MANIFESTO, LE TEXTE
Curated by Brian Ganter, published byTCRThe Capilano Review, February 2011, 5500 words
She was dead when they found her body. Only three members of the collective were present at that moment, while the rest of us cowardly fled to the sound of the sirens deploying all of their apparatus. Rumors of bloodshed. Sprinklers. Blinkers. Alarm systems. Emergency. Evacuation. Sirens used to represent desire, now signifying danger. There are definite sirens in the word desires. A lot of anger in danger. While we knew she wanted something radical for the last performance – she did mention something about “deadly” – no one suspected she would use real dynamite and loaded machineguns. A week before in Stockholm, she managed to mobilize the forces of order under a bridge where she faked a first suicide. The film we shot to document that performance was very successful. The abstraction of both her gesture and the response it engendered from the authorities. The one and the multiple, I and world ensemble, so transparent. The recording of an ever simple trajectory - one aloof dissident straight line going down to the middle of a circle of concerned citizens. One line in a circle. The whole thing in unbearable slow motion, very fast and slow again. The registering of it was more powerful than the performance itself no doubt. No sound added or needed. She was after the idea that while there were millions of strangers unwillingly dying in the world - this vast and massive ignored misery - the life of one bourgeois had the power to mobilize an army of its own kind. The absurdity to save one person while half of the planet is starving. We could say she died a communist, even though she never truly believed in it, she had to believe in something. The question of believing. Believing in something radical. This powerful desire for transfiguration, a living transcendence of a sort, a salvation, and all the self-righteous revolutionary and authoritarian vocabulary that comes with it. Fantasies of freedom and slavery abolition. This thirst for apocalypses where everyone would be an artist. It was not so much the content of it all that was functioning best in that particular piece, but the deliberate poetics of the enterprise. Something bigger than the initial idea. The free fall. She called it Chute Libre and had a perfumer create a special fragrance from it, eponymously, with myrrh as a main ingredient because of its extraction process which consists of a purposeful wound inflicted through the bark of the tree and into the sapwood. Honey-like note, sharp, pleasantly earthy, and somewhat bitter. In that performance, the artist was positioned exactly between the strange and the familiar, the criminal and the victim.
I am not trying to defend her or look for naked truths. We know that truth is always dressed up, confessions always disguised. We are all defendant lords, manager of our own neurosis, head of personal blazons, everyday justifying our coat of arms. If making art is planting flags, then an army of selves is already too much. We are all dissidents. Revolution and dictatorship are two faces of the same coin. People accused her of being dishonest. She was actually very interested in dishonesty. She often talked about the grace in the agility of the thief. Nothing sticking to him. Pink Panther. For the pickpocket, life is a game which demands skill and detachment. The crook plays for himself. The terrorist is less seduced by the coup d’état than the coup de theater. The deceitful is an artist. The murderer, an artisan of crime. The offender always produces meaning. The culprit has something more, and the victim, definitely something less. The scoundrel who killed sixty-nine women and turned them into sausages, is expressing something. Nothing more disgusting than a pork farm. The guy who plotted to bomb the twin towers, one tooth at the time. Nothing more arrogant than American occupation. In his Eloge de la complexité, Edgar Morin states that the simple fact to increase complexity of an ensemble augments its performance, its potential. The cheat is complex and multiple, thus the fraudulent, additive in nature, plays on many lives, while the victim, subtractive in essence, is mistaking the origins for the destination. The just is afraid to loose something while the embezzler already risked everything. Risk is the rupture with any roots and the possibility for perdition. The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway at the end of the film, the airport scene, when the larcenist disappears into the crowd. He hired a number of individuals dressed exactly like him. Black suit, white shirt, red tie and black bowler. Totally distinctive yet impossibly identifiable. He vanishes in the crowd yet he is always visible. Simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Genius. Brilliant. Delightful. The burglar goes on to the next page while the trustworthy is fixated on the same word, a lack of pride while the fallacious has all the pretensions. Even on the electric chair there is the possibility for a last word. In aNakedCity episode, Roddy Mcdowal plays a talented stage actor who swipes endless refusals. Prevented from perfecting his art he becomes an unflinching murderer. When the police surround him on the rooftop, facing the impasse the actor replies with mad lucidity, “You do not understand. I play for myself !”. That is just before he throws himself into nothingness. Suicide as a last word.
She was lying in a coagulating puddle, almost right in the middle of the space. It reminded me of a piece I saw in Paris, Lâché de feuilles rouges. A pile of A4 format sheets of red paper thrown from above onto white floor. Now the lights of the outside blinking red neon spelling the word MANIFESTO in Wingdings fonts were flashing on her body in a fragmented manner. A shooting star that touched earth. It is astonishing to know that a falling star and a meteorite are actually the same object. So different, I never wanted to believe that. Revolutionary impetuses dismantle as soon as the leader is decapitated. Montezuma as the ancestor of an infinite series of failed Mexican revolutions. I will never forget the images of humongous Stalin statues being pulled down on the ground by strings. Stalin, what a ridiculous little thing. We were no exception. I said we. I meant the collective. I swear I never use we, usually disqualifying any living being who speaks in the name of any we of any sort. Not only I find it distasteful but also infinitely suspicious, extremely questionable and moreover, just tragic. An artist takes a part-time job as some clerk in order to pay the rent and progressively slips towards the we, ending up speaking in the name of the company in a very convincing manner. We used to carry that. We will look into it. We are expanding. We are relocating. We specialize in identity loss. Absorbed by the institution or the corporation, the individual, even the most resilient, ends up gradually dull-witted and then totally ossified, petrified, sooner than later, speaking in the name of someone else. The identification becomes total, the alienation, complete. I saw it happened too many times it makes sick to my stomach. You might as well just kill yourself. The worse types are unionized, therefore automatically against management. Although they have no share in the business they slave for, they speak about it as if they own it just to sublimate the fact that it is the company who owns them. These people also come with a whole set of automatic sayings. When asked ‘’How are you ?’’ they answer ‘Five minutes from my coffee break!’’, or ”One more day before the weekend !’’ They barely exist on their day off as their brains are fried from focusing on mindless things. The parade of the walking dead is not an October event, it happens every day of the year. Seneca. “I made myself the slave of no one, I do not wear the name of anyone”. It’s bad enough the world needs slaves for the wheel to turn around, but the proliferation of self-imposed forms of slavery leaves me simply bewildered. I once enjoyed temporary placement in the ranks of a crown corporation where employees of all levels had the right to defer salary towards a year off. The sabbatical is an ancient tradition used for deepening academic research but this was no academia as the most meaningless occupation was eligible for the furthering its development. An employee announced me that she was finally going on a sabbatical to live comme une artiste for a year. I thought I would kill her. What could I possibly reply to such ignorance, do you know what being an artist entails? The artist is someone who cannot find sleep, seeking every minute of the day and night, by involuntary reflex, a mental illness, itchiness, a chronic condition, a true curse, the poetic, the poetic, in order to survive the mediocre, someone who says no, no, no, not in space but in time, this time you spend killing until you try to live once every seven years. Your sabbatical means the year you will realize you wasted your life. After twelve months in artiste hell, on the verge of suicide, you will be so happy to come back home and reinstate yourself within the fold of a secure job, relieved from disposable freedom. They are all vampires sucking what they call the system. A few breaths away from anticipated retirement. A few winks from death. The state owes them. The government is this abusive father we loot. Sun worshippers who take full advantage of the daylight. The small time employee avenges his condition everyday, contributing in a minimum manner while withdrawing maximum benefits. All potential serial killers. Why did I get in such diatribe. Because of the we. I was asking myself, why I said we though I was not truly one of them. I just happened to be there because she wanted a good cinematographer and she was paying well, plus she was fun to be with. I became her personal archivist and tried to put some order into her research on the bêtise (generalized imbecility). I did partake in their soft subversions which gradually became perverse. The collective, whom I secretly referred to as the group of people having landed upon the ‘’pile of nearly made its”, started its deep descent soon after my unconscious subordination. Perhaps I am partly responsible. It is evident that this temporary affiliation for ever cured me from any need of belonging. The end. Boom. Then end. Bang. The end. Boomerang.
On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies was the title of Copernicus’s treatise about the movements of planets around the sun. Revolution then passed from astronomy into the vernacular coming to representing abrupt change in the social order. Revolutions. There is something révolu in revolution. (passé). Obsolete. American, French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Spanish revolutions. So much red to finally understand that there is not such things as true revolutions, in the sense of complete rotations, total conversions. Only revolutionary moments, ephemeral in nature, manifesting themselves like little targeted fireworks under complicit constellations. An essential cry, an inanity under the sky. A veillity, a big sigh. Momentums are so fragile. The right time to say I love you for the first time. The first manifesto was communist. Agitated present, present past, conjugated times. Regicides, restorations, reforms, counter-reforms. The big zigzag of history, its giant slalom and the obliqueness of its writing and rewriting. Slopes and tracks. Bolsheviks, metamorphosis, super heroes. The twentieth century was big on the idea of change, notably prolific in manifestos of all kinds. Understandably so, as we went through a lot of unimaginable horror screenings that seemed to have drawn little holes as to evacuate the unfathomable, liquidate time from continuity, liquefy reality. The reply of the artistic youth seems to echo the violence it merged from. Killing painting. Killing narratives. Bombing language. Totalitarian reflexes leaked from the political to the art battlefield. Something military in the avant-garde. The front. Not only a masquerade of MUSTS, DOES and DON’TS, SHALLS and SHOULDS, SHOULD NOTS and WHAT NOTS, but a genuine desire to kill the fathers. Art as this cultural edifice born from the guilt of the killing of the fathers. Goya’s Cronos upside down. The fox biting its tail. The hand that feeds. A way out of continuity. Tabula rasa. Rupture as an origin, discontinuities as a need for the tabularized, all that triggered by real exasperation, an immense dissatisfaction with the present. Nothing surpassed Dada. DADA doesn't speak. DADA has no fixed idea. DADA doesn't catch flies. Its immense legacy was the birth of humour in art. Absurdity as a means. This splendid and naïve idea that one can extract oneself from the world and change it once for all. That would be enough bêtise as it is, but more over, collective niaiserie (monkey business) aspiring to spreading their ideas on a planetary scale. Proselytism is not a very sexy word, because in-your-face screaming is not very attractive either. It’s like bold oversized capital letters. This transpiring need for allegiance. Truisms, rules, tracts, posters, headlines, preachers, dogs, mobilization, internationals. It’s a bit rich. And what a stupid word that is, IN-TER-NA-TION-AL. I have an image in mind of a small time manager, fat and charming, quite helpful, working for a mid-scale company wannabe empire wearing the logo of the company on his chest pocket. A small steel gray oval grid with a blue arrow pointing towards the “regent” and “champion” and “royal” “worldwide”. Logo is another word that has lost much meaning since the Greeks. It used to mean speech, discourse. Now, it is a symbol formed by a set of graphic signs representing a label, an organization, an identity specially designed for people who do not have one. I will spare myself from ranting against logos but it does relate to the we, which relates to the collective which relates to manifestos which relates to mass murder of everything. International just means internet. Although I am not exactly nostalgic, I get very irate with loss of meaning, as if I was scared to become dead poor, language wise. Death camps were famous for their use of rational and technical language. Rationalizing extermination. On the impoverishment of language through the advancement of technology, see Heartbeat Detector from Nicholas Klutz or read Houellebecq’s Whatever. Both very lucid, the former a philosophical essay, the ladder so tragic it is funny. A technocracy happens when technology becomes more important than culture, more important than history. Even the word memory has another feel to it, alluding to computer memory more than anything. A mouse is not a mouse. Memory of an apple. That reminds me of a poem I fell upon by Daniel Donahoo which says something like Everyday we manage to fit more and more into smaller and smaller until one day we will be able to fit all the information the world has, everything that everyone knows and believes and dreams into nothing. The information will slip, not through our ears and eyes but through our skin. Information will breathe in and out of us, knowledge as deep as wide, so full of knowing, that all there is left to do is unlearn.
None of us looked at each other at the funeral. We gathered only to vanish in all directions minutes after the event. I am trying to recall–strained recollection of dream in noisy morning - the night of the carnage. Carne. Canard à l’orange. Orange, so close yet so far from red. The confusion of signs. Head throbs. I did swallow several capsules of gamma amino butyric acid but it had the counter effect of multiplying the number of neurons firing to my brains so I could not distinguish the languages of war, the penchant for the military, embargo, siege, terror, birds, the court, the history of all revolutions, religious dogma, crusades, propaganda, 9/11 7/11 747 4X4, Terminator, Desert Storm, Oedipus, axis of evil, rewind-fast-forward, animals becoming intense, mailboxes, the Ten Commandments, red, pink, death, XXX, excess. Dali’s paranoiac critical method is the Surrealists’ most important legacy. The ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described it as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." I just stepped a notch deeper, beyond systematization and it was a little more complicated to come back from a lack of differentiation between the state of the world and my heartbeat. As if Foucault’s dispositif had been all encompassing, therefore irrelevant, beyond mechanisms, only one single huge machine. More than prisons and madhouses, more than Agamben’s cigarette, more than facebook, twitter, gargles, all systems of capture in one. We are all wikipefied. In my delirium, all of our previous actions were compiled in my vulnerable memory as one big strategic impulse emanating from a common source that is, springing from the immensely puerile and stupid idea that one could change the world. Giant close up of conflicted agglomerations of pubescent hormonal imbalance. Movement- movement-movement. Tentative angry fists marching in deep layers of shit towards freedom. Central America, squeezed in a protest, I was never where I wanted to be, some march of the dead, other people’s rights, and the crowd screaming El pueblo unido jamas sera vincido. The cry of the vanquished. I was so irritated by the massive movement, the us, the we again. The consensus. That is just it, the consensus of it all, that I find most exasperating, most suffocating. What is scary about consensus is that people stop thinking by themselves and it is sufficient to rally around a set of ideas, a vision, religiously, blindfolded. Unanimity as a lack of opposition. That is scary. Even the term left wing nowadays does not mean anything else than a consensus between individuals who do not need to read anymore. One just has to prove they live on the eastside of things and that they are pro-Palestinian, pro-environment, do not own a car, burn fur and hate people with money and power. They burn books by not reading them. The blind lefties are just as irritating as the westside jocks, perky lulu lemon derrière, designated spot for their burnt plastic coffee on the top of the stroller. It’s just a set of preconceived ideas and values. Groupings. Being an intellectual use to mean something. Ever since that last collective overdose I cannot even be on a bicycle path without feeling part of a benevolent brotherhood supra consciousness of exemplary non-smoking passive aggressive citizens who recycle on the right day without a miss. Bicycle gear, especially the shape of the helmet, makes me violent. I never escape contempt. It is a chronic condition. I am just learning to live with it.
While we were waiting for Security, we were all screaming silently. A sardonic ritornelle, a short return or repetition; a concluding symphony to an air, often consisting of the burden of the song. Us, half conscious carrion waiting. Assaults, like revolutions are reversible. The lion becoming sheep. As a child I always reveled in front of any types of reversible garments, and the trickster feeling of it all still provokes in me the same fascination. An episode from the Twilight Zone with Peter Faulkner who plays the role of a Latin revolutionary rapidly turning into a dictator once in power. This search for a new paradigm, engendering futuristic movements, always ended up in steel gray susceptibility and black and white quarrels. Famous for their fights outside the café, leaders of manifestos physically beating the hats of who ever disagreed with their principles. It was like that within the collective too. Whoever had the pretension to aspire to an individual thought was rapidly marginalized, ostracized, nailed. There was nothing else to say because when you abstract all planes to a line and all lines to a point then there is not much space to add anything. At the end of it all, they looked like members of a dysfunctional family around the table of a dinner that seriously went wrong. What happened I think was a lack of experience with chance. They forgot to invite it. All they wanted was for the viewer to coincide with himself, thus become an emancipated spectator. It was a lot to ask. Plus even they, under an intellectual dictatorship, could not even intervene at the right moment as they took the oath to the uncontrollable. They were so pedagogical in thinking that art should be useful, utilitarian and functional. I was a bit shocked as I always felt that art was at best of times, useless, amoral, apolitical, anti-didactic, futile, useless, pulling from that nothingness its own relevance, its own power. A certain mystique. But I noticed that more and more there is sponsorship of art projects invested with aspects of the social, or worse, the environmental. Olympic art. Prevalence of documentary over fiction. Bonjour tristesse. Someone worrying that art should speak about our times. As if we could avoid that. Even without slick rules or predigested themes, art always speak about the era that gives it birth. We do not have to state the obvious and sit on the piano!
By definition, the opposite of creation is abolition, annihilation, destruction, counterfeit, copy, imitation, nothingness. Thus, art would be opposed to all of the above, even when it seeks to abolish, annihilate, destroy, forge, copy, imitate, nothingness. It is obvious that the only way to destroy the desert is to build on its surface. Of course writing is destroying white planes. Speaking, furnishing silence. Creation relates just as much to genesis as it does to the nuclear bomb. Making art is perpetually creating and destroying the universe. We are all wonderers, false pleaders in search of ephemeral immortalities. Some are ready to sacrifice a lot to arrive at their place under the sun for five minutes. These one have the arrogance of the forger, tend the surface of the earth while others, with the humility of the sexton, spend their time digging graves. Père Lachaise. Libraries are cemeteries for the immortals. The delicate gesture of opening a book for a genie to pop out. Towards the middle end, I could tell she did not believe anymore in the initial declaration of intentions. But she could not say anything as it would have been at once too demanding and too disappointing. Too many members looking for answers. She just wanted to send them all to the corn field but they needed her as a leader. Looking back, all of her work was about this resistance to unity. If we understand that the process of thinking is about sorting out sameness, that in order to comprehend, we need to differentiate, then having a thought is producing sameness. Furthermore, this instinctual need to fabricate sameness in order to survive chaos would in turn produce thoughts that would be nothing more then self-preservation reflexes. Thinking processes hijacked by the safeguard of our political and economical positions. That certainly sheds light on the history of philosophy. But with her, thinking seemed to be about the disassociative, escaping synthesis, anti-system, anticonstitutional. There was only the antithesis of the antithesis of the antithesis, endless interpretations to infinity. But you cannot share this kind of all encompassing insights, it has to emerge naturally. Before this cosmic detachment experience, people need to believe in something, even after the Soviet Union, after the Berlin Wall, after Sarajevo, despite the failure of all the isms, they still needed to believe, to believe in anything, even in Heidegger. To believe in nothing is to believe in something. Nothing is already too much. It is best to avoid the question altogether.
I have to admit that I was happy to see the cops and all reactionary devices to counterweigh the absolute catatonia we drove ourselves into. It is not that I simply turned my vest inside out. It was more complicated than that. Or perhaps simpler. There is always an ineluctable ambiguity in surrendering. Like Cleopatra who decided to fall in love with the enemy to make her defeat more palatable. She converted humiliation into sex appeal. It was a very creative way to have the last word. They put us in a van without futile brutality. They were not used to be called for an art opening and deal with skinny vegan types with big glasses. When they heard that we were using machine guns they expected to find a mad crack house or some mafia insider bloodshed. I think they misheard the word Manifesto for Mafioso. They actually both subscribe to organized crime. We were more like deserters. All I remember is not the events that followed but what is still processing in my psyche. My thoughts are the event as an accelerator of particles, a probability theory, a festival of paranoia, a convention in hypertension, a vast interstice of abstract intuitions, a necklace of noesis. Louise Bourgeois once stated that at some point, one has to come to the evidence that one is just plain ridiculous. Seriously, a manifesto. What is this need to define school of thought, form movements, aggregate, congregate. This need for a new objectivity, a new science, a new machine, a new architecture. A new paradigm, a new paradise, a new parasite. I suppose they felt that rationalism came to a dead-end and that since god was dead the answer was a new order, a new dogma. But why still? It reminds me of a film by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo. In memoria di me. A Jesuit monastery on a Venetian island with two protagonists. Andrea, tormented and disappointed with life, commits as a novice within the Catholic Order. Convinced he has found truth he meets another novice, Fausto, who is struggling with the idea of it all. Fausto refuses truth that does not emerge from within. Andrea does not question anything because he refuses to experience doubt embracing the basic principle of the idea of truth in dogma, while Fausto is losing himself in deep questioning. Andrea, facinf his tutors, is enunciating truth with perfect declarative diction while the other is barely able to finish one sentence. The former remains impassible while Fausto is tortured with questioning. The camera never penetrates the sacred spaces so we walk along corridors, refectories, gardens, hallways, passageways, antechambers, cells, like so many transitional borrowed spaces. The soundtrack gently reveals some bias. Pieces by Johann Strauss a waltz named something like We only live once, the Artist Life. A concerto by Tchaikovsky which is known for its tension between the soloist and the orchestra, where the former has to take over, dominate. A film about the victory of the individual over the group. The personal, the idiosyncratic against the general consensus. Without ever leaving the lieu, he collages a military march from Schubert. The author thus speaks about voluntary prisons, allowing the two camps to show their point, without condemning the individuals but the systems that employs them. Belief systems of all sorts. This general hatred for the mind nowadays proliferating more than ever. This attraction for self imposed dogma is so immensely questionable. That one artist comes up with his own sets of ideas and constraints is a given, a necessary thing, a frame of work, but the question is why to make it an international rule. As if Bergson is more right than Spinoza, Leibniz closer to enlightenment than Lévinas. Sartre less than Deleuze. Philosophers’ life work are nothing less than wise and passionate manifestos. The odd thing is to notice a shift towards the end of their life as for most of them there is a return to something less rational, am not sure what exactly, something more mystical, less scientific. Manifestos with their big contrasting truths are perhaps similar to adolescence, often abject and as much necessary as unavoidable but also objectionable. Transitional, they act like bridges, so we can walk on them as we reach something else. Discourse engendering discourse. Chain of ideas. Ideas about chains.
It was always painful for philosophy teachers to teach idealism, its absolute essential nature as well as by the same absolute, its unavoidable failure. I remember wanting to extract myself from any group, any monticule, any pile of ideas that were not stemming from myself. Individuation process. Dissociation is happening in art too. The resistance of making a front, resisting the new, the constituted movement, the consolidated aesthetic, the concealed tendency, the sous-vide. While I do prefer crispy outside and tender inside, I am not going to gather an internationalist propaganda, design a whole movement about it. I prefer to understand that the new and the old is not a question anymore. The old being tangibly vaster, the new needing to prove itself as equally interesting. The huge task of elevating the viewer above his quotidian is already heroic, in an overloaded world, imposing yet another image, yet another text, as something necessary. Art thrives in that tension. The work IS the manifesto. I must have taken another dose of stimulants as the group of individuals dressed in black called Security was replaced by a group of individuals now wearing white as I was lying in a fresh bed. I must have fainted in between. Change of guard. Uniforms. Uniformity We all wear uniforms. Even nudity nowadays has become a uniform. The consensus of it all again, I am going to be sick. The whole room started to spin. I was falling again, even though I was already lying down. Everything was turning, the room, the events, the globe, my head, eternity. We are all falling. Every step we take is defying gravity. Standing up we belong to ourselves. Sitting down we are half surrendering. Lying down, we are fatally conquered. By love, by sleep or by death.
Then I think I must have slept for days. My brain synapses were perfectly loosened for the leaky cosmos to get in. My body did not exist, it was an immense joy. I actually did not feel anything, neither sad nor happy. It was paradise. I felt freedom for the first time. Then I remembered my husband, my son, and I still did not feel anything. Then I got scared I would never feel anything ever. Neither joy nor sorrow, so I pushed the panic button. They came within a few minutes. Not my family but the guardians of my thresholds. I could not explain to them why I was in such a panic. The drug addict seems slow because he is unable to articulate the simplest and most banal of sentences while he is beating speed records in active thoughts on the theory of complexity. When I woke up, even though I was blanched from any responsibilities associated with the series of crimes the collective accomplished, I still had to go through an interrogation with the other members. A formality they said. Everyone was wearing black again. Left, right, panels, round table, defendants, plaintiff, wood, togas, frank incense. Before the questions started to fire up in our direction on the motives of our operations, we had individually internalized the deep meaning of table, chair, floor, ceiling, walls. We all saw surdity in absurdity. We then knew very well that art would never change anything and that all is quickly recuperated by fashion, advertising, real estate or nostalgia. It was not fighting fire by fire, or perhaps it was. Détournement
is always dizzying. I remembered this piece where the artist had screwed the horses of a merry-go-around in the opposite direction of its base. Brilliant. It was something about the obsolescence of revolutions and counter-revolutions. I am not sure, because the more you play with revolving and devolving; it’s the revolution that gets immobilized, neutralized. Exactly a year after the trial, I was invited for dinner in midtown. We were eating Californian strawberries on plastic granite standing on wood laminate. Beside the electric piano there was an electric fire place. Baudrillard passed away that very same night I was dining with fake friends onPastiche Avenue. We are all pattern seekers. We seek to distinguish patterns while looking for models. We draw tendencies while deciphering behavior modes. Masson of concepts, we register schemes. Seers, we weave links between beings and things, between life and death. We are all weavers of meaning, misbrands, blinds leading blinds. Demonstrators, protestors, stickmen with big ideas, big men with sticky dreams. We are all universal junkies. Night owls and early birds. Leeches and crocodiles. Scaffoldings and butterflies.