured appearance, as if by nature dual; and this face no longer pertains to that which is human as if, when he first put on the mask, he blotted out his own, original face and so defaced himself for ever. Because the hood of office renders the executioner an object. He has become an object who punishes. He is an object of fear. He is the image of retribution. Nobody remembers why the mask was first devised nor who devised it. Perhaps some tender-heart of antiquity adopted the concealing headgear in order to spare the one upon the block the sight of too human a face in the last in moments of his agony; or else the origins of the article lie in a magical relation with the blackness of negation - if, that is, negation is black in colour. Yet the executioner dare not take off the mask in

case, in a random looking-glass or, accidentally mirrored in a pool of standing water, he surprised his own authentic face. For then he would die of fright. The victim kneels. He is thin, pale and graceful. He

The victim kneels. He is thin, pale and graceful. He is twenty years old. is twenty years old. The silent throng in the courtyard shudders in common anticipation; all their gnarled features twist in the same grin. No sound, almost no sound disturbs the moist air, only the ghost of a sound, a distant sobbing that might be the ululation of the wind amongst the scrubby pines. The victim kneels and lays his neck upon the block. Ponderously the executioner lifts his gleaming steel. The axe falls. The flesh severs. The head rolls. The cleft flesh spouts its fountains. The spectators shudder, groan and gasp. And now the string band starts to bow and saw again whilst a choir of stunted virgins, in the screeching wail that passes for singing in these regions, intones a barbaric requiem entitled: AWFUL WARNING OF THE SPECTACLE OF A DECAPITATION. The executioner has beheaded his own son for committing the crime of incest upon the body of his sister, the executioner's beautiful daughter, on whose cheeks the only roses in these highlands grow. Gretchen no longer sleeps soundly. After the day his decapitated head rolled in the bloody sawdust, her brother rode a bicycle interminably through her dreams even though the poor child crept out secretly, alone, to gather

up the poignant, moist, bearded strawberry, his surviving relic, and take it home to bury beside her hen-coop before the dogs ate it. But no matter how hard she scrubbed her little white apron against the scouring stones in the river, she could not wash away the stains that haunted the weft and warp of the fabric like pinkish phantoms of very precious fruit. Every morning, when she goes out to collect ripe eggs for her father’s breakfast, she waters with felt but ineffectual tears the disturbed earth where her brother’s brains lie rotting, while the indifferent hens peck and cluck about her feet. This country is situated at such a high altitude water never boils, no matter how deceptively it foams within the pan, so their boiled eggs are always raw. The executioner insists his breakfast omelette be prepared only from those eggs precisely on the point of blossoming into chicks and, prompt at eight, consumes with relish a yellow, feathered omelette subtly spiked with claw. Gretchen, his tenderhearted daughter, often jumps and starts to hear the thwarted cluck from a still gelid to scarcely calcified beak about to be choked with sizzling butter, but her father, whose word is law because he never doffs his leather mask, will eat no egg that does not contain within it a nascent bird. That is his taste. In this country, only the executioner may indulge his perversities. High among the mountains, how wet and cold it is! Chill winds blow soft drifts of rain across these almost perpendicular peaks; the wolf-haunted forests of fir and pine that cloak the lower slopes are groves fit only for the satanic cavortings of a universal Sabbath and a haunting mist pervades the bleak, meagre villages rooted so far above quotidian skies a newcomer might not, at first, be able to breathe but only wheeze and choke in this thinnest of air. Newcomers, however, are less frequent apparitions than meteorites and thunderbolts; the villages breathe no welcome. Even the walls of the rudely constructed houses exude suspicion. They are made from slabs of stone and do not have any windows to see out with. An inadequate orifice in the flat roof puffs out a few scant breaths of domestic smoke and penetration inside is effected only with the utmost difficulty through low, narrow doors, crevices in the granite, so each house presents to the eye as featureless a face as those of the Oriental demons whose anonymity was marred by no such commonplace a blemish as an eye, a nose or a mouth. Inside these ugly, unaccommodating hutches, man and domestic beast - goat, ox, pig, dog stake equal squatting rights to the smoky and disordered 1988 V14N1 p193

hearths, although the dogs often grow rabid and rush frothing through the rutted streets like streams in spate. The inhabitants are a thick-set, sullen brood whose chronic malevolence stems from a variety of both environmental and constitutional causes. All share a general and unprepossessing cast of countenance. Their faces have the limp, flat, boneless aspect of the Eskimo and their eyes are opaque fissures since no eyelid hoods them, only the slack skin of the Mongolian fold. Their reptilian regards possess an intensity which is in no way intimate and their smiles are so peculiarly vicious it is all for the best they smile rarely. Their teeth rot young. The men in particular are monstrously hirsute about both head and body. Their hair, a monotonous and uniform purplish black, grizzles, in age, to the tint of defunct ashes. The womenfolk are built for durability rather than delight. Since all go always barefoot, the soles of their feet develop an intensifying consistency of horn from earliest childhood and the women, who perform all the tasks demanded by their primitive agriculture, sprout forearms the size and contour of vegetable marrows while their hands become pronouncedly scoop-shaped, until they resemble, in maturity, fat five pronged forks. All, without exception, are filthy and verminous. His shaggy head and rough garments are clogged with lice and quiver with fleas while his pubic areas throb and pulse with the blind convulsions of the crab. Impetigo, scabies and the itch are too prevalent among them to be remarked upon and their feet start early to decompose between the toes. They suffer from chronic afflictions of the anus due to their barbarous diet - thin porridge; sour beer; meat scarcely seared by the cool fires of the highlands; acidulated cheese of goat swallowed to the flatulent accompaniment of barley bread. Such comestibles cannot but contribute effectively to those disorders that have established the general air of malign unease which is their most immediately distinctive characteristic. In this museum of diseases, the pastel beauty of Gretchen, the executioner’s daughter, is all the more remarkable. Her flaxen plaits bob above her breasts as she goes to pluck, from their nests, the budding eggs. Their days are shrouded troughs of glum manual toil and their nights wet, freezing, black, palpitating clefts gravid with the grossest cravings, nights dedicated solely to the imaginings of unspeakable desires tortuously conceived in mortified sensibilities habitually gnawed to suppuration by the black rats of superstition whilst the needle teeth of frost corrode their bodies.

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They would, if they could, act out entire Wagnerian cycles of operatic evil and gleefully transform their villages into stages upon which the authentic monstrosities of Grand Guignol might be acted out in

In this museum of diseases, the pastel beauty of Gretchen, the executioner’s daughter, is all the more remarkable. every unspeakable detail. No hideous parody of the delights of the flesh would be alien to them ... did they but know how such things were, in fact, performed. They have an inexhaustible capacity for sin but are inexorably baulked by ignorance. They do not know what they desire. So their lusts exist in an undefined limbo, for ever in potentia. They yearn passionately after the most deplorable depravity but possess not the concrete notion of so much as a simple fetish, their tormented flesh betrayed eternally by the poverty of their imaginations and the limitations of their vocabulary, for how may one transmit such things in a language composed only of brute grunts and squawks representing, for example, the state of the family pig in labour? And, since their vices are, in the literal sense of the word, unspeakable, their secret, furious desires remain ultimately mysterious even to themselves and are contained only in the realm of pure sensation, or feeling undefined as thought or action and hence unrestrained by definition. So their desires are infinite, although, in real terms, except in the form of a prickle of perturbation, these desires could hardly be said to exist. Their lives are dominated by a folklore as picturesque as it is murderous. Rigid, hereditary castes of wizards,

warlocks, shamans and practitioners of the occult proliferate amongst these benighted mountain-dwellers and the apex of esoteric power lies, it would seem, in the person of the king himself. But this appearance is deceptive. This nominal ruler is in reality the poorest beggar in all his ragged kingdom. Heir of the barbarous, he is stripped of everything but the idea of an omnipotence which is sufficiently expressed by immobility. All day long, ever since his accession, he hangs by the right ankle from an iron ring set in the roof of a stone hut. A stout ribbon binds him to the ceiling and he is inadequately supported in a precarious but absolute position sanctioned by ritual and memory upon his left wrist, which is strapped in a similar fashion with ribbon to an iron ring cemented into the floor. He stays as still as if he had been dipped in a petrifying well and never speaks one single word because he has forgotten how. They all believe implicitly they are damned. A folktale circulates among them, as follows: that the tribe was originally banished from a happier and more prosperous region to their present dreary habitation, a place fit only for continuous self-mortification, after they rendered themselves abhorrent to their former neighbours by the wholesale and enthusiastic practice of incest, son with father, father with daughter, etc. - every baroque variation possible upon the determinate quadrille of the nuclear family. In this country, incest is a capital crime; the punishment for incest is decapitation. Daily their minds are terrified and enlightened by the continuous performances of apocalyptic dirges for fornicating siblings and only the executioner himself, because there is nobody to cut off his head, dare, in the immutable privacy of his leathern hood, upon his bloodbespattered block make love to his beautiful daughter. Gretchen, the only flower of the mountains, tucks up her white apron and waltzing gingham skirts so they will not crease or soil but, even in the last extremity of the act, her father does not remove his mask for who would recognize him without it? The price he pays for his position is always to be locked in the solitary confinement of his power. He perpetrates his inalienable right in the reeking courtyard upon the block where he struck off the head of his only son. That night, Gretchen discovered a snake in her sewing machine and, though she did not know what a bicycle was, upon a bicycle her brother wheeled and circled through her troubled dreams until the cock crowed and out she went for eggs.

Excerted from ARTIFICIAL FIRE. Copyright 1988 by Angela Carter with permission from McClelland and Stewart, Toronto.

DONNA LYPCHUCK

SPEAKS WITH

John Waters The occasion: The night of the Toronto B Movie Festival’s Tribute To John Waters. The location: upstairs at Lee’s Palace (Festival Headquarters) and later -- The Bloor Cinema where the tastiest part of this tribute to America’s most “tasteless” of filmmakers was to take place in the form of a selected screening of three of his works -- The Diane Linkletter Story (1964), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Polyester (1981). John Waters still resides in Baltimore, where he was born in 1946, and where on February 7, 1985, it was officially declared to be “John Waters Day”. After being expelled from New York University’s Film School, (a whole section of the speech he delivered was devoted to how much he hated film school), he “returned to the world of the theatre” and became a puppeteer for children’s parties. His predilection for fake blood, however, soon got the better of him, and inspired by the gift of a camera from his grandmother, began his career as the unabashed auteur that to date has made over twelve films tantamount to the “Art of Trash”. Waters is also an author. His first book, Shock Value, (mandatory reading for all aspiring movie moguls), chronicles film by film the petty pragmatics of his early years as a film-maker as well as his stock fascination for sex, death and disaster. Crackpot, a collection of his journalism released last year, is like a “crash course” in John Waters type sensibilities that is chock full of observational humour vented upon a diversity of topics: The City of L.A., Christmas, Fame, Celebrity Burnout, and Jean Luc Godard’s Hail Mary. Highly respected as a writer and a film critic, as well as being an avid public speaker, Waters is primarily known as an independent filmmaker.

P H O T O G R A P H Y

.

R O B E R T

B A I L L A R G E O N

An atypical twist on the teenage “message movie” The Diane Linkletter Story marks Divine’s screen debut as a “sweet young thing” on acid, who once confronted by her parents about her “bad attitude”, becomes hysterical and “makes like a bird” from out of her parents’ upstairs bedroom window. John Waters’ other films include Hag in a Black Leather Jacket {1964), Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), Mondo Trasho (1969), and Multiple Maniacs (1970).

B A D TA S T E Making the kind of movies I do, you can only hope that what you do is in bad taste. How can you top Baby Faye with a monkey heart and all this medical stuff? I mean, I even felt sorry for Nancy Reagan for the first time in my life last week. A doctor who was about to take a journey up Reagan’s asshole was on the news. That’s much more tasteless than anything I could do today!

in “Smell-0-Rama.” The audience was invited to “smell” along with the characters in the movie by scratching the sealed odours on a “Scratch ‘N Sniff” card, whose numbers corresponded with those flashed in a corner of the movie screen. In 1986, John Waters broke his own lifetime resolution and appeared last year as an actor (a used car salesman) in Something Wild. He also makes an appearance in his own, soon-to-be-released, first commercial feature Hairspray, another “Divine” comedy. Also starring a delightful pot-pourri of heavyduty personalities including Pia Zadora, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, and Jerry Stiller, as well as Toronto’s own teenage heart-throb, renegade stand-up song-stylist (and stand-in for Joan Rivers on The Late Night Show) Shawn Thompson.

JW: Twenty-five thousand! Multiple Maniacs! Five

Thousand! The Diane Linkletter Story … Eighty dollars. It’s not even a movie. It’s a camera test. For Divine. But I’ll show it. You got twenty-five bucks? You can rent it. Buys my cigarettes. ST: Are you going to do any more movies like Polyester with “Scratch ‘N Sniff?” JW: Well, that was just a gimmick, really. It was

sort of a homage to William Castle. DL: He’s the guy who used to station nurses in the

lobby and put joy buzzers under theatre seats ... JW: Right. No, I don’t think I’ll do that again. It’s

DONNA LYPCHUK: I’m just here to look at what

you’re wearing. JOHN WATERS: What were you expecting? A

just too hard to show. I think, actually, that movie stars are the best gimmick. It’s all in the casting - the putting together of all of these names. With Hairspray, I want people to see all of these names together on one bill and go “Huh?”.

straitjacket? DL: How did you meet up with Shawn? SHAWN THOMPSON: Donna is from one of

BESTIALITY

This is the first time I think, that an uncut version of Pink Flamingos has ever been screened. I think it’s all about that sex scene to do with the chicken. I mean, people are always coming up to me and asking, “Do you eat chicken?” I mean, chickens don’t just have a heart attack and die on your plate. We put the chicken in a movie, it got famous and it got fucked to boot! What do you want? We ATE the chicken at the end of the day. We didn’t have caterers in those days.

M Y T R I P T O J A PA N

those ART magazines ... you know. DL: Is there a lot of art direction in your films ? So much of what you do seems to be “cinema verite.” Like filming wildly self-indulgent creatures in their natural habitat.

DL: What used to be thought of as underground JW: We have some rehearsal ... I’m fully of the

school where you get it on the second take and if you like it - - you move right along. You know, I’m not of the Stanley Kubrick school of “those eighty takes of the exact same line” ‘cuz I have a budget to work within, and everyday THEY (the producers) come to see how far you got. Hairspray came in right on schedule. Actually, it’s the only movie ever made that came in a day under schedule and under budget. DL: What was the budget for Hairspray?

I went to Japan this year, and it was very strange because everywhere I went, people would go, “Your name is John Waters?” and chuckle. I finally realized that my name translated there as john which means toilet and they thought my name was Toilet Waters. His first major underground “cult” hit, however was Pink Flamingos (1972) and featured Divine in the final stages of her “drag queen evolution” as the “star persona” we are familiar with today. Infamous for its images of cannibalism (the Good Guys literally eat the Bad Guys at an outdoor barbecue), incest (Divine gives her son a blow-job) and bestiality (a chicken is literally “torn between two lovers”), Pink Flamingos was followed by Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977), both of which were notorious for their scenes of castration. In 1981, Polyester was released

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JW: I met him through this good casting woman in New York. I never even read anybody else for the part because he came in and he was EXACTLY what I wanted. That never happens. I mean, he even had on the right suit!

JW: About two and a half million, but that’s misleading because five hundred thousand was for music rights. Below the line, there’s a million and two, and there’s eleven hundred people in this film, so I still consider it to be a low budget movie. DL: What was the budget for your last film

Polyester? JW: Three hundred thousand! DL: How about Desperate Living?

is now considered mainstream. I was wondering, how, as an artist, you dealt with this change in the collective cultural psyche? JW: I think it’s good news. I think the perfect

example of how this affected my career was when the Baltimore Museum of Art in my hometown did a complete retrospective of all of my films. Black tie and everything! But I went, thinking, “These are the exact same films that I was getting arrested for in this same city ten years ago.” What a magical change! It just proves how people’s sense of humour has just drifted, not Right or Left, but Off-centre, certainly to the point where they feel they can laugh at terrible things now ... I feel sorry for the kids who are nineteen or so right about now. There’s no way to rebel! What can you do? A mohawk means nothing. If you wore long hair in the sixties, people wanted to beat you up. What can you do now? If you kill your parents, they’ll make a T.V. movie about it the next week. There’s nothing you can do nowadays to make your parents insane. Except take drugs, and that’s boring. In the sixties, people took drugs to change their minds. Now, they take drugs so they don’t have to think.

JW: Sixty-five thousand! DL: Female Trouble?

DL: Has your ambition always been to make funny films?

JW: That’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to do. To me, what’s funny is not always everyone’s opinion of what’s funny. Yeah. I don’t make movies to change America. If everything was about what’s good and what’s fair, I would have no subject matter left. I’m not trying to change anything specifically. I like everything that’s wrong. DL: Let’s talk about your little known side. You

go into the Hollywood Studio System? JW: Well, Hairspray almost happened in the studio. It got up “two levels” and then, “what always happens” happened. The main producers come in and say, “Well, let’s watch Polyester.” Then, they watch it by themselves at ten in the morning and they are APPALLED! I mean, the fact that I made these movies gets me in and keeps me out.

are also a well respected American film critic… ST: What stage is Hairspray at now? JW: I write for Rolling Stone, Vogue, American Film, Film Comment, National Lampoon ... Esquire. It’s hard, you know, because editors and publishers encourage me to be crazy. Editors always want to know about a film: “But will it play in Peoria?”. DL: What did you think of Blue Velvet? (1986; David Lynch) JW: Oh! It was my favourite comedy of the year. I think David Lynch thought it was a comedy, too Comedy is the deadliest weapon of all. It’s worse than a gun. DL: What did you think of its mirror image -- True Stories? (1986; David Byrne) JW: Yeah, I liked it. I thought it was fun. I liked some parts of it better than I liked others. David is a friend of mine. He’s from Baltimore.

JW: It’s in a fine cut. It’s in a test screen. It’s close. It’s ninety minutes. Every movie I’ve ever made has been ninety minutes and I really don’t think a comedy can be longer. There’s nothing worse than a long comedy. Long jokes are bad! All the best jokes are one or two words.

Have you ever considered writing a fictional book?

DL:

JW: Yes. I know that’s what everybody says in

their lives. “Oh! I’d love to write a novel!”, but that is, really, what I want to do. DL:There are a lot of vampires around lately. In

Dudes and The Lost Boys, for example. Do you think it’s because as an image they make such a good metaphor for AIDS?

movie years ago: It Came From Within.

JW: I grew up with David. I love the National

Enquirer. That’s the best barometer of Fame in America. You’re not really famous until you’re in the Enquirer -- or on television.

M Y N E W F I L M H A I R S P R AY It’s a satire on two of the most dreaded genres today: the Teen Flick and the Message Movie. I hope my version of an All-Star cast will pull ‘em in. We have Shawn Thompson, who plays a sort of hillbilly Dick Clark. Sonny Bono’s in it. I hear he’s running for Mayor of Palm Springs and I can’t imagine any “bigger pride” than going into a voting booth, pulling the curtain, and then pulling the “politically correct Bono Lever.” Debbie Harry plays a hillbilly mom. We had to shoot Pia Zadora singing on location in the slums of Baltimore and she thought it was a set! I had to tell her, “No, Pia. People live here.” Phyllis Diller’s in it ... Jerry Stiller and Mink Stole. The star is a newcomer who plays a fat teenage girl, sort of a baby Divine. We auditioned every fat teenage girl in the country for this role, and sometimes we’d have to tell them, “No, you’re just not fat enough,” and they would break down sobbing.

JW: David Cronenberg made the best AIDS

DL: But didn’t you think there was a deliberate

pretension on his part that undermined the whole thing: to make a “cult” movie a la John Waters on purpose?

can’t have that! That’s a vagina shot!”, and I’d say, “That’s a man.” (Divine). I couldn’t explain to her what a “cheater” was all about. She used to sit there and watch three movies at once, ‘cause she knew all they were looking for is the sex, and shout, “Reel Two! Rear Entry!”. Rear Entry? What’s that? I’d never heard that expression, before. This little, dirty old lady.

THE BEST HORROR MOVIE OF THE YEAR

DL: So, has anybody called you a nihilist lately? JW: I’ve been called that, but I’ve been called

worse. I don’t think I am at all. My films are very moral. The Good Guys win. DL:Do you have a favourite “exploitation” film?

The Whales of August, of course, was the best horror movie of the year. The close-ups of Bette Davis were much scarier than anything I could have dreamed up.

JW: Faster Faster Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (Russ ST: How do you feel about having this Tribute to

you, here, in Toronto? JW: It makes me feel like I’m dead ... which I love. DL: What projects do you have planned after the

release of Hairspray?

Meyer). I hear it’s never screened up here. I don’t know why. There’s not even nude breasts in it. It was made in 1966, so it’s not like there’s “gore” in it or anything. Do they censor David Cronenberg’s films up here? We had a censorship board in Baltimore and there was a lady there who used to butcher my films for years.

NUDITY ON SCREEN

I love nudity on screen. I’m against it in real life.

DL:What’s your favourite John Waters film?

JW: Well, I just signed this two book deal with

Vintage Books, which is part of Random House. I have some appointments with some studios when I go back to L.A.. I have some ideas, but it’s too early to shout them out loud. ST: Is that difficult for you? Being outside of the

system, being an independent and then having to

ST: She sounds a lot like Mary Brown, a lady we used to have here. JW: She was somebody who hates movies,

basically. I mean, she’d hand me the scissors! I would take her in a brand new print -- and I wouldn’t have a penny left and she’d say, “You

JW: Oh! Female Trouble, definitely. Did anybody here ever meet Glenn Gould? He’s one of my idols. Talk about a gifted eccentric! I even rented Glenn Gould’s Toronto! Who’s the most famous criminal here? I mean, like a famous, famous, criminal? Like an axe murderer or something? There must be one! Canada isn’t that civilized.

1988 V14N1 p197

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F I C T I 0 N

One of the most important literary figures in France, Marguerite Duras is best known in this country for her

novel The Lover.

She is the author of several screenplays, including

Hiroshima Mon Amour, and many novels.

Duras’ style is immediately

recognizable as she has a particular ability with dialogue and descriptions that evoke the past, even when writing of the present.

The Slut of the Normandy Coast Luc Bondy had asked me to direct La maladie de la mort −

The Sickness of Death − at the Schaubuhne in Berlin. I had accepted, but I had told him that first I’d have to adapt it for the

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BY

stage, that I’d have to make a selection of the text,

MARGUERITE

that it could be read but not acted. I made the

DURAS

adaptation. In it, the story’s heroes were silent, and the actors were the ones who told their story, what they had said, what had happened to them.

All the scenes, all ten or twelve of them, were finished. They were to be read, as well as the text of the dialogue between the main characters. The woman had not been called upon in this adaptation, she had been set aside. The actors would speak to the man, but not to the woman. Two days after having sent this stage adaptation of La maladie de la mort to Berlin, I phoned to ask them to send it back because I was giving up on it. I told Yann. I often tell him what I do. From the very moment I severed myself from the manuscript, I realized I had made a mistake. I had done exactly what I had tried to avoid. I had gone back to La maladie de la mort, to its very principle of a text for three voices, to its stilted and unitary form. I had been emptied out, I had become the opposite of a writer. I was the plaything of a formal fate from which I was trying unsuccessfully to escape. I spoke of this to Yann. He didn’t believe me. He had often seen me stalled in my projects, come to a halt, then begin again. Three times I started on the Berlin adaptation, the third time with a typist and a schedule. That time I dictated what I imagined to be the perfect version, but in fact it was the worst of all, pompous and artificial. Three times I tried. I would begin with La maladie de la mort and I would come back to it. While I was working I had no idea where I was going. I’d find myself back there, each time back to the same place in the book, huddled against it, dazed. I could no longer trust myself, I was lost. To make matters worse, it was always at the stage of typing out the final draft that I would become aware of the results. Whatever I did, it seemed that I had always to resort to a false solution: the stage. Once again I spoke to Yann. I told him it was over. I was fed up with wasting time, I was giving up the idea of adapting the text. I’ve said that I had discovered, once again, that La maladie de la mort was such an evidently ambiguous text that one had to use other methods to defeat it, that it made me feel incapable of anything. Even today, this is still all I know about the difficulties I had with that text. And then there was that Quilleboeuf episode, to which I paid no attention at the time. Shortly afterwards I began a book which was to be called L’homme menti, “The Perjured Man,” but was also abandoned. And then, one day, the weather was warm, in the evening, at night. It was midsummer, in June. I began writing about the summer, about the hot evenings. I didn’t know exactly why, but I carried on. It is the summer of 1986. I’m writing the story. Throughout the summer, every day,

sometimes in the evening, sometimes at night. It is then that Yann enters a period of crying out loud, of shouting. He types out the book, two hours a day. In the book, I’m eighteen. I’m in love with a man who loathes my desire, my body. Yann types as I dictate. While he types, he doesn’t shout. That happens afterwards. He shouts at me, he becomes a man demanding something, who doesn’t know what that something is. So he shouts, to say that he doesn’t know what he wants. And he also shouts to find out, so that, from the current of words, the knowledge of what he wants might appear on its own. He can’t separate the detail of what he

wants this summer from the whole of what he has always wanted. I hardly ever see him, this man, Yann. He’s hardly ever there, in our apartment by the sea. He goes for walks. During the day he covers different distances, each several times. He goes from hill to hill. He visits the large hotels, he seeks out beautiful men. He meets several handsome bartenders. Also on the golf courses, he seeks them out. He sits in the lobby of the Hotel du Golf and waits there, watching. That evening he says: “I had a nice quiet time at the Hotel du Golf, I felt very relaxed.” Sometimes he falls asleep on the Hotel du Golf lounge chairs, but as he’s well dressed, very elegant, Yann, all in 1988 V14N1 p201

white, they let him sleep. He carries with him all the time a huge old blue bag, made out of cloth, which I made in case he needed it for his shopping. He keeps his money there. At night, he goes to the Melody. In the afternoons he also goes, sometimes, to the Normandy. In Trouville, he goes to the Bellevue. When he comes back, he screams, he shouts at me, and I carry on writing. Even if I say, “Hello”, “How are you?”, “Have you had dinner?”, “Are you tired?” he shouts. Every night, for a month, he wants the car to drive to Caen and see some friends. I refuse to

Of himself and of his anger, he knew as little as an animal does, that is to say, nothing, not even that he shouted. That is how, a month before the date agreed upon for the delivery of the manuscript, I began the definitive book, that is to say, I began to find that man, Yann, but elsewhere than there where he found himself, looking for him in things that were alien to both him and the book -- for instance, in the landscapes of the Seine estuary. Very much there. And in himself as well, in his smile, Yann’s smile, in his walk, his hands, Yann’s hands. I separated him completely from his words, as if he had caught them unwittingly, and

In the book, I’m eighteen, I’m in love with a man who loathes my desire, my body. give him the car because I’m afraid. So he takes taxis, he becomes the driver’s chum, his best client. When he shouts, I continue to write. At first, it was difficult. I thought it was unfair, his shouting at me. That it wasn’t right. And when I wrote and saw him coming and knew that he was going to shout, I could no longer write, or rather the writing stopped everywhere. There was nothing left to write, and I would write sentences, words, scribbles, to make believe that I didn’t hear the shouting. I spent weeks with a jumble of different writings. Today I believe that those which seemed to me then the most incoherent were, in fact, the most decisive in the book to come. But of this I knew nothing. I wouldn’t tell him that I couldn’t because of his shouting, and because of what I thought was his unfairness towards me. Soon, even when he wasn’t there, I was incapable of writing. I waited for his shouts, his screams, but I continued to fill the page with sentences that were alien to the book which was there, in the process of being made, in a field foreign to it, in fiction. At last a sense of order was established, one for which I was not responsible, I who worked the writing onto the page, but for which Yann was responsible, he alone, and without putting pen to paper, without having to do anything about it, without any other intention than that of slaughtering, down to its very roots, anything that might be seen as an encouragement to live on. p202 V14N1 1988

they had made him ill. And that was how I found out that he was right. That he was right to want something with such intensity, whatever that thing might be. However terrible it might be. Sometimes I would imagine that the time had come, that I was going to die. Four years ago I underwent a treatment that left me weak; since then I tend to believe that death is there, in reach of my life. He wanted everything at once, he wanted to destroy the book and feared for the book’s survival. For weeks he had typed two hours a day for me. Drafts, different stages of the book. He knew the book was already in existence. He would say: “What the fuck are you doing writing all the time, all day long? You’ve been abandoned by everyone. You’re crazy, you’re the slut of the Normandy coast, a fool, you’re embarrassing.” After that, sometimes we’d laugh. He was afraid I’d die before the book was completed, maybe, or rather, that I’d throw the book away, once again. I thought no longer about Quilleboeuf, but I still felt the need to go there. I would go there with friends, but I didn’t know why that alien place meant so much to me; I thought it was because of the large river which ran past the square where a café stood. I though that it was because of the sky of Siam, here yellow with petrol fumes, while Siam itself was dead. Sometimes he would return at five in the

morning, happy. I began not to ask him any more questions, not to speak to him, to say good morning just because of the pleasure of doing so. Then he became louder, he became terrible, and at times I was afraid, and believed that he was more and more in the right, but I could no longer stop the book, any more than he could stop the violence. I’m not certain against what Yann was shouting. I think it was against the book itself, real or imagined, beyond all definition, pretext, excuse, etc. It was simply that: making a book. It went beyond what was reasonable in its reasons, and what was unreasonable in those same reasons. It was like a goal: kill it. I knew that. I knew more and more things about Yann. In the end, it was like a race. Run faster than him in order to finish the book, so that he would not stop it completely. I lived with this throughout the summer. I also must have expected it. I would complain to people, but not about the essentials, not about what I am writing now. Because I thought that they would not be able to understand. Because there had been nothing in my entire life as unlawful as our story, Yann’s and mine. It was a story that meant nothing outside our space, there where we stood. It’s impossible to speak of how Yann spent his time, his summer -- it’s impossible. He had become illegible, unforseeable. One could say that he had become fathomless. He went in all directions, to all those hotels, to search beyond the beautiful men, the bartenders, the husky bartenders of foreign lands, of Argentina or Cuba. He spun in all directions. Yann. All directions met in him at the end of the day, at night. They met in the mad hope that a scandal might occur, an absolutely commonplace scandal centred around my own life. In the end, it might have become comprehensible. We had reached a place where life was not totally absent. Sometimes we received signals from it. It, life, strolled along the seaside. Sometimes it crossed through town, in the cars of the Morality Squad. There were also tides, and then Quilleboeuf, of which one became aware in the distance, as everpresent as Yann. When I wrote La maladie de la mort, I did not know how to write about Yann. That I know. Here, the readers will say: “What’s gotten into her? Nothing happened, since nothing takes place.” When in fact what took place is what happened. And, when nothing else takes place, then the story is truly beyond the reach of both the writer and the reader.

Tra n s l a t e d f ro m t h e Fre n c h by A l b e r t o M a n g u e l

IMPULSE J.G. BALLARD SPEAKS WITH

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and was interned by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. Combining a visionary intensity with a powerful narrative flow, Ballard has been called the most imaginative living British fiction writer today.

IMPULSE: Do you believe there is a conscious connection between nature and dream? J.G. BALLARD: Yes. I assume that it is no accident that human beings have been endowed with prodigious imaginations and a remarkable capacity to enter various hallucinatory or delusional states - as in dreams, hypnagogic imagery, flashes of deja vu etc. Bearing in mind the difficulties that a wholly rational being would have in coping with a largely hostile environment, there must be enormous evolutionary advantages in possessing a powerful imagination, contrary to what one would assume, or the pressures of natural selection would long since have eliminated anyone handicapped by this confusing ability to invent an imaginary alternative to the world presented to us by our senses. And that, I take it, is the vital function which the imagination performs for the central nervous system and a brilliant strategem for dealing with crucial limitations in the brain’s picture of reality. This would accord with the view of modern psychology that the brain presents us with only a ramshackle view of reality, a partial construct imperfect in numerous

ways, from the more trivial – the geometry of the rooms we inhabit - to the more serious - our sense of time, memory, our hopes, ideals and private mythologies. The more we can engage our imaginations, therefore, the better, and the most important task for each of us is to test the imperfections of reality against the perfectibility of the dream.

J.G.B.: No. Each of us already forms a subculture of one. Add another, and you have, not a subculture, but a crowd - a far smaller entity.

IMPULSE: Is nature, by its very essence, apocalyptic?

J.G.B.: I take it that the correlation is total. My novels and short stories constitute a series of snapshots of my central nervous system, a set of extreme hypotheses, a collection of documents describing a mysterious cerebral event.

J.G.B.: Yes. Everything is in a state of continuous tumult, and from the standpoint of the central nervous system the most commonplace acts describe a state of imminent crisis - does the angle between two walls have a happy ending? Does the cheek placed on a pillow make time retreat from us? Do the stairs to the next floor lead to infinity? Are all the objects in our rooms a set of coded messages? How does one decipher a chair, a ceiling, a mirror? Only the imagination can turn these keys. IMPULSE: Do you feel that one method of transcending nature in a metropolitan environment is to immerse oneself in a subculture?

IMPULSE: Do you see any correlations between the extreme conditions of certain phases of your psychological life and the literature that you have produced?

IMPULSE: Do you have a moral stand or position? Your characters are fighting against forces so powerful that they seem doomed to fail. J.G.B.: No - in fact, in so far as my characters are true to their own imaginations, they are doomed to succeed - I can’t think of a single one of my characters who is a failure - they all embrace the logic of their obsessions and pursue them to the end. That is why I think of myself as the most optimistic of present-day writers.

IMPULSE: Images of death have haunted your work; what is your relationship with death? J.G.B.: A minor member of his family, who in due course will inherit a small share of his estate. 1988 V14N1 p203

S T O P F E E L I N G G U I LT Y A N D L O V E V I E T N A M

With the appearance of Tour of Duty, a weekly dramatic television series about Vietnam, the media’s treatment of the war has completed a rather perversely negotiated full circle. After an evasive cultural trek through literature, theatre and film, the war has finally returned to the representational site from whence it sprang: after a twelve year absence, Vietnam is back on TV. In the prominently displayed TV Guide ads for the series, Tour of Duty’s promoters congratulate themselves on their controversy and convention-bucking daring: “A series so powerful it … it’s actually making news.” But if there’s anything truly shocking about television’s rediscovery of Vietnam, particularly for anyone old enough to remember the harrowing nightly network glimpses of the apocalypse, it’s how hair-raisingly limp the whole thing’s become. In other words, it may have taken half-a-generation to do so, but the mainstream media has finally succeeded in doing what it couldn’t when that most meaningless of meaningless wars was in full, fearsome swing: it’s reduced it to a series of instantly safe conventions and cliches. It’s tamed Vietnam. That it took this long to do so -and a dozen years is a eon in popcult terms -- is proof of the conflict’s enduring persnickityness in conventional moral, social and political terms. So ugly was Vietnam’s reflection of America’s interests and nature, so devastating was the rift in the social fabric it tore, it fairly exploded the country’s mythical selfimage as a just and unified crusader for global freedom. Small wonder

HOW

WE LEARNED TO

C onventional

p204 V14N1 1988

that, for so many years, mainstream media either didn’t touch Vietnam, or did so only obliquely. (As it did, for example, when Vietnam vets

warfare

were treated on film and TV as an army of maladjusted psychos -- a neat trick that both acknowledged the war’s damage and corralled its effects.)

Small wonder too that those early popcult attempts to stare the war straight in the eyes -films like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) -- were finally stymied by a conflict that would not be subjected to any cut-and-dried, a priori conceptualizing. If anthing, both Cimino’s and Coppola’s films are masterworks of ideological confusion: The Deer Hunter nobly and futilely scrambles to define heroism (“One shot ... that’s all you’ve got”) in a heroless context; Apocalypse Now soporifically leaving the war behind as it sails sideways up a river of raging metaphor. At least their failure was, to a certain extent, representative of the war itself: their ultimate confusion reflected the deeply troubling nature of Vietnam. Quite possibly, there is nothing in conventional pop culture vocabulary capable of accurately expressing just what this war was about. Pop culture trades in the familiar and the commonplace, and Vietnam left room for neither. The solution was simple and probably inevitable: if popular culture could not accommodate itself to Vietnam, it would accommodate Vietnam to itself. This it has done, and Tour of Duty is merely the most visible and extreme example of the gradual familiarizing process the war’s been subjected to

G E O F F

P E V E R E

in the mid to late eighties. Learning expensive lessons from the tepid commercial and mixed critical responses to Cimino’s and Coppola’s highly personalized visions of Vietnam (and the ensuing decade has seen the complete critical discreditation of both directors) pop culture waited for the appropriate mass terms in which to represent Vietnam to emerge. As they always do, they eventually did: with the patriotic nostalgia of Reaganism came a corresponding resurrection of 99 and 44/100% pure Yankee populism, a faith in down home, working class purity that assuaged an ailing superpower with the reminder that, deep down, it was jes’ folks that built this great country, and (dammit) jes’ folks that keep it great today. Mythology being what it is, working class heroes and hayseed chic ruled the land: Reagan, Springsteen, Stallone, denim, antiques, Top Gun, Bernie Goetz, Joe Bob Briggs, Oliver North. Politics and bureaucracy were made villainous anew, and America rejoiced under a government that denounced governing. Reaganism restored the heroic, simple individual to his rightful place in American mythology, and the stage was finally set for the triumphant return of the Vietnam war. Only this time, to paraphrase John Rambo, it would be won. In the late eighties, Vietnam is no longer a place that makes Americans go kill-crazy (pace Deer Hunter and Apocalypse), it’s a kill-crazy place where Americans go. Its horrors are no longer seen as the perverse but logical expression of something intrinsically American, they are the product of alien circumstances, perpetrated by others on Americans. Americans may be driven to kill there because senseless circumstances demand it, but there is no longer the sense that it is a great place for Americans who want to kill -- like Apocalypse’s magnificent Colonel Kilgore -- to go. No longer something that laid raw a fatal flaw in the American dream, it now exists to vindicate American purity. The reason for America to go to Vietnam today is to distinguish itself from it The new Vietnam is an arena for the tragic sacrifice and transcendence of the common man -- a grunt’s war. If there’s a philosophical assumption binding the otherwise diverse interests of such Vietnaphilia as Rambo: First Blood Part II, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Good Morning Vietnam and Tour of Duty, it’s the populist conception of the war as a sacrificial altar for

ordinary people, a mettle-testing hell that reaffirms the dignity of the average joe while damning the callous self-interest of a remote and cowardly authority. As it always is for the other wars in American movies, war in Vietnam may be hell on the body, but it’s great for building character. Though lip-service to pacifism is paid by pious soldiers as ostensibly distinct as Stallone’s Rambo and Platoon’s Christly Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), the sentiments are no less bogus than their prop department artillery: they and we both know that without the war they’d be nothing. It’s war that defines these guys, gives them their purpose, and establishes the higher cause that lends meaning to their frequent acts of self-sacrifice. Above all, it’s the notion of duty before reason -- which explains why the anti-war movement at home comes in for such hostility -- that makes these men true, red-blooded Americans. The sanity of the war and the country’s leadership might be frequently called into question, but the country itself never is. It’s a potent notion, this concept of the common man enduring apocalyptic horror in the name of a higher concept called country, but it’s safe (and familiar) as milk. If it weren’t, if it truly was a dangerous idea, would Platoon -- a textbook example of the new populist Vietnam -- have been rewarded for its incendiary daring with a trenchload of Oscars? If it was legitimately challenging, or even as gutsy as it claims to be (and its promoters seem to have confused power with piety), would Tour of Duty have found a home on network TV? In order for Vietnam to have executed the full circle from TV news event to TV dramatic event (a distinction that grows less clear by the minute), it had to he reconstructed in palatable, pop-cult terms. Most obviously inspired by the grunt’s eye view of Platoon, TV’s first Vietnam series also adopts the film’s romantic, military paternalism. Under the hard-bitten but sensitive guidance of Sgt. Anderson (Terence Knox), Tour of Duty’s ethnically balanced grunts (none of Platoon’s revealing racial tensions allowed in Cosbyland) are led by the hand through weekly eruptions of physical carnage and administrative blunder. A man of customarily few words, the lantern-jawed Anderson’s tongue usually limbers up for the requisite speechifying at the end of each episode. It is then -- usually at the prompting of some weteyed grunt’s earnest desire to know whythings-like-this-happen-Sarge? – that Anderson’s function as mouthpiece for conventional populist morality comes spewing

forth with the acrid pungency of napalm in the morning. Each week, he fixes that formidable jaw and says basically the same thing: “It’s hell, but nobody dies for nothin’. This war may he meaningless, but that boy’s death wasn’t. The chips he cashed were for his country.” Next week, someone else will die a “meaningless” death (though we know better: there’s meaning enough), and this khakiwrapped windbag will be called upon to gas forth again. (At least Platoon’s resident moralizer, the saintly Sgt. Elias, (got killed off -Anderson’s back every week.)

In order for Vietnam to have executed the full circle from TV news event to

But the popularization of Vietnam couldn’t have been facilitated without the makeover of the war from specific event into universal condition. Despite the specifying measures evident in the use of sixties rock and mod lingo, Tour of Duty signals its true suitability for television by, ironically, not being about Vietnam. The questions asked by the program never have to do with sticky matters of American involvement, military atrocity, racism or getting laid in the jungle. All its concerns are safe, standard-issue universals: duty, heroism, comradeship, dealing with the loss of a buddy. Matters that is, that could be raised just as easily in another war, (or in a police precinct or a spaceship) as in the jungles of Vietnam. These are time-tested, stridently inoffensive, generic TV issues. And their relentless invocation on the muchtouted dramatic TV debut of Vietnam proves just what so many feared about both the war and the country that perpetrated it: through the oblique reflection of popular culture, one can see Vietnam hasn’t changed A m e r i c a , A m e r i c a ’ s c h a n g e d Vietnam.

TV dramatic event (a distinction that grows less clear by the minute), it had to be reconstructed in palatable, popcult terms.

I TALKED ABOUT

GOD

“My Dearest Marie Ange, I have suffered 50 comas resulting from electroshocks at Rodez. They obliterated my memory and my consciousness for months on end because Dr. Ferdiere who was a pig and a heroin addict was jealous of my work and of the power of my imagination. It so happens in life, these jealousies of the bad unconscious, while in surface one pretends to help a writer get back to his work. I’ll Antonin Artaud tell you when I see you.” p206 V14N1 1988

WITH

ANTONIN ARTAUD

DR. LATREMOLIERE: I must tell you that when you called to set up this meeting, I wasn't wildly enthusiastic. The idea of raising the issue of Artaud’s life again, thirty years after his death, seems to me beside the point. For two years I was working with the director of the Rodez asylum, Dr. Gaston Ferdière. I was Artaud’s friend. I’m aware that Artaud is being studied a great deal. It’s too bad. Artaud had no message, never had. He was a distinguished paranoiac, with extraordinary ideas of grandeur and persecution. Those people he considered his friends were the ones he contacted when he needed opium. We never gave him opium, but he asked for it. We were his friends, but as soon as we were gone, we became his enemies. To me his written work is something of a cry. A cry of horror. Raised by a man who had no sense. No sense of other people. He placed himself at the centre of the world. You’ll see. It was just him and little birds.

theatre of cruelty. It took Artaud to Mexico and Ireland. Do you find that so weird? To me, Artaud is anarchistic like the dadaists. He’s the echo chamber of this great breakdown that dada responded to – World War I, the first big bloodbath, this craze for universal annihilation. Artaud may be paranoid, narcissistic, megalomaniac, whatever, but it gives him a certain perception. Almost inhuman.

SYLVERE LOTRINGER

SPEAKS WITH

DR. JACQUES LATREMOLIERE

Dr. L.: Privileged? He was to be the one in power before the last appearance of God on this earth. S.L.: Artaud may have thought he was the centre. He was in a way so absent, so lost in himself, so desperately deep into himself that he could connect to all despair. When you get to this degree of suffering, all the suffering in the world is a part of you.

Dr. L.: I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve practised many years of psychiatry and I’m afraid I have to say that this notion of yours is romantically absurd. The more turned in on oneself a person is, the less open to the world ... to love. And that’s why Artaud was junked. He was no longer socially viable. If we treated him -- which is what we’ve been criticized for doing all these years -- it was only to protect him from Dr. Jaques Latremolière himself. And we saw him come around! He was able to write again, to draw, to talk with us. We gave that to him. All my life I’ll remember my friend Ferdière saving, “If I had known Dr. L.: If he’s inhuman, how can he contribute to hum what was to come, I would never have let him leave Rodez. anity? I’m immensely sorry.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like to give electroshock. We see a dissolution of the person followed by a reconstruction. Every time we did it on Artaud we rebuilt a little more.

SYLVERE LOTRINGER:

Well, at least

there were the birds. Dr. L.: In any case I find his fame a bit exaggerated. How is it that he experienced such different things at such short intervals? That really couldn’t have been him. But as for me, I saw him scream, heard him scream. Not against me! Never! He only yelled at me after he had left Rodez, didn’t he? So. I believe that people will find nothing in Artaud’s work. It will not advance civilization. I believe that someone who cannot control himself can be of no help to anyone. S.L.: But the horror at the bottom of the paranoia, isn’t that what makes his work important? His pain forced him to write what he wrote, then the writing itself made a shock. Dr. L.: I have here Artaud’s complete works – have you read them? – and I’ve digested them little by little. I have the first editions of his books, haven’t I? He gave them to me! Well, when you’ve read everything he wrote, you see there’s very little that’s understandable. Very little.

You know, it’s no coincidence that everything important in modern art since the turn of the century looked towards primitive societies. Like Artaud. Civilization was already limping towards a loss of substantiality, things appeared and vanished at incredible speed. People needed to get back to the earth, to reinvent implacable rituals. And that’s the

S.L.:

S.L.:

But humanity is inhuman!

I can’t believe you think Artaud was sensitive to civilization. I can guarantee he wasn’t in the least. He was only interested in himself. During the whole time that I knew him he was Christ, the centre of the world. Don’t tell me he has contributed to the progress of humanity, not in the least. He was sensitive only to his tremendous pain. And I studied his pain. With him. But his pain. His alone. So don’t place him on a pedestal.

Dr. L.:

S.L.:

What was it like to be Artaud’s friend?

S.L.: What seems important isn’t to know whether or not Artaud deceived his friends. I’m sure he did, especially the ones who decided about his freedom. But look back at what he wrote.

That is not great. That does nothing to advance

Dr. L.:

society. Then why does this thing we call literature exist? Why do people wrack their brains to say indirectly? Why do they teach these things at school if people write only out of greed or eccentricity?

S.L.:

Artaud is hardly taught at school.

Oh, we chatted a lot. For hours. About God. And God only knows, his ideas about religion were disputable. He fashioned a kind of myth at which he was the centre. So hey, let me laugh when they talk about his “message”. There’s nothing. It’s hollow. Besides, it makes no sense. I was there.

Dr. L.:

Artaud thought he had a privileged relationship with God?

S.L.: One of the pieces on the Tarahumaras was written at Rodez in 1943. A sort of delirium on Christ and the Cross,

Dr. L.:

S.L.:

S.L.:

I teach him at Columbia! I’m not the only one!

Yes .. Well. I am sorry for your students. Because they are not happy in life. This sort of thing will not make them stronger. Oh no. It will leave them crawling on the round.

Dr. L.:

1988 V14N1 p207

ARTAUD’S SELF-PORTRAIT 1946

one is no longer in touch with anything, not even with stones. Doesn’t this sort of question seem valid to you? I mean, that’s what thinking is about. Or writing. Perhaps the function of literature is to imagine a world where men are like stones, and not only blurred images on the television screen. Dr. L.: If you’ll take a look at my article, you’ll see that in the end he found it necessary to emasculate … man … he commits … impure actions. That’s all he had in his head. Artaud was unhappy to be the way he was.Yes, unhappy. So he wanted others to be like him. In emasculating others, he wanted to reduce them to his own dimension.

which Artaud rejects a few years later as priestly bewitchment. But the ones written in Mexico are very beautiful, crystalline. Dr. L.:

I don’t know them.

It’s an extremely serene vision of the world. Which is unusual with Artaud. Everything is in its place. God, men, stones. Men are no longer the centre of the universe. They’re hewn in stone and the stones are gods. There’s a sort of material harmony... a rocky, primitive, organic feel for it.

S.L.:

You find an equivalence between stones and gods harmonious? Dr. L.:

That’s what the Greeks said. Why can we accept certain things from the Druids, accept their beliefs as legitimate -- but when someone takes himself for a Druid, and becomes a Druid again, we lock him up.

S.L.:

To go from Artaud to Christ himself then back to the Druids is quite a feat. Dr. L.:

S.L.:

We were talking about stones and gods.

Yes yes yes. I have not lost sight of our topic. Civilization at that time could allow itself to speak about stones, even to sacralize them. Why not?

Dr. L.:

S.L.: The Stone Age isn’t so far away. Anyway, when one thinks about it, 1500 or 2000 years of history doesn’t amount to very much. And when one starts thinking about such things, starts asking oneself what it’s like to live and to live in a society like ours when one no longer knows very well what a god is, when

p208 V14N1 1988

S.L.: In the 19th century, sexuality was a private thing. Right now it’s so spreadout and widely advertised that you could see that as a kind of emasculation. Sex isn’t very sexual anymore. Its on billboards, on TV, on the couch … everywhere. Sex is society. You know, America isn’t even America. It’s the world … just faster and more raw. It speeds things up. Brings to light things which elsewhere, here for instance, are still in the shade. A little like Artaud did in his head, in isolation, with his nutty notions…

Your ideas about civilization are rather curious, Monsieur. Allow me not to share them. I talked about God with Antonin Artaud. I could only guess what shameful erotic manoeuvres his demons were exercising over him. Artaud thought his failure to uphold personal purity would prevent the Second Coming. Oh Jansenism, how much harm did you do? Artaud conceived of human love in a very strange way, turning the human procreative body into an object of abjection. I told him that the act of love was a giving up of oneself in abandon -- a death achieved by thinking of the other’s joy. Throughout the centuries, Christ has offered us a symbolic re-creation of his Creation. I tried to make Artaud perceive of abandon existing outside the sphere of sin by comparing it to his own ideas about art and death. But he was chained to a vision of a world repulsively organic and profaned. The virginity that he wanted so badly was outside of the body; he fled in panic and disgust when confronted by any living matter and saw only bestiality informed by horror. Artaud protected himself violently against any kind of true abandon, rallying only his darker forces at the expense of real creativity. I wanted him to see how much plentitude and joy he might find in God. Artaud pursued an evangelism devoid of love, the hero of a private drama. Sometimes I shudder at the mere thought of what might have happened had Artaud actually looked for disciples, who might well have been attracted by the magical quality Dr. L.:

of his speech and his inspired appearance. What would have been the future of the human race? Artaud was impotent, finally to conceive of Christian love and love itself. I felt obliged to make him understand the unorthodoxy of these views. In my letter of 18 July 1943 I offered him a few awkward and perhaps not very charitable comments suggesting that only the whole of a life turned towards the glory of God could stand up to diabolical possession. When a crazy person writes and his texts are read and taught, they become literature. What do you do with this kind of literature? Why do you read it? Why shouldn’t you read it?

S.L.:

Dr. L.: Yes. Well. Artaud will be forgotten very quickly. I don’t understand him anymore. I don’t even feel like listening to him. He has nothing to teach me. Not about himself, nor about me, nor about man. Especially not about man. Artaud won’t last.

Don’t you even try to forget the man you’ve known when you read Artaud’s texts? To read him in the same way you read Racine …

S.L.:

Oh no! He speaks to me. He speaks to me anyway. He doesn’t say much to me, but yes, he speaks.

Dr. L.:

S.L.:

And what does he say?

Oh! Images. He throws images around. It’s pretty empty. I’m sure that in 30-50 years no one will remember any of this.

Dr. L.:

What writer of Artaud’s generation will be remembered … in your opinion?

S.L.:

Dr. L.: I don’t occupy myself with literature for my personal amusement. I hope to find an essential forms of civilization … that’s all. S.L.:

In literature?

In … In life. I didn’t do literature with Artaud, you understand. I had a first-hand experience with him. It wouldn’t have meant much, if there wasn’t so much controversy. But if you want to know what I got from it, it gave me a notion of normalcy, the picture of the normal man. I mean the man able to live in society.

Dr. L.:

“I tried to make Artaud perceive of abandon existing outside the sphere of sin by comparing it to his own ideas about art and death. But he was chained to a vision of a world repulsively organic and profaned.”

L E H C I

O r i g i n a l

transcription

L I S A

WEBSTER.

Tr a n s l a t i o n

from original

French

to

M

b y

F

OUCAULT

was interviewed on national French radio in the late seventies by an interviewer somewhat unfamiliar with his work, resulting in an often amusing yet revealing discussion with the famous post-structuralist philosopher and critic.

English by

RON ALD B.

DESOUSA . 1989 V15N1 p209

Michel Foucault, you are a Professor at the College of MF: Of Course. Lucky he set the example! (laughter) Who France, a philosopher and thinker. You are 48 years was keener than Nietzsche on telling us what was good and old. You are immersed in learning. How does one what was evil? But to want not to think in those terms is arrive at learning? MICHEL FOUCAULT: Arrive... really to want to avoid this or that current conception of you’re born to it, you know. For someone like me, brought good or evil. To undermine the barriers, to unsettle, to up as a provincial petty bourgeois, learning comes with your spread uncertainty, to foster osmosis, passages: I think that’s baby bottle before you even go to primary school. Knowledge what matters. You often hover on the border of seriwas the rule of existence: you had to be first, you always had ousness and levity. Sometimes, it’s hard to follow you. to be a bit better in class… So I’ve never arrived at learning, MF: It saddens me to be told that. My ambition is to write I’ve always been splashing about in it. You were lucky. in such way as to give my readers a kind of physical pleasMF: What’s luck? When I say I’ve ure. That almost strikes me as a been splashing about in learning, writer’s politeness. The book actually it’s because I would soon that launched your career was be rid of it. Since you can’t do that, your History of Madness. Why “For someone like me, you look for a different angle, madness? MF: It so happens something that isn’t part of learnthat for biographical reasons I was brought up as a provincial ing but should be. Someone exposed to the true nature of asypetty bourgeois, learning remarked the other day that May lums. I heard the voices of the hun68 was an insurrection against dreds of thousands of people who comes with your baby bottle learning. But on the contrary , it got locked up, fell in the hole, and was a rebellion against the kind of suffered, and spoke out, and before you even go to primary learning that amounted to a prohibawled. Like anyone else I was school. Knowledge was the bition against knowing certain overwhelmed by those voices. I was things. In fact, May 68 was a about to say: like anyone except rule of existence: you had to pulling down of barriers, and psychiatrists: not that I have anyintrusion of a new kind of learning. thing against them, but to them, be first, you always had to be I felt rather at home in it, myself: howls have become inaudible, I’ve always been interested in the because they come filtered through a bit better in class…” underside, the “lower depths,” as their institutionalised learning. Nietzsche would say. Still, you Do you still think of the asylum have a lot of diplomas. MF: I as your universe? MF: No, suppose I do. Do you find not really. But it was the asylum it unwieldy, that satchel-full of diplomas? MF: The that first set for me the problem that still haunts me: the ones one hasn’t deserved, one remembers with pleasure. The problem of power. Knowledge and domination are intimateunwieldy ones are those one had to work for — after three ly linked. I saw that most nakedly in the asylum, where the years of cramming, your style gets cramped, you’re stuck apparently serene and speculative learning of the psychiawith ready-made ways of thinking, that’s really tough to get trist is absolutely inseparable from an amazing meticulous rid of. Do you teach? MF: I lecture in a rather special system of hierarchical power. That, in effect, is the asylum. place, the College of France, where my function is precisely One thing that particularly fascinated me was the transition not to teach. The normal teacher starts off with a dose of from the vocabulary of madness to the vocabulary of sickguilt: “There are things you should know.” Then comes a ness: it looks like a change in terminology, but it’s really dose of obligation: “I am going to teach you what you should seizure of power. And, in the end, this psychiatric power is know.” Third comes the checking up stage: exams. A whole all the more powerful when it spreads beyond its birthplace, series of power relations! At the College of France, though, the asylum: you find psychiatrists in schools, in families, in the audience only comes if they feel like it. Twelve times a law courts and jails…. Psychiatry has become a general year, it’s the teacher who gets examined. At any rate, I get instrument of subjection and normalization. In your terrible stage freight before my lectures, just as I used to feel book Discipline and Punishment (Surveiller et Punir, at exam time. I feel the public is coming to check up on my or literally Surveillance and Punishment. The English work: if they’re not interested I get rather dejected! title misses the idea of surveillance, central to the Are there things it’s essential to learn? MF: The book and to this segment of the present conversation) first thing one should learn, is that learning is something you analyzed the relation between crime and the methprofoundly erotic. In fact it’s quite an achievement, the way ods used by society to punish crime. When did the teachers manage to make learning unpleasant, depressing, institution of punishment begin? MF: There is grey, unerotic! We need to understand how that serves the probably no human society that doesn’t punish. But what’s needs of society. Imagine what would happen if people got especially characteristic of our society is surveillance. As late into as big a frenzy about learning as they do about sex. as the eighteenth century, a huge number of people effectiveCrowds shoving and pushing at school doors! It would be a ly escaped the law. The power to punish was discontinuous, complete social disaster. You have to make learning seem full of holes. That’s why, when you did catch a criminal, the rebarbative if you want to restrict the numbers of people who penalties were awful: all the more so because of the need to have access to knowledge. You’ve claimed one should “make an example.” It seems to me that it is only since the refrain from thinking in terms of good and evil. How do beginning of the nineteenth century that society has sought you feel now about that maxim? MF: All the peoto extend its power to punish so that, in principle, nobody ple who say you shouldn’t think in terms of good and evil are could escape. The actual punishment could then be milder. thinking in just that way themselves! Nietzsche. Nowadays, of course, magistrates still punish, and punish 1989 V15N1 p211

heavily, but if you ask them to justify punishment they talk not about expiation but about correction: they think of themselves as engineers of behaviour. Discipline and Punishment begins in horror, with a long description of the torture to death of the regicide Damien, witnessed by a crowd of happy spectators. Could that happen now, those happy spectators? MF: That’s a grave question. There’s not the slightest doubt that if we left punishment up to what’s called public opinion, the results would he frightful, frightful. Surely we’ve progressed since the torture of Damien! MF: Of course. You want me to say that we don’t use torture anymore. That’s true, but only within the penal system. But torture has merely been displaced to another institution, an institution that dates precisely the time torture disappeared: the police. You had to have the police as soon as the goal of the system was to punish everyone instead of making a few spectacular examples. But the police, as you know use increasingly violent means to extract the truth. But the West has no monopoly on the use of torture. MF: The interesting thing is that the mechanism of surveillance has proved to be such a terrific invention that it’s spread almost as easily as a steam engine. Still, you won’t stop people from thinking that a crime must be paid for by suffering. M F : True, but that thirst for vengeance has been transferred to a social institution, and people don’t recognize themselves in that institution. Michel Foucault, do you have children? M F: No, no, no. I’m not married. Well if you did have children, and your children were harmed, how would you react? Did you think about that when you wrote? MF: No doubt my book isn’t clear… But it’s absolutely wrong to see it as some sort of apology for crime! I don’t say you shouldn’t punish, I don’t advocate giving murderers a crown! You just want to humanize punishment. MF: No! What I would like to show is that the way we punish nowadays is tightly linked to certain forms of power and political control, common to both capitalist and socialist societies. Old fashioned punishment seemed to answer to a taste for horror: rubbing salt into wounds… did that stem from ignorance? MF: On the contrary, it was a very precise ritual, linked to another form of political power, exercised in the name of the sovereign in his physical person. You have to think of the great ceremony of public torture as a sort of political ritual, like coronations. In the body of the tortured, in his wounds and his screams, the physical power of the king was manifest in all its brilliance and ferocity. But will there ever be a time when every citizen will be free to do what he wants? MF: No! Individual relationships are also relations of power. If there’s a polemical aspect to my writings, it’s in my insistence that people p212 V15N1 1989

have to ignore those relations of power. In traditional academic philosophy, individual relations are viewed as dialogues: either you understand one another or you don’t. On the Marxist analysis, they’re essentially determined by relations of production. But it seems to me that our lives are plotted according to relations of power that are just as fundamental as economic or discursive ones. To reveal those relations of power, in my mind at least, is to try and hand them back to those who are involved in them. You’re very trusting: you think people can become better... MF: Maybe not become better. But people must he able to increase the quantity of pleasure of which they are capable. Is that a pessimistic diagnosis? MF: You have to he pessimistic, in the sense that you have to paint things black if you want to make future possibilities more vivid. I’m vain enough to think that the fight I’m involved in, against the encroachment of psychiatry in our lives, is an important one, but my own contribution to this process does-

“Even making love involves power relations, charged with eroticism. That hasn’t been studied much. There’s so much pleasure in giving orders: there’s also pleasure in taking them. This pleasure of power – well, there’s a topic for study.” n’t strike me as very important. Nothing would change much if I and my books didn’t exist. I rather like that feeling — I find it almost physically pleasurable to think of the causes I’m concerned with just passing through me, of thousands of people and books going in the same direction as me but ultimately flowing way beyond me. Michel Foucault, I get the impression that you would like to get rid of your great burden of learning. I almost get the feeling you’d like to start over from scratch, elsewhere. MF: Funny you should say that, because actually it’s quite true. And what about that “elsewhere”: can you define it? MF: Not at all! Anyway maybe I won’t do it: maybe I’ll just keep treading the same ground, fighting the same fight against the normalizations that confine us. Maybe I’m just more normalized than I think I am, or than I’d like to be. We were speaking of power. Do you like to take orders? MF: Even making love involves power relations, charged with eroticism. That hasn’t been studied much. There’s so much pleasure in giving orders: there’s also pleasure in taking them. This pleasure of power — well, there’s a topic for study.

BLADE

Now B.J. you are asking me to tell you in one

R UNNER

sentence what

It’s

this film is about? I’m telling you it is too big for one sentence – even a life sentence. For starters it’s about the National Health Insurance we don’t got. about

plain

middle-class

middle-income

Joe, the $15,000-a-year boy, sweating out two jobs, I.R.S. wringing the moonlight dollars out of him to keep the niggers and the spics on welfare and medicare so they can keep up their strength

to

mug

his

grandmother,

rape

his

sister, and bugger his ten-year-old son. How

F

I

C

T

I

O

N

B

Y

much money does 15G Joe have in the bank after I.R.S. hits him for the service? Less than

WILLIAM

S.

BURROUGHS

nothing. Can he afford to pay $300 a day for a hospital bed?

1989 V15N1 p213

Pushers on welfare and medicare lean out of a Mercedes and

gangs, mountaineers and steeple-jacks. A sky boy steps off his penthouse

spit in his face.... ”IS THIS WHAT I PAY TAXES FOR?” “We gotta be careful of ethnic slurs.”

into a parachute on guide wires that drop him to a street-level landing. The parachute is retracted by hand-operated winches and pulleys, or a delco

“Well it’s the way some folks feel. Part of the whole picture. Fascism is defeated in the end by the American dream.”

motor. (The sky boys compete with the subs for control of electrical service in the lower city.) Or the sky boy may use wire slides with a jump seat

This film is about overpopulation and the growth of vast service

under the carriage, zig-zagging down from landing platform to landing platform. Or he may skip from roof to roof in his hang-glider, or use his auto-

bureaucracies. The FDA and AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen. You’re dying of cancer, see? The doctor gives

gyro parachute. Buildings are joined by suspension bridges, a maze of

you no hope, wants you out of his office as quick as possible because you don’t carry health insurance or qualify for medicare. All he gives you

platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts. Inside these buildings, light elevators that can carry several hundred pounds have been installed.

is a grudging RX for darvon. Any croaker gives a dying cancer patient darvon should be broken down to bedpan duty in an animal hospital.

During the 1984 riots some jokers dumped all the fish from the aquariums, all the reptiles and amphibians, into the waterways of New York

So you want to do something about your big C. You’ve heard about laetrile, Reich’s orgone accumulators, a doctor in France with a magnet-

— and now fresh water sharks cruise the Hudson. Water boas, alligators, piranha fish, electric eels, infest the subway tunnels, the swamps and

ic machine, another French doctor who has cured cancer with inocuations of Chagas’ disease, and someone in Rumania.... Can you even try these remedies? Fuck no, The FDA won’t let them on the market — they even destroyed Reich’s writings. Now who is to decide whether I take laetrile or use an orgone accumulator for my terminal cancer? Me or the

...America goes underground.

FDA? After all it’s me that’s dying. Is this freedom? Is this what America stands for? So America goes underground. They all make their own medicines in garages, basements, and lofts, and provide their own service.

They all make their own

This manual is in every pocket: YOU DON’T NEED A DOCTOR. All the kids learn to give injections at school. You don’t need a doctor for such simple complaints as leprosy, syphilis, typhoid fever, malaria, dysentery. All you need is access to the medications. To alleviate the pain and discomfort of these and other complaints, salutary draughts of laudanum should be administered at eight-hour inter-

medicines in garages, basements, and lofts, and provide their own service. This manual is in every pocket: YOU DON’T NEED A DOCTOR.

vals, supplemented by supportive injections of morphine if any residual unease remains outstanding, since the euphoria and relief afforded by an adequate dosage of opiates is one of the solaces of illness. No medicine chest should be without God’s Own Medicine. Mom wears the key around her neck. There she is, reaching for it on a Saturday Evening Post cover. This film is about America. What America was and what America

canals, sometimes materializing in swimming pools, bathtubs, and toilet bowls. All the zoo animals were also released — and killer bears now roam

could be, and how those who try to stifle the American dream are defeated- We have been taught that if you put a better product on the free market, the superior product will sell. So you got the seven-year Amazon Pill and a loft lab. Are you going to get the OK from the FDA to put the big drug combines off the Pill market? You should live so long. In this film we don’t need their OK. Medicine has gone underground. And underground medicine saves the world from disaster. This film is about cancer and that’s a powerful subject. Already doctors are talking about an epidemic. In the film a strain of epidemic flashcancer is stopped by virus B-23, a virus of biological mutation which restores humanity to pristine health. This film is about a city we all know and love, a city which has come to represent all cities. In the year 2014 New York, world center for underground medicine, is the most glamorous, the most dangerous, the most exotic, vital, far-out city the world has ever seen. The only public transport is the old IRT limping along at five miles an hour through dimly-lit tunnels. The other lines are derelict. Hand-propelled and steam-driven cars transport produce, the stations have been converted into markets. The lower tunnels are flooded, giving rise to an underground Venice. The upper reaches of derelict skyscrapers, without elevator service since the riots, have been taken over by hang-glider and autogyro

Central Park. The man-eating leopard on Third Avenue was finally shot from a tree surgeon’s rig, with a half-eaten faggot as bait. Other species have settled down to co-exist, the jackals, wolves, foxes and hyenas mating with the vast wild dog packs. This is the background against which the film revolves. Any treatment, any drug, any vice can be found here for a price. This film is about a second chance for Billy the blade runner, and for all humanity. For the virus makes a hole in time, and Billy steps into the past — which is also the future. This film is about the future of medicine and the future of man. For man has no future unless he can throw off the dead past and absorb the underground of his own being. In the end, underground medicine merges with the medical establishment, to the great benefit of both. The large number of trained practitioners who are not licensed doctors takes a vast burden off the profession, drastically reducing the price of medical care. Experimental drugs and treatments now have access to all the equipment and resources of modern laboratories. Doctors learn, in addition to Western medicine: acupuncture, osteopathy, herbal remedies, and all methods of Eastern healing. New branches of medicine evolve. Prophylactic medicine... “If you get sick, I pay you.” Pros are taught to consider the patient as a functioning organism in relation to his entire

p214 V15N1 1989

environment. To what illness would such an organism be subject? How can

“The Wall was built after the Health Act Riot of 1984. The Lower

such illnesses be averted many years before they develop? Far from being computerized, diagnosis becomes a fine art. Some can diagnose a case

City can be cut off and the wall manned with troops on half an hour’s notice. A similar wall cuts Harlem off from central Manhattan ...... ”

entirely by the sense of smell. The doctor sniffs. He shakes his head with a terrible smile.

The helicopter moves south... rubble, ruined buildings, vacant lots. It looks like London after The Blitz. Few signs of reconstruction, except

“I am referring your case to the coroner.”

for sporadic patchwork. Many streets are blocked with refuse and obvi-

Others rely on disease-sniffing dogs. The dog sniffs, then throws back its head and howls. The dog bares its teeth and growls ominously at

ously impassable. Here and there, shabby open-air markets and vegetable gardens in vacant lots. Some are crowded, others virtually desert-

an incipient tumor. Young and attractive doctors use sexual contact as a means of diag-

ed. Crowded squares and streets abruptly empty for no apparent reason. There are improvised boats on the rivers, loaded with produce.

nosis. Kirilian photography, voice-print and handwriting analysis are standard procedures.

By 1980, pressure had been growing to put through a National Health Act. This was blocked by the medical lobby, doctors protesting

Now here are a few sample shots. He riffles through stills from the movie like a deck of cards....

that such an Act would mean the virtual end of private practice, and that the overall quality of medical service would decline. The strain on an already precarious economy was also cited. Drug companies, fearing that price regulation would slash profits, spent millions to lobby against the proposed bill and ran full-page ads in all the leading newspapers. And above all, the health insurance companies screamed that the Act was unnecessary and could only lead to increased taxes for inferior service. Here is the middle-income bracket citizen in his rundown apartment. The roof leaks and he has been trying for two weeks to get it fixed. The landlord does nothing. The citizen has just shared a tin of dog food with his family. “Here we are, paying to keep the niggers and the spics and the beatniks in hotels and hospitals. We pay for their stinking dope habits, give them money not to work, and what about us? Can we afford to spend $500 a day for a hospital bed?” They find a spokesman in the Reverend Parcival, who

+++++ Helicopter view of Manhattan.... “Overpopulation has lead to ever-increasing governmental control over the private citizen, not on the old-style police-state models of oppression and terror, but in terms of work, credit, housing, retirement benefits, and medical care: services that can be withheld. These services are computerized. No number, no service. However, this has not produced the brainwashed standardized human units postulated by such linear prophets as George Orwell. Instead, a large percentage of the population has been forced underground. How large, no one knows. These people are numberless .” Newborn babies howl. Subdivisions, housing projects grow. Computers buzz in Con Ed, I.R.S., Welfare, Medicare, Health Insurance. Forms, notices, bills pour out. Exasperated citizen packs one suitcase and walks out of his Levittown house. He rakes some leaves together, dumps a stack of forms on top, and sets the heap on fire. Old woman across the street rushes to the phone. Squad car arrives and gives him a summons for burning leaves. As the squad car drives away he drops the summons into the ashes. He walks away with his suitcase. Aerial view of the Wall that runs along 23rd street to the Hudson and the East River...

puts out a paper known as The Watchdog, with a cartoon strip: Blond Nordic couple carry sick child to a hospital. A black doctor throws them into the street “Unqualified filth.” He welcomes a Puerto Rican youth who has skinned his knuckle in a brawl. “Come right in my boy. Nurse, quarter grain G.O.M. for this gentleman.” +++++ “Heroin was legalized for addicts in 1980. The United States Health Service took over distribution through government clinics and built up an intricate bureaucracy, with police and investigators who turned out to be totally corrupt. Many people who were not addicts got on the program and made a comfortable living selling off their allowance.” Here is Mr. Middle Income again. He has a painful and disabling case of shingles. He has just paid a doctor $50 for a visit. The doctor refuses to prescribe codeine. “Only thing I can prescribe is Whitfield’s ointment.” And here is one big happy welfare family. Knock on any Harlem door. Two boys on heroin maintenance, a daughter in the federal leprosarium at Carrville, Louisiana, one retarded in King’s State, one muscular dystrophy on a special program. Ma collects on all of them — loss of support allowance. No work, no worries. Color T.V. Remains of a huge turkey on the table. Ma helps herself to a liberal dose of her own special heroin cough syrup to keep out the winter colds. Pa is eating strawberry ice cream. The kids sprawl on the floor studying travel folders. They can’t decide whether to go to Lexington for the summer cure (“The Country

1989 V15N1 p215

Club” now earns its moniker with miles of woodlands, hiking, horses,

into a rewarding way of life.”

golf, tennis, boating, and fishing available to inmates), or to visit Sis in Carrville.

“Is this what I pay taxes for? Queer sex orgies and injections of marijuana?”

“My God,” Pagroans, “I got an ice cream headache. Give me a

“In our splendid facilities — provided by the kind American government — we do not have to concern ourselves with assholes like you who work for a living. May you

... underground machine merges with the medical establishment, to the great benefit of both. The large number of trained practitioners who are not licensed doctors takes a vast burden off the profession, drastically reducing the price of medical care.

prolapse into the privy from which you emerged.” Mafiosos lean out of their Cadillacs to spit in the taxpayer’s face. “Who you, worka fora living? I speet in your crumb face.” And many youths claimed disability, saying they could not co-exist with disgusting taxpaying slobs. “They make me so nervous I have been unable to work. I claim full disability and heroin maintenance.” “When the third National Health Act was defeated in the Senate as a result of shameless lobbying and obstructive tactics, the Health Act Riots of

shot, son, quick... it’s going away...” Doctor hands boy his heroin script with a corrupt leer… “Now don’t let me catch you selling any off the top.”

1984 broke out. It is estimated that 500,000 people died in New York City alone, and property damage was in the billions. Other cities counted comparable casualties. The total fatalities throughout the U.S. ran close to ten million. Ironically, the high death rate was largely

He picks up the phone. “Nurse, how many lepers out there bucking for Carrville?” The traffic in Hansen’s bacillus is rampant. It’s now known as “the white stuff.” Just scratch a patch of skin with a needle and rub it on, and six months later... Now lepers stream out of an old paddle-wheel river-boat singing

due to the government’s efforts to forestall the outbreak by strict weaponcontrol measures. The National Firearms Registration Act of 1982 debarred anyone with a criminal record or any record of drug addiction or mental illness, and all those on the welfare rolls, from buying or possessing any firearms of any description including air guns. This left the disaffected middle-class in possession of more firearms than any other group.

“Home Sweet Home”. Others drop off at lonely sidings, frogs croaking.... “Welcome to the Hansen family. You’ll just have to imagine my hand... never bounce me off the program. They can arrest you, and return you to civilian life if you aren’t careful. Now I handle the best white stuff in Carrville. Stay on the program with Doc White’s Ointment.” Along the bayous, lakes, and rivers are the cottages covered with bougainvillea, roses and morning glories, where the languid lepers

“Relying on stockpiled weapons and the sympathy of the police and the National Guard, Parcival’s Soldiers of Christ now talked openly of taking over New York and slaughtering all ethnic minorities, beatniks, dope fiends, queers and longhairs. In fact they talked too much and scared too many people, dropping dark hints about international bankers and Wall Street and the Yellow Peril. Did this mean the Jews, the wealthy and the Chinese were also on the list? Powerful anonymous figures decided it

lounge smoking pot and opium from their gardens, shooting government H, oranges, mangoes and avocados growing in the backyard, catching catfish bass and perch from the front porch, or opening tins from the government store. Carrville is now a huge area of swampland, stretching from the Great Thicket of East Texas to the Everglades of Florida. On swamp islands strange rites are celebrated. Naked youths with alligator masks dance before the Gator Goat God who has the head of an alligator and the feet of a goat. Mardi Gras time in Carrville. A languid young aristocrat drifts by on a flower float, one leg eaten off at the knee, the stump phosphorescent in the gathering dusk. A radioactive strain my dear, terribly chic. Violet lagoons where fishes of emerald dive for the moon. And here is a stunning young leper in Cleopatra drag on her barge with a dishy Marc Antony....

might be prudent to provide effective opposition to Parcival’s followers. In any case a document known as The Devil’s Diary leaked out to the minorities most immediately and specifically threatened. “The Devil’s Diary had been prepared on orders from the CIA in the 1960’s. It contained detailed instructions for assembling weapons from materials easily available in any grocery or hardware store: black powder, fire bombs, plus a battery of biological and chemical weapons. How to make botulism from canned bouillon; how to make nerve gas from bug sprays; how to make chlorine, nitroglycerine, phosgene, nitric oxide, arsenical gas. It was these weapons, delivered and supplemented by crossbows, blowguns, slingshots, and black powder grenades, that occasioned the staggering casualties.” August 6, 1984...Parcival’s Soldiers of Christ have gathered in Central Park. Unopposed by the police, they now split into two columns marching north and south. A series of paintings like Custer’s Last Stand record the ensuing battles: The Siege of St. Vincent’s at 12th Street Doctors, nurses and orderlies fight the rioters with scalpels, saws and bedpans. Ether bomb explodes in a corridor, stopping the rioters long enough so a doctor can pass patients down a laundry chute to safety. The hospital is on fire. A Chinese orderly throws copper into a vat of nitric acid,

+++++ And the whole reservation is fenced and guarded. “So we leave the happy people of Carrville, who, through some inner source of courage and strength, have turned their terrible affliction

p216 V15N1 1989

releasing nitric oxide. This is a delayed-action poison. Rioters who inhale

He holds the fish up and pulls up to the cobblestone wharf.

the fumes collapse an hour or two later. The March to The Sea

“Got beeg one meester. Very good price. Twenty dollar? What you come here for? Take drug live two hundred years maybe? Plenty good

The Soldiers advance on the Village. Marshals are evacuating the area, concentrating their forces

monkey nuts? Whole new preeck? Too many rug rats? Here seven year Pill meester.”

in the lofts and warehouses and

Lower Manhattan is a world center for underground medicine. Any

derelict buildings of lower Manhattan. A number of gay

drug, any operation, any treatment can be had here for a price. In this maze of tunnels, canals, abandoned buildings, lofts and basements, live

bookstores, art galleries, and liquor stores are booby-trapped

all the fugitives and outlaws from the Service State. Here is Pop Street, where you can buy the brain stuff - fifty times stronger than morphine. It

with nitric oxide, arsine, phosgene, and botulism. Blood-mad

was thought at first to be non-addictive, but this proved to be an error. A pop puts the addict in a state of suspended animation, a point of almost

and frustrated at not finding the victims they had anticipated, the

zero metabolism from which he thaws out rotten like twice-frozen meat. He needs steady pops to stay frozen.

Soldiers charge into the area

And here comes the pop man in his electric canoe, all black and

below 8th Street, many of them dying on their feet from various

silver to blend with the dark water and the warehouse windows... Needless to say, the sale or manufacture of this drug is illegal.

poisons they have absorbed. Cobble stones from roof

A flourishing black market in sperm heralds a long-range genetic war. Meester?”

tops... The Soldiers of Christ rush into buildings to be met by a cloud of chlorine rolling down the stairs. Black powder grenades launched from slingshots and crossbows loaded with crushed glass and sodium cyanide. Silent blowguns with cyanide

Rock stars and movie actors sell off their sperm to the underground banks. Sperm trafficking is a felony, but few spermers or underground doctors are arrested and still fewer prosecuted. Obviously, the Health Inspectors are turning a blind eye and an open palm.

and botulism darts. By the time the Soldiers of Christ realize that the opposition is not playing fair at all, they have suffered heavy losses — and now the partisans launch hand-to-hand attacks with machetes and spears and swords. Seizing firearms from the dead and dying, they close in behind the Crusaders who, caught in a deadly crossfire and dropping from delayed-action poisons, are forced into the bay, where many perish

Lower Manhattan, 2014. Here clients come for operations, drugs, treatments, that cannot be bought for any amount of money through legal channels ... drugs suppressed by the drug manufacturers from longrange profit motives and in turn suppressed by the State bureaucracy. Apomorphine as a cure for addiction suppressed by the heroin industry and the drug enforcement agencies. Suppressed after the legalization of

from drowning. Survivors split into small groups and, abandoning their holy crusade, take to raping, looting and killing in the middle-class neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan….

heroin for addicts, to keep as many addicts as possible on the program so as to maintain personnel and appropriations. Neither drug manufacturers nor the medical bureaucracy want to solve such a convenient problem. In 1956 a contraceptive drug developed by the Amazon Indians was submitted to an American drug company for testing and eventual distribution. One dose prevents pregnancy for seven years. And one

+++++ Lower Manhattan in 2014 has less a look of having been rebuilt than resettled. Services are limited. Only one subway line is still operating. The derelict tunnels are occupied by delco gangs, clandestine laboratories, rats and wild dogs who snarl and snap at passers-by through rusty subway grates. They are maintained by the occupants to discourage intruders. A mysterious personage known as the King of Subways has his headquarters in Queens Plaza — a dazzling construction of subway cars, change booths, turnstiles, so that part of the structure is always in motion. You get on a diner train for dinner, and get off at a northern Carrville outpost, frogs croaking in New Jersey swamps. Vegetable gardens are everywhere — on roofs, in vacant lots and terraces and basements. Many streets are blocked with refuse since the riots. The potholes are enlarged and used as fish ponds. A reclamation project called for a series of canals across Lower Manhattan to substitute waterways for trucks, owing to the fuel shortage. The project was not completed. The canals stop in a dead-end of rusty locks and machinery. Houses along the derelict canals are sought after, though some can’t get used to the damp and the mist. The fish are coming back.... +++++ Boy fishing from a concrete mixer pulls in a five-pound sea bass.

dose of another drug allows conception. Here we have a precise method of population control, at a time when overpopulation is an ever more urgent problem, Drug companies rejected the drug, since it would cut their profits. They could sell a pill a day forever, so who wanted to know about a Pill that lasts seven years? The drug was ignored from a profit motive. Subsequently outlawed by the sterilization bureaucracy, this drug is available on the underground market. Loft drug labs are not thinking in long-range terms. The shoestring entrepreneur, the innovator, the eccentric, the adventurer, long banished to limbo by the coalition of the big drug companies and the FDA, reappear. Man in Amazon jungle collecting the contraceptive vine...basement lab...drug in the street. .. “Amazon pill meester? Very good price...$5oo...” There were of course regrettable incidents, in which the wrong product was marketed.... Man gargles no-cavity mouthwash and all his teeth fall out. Sometimes standards of cleanliness

and purity in the underground laboratories left much to be desired....

flurry of snow. He turns from the window, sniffing, and begins examining

Filthy laboratory in a former urinal, cockroaches in the cultures... And there were laboratories with doubtful objectives, such as

the room in a methodical manner. He finds it behind a radiator: a short metallic stalk emerging like a periscope from the floorboards. At the end of

super- habit-forming drugs like the Blues, and biological weapons. Essential to underground medicine are the blade runners, who

the stalk, a glistening crystal bead. There is a little pile of sawdust beside the device. Flash of erect penis with a listening bead of lubricant.

transfer the actual drugs, instruments and equipment from the suppliers

Sleepy young voice: “What is it Billy?”

to the clients and doctors and underground clinics. Some of the underground laboratories are well funded and staffed,

Billy puts a finger to his lips. He makes a motion of looking through a telescope wiggles his ears. The other boy throws him a towel from the

and even the lower city grapevine does not know exactly what they are doing. Probably they are working on selective plagues and genetic engi-

bed and he drops it over the bug. He stalks back to the bed, his shorts sticking out at the fly. He stops at the foot of the bed and pulls his shorts

neering. There is talk of a “final solution to the problem of the sterile drones,” and of blueprints for a race of supermen.

down and, his dick flicks out like a switch-blade as Billy clicks his tongue. He kicks his shorts over his shoulder and stands there, shaking his hands

Every underground doctor needs a blade runner, since possession of illegal surgical instruments and drugs is a felony for a doctor, as evi-

above his head as if acknowledging the applause of a vast crowd. Roberts has thrown back the sheet and is sprawled naked with a hardon, one foot

dence of illegal practice, but a misdemeanor for a private citizen. Also,

sideways on the floor showing the dirty sole. They look at each other and

the blade runners know every tunnel, alley, canal, slide, bridge and catwalk in the intricate maze of the lower city. Most of the blade runners are

their throbbing phalluses pick up the same rhythm — throb throb throb — heartbeats like drums in the dark room. Flash of signal drums and bleep-

boys in their teens, and as minors, treated leniently by the courts when they are apprehended. Blade runners keep the underground doctors in

ing heart beat recorders. Billy does a slow-motion pratfall, legs in the air, applauding with his feet as Roberts pivots between his legs and they do a

business.

slow-motion underwater act, Billy squirming like a clam, flushing pink and purple and iridescent as the radiator starts gurgling and trilling and thumping like a copulating dinosaur and they ride the radiator sound-effects to a chorus of tremendous thumps that shake the old building to its foundation.

+++++ The Blade Runner. Flash of nude boy with Mercury sandals and a doctor’s satchel. A boy is seen running through the streets of Lower Manhattan, dodging from one doorway to another as the credits come on. Blowing snow…dogs bark from the windows of derelict buildings. The boy is leaning into the wind, snow in his face. He collapses for a moment, leaning

Rumble of failing masonry outside. Speed-up dress scene. Outside, a section of the building has collapsed, blocking the street. As they skirt the rubble, a pack of wild dogs rounds the corner. Billy holds up his hand, palm out, and the dogs are deflected as if they have hit a wall — they slide sideways, one throwing a last yipe of terror and defiance over his shoulder.

against a tree. He passes a vacant lot with frozen corn shucks. As he runs, the weather gets milder. Frogs jump into a pothole, weeds and bushes grow up through undergrowth and gulleys full of branches. He is clearly running from something now. Sound of a chainsaw behind him. He stumbles and falls and turns Doctors nurses and screaming as a tree

At an intersection a car full of uncouth youths whirls in front of them, one beefy boy leaning out and screaming “Fucking faggot blade runners!” Billy takes a quick look around. A truck is coming fast. Light changing. He yells....

falls on him in a cloud of sawdust. He sits up in bed, naked to the waist, a young male figure beside him in the dim dawn. Outside, the sound of a motorcycle revving up. He slides out of bed in his shorts, eyes narrow and wary as he parts the blinds and peeks out. Wan sunlight on the pale young face. Police helicopter overhead. Motorcycle takes off and rounds corner in a

p218 V15N1 1989

orderlies fight the rioters with scalpels, saws and bedpans. Ether bomb explodes in a corridor, stopping the rioters long enough so a doctor can pass patients down a laundry chute to safety.

“Get out of that car you yellow cock-sucker….” Brakes slam on — truck’s horn — truck plows into the back of the car, throwing people out of doors, shoes flying across the street as the gas tank explodes. The two boys look at each other, showing their teeth like wild dogs.... They pick their way through a maze of derelict buildings and open a door with a key. This is the blade runner’s coop. It is a large bare room with long tables. The coop walls are covered with paintings, drawings, cartoons and photographs, mostly of the work of anonymous artists. There are pieces stolen from museums or private

collections during the riots: Custer’s Last Stand, The Swimming Hole,

A bulky hardhat steps in front of Roberts and reaches for a gun in

blowups of old photos like Water Rats, Stern Reality, photos by Baron von Gloeden, photos of New York in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

his belt. Roberts brings out his spring knife, it snaps forward on a heavy spring from a tube into the man’s stomach. He grunts and dou-

These pictures convey most of the background material. Posters and placards:

bles over as Roberts pulls the knife free, whipping it back and forth. The front ranks fall backwards into those behind them. A shotgun blast

FREEDOM TO MUTATE

shatters a shop window by the Hand’s head, spattering his face with

ORGONE ENERGY NOT RADIATION U.D. NOT CANCER

red dots. His silencered nail gun is out: sput sput sput. Billy draws his

The decision to release U.D. on a mass scale to combat the cancer epidemic caused a furor when it leaked to the press ... lynch mobs, burning cities.... “Well now it never would

Lower Manhattan, 2014. Here clients come for operations,

have leaked out like that in front of decent people except for some technical hang-ups. We had just two of these artifacts, the crystal skulls, containing the virus code made 23,000 years ago in an area that is now the Gobi desert and was at that time the site of an advanced civilization which was wiped out by the virus. “So we split the project into Team A and Team B. We found that neither A nor B alone was able to reproduce itself and cause secondary infection. Each strain alone was sterile as a mule, and we needed a virgin soil epidemic to stem the foam runway of flash cancer. It was only by uniting the two strains that the virus could reproduce and do its work. So Team A with the A strain and Team B with the B strain are

drugs, treatments, that cannot be bought for any amount of money through legal channels...drugs suppressed by the drug manufacturers from long-range profit motives and in turn suppressed by the State bureaucracy.

trying to join up all over Manhattan and Greater New York City, making a different meet every day. Lynch mobs, false police, real police, agents official and selfappointed, guardians, minute men, watch dogs, the veterans of S.O.C., are all out to stop U.D. Chases and shoot-downs. The whole underground is supporting the teams. The A Team is rescued by hang-glider boys who swoop down from the World Trade Center, their Venus machine guns farting like a herd of stallions. “Meet at T.E…” “That’s Grand Central — let’s go.” At first they slide along unnoticed. But as they approach Grand Central, in an area of small shops, suddenly everyone sees them. Everywhere they look, a suspicious hostile eye peering out of a shop window, turning to look after them, closing in behind them, muttering, rising up in their path - faces of sulphurous hate closing in on all sides, others massed behind them.... “You lousy plague runners ...... “Stop right there.... “You carrying nigger eggs?” “What we carry is our business. Out of the way.”

cyanide and crushed glass pistol and blasts a hole in the crowd. The boys sprint through. The other team is closing in from the other side. The mob scatters. The two teams rush together. “I’m AAAAAAAA!” “I’m BBBBBBB!” Both teams are the same actors now, wearing old style gym clothes with “A” or “B” on the shirt front. They embrace in a blur of snow, confetti and streamers — cheering crowds, VJ Day, VE Day, the Armistice. Station is moving back in time — 1914 passengers, long train whistles...

1989 V15N1 p219

William Gibson

D O U G WALKER

INTERVIEWS

SCIENCE

FICTION

AUTHOR

p220 V15N1 1989

William Gibson was born in Virginia and moved to Canada in 1971. In 1985 his first novel Neuromancer won

K. Dick awards. Gibson

T

the Hugo, Nebula, and Phillip

employs a taut literary

E

technique reminiscent of roman noir style to describe a credible near future where

culture, and market

C

media, technology, pop

imperatives have spun out of

experiment in social

H

control “like a deranged

Darwinism, designed by a

one thumb permanently on

N

bored researcher who kept

the fast forward button.” Gibson’s extrapolations

O

become high-orbit metaphors mapping the dynamics of social change of the current

P

condition. William Gibson has published three novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero,

collection of short stories,

U

Mona Lisa Overdrive and a

Burning Chrome. Doug

interview with Gibson at his

N

Walker conducted a written

home in Vancouver through the quaint and archaic

K

medium of the Canada Post.

1989 V15N1 p221

probably a more direct “cinematic”

a lot of favour with the intellectual

influence. So far I haven’t been able

avant-garde

to figure out quite what screenplays

illustration

are

such

actually

objects

of

some

mysterious. sequel

to

for. They’re I’ve

kind.

It’s

very

of

metaphorical

certain

simulation

key

and

implosion authored by people such

for

and

I’m

doing

and Frederic Jameson. Was any of

friend

John

this “Post-structuralist” theory an

as

Jean

Baudrillard,

Paul

DOUG WALKER: How did you get

another,

involved

in

Shirley, loosely based on my story

influence on your work?

Fiction?

Was

New

read them.

writing it

a

Science conscious

Rose

ideas

cultural

one

my

a

as

a

done

Aliens, with

totemic

as

Hotel

for

Edward

Virilio,

I haven’t

In our present

decision or has it always been a

Pressman. If that one rolls, it’ll be

society, the speed of information

W I L L I A M

directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who

technologies seem to be eroding a

GIBSON: Neither, really. There was

we chose on the basis of her film

sense

an

Near Dark.

history. Do you have any opinions

fascination?

element

of

real

compulsion,

You focus a

of

identity

and

cultural

though I didn’t think writing Science

lot

in

as to how the boosted information

Fiction was a particularly cool thing

your novels. Is there anything that

flow of the future will affect society

to do. Quite the opposite; it felt

you find especially interesting in

and what the forms of adaptation to

terminally geeky. It seemed to come

the subcultures of today?

of

interest

on

subcultures

I

like

I

this condition might be like?

from way down, though. Science

the idea of subcultures generally. It

think I had something like that in

Fiction pretends to be “about the

makes

future,”

Marginally

interesting.

mind in Count Zero, with characters

interesting.

like Bobby Newmark whose sense

greenhouse

Though actually hanging out with

of self, as conveyed in the narrative

effect, bits of Chernobyl in your

anyone whose sense of identity is

voice, derived almost entirely from

salad) seems to require the whole

primarily

third-rate media. Or his mother who

Science Fiction toolkit now.

pretty dull.

The level of detail and technical

of

information

personality

present

but

apprehending

(AIDS,

extremely

in

the

the

vivid

the

stories

and

is

suggests

things

more more

subcultural

tends

to

be

With the concepts

downloading

hardwired

constructs

mainframes

and

into

artificial

literally

lives

in

an

endless

soap

opera called People of Importance. Jack

Womack’s

Ambient

is

one

recent novel that comes to mind as

you’ve done a lot of homework in

intelligence acting as deities, you

having

this area. What were your sources?

give

of

century proles subsist on a video diet

That’s just an illusion I’m apparently

immortality a contemporary edge.

of re-runs of Leave It To Beaver and

good at generating. It basically calls

Do you have any speculations on

I Love Lucy, without seeming to

for the skills a clever English major

how

think of this stuff as being old.

employs to write an “A” paper about

adapt

a

technological possibility?

book

he

hasn’t

opened.

The

our

classic

society

if

might

react

or

downloading

were

a

his

21st-

As a writer you have been creating interesting

characters

for

the

your success the public wants to

that. I don’t think of what I do as

non-fiction The Tomorrow Makers.

consume

“research.” We’re all living in this

(If you think downloading is spooky,

character. How does it feel to deal

massive flood of information… For

this is the place to check out the

with that shift?

me,

possibilities of nanotechnology.) I’m

shift frees me from feeling the need

randomly at fragments in the flow.

not Isaac Asimov; I don’t have ideas

to be interesting.

Has your work been influenced by

about things like that, not on an

action in Neuromancer takes place

first

everyday basis. Whatever sense I

in

Carpenter’s

have of these things emerges more

everyone stays up late, works hard

Escape From New York had some

or

it’s

a

matter

of

The

any specific films?

ten

minutes

of

glancing

John

high-tech

an

interesting

I find that the A lot

bohemia

of

the

where

the

at their chosen obsession, and can

sort of influence on Neuromancer,

then go to an all night bar and talk

but

description of the future has found

shop with like-minded comrades. If

p222 V15N1 1989

comics

were

process.

during

as

Your

Metal

exclusively

a

you

narrative

Heavy

less

possibilities

this;

public to consume and now with

reality,

the

with

of

of

on

The

dealt

“downloading” is Grant Fjermedal’s

illusion

book

theme

technological or otherwise, is just

literary

best

the

you switch console cowboys with

like...” Cornell’s boxes had always

sound, it looks as though it’s going

artists

good

intrigued me, so I went after them in

to be a very dark book.

description of the “scene” of the

Count Zero. I try to do a similar job

have any plans to work outside a

recent

on

you’ve

got

past.

a

pretty

Is

there

any

Mark

Pauline

I

format?

like

satisfied with the result. Pauline’s art

produced. I like making money. I

with a “scene” and your personal

feels to me like an extension of

like

screwing

wrote three years ago turn up in my

and

his

I

development as an artist?

around

with

not

pop-culture

environment and your involvement

Case

I’m

Lisa

knowing that my text will be mass-

with

though

Mona

as

connection

Overdrive,

in

Do you

dangerous

seeing

some

crazed

thing

I

think the main difference between

things

the

the

you’re sixteen, loading empty CO2

Everything

console cowboys and any art scene

cartridges with the heads of kitchen

gone straight into print — generally

I’ve known, at least in Canada, is

matches... I like that.

It

into mass-market print. The idea of

that the cowboys haven’t anywhere

seems

the

producing something in a limited

to go for grants… I was thinking of

reasons your work is so popular is

edition isn’t very exciting for me;

criminals rather than artists, though

that you have a unique talent for

might as well leave it in manuscript.

“bohemia”

creating

I

“scene”

I

is

imagined

probably

for

the

right

in

your

to

back

me

that

images

word here, because the “scene” in

articulate

the

yard

one

that

when

of

perfectly

beauty

and

local

Safeway.

initially

I’ve

It’s ever

assumed

a

kick.

written

that

has

what

I

wanted to do was outside Science

Neuromancer is extremely romantic

strangeness

and hasn’t much to do with real

urban

like

template... If I got to a point where I

criminality

technopoetry giving a voice to a

had to go elsewhere in order to feel I

Lisa

huge reservoir of mute experience.

was “doing art,” I’d be unhappy if I

the

The strength of your style seems to

were still writing Science Fiction.

experience of living as a Canadian

transcend

and

As it is, it still feels like screwing

in Vancouver made any difference

become something more. Do you

around in the back yard, blowing

see

things up.

this

at all. (I try to redress

somewhat

in

Mona

Overdrive.)

Has

Canada

in your writing?

has

of

life

your

in

the

work

technological 1988.

pulp

It’s

genre

operating

in

this

always felt like an “alternate reality”

way? How does your work relate to

to

genre Science Fiction?

me. A not-quite-America. The

America

I

vanished

in

grew

up

the

in

largely

thanks, but you make it sound as though I just fell out of nowhere,

Eighties, so that I experience the

fully formed, with all these tricks up

contemporary realities of New York

my sleeve — whereas, if it weren’t

or

as

some

of

for the work of William Burroughs,

“future.” Which of course I find very

J. G. Ballard, or for that matter of

valuable. The

homeless

uncounted “genre” practitioners, I

ragged people lying comatose on

wouldn’t be here. John LeCarré once

weedgrown traffic islands in West

created

Hollywood

still

unbelievable, a

cheap

1980s

sight

of

sort

Ian

Fleming

strikes

me

as

inadvertently

something

out

disaster

Considered

Disaster film”…)

film. as

a

You

with

created

a

having

of

market,” with the Bond books, for LeCarré’s work. I think what you

Cheap

call “genre” Science Fiction may What interests are you exploring in

novels, especially Joseph Cornell. I

your new work?

also

novel, in collaboration with Bruce

understand

Pauline

in

and

Laboratories.

the

that work

you of

are Mark

Sterling,

called

I’m The

writing

mass-produced. I like making money. I like seeing some crazed thing I

Engine, an alternate history in which the Victorians invent steam-driven computers.

Cute

as

wrote three years ago turn up in my

Difference

Research

much about art but I know what I

my text will be

a

“I don’t know

Survival

I like knowing that

have done the same thing for me.

quite a few references to art in your

interested

pop-cult

“reverse

(“The make

particular

W e l l ,

and

Los Angeles

Seventies

Fiction’s

that

might

local Safeway. It’s a kick.

1989 V15N1 p223

p224 V15N1 1989

coexistence?

p228 V15N2 1989

LAOCOON 1. In Book One of Virgil’s Aeneid we read the story of Laocoon, a Trojan pri est of Neptune who, having prophesied the Fall of Troy, is killed together with his two young sons in the most horrible manner, by sea serpents sent by the vengeful goddess Juno. It was Laocoon who warned his people of the Trojan horse, in a phrase which has passed into every European language, to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Laocoon is the very model of the prophet reviled, a victim of “truth.”

S I M O N

W A T N E Y 1989 V15N2 p229

2. The phone rings, I stumble out of bed: it is 2 a.m. One of my students wanting some advice — his project in ruins, something about a photograph. I listen. After twenty minutes of somewhat aimless rant I ask him what he’s really about, half-knowing already what he’s going to say, “Well, it’s like this, you see, my girlfriend was sleeping with another boy three years ago, and she thinks, maybe, he was bisexual.” Has she asked him? “Well, not exactly.” All around us, sex and guilt and fear. I find myself getting increasingly impatient with heterosexuals. Have we all worked so hard to set up Gay Switchboard and the Terrence Higgins Trust to talk round and round the clock to worried wives and randy husbands? The age of the gay man as Oracle has returned. Meanwhile, back in bed my boyfriend’s having nightmares. Two friends of his died last year. My diary tells me that tomorrow is the first anniversary of my first AIDS funeral. 3. I read Larry Kramer in New York in 1983: “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in big trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.” (New York Native, Issue 59) “Oh, New York!” I thought, “New York!” And promptly forgot all about it. It was like hearing the Last Minute Warning in Oz. I don’t think straight people could ever fully understand what New York or Amsterdam meant to my generation of British gay men. They were a permission to be oneself, to acknowledge the complexity and richness of our sexuality in ways which remain all but unimaginable in a British context. Without quite realising what had happened, we had traded in our Englishness in exchange for dignity and selfrespect. Sweeping in through Gatwick and Heathrow, we smiled serenely at the pathetic little Customs men as they jeered and sneered at our badges and pink triangles. We were saved. We had seen the Promised Land. 4. Last month in Amsterdam my old friend Richard said something very telling about the English: “They are the most mean-spirited of people.” I nodded my head. Yet we are both as English as they come, with our Gracie Fields records, and our would-be Morrissey-in-our-latethirties-haircuts. We were at school in the Sixties, and we knew that whoever they were swinging for, it certainly wasn’t us. I think back to endless Sunday afternoons spent stretched out on the carpet in front of the TV, watching old Hollywood movies. All over Britain, thousands of us, looking for all the world like nice little

p230 V15N2 1989

boys, our eyes blinded by tears as we watched ourselves as Greta Garbo sailing away from Sweden and from love, as Bette Davis lighting his cigarette out on the verandah under the stars ... our parents looking down at us absentmindedly from behind the Sunday Express and The News Of The World. They were reading about the monsters we would become, but they never knew it. They just saw their kids.

5. We thought we were the last generation of “queers,” the last generation of children doomed to grow up under the curse of whatever it was

that crushed and denied us so utterly, so casually, so callously. Thom Gunn puts it very well: If we have fought across the fields of absurdity we have through our cunning fought a real army whose perfected barracks are houses for the beaten and dulled. (“The Menance,” The Passages of Joy, Faber, 1982)

This afternoon they’re showing Queen Christina in the barracks. I hope the sissies are still watching.

6. “The problem with most consumer groups is that they lose their tribal identity when they begin to take on responsibilities.... But this wasn’t the case with the gays. There was … another factor -- gays were insecure. More than anyone else, they were vulnerable as consumers. Insecure people are always looking for groups to join, badges to wear, things to buy.” (William Leith. “Will GayGoPop?”, The Guardian, 23 January 1987). If anyone wants to understand my

generation of gay men, they would have to be able to work out for themselves why statements like that make me sick with fury, make me want to firebomb The Guardian.

7. I have been writing about AIDS now for about two years – living it for much longer. I have sixty-four files of notes and cuttings lined up under different and ever-expanding category headings. My home has become an archive, and every day I have to deal with people who are trying to research aspects of AIDS in the total absence of support from their colleges and universities. Like the woman who was using my AIDS & Women file for her third year dissertation on AIDS & The Law — until the Law Department of Bristol University informed her that AIDS is not a legal issue.... Every day. sifting, re-filing, re-classifying, making notes, setting the video, trying to contain the tidal wave that builds up in my study. Some mornings I’m half afraid to open the door in case I’m simply washed away. 8. I press the “Play” button: Dr. John Green: “We just have to stop this particular disease spreading and basically we take that as our start point, rather than what we’d like them to do.” (What they’d “like” us to do is to die.) “Because if we don’t do that then we’re going to see this disease spread at an alarming rate.” (What the hell do they think it’s been doing these past five years. He knows that 220 people are dying of AIDS every week in the United States. “Queers.”) Nick Ross: “Might I say I suspect a number of our listeners will disagree. Let’s go to Mary Brodie in Bedford. Good morning Mary, what’s your point?” Mary Brodie: “Good morning. I expect you’ll call me a moralist but I don’t necessarily agree with these people saying ‘I’m not really taking a side.’ We thought the policeman was speaking up because, um….” Nick Ross (interrupting her): “You’re talking about Mr. Anderton are you, the Chief Constable of Manchester?” Mary Brodie: “It’s true because really and truly it’s people in high places who are pushing this out, even to children in schools, and on our TV.” Nick Ross: “So, what are they pushing out?” Mary Brodie: “Well, now you’ve got children saying so-and-so is gay, and things like that —‘he’s a gay’ — I mean, they’re being pushed in on us from the press and television — all of them push sex. Had something been done years ago, these people who’d spoken up, who are speaking up, years ago, and kept to the moral law, and teachers properly selected, this could have been stopped.... A lot of this is us accepting — and I’m sorry it’s going to cause a bomb I’m

sure — the American standards, the American free liberty. Because it came in during the war.” (“Calling Nick Ross,” BBC Radio 4, 16 December 1986).

9. I push down the “Pause” button on Mary’s last phrase. I have another thirty minutes of tape to transcribe, another three hours or more of “pause” and “rewind” and “play,” attending to these shrill and shoddy little voices, struggling to take in what they’re saying, to take them as seriously as they deserve if we are to be able to answer them back and expose their sordid and frequently pathetic fantasies; their ideas about us. They will never wonder what we think about them, but even so, I am aware of a certain pathos in the parallel disgust which we represent to one another. For Mary Brodie clearly feels a horror of me which in some ways resembles my horror of her. Even as I picture her dressed up in her Marks and Sparks best, to be on the radio, I find myself wondering what happened to her in the war to have made her so sure that that was when things went wrong, in her terms. Did she perhaps fall in love with a gay GI? She evidently wants so much to make time stand still at that moment in 1945, to control, I scribble down a little note to myself about amnesia, and reach for the “Pause” button. But I don’t release it. I sit here thinking of the cost to me of these endless transcriptions, of all the time I spend locked up with these mad and dangerous people, here in my own home -- and how like Mary I am, not wanting her pushing into my home. The difference of course is that the Mary Brodies of this world have always been able to push through my front door. How strange that they should want to do so in the name of defending their own. The whining self-righteous voices of opinionated ignorance, panels of them, squadrons and legions of them, the “beaten and the dulled,” adjusting their spectacles and bustling off to their Selection Committees to make sure that their poor unfortunate children will only get “ proper” teachers, only read “proper” books, only watch “proper” TV programmes, only have “proper” friends — grow up to be “proper” people. And all these shrill and shoddy little phone-in voices, every one so insecure and anxious and afraid — and terribly, terribly aggressive. It’s getting late. I pick up my pen and press the button and Mary’s here in my study, drying her red hands on her flowery Oxfam apron, and talking, talking, talking.... 10. We’ve known the picture all our lives. We coloured it with wax crayons when we were only five or six years old, and already thinking about the men in their little skirts.... A great wooden

horse, built like a ship with clapboard sides, towering up above the city walls of Troy as the people drag it in. I can hear its huge wheels groaning, I can see Laocoon wringing his hands. But are we inside the horse, or are we pulling it?

11. “Health Secretary Norman Fowler is going on a fact-finding AIDS mission to San Francisco later this month. And it will be a real eye opener.... It is still a way-out world where homosexuals flaunt it — even though one in fifteen San Franciscans now has AIDS. Mr. Fowler will rub his eyes in disbelief at the antics

of the gay ghetto in the Castro district. The streets are thronged with men and women openly kissing and cuddling people of their own sex. Gays wear one of fourteen different coloured handkerchiefs in the back pocket of their Levis. That signals to the world the particular perversion they prefer.... It’s claimed that promiscuity among gays has stopped, but it is only a claim!” (The Sun, 6 January 1987). I hold my head in both hands and read this slowly to myself out loud. I am trying to imagine the mind of the person who wrote it. That mind is so small, so ugly, it hurts too much to stay inside it for more than a moment. But I know the picture it describes. I have drawn it and coloured it with wax crayons. Sodom. I think of the courage of San Francisco, of my friend Jan. Then I look up again to London.

12. “We do not see ourselves as victims. We will not be victimized. We have the right to be treated with respect, dignity, compassion and

understanding. We have the right to live fulfilling, productive lives, to live and die with dignity and compassion. NAPWA will network with other PWAs and PWARCs regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, gender, age, disablility, and sexual or affectional preference. We are born of and inextricably bound to the historical struggle for rights — civil, feminist, disability, lesbian & gay and human. We will not be denied our rights!” (Statement of Purpose of the National Association of People With AIDS, San Francisco, September 1986). I think of the Terrence Higgins Trust here in England, and the light-years of experience which separate it from the NAPWA or the SHANTI Project. An upstairs room in an East London pub full of middle-aged Thatcherite queers taking two hours to decide whether they should give another AIDS helpline £200 or £300. A camp, Fifties, Kenneth Williams voice: “We don’t want the Government to think we’re just a bunch of screaming queens, do we?” Looking at himself through Mary Brodie’s spectacles with so much fear and contempt, painful in much the same way as it had been earlier in the day, transcribing phone-in tapes. Only this is supposed to be different. Trying to please everyone — the National Health Service, the DHSS, the DES, the Government, all political parties, gays, non-gays, Mary Brodie. Helping people die, with no idea how they might have lived, no idea of what I’m talking about now, reading this page with blind incomprehension and shaking their heads: “We can’t change the world dear, can we?” In The Devil Finds Work James Baldwin wrote that “the victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim; he, or she, has become a threat.” Let’s print that on the condoms!

13. “The Government has admitted that thirtyseven innocent homosexuals have been jailed for ‘crimes’ which do not exist for heterosexuals. The thirty-seven men were given prison sentences ranging from three months to five years for having consensual sex. They were jailed because of the outdated Age of Consent law which says gay men must be twenty-one years old, whilst heterosexuals need only be sixteen to have sex. The figures, the latest available, are for 1985 and show a slight increase on the previous year when thirty-three men were imprisoned. The average sentence has also gone up from twenty months to twenty-two months.... The thirty-seven men were all over twenty-one and their partners were between sixteen and twenty-one. Fifteen were charged with buggery, and twenty-two were charged with ‘gross indecency.’ The partners of all these men agreed to have sex.” (Capital Gay, 16 January 1987)

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This is our side of the fence, the Iron Curtain which hangs in all our windows. After a while, the plain, familiar electric shock of injustice begins to wear off — but only to be replaced by something else, something even worse, the sense of the other thirty-seven, sent back for life to their homes, and the loving care of Mary Brodie. Prisons and hospitals, cells and wards, these are the only places where we can be safely inspected, through the unblinking peep-holes of “morality.” Do you know the feeling, when the usual carapace of irony, or “theory” just isn’t there? When the walls are down, and one sits at one’s desk reading the papers with no defences, facing the hurricane with one’s eyes open. Waiting to be rescued by merciful indifference.

14. “There is evil in our society. It is the source of everything that is wrong with our lives. It can never be combatted merely by physical measures.... It demands that people should be encouraged by word and example to live by moral standards.... If James Anderton is hounded out of his job, then future generations may well conclude that the Britain of 1987 was indeed a strange land.... IT WAS A PLACE WHERE IT HAD BECOME A CRIME TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST EVIL. IT WAS A PLACE THAT DESERVED ITS MISFORTUNES.” (“The Sun’s Message To Britain,” The Sun, 22 January 1987) I’m going out to Harlow New Town to give an AIDS talk at the local Tech., which stands, indistinguishable from the Town Hall, on a bleak outpost of the central shopping centre. Disturbed pensioners stumble from the glare of Boots to the warmth of British Home Stores like refugees from a Van Gogh prison painting, braving the wind tunnels of the grim piazza -- itself a godforsaken parody of some warm Renaissance dream -- whilst a lone dustman mounted on a mobile vacuum cleaner aims his steed hopelessly as the swirling maelstrom of detritus which hurls itself furiously around our feet. Inside the Tech. it seems that the ten year laboratory experiment of Thatcherism has just been successfully realized: a sullen silent stupefied generation looks out at me, filleted of any sense of history, teenage Sunreaders, who will kill for a job I’d rather die than contemplate. I am from another planet, from another age. What is the point of trying to explain the situation facing most people with AIDS to an audience which already knows without a flicker of doubt that James Anderton was right? They know AIDS comes from the nig-nogs and the queers. You keep on talking, but you just want to weep. Walking back to the station, a black Volvo screeches round a roundabout, coming down (would you believe?) Allende Avenue. I turn

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round casually. Four boys, two leaning from the windows screaming “Wanker! Fucking wanker!” and they’re getting closer. I break into a run -people ahead, thank God! That old feeling, so many times before.... We who were going to be the last generation of “queers”…. The car is following me slowly at a distance of maybe fifty yards and they’re screaming now, four cute psychotics, the Brodie boys, to whom I blow a hopeless kiss as I burst into the arms of British Rail, and safety, and tears.

15. We waited until night and quietly opened up

the hatch before climbing down, one by one, grouping under the Horse’s belly as arranged, holding our bright swords. They were waiting for us. They’d read all about us in the papers. They were laughing hysterically behind their visors, rocking to and from in their tanks and squad cars. The whole square was by now flood-lit. “Right! Drop your swords and shields!” demanded a voice over the loud-speakers. “Get over to the yellow trucks and you won’t be hurt. We have gas and water cannons if you try to make a break.” Blinded by the lights and halfdeafened by the noise, we stumbled towards the wagons. And as we stood there, stunned, facing our own sharp shadows, they started firing.... I wake up screaming.

16. “It is surely no accident that in the film’s two most celebrated sequences -- perhaps two of the most fondly remembered scenes in her entire career -- Garbo appears virtually alone. The first ... represents the Queen’s rapturous discovery

that there is a source of enchantment in her world as she prepares to leave the room in which she has found love ... she drifts slowly round the room, stroking her hands gently along the surface of a sideboard, pausing at a mirror to smile at her lover’s reflection, touching a box, a spinningwheel, a wall ... closing her eyes to remember, then continuing her journey, round the bed, across it to kiss the pillow, to run her fingers wonderingly over an ikon on the wall, until Antonio asks what she is doing, and that soft, throaty voice wells up from the deep: ‘I have been memorising this room. In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room.’ The second sequence, the great elegiac rite of the end, is the moment in the future she has been preparing for, when she must draw on this memory and live in it. Her lover has been killed in a duel, and as the ship that will bear them back to Spain prepares to set sail, she moves majestically to the bow. The last, magnificent close-up is held and held as she stands immobile as a figurehead, staring inscrutably ahead, remembering, until the image slowly fades.... Garbo asked me: ‘What do I play in this scene?’ Remember, she is standing there for 150 feet of film — 90 feet of them in close-up. I said: ‘Have you heard of tabula rasa? I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience. I’d like it if you could even avoid blinking your eyes, so that you’re nothing but a beautiful mask.’ So in fact there is nothing on her face: but everyone who has seen the film will tell you what she is thinking and feeling. And always it’s something different.” (Tom Milne, Mamoulian, Thames & Hudson 1969)

17. Mary Brodie’s playing Santa Claus this year. Well, you’ve got to go with the times, haven’t you? She’s sitting in her surgery with a big sack full of gifts. You’re shaking as you walk, across the room, and swallowing hard. “Sit down dear,” she beams, “Now here is your test result ....” 18. “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” (Shakespeare Sonnet no.65)

Simon Watney chairs the policy committee of the Terrence Higgins Trust, Britain’s oldest and largest AIDS service organization.

safe

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WHITE

CANNIBAL WOMAN

t

his lady and her daughter were living with her husband in a winter home in

Quetico Park with a few other families, maybe five or six altogether. She was allergic to the otter. Not knowing this, her husband made her skin one and stretch it. When you’re allergic to some animal, it’s usually to the blood or a certain part of its body. If you accidentally take some, it’s like poison I guess. It gets you before you know it. Usually, you are killed, or if you know what medicine to take you can be cured. But it is also possible that you will turn into Windigo -- a cannibal. You grow large and get powers to kill your own people and eat them up, a whole tribe. Sometimes, one particular man or woman has the knowledge and powers to attack and kill a person who has become a cannibal. Cannibals are born and attack in the fall. As the winter ends, they start losing strength. By spring, they usually try to head to the south. They’re much weaker. In other words, fall is the strongest time of year for them. This story took place in the arctic, where it’s real cold even in the summer. These families were trapping. There’s not too many otters up there, but lots of seals. This lady was allergic to otter. First, she killed her husband. Then, on the same night, she killed the other five families. But she wouldn’t touch her daughter. After a while, the lady and her daughter moved on, heading towards the south. They passed a few families along the way that were camped a little off to the side. A cannibal won’t bother people even if they’re one mile to the side. Only those people who are right in their path. They came to an Indian reserve which had lots of people, maybe forty or fifty families. The cannibal woman killed all of these people, but still did not touch her little girl. The only thing she’d do to her was to cut her now and then, usually in her arm, to see if she was fat enough yet. She named her daughter Go tish shwash which means ‘testing her,’and fed her what people eat. Whenever the food was gone, she’d pack up and leave again with Go tish shwash. They were heading down into our country, a ways north yet. It was almost mid-winter. A cannibal must get wherever it’s going in one winter. If it gets too late in the spring, or if you don’t make it before winter runs out, you’re dead. These two were taking longer than they should. They came upon these trappers, four or five families, and killed them all then started traveling again. By now mid-winter had passed. It was February or March and the mother felt weaker, she was losing all her energy.

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They reached an Indian reservation. Go tish shwash was able to go visiting people. She knew her mom was doing the wrong thing. This tribe was still living in teepees and wigwams. Together with them, she made plans to kill her mom. They made ice at night and covered it during the day so it wouldn’t melt off. Go tish shwash’s plan was to make her mother slip and when she fell down, all the men would cut off her head, arms and legs, then burn her. One day, they went ahead with it. As soon as the mother slipped, they cut her head off. It slipped far away, but she kept trying to reach for it, rolling around her body. While it was still out of reach, they cut off her arms and legs. Then all the men and women hurried to build a big fire. They had to burn her before midnight, and there was a reason for that too, burning her into ashes before midnight. But her back would not burn for a long time, and that’s where her main energy and powers were. The month was April. As the spring and summer went on, Go tish shwash kept dreaming about her mom. Her mom was giving her powers and instructions about how to avoid becoming a cannibal also. Go tish shwash’s mom appeared in a dream. She told her, “Go south as fast as you can. Early in the fall, go off by yourself. Eat an otter hind as soon as you find one, before the ice is solid enough to walk on. Be careful not to bother people, but keep on the same path we were following. You must get to a special place in the south before you turn weak in the winter. There, you will be treated by stone people from the ocean, and by star people.” Go tish shwash kept on walking south alone. She had turned to a killer when her mom was killed. But she stood a good chance of making it south before it started. Even though Go tish shwash was starving, she stayed away from the Indians. When she was weak from fasting she had a dream. In it, her mom came and gave her powers. The next morning, she was able to float, maybe two feet above the path, so her feet did not get stuck in the snow. She made it south before she turned to a cannibal. The spirits were happy to see her. They knew she was coming. They held a big ceremony for her, as they do for all the cannibals that make it. This made her into another kind of animal, like a sasquatch. Now she could go north again in the spring, and she would never eat meat again.



RON GEYSHICK WITH JUDITH DOYLE

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FLACK

However you look at things, the ultimate question is the question of distinctions: between the real and the imaginary, between sleep and waking, knowledge and ignorance -in sum, all those distinctions of which any worthwhile activity must exactly take stock and demand resolution. And of all distinctions none is sharper than that of the organism and its environment, none affords a more immediate experience of separation. It therefore deserves to be observed with particular care, and so does that which may be deemed its pathology: the family of phenomena known as mimetism.

MIMETISM A N D

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Biologists, for various and often equivocal reasons, have long had a kind of overdetermined predilection for the facts of mimetism: some wishing to prove evolution, which luckily is on safe ground without them, while for others the facts in question illustrate the wise providence of the celebrated God whose goodness stretches over all of nature. The lowest degree of mimetism involves vague analogies of hue: the white fur of snowbound animals, the rust of desert animals, the green coloration of prairie animals, the earth colours of those that dwell in furrows. But more refined examples of animals’ colour harmonizing with that of the environment abound: some animals keep their colour all

R O G E R

CAILLLOIS

Adapted from L e M y t h e e t L’ H o m m e 1 9 3 8 . Tr a n s l a t e d b y R o n a l d d e S o u s a

their life, others go through stages, like the lime tree caterpillar, Smerinthus tiliae, which is green on the leaves that nourish it and then turns brown when it descends along the bark to bury itself. Sometimes coloration varies with the seasons; in other cases an animal can opt for a different colour from one moment to the next, as in the well-known cases of the treefrog, the chameleon, and various flat fish: sole, place, Mesonauta insignis, tench, and most notably the turbot which can blend into black and white tiling. The mechanism of these phenomena is now known, and usually involves retinal vision: when blinded, the fish can no longer adapt, and the tree-frog, Hyla gratiosa, remains green on brown surfaces. The reason is that the excitation caused by light is no longer transmitted to the starry pigment cells with their radiating fibres, the chromatophores. These can independently contract, dilate, and form halo effects, generating multiple colour combinations. Sometimes the explanation is even simpler, as when pigments contained in food are simply deposited onto the skin: the colour of

Archidoris tuberculata in Arcachon depends only on that of the sponges on which it has fed. Reflected light occasionally plays the same role: some caterpillars spin blue silk when they are subjected to blue light.

Teleological interpretations of such facts used to be popular until their mechanistic explanations were discovered; and such interpretations continued to hold sway in connection with that other group of phenomena which George Wallace termed warning colours. Wallace had noted that brilliantly coloured insects generally had a nauseating smell or taste, so that any predator, having once tried such prey, would learn its lesson: the brilliant colours would serve as reminders of its first discomfiture. Unrelated and nonnauseating species seemed to imitate the colours and forms of these uneatable species, so as to benefit from the repugnance which their appearance inspired in predators. These cases were the first to which the term mimetism in the narrow sense was originally applied. Not all nauseating species are

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The

Brazilian

known

as

themselves

butterflies

Cloliae in

a

space regular

row on little stalks as if they were the bells of a lily of the valley. decorated with warning colours, however, and besides, observed resemblances are in many cases useless. Such mimetism, therefore, may be an accidental convergence, meriting no special explanation. In any case, many of these cases of homochromy smack of anthro-pomorphism: the resemblance is all in the eye of the beholder. The same cannot be said, however, for cases that might be called homomorphy, where morphology itself, not merely colour, becomes assimilated to the inert environment rather than to another living species. There are many examples: certain mollusks look like pebbles, others like seeds; phylopterix fish, from the Sargasso sea, have been described as shredded algae in the shape of floating straps. Cilix compressa resembles a bird dropping, and everyone knows the Phyllium, that insect that so startlingly simulates a leaf. For various reasons, however, mimetism cannot really be considered a defense mechanism. To begin with, it would only make sense for predators that hunt by sight, and not by smell as is often the case. And even the former generally ignore motionless prey, which suggests that mere immobility would make a better defense. Many insects, in fact, are well served by their capacity for cadaveric stillness. Indeed, experiments have definitely settled the question: predators are not fooled by homomorphy or homochromy: they eat locusts that blend into oakleaves, or weevils that to the human eye are quite indistinguishable from pebbles. It would appear, then, that mimetism is in fact a luxury -- and a dangerous one at that, for it is sometimes drastically counterproductive. The case of the leaf-insect is especially pathetic, as they graze on one another, mistaking each other for real leaves, as if their pretense to be a leaf expressed a sort of collective masochism culminating in mutual homophagy, a provocation to a kind of totemic cannibalistic feast.

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This interpretation is not as gratuitous as it seems; indeed, in man there appear to subsist certain psychological propensities that are strangely reminiscent of those facts: apart from totemism, there is the huge domain of mimetic magic, upon which all incantatory practices are more or less based. Of particular note is the correspondence between the principles of magic and those of the association of ideas: to the magical law that things that have once been in contact remain linked, there corresponds association by contiguity, while association by resemblance corresponds very precisely to the attractio similium of magic: like produces like. In this way, the same principles govern the subjective and supposedly fortuitous association of ideas on the one hand and the supposedly causal and objective associations of real phenomena on the other. The crucial point is that there remains, in the “primitive” mind, an imperious propensity to imitate, together with a belief in the efficacy of such imitation; that tendency is powerful still even in the “civilized” mind, both in the poorly understood power wielded by resemblance in our emotional life, and of what we know as correspondences in aesthetics. That tendency, the universality of which can hardly be doubted, may have played a determining role in the development of mimetic morphology in insects, at the time when they were more malleable than they now are; that they once were so seems to be implied in the fact of evolution. Mimetism could then be defined as the highest form of magical incantation, in which the sorcerer becomes his own victim. (Let it not be called folly, this attribution of magic to insects; this novel use of words should not be allowed to conceal the thing’s profound simplicity.) Yet this attempt to explain mimetism in terms of the magical quest of like for like can only be a first step, since it in turn demands an explanation. The quest for like is only a means; the end can only be assimilation to the environment. To this end, instinct completes the work of morphology: the Indian butterfly Kallima positions itself symmetrically in relation to a real leaf, the appendix of its lower wings placed at the very spot that would be occupied by the leaf stalk, and

the Brazilian butterflies known as Cloliae space themselves in a regular row on little stalks as if they were the bells of a lily of the valley. One might think one is witnessing a veritable temptation to merge into space. When schizophrenics are asked, “Where are you?” their invariable response is: “I know where I am, but I don’t feel I am where I am.” To minds thus dispossessed, space feels like a devouring power. Space pursues them, besieges them, digests them like a giant phagocyte. In the end, space takes over. The body’s solidarity with thought is then dissolved; the individual crosses the boundary of his skin to live on the far side of his own senses. He tries to see himself from any point in space; he feels himself become space, black space, where no thing can be placed. And he invents spaces, which he convulsively aspires to possess.

All these expressions, taken from the author’s own introspective notes during a crisis of psychasthenia purposely aggravated for the sake of discipline and of interpretation, throw into relief the process of depersonalization by assimilation to space, which is just what is realized morphologically by the cases of animal mimetism just discussed. The magical hold of night, the fear of the dark, no doubt has the same roots in the danger it affords for the opposition of the organism to its environment. As Eugene Minkowski pointed out in Lived Time, darkness is not mere absence of light; clear space allows itself to be supplanted by the materiality of objects, but darkness is a “stuff,” it touches, surrounds, and penetrates the individual: “the ego, opaque to light, is permeable to darkness.”

The surrender to space is necessarily accompanied by a waning of personal identity

and life. At any rate, in all mimetic species, imitation always goes one way: the animal mimics the vegetable, hiding or giving up its proper relational functions. Life withdraws one step at a time. Moreover, sometimes an insect identifies itself not only with a plant but with rotten or decomposing matter. Thus the crab spider resembles a bird dropping: with the web figuring the more liquid and more quickly dried

refers to the syncretism of a physiological need, the efficient cause, with an image of its own consummation acting as final cause.

portion of the excrement, it spreads like a drop fallen upon a leaf and even emits a smell of urine to attract flies. One could hardly give a more striking demonstration of the fundamental character of the phenomenon, of the fact that it consists essentially in a return to the motionless and the inorganic.

knows, towards the suppression of all distinctions, to the erasure of all oppositions, so that its goal seems to be to tempt all sensibility with an ideal solution of its conflict with the external world, and thus to satisfy its propensity for the relinquishment of consciousness and life.

Formless space exerts upon living matter a kind of continual fascination, weighing it down, restraining it, always ready to draw it back, to level the moat that isolates the organic in the midst of the lifeless. We touch here that fundamental law of the universe summed up in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the world tends to uniformity. Throw a piece of hot metal into tepid water: the temperatures become equal instead of drawing further apart. Never does the metal become red hot while the water turns to ice. And higher on the organic scale, sleep, too, has sometimes passed for a phenomenon of depolarization, the natural end of which is to compensate for excessive activity. We are thus brought to see mimetism as the outcome of a kind of instinct, where the term

From then on, it is not only psychasthenia that can be related to mimetism, but the need for knowledge itself, of which it represents a perversion. For knowledge tends, as everyone

The living organism is one with its environment. All around it are manifested the same structures ruled by the same laws. In truth, the organism is not in that “environment”; it is that environment, and the very energy that cleaves them apart, the will of every being to persist in its being, consumed with its own exaltation, secretly lures it back already towards that undifferentiation to which its flawed autonomy brings scandal.

T

he longing for

assimilation into space, for identification to matter,

The longing for assimilation into space, for identification to matter, is a familiar theme in lyric poetry: the pantheistic theme of fusion of the individual into the whole, a theme into which psychoanalysis sees the expression of a sort of wistful memory of prenatal unconsciousness. In art, too, confirming facts appear as soon as they are sought. Witness the amazing motifs of popular Slovak decorative art, in which it is impossible to tell whether one is looking at flowers with wings or at birds with petals. Witness also the pictures painted by Salvador Dali around 1930, in which, whatever their author himself might say, these men, sleeping women, horses or invisible lions do not so much express the ambiguities or polyvalences of paranoia as mimetic assimilations of the animate world to the inanimate.

is a familiar theme in lyric poetry: the pantheistic theme of fusion of the individual into the w hole, a theme into which psychoanalysis sees the expression of a sort of wistful memory of prenatal unconsciousness.

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The Black Dog The other day while out for a walk in an old neighbourhood a big black dog began to follow me. He began to walk beside me. I didn’t pay too much attention to him, as I was daydreaming. I only noticed his coat was black and shiny and thick. When I was tired of walking we went into the backyard of winter everywhere just as it used to be. The plants were covered in snow and so was the broken-down garage. The black dog and I sat looking at it together. He smiled at everything with his mauve lips exposed. I put my arms around his beautiful neck as I sat there. Around his neck I found a fine chain, attached to which was a little tube. In the small tube I found a dollar bill. It was enough money for us to begin our lives togehter.

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1989 V15N3 p243

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Tr a n s l a t e d b y R o n a l d d e S o u s a

FRANCIS PONGE We learn from the Littré that wonderful

treasure

chest

of

old

expressions, that Fontenelle, praising the botanist Tournefort, evoked the image

of

nature

hiding

in

deep

inaccessible places (the grottoes of Antiparos) “to labour at the vegetation of stones.” His contemporary René-Just Haüy, the crystallographer, spoke of “flowers”; and our own mineralogists, too, sometimes fall back, without conviction, on that cliché, doubtless yielding to an academic bent from which the very reason for our existence, if there is one, is to induce them and everyone else to recoil in distaste.

Oh the precious stones in hiding, the flowers, already staring.

Let us then overcome, at the sight of natural crystals, this feeling that grips us, this exactopposite-of-being-disturbed, yet very violent feeling; and, with a cool head altogether befitting the case, let us begin by inviting the idea of a flower honestly to go away and sit down. And that goes for other images, such as that of the birdabout-to-alight, dove or seagull I suppose, which, since they no longer fit the present state of science, will (I can’t help it) enter not at all into

RIMBAUD, After the Deluge

our own authentic speculations.

Why then, at the sight of crystals, are we so strongly moved? Maybe the reason is that we are in the presence of something like the best concrete approximations of pure reality, which is to say of pure thought: put that into what order you will! Come! We too must hide and come down at least several steps. But look again: THERE! Yes, here at last the qualities of stone and fluid harmonize! The hardness that is the essence of mineral matter sufficiently explains its lack of interest in the processes of reproduction, or even (usually) in those of its own extension. It knows itself

p246 V15N3 1989

O

F

N

A

T

U

R

A

L

CRYSTALS eternal, or nearly so, and so comes to be quite free of all preoccupation with its appearance or its form. But because again and again it has suffered the most intense physical onslaughts, (though without ever vanishing, and that is all that matters), so, for a long time now, it has been nothing but formless chaos -- if ever, indeed, it had form at all. Besides, we know that in the solid state the energy level of matter is lowest. The mineral kingdom is therefore a kingdom only in the sense in which we speak of the reign of indifference or of cowardice. There lies in stones a passive, sulky non-resistance toward the rest of the world, on which they seem to turn their back.

And yet, at the heart of this lustreless chaos, seizing the chance afforded by a crack or a crevice, grow rare exceptions to that rule. And therefore, at the sight of them, how can we not be thrilled! Instead of sempiternal clouds, suddenly, for a moment, pure sky with stars! Finally, stones turned toward us, their eyelids opened, stones that say YES! And what signs of intelligence, what knowing winks!

These are homogeneous species, made up of perfectly definite elements; by the juxtaposition of identical atoms bound by identical links, they emerge at last according to the outlines of their peculiar geometries. So much so that in the supposed freedom offered by the cracks in their social environment, what should they develop but their own determinism, in all its rigour and purity. Hence their energy, hence also their stricture, their marvellous stricture! It is instant perfection. No arguments now, but only concrete EVIDENCE, and by these (RESTRICTED) evidences, what powers are revealed! Void of all mists, of all shadow, the slightest light feels instantly captured, and cannot get away; and so it tightens its fists, it shakes, glisters, seeks to escape, and shows itself at once at every window, like some maddened denizen of a house set (by himself) on fire.

1989 V15N3 p247

HA!

HA!-HA! expressed their surprise at

walls were practical necessities against

AH! AH! and the French AH! HA! derived

finding a sudden and unperceived check

deer, cattle and rabbits, as well as formal

from an exclamation of surprise upon

to their stroll....

architectural boundaries of the garden.

discovering, or falling into one.

“On ev'ry side you look, behold the

The Invention of the HA-HA or sunken

So long as gardens were enclosed to

wall!”

fence made it possible to pretend that the

obtain privacy, to keep out cattle, to

whole landscape was part of the

mark a boundary between the garden

gardener's domain.

and the surrounding land, an enclosure,

Instead of a raised enclosing barrier, a sudden sunken barrier shaped like a ditch

a wall, a hedge, a fence were necessary.

or a dry moat was dug around those

HA-HA. A sunken fence, a ditch with one

And as long as the garden was enclosed,

parts of the garden which were to be

sloping side and one vertical, the latter

its relationship with the surrounding

made into a “pretty landskip.”

usually supported by a wall.

land, with the landscape and with

Up to the end of the seventeenth century,

Both the original 1712 English spelling

“nature” was inevitably limited. Behind

p248 V15N3 1989

a wall, the garden was inward-looking,

HA! SUSAN SPEIGEL

tied to the house, its aspects and Its

architectural composed views, a boundary

formal, perspectively controled, English

proportions. The garden remained

between civilized land and uncivilized

landscape garden.

architecture on the flat.

land -- safe nature and wild nature -- an enclosure, a wall, a hedge, a fence,

The end of the perspective grid with its

constructed and obstructed view.

untrue dimensions but true picture.

the land outside to the garden inside, and

With the HA-HA invented, the gardener

Between the perspective grid and

to be as unnoticeable and invisible as

leapt the fence and saw all nature was a

modernism is the axonometric grid: true

possible, to create the illusion that the

garden. A “total landscape” which led

dimensions but untrue picture.

garden and the surrounding countryside

beyond the resources of the small

were one.

property into a total recomposition of

The ditch needed to be deep and wide enough to prevent actual crossing from

HA-HA

nature. That funny moment when things

So long as gardens were enclosed to obtain privacy, territorial imperative,

The point at which the fence drops is the

begin to flip back and forth.

1989 V15N3 p249

Professor Frye, what does the word nature mean to you? • Traditionally, there have always been two aspects of nature: nature as structure or system in the environment -- the nature of physics, and the nature that is the force of growth in life -the nature of biology. As man did not make nature we therefore can not understand it. How has man dealt with this incomprehensibility of nature? • Man looks at nature and finds it intelligible. How the intelligibility got there is none of his business as a scientist, but he does find that he can make a picture out of it, and that human picture is what we use for nature. We don't know what's behind the human picture.

N ORTHROP

FRYE

You’ve stated that gods in nature are usually evil, and in the Bible we find nature symbolized by monsters like leviathan and behemoth. Why do we look at nature as a monster?

Northrop Frye is a professor of English at Victoria College, University

• In the Bible there is a strong polemical tendency to try to get the Israelites away from the nature cults of the peoples around them. The pre-Biblical religions were mostly cults of the mother-goddess, and the Biblical authors were afraid that as long as you have a mothergoddess representing nature at the centre of things, man will always be an embryo; he'll never be able to get out of the womb of the mother-goddess. The tradition that started with the Bible and runs through both Judaism and Islam, too, is to find man's salvation in human institutions, not in natural objects.

of Toronto. As a teacher and literary critic for close to five decades, he has achieved

Is it related to death?

international acclaim. On the subject of nature, Professor Frye was interviewed by Christopher Webber and Stuart Inglis in his office at

• In nineteenth century Canada where conditions were so frequently pioneering conditions, where small populations were isolated and cut off from one another, Canadians threw all their energy into the integrity of the human community. What was the artistic reaction to this isolation within nature? • The reaction was really a kind of intensification of the Biblical view that there is nothing worshipful or numinous in nature. Nature in many nineteenth century poems is rather sinister. Other poems which we composed in the summer take a different view of nature, but nature is very seldom thought of as something that really complements the nature of man. Everything in Canada suggests a dominating of nature by an intelligence that doesn't love it. In this century our population has become concentrated in urban areas. Do our artists still work within the “garrison mentality” or has it metamorphosed? • I think the contemporary Canadian poets tend to deal with the sinister elements of the natural environment more in internal terms. There is a sense of psychological exploration of inner space, and that's where nature seems to have moved to.

Massey College.

In the past century nature was considered the enemy of creative forces. Do you see any new enemies to creative forces? Could it be the city?

• Yes, man is not a noble savage; he can never live directly in nature the way the animals do. As a way of coping with nature, early in Canadian history we tended to accumulate in

• The city will always be an enemy because it's humanity in the form of a mob; the sense of the big city as being so full of violence and a kind of lawlessness that has almost got out of hand, and that is certainly an enemy of all creative spirits in Canada as elsewhere. Does the city offer any creative benefits that the

• The mother-goddess nature is both the womb and the tomb. She is the repository of all death as well as the fosterer of all birth, so she has a very ambivalent character. Is the ambivalent character of nature the reason why we develop a cultural envelope, “a social skin that defines a boundary between us and nature?”

small communities isolated from one another by natural barriers. The people living in this period exhibited what you've called a “garrison mentality”: What does this term mean?

1989 V15N3 p251

countryside does not offer?

I

• Yes it does. It's the focus of the community and the focus of creativity. Culture is vegetable. It sends out roots and needs something with a limited environment. At the same time the city is your market, and also the place where you draw your techniques from. In nineteenth century Canada a great deal of culture was provincial because they thought of standards as something that were established elsewhere: London, New York, Paris. They also thought that it was important for Canada and Canadian authors to meet them. Well, you don’t meet standards, you can only establish them yourself, but in order for that to happen you have to be in control of the international set up, or at least be in touch with it. And out of that, the region becomes articulate.

f you journey from Toronto to Ottawa by plane you’re simply moving from one point of space to another and you’re hardly conscious of the intervening land. The flight itself takes only forty minutes and you’re sealed up in a tube. If, however, you find that you have to go by train instead, it’s a hell of a long bleak journey through a great deal of landscape, but at least you’re aware of the landscape.

Would you explain how the airplane, television, and other communicative media have created what you’ve called an “obliterated environment.”

• If you journey from Toronto to Ottawa by plane you’re simply moving from one point of space to another and you’re hardly conscious of the intervening land. The flight itself takes only forty minutes and you’re sealed up in a tube. If, however, you find that you have to go by train instead, it’s a hell of a long bleak journey through a great deal of landscape, but at least you’re aware of the landscape. You can see that it is there. Why does an obliterated environment cause “imaginative dystrophy”? • Because there is no sense of rapprochement between a human community and the environment of that community. You’re getting

p252 V15N3 1989

a self-contained community which never gets outside itself like those science fiction stories where people spend years traveling to the nearest star inside a spaceship. How is the study of the laws of nature, that is, science and tragic drama related? And what effect has the theory of evolution and quantum physics had on tragic drama? • The two developments of science which were contemporary with two great movements of tragedy were both discoveries of law in science. A sense of the immutability of certain processes, certain effects follow certain causes. The tragedians also worked out dramatic patterns that if you do A, B is certain to follow. With evolution in the nineteenth century and the quantum jump and the uncertainty principle in twentieth century physics, you have something which is not quite this cause-effect relationship, and consequently it causes a more ironic tone in the arts. As the natural world disappears from our awareness along with it disappears the names of nature. If you took a typical youth of today into the forest and asked him to identify ten different species of trees, he probably couldn’t; yet he could give you many names of things found in the cityscape. He could, for example, name ten “species” of cars. There has been a loss and a gain in our lexicon. What is the net effect of this loss and gain on symbolism? • This is a matter of turning away from the physical environment into the human envelope. You give names to what you have priorities for. The Eskimos are supposed to have twenty-five names for the word snow because snow is very important in their lives. We have twenty-five names for different kinds of buildings because they are important in our lives. The Bible tells of the divine act of making the world and our subsequent fall from it. What is the status of these two myths today? • When you have a myth like a paradise lost in the past or a hell threatening you in the

future, you have myths which are distorted by the anxieties of time. The great strength of myth is that it really has no past or future, everything is in the present tense. The reality of hell is the fact that we put it there, and the unreality of paradise is that we failed to put it there. If you transpose these past and future things into the present tense you have the genuine myth. According to Christian theology, we are dominated by a sky-father not an earth-mother. This leaves us with a nature lacking in spirits and deities. How has this influenced our attitude towards nature? • I think the Bible in insisting so much on the fact that there were no gods in nature, that all the gods discovered in nature are really demonic forces, and that man was to look to his own institutions for his salvation had an unfortunate side effect. The side effect was this dominating and the exploiting of nature which has reached a dead end now. And what would be different if we adopted an earth-mother? • We would have to rejuvenate her and turn her into an earth-bride, that is, as something which complements humanity. I don’t know why we need fathers or mothers. They are symbols which are appropriate for childhood. I would think that the tendency was rather in the direction of the New Testament image where you have bride-groom and bride, where humanity is a male principle and the surrounding environment is female, or the other way around, it doesn’t matter which. What is symbolically female doesn’t have to be sexually female, and vice-versa.

• They may have adopted a more complex view of nature. The whole abstract expressionist period of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, is an approach to nature which really sees it through a film of twentieth century physics, as well as various other human constructs, by

We really haven’t felt in touch with our natural environment the way native Indians and Eskimos have. In fact, we have a history of not really being “in touch” with the native people.

If you fly over a city at night in a plane and look down on the geometrical patterns of lights, you can see why this is the century of Kandinsky and not the c e n t u r y o f R e n o i r.

The British and French white settlers in our country really did their best to obliterate the civilization that was in front of them. They regarded the Indians as some kind of blank in the cosmos, and unless they could be converted to the white man’s religion or way of life, they were simply not human beings. I think we have outgrown that. Our poets and painters, particularly, are looking for ways to establish some kind of continuity with the culture we have obliterated. Of course, when you do try to destroy a culture, or found a culture on the destruction of another one, it does breed guilt feelings that you are unaware of for a long time. Will we ever learn to love our planet instead of simply imposing ourselves on it? • I would hope that we will learn to love nature. That is surely what ecology is all about: a feeling that humanity and nature are interdependent, that man is a child of nature. Man sprang out of nature, He ought to have some gratitude to it for giving him his own existence. The only way to achieve a love for nature is through stimulating awareness. You said a moment ago that you cannot take a modern child into the forest and point out trees and have him recognize the names. That sense of a lack of contact with the physical world is the state of unstimulated awareness. Loving nature is a matter of the awareness of it being poured into our minds.

PHOTOGRAPHY : ELDON GARNET

Do our present artists reflect a sense of belonging to nature?

which we make nature intelligible to our own perceptions, so that it is no longer a simple landscape. If you fly over a city at night in a plane and look down on the geometrical patterns of lights you can see why this is the century of Kandinsky and not the century of Renoir.

1989 V15N3 p253

p254 V15N4 1990

It’s only in recent times that people have lived past 40. I got married at 40 and thought I was dying, because all that was over. If you don’t die when you get married you die when you have kids. You make love and then your wife goes to the hospital and they cut her open and send her home scarred and flabby with a livid vampire clinging to her breast. You’re given the embodiment of your darkest nightmare, a parasitic extortionist incapable of coordinated motion, unable to speak, reason, or control its bowels, yet absolutely your master. All it can do is suck and scream, and it has a voice invented in hell. It appears miserable to be alive, its disability is hideous, and it’s wired to every vulnerable nerve in your body, a dumb extrusion of your body’s pleasure that carries a cattle prod made for you. When we have children we cease having appendages and become an appendage to their hideous binding need. We’re a corpse on which they feed, a necessary but ultimately disposable appendage to their vitality. We are dying and they’re immortal. Our lives, that were once our own, are now eaten up by others, thank God. There is no more inner life, because our life is outside of us. There is a loss of sovereignty over one’s own body. Sexual options are limited. While we would give our right arms for anonymous sex with a perfect stranger, we will probably keep our right arms, for one reason and another. We are aroused instead by our children, their bodies close to ours more sensual, willing, and needful than anything we ever imagined. We are held and aroused by the fulfillment of a sexual moment, an unallowable object of desire that is going away, rather than coming to us. It’s a trick. One purpose is substituted for another. What we mistook for magic, something for nothing, a pure overwhelming joy, was a calculated trick, a little biological extension beckoning us out into the streaming traffic, where we were swept off our feet and handed a baby, a tiny vampire from hell that has us by the short ones and doesn’t let go. It’s not a trick that abandons us, but one that persuades us our fortune has increased, even though we’ve lost half we ever valued. Our body seduces us and then reneges completely,

substituting a larger purpose, which then seduces us by a pleasure we never desired. Just in time, this gentle trick saves us from death, sexuality sublimated into reproduction and narcissism sublimated into an upwelling of love for another, an identification with our product. In youth a life is a paranoid and magical field in which anything is possible. An adult in mid life is half lost, not potential but a scattered history, a little dust; a scattering of faulty memories swimming in the biology of those around us, or voices frozen into a few poor artifacts and vague misleading texts. Our lives are half a fiction, not paranoid and magical but subdued and lost. Our lives are half history. History is both revelation and fiction. A thing revealed is fictionalized and our lives revealed are fiction. We are utterly lost in history. History and children are all that remain of us. Both bury us. Both are sublimations of our bodies that displace and preserve us in a strange fictional mediation of our presence. Both restore a paranoid and magical future, abysmal and unimaginable. That history is not powerless. The young are born into the power and authority of a little dust. Maturity is a luxury, a cultural appendage sublimated from an erotic and bountiful youth. At 40, we’re supposed to be dead. Instead, by being many and alive, we dominate. The sublimated limb prevails. We entrench our history. A bulge in the population dominates, overwhelming the culture of several generations before and after it. As a generation we’ll be dominant so long we’ll grow blissful in the domestic security of our own excretions. Our narcissism will grow cosy. We won’t live in nature but in culture, a self-satisfied slug at the end of evolution. We’ll watch reruns of our own history until we think history has ended. We’ll live in a museum of life, buoyant polyps of nature suspended in and dependent on a toxic fiction of our own making, recycling a history that is more rondel, collage and pastiche than progress. We will offer our children not guidance or foundation or root or adversary but a numbing power mired in nostalgia and awash in stuporous domesticity. We’ll be tired little polyps of nature at the end of long history, settling into a warm euphoria.

Tom Dean 1990 V15N4 p255



Fiction by

William Burroughs

Tiger

Terry

p256 V15N4 1990

It was one of those drunken Texas interludes.

We’d driven down from Pharr to the island off Corpus Christi, to a motel on the beach. There was KE and his lady of the period was it Golden or I forget they all ended up weeping on my shoulder about Kells who after three drinks would start declaiming. “Show me a good woman ANYTHING.” Couldn’t stand them couldn’t live without them. And there was young Terry, like all of us a farmer didn't know shit about farming, we had farmers for that. “What’s that growing on my land?” I ask KE. “Tomatoes. “Why?” “Get ‘em off early we get ten cents a pound.” “I understand.” We take a bright positive view of things. And there was someone named Mike, looked like a cop, seemed to know a lot of cops (in fact he reeked of cop, 200 pounds of hard fat and muscle) had a girl with him named Pat who every few seconds would scream out, “BEER BEER BEER, said the private.”

And I’m drinking whiskey out of a chamber pot with a filthy yachting cap on and they call me the Old Engineer and I tell one of my dirty jokes only got two. Strip tease in London music hall... Nice one skips out. “Oh blimey, look at ‘er!” And this blasé bloke next to him says, “I’ve ‘ad ‘er!” One after another, “I’ve, ‘ad ‘er.” So finally the most luscious bird of them all skips out,” “So what about’er, mate?” “Shuuuuush, I’ve ‘aving ‘er now.” At one point Terry has a hard-on in the corridor, necking with one of the tomatoes. Papa didn’t grow no peas last year. Papa didn’t grow no taters. But Oh Christ tomatoes. Late getting them off you can sell ‘em to the canneries for one cent a pound or you can plough them under. We ploughed them under wouldn’t you? “BEER BEER BEER, said the private.” “I’m ‘aving ‘er now.” So she grabs Terry’s cock and turns to Coppy Mike and says, “My gawd! Feel it!” And Mike says, “What I wanta feel his old peter for?” Later Dick Tracy gets really smashed, strips off all his clothes and walks into the water like a great big laughing baby. “Be careful he don’t drown hisself!” Pat screeched and I went out and beached him like a whale. Next day he says, “and I’m usually the son of a bitch goes around telling everyone else what they did last night.” On the beach next day we run into this retired army sergeant weather-beat

face close-cropped gray hair and cold hostile crazy gray eyes very pale in the face and we tell him this is Tiger Terry the coming champ and Terry hams it up shadow boxing and spitting and the 20 year man doesn’t like it one bit but he doesn’t want trouble with Mike and KE. So he went away muttering curses. The rest I hear second hand. There was a restaurant bar called Joe’s in Reynosa, Mexico… we used to drive across to eat and drink. “Let’s go to REYNOSA!” someone sings out and off we go, me and these good sports. Joe had game dinners like quail and dove and venison and sometimes it was good and sometimes it would just kill you. Usually we ate out on the patio. Joe had picked up this mangy old lioness from a stranded carnival and kept her in a cage as an attraction. So Terry gets drunk and goes in the cage and pets the lioness… “Petting the cat,” he called it. When Joe heard about this he told the bartender to keep the key behind the bar and see to it the gringo loco didn’t get his hands on it. But Terry sneaked in behind the bar and got the key. “Time to pet the cat,” he said. And those were his last words. The lioness is sleeping, he goes in with a flashlight, shines it in her eyes and the cat comes up on him, knocks him down biting and clawing at him. The two kids from Texas who were with him said, “We don’t want to get in any trouble in Mexico!” and got in their car and drove away. The Mexican waiter went in with a chair and tried to get the lion off Terry but the lion dragged him off into a corner perhaps with culinary intentions, but the

bartender gracefully vaults over the bar with his .45 goes in the cage like a matador and blasts the lion from a distance of six inches. Tiger Terry was DOA Red Cross Reynosa with a broken neck, a fractured skull, a crushed chest like the cat has broken every bone in his body. He was 22 years old. Now I had a shotgun I’d left with Kells at some point and Kells loaned the gun to Terry. It was a good double-barrel .12 gauge belonged to my father and I wanted it back. When Kells talks to Mr. Bickford, Terry’s father, who has come down from Tyler Texas or someplace to settle things, Bickford comes on dead nasty. “I don’t know anything about any shotgun.” Seems Terry owed a lot of money around town and many of the debts were not in writing. So Kells says, “Look Mr. Bickford, if you think I’m lying, we’ll just forget it.” Next day he runs into Bickford again and Bickford says, “Are you in a settling mood?” And Kells says, “Mr. Bickford, I couldn’t care less one way or the other.” And Bickford slips him a hundred dollar bill. So Kells passes the C note on to me, and I can see he feels a bit guilty for lending the gun to Terry. But who could have imagined that Terry would be dead a week later killed by an African lion in a border town bar. So we call it square and that is the last I ever hear of Tiger Terry. Fights between lions and tigers have been staged. The tiger always wins.

 1990 V15N4 p257

p258 V15N4 1990 PHOTOGRAPHY : CHRIS BUCK

AN

I

NTERVIEW

WITH

William Burroughs THE PRESENT E L D O N G A R N E T:

How old are you?

WILLIAM BURROUGHS:

synchronicity. If things happen together it doesn’t mean that they’re causing each other but that one is a result of the other.

Seventy-five.

THE AFTERLIFE

E . G . : Do

you think the future you wrote about in your early work has become our present?

W. B . : What

E . G . : Do

you consider yourself an elderly person, that age has affected you in any way?

E . G . : How

W. B . : No, I don’t have any feeling about age. But the feeling of death is always with me. But I’ve never doubted the possibility of an afterlife.

do you mean by the future? It’s obvious to me at the present moment that it contains both the past and the future. so?

W. B . : Everything

is there at any given moment. As Don Juan says, “Your death is always with you.” Your death is always with you at all times and so then your future is with you at all times. And not that it has to be seen as predetermined but all that is getting into concepts that don’t really mean much. See, I don’t believe in cause and effect, I believe in

by

E . G . : If

you believe there’s an afterlife, wouldn’t it make this life less important?

W. B . : Not

necessarily, it would make it more important, much more important. Because what you do now is going to determine what form

Eldon Garnet 1990 V15N4 p259

“I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony, people have goofed or we wouldn’t be here.” your afterlife will take. What one does right now is the way one does everything. And if you’re not taking, as it were, advantages of educational opportunities here, you’re going to be in a much worse position. I think that what you do now is much more important. E . G . : Do

you find meaning in this life?

W. B . : Everything

means something. You walk down the street and you see something, that’s because you were there at that particular time and that has a meaning for you. A found meaning. I ask my students just to walk around the block, notice everything they saw, refer it to what they were thinking about at that particular time which is what I call an intersection point, then come back and write it down. Of course, they were painters and they would put it down on canvas. I was uptown and my downtown loft was far from a shopping centre, so I said I’ll buy something up here that I needed like, milk and stuff. I ran into a young man coming around the corner going into the deli, got on the subway, he was sitting opposite me. Now my stop was Franklin Street and I just knew that he would get off at Franklin Street too. He had the same problem that the nearest shopping place was six blocks away. Now that’s a case of what I call synchronicity, we were both there at the same time for the same purpose. Never saw him again. Now often people won’t see him the first time, if you don’t see him the first time you won’t see him the second time. However when they begin to open their eyes and look around they get scared, they think this guy is following me. I think anyone who doesn’t believe in ESP just hasn’t opened his eyes. Good god, ‘cause it happens all the time, it’s not an unusual occurrence that happens to a few people, it happens all the time. Anybody good at anything uses it.

E . G . : So

there is no real moral attachment to that thought?

W. B . : No,

no, none whatsoever. If I had never been addicted to drugs, I doubt if I would have started to write. If I had inherited a large sum of money, say if the family hadn’t been done out of the Burroughs adding machine stock by the executives. That would have been a terrific misfortune, I’m sure I wouldn’t have written a line if I had eight million dollars. Show me a good writer, rich from inherited money, I’m not talking about people that made their money. The nearest we come to are the bourgeois of France, people like Proust. They weren’t millionaires but they were very comfortably off.

AMBITION E . G . : What

motivates you now that you are monetarily comfortable?

W. B . : I’m

always in need of money. I can use any amount of money often for good purposes. I just came back from North Carolina, from the primate centre, from the lemurs. I would do that on a much larger scale if I had more money, proportionately larger. And I would buy some animals myself, I’d love to have some lemurs, they haven’t been released for private purchase yet.

E . G . : When

people are younger they’re very ambitious, as you become older do you become more sedate?

ESP is different than the afterlife, it’s a perception of this life, a hyperextension of it.

I become more ambitious because there isn’t all that much time, more ambitious, it’s more present. If I was thirty years old and my painting career is where it is now I could afford to sit down, to sit back, wait and not do too many shows. I don’t have time for a waiting game now, as I said, it makes me more ambitious.

W. B . : Well,

E . G . : You

E . G . : But

it extends into the afterlife as far as I am concerned, I mean the fact that everything I see has significance for me is an indication to me of a much larger perspective not afforded by this life. I feel that this life is sort of a penal colony, people have goofed or we wouldn’t be here.

E . G . : When

you were younger you were well known for your wild life. Is this going to make it more difficult in your afterlife?

W. B . : No,

of course not. Experience is very necessary and it was experience that I needed to write and to think.

p260 V15N4 1990

W. B . : No,

have developed a particular style as a writer. Do you feel violated when you perceive other writers imitating you?

W.B.:That’s

fine, fine with me. Imitation is supposed to be the highest form of flattery. Imitation or outright theft. Writers don’t own words, painters don’t own colours. There’s no reason why you can’t, if it’s appropriate, take something from someone’s work or something very similar to it. Someone said Pollock was breaking new ground and that’s the difference between me and Pollock. Well, for god’s sake, there is plenty of ground. Back in the old days when I was painting

cows in the grass, lots of cows, lots of grass, there was plenty of room for any number of painters. But now one guy will get one gimmick and that’s his patch upon which he establishes a virtual copyright. I think this is ridiculous.

DEATH E . G . : Does

death disturb your sense of mortality?

W. B . : Of

course it disturbs me. Everything makes a hell of a lot of difference, the form of death makes a great deal of difference, some of them are very unfavourable as the Buddhists point out. They shouldn’t happen if the man is sufficiently advanced, these unfavourable deaths will not occur.

E . G . : How

would you like to die?

W. B . : It’s

not for me to decide because if I could decide, if you could decide how to die you wouldn’t die. Death must present the form of surprised recognition, it’s the last thing you expect to see and absolutely the most appropriate thing. It was a psychoanalyst who invented that, that certainly applies to painting too, that’s exactly what I try to do, evoke a surprised recognition.

E . G . : Wouldn’t

that be any art form?

W. B . : Of

course it would. It applies to any art form. That’s what I try to do in painting. Klee said a painter strives to create something that has an existence apart from him and which could endanger him. Now the most clear proof of something being separate is if it can harm you, of course I don’t say that’s the only thing. But I do think all writers, Orwell, certainly many other writers and painters are trying to create life, something that has an existence apart from them, apart from the writer, apart from the painter. It would literally step out of the picture or the book. So all artists are trying to achieve what some people would say is impossible, that is to create life. Of course, impossible is a meaningless word to me.

W. B . : Well,

if you consider that perhaps the future is contained in the present moment perhaps being really aware of this would make you younger, yes. You’ve read the Don Juan books?

E . G . : Yes,

so you believe in that type of mysticism?

W. B . : Oh

absolutely. I’ve seen things like that.

E . G . : Are

those things seen through drugs or your own chemistry?

W. B . : Without

drugs. I always pay a lot of attention to my hunches. Of course, scientists and academics live in such cloistered environments that they don’t need hunches, they never endanger themselves. But anybody who doesn’t pay attention to his hunches won’t live long. I read a magazine article by a cop, an ESP cop, he called it his survival IQ. He stopped someone for a traffic violation, the man started reaching into his glove compartment, where people keep their papers, but he could see a gun in the glove compartment so he rushed over and dragged the guy out. He did have a gun and was a terrorist. Saved his life probably, being able to see a gun, a gun in a car through a closed door or closed compartment.

E . G . : Do

you think your visual and verbal art has a sense of ESP in it?

W. B . : Oh

god, yes, that’s what it’s all about. The way that clear representational objects will emerge from what would seem to be a random procedure. I once took a small notebook and put some red gouache on here and on there, it’s an ink blot technique. I looked and there was a perfectly clear red pig, a wild pig, tusks, bristles, and everything. I find that more interesting than Wyeth’s pigs. It came out of nowhere or somewhere, anyway but here it is, a pig. I also have a good photographer, I’ll have sessions with him and I’ll get into photographs, close-ups and things like that and then I’ll use them in collages and other pictures.

AIDS E . G . : What

HUNCHES

are your feelings towards the HIV virus?

W. B . : Twenty E . G . : Is

there any part of your youth that you miss?

W. B . : On

the contrary, I look back on it with horror. Just awful, that’s all. Full of errors, stupidity and falseness. It takes a long time to have any idea of what you’re doing.

E . G . : Are

you sensing that you’re younger than you were then?

or thirty years ago I read a science fiction book but I can’t remember the name of the writer or the name of the book. People were dying of colds and slight infections, at first they thought that these were mutated cold viruses then they found that the thing that united them all was

1990 V15N4 p261

“I always pay a lot of attention to my hunches. Of course, scientists and academics live in such cloistered environments that they don’t need hunches, they never endanger themselves. But anybody who doesn’t pay attention to his hunches won’t live long.” the breakdown of the immune system. A case of the writer very accurately predicting. Apparently it’s a very simple job of genetic tinkering. Tinker here and there and you got a human AIDS virus. A lot of people seem to think that it was deliberately released. You see the problem although there’s no proof or evidence. E . G . : Your

writing would imply that AIDS is a government conspiracy. Do you believe that?

W. B . : Well, sure, way

back fifteen or twenty years ago, they were talking about selected pestilence that would attack only certain ethnic groups based on small differences, certain diseases that are largely Jewish, certain diseases that are black and so on. You just take those and develop more malignant or contagious strains. That was twenty years ago, I’m sure a lot of progress has been made since then.

biogeneticist, any good team could do it. E . G . : Do

you feel threatened by the disease?

W. B . : Not

unless it develops an airborne strain.

SEX E . G . : Is

sex no longer a part of your life?

W. B . : It

doesn’t interest me. I think that possibly sex and love, whatever they call it, requires a certain degree of selfdeception which people may well outgrow, people may not be able to deceive themselves into thinking that it is pleasureable. I don’t say that with any idea of criticism of anyone else’s point.

E . G . : Is

there a substitute?

W. B . : Your

only substitute is whatever you do, your work. Have you read about the chimpanzee paintings? They noticed that when he painted he went into a sort of sexual frenzy and he had a very definite idea as to when a painting was finished. That was it, he wouldn’t touch it after that, sort of lost interest. They were shown to Rothko and various people who thought they were creditable. I think it was Klee who said that the way a picture was produced was much more interesting than the picture itself. So you throw away the picture and keep the palette. Noticed that myself. I have a file folder in which I test colours and after I painted this picture over here, I sometimes found that this one was more interesting than the picture itself. Perhaps because it’s more unconscious. In writing you cannot help but be conscious of what you’re writing, that’s implicit in the process of writing but I don’t find that true in painting. I see with my hands.

CREATIVITY E . G . : There

research?

is that creative jump. It comes out of everything and nowhere.

W. B . : There’s

W. B . :

E . G . : How

evil could a government be that would initiate that kind of

absolutely no limit to what the control mentality will do. A doctor in London said it was Soviet, somebody else said that it was the war against gays and blacks by the American government and then there was some scientific material indicating that it was an engineered designer virus. A simple job of genetic tinkering that any competent

p262 V15N4 1990

That’s exactly it. It comes out of nowhere, you have your hands and I have rather bad sight, with cataracts in both eyes, but so

what. I’d like clearer sight if I could but you have to take things as they come. E . G . : Your

mind is still there, still active.

W. B . : It

serves the body, it does what I need done. I like to row if there’s an opportunity and I get out to target shooting every week, that’s not much exercise but it gets me out. I hate games, I never have liked games, any sort of competitive sport or games. I never played them, cards too, I never played cards, a waste of time.

what becomes a sterile lifeless process of replication. As Klee says, painters don’t render nature, they render visible. They see something others don’t see and by painting it they render it visible to others. That’s certainly one of the things they do or attempt to do. E . G . : Are

your shotgun paintings a reverberation against the notorious action of fatally shooting your wife?

W. B . : There’s no real connection.Sure,well,it can’t be helped.It doesn’t matter. E . G . : Have

THE FUTURE E . G . : Is

you ever written about that?

W. B . : No,

but I’ve given accounts of it. I told Ted Morgan what happened, that’s all. Once and for all.

there still a lot of work you want to create? E . G . : Is

W. B . : A

great deal. After all, I’m still trying to get it to move, literally move. Oh yes, lots of ideas.

that one of the moral accountabilities that might determine your next life?

W. B . : That E . G . : What

are you planning to do in the future?

W. B . : A

lot of painting and I also have some writing. I just finished a book, it all goes to chance, it’s about lemurs and also about Christ. Well, that’s some project, I finished that one but there’s a lot of themes in there that I haven’t explored yet. I have many ideas. I’ve tried various mediums; metal, glass I thought would be much more interesting than it is and mirrors. I find that some colours for me are easier to work with than others. I have a lot of trouble with blue, my easiest colour is the whole spectrum of red, russet, sepia, brown, yellow, that whole spectrum. Blues and greens I find very hard. Black, I find very good, black and white backgrounds, gold and silver backgrounds.

E . G . : You

would be putting it in a very simplistic way. It isn’t a question of morality anyway, it’s a question of where you are now, your synchronicity and how your actions affect your whole contacts, present, past and future. Contacts, there’s no morality involved. I’m not following any moral law.

E . G . : The call of “moral” is very Catholic, very cause and effect. It’s too easy. W. B . : Exactly. Causality

and the either or. Either this or that. They set up a false dichotomy which doesn’t exist, very often it’s both. That’s the war formula, either or. It’s the barber’s formula.

E . G . : It’s

obvious you keep striving for more. As you become older, you become more ambitious. I find it inspiring.

are a young artist. W. B . : Yes. Absolutely,

Yes, I found this out and that out through various randomizing techniques like ink blots, the shotgun blast, drip canvases, dripping this way, dripping that way and so forth. But, of course a bag of tricks doesn’t make a painting it’s the painter that uses them.

absolutely.

W. B . : Exactly.

E . G . : You

were saying that the process was very important with the shotgon paintings. Do you think it’s just a gimmick?

W. B . : They’re

all gimmicks. In the old days somebody would get a little kind of varnish that would give a particular colour and that would be a closely guarded secret. All those tricks are known. People say that’s an ink blot or a drip canvas or whatever. Of course, the shotgun blast exploding colour does add a new dimension. There’s no way you can predict a shotgun blast. Random technique is to let the unpredictable factor in. The unpredictable, spontaneous, living factor, life in short, into

E . G . : You

haven’t laid down yet.

W. B . : Heavens

no. Right now I’m collaborating on an opera called “The Dark Rider” with Bob Wilson. It’s going to take place in Hamburg in September, I’m going to spend a couple of weeks there. It’s an old German folktale about someone who is going to sell his soul to the devil for magic bullets because he has to pass a shooting test to win a certain position and also his girl. So he gets these magic bullets from the devil and of course, disaster. A devil’s bargain is always a fool’s bargain.

E . G . : Have

you ever entered into any bargain like that?

W. B . : God

no. I’m not such a fool. This old Satan doesn’t take me for dumber than I look.

1990 V15N4 p263

Enough.

Louise Lawler p264 V16N1 1990

Impulse Chronology

Volume 1 Number 1, 1971 – Volume 16 Number 1, 1990

p265

Volume 1 Number 1, 1971  Editor: Peter Such. Published three times a year: Erindale College, University of Toronto. Cover Etching: Irwin Spigel. Cover Design: Norman White. Magazine Design: Arden Ford. Secretarial: Ilka Higgins. Contributors: Al Purdy, ‘Excess Of Having’; Dennis Lee, ‘When It’s Over, Second Elegy’; Graeme Gibson, ‘from Communion’; Margaret Avison, ‘Because Somebody Said “They Dress So Well”’, ‘Immobility/ Rest/…’; Miriam Waddington, ‘Honeymoon House’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Angel Two, I Hate This Man’; Tim Inkster, ‘The Children’s Game Of Jury, Your Knight, Your’; Matt Cohen, ‘The End’; Shirley Gibson; Allisan Noble, ‘Poem For Don’; Andre Stein; Harold Ladoo, ‘from Yesterdays’. Volume 1 Number 2, Winter 1972  Editor: Peter Such. Cover Design: Eric Running. Published three times a year: Erindale College, University of Toronto. Table of Contents: Irving Layton, ‘Mexico Poems: No Exit, Tide’; I.M. Spigel, ‘Metawagons and Orthostars’; George Jonas, ‘Airplane Poems: Bomber Pilot, Descending’, ‘Garment District, New York’, ‘Crossing The Straits Of Georgia with Beverley’, ‘Literary Wife’”; Valerie Kent, ‘Lunch Undercover’; Margaret Atwood, ‘Encounters with The Element Man’; Tim Inkster, ‘Mrs. Grundy Poems: The glass bottomed mrs. grundy, Bats are hangmen (innocents), In the fields of her forebears’; Robin Kelsey, ‘Norman’s Chinese Junk’; John Ditsky, ‘Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes’, ‘Three Spasms After First Brautigan’; Eugene McNamara, ‘Forty’; Eldon Garnet, ‘from Henry K. a novel’; Dale Zieroth, ‘The Magic Men for John Newlove’. Editorial: The success of a magazine such as Impulse

depends entirely on the quality of the material submitted to the editor. Fortunately, our first issue contained good writing by well known authors and others and it is to these people the editor is grateful for the many congratulatory notices he received from critics and interested readers throughout Canada and the United States. Contemporary Canadian Writing is as diverse and experimental as contemporary Canadian society. Therefore it is not the editor’s intention to try for a kind of artificial unity in the composition of any single issue unless it spontaneously presents itself. Impulse intends to present a continuing survey of the best Contemporary Canadian writing in all the interesting phases of its creative mosaic. This issue, for instance, includes such things as ‘Mexico Poems’ by Irving Layton, ‘Airplane Poems’ by George Jonas and an experimental short story by Margaret Atwood as well as some unusual poetry and prose by other writers. Most of Impulse’s circulation so far has been through bookstores across the country from Moncton to Vancouver and in university and public libraries. Our Circulation Manager, however, would like to see a firmer personal subscription base established and to that end is offering a free copy of the first issue published last Fall, a few of which are still available. Please use the subscription form for convenience, or better still write and let us know your comments. All manuscripts will receive personal attention and should include return postage. No critical articles please. 

Peter Such

Volume 1 Number 3, Spring 1972  Editor: Peter Such. Cover Design: Georgina Anderson. Published Quarterly by: Peter Such with assistance of The Canada Council and The Ontario Council For The Arts. Table of Contents: Miriam Waddington, ‘Dead Lakes Of Sudbury’, ‘Back At York’; Doug Fetherling, ‘Mackenzie’s Ghost’; Alden Nowlan, ‘At a Distance He Observes an Unknown Girl Picking Flowers’; Gary Ross, ‘Landladies’; Les Gasparini, ‘The Mannequin’; Fred Booker, ‘Wade Park’; Ian Young, ‘Eagle Pond’, ‘Wanstead’; Jane Beecroft, ‘The West Wind; The Jack Pine’, ‘To Anne and David’, ‘Contact’; George Amabile, ‘Sustenance’; Eldon Garnet, ‘A Wilderness Problem’; Tim Inkster, ‘Seen from the outside looking in’, ‘Dithyramb in search of the lost mornings’; Joe Rosenblatt, ‘The Flowerbox’, ‘A spaceship’; ‘Bumblebee Dithyramb’, ‘Frog in the Well’; Irving Layton, ‘New Years Eve Zihuatanejo’, ‘Magic’; Max Layton, ‘Reflection’; ‘Silence’; Dorothy Livesay, ‘To Be Blind’, ‘Not’, ‘Of Death: at Easter’; Hans Jewinski, The Many-Coloured Cloak’; Alan Pearson, ‘Spanish Dancer’; Miriam Waddington, ‘Moscow Roses’; Peter Stevens, ‘The Spy Who Went Out From The Cold’, ‘Bomb Squad’; Douglas Barbour, ‘Song 50: the visit’. Editorial: The anvil is struck, a chain crashes to the floor;

set free, the soul dashes in terror through a universe sizzling with chaos, wailing, “Where shall I flee? “Murray Schafer’s ‘Divan i Shams i Tabriz’ for orchestra, singers, electric organ and tape begins its allegory of search, change, synthesis, resolution and peace. Based on poetry by the 13th century writer Jalal al-Din Rumi and borrowing its title from his mystical work telling of the fusion of religious and human love, the piece rings with ecological significance, including sound of wind, rain, and thunder. Murray was kind enough to allow Impulse to print the first page of his score crammed with notations and visual renderings of sounds made beautiful by his imagination.

p266

And from the poetry of music to the music of poetry is perhaps not very far to reach in this warm season, Impulse’s third. Shifting the world sideways is Joe Rosenblatt’s dithyramb of the bumblebee, a long chant for which the reader will have to create his own score. There’s also poetry written by Jane Beecroft intended for an opera. And the rest of the poems in this issue contain their own unique music. Many readers will recognize familiar names such as Miriam Waddington, Dorothy Livesay, Irving Layton, Alden Nowlan, Ian Young and Doug Fetherling. Walter Buczynski’s score for page seven of his new work Zeroing In No. 2 is used as the end piece.  Peter Such Volume 2 Number 1, Fall 1972  Cover Design: Dennis Noble. Supervised by Janis Rapoport. Published quarterly by: Editors with the assistance of the Canada Council and The Ontario Council For The Arts. Table of Contents: Matt Cohen, ‘The Empty Room’; Barry Charles, ‘Barry and Maria’; Mark Plourde, ‘The White Magnet’, ‘The Man in the Station’; Randy Thomas, ‘There Was Toronto’; John Newlove, ‘That There Is No Relaxation’, ‘The Flock Tougher Than Its Shepherds’, ‘A Long Continual Argument with Myself’; Chandler Davis, ‘A Wife’s Song’, ‘Historian’; Edward Strickland, ‘Atelier Oeuf: Lune’; Gary Geddes, ‘London’, ‘Rio Seco’; Derk Wynand, ‘Snowscape’; Terence Roberts, ‘Image 1’, ‘Image 2’; Fraser Sutherland, ‘The Piazza’; Dennis Lee, ‘The Presence Of Pioneers’; Anne Daffos, ‘The Planet Sun’. Editorial: With this number Impulse enters into its second

year of publication. The editorial staff has doubled, the circulation department has moved to separate premises - we seem to have eased into a phase of expansion. Manuscripts and correspondence continue to arrive steadily, from as far away as the U.K. and the Netherlands. And this issue of Impulse reflects the international interests that unite those who are writing in contemporary Canada. Consider the diversity of the background both of the contributors and of their subjects. A Guyanan and a Canadian-American externalizing their impressions of Toronto, today’s and tomorrow’s. Canadians from across the country using their native surroundings, those of England, Spain, Italy and France, as well as the unique territories forged by their own imaginations. The prose in this number is experimental, both in style and in content. The poetry ranges from the traditional through to the contemporary. We continue to be aware of the difficulty for new writers to get their work into print. It is part of our editorial policy to encourage young and new writers and to include them in each issue. The cover and internal design of each number of the magazine will reflect the nature of its contents. We are eager to look forward as well as back. Part of a musical score appeared in the last issue, an excerpt from a scenario or film script may present itself in the next. We, the editors, challenge the originality and the creativity of our contributors. Their future is ours.  Peter Such Volume 2 Number 2, Winter 1973  Editor: Peter Such. Supervised by: Janis Rapoport. Cover Design: Barry Rubin. Published quarterly: Editors with the assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Council for the Arts. Table of Contents: T. H. Crerar, ‘A Chronicle’; Norman Skolnick, ‘Two Drawings’; Nachman of Bratzlav, ‘Tale of a Rabbi and his Son’, Translation by Seymour Levitan; Tony Thomas, ‘A Reading By Joe Rosenblatt’; Helen Weinzweig, ‘Treble Clef’. Editorial: The next issue of Impulse promises to be a

literary event. It will be a double number (Volume 2, Number 3 and 4) and will have bound within it the second issue of Porcepic Magazine. Porcepic appeared last year for the first time as a limited edition collector’s item put out by David Godfrey (New Press, President of The Independent Publisher’s Association) edited and designed by Eldon Garnet and Tim Inkster (poets, operators of Press Porcepic). It featured the best avant-garde writing in Canada. The special Impulse number will also contain an index of poems, short stories etc. published in Impulse during the two years since it began. Extra orders should be placed now. The double issue is priced regularly at $2.00 (Ten or more copies, 40% discount.) Are writers, like artists and musicians, growing tired, at last, of purely decorative modes? Are they growing tired of repressing their natural human sensibilities in order to adopt the arrogant and sophisticated writing-stances that are currently in fashion? Most of the prose received lately by the editors of this magazine seems to reflect a desire to communicate human language. Eschewing Joycean manipulations of diction and French aesthetic sophistries, these writers are choosing, instead, a confrontation with structural and mythopoeic elements. These are the things that can cross from one language to another. Northrop Frye, in his introduction to Dialogue Sur La Traduction (Frank Scott’s translation of Anne Hebert’s poem, ‘Tombeau des Rois’), says: ... Mr. Scott quotes Robert Frost as saying that ‘the poetry’ is what is lost in translation, adding that he does not think

this the whole truth. I have become convinced that it is the opposite of the truth, and that ‘the poetry’ is precisely what . . . can be translated. What cannot be translated are the linguistic accidents.... Working in a context of different languages and cultures, a microcosm of the world itself, is it an historical accident that Canadian writers should be already developing those modes which promise to bind more closely what one of Canada’s geniuses has called, The Global Village?  Peter Such Volume 2 Numbers 3 + 4 and Porcepic Volume 1 Number 2, 1973  Editor: Peter Such. Published Quarterly by: Editors with assistance from the Canada Council and the Ontario Council for the Arts. Porcepic edited by Eldon Garnet. Cover Graphic: bill bissett. Table of Contents: Harold Sonny Ladoo, ‘The Quiet Peasant’; Margaret Atwood, ‘Book Of Ancestors’; Joe Rosenblatt, ‘The Whole Academy Explodes’, ‘He is the Mozart Of Animal Sounds’, ‘The Cool Dream’, Eldon Garnet, ‘Below Ground Trembling’, Dorothy Livesay, ‘Getting it Straight’, George Bowering, ‘David McFadden’, Eli Mandel, ‘Estevan 1934’, ‘At Wabamun the Calgary Power Station’, ‘Lake Wabamun: Summer 68’; Peter Such, ‘Floating Bears’; bill bissett, ‘canada’; Sue Swan, ‘Pit–stop’, ‘Alternatives’; Dave Godfrey, ‘A Dew Year’s Morning on Bloor Street’; Michael John Nimchuk, ‘Quinte Summer’; Peter Stevens, ‘Grandfather’; David Clift, ‘Chicago’; Tim Inkster, ‘The Ghosts Of All The Horses’; Len Gasparini, ‘Trophies’; Hans Jewinski, ‘!:-;; The Great Shell Game’; George Amabile, ‘The Beggar’; Miriam Waddington, ‘The Last Rehearsal’; ‘Downtown Streets’, Max Layton, ‘Only In The Stillness’; Pier Giorgio DiCicco, ‘Dianne I Could Have Loved You’; Richard Hillman, ‘Return Journey By Rail’; John Bemrose, ‘Lying In Surrey’; Chuck Carlson, ‘Chartreuse Crazies’, ‘Blakean V8.’, ‘Ask Me To Write’; David Lewis Stein, ‘Back Where I Can Be Me’; Frank Davey, ‘The King Of Wands’, ‘Manuscript, 28 November, 1968 Titled “Justice”’, ‘Manuscript, 19 January, 1969 Titled “Love Poem, After L.Cohen”’, ‘The Hanged Man, To Himself’. Volume 3 Number 1, Fall 1973  Editor: Peter Such. Published Quarterly by: Editor with Assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Business Manager: Catherine Stewart. Table of Contents: Habitat Brian Henderson, ‘Off King William Island (The explorer, Franklin)’; Keith Garebian, ‘The Second Language’; Miriam Waddington, ‘Charlottetown’, ‘The Dark Lake’; L. E. Arnold, ‘Vineland, Ont.’ Katherine Clarke, ‘Cedars’; Geoffrey Rutell, ‘April 1946’; Jean-Guy Carrier, ‘Diamonds’; Fairies At The Bottom of; Richard Hillman, ‘Voice From Close-by’; Saam Tata, ‘Mother Goosed (poem and Story)’, (cartoons) by Peter Walley. Flying Douglas Barbour, ‘Evening Flight, 20.2.73.’; ‘Flying, 39,000 feet up’; Hans Jewinski ‘!:-;; Crowded Skies [ Airlift ]’, ‘Procedures; Lovers and Lesser Pier Giorgio DiCicco, ‘Closest to thoughts of her’; Laurence Hutchman, ‘By The Pool’; George Jonas, ‘A Love Poem’; Anne Daffos, ‘Little Indeed’; Richard Hillman, ‘A Conversation with Jane’; Charlotte Fielden, ‘Bubeh Meisse’. The Process A. Kochanowsky ‘On Rembrandt The Jewish Bride’; ‘Kensington Birth’; David Clift, ‘Empty Bottles’; Rosalind MacPhee, ‘Eclipse’; Larry Everson, ‘I’ve got a big old watch in my pocket; Paulette Jiles, ‘Scherezade’; Douglas Smith, ‘Morning For Van Gogh’; George Jonas, ‘Bridges On the Danube’; David Godfrey, ‘Free Form Interpretations of the I Ching Hexagrams’. Volume 3 Number 2, 1974  Editor: Peter Such, Associate Editor: Louise Dennys, Published Quarterly by: Editor with assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Table of Contents: Eli Mandel, ‘Criticism as Ghost Story’; Susan Musgrave, ‘Skoocumchuk’; Eric Young, ‘Hebrides Coast’; Saro d’Agostino, ‘Alex Colville’s Horse’; Jacques Ferron, ‘Little William’; E. Hagerman, ‘Expatriating at the Interface’; Linda Pyke, ‘To An Expatriate’, ‘Conspiring’; Les Arnold, ‘Immigrant Complaint’; Robert Clayton Casto, ‘Underground Fires’, ‘Casto’; Carl Jackson, ‘I Hear A Tambourine’; George Amabile, ‘The Ladyrinth’; Joe Rosenblatt, ‘Travel’, ‘Dream Food’; Don McKay, ‘October Edge’; Séan Virgo, ‘Ludwig’; Mark Sarner, ‘The Baker’; Stephen Zeifman, ‘Harlequin Rags’; Pat Elliot, ‘Velvet Box. Diamond. Mine’; (to John Newlove); Robert Fothergill, ‘One – Night Fall (a play)’. Volume 3 Number 3 + 4, 1974  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Business Manager: Lorraine Filyer. Table of Contents: Introduction; David UU; Joe Rosenblatt; bp Nichol; Daphne Marlatt; Gerry Gilbert; Maxine Gadd; David Dawson; Frank Davey; David Cull; Judith Copithorne; Victor Coleman; bill bissett; Nelson Ball. Volume 4 Number 1, 1975  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Business Manager: Lorraine Filyer. Table of Contents: Photographs by Fletcher Starbuck.

Volume 4 Number 2, Spring 1975  Edited and Designed by Eldon Garnet. Business Manager: Lorraine Filyer. Table of Contents: Jennifer Oille, ‘Video Ethics’; ‘West Coast Sailing…’; ‘Funbun ‘N’ Eatmeat’; Hugh Miller’s Erection; Barbara Astman; R. Rolfe, ‘My Arms, Rivers’; Peter Melnick, ‘Theatrical Passions’; review by Eldon Garnet, ‘El Topo’ a film by Alexandro Jodorowsky’; Eugene McNamara; ‘Night Air Mail 1922’; Vincent Sharp; Jean McKay ‘The White Tornado’; HJ Boenke, ‘The Photographers Dance’; ‘People’s Republic Of Poetry’; Lawrence Mathews ‘Mythology of the Body’; R. Billings, ‘Experiments with Human Flesh’; Kenneth Strange ‘Advertisement for Delayed Action Stop Loss Animal Game Traps’; Frank Davey, ‘From Literature To Criticism: A Note’; Brian Trevers, ‘Re write…’; ‘To Be…’. Volume 4 Number 3, Fall 1975  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Associate Editor: Gary Michael Dault. Business Manager: Lorraine Filyer. Table of Contents: Michael Snow, for Marni de Pencier ‘Cover and first pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Zettel”’; Les Levine, ‘What can the Government of Canada Do for You?’; A Day in the life of L C Foot’; David Rabinowitch, ‘Thoughts on the Long Rotational Mass of Four Scales’; Mark Prent, ‘In March, 1972, on the occasion of’; David Gilhooly, ‘Excerpts from an Ongoing Saga of the Frog World’. Volume 4 Number 4 + Volume 5 Number 1, 1976  Editor: Eldon Garnet; Associate Editor: Anne Hall. Table of Contents: Editor’s Introduction; Suzy Lake; Colleen Kennedy; Les Levine; David Young; Rodney Werden; Susan Musgrave; Ralph Fones; Margaret Campbell; Diane Boadway; Lorne Fromer; Anne Wordsworth; Wendy KnoxLeet; Sue Swan; Colette Whiten; Vince Sharp; Maurizio Nannucci; Eldon Garnet; Joe Hall; Michael Snow; Hans Jewinski; David McFadden; Vincent Tangredi; Peter Dudar; Bobbe Besold; Chrysanne Stathacos; Vic D’or; By example; Brian Trevers; Stephen Shortt; Massimo Nannucci; Dawn Eagle; Basia Irland; Joe Rosenblatt; John Lander; Jack McCluskey; Paul Campbell; Barbara Astman; R Right; Pearl White; David Hlynsky; Gary Michael Dault; Ruby Etch; Edwina Frankford; John Scott; John MacGregor; Fletcher Starbuck; A.S.A. Harrison; Steve McCaffery; Penny Chalmers; Judy Keeler; Amirgo Marras; General Idea; L C Foot; Mark Lightbody; Dave Godfrey; Art Canada; Heather McDonald; R Rose; Francoise Sullivan; Art life; Paul Harnett. Editorial: it is Tiresias who begins it all the prophetic seer

saying : “yes, if he does not come to know himself” the boy Narcissus will live a long life & the dark river nymph Liriope embraced by the curving stream Cephisus imprisoned in his waves & forcefully loved to bare Narcissus the image of his mother’s beauty at 16 who could be called boy & man his soft young body by pride unyielding to the touch of boy or girl Echo when she still had a body & was not just a voice saw the boy driving deer into his nets & she fell into love for holding Juno from the truth by the chatter of her tongue Echo is stripped of her power of invention & left with only imitation when she saw Narcissus wandering through the woods she followed secretly in his steps & she could not articulate her pleas only wait for words she might echo Narcissus lost from his friends calls out: “is there anyone here?” Echo: “here” Narcissus: “come” Echo: “come” Narcissus looking behind him: “why are you avoiding me?” Echo: “why are you avoiding me?” Narcissus: “come here & let us meet” Echo: “let us meet” running from the woods embracing but Narcissus retreating “away with these embraces. i would die before i would have you touch me” she hid her shamed face in the shelter of leaves & ran to the lonely caves & the pain in her heart would not let her sleep & she became thin slowly wasted her beauty the morning mist into the dry air & only her voice and bones remained till finally only her voice in the woods in the mountains in the empty room. she lives another he had ignored complained to heaven: “may he himself fall into the empty love as we have with him” & Nemesis heard Narcissus tired from the hunt hot lay down beside a pure pool where shepherds goats or cattle had never been. a place of peace undisturbed by bird or beast or falling branches. protected by trees ever cool to relieve his thirst drank & as he drank fell in love held enchanted by his self motionless. stars his eyes ivory his skin the rose flush on the smooth snow. wanted himself seeking & sought himself the flame which he burned. to kiss the pool reaching deep into the water to touch. he did not know. himslef to hold the drifting image. it comes with you & lasts while you are present, it will depart when you depart if you are able no food no sleep unable to leave the pool stretched on the

grass fixed on himself with eyes that could never be filled by his eyes undone: “woods has anyone felt a crueler love? i see my love but the form i see i cannot reach. not separated by endless ocean or highway or mountain or city wall with barred gate only a little water. my love desires me. i lean forward to kiss the clear waters he lifts his face to mine. why do you elude me? your looks offer me hope. when i stretch my arms to you stretch your arms to me, you laugh when i laugh, your tears when i weep, your lips answer in words that never reach my ears. i know & i am not deceived by my image. i burn with love for myself the flame which i must endure. what i desire i possess, my riches make me poor. i pray to separate myself from myself, a lover i wish the lover i love away. little life remains, i am cut off the flower of my youth. i have no objection to death in death i will forget my pain only i wish my love might outlive me but we must die together” the tears from his eyes disturbed the water the pool rippled the image grew faint & as he saw it disappearing cried: “stay, do not desert your love. if i cannot touch let me look let me feed my love in sight” beating his breast till it bled “for the boy i love in vain” reaching into the red water entering himself. nothing remained. the echo from the woods: “for the boy i love in vain” in the underworld he kept looking at himself in the waters of the Styx. his sisters the nymphs of the spring mourned for him cut off their hair in tribute to their brother Echo singing her refrain to their lament for the pyre for the torches no body was found only a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow centre for this circle Tiresias can be blamed.  Eldon Garnet Volume 5 Number 2, 1976  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Published by: what about music & eyeball wine music. Recorded at: MSR productions; Ancaster, Ontario. The issue is a 12” long-playing record by Joe Hall, ‘HJ Boenke’ (Written and Composed by Joe Hall). Volume 5 Number 3, Winter 1977  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Contributing Editor: Vincent Tangredi. Business Manager: Ann Hall. Design and Concept: Vincent Tangredi and Eldon Garnet. Table of Contents: Letters; John Fernie; Gar Smith, ‘Romance and Finance Beauty and Bureaucrats’; Patti Smith; Peter Anson, ‘Free Music’; Vincent Tangredi, ‘Beautiful Blud’; Lorne Fromer, ‘Of Muscle and Men’; Opal L. Nations ‘A Pen, Some Paper, Pen & Paper’; N. E. Thing CO.’s Eye Scream; Eldon Garnet, ‘A Critical Investigation’; Joe Hall, ‘HJ Boenke’. Editorial: Quantum mechanics has recently hypothesized

with xtrastenchial Hegelian dichotomy religious fantasy that the whole of space is filled with pairs of “virtual” particles & antiparticles who/that are constantly materializing in pairs, separating & then coming together again & annihilating each other. In the presence of a (one of many) black hole(s) the drama begins: one member of a pair of virtual particles may fall into the hole; so tragic; leaving the other member without a partner with which to annihilate. The forsaken particle or antiparticle may fall into the black hole after its partner, but he may also escape to infinity, where she appears to be radiation emitted by the black hole.  Eldon Garnet Volume 5 Number 4 + Volume 6 Number 1, 1977  Editor: Eldon Garnet; Business Manager: Ann Hall. Table of Contents: Photographs by Les Levine; Five Ohhh. Editorial: Disposable Sculptures. The space occupied by

an activity. The time used between spaces to concentrate on problems in art. The following photographs are proposals for a series of sculptures with performers yet to be executed. Each photograph is a working plan for a sculpture with performers. Any person may make the sculpture according to the information contained in an individual photograph. 

Les Levine

Volume 6 Number 2, Winter 1977  Impulse Editor: Eldon Garnet. Impressions Editor: Isaac Applebaum. Newswire photographs. Editorial: These photographic reproductions constitute the

raw material of our newspaper imagery. Transmitted as current through wire or as electromagnetic wave through the atmosphere: they are news photographs. The photoelectric technology which produced these images is revolutionary yet archaic. These images represent a quarter century of photographic transmission employing electrosensitive paper as the recording medium, a technology which will soon be usurped by a more sophisticated process. We have become acclimatized to the electric transmission of images through television, but it was not until the early 1950’s that the images no longer had to be carried by hand from point A to point B, but became electric, as the word had in the 19th century with the invention of the telegraph & the telephone. When artists first began producing multiple prints by means of the stone, metal, or wood plate they released the image from its one-of-a-kind preciousness as painting or illumination into a mass information vehicle able to exercise a pervasive influence. As the identity of the early mass-media artist is generally

unknown today so the person of the photographer & writer of the news photograph is submerged in an attitude of anonymous reporting of the news : the capitalist’s press articulates the desire to disseminate information which is an accurate, impartial, descriptive rendering. In our present electric era the news event has broadened, beyond recording the lives of power mongers, genocide & the machination of the beast, into a concern for individual men & women balanced on the edge of their particular lives. As history becomes more democratic & anonymous, the specific identities of the actors become less important than the metaphor of their actions. In the electric news drama, our history, our myth, has become not the actions of a select few, but a complex collection of individual & group actions; it has become our total environment, The play, the myth, the environment is endless, repetitious, fragmented, & being constantly adapted by the actors & audience as they freely interchange roles: every time an actor is killed, a part of the audience must also die. The photographs of this book are presented in their original format, products of the K-300 receiver, offered as a few more edited random moments of our present history. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 6 Number 3, 1978  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Published: Editor with the assistance of the Canada Council & the Ontario Arts Council. ‘Einstein’s Joke’ was conceptualized by Eldon Garnet, shot as a super-8 film by Duncan Johnston, with Jack McCluskey as the second peasant. The issue was released as a 4”x6” microfiche (‘cinefiche’) and an invitation to screenings of ‘Einstein’s Joke’ in San Francisco and Toronto. Volume 6 Number 4 + Volume 7 Number 1, 1978  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Associate Editors: M. A. Hanet and Anne Milne. Business Manager: Trudi Brintnell. Design: M. A. Hanet and Eldon Garnet. Table of Contents: Bill Gaglione and Anna Banana, ‘Alternation of Character/Alerazione Di Charattere’; Bruce Andrews, ‘Love Song No. 29’; Michael Snow, ‘Larry Dubin’s music’; Dan Ulaky; Mary Lou Dickinson ‘Which One Are You?’; Savas Patsalidis, ‘What A Guy!’; ‘This Car Up’; Lola Michael, ‘Interview: The Viletones’; Duane Michals, ‘A Portrait’; Isaac Applebaum, ‘Electra At The Sylvère Dollar’; Anne Milne, ‘20 Questions’; Pedro Vasquez, ‘God Shave The Queen’; Michael Gibbs, ‘So Bigger’; ‘Aliementation Impulsion’; Patti Smith; Davi Det Hompson; Buster Cleveland, ‘Fill Out & Send’. Editorial: The lines that have been drawn. The plan is

simple, utilitarian & classical. After 7 years of format investigation Impulse is now experimenting with the standard format. Touch the square. The seventies are ending, the eighties are beginning. The grid is intended to bring the lines to tension to create what will transform the past into the present into the future. Our ability through Impulse to manipulate is limited but our ability to act as a ‘centre’ is open. With this we are setting out the format, the package which may absorb & transmit. The magazine. A moving centre in the network. It is not a vacuum which asks to be filled but a structure, a grid ready for the images of the construction. By example, here the prototype. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 7 Number 2 + 3, Spring 1979  Editor: Eldon Garnet; Associate Editor: M. A. Hanet & Anne Milne & Trudi Brintnell; Advertising: Anne Pepper. Table of Contents: Victor Coleman, ‘Doppleganger (Sonnets)’; Dennis Oppenheim, ‘I Shot The Sheriff(Art)’; Isaac Applebaum ‘Naked Lunch (photo/poem)’; Martha Hawley, ‘Deah Maw (poem)’; George Manupelli ‘Almost Crying (a film)’; Dawn Eagle, ‘Vixen K (narrative)’; Gary Greenwood, ‘The Distance Between (photography)’; David Young ‘Spotting: A Case Story (fiction)’; Karl Jirgens ‘Underwater Hockey: The Championships’; ‘The Basic Home Communicator: A Proposal’; James Wines, ‘Site, An Architectural Group: Three Projects’; ‘Hockey & Television: An Examination’, David Hlynsky, ‘Lasers: Random Notes In New Developments’; Correspondence; Eldon Garnet, ‘Personal Hygiene: Dental Floss vs. Periodontal Disease’; M. A. Hanet ‘Alimentation Impulsion: TV Meals, Four Hot New Dishes’; Lola Michael ‘Interview: Blondie, A Toronto Conversation’; ‘Off The Wire: A Computer Thief’. Volume 7 Number 4, Summer 1979  Editor: Eldon Garnet; Associate Editors: M. A. Hanet, Anne Milne and Trudi Brintnell; Advertising: Anne Pepper. Table of Contents: Rodney Werden, ‘Baby Dolls’; Judith Doyle, ‘Robotics- A Case Study’; Kim Todd, ‘Atomic Statement’; Martin Avery, ‘Just A Picosecond (story)’; William Wheeler, ‘Discourse: A Coin’; John Brown, ‘What Kind Of Gun Are These You Got’; Interview with Sylvère Lotringer; Joe Vykydal, ‘An Introduction To Monster Hunting’; Willoughby Sharp, ‘Toward the Teleculture’; Chris Burden, ‘The Curse Of Big Job’; Interconnect; Eldon Garnet, ‘Personal Hygiene: A Perceptual Motor Skill’; Michael Duddy, ‘Architecture: The Plaza’; Of The Wire: Einstein; Lola

Michael, ‘Interview: The Only Ones’; Mary Ann Hanet and Anne Milne, ‘Alimentation Impulsion: Bigos’. Volume 8 Number 1, Fall 1979  Editor: Eldon Garnet. Associate Editors: Shelagh Alexander and Anne Milne. Contributing Editor (New York): Willoughby Sharp. Table of Contents: Impulse, ‘Interconnect’; Lola Michael, ‘Divine’; Science Council of Canada, ‘A Technology Policy For Canada’; Tom Sherman, ‘Once Living In A Healthy State Of Paranoia’; Jonathan Richman; Gilbert McElroy, ‘Island’; Willoughby Sharp, ‘Toward The Teleculture Part II’; Ross McLaren, ‘Microfiche Insert’; Shelagh Alexander, ‘Mr. Leather Chicago ’79’; Excel, ‘Fashion’; Les Levine, ‘Deep Gossip: A Video Novel’; J. Kit Miller, ‘Monkeys Eat Red Peppers’; Philip Hughes, ‘Little Blank Crambo’; Michael Duddy, ‘Thinking Post Modern’; P.L. Noble, ‘Devo’. Editorial: One of the prime functions of the artist

throughout history has been to aid in the improvement of man’s environment. Today it isn’t enough merely to work the surface, to add to the existing structure. The current demand is for deep change: not simply to cover the wall but to rebuild it from the core. The artist’s obligation to his environment goes beyond decorative improvement. The technological revolution has made it clear that the entire social, economic and political structure of the world is rapidly changing and the artist who isn’t sensitive to these changes cannot be considered an artist. The concepts expressed in The Science Council of Canada’s A Technology Policy are an example of the analytic self-examination and planning strategy necessary in every phase of modem life: to be aware of the current situation and to offer positive actions for the future. The artist of today and tomorrow will be a social innovator, aware of technology and its pervasive ability to institute cultural change. Impulse supports the artist on the edge whose view is to the future. Painting, sculpture, drawing, the plastic arts are historical and no more interesting than wallpaper design. Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid process, has done more for photography than Ansel Adams, the landscape photographer. As a cultural magazine, Impulse attempts to aid in the introduction of new modes of communication and perception; to think postmodern; to break loose of the existing confines into the unexplored. Our vitality continues to be our growth.  Eldon Garnet Volume 8 Number 2, Spring 1980  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet and Shelagh Alexander. Contributing Editors: Anne Milne and Willoughby Sharp (New York). Design: Shelagh Alexander and Eldon Garnet. Table of Contents: Andrew James Paterson, ‘Flat Tire’; Leila Angelic Interview, ‘Capturing Toronto’,; Norman White, ‘The Tinkerer’s Robot’; Scott Gladden; Peter Noble, ‘Iggy Pop: History Starts Here’; Adam Swica; Michael Kieran, ‘Buckminster Fuller’; Mac Adams, ‘Mysteries’; Judith Doyle, ‘Conversational Machines’; Tom Dean, ‘The Floating Staircase’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Bob Colacello Interview(ed)’; Two New Projects by Site; Barbara de Genevieve; A.S.A. Harrison, ‘Nellie’s Mistake’; Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘Vehicles’; Anne Milne, ‘Grapple’; John Brown, ‘Rich People’; Annie Nikolajevich and George Whiteside, ‘Future Image Language’; Ralph Alfonso, ‘More Politics of New Wave’; John Greyson, ‘Eavesdrop’. Volume 8 Number 3, Summer 1980  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet and Shelagh Alexander. Contributing Editors: Judith Dolye and Anne Milne; New York: Lisa Baumgardner and Willoughby Sharp. Design: Shelagh Alexander and Eldon Garnet. Advertising: Tony Hardingham. Table of Contents: Randy & Berenicci, ‘The Singapore Postcards’; Donna Lypchuk, ‘Baby Snooky Come Back’; David Hlynsky & Michael Sowdon, ‘3-D Perspectives’; Steven Davey, ‘America’; Willoughby Sharp, ‘Zero Time Data Hideout: Alain Robbe-Grillet Interviewed’; David Buchan & George Whiteside, R. Dick Trace-It, ‘Seven Days A Week’; Peter Noble, ‘John Lydon Gets His Palm Read’, ‘Now Tell Us Ondine’ Impulse interview; Philip Monk, ‘Exits’; Constance De Jong, ‘Oh, Those Desert Nights!’; Robin Collyer, ‘Untitled Magazine Pages 37-40’; Judith Doyle, ‘Envy’; Peter Noble, ‘Wobble’; Carl Loeffler, ‘Notes On The Future Of Television’; Michael Kieran, ‘Humanova: Evolving In Space’. Volume 8 Number 4, Fall/Winter 1980  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet and Shelagh Alexander. Business Manager: Sydney Dinsmore. Contributing Editors: Judith Doyle; New York: Lisa Baumgardner-Bachner and Willoughby Sharp. Design: Shelagh Alexander and Eldon Garnet. Design Assistance: Michael Wurstlin. Advertising: Tony Hardingham. Typography: Alphabets. Table of Contents: Peter Noble, ‘Martha and The Muffins’; Cece Cole and Patrick Mata, ‘Nina Hagen’, Lisa Baumgardner-Bachner, ‘Lech Kowalski’; ‘Harry Smith’; Carole Corbeil, ‘Censorship:

Magazine Repression’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Escapism’; Philip Monk, ‘Violence and Representation’; Randy & Berenicci, ‘Metaphor For the 80’s: the Cockfight’; Kenneth Decker, ‘Tony Chestnut Talking’; David Hlynsky, ‘The Day Time Stopped Standing Still’; Tom Sherman, ‘How to Watch Television’; Paul Rutkovsky, ‘Commodity Characters’; Michael Wurstlin, ‘Growing up in a Safe, Healthful Community’; Willoughby Sharp, ‘Hazel Henderson’; Shelagh Alexander & Andrew James Paterson, ‘The Flying Objects’; Impulse Questionnaire compiled by Judy Keeler. Volume 9 Number 1, Spring 1981  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Shelagh Alexander and Judith Doyle. Contributing Editors: New York: Lisa Baumgarder. Design: Shelagh Alexander. Design Assistance: Ken Baird. Advertising: Tony Hardingham. Distribution: Karl Jirgens. Typography: Alphabets. Table of Contents: Andrew James Paterson, ‘Industrial Overload’; Anne Milne, ‘Considering Christian Television’; Dawn Eagle, ‘Theory Of Appearance’; Chris Dewdney, ‘Case A7’; Matt Cohen, ‘In Search of Inspiration’; Donna Lypchuk, ‘Rebel Without A Car’; Judith Doyle, ‘Fading’; Steven Davey, ‘Fads Fade Orchestral Manoeuvres’; Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘Proposed Projection’; Tom Dean, ‘Ramps’; Vincent Tangredi, ‘The Campanile’; Brian Boigon, ‘A Mirror In The Window’; Lorne Fromer, ‘Russ Myer’; Kaz, ‘Untitled’; Barbara Astman, ‘Untitled’; David Buchan, ‘Out Of This World!’; Denis Bouchard, ‘Hair Wear’; Maurizio Nannucci, ‘All That Happens Goes’; Dennis Oppenheim, ‘Thought Projectile Factories’; Gerard Malanga, ‘Shark Bait’. Editorial: Q: Can you describe the beginnings of the

magazine? A: Impulse was founded in February 1971 by Peter Such a literary magazine publishing new work as opposed to reviews and commentary. It was small, historically important, an outlet for new and established writers. Q: Who were you then? A: I was a young writer, a contributor to the first issue of Impulse. In 1973, I became associate editor - a collaboration between my magazine Porcepic and Impulse. I resigned shortly thereafter when Impulse completely absorbed Porcepic - it appeared merely to be an issue of Impulse. Q: How did you eventually become the editor? A: In 1974, Impulse published a double issue of a book I’d edited, W)Here? The Other Canadian Poetry. At this point, I literally had become the editor, so Peter Such gave me the magazine. Q: After this issue the magazine appears to have changed drastically. A: The next issue was a monograph of photographs by Fletcher Starbuck. The literary readership hated it. I woke one morning to a radio interviewer’s phone call; I told him to phone back after I’d had a cup of coffee. I spent the morning listening to Impulse being attacked on the radio. Q: Some of your issues aren’t even recognizable as magazines. A: From 1975 to 1978, Impulse was a magazine of changing formats, an artists magazine, publishing new works produced for magazine format. In 1976 a long-playing record was released as an issue. In 1978 the magazine was a super-8 movie, Einstein’s Joke, and a “cinefiche” of the movie. Although conceptually one of the stronger issues, the microfiche succeeded in destroying the remainder of our market. I still don’t know five people with microfiche viewers. With each issue, I would try to change, to surprise, to destroy everyone’s expectations. After four years of redefining what could be called a magazine, I felt the most radical change I could undertake would be to standardize the format. Q: Is that when the square format appeared? A: Yes, with the help of M.A. Hanet, Impulse became square and glossy, employing the grid as a motif of organization. The design was simple and flat. Our basic editorial aim remained the same, a commitment to publishing new works by artists and writers. Throughout the past four issues, Shelagh Alexander’s design sensibility is pre-eminent; now as a designer and an editor she is involved in every aspect of the magazine. Judith Doyle, an editor for the past three issues, has worked to develop our text. I am now publisher, general overseer and frequent contributor. Q: Has the magazine changed much lately? A: Our concerns are consistent; Impulse changes with the changing interests of its contributors. If we didn’t change there wouldn’t be any sense in continuing to publish the magazine. Q: Happy birthday. A: After ten years, thanks.  Eldon Garnet Volume 9 Number 2, Fall 1981  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Shelagh Alexander, and Judith Doyle. New York Editors: Lisa Baumgardner. Editorial Assistance: Philip Monk and Lynne Fernie. Design: Shelagh Alexander and Ken Baird. Advertising: Tony Hardingham. Typography: Alphabets Mascot: Spot B. Table of Contents: Insert, ‘Bikini girl #8’; James Dunn, ‘Canada’s Wonderland’; Judith Doyle, ‘A Chronology of

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Censorship in Ontario’; Anne Milne, ‘Notes on Pay TV in Canada’; Andrew James Paterson, Fred Gaysek and Eldon Garnet, ‘Kraftwerk’; Peter Noble, ‘Lounge Lizard Lingo’; Lori Spring, ‘In Defence of Movie Pleasure’; Dennis Pike, ‘Special FX’; Judith Doyle, ‘Transcript’; Tom Sherman, ‘Inside The Cultural Industrial Compound’; A.S.A Harrison, ‘The Mechanic’; George Legrady; Nancy Johnson, ‘My Superego Gives Me Choreography’; Brian Boigon, ‘The limits Of a Territory’; James Dunn, ‘Family Picnic’. Editorial: It was a hot summer. The world appeared to be

falling apart at the seams. One night everyone left their designer’s knives on the light table to hang out on the roof and watch a 55% eclipse of an almost full moon. We fought. Shouted. Punched. But working in the heat is never easy at the best of times. Scrambling in the face of every obstacle, including a national postal strike, our contributors showed their fortitude, ability and creativity providing us with the material for yet another, shall I say it, hot issue. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 9 Numbers 3 + 4, Spring 1982  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Shelagh Alexander, and James Dunn. Contributing Editors: Judith Doyle (Toronto) and Lisa Baumgardner (New York) Editorial Assistant: Robbyn Grant. Design: Shelagh Alexander. Advertising: Robin Wall. Typography: Alphabets. Mascot Trainee: Severin. Table of Contents: Frank Geiger, ‘Illusion of Survival’; Joan (Adaire) Brouwer, ‘Release and Detonation’; Susan Britton, ‘Fiscal Dread’; Comite De Defensa, ‘Uruguay Prison’; Caroline Simmons, ‘Herpes’; Peter Wronski, ‘TV: The Semiotic Conspiracy’; Peter Wronski, ‘Fear’s Invention’; Kenneth Decker, ‘Where Seldom is “Herd”’; Lisa Baumgardner, ‘Diary Excerpt’; Eduardo Galeano, ‘Of Virgins and Saints’; Lynne Tillman, ‘Diary of a Masochist’; Karl Jirgens, ‘A Bedtime Story’; John Wadsworth, ‘Stars False/Stars Fallen’; Dotty Attie; Michael Merrill, ‘Birthday’; James Dunn/Eldon Garnet, ‘David Cronenberg’; James Dunn, ‘Topology of a Monster: Jaws’; Gord Smith, ‘Anatomy of a Special Effects Technician’; James Wines, ‘Fear of the Albany Mall’; Keen, ‘Span’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Glenn Branca’; P. L. Noble, ‘Jules Baptiste’. Editorial: Patiently we waited to be scared. Obligingly, the

images and stories poured in - grotesque faces, contorted bodies, distorted situations, gruesome accidents. Nothing scared us. It was all too contrived. Looking for images of the Hiroshima aftermath, a librarian asked: “You’re not going to say anything bad about the bomb, are you?” We realized that we did not really fear extraterrestrial invasion or supernatural possession. We discovered that our fears were much closer to home. We fear the world as it is. We fear ourselves as we are. We no longer have enough time to speculate and anticipate future fears. In our attempts to create a world in which nothing “bad” could happen, we have created a world which is almost unfit for human habitation. “Of course you know that millions of lives were saved by the bomb,” added the librarian. We did not fear her; we feared the way she had so conveniently neglected to learn from the past. One bomb, one city. The Editors would like to thank the following people for giving their time and energy: Andy Paterson, Amy Wilson, Kenny Baird, Tim Jocelyn, Leighton Barrett, Michael Woods, Aaron Milrad, Carol Off, and especially The Cameron (Herb, Paul, Debbie) for providing Impulse with an office when our furnace blew up.  Eldon Garnet Volume 10 Number 1, Summer 1982  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, James Dunn and Judith Doyle. Contributing Editor: Lisa Baumgardner (New York). Editorial Assistants: Joan (Adair) Brouwer, Ken Baird and Robbyn Grant. Art Direction: Ken Baird. Office: Joan (Adair) Brouwer. Advertising: Robbyn Grant. Typography: Alphabets. Mascot Designate: Severin. Table of Contents: Stanley McDowell, ‘Nuclear Strategy/Political Will’; Elspeth Sage and Joan (Adair) Brouwer, ‘The Model Worker’; Brother Martin Shea/Judith Doyle, ‘Appropriation of Suffering’; Paul Virilio/Sylvère Lotringer, ‘The Suicidal State’; John Bentley Mays, ‘The Victims’ Ball’; Andrew Czeszak, ‘TBDF: Transborder Data Flow’; Todd Grimson, ‘Amnesia’; Lisa Bloomfield, ‘False Sites and Complexes’; Robert Cumming, ‘Drawings’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Privacy’; Ken Baird and Joan (Adair) Brouwer, ‘D. A. F.’; James Dunn, ‘The Death of Canadian Cinema’; Anne Milne, ‘Insomniac: An Interview with Jeff Silverman’. Editorial: There is a hail of events under which every

person stands unsheltered, unable to command the storm’s withdrawal. What minor protections we construct are ephemeral shacks against the constant onslaught. I have no pacifist’s dream of an end to hostility. Dreams must be made by muscle. Action must be answered by better action. Deconstruction by construction. When the enemy attacks you must induce him to turn the weapon against himself. All the power which stands against you is your potential power. You stand as the transformer, where power against weakness becomes power against power; where power becomes a relinquishing, becomes weakness, becomes weakness against

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The forces continue. If these were positive and not oppressive, all would seem well. We are in the winter of 1982, and are to say the least, not overjoyed. The suggestion of change is met with argument. Opposition is announced in the name of morality, law, pragmatism, the status quo. Against his complaints and better wishes he’s pushed into a cage, shoved rudely into a car and carried 200 kilometers into the forest. Confused. Frightened. Arriving at a shack beside a swamp. Cowering as all senses of the environment read as hostility. He hears them drinking, laughing, eating. Smells the smoke from the fire but is too far from the flame to be comforted. The next day at the first opportunity he runs blindly into the woods. Wild without direction. Escaping. By nightfall completely lost, completely unbounded. Not the faintest sound of their presence. His freedom has been short lived; the cage is now undefined distance and direction. Weary, we mythologize a sense of ever more vague potential, but this promise could shift as easily into destruction as creation. Our myths become shapeless. Exhausted, curled into himself for warmth. The strange animal odor of fear fills his air. Every day, it is necessary to deal with the spectre of vague forces. But eventually that which looms as opposition must be named or measured. The common scales of measurement are now exhausted and rationalize repression. A new set of archetypal positions and actions must be formulated and articulated.  Eldon Garnet

initially very attractive in that their critique is directed against the “correct” groups. But this critique is nothing more then rhetoric. Once the power centre has been replaced by their power center, there is no substantial change, merely a minor transformation from one elitist group to another who nepotistically support their own constituency. These so-called liberals champion the suppressed only to attain their authority, only to suppress once again and exercise their position of power to further their own worldly ambitions. Second: those who are presently in power, the current executives, those whose central concern is to maintain the status quo and establish profits for themselves and their organizations. This power group is the accepted object of attack of the non-power group – the pseudo liberal can always make points by finding weaknesses in the power group’s superstructure and articulating them to their followers. This group is basically responsible for the current state of misaffairs and is intent on preserving their own position at all costs. Change except for gain is their constant enemy. They have worked hard to establish themselves in their current position and are not about to allow themselves to be easily removed. Worst of all, they passionately believe in what they have achieved. The scenario developed here is a dead end: the false liberals confronting the entrenched established. Historically it is the sound of this conflict which is heard by the media and the populace; stances are taken in relation to the individual’s interpretation of this conflict; the individual deciding because of personal necessity on which side they will stand. A dead end situation: I have no desire to side with either of these parties: neither hypocrisy nor bureaucracy interests me. What has to be found is a third state. A third group, another viable direction. What must be found is a form of liberalism which is based on genuine compassion, which is self-directed and must not unfairly co-opt the effort of others, which is not hypocritical, which is not based on old ideologies, on male/female differentiation, or old dialectics, which is not racist, not based in class priorities, or on historical analysis of examples outside our present situation. It must be based on a system of rational, humane judgement which is situationally oriented and problem solving directed; it must have a language of its own not one borrowed from another’s ideological position whether that position be from the right or the left. We can only continue to search, to plot new directions based outward from the moment. When a solution has been found, beware. At best we can only hope to be frustrated investigators. Once again.  Eldon Garnet

Volume 10 Number 3, Spring/Summer 1983  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White and Judith Doyle. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Joan (Adair) Brouwer (London). Art Direction: Ken Baird. Business: Carolyn White. Advertising: Cindi Emond. Legal Council: Gerald Owen. Mascot: Bunny. Table of Contents: Terence Sellers, ‘The Correct Sadist’; Dr. Henry Morgentaler vs. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, ‘To Be Or Not To Be?’; David Lake, ‘Executive Targets: Industrial Espionage’; Robert Stewart, ‘Causation Of Abstract Relations’; Judith Doyle, ‘Rate Of Descent’; Roger Peyrefitte, ‘Baron Wilhelm Von Gloeden’; Joel Peter Witkin, ‘Penitente’, ‘Angel of the Carrots’, ‘The Sins of Juan Miró’; Lori Spring, ‘Western Perspectives On Japanese Cinema’; Vincent Tangredi, ‘Of The Four Considerations’; Anne Turyn, ‘Lessons and Notes’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Caves’; Jody Berland, ‘Re/Percussions: Drumming In The Age Of Electronic Reproduction’; Jean Baudrillard, ‘Nuclear Implosion’; Sylvère Lotringer Interviews Jean Baudrillard, ‘Dropping Out Of History’. Editorial: I’ve stood in front of so many self-centred

Volume 10 Number 4, Fall 1983  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet and Carolyn White. Associate Editors: Judith Doyle and Gerald Owen. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Joan (Adair) Brouwer (London). Art Direction: Carolyn White. Contributing Designer: Ken Baird. Production Technician: Robert Labossiere. Editorial Assistant and Business: James Gronau. Computer Keyboard Operator: Wendy White. Mascot: Money (Bunny Freed). Table of Contents: Edward Slopek, ‘TV Scanners Entraining: Going Berserk On The Crest Of The Third Wave’; Andy Payne, ‘Father, Discourse and Identity: Notes Towards A Reading Of Hamlet’; Gerald Owen, ‘The Neo-Conservatives’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Love Songs’; Ara Rose Parker, ‘The Status Of Women’; Sylvère Lotringer Interviews Fadi Mitri, ‘Framing Death’; Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Right Time’; Donna Wyszomierski, ‘More Time On His Hands; ‘Ecological Disease’; Carolyn White, ‘Targeted Training’; Hans Haacke, ‘Voici Alcan’; Paul Collins, ‘Implied Writing’; Brian Boigon, ‘I Got The Frights’. Editorial: The demand for and the ability to create an

answers only to discover dead centres. So many polarities. The opportunists and the power hungry. On one side are the opportunists who appropriate liberalism to hide their personal ambitions. On the other side are the possessors of current power who defend their rights in the name of capital. Both have their allure but both are false. First: the pseudo liberals, the media liberals who perform for public acclaim; these are not the daily, grassroot workers who are directly effected by the suppressive situation, who know the situation first hand. The pseudo, media liberals are those firetruckers who complain their way to a position of power by demanding esteem for themselves in the name of “socialism”, “collectivism”, and “Marxism”, in the name of people, of the workers, of the oppressed minorities. This group attempts to exorcize their minor feeling of guilt while simultaneously promoting their individual power-seeking ambitions. The noise of their constant denial is prevalent; many uncommitted members of the same group hear their complaints and become slightly more guilty and so lend them more support, more power and ultimately aid in the suppression of who they profess they want to champion. The truth is: who they want to free is themselves, to ingest as much power as possible for their individual egos. Their articulate denial of the established power group is

improved state of physical and intellectual conditions are obstructed by the existing system in North America. The power structure conditions and enforces against change. Industrial government maintains, it does not attempt to extinguish itself in a radical transformation into the future. The state exists in Law. Law is clearly a necessity, yet contained in its structure are only the most conservative plans for the future. Law must focus on the present: empiricism not idealism is its guiding force. The lack of a poetic spirit is a lack of elasticity, an absence which tightens to rigidity; to be without the sense of impossible turns as the possible turns. Thinking is a set of rearrangements without rest. One must be a constant juggler. The tyranny of power is in the solidification and maintenance of Law. We in North America have always lived in Law; our only cultural revolution was to colonize and to order our natural environment. The electronic revolution could be considered our current cultural “revolution.” The giants of post-war Europe are slowly reorganizing after their recent industrial deaths. Very slowly. Industry is only beginning to replace its Luddite workers with robots. There is no spirit of cooperation or understanding between labour and management, no

weakness, becomes agreed. Running for cover is no solution. Safety can only be achieved by turning the storm back on itself.  Eldon Garnet Volume 10 Number 2, Winter 1982  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Judith Doyle and Joan (Adair) Brouwer. Contributing Editors: James Dunn (Toronto) and Lisa Baumgardner (New York). Associate Editors: Ken Baird and Carolyn White. Art Direction: Ken Baird. Office: Joan (Adair) Brouwer. Advertising: Lola Boomer. Legal Counsel: Gerald Owen. Mascot (Deceased): Severin, Two seasons, eaten by wolves. Table of Contents: David Clarkson, ‘Labyrinth’; Caro, ‘Bouzillage’; Margaret Dragu and A.S.A. Harrison, ‘Vice’; James Dunn, ‘Psychiatry as Social Control’; Jack Scrivener, ‘Lineation’; Boyd Webb, ‘Sleuth’; Interview with Lothar Lambert; Ken Decker, ‘absTraction’; Susan Britton, ‘Frontier Life’; Gerald Owen, ‘Pseudolexicon’; Sylvère Lotringer and Felix Guattari, ‘The New Alliance; Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith’; Interview with David Cunningham. Editorial: Forces press against. We resist and become tired.

opportunity to interact for mutual improvement. The capitalist tradition of separating worker from capital has perpetuated a condition of non-cooperation. The idea: if I’m working for someone else I am not working for myself; if I’m working for myself I am working for myself. We did not listen when Einstein elaborated on the metaphor of the bounded infinite. We remained nonEuclidean, flat beings with one dimensional implements free to move only in our plane. No one works alone. Marketed computer software is idea, process for sale: labour for sale, idea. The electron worker is changing our working world: organized white collar workers will create organized machines to build their physical world. It is this improved environment which we want to construct. With our knowledge. The central political debate is being clouded by the noisy and bloody conflict of the two super systems. Both are calcified skeletons, frightening and destructive, clashing armies wasting away. A cultural reorganization is needed as much as a physical retooling. The attitude of improving our physical conditions by creative planning and cooperative implementation is currently rare, but if it became commonplace in the future, replacing violent non-cooperation, we would suddenly be on a utopian course. It is far too simple and, of course, impossible. Someone firing a mortar shell in Lebanon would be justified in laughing at this naivete. But it is here in North America and in the current industrial nations of the world that the cultural revolution could take place, in the countries where the violence of war has been less local. Utopian, perhaps, but that is precisely the central point of the future. Why plan for a negative future; it is senseless to plan for failure. The greatest power is that which is able to relinquish power. Strength is not stubborn adherence to stability, to present power. To remain stable is only to incur deterioration either dramatically imploding or with creeping ossification and eventual crumbling.  Eldon Garnet Volume 11 Number 1, Summer 1984  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, and Gerald Owen. Nicaragua Issue Editor: Judith Doyle. Co-Editor: Jorge Lozano. Editorial Assistants: Adriana Angel, Eldon Garnet, James Gronau, and Gerald Owen. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Production Assistant: Robert Labossiere. Business Administration: James Gronau. Computer Keyboard Operator: Wendy White. Translation: Judith Doyle, Augusta Dwyer, D. J. Flakoll, Fred Gaysek, Jorge Lozano, Miguel J. Rakiewicz, Rhea Tregebov, and Kathleen Weaver. Typographic Interface: Graphic Alliance. Table of Contents: Alan Bolt, ‘The World, the Devil, and the Flesh’; ‘Theatre of Extraordinary Reality’, Judith Doyle interviews Alan Bolt; Juan Aburto, ‘The Disappeared’; Octavio Robleto, ‘Hidden Gold’, ‘Oluma Nights’; Alejandro Bravo, ‘The Mambo Belongs To Everyone’; Sergio Ramirez,’ excerpts From De Tropelesy Tropelias’; Lizandro Chávez Alfaro, ‘Insignia’; Fernando Silva, ‘Things that Happen on St. Martin’s Day’; Jorge Eduardo Arellano,’ Kid Tamariz’; Augusto César Sandino, ‘RIN and ROFF’; ‘A Theatre that Subverts’, Adriana Angel and Judith Doyle Interview Omar Cabezas; Margaret Randall, ‘A Conversation with Sergio Ramírez’; Julio Cortázar, ‘Acceptance Speech’; Rosario Murillo, ‘Culture’; Leonel Rugama, ‘To Go By’; Daisy Zamora, ‘Commander Two’; Rosario Murillo, ‘Illumination / Untitled’; Yolanda Blanco, ‘The Flowers of Horror’; Santos Cermeno, ‘Maypole in Bluefields’; Marvin Rios, in Masaya; Rubén Darío ‘To Roosevelt / I Seek a Form’; Adelina Díaz, ‘4 Months’; Ernesto Cardenal, ‘Managua 6:30 P.M. / I Don’t Know’. Editorial: “Here in Nicaragua, we speak of something we

call Somocista kitsch ... what the Somocistas really wanted was to turn Nicaragua into a kind of Miami —which is not really the best cultural tradition of North America.” — Sergio Ramirez, novelist, and member of the Governing Junta, Nicaragua. This is an issue of Nicaraguan art and writing which called for or came after the July 19, 1979 victory of the revolution. At this time of expanding warfare and U.S. intervention in Central America, Nicaragua’s artwork, along with developments in health, education and land reform, are eclipsed in the news here by the old bugaboos of ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘foreign agents’, trundled out to rally public opinion against the Nicaraguan revolution. We are publishing Nicaraguan work rather than secondhand reports to give a more direct view of the new culture in Nicaragua, following the long dictatorship. Nicaraguan artists are working to build an authentic, national culture against ‘Somocista kitsch’. There is no one ‘correct’ theory or style, and no interest in finding one. Different artists raise different ideas on the role of the artist in Nicaragua today. The Nicaraguan government has done much to promote culture, to make the facilities and conditions for it available to far more people. It has done so in the face of a huge

foreign debt following Somoza’s flight in 1979 with most of the country’s wealth, and deepening counter-revolutionary attacks backed by the Reagan administration. In her paper, Rosario Murillo, Secretary-General of the Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers, outlines cultural programs as they are developing. To give two examples, a campaign in 1980 reduced illiteracy from 50% to 12%. Cultural supplements are published weekly in all three of Nicaragua’s daily newspapers- the FSLN party newspaper ‘Barricada’, ‘EI Nuevo Diario’, an independent paper which supports the government, and in the opposition paper ‘La Prensa’. The Nicaraguan Council of State has passed measures affecting culture. For example, there is a law against sexual exploitation of women in advertising, and a law initiated by poet, priest, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal against commercial exploitation of Christmas. Under the state of emergency, news for the dailies must be submitted to a censor’s office, which is trying to inhibit the publication of “lies, manipulation and misinformation.” – Lieutenant Nelba Blandón, Director of News Media, National Reconstruction Government. ‘La Prensa’ posts rejected articles outside the newspaper offices. The Sandinistas have declared that all opinions can be expressed through editorials, and the absolute freedom of artists and writers to produce and exhibit their work. There were many works we wanted to publish in this issue, but could not because of space and time limits. We regret the absence of work from Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, and wish we could have published more popular poetry and drawing, given their importance in Nicaragua. We dedicate this issue to Julio Cortázar, the Argentinian novelist who died this February and was a great friend of the Nicaraguan revolution. We share the aims of Artists’ Call – “a broad coalition of U.S. and Canadian artists, art publications, commercial galleries, artists’ organizations and film and video screening spaces who are organizing activities in homage to the Central American people, and to protest the growing U.S. military presence in Central America.” 

Judith Doyle

Volume 11 Number 2, Fall 1984  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, and Gerald Owen. Contributing Editor: Sylvère Lotringer (New York). Editorial Assistant and Business: James Gronau. Advertising Issue. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White, and James Gronau. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Computer Keyboard Operator: Wendy White. Mascot: Money. Typographic Interface: Graphic Alliance. Table of Contents: David Anderson for The Funnel; George Whiteside for Arkon Electronics; Ann Peiponen for Pages + The Cameron Public House; Barbara Klunder & Patti Habib for The Bamboo Club; Jo Whale for Art Com; Gloria Berlin (G.B. Jones) for Fifth Column; Ryan Takatsu for Plug in Gallery; Geoffrey Shea & Robin Collyer for Trinity Square Video; Ida Applebroog for Ronald Feldman Fina Arts; George Whiteside & Karen Simpson for Bambini; Ellen Tofflemire for Devah; Bruno Dyan for Denis Bouchard; Humour in Advertising: The Joke’s on Us by Gerry Vise; Greider for Art 15’ 84; Martin Avillez & Greg Whitehead for Semiotexte; Video 84; Sydney Dinsmore for Interference; Gary Nickard for Ceppa Gallery; Mark Newgarden for Raw Magazine Reactor; Chip Lord for Ant Farm; Fastwürms for Ydessa Gallery; Mark Krawczynski for The Record Peddler; Miguel Albear for Danceteria; Michael Snow for The Music Gallery; Another Quaint Device in Their Trading by Edward Slopek; Maurizio Nannucci for Zona; Brian Boigon for Waterloo School Of Architecture; Doug Walker for Gallery 76; Anke Davids for Dufflet Pastries; Arni Runar Haraldson for Vanguard Magazine; Sherry Kerlin for Ok Harris Gallery; Ed Radford for the Isaacs Gallery; David Wilson for Phoenix; Carolyn White for Tonik; Susan Britton; W.S Brown; Vincent Tangredi; Rodney Werden; Les Levine; David Buchan; Blair Robins; Randy & Berenicci; David Hlynsky; Nancy Burson; Gordon Lebredt; Les Levine; John Bentley Mays; Eldon Garnet; Tom Sherman; Persuasive Notion of Desire by Bill Nicholas; Liz Magor; Chris Burden; General Idea; Hard Werken. Volume 11 Number 3, 1984  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, and Gerald Owen. Contributing Editor: Sylvère Lotringer (New York). Art Direction: Carolyn White. Business Manager: James Gronau. Special Edition Artist Monograph, Allies: Several Stories by Nancy Johnson. Volume 11 Number 4, Winter 1985  Publisher: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Eldon Garnet, Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, and Gerald Owen. Contributing Editor: Sylvère Lotringer (New York). Death Issue Guest Editor: Sylvère Lotringer. Co-Editor: Eldon Garnet. Associate Editors: Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, Gerald Owen, and Andrew Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Editorial Assistants and Business: James Gronau, and Sharon Brooks. Advertising Representative: Natalie Olanick. Cover Photograph: Bernard Faucon. Cover Design: Carolyn

White. Table of Contents: Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Child in the Bubble’; Pierre Guyotat, ‘Coma’; Judith Doyle, ‘Animal Lives, Rights, and Death’; Ken Hollings, ‘Public Citizen: Private Army’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Necrophilia: Beyond Persuasion’; Sylvère Lotringer interviews James Van Der Zee; Alain Jaubert, ‘The City Below’; Paul Virilio, ‘The Spirit Of Defence’; Kathy Acker, ‘Scenes in World War III’; Eldon Garnet, ‘I Shot Mussolini’; Brian Well, ‘Miami Police Force’; John Brown, ‘Land: Sleep’; Louise Noguchi, ‘The Catch’; Sharon Cook, ‘How to Draw a Vulture’; Gordon Lebredt, ‘Death Throe’. Editorial: We don’t kill people any more. We put them to

sleep. Like dogs. We used to carry our death inside like a growth. Now we carry life in our organs. But to deliver we have to die. Spare parts: Technological psychosis. Noncoital collaborative reproduction. We removed sex from procreation. Now we have procreation without sex. A teenager in chemotherapy asks his father to freeze some of his sperm for his future wife. Technological incest. Frozen sperm can keep for dozens of years: a great-grandfather will be able to fertilize his own offspring across the generations. Genealogy and filiations are about to collapse, but Oedipus still reigns supreme. And the Name of the Father. We are now losing the Law, the Name . . and The Thing (Das Ding). A California real estate developer and his wife crash in a light plane. Their two offspring are waiting in Melbourne, Australia to receive a share of the millionaire’s estate. Frozen in suspended animation. I bet they’re dying to be born. A woman was kept clinically alive for six days at Buffalo’s Children’s Hospital in 1981 until her baby could be born with a better chance of survival. The woman had suffered brain death, but the fetus showed movement and a good heartbeat. “The bottom line was that she could care for the baby better than we could,” Dr. Dillon said. Who was she? “Where’s the patient? Where’s the patient?” cries Arthur Knobloch, an ambulance driver for the Hasbrouck Heights Volunteer Fire Department. “We heard it’s a cardiac case.” “It’s not a patient:’ the assistant explains. “It’s a heart” Baboon transplants. We should get their brains, too. It would make us more human. Antonin Artaud talked about a “body without organs.” Now we have organs without bodies. Soon the body will go, too. The advent of cyclosporine, a new drug that persuades the immune system to tolerate grafts, has made the transplant of all kinds of organs increasingly feasible. Enthusiasts assert that by the end of the decade no one need die of organ failure. Barry Jakobs, a defrocked doctor from Reston, Virginia, plans to start brokering human kidneys. He hopes $10,000 will persuade a donor to part with one. The second kidney must be more expensive. The artificial heart was still beating when Dr. Clark died. Decline in autopsies raises concern. Biopsy techniques are now so precise that they provide a mini-autopsy while the patient is still alive. No rush for dying any more. It can be done live, Dr Lundberg argues, though, that the time has come for doctors to “stop burying their mistakes” With death’s disappearance, that’s apparently all he could find to bury. Frozen death is our round-about way of re-creating traditional attitudes towards death, where the dead always keep for eternity. We always think post-mortem. Theory is our death-work. When something becomes visible, it’s already moribund. When Freud put his nose on hysteria, it was already on its way out. Where is hysteria now? Everywhere. In women and men alike. Small hysteria. No more orgasmic performances. Signs were getting out of the body. Out of hand. Freud put them back into the body. For that he had to invent a new body of science. He wanted signs to be rooted deeply somewhere. He called that somewhere the UNCONSCIOUS. It’s a deadly place. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross patterned the four stages of death and dying after Freud’s theories of child sexuality. Now at least death can be polymorphous perverse. Instead of being ostracised, terminal cancer patients are now encouraged to share their experience with trained personnel. Terminal therapy: let them talk themselves to death. Death is the ultimate outrage. Don’t try to make it respectable. Dignity in death: “Gratifying for the visitor.” (Kubler Ross). “How do you deal with rage and anger?” Dr. Kubler-Ross was asked. “You try to tell him that you can appreciate his anger and his envy and that if you were in his position you would be angry, too:” she answered. “in other words, you try to put fuel in the fire and let him ventilate his anguish ...” A few extra minutes spent with these extra-difficult patients can work wonders. They will call for the nurses less often, the family is more content, and the patients are more comfortable. God forbid anyone should look back in anger. It would make everybody uncomfortable. Death with dignity. Two-way exit. Patients’ legitimate right of autonomy dangerously coincides with “deregulation”

policies. As Richard D. Lamm, the Governor of Colorado, put it bluntly, “we’ve got a duty to die, to get out of the way with our machines and our artificial hearts.” Missiles don’t have hearts, but they too, are “extraordinarily expensive” machines, and they kill without dignity. The technology of death is way ahead of us. We’re lagging behind, still trying to pump some humanity into it. Brain transplant. Who’s who. Dialogue on death and technology: Sylvère: When someone is strapped to a machine, individual and society are one and the same thing. Society is in him with all these tubes. Money also flows through them. Eldon: It’s not an individual death any more. It’s a societal death, the kind that’s not supposed to exist any more. Sylvère: But it’s through the machine that we regain society. A very unhuman society. Eldon: Unhuman? Machines are the most human aspect of our culture. They are our creations, or extensions. They are human machines, obviously, we built them. Sylvère: They can replace us. They are operational. But they don’t have a life. Eldon: We are also operational. Sylvère: That’s what I was saying. It’s the disappearance of death. Over the last two years both prisons and hospitals have started hiring “resident” philosophers. “We hope he will ask the big questions we often don’t have time to ask ourselves,” said Connecticut’s Commissioner of Correction. This prison philosopher program is the first in the nation. Several teaching hospitals in New York City have hired philosophers to help their doctors grapple with the ethical aspects of medical decisions such as whether to allow a terminally ill patient to die or to use sophisticated life-support systems. When institutions start asking big questions, they really are at their wit’s ends. Death by injection. The condemned is injected with a needle connected to a tube that runs through the wall into the next room. There, two medical technicians force liquids into the tube. Without knowing which is which, one will inject harmless salt water. The other will inject three kinds of deadly chemicals. Death cell: it has to be “comfortable enough to guarantee a good night’s sleep but not so comfortable that you want to stay”. A wall for a tube. Social thought crystallized in a ton of bricks, Ridicule also can kill. Prisoners on death row volunteered for the artificial heart experiment. They were rejected, said Dr. De Vries, “because the benefits would not have outweighed the risks”. The prisoners didn’t stand to lose much, so where was the risk? That people might discover that prisoners too have hearts? Or that lawabiding citizens can manage with a pump? Why don’t we freeze criminals instead of strapping them to the electric chair? We may spare ourselves some guilt and a few criminal errors. Death by lethal injection: execution by “safe and effective” medication. We should call death row ‘intensive care’. “I do have to tell society I am very disgusted with them, Tim Baldwin, 46, the “ex-altar boy,” said before his body shot bolt upright and smoke started puffing from under the electrodes. “But really, I’m not afraid because I’ve got a curious nature to begin with. I’m curious about what happens after death.” To kill him once wasn’t enough. Autoerotic deaths are causing widening concern. Parents should be “alert to such signs in their sons as frequently bloodshot eyes; marks on the neck; foggy or disoriented behavior, especially after having gone off alone for a while; and possession of or fascination with ropes, chains or other forms of inducing partial asphyxiation such as plastic bags, gags or gas inhalation devices.” Every culture provides tools to deal with death. Ours doesn’t. We pay for everything. Death always happens at the end of the line. It makes up a narrative. I want death at the beginning. To be born dead is to be born alive. Death is always buried in narratives. Break up the story and death lives. There are diseases that we inoculate in small doses in order to develop the immunity of the organism. Stories are death’s vaccine. Philosophy doesn’t prepare us for death, Death prepares us for philosophy. In America the main function of language isn’t to communicate, but to maintain contact. Hence the fascination repulsion towards the “loner” who comes back gun in hand because he’s taken it upon himself not to communicate anymore – or to communicate only through death. We don’t communicate with the dead any more, so to be unable to communicate has become synonymous with death. People who are afraid of death live their lives as a living death. I want my death dead to live my life alive. You never know where anguish comes from, or where it goes. It floats around aimlessly, always ready for a call, or for a cause. There are always enough causes lying around, looking for an effect. Fear gives anguish a point. Anguish gives fear a push. A little anguish is always useful. It keeps on line. Anguish has no face, no identity. It is ready for anything. Anguish makes us want security in life. Death is our only

protection: Sylvère: Anguish is at the root of the individual. Eldon: So what’s the way out? Sylvère: Technologization of death, technologization of life. Eldon: Do you suppose science and technology are an answer to anguish? Sylvère: It’s not the answer. It’s the disappearance of the question. Death has no meaning in our culture. So even to be fascinated by that faceless face is the mystic phase of meaninglessness. Death is becoming visible again, not because we have acquired a greater cultural maturity or that conditions which had initially permitted its disappearance have been remedied: Death is reappearing because technology’s higher bid is pushing death (and life) to a crisis. The ancient configuration which relegated death to the margins of consciousness no longer holds. Death is spreading everywhere but in a diluted, therapeutic form. Between technology and therapy, death is slowly disappearing as a major cultural force.  Sylvère Lotringer Volume 12 Number 1, Summer 1985  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Carolyn White, Judith Doyle, and James Gronau. Contributing Editor: Sylvère Lotringer (New York). Associate Editors: Gerald Owen, and Andrew Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Editorial Assistant and Business: Sharon Brooks. Advertising Representative: Natalie Olanick. Cover Photo and Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Dot Tuer, ‘The Site of an Imaginary History’; James Wines, ‘On the Subject of World Expositions’; Impulse Interviews James Wines and Richard Blagborne; Alexander Wilson, ‘The Managed Landscape’; David Burgess, ‘The Orillia Opera’; Will Straw, ‘Heavy Metal’; Tim Jocelyn, ‘Artists Furniture and Functional Art in New York’; Claudio A. Santon, ‘The Mystery of Leonardo’s Bicycle’; Miguel Rakiewicz interviews Nestor Almendros; Mike Glier, ‘Men At Home’; Susan Speigel, ‘Theatre of Architecture’; Silvia Kolbowski, “December 1984”; Midi Onodera, ‘Ten Cents A Dance (Parallax)’. Editorial: Is it out of fear or out of strength. I told him, I

think it is out of fear. She said, the equation, suppressing in the name of freedom, is impossible to resolve. What difference does it make to us that they call it defence as our bodies fall. History is always expecting. “Our people in South Africa knew that they hate apartheid. They are fighting against it. But after apartheid — what then? That is the question we are trying to answer here.” Principal of the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, Mazimbu. The institutions of freedom in our culture have become institutions of control. The legal system describes the moral order under which we are being asked to live. Freedom is a set of legal restrictions. The struggle with freedom has become a struggle with the law, with the existing institutions. “We are entering a period in which our legal culture and constitutional law may be transformed, with even more power accruing to judges than is currently the case.” Appeals Court judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. As the institutions become more entrenched, the question of moral harm of community or Institutional control versus the privatization of morality becomes central. “These institutions are designed to achieve compromise, to slow change, to dilute absolutism.” Historically the liberal position has been to argue for individual rights. This position is consistent with freedom of speech. But what occurs when a man makes a career out of publishing racial lies, do we still respect individuals and their right to free speech, or do we respect the truth of history, the right of the victim? The right of the community versus the right of the individual, but to the detriment of the community. Should a censor board have the power to protect individuals against their own will, to self-righteously and forcefully impose an unwanted morality, to police and regulate the community to ensure that it does not experience questionably harmful material (and harmful to whom, the community or the individual viewer)? Or should individuals have the right of choice, to decide for themselves whether to see a particular movie, or read a particular book or magazine. And should the President of the United States ignore the vote of the House of Representatives and the Congress not to visit the cementary at Bitburg, following the imperative of his own will? Should the ruler of a country surpress the sexual activity of one group in the name of a nation’s morality? Should sex between consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedroom, or the viewing of video tapes in the privacy of one’s home be the topic of government regulation? Should the president of a democratic country continue his attempt to give financial and moral support to the previous supporters of a dicatorship against an elected popular government? Is this what the Third World countries have to look forward to after completing their initial liberation? Only the name and excuses differ. “But,” he said, “I remember Chomsky describing in detail

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the consequences of changing even a small part of the system, implying in his extensive extrapolation the impossibility to commit even the simplest change.” “Is that a defence or a weapon?” she asked. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 12 Number 2, Fall 1985  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Managing Editor: Judith Doyle. Editors: Carolyn White, Gerald Owen, and Brian Boigon. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York), and Andy Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Assembly Assistant: Werner Arnold. Business Manager: Sharon Brooks. Advertising Representative: Cliff Dempster. Cover Image: Eldon Garnet. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Elena Garro, ‘It’s the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas’; Pier Luigi Tazzi, ‘A Whole Story’; Brian Boigon, ‘The Fish Spy’; Liliana Heker, ‘Jocasta’; Astrid Klein, ‘Photoworks’; Jenny Holzer, ‘The Survival Series’; S. Kerlin, ‘New Worries for the Future Worlds’; KomarMelamid, ‘Thank You Comrade Stalin’; Larry Richards, ‘Meeting Jimmy 30 Years Later’; Hans Haacke, ‘Metromobiltan’; Virgina Wright, ‘Modern Furniture Designers in Canada’; ‘Abortion Rights: A Chronology’, assembled by Judith Doyle; Jeanne Randolph, ‘Small Diary Of Suppression’; China: Architecture, Wen Xiu interviewed by Brian Boigon; The Official Story, Luis Puenzo interviewed by Miguel Rakiewicz; Electronic Persuasion, Tony Schwartz interviewed by Impulse. Volume 12 Number 3, Spring 1986  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Managing Editor: Judith Doyle. Editors: Carolyn White, Gerald Owen, and Brian Boigon. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York), and Andy Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Assembly Assistant: Werner Arnold. Business Manager: Sharon Brooks. Business Assistant: Jonathan Pollard. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Author Photos: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Rodney Werden, ‘Aboo’; Sarah Sheard, ‘Will You Hold Them for Me?’; Stephen Hatfield, ‘Stand by Your Man’; Judith Doyle, ‘Echo (The Constant Nymph)’; John Greyson, ‘Take Two Rivers’; Robert Everett, ‘Green, Animal Husbandry’; Helen Weinzweig, ‘Causation’; Matt Cohen, ‘In Search of Inspiration’; Patricia Bradbury, ‘The Ship’; Mel Bradshaw, ‘Trip to the Waterfall’; Peter Such, ‘Certain Findings’; Dot Tuer, ‘Mary, Mary is Quite Contrary’; Susan Speigel, ‘The Fibonacci Flip’; Donna Lypchuck, ‘The Mark Of The Babe’; David Hlynsky. ‘Raspberry Crunch Cocktail’; John Bentley Mays, ‘Corrigenda’; Eldon Garnet, ‘I Shot Mussolini (Section 3)’; Janice Williamson, ‘Fundamental Rule’; Tom Sherman, ‘Sex and Violence Through Television’; Fred Gaysek, ‘The Story’; Chris Dewdney, ‘Excerpt From a Continuing Story’; Carol Barbour, ‘Interruption Interrogation Interpretation’; A.S.A. Harrison, ‘Stories For the Left Hand’; Peggy Gale, ‘Beasts’; Arnie Achtman, ‘Swimming in Mud’; Ann Ireland, ‘The Secret’; Karl Jirgens, ‘Argentina Declares Independence’; Katherine Govier, ‘Between Men’; Steve McCaffery, ‘The Swimmer’; Colin Campbell, ‘B. Mode’; Brian Shein, ‘Identified Objects’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Passports of Love’; Andrew Payne, ‘What Some Call Grace’. Editorial: Eldon Garnet: So many have difficulty

determining the voice when they read fiction. Too often the reader’s first thought is that the author is writing a confessional, at the least a psychological disclosure. Some readers imagine the author is speaking the truth. But these are the fictions of fiction. Its stories. Judith Doyle: Not so long ago, narrativity per se was suspect, but now a lot of people are rethinking this and using fictive strategies in their work – whether it’s film, video or criticism. The question always comes up – where is this voice speaking from? To whom is it speaking? EG: For the cultural commentator, the basis of fiction is not the self or the identity of the writer, but instead it is history, the conflicts of the individual with culture. JD: For me as a writer, one of the interesting aspects of editing this issue was to look at very recent fiction, at how it has been changing. EG: It’s been interesting to look at the vehicle of fiction, its ability to carry information, and its attention to the reader. I’m so bored reading criticism. Theory is becoming stale. I’ve heard it all before. I’m looking for a pleasure of text in my reading. Something warm to read; it’s so cold here and the winter is only half over. Why do you think we’re calling this issue, “COLD CITY FICTION”! JD: All the fiction comes from Toronto, but the problem with calling it ‘Toronto Fiction’, is that it might suggest we chose Toronto for some special reason. We chose it because we live here. We were looking for a generic title. There’s no thematic or formal continuity to these stories. Some of them are very conservative, very classical; others are autobiographical, or dream-association pieces. Some are writings by artists which might be used as scripts for their film or video work. Others are like essays that make a crossover between genres. So, we came up with a condition of locale which would reflect an underlying, common interest for the writers.

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EG: This is a grouping of writers by their common physical environment. A cold city. It’s a grouping within a limited loci – of one magazine, in one area. JD: In the last few years, we’ve had an international focus. Our contributors have come from Latin America, Europe, the States, and across Canada. This time we wanted to do something closer to home. At times, ‘Toronto’ seemed to be almost too general. There are different cultural emphases in different quarters of the city, each with its own writing. EG: We haven’t tried to be rigorously selective. We didn’t try to look at who’s writing what might be called the “best” fiction in Toronto. We examined the situation and then tried to find out how the younger writers were working, and tried to represent them as best we could. We also solicited work from more established writers, and some who people consider well-known, even though they weren’t well-known to us – to the literary community they are establishment figures. All the authors in this issue are included because the editors enjoyed or felt engaged with their writing; our central editorial concern was for text not reputation. JD: I’d say only a third of the people in the issue have developed reputations as fiction writers. Another third are artists who’ve used language and writing in their work. EG: More precisely they’ve used fiction in their work. JD: The other third have just started writing, or are betterknown as critical writers. They use fiction as a genre of criticism. It’s a way of projecting certain opinions, and a certain ‘self’. EG: The inclusiveness of our editorial position reflects the overall diversity of recent writing which we have chosen to describe under the ‘cover’ fiction. JD: I like fiction’s capacity for a sensuality of language, and for expressing desire, with a very delicate shading. Fiction is well-suited to describe what people want, and what repels them. I’ve been reading articles by Dot Tuer, and I’ve seen videotapes by Rodney Werden, but I looked forward more to reading their new stories. I felt I’d find out more about what they’re really thinking now by reading their fictional writing. EG: What interests me is not so much the revealing of ‘person’, but rather the fiction writer’s cultural analysis in the guise of fiction, the narrative structuring of an analysis of a culture, and society. JD: Yes. What’s in it for me - what I want to find out from reading these texts - is different from what it is for you. EG: This issue represents a circle for Impulse. JD: A lot of people don’t realize that Impulse began as a literary journal that published almost entirely poetry and fiction by people from the Toronto area. EG: Just by coincidence, this is the fifteenth anniversary issue. JD: And, coincidentally, we’re re-inhabiting the form that we used to maintain. EG: A paradoxical circle.  Eldon Garnet + Judith Doyle Volume 12 Number 4, Summer 1986  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Managing Editor: Judith Doyle. Editors: Carolyn White, Gerald Owen, and Brian Boigon. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Andrew Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Assembly Assistant: Werner Arnold. Business Manager: Sheila Dee. Cover Photo: Boyd Webb. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Jeanne Randolph, ‘Letters to an Authority’; Reese Williams, ‘Common Origin’; Albert Russo, ‘Tunisian Fever’; Ken Decker, ‘Cleaning The Tools’; Judith Schwarz, ‘Knossos’; Rebecca Garrett, ‘A Peripatetic Soap Opera’; Fastwürms, ‘The Perfumed Tadpole’; David Rasmus, ‘Photographs’; Susan Schelle, ‘The Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin’; Brian Boigon, ‘Murder Architecture’; Lori Spring, ‘The Body in Film’; Ken Ludlow, ‘Psycho – Lingo’; David Greenberger, ‘Duplex Planet’; Marino Tuzi, ‘Comic Books and the Neocold war Discourse: The Problem of Moral Recuperation’; Carolyn White, ‘Midwifery in Canada’; John O’Neill, interview by Andrew Payne and Richard Wellen; Paul Virilio, Interview by Chris Dercon. Editorial: A slight moan, he covers his forehead and eyes

with both his hands. Rubs his eyes. Rest? Not working? Difficult to remember the moments when the body was not demanded to perform. “Your eyes,” he heard, “are like mine, they are enclosed by red dark rings. Do you think it’s a disease?” And he overheard someone say, “It’s so nice to have someone do all this work for me:’ The proletariat body is an absence of rest. A small hand stretches to grab at a brightly coloured moving object and almost touches, misses, but scores a red ring which is quickly pulled toward the mouth it almost reaches. The hand tugs and the back arches until the lips are moist and the red ring rubs the tongue. A deep moan: the articulation of an entire body. He closes his eyes and rubs the skin around the temples. “Oh no! The blood isn’t coming off. Will that show?” 

Eldon Garnet

Light reflects from an arm. Details of surface texture and fine hairs fix in chemical emulsion. The line of the arm curves, and flesh succumbs to shadow.

In memory and association, there is one skin pressed against another’s. A mother’s face wrenched by birth, circled by the arms of a woman who supports her. An infant – Lacan’s homme-lette, half child and half egg – whose twisting face mirrors appetites exactly. Though there are no words, there is the consolation of language, its materiality, tones and very lack of transparency. Even voices resist description, the attempt to construct a double within. The camera moves, and it’s like touching. Tracing a length of skin, the camera is your hand, lightly caressing, almost floating.  Judith Doyle

‘House’; Hani Rashid, ‘Four Kursaals For Pierrettes and Evacuees’; Gelsomina Petti, ‘Renovation of the Body and the World’; Lorenzo Pignatti, ‘Forms of Inhabitation’; Margaret Priest, ‘Stairwell’; Kathryn Firth, ‘Conjectural Landscape’; Graham Owen, ‘Of Politics, History and Pleasure: The Theoretical Project as Excavation of the Modern’; Michael Piraino; Robert Stewart, ‘Brasilia: Ordem E Progresso’; Gordon Lebredt, ‘In a Manner Of Speaking’; Michael Gold, ‘Ideal Cities and Demolition’; Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Adrian Blackwell, ‘Essential Hut’. Editorial: A fine line between collaboration and

Volume 13 Number 1, Storm Corridor 1986/87  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Managing Editor: Judith Doyle. Editors: Carolyn White and Brian Boigon. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York), and Andrew Payne (Toronto). Theoretical Architecture Guest Editor: Susan A. Speigel. Associate Editors: Eldon Garnet, Judith Doyle, Carolyn White, Brian Boigon (New York) and Andrew Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Assembly Assistant: Werner Arnold. Advertising: Werner Arnold and Janna Levitt. Business Manager: John Allan. Proofreading: Sabina Harris Dobo. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Michael McCarthy, ‘The Theoretical Imagination In Piranesi’s shaping of Architectural Reality’; Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Richard Cameron, ‘Enemies: My Lives Seem Transparent’; Alexander Pilis, ‘A Deadly Conversation’; Gordon Lebredt, ‘In A Manner Of Speaking’; Gelsomina Petti, ‘Renovations of the Body and World’; Margaret Priest, ‘No Exit’; Martin Vahtra, ‘Squatters Tactic and the Picturesque’; Janna Levitt, ‘The Executive the Braille Mind’; Spring Hurlbut; Brian Boigon, ‘Shopping for the Real’; Ed Kin Chan, ‘Urban Work Community Ipoh’; Mary Ann Unger, ‘Beehive Temple’; Frederic Urban, ‘House for Panza’; Margaret Priest, ‘NYC in August’; Susan A. Speigel, ‘Geometry of the Stain’; Paul Shepheard, ‘Phlegm The Trials of Lillibet’; Francois Schien, ‘Subway Map Floating on a New York Sidewalk 1986’; Michael Djordjevitch, ‘Of Facades and Plans’. Editorial: You construct a structure, a working surface

desperation. A sense of learning that is intellectually erotic imagining a large picture of theoretical architecture, not one theory, proven. You read the drawing. There is a gap between theory and theoretical. There are theories of theoretical / architecture, about the whole thing not being revealed at a glance. / Renaissance architecture, where the whole is revealed to a privileged position. / And there is mannerist theory which appropriates renaissance theory and manners it, shifts it. That’s where theoretical architecture begins using theory as an / Object. / Appropriating theory to some other end. Blood fraction. All these strangers standing side by side. / Everyone knew that to be in the magazine structure meant sharing paper / and fictional space with others of unlike sensibilities, their adjacencies have created something that is / odd. Adjacency is the most common type of spatial relationship. It allows each space to be clearly defined and to respond, each in its own way, to / functional or symbolic requirements. / The degree of visual and spatial continuity that occurs between two adjacent spaces will depend on the nature of the plane that both / separates and binds them together. An interlocking spatial relationship consists of two spaces whose fields overlap to form a shared zone. / When the two interlock their volumes in this manner each retains its identity and / definition. But their configuration as two interlocking spaces will be subject to a number of interpretations. Space theory becomes appropriated and flattened and abstracted. The capricci are pictures that merge the real and the projected and that assemble the real into new configurations. Finally we are caught / Labyrinthine / In dark boxes Using the grand text of history, / Pursued through the relationship of the grid / to the plotting of beliefs Ordering the contents of the dream into acceptable form.

between things that speaks across / distance / geographical fatality / selection assembly and interruption. There is an awkward instance when you step off the known, the accomplished. / And attempt something - a change in sensibility where there is a gulf between / one sure territory and the next. You need. To allow for that moment, that / Awkwardness, that gap in surety, because from this risk comes something / Unexpected. Theoretical architecture means dealing in the practice of pure theory, built or / Unbuilt. Is theoretical architecture, architecture that just isn’t built? / A few pieces stand as built theoretical architecture. / Built architecture cannot be the pure representation of theoretical architecture. / By the time a thing gets built, thought is elsewhere. A fireplace is a representation of something powerful, no longer / necessary in itself. / Fire is theoretical now. / Inevitably theory gets built, but not in its most concentrated form. / Theoretical architecture takes place in publication. It is important that architecture be more urgent than plumbing diagrams and / the building code. / But at that even the most conventional architectural drawing is an abstract / code speaking its own language. / Translation of spatial experience to an abstract language is common in / conventional architectural representation and / theoretical architecture. There is a distended, tenuous but crucial relationship between theoretical architecture and architecture-built. Architecture, once removed, becomes the theory of architecture, then once removed again begins to get built. To see these two volumes as a complete picture — one is hard pressed to. / Process observations in advance of knowledge. / Proceed toward a metaphysic that enables us to find ourselves on a later plane / In a moment of knowledge wider than the previous one. The working surface of this publication: theoretical architecture, its obsession / with language, manipulation and appropriation of codes and discourses. Surpassing of accurate portrayal of existing scenes to create an alternative state which can only exist in the mind. A city of the mind Architecture of the mind.  Susan A. Speigel Volume 13 Number 2, 1986/87  Publisher / Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Managing Editor: Judith Doyle. Editors: Carolyn White and Brian Boigon. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Andrew Payne (Toronto). Theoretical Architecture Guest Editor: Susan A. Speigel. Associate Editors: Eldon Garnet, Judith Doyle, Carolyn White, Brian Boigon (New York) and Andrew Payne. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Assembly Assistant: Werner Arnold. Advertising: Werner Arnold and Janna Levitt. Business Manager: John Allan. Proofreading: Sabina Harris Dobo. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Nato, ‘Narrative Architecture Today’; Joshua Bendah, ‘Architecture of the Sensation’; Penny Umbrico,



Susan A Speigel

Volume 13 Number 3, Summer 1987  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Andrew Payne, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Brendan Cotter, Julia Emberley, Monica Gagnon, Marc Glassman, Sylvère Lotringer, Donna Lypchuk, Alberto Manguel, Andrew James Paterson, Jeanne Randolph, Kim Sawchuk, and Janice Williamson. Art Director: Carolyn White. Production Assistant: Debbie Willock. Administrator: Gillian Leigh. Proofreading: Sabina Harris Dobo. Cover Photograph: George Whiteside. Cover Design and Concept: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Donna Lypchuk, ‘Ms. Molly’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Andy Warhol: The Starmaker and the Star’; Aldo Walker; Barbara Ess; Carolyn White; Bryan Bruce (Bruce La Bruce), ‘Zuzu’s Petals’; Judith Doyle, ‘Holy Smoke Interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante’; Julia Emberley, ‘Metamorphosis’; Geoff Pevere, ‘Peewee and TV’; Donna Lypchuk, ‘This is Not a Shoe’; Scott Burton Talks to Peter Day, ‘Mutant Design’; Kim Sawchuk and Julia Emberley, ‘Fashion in Ruins’; Coco Fusco, ‘Cuba’; Janice Williamson, ‘Telltale Signs’; Brian Boigon, ‘Downtown’. Editorial: The square is history. Its over. You can package

and analyze it, its dead. Like Warhol, like Beuys, like Cary Grant. The eighties are over. Impulse impatiently enters the nineties. The ratified hope of a new era. A cultural quickening. Somebody is nervous. Someone else is excited. The last ten years of the millennium. After ten years of the same format. Let’s get going. There’s no time to waste. And someone shrugs their shoulders and says: so what’s the big deal, a new decade, a new century, a new millennium, so what? And I say, if you’re that bored and cynical get out. And Impulse is excited. We want to know everything. We want it to be different. We want it fresh, we want it alive. We’d rather be a part of culture than history. At Impulse we take it in and give it out. We reflect the mirror in which we reside. You are the image in the mirror of the magazine you hold in your hands. We want you to know you aren’t alone. And we want you to know. We’re curious and we expect you to be. An art critic friend once told me he considered American culture boring. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. And then he moves to New York and obtains a job in an uptown gallery, makes a lot of money, shops at Comme

des Garcons, goes to dinner parties with collectors, and now I know what he means. We want to know what you’re thinking and what you’re wearing. And if you’re eating at the worst restaurants at least I hope the company is good. And as far as magazines go we’d like to go further. A new Impulse. And we intend to provide you with more. The older one gets the harder they have to shake to rid their bones of winter. And for us its always spring. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 13 Number 4, Winter 1987  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Andrew Payne and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Brendan Cotter, Marc Glassman, Sylvère Lotringer, Donna Lypchuk, Alberto Manguel, Andrew James Paterson, Jeanne Randolph and Kim Sawchuk. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Production Assistant: Alison Hahn. Administration: Gillian Leigh. Front and Back Covers: Orion Pictures. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Typography: Copy Network. Film Preparation: Cyan Graphics. Table of Contents: Babel’s ‘88 Collection; Andrea Ward Speaks with Frederic Jameson; Judith Doyle Speaks with Brian Wright; Peter Day Speaks with bridge designer Siah Armajani; Three Guys with Nothing to Say, Shadowy Men; Rock On Bambi; Nicole Brossard, ‘Certain Words’; Claire Christie, ‘Meeting Architecture Head On’; Aidan, ‘Noah’s Ark’; Toronto’s Tom Taylor; Brendan Cotter; California’s Lisa Bloomfield; Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, ‘Panic God’; Curtis Herbert, ‘Robocop; A Scientific Report’; Jeanne Randolph, ‘Fifty Normal White Men’; Impulse speaks with costume designer Peter Minshall: King Of Carnival; Geoff Pevere, ‘Rock Video: Billion $ Baby’; Stella De Silva, ‘Spar City: Home Improvement’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Men Who Don’t Drive’. Editorial: We tried, we tried to keep pace.

I can’t believe how slow some people move. Some in slow motion, some in stop action. Why aren’t they rushing between appointments? Is it because they are just too late to care? And worse, when you finally get to your appointment and you’re checking your watch not to be too late for the next and the person beside you is talking so slowly and repeating themselves and slowly repeating. Don’t you hate people who talk slowly and have to explain everything in minute detail twice? We trained. Read. Edited. And then we installed a computerized page design system. In traffic locked. Here are the masses mixed. Classless. Locked in primordial struggle. Get out of my way I’m in a hurry. I’m in a bigger hurry. Get out of my way. Speed. What we have to accomplish to do more, better. Isn’t this progress: speed? Doing more quicker. Isn’t this culture? What kind of civilization would we be living in that wanted to do less, worse. We were technology’s dog held on a short lease, lunging nervously against time. There was a small Peruvian tribe who would purposely move in slow motion. Doing as little as possible as slowly as they could. Now extinct. And if we are late: Just relax.  Eldon Garnet Volume 14 Number 1, Spring 1988  Excutive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Marc Glassman, Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, Andrew Payne, Andrew James Paterson, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Production: Alison Hahn. Administration: Gillian Leigh. Cover Design: Carolyn White. Table of Contents: Impulse Pays Homage To Brazilian Architect Lina Bo Bardi; Eldon Garnet, ‘Bridges for Future History’; Detlif Mertins, ‘TD Dawn TD Dusk TD Dawn’; Impulse Speaks with J. G. Ballard; Sylvère Lotringer Speaks with Artaud’s Doctor; Marguerite Duras, ‘The Slut of the Normandy Coast’; Angela Carter, ‘The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter’; Geoff Pevere, ‘Conventional Warfare’; Michael Roberts, ‘Homeopathy An Approach To Health’; Donna Lypchuk Speaks with John Waters; Conversations with Margarethe Von Trotta; Christian Boltanski; Alan Glicksman; Lin Gibson; Fastwürms; Ida Applebroog. Editorial: What is appears to be, what isn’t.

A newspaper article talks at length about the greenhouse effect. The winters will be less severe: The growing season two months longer. Great news for a cold city. As the planet warms up Toronto will become a better place to live. So what if the melting polar icecaps will flood coastal regions and arid land will turn to desert. I could have opened the door, but on the other side fire raged. It was safe here, but empty and silent. The door was inviting. Tempting. If I pressed my hand against its surface I could feel the pulsing, the life, the vitality. I was convincing myself that it couldn’t be that dangerous, that I had the strength to withstand its force. If I pressed my ear to the door I could hear its siren-like hissing. And when I turned my back and tried to walk away I felt abandoned. I would say there was no choice: I had to open the door. How was I to know this fire was only a machine.

Why create illusion? Why was it so important that I be deceived? I was wrong. It wasn’t a deception. This was no chimera, but a physical reality, a concrete machine. The fire was unrest. The machine could be touched; it responded to intervention. The fire was the lie. An element of disappearance. In a newsmagazine I read of an atmospheric spill. A genetically engineered gas molecule has escaped from a lab. At a fixed locale in the lower atmosphere it reproduces then explodes in a flash resembling lightning. Spectacular. It disappears to randomly reappear exploding. At the moment it is harmless, but no one is sure of the effects if it strikes an aircraft, and it appears to be flashing more frequently and in multiple locations.  Eldon Garnet Volume 14 Numbers 2 + 3, Summer 1988  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Marc Glassman, Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, Andrew Payne, Andrew James Paterson, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Administration: Jennifer Howey. New City Fiction Guest Editor: Donna Lypchuk. Author Imagery: Eldon Garnet and Carolyn White. Table of Contents: John Copping; Robyn Marie Butt; Meryn Cadell; Wendell Block; Susan Perly; William Power; Colleen Subasic; Ron Giii; Peter McGehee; Winston Kam; Gary Michael Dault; Margaret Hollingsworth; Siobhan Flanagan; Barbara Mainguy; Carole Corbell; Joseph Eglitis; Gary Paul & George Mitolidis; Christine Davis; Anne Milne; Claire Christie; Paulette Phillips; Walker Smith. Editorial: Our guidelines were simple: unpublished

Toronto fiction writers. We already knew of the famous and the infamous, what we wanted today was the rough beginnings for tomorrow. Donna Lypchuk, as Guest Editor for this double issue of Impulse Magazine, read the unknown texts of the city. The result: New City Fiction.  Eldon Garnet Volume 14 Number 4, Fall 1988  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, Andrew James Paterson, Andrew Payne, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Director: Carolyn White. Administration: Stuart Inglis. Published Quarterly with the Assistance of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Ministry of Culture and Communications. Special Edition Poster, Artist Monograph by Carolyn White. Volume 15 Number 1, Winter 1989  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, Andrew James Paterson, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Administration: Stuart Inglis. Assistant: Christopher Webber. Typography: Tony Gordon Ltd. Table of Contents: Jeanne Randolph, ‘Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming’; Edward R. Slopek, ‘Collapsing the Interval’; Brian Boigon, ‘Kiss Sugar Goodbye’; Georges Bataille, ‘The Caves of Lascaux’; Geoff Pevere, ‘Forget It’; William Gibson interviewed by Doug Walker; Michel Foucault interviewed by French Radio; Wim Wenders interviewed by Bethany Eden Jacobson; William S. Burroughs, ‘Blade Runner’; Sylvère Lotringer, ‘The Miracle of Lascaux’; Andrew J. Paterson, ‘Authorities’; Garry Neill Kennedy; Leon Golub; Frederick Urban, ‘Waiting for Good News from them D. P. R. K.’; Steven Snyder, ‘Yorkdale Holiday Inn’; Tom Dean, ‘Excerpts from a Description of the Universe’; David Baker; Ivan H. Sladek; Ben Walmsley, ‘Serious Bruises’; Paul Laster. Editorial: To be held within the bounds of the edifice, safe

within the comforts of the expected structure. Stoke up the fire, place one’s feet on the rug, light the pipe. But the fire is polluting the air, the rug is seal skin, and the tobacco is cancerous. A meeting of distinguish editors, the topic, an exciting series of fiction works by new writers, the daring decision: the works must be good and have a market. The great good. The great market. The art critic spends an entire column discussing the formalistic merits of an etching. So IMPULSE has no other choice in the North American climate of mercantile conservatism but to produce itself as change. To slide. Yesterday’s mistakes are a quiet growth over the edifice’s senses, as ivy over the ivory tower. So we will attempt to be what we haven’t been before. You go to your newsstand, you open your mail and here is the magazine you didn’t expect to be this incarnation of a magazine. Which is what we plan to do for the future, to do what you haven’t anticipated. For the time being we will be more difficult to locate. But all you need to do is look. We want to be poetic but still read today’s news. 

Eldon Garnet

Volume 15 Number 2, Summer 1989  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Marc Glassman, Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Administration: Stuart Inglis. Editorial Assistant: Sophia Vayda. Table of Contents: Sophia Vayda, ‘Ecology’; Eldon Garnet, ‘Homeless’; Tom Sherman, ‘Nature by Any Other Name Is ….’; Alexander Pilis, ‘Architecture Snack Lunch’; Michael Balser and Andy Fabo, ‘Survival of the Delirious’; Ron Geyshick and Judith Doyle, ‘Cannibal Woman’; Brian Scott, ‘Anaesthesia’s Room’; Simon Watney, ‘Laocoon’; Jocelyn Laurence, ‘The Hurricane Party’; Ron Geyshick and Judith Doyle, ‘A Windigo’; Graham Coughtry, ‘Smoking with Philip Marlowe’; Tony Scherman, ‘The Speed of Desire’; Donna Lypchuk, ‘Hypergrafea’; Ron Geyshick and Judith Doyle, ‘Inside Me’; James Purdy, ‘True’; Carolyn White, ‘Safe’. Volume 15 Number 3, 1989  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer, Alberto Manguel, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Director: Carolyn White. Administration: Stuart Inglis. Editorial Assistance: Sophia Vayda. Table of Contents: Roger Caillois, ‘Mimetism and Psychasthenia’; Robert Flack, ‘Vanitas Wheel’; Peter Day, ‘Tools Of The Trade’; Drawings by David Nash; Daniel David Moses, ‘The Dreaming Beauty’; Sharon Cook, ‘Classified Birds’; Alexander Wilson, ‘Tourism and Public Landscape’; Joyce Weiland, ‘Drawings and Fiction’; Michael Stadtlander interview by Judith Doyle and Gerald Owen; Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Hyper Rebel’; Francis Ponge, ‘Of Natural Crystals’; Susan Speigel, ‘Ha! Ha!’; Gary Michael Dault, ‘The Furniture of the 2nd Modernity’; Northrop Frye Interview by Christopher Webber and Stuart Inglis. Volume 15 Number 4, March 1990  Executive Editor: Eldon Garnet. Editors: Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, and Carolyn White. Contributing Editors: Sylvère Lotringer, and Jeanne Randolph. Art Direction: Carolyn White. Editorial Assistant Administration: Lisa Henderson. Table of Contents: William Burroughs, ‘Tiger Terry’; Arnie Achtman, ‘Sub’; William James Power, ‘Doctor Galen and the Judo Club’; Jeanne Randolph, ‘Hurricane Watch’; Brendan Cotter, ‘The Young Geriatric’; McKenzie Wark, ‘Seeds of Fire’; Michel Leiris, ‘Leiris’; Evan Hanson and Melony Ward, ‘Les Palais Ideals’; David Greenberger, ‘Duplex Planet’; Keiko Sei, ‘The True Japanese Art Form’; Eldon Garnet Interviews William Burroughs; Antonio Mazza interviews D. M. Thomas; Cathy Daley, ‘Natural’; Tom Dean, ‘Age, Death, Kids, Power’; Tom Dean, ‘The Varieties of Hell’; Micah Lexier, ‘Micah From Baba Sarah’. Editorial: THE LAST EDITORIAL

The fingers close. Pull at the water. Kick. The arms reach. Pull at the water. The hands stretch. How long has it been? When did I enter? What compelled me from shore? The horizon remains a constant, an image of a line between sky and water and I am constantly approaching the horizon swimming forward to the point. Sometimes I lift my head, float, enjoy the sun’s slow set. Another stroke toward the painted distance. Pull at the water. Far into the night. The silence. The night. The deep black. The sound of predators, my heart rushes. One to my left, one to my right. They are closing. One behind. I can feel them circling. I freeze. Not even my breath. A bolt of lightning ignites the sky. A single star directly over my head. The shore. The shore. Is this where I am heading, or was it merely the point of my beginning? Am I to arrive at the same shore? No. There must have been a reason, a direction I undertook. Or was there no shore? Entered at a point already at the horizon. No difference. Was I forced? An accident? No difference. And finally when I find the shore will I be expected, the crowd, perhaps they will be waiting, watching. They will lift me over their heads and carry me. The smiles on their faces will they be celebratory, are they? Or will it be the empty landscape. Sand stretching from the water, the dunes? Why should I expect more. Perhaps they are waiting armed, ready to force me back into the water. But expect more, how is it possible. The water. The lifting of the mouth out of the water, the breath in. The lowering of the mouth into the water, the breath out. So.  Eldon Garnet

‘Conjugal Rights’; Wes Christensen, ‘Concept: U.S. Senator Jesse Helms’; Ruth Cowen, ‘Mirror, Mirror’; Stephen Cruise, ‘Aloneness’; J.W. Curry, ‘“Ich”’; Simon Cutts, ‘A History Of The Airfields Of Lincolnshire’; Augusto De Campos, ‘Rever’; Peter Downsbrough, ‘As’; Howard Eaglestone and Wendy Frith, ‘Cythera’; Evergon, ‘“Cheese”’; Douglas Fetherling, ‘Mothertongue’; Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘Osez!’; ‘Fly’; Yasuo Fujitomi, ‘DAY’; John Furnival, ‘Convulvulus’; Heinz Gappmayr, ‘1’; Will Gorlitz, ‘V’; Lisa Henderson, ‘Disposable’; Dick Higgins, ‘Another Maybe’; Michael W. Holmes, ‘Darg’; Mendelson Joe, ‘Liars’; Brian David J(O(H)N)ston, ‘Hugo Ball Abandoning The Future (Surrealism) In Favour Of The Mystical Concepts Of God And/& Immortality’; Nicole Jolicoeur, ‘Madeleine’; Alex Katz, ‘Alex Katz’; Silvia Kolbowski, ‘Man’; Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Dipsomania’; Louise Lawler, ‘Enough’; Micah Lexier, ‘Making’; Attila Richard Lukacs; Steve McCaffery, ‘William Tell: A Novel’; John McEwen, ‘Naming’; Al McWilliams; Graeme Moore, ‘Study for a one word poem’; Michael Morris, ‘Souvenir’; Ikuo Mori, ‘Earth Of Heart’; Marlene Mountain, ‘unaloud haiku’; David Nash, ‘Comet’; Mary Margaret O’Hara, ‘Egg’; James Pierce, ‘Uomo’; Gert Rappenecker, ‘Horizont’; Larry Richards, ‘Overpopulation’; Toshinori Saito (Shuntoku Saito), ‘SAI’; Susan Schelle, ‘Witness’; Alex Selenitsch, ‘everyone / ever one; Takahashi Shohachiro, ‘cosmography for who’; Alison Sky, ‘Fading Fur’; Tom Slaughter, ‘Boat’; Linda C. Smith, ‘Music For John CAGE’; Fiona Smyth, ‘Nepenthe’; Frederic Urban, ‘A’; David UU, ‘Bawdy of Dog for jwcurry’; Lawrence Weiner, ‘BREACHED’; Jonathan Williams, ‘“the least that can be said”’; Christopher Wool, ‘Trouble’; Ryojiro Yamanaka, ‘Scenery’. Dedication: During his brief editorship of Impulse

magazine, Peter Day inspired us with his activism and advocacy for contemporary art. Peter died on May 29, 1990, just before this issue was to go to press. He wrote the dedication that follows: He wrote under variants of his forename: Shaunt Basmajian. Shant Basmajian. Sha(u)nt Basmajian. He died on January 25, 1990, aged thirty-nine, and this publication of one word works is dedicated to him. He had promised to contribute to it, but never had time to submit a piece. In his self-effacing and humble way he would have apologized profusely for this. Our personal acquaintanceship was short. We had talked on the telephone a couple of times and met twice. He was modest about his own work, overly so, and surprised that others were interested in it. The last time we met he gave me a book, not one of his, but a collection of works by Marlene Mountain. It was inscribed: “To Brian from Marlene”. He said I should have it. Sha(u)nt had been given the collection by his colleague Brian David J(o(h)n)ston. Her work was unknown to me. It was Pissed Off Poems and Cross Words (1986). She was a great poet, Shaunt said, someone overlooked and neglected. May day, 1990.  Peter Day Introduction: It has been a year since our last issue — and for us, like much of the world, it was a year of dramatic transitions and new beginnings. Here, briefly, is the story: Last winter, after 15 years as the Executive Editor of Impulse, Eldon Garnet transferred his duties to Peter Day. Peter began selecting One Word Works from the many artists, writers, musicians and photographers featured in this special issue. His untimely death, in the midst of production several months later, threw the magazine into grief, shock and disarray. After much dedicated effort by long-time editors Brian Boigon, Judith Doyle and Carolyn White, the issue was recovered, bit by bit. I accepted the Executive Editorship late last Fall. There was no question that Impulse would resume its publication with Peter’s One Word Works. It is presented not only with some pride, as a testimony to his vision and talent, but also as a reminder of the magazine’s resilience and collaborative nature. During its 20 years of publication, Impulse has always stood for creativity and change — and this commitment will continue. To mark this new phase of revitalization and renewal, Associate Editor Gordon Lebredt and I have decided to rename the magazine. Beginning with our next issue, Impulse becomes M5V Magazine. Look for it in September. 

David Clarkson

Volume 16 Number 1, 1990  Editor: Peter Day. Editorial Assistants: Lisa Henderson and Michael Holmes. Art Direction: William Lam Design Inc.. Production Assistant: Greg Van Alystyne. Table of Contents: Vikky Alexander, ‘Grace’; Gary Barwin, ‘Hallelujah’; Jacqueline Benyes, ‘Maman’; bill bissett, ‘Tree’; Brian Boigon, ‘Theory’; Friesco Boning, ‘Void’; Christopher Butterfield, ‘part/ trap’; Barbara Caruso, ‘AN&D’; Karen Cherry,

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