You would never expect it to happen.  Then when it does, you wonder why it doesn’t happen more often.  How have you lived in this city for years, and today is the first day you’ve experienced it.  The subway — the F — the same train you ride every morning and every evening.  You go underground with your flimsy little card, ready to swipe.  But the train is not running.  Not today.  And just before you groan, you realize that there is no yellow tape.  Only cops, ten of them at least, guarding the turnstiles.  This hold-up has nothing to do with construction.

Fellow commuters are buzzing about you, and that’s what they interpret it as: a hold-up, a wrench in the wheel, a roadblock in their ritualized Manhattan-bound sojourn.  They’re folding their papers, tucking them back into their leather bags.  You’ve got to be kidding me, right?  Isn’t that what they say?  There will be no relaxing on the way into work this morning.  It’s time to map an alternate route.  Perhaps walk a few aves to the R, or schlep all the way to the Atlantic-Pacific hub and take one of those spider legs to Wall Street, or Times Square, or wherever each and every one of them is destined.

But you don’t know what happened with the F.  And you’re reluctant to approach one of the police officers because you don’t want to be that person — the rubbernecker without a view, essentially, because you can’t peer down onto the tracks themselves.  You’re not granted access to that second staircase beyond the swipe-in point.  Out of the ten officers, five of the men look like they could be your uncle: tall, quiet eyes, with gin blossoms on their cheeks from the night before.  You don’t blame them; if you saw this kind of shit every day, you’d find an easy way to lull your mind just the same.  Let them be, you think.  Don’t interrupt them in their states of duty.

So you ask a man, passing by, as he makes his way out of the rat maze, Is the F running?  Or is it just a problem with the G?  Neither, he says.  Someone’s on the tracks.  Your reflex squeaks, Are you serious? And what can he say but, Yeah.  Immediately, you’re ashamed.  You want to redact your comment.  Someone just ended his life and all you can say is, Are you serious?  You sound like a preteen from a 4pm sitcom.

You follow the crowd to street-level, where everyone is busy with their cell phones, dialing away: I’m going to be late to work.  The F-train is down.  But, what about the man on the tracks, you think.  There is a man down, too.  But, maybe it’s not a man.  Maybe it’s a woman.  Why did your thoughts, automatically, assume that the jumper was a man?  Didn’t you learn somewhere that more women are likely to ponder suicide attempts, but more men are apt to actually carry-out the mission?  Ah, fuck it, you think.  Still, it could’ve been a woman.  It could have even been a child.  And perhaps there wasn’t a jumper at all.  Perhaps there was a fight and someone was shoved onto the tracks, that unlucky person never attempting to land in the line of a barreling F-train.  What time did it happen?  Do they not bother to mention these incidents on the news?  Did the conductor see the victim?  Did they hit the breaks or was it too late?  Dead? Alive?  What happened?

Pull yourself together, that’s what you must do.  There was a reason you didn’t ask the cops.  You can’t think of it now, but there was.  All you know is that you can’t go on with your day if your head’s teeming with question marks.  Put your ear-buds in, turn on your iPod.  Listen to something upbeat—the Cure, maybe—derail your own thoughts.  You can do this.  You’re of that generation, the up-and-coming that witnessed the conception of viral culture; you handle mass communication with dexterity, you know how to ignore the sidebars and grab a hold of the meat, what matters at this moment.  You can surely harness your own thoughts.  Try to focus on the work that needs to be done at the office.  Think of paper and binder clips, e-mails, after-work plans.  A good night’s sleep at the day’s finale.  Ready for tomorrow.  When there won’t be anything on the tracks.  Just an F-train running.

The ducks saw the woman falling from the sky and immediately held a meeting. ‘How can we make sure she doesn’t fall into the water?’ they wondered. After discussing the matter, they decided at least to slow her fall. Each duck opened its wings until they touched those of the others, and thus united they lowered the beautiful woman to the surface of the ocean.

Then the monsters of the abysses held a council to decide how to protect this marvelous creature and keep her from drowning. They decided that only the Giant Turtle was big enough to support her weight. The Turtle happily obliged and the beavers laid mud on its shell to make it softer. The woman was gently laid on the back of the Turtle which began to grow until it became a big island.  

After some time, Sky Woman gave birth to two twins. Right-hand Twin created all the good things on the earth, made maize, fruits and tobacco grow. Left-hand Twin created weeds, worms and beetles and all the creatures that harm animals and birds.

All the time the Giant Turtle went on growing, so the world became bigger and bigger. Sometimes the Turtle moved and caused earthquakes. After many years had passed, Right-hand Twin decided to create men and because he wanted them to surpass all creatures in beauty, strength and courage, he drew six couples from the base of the island, where until then they had lived as moles.

The first couple was left near a big river, now known as the Mohawk, and for that reason their descendants were called by the same name. The second couple was ordered to build a house next to a big rock and their descendants are called Oneida. A third couple was left on a hill and has always been called Onondaga. The fourth couple produced the Cayuga and the fifth the Seneca.

The sixth couple was led along the Roanoke River in what is now North Carolina, and that was the origin of the Tuscarora. The Tuscarora say it is there that He Who Holds Up the Sky built his house, he was teaching their people a lot of useful knowledge and techniques. But each of the other five nations would say it is near them that He Who Holds Up the Sky built his dwelling on Earth.

With the passing years, many Iroquois families were also distributed around present-day Pennsylvania, the Midwest and southern Canada. Some settled where the bear was the main prey, and for that reason were called the Clan of the Bear. Others lived where there was an abundance of beavers. For that reason they were called the Clan of the Bear. For similar reasons the Clans of the Wolf, the Dear, the Woodcock and Turtle received their names.

In around 1140, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Cayuga united to form the League of the Five Iroquois Nations, in what is today the state of New York. In 1715 the Tuscarora, coming from the South, were accepted as the sixth nation in the League.

07 February, 2007

This is an excerpt from the Wu Ming collective’s upcoming novel Manituana, which will be published by Verso in October.  For more information visit the book’s website.

God bless you Lawrence and here it is. I hope I’ve got nothing wrong

I suppose some artists have loads of imagination but I never did, most of what I make comes from straight observation. A lot of this has taken the form of stalking people around me, I sort of follow and watch and record them. As with all forms of sleuthing, there are dangers involved that are minimised with the application of a few simple rules: the etiquette of creative stalking, if you like.

I’ve done quite a lot of stalking over the course of my career. In my first week at art school, eager to impress, I followed an alcoholic around the streets, secretly drawing him. Eventually he noticed what I was doing and we got talking. He had the most extraordinary story to tell, full of boxing and gangsters and floosies flavoured by the intoxicatingly dark allure of the gutter. I got a bit too involved and invited him back to college where he stayed for a week, getting increasingly drunk and frightening. Eventually a kind girl in the Christian Union invited him to stay at hers where he made a terrible mess and tried to kiss her. She had to hide in the toilet until he left, taking with him an armchair and a pair of knickers, never to be seen again. I had of course broken the first rule of creative stalking, which is to not let the person know you are doing it.  

It was years later that I really learnt this lesson. I was living in Deptford very near to the infamous Carrington House hostel. At that time my work was based around my observations of the characters that lived there. These people were different from the kind you meet on the street these days: dirtier, growlier and yet somehow comfortable in their strange netherworld of methylated ranting. In the one local cafe that allowed them in there was often a customer dressed in a ragged assortment of seventies glam rock gear, soiled white satin and ripped velvet. I was keen for his story, and followed him for a couple of weeks trying to record what he was saying.

Eventually he noticed and approached me in a cafe where I was sat trying to impress a girl. Eyes bulging, he tried to get his hands round my throat and screamed that I’d stolen his woman and one of his songs. I think he thought I was Leo Sayer. After the girl managed to calm him down, we bought him breakfast and got told the story of his life. Hank had been a minor rock star in the seventies and was chewed up and spat out by the music business in a particularly clichéd way. Although understandably bitter, he was also clearly insane, but this didn’t prevent the girl I was with from telling him where I lived.

Hank would follow me home and sleep on my doorstep, demanding breakfast or money or sex. He screamed and yelled and occasionally sang one of his hits. I finally got rid of him when I moved five years later though in many ways he haunts me still. I’ve been performing a piece based on his life for eighteen years now and although it’s really no more than spurious doggerel, I can’t find a way to stop. My punishment for artistic immorality is an eternity of dressing up as Hank. Perhaps I really did steal his song.

Then there’s the bloke I used to see on the bus every morning. Mr Ginge was a ludicrous figure, a bit like Mr Bean, with a crossly furrowed face and shiny flannel trousers six inches too short. Mr Ginge always sat two seats back from the top deck front window, on the right. If anyone got there first he would get very upset, sit as near as possible and move at the next opportunity, I used to deliberately sit there to gauge his reaction. On one occasion I followed him home, and another time to a restaurant to see what he was eating. I was building a detailed picture of his life but when it came to making work out of the material, I transferred it into an eighteenth-century setting. I embellished and invented details, particularly with regard to his sexuality. I always felt guilty for that. I felt I hadn’t been true to my observations, that I’d transgressed the etiquette by inventing and not observing. I used to perform him in an elaborate eighteenth-century dandy costume and turn him into a lonely, unhappy figure, which probably wasn’t true either.

I met Lawrence in a bar in Ireland; he said my partner reminded him of a woman he’d once loved. Lawrence entertained us for five hours with the story of his life and as I was leaving I told him I would go home and write it into a song. He gripped my hand very tightly, looked into my eyes and said: “You will do no such thing. That’s my life that I’ve lived and you’ll leave it to me.“ But I couldn’t help myself. I wrote and recorded the song and one day I will go back and sing it to him.

Lately, I’ve been keeping a weather eye on a person who lives on the street near my house. I talk to him most days and give him money and fags. I’ve got quite a lot of his story down and to date he has provided material for two songs. I realise that I’m breaching my own rules of engagement by getting to know him but somehow, I just can’t help myself.

This piece first appeared in Monika No. 01: The Anon. Monika is a magazine with no masthead and no bylines based in London and now available at the Dossier store in New York.  For a full list of retailers see the magazine’s website.

They portray us as DUDS, and that is what we are.

We are nothing, we mean it, NOTHING AT ALL, and we intend to be of NO USE.

“Respectable people” harp on: ”WORK! BUCK UP! SUCCEED!”  SUCCEED IN GETTING WHERE? IN DOING WHAT? IN WHAT CONDITION?

Our motto: IN ORDER TO ARRIVE, ABOVE ALL, DO NOT LEAVE.

All you, INCAPABLE, USELESS, IDLE, RAGGEDY BARFLIES!

Come and acknowledge one another and assert yourselves at the

GRAND MEETING OF FAILURES

to be held at the House of Learned Societies

8 Rue Serpente, Paris 5

15 March 1950. 8:15 p.m.

The following will discuss “The Merits of Impotence”:

Serge BERNA: left-wing syphilitic

Maurice-Paul COMTE: individual

Jacques PATRY: former Dominican

A free buffet will be served along with Madeleine AUERBACH.

Evening dress required!

Taken from Jean-Michel Mension’s The Tribe, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, City Lights Books, 2001.

After reading an interesting essay last year about the Praying Mantis by the surrealist writer Roger Caillois, I decided to keep a couple of these insects as pets. The mantis, which can grow as big as six inches and mostly lives in warmer climates, adapts easily to a domestic environment and is often incorrectly confused with the incomparable stick-insect. My intention was just to get a male and a female of some easy to keep species, but in the end I found myself turning the whole bathroom (the only warm room in the flat) into a mess of heat lamps, glass jars, and plastic flowers. This tropical enclave housed at its most busy point a male and female of the Giant Asian Mantis (Hierodula membranacea), two couples of the Ghost Mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa), and one small polygamist family of the Spiny Flower Mantis (Pseudocreobotra ocellata) with one male and two females.

The praying mantis’ inclination towards live food unfortunately obstructed any domestic bliss among the couples. All individuals had to be strictly kept in separate jars as they can easily  take on a prey their owns size and would not decline a bite of their own kin if they had the chance. Still, there is not much about the mantis’ exterior that would give away its carnivorous nature. The famous 19th century entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre described the praying mantis as possessing “a certain appearance of graciousness, with its slender body, its elegant waist-line, its tender green colouring, and its long gauzy wings”.  He notes how unlike other insects it has “no ferocious jaws, opening like shears,” but has instead a “fine pointed muzzle, which seems to be made for billing and cooing.” And it is true, my female specimen of the Giant Asian Mantis looked more like a kitten than an insect when she gently cleared away cricket-guts from her face after a meal. There was nothing about her that would reveal that moments before she had been, in Fabre’s words “a cannibal, a ferocious spectre, biting open the heads of its captives after demoralizing them with terror.” 

I would often let the Giant Asian Mantis roam around outside her jar. Her way of searching out and killing a cricket was an unmatched spectacle and her slightly translucent body was reminiscent of a precious green gem as she climbed around the white porcelain sink. My ghost mantids on the other hand led a slow and static life on a bunch of dried sticks. There, their perfect mimicking of withered leafs rarely exposed their existence. Upon closer inspection the contour slowly change from one of dead organic matter to the demonic face of a small alien, but besides their occasional swaying like leafs in the wind, they mostly stayed on the same spot.

All the different mantis species have highly captivating physical attributes and it maybe is not so strange that people have associated this insect with the supernatural since ancient times. When the mantis is at rest it draws its large forelimbs close to its thorax, and so assumes a prayer-like posture which has earned it its sacred name. Besides its extravagant camouflage and strange movement, it is the mantis gaze that people seem to find particularly extraordinary. The large compound eyes and the flexible neck of the mantis give it the great field of vision necessary for ambushing its prey, but it is also these elements that give it a surprisingly human-like appearance. Unlike walking in on a cockroach which might be pointing its body and so also its dull eyes in your direction, the mantis traces your every movement by only turning its head as you walk past. In this respect, the microscopic Spiny Flower Mantis had the most disturbing gaze, and it was more than once that visitors to my tropical bathroom got freaked out by being eyeballed by these little beasts.

Roger Caillois claimed in his essay “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis” that the mantis anthropomorphic qualities, more than just being captivating, also have the ability to touch the deeper layers of the human unconscious.  Just like the bat with its several human attributes (Caillois mentions”the presence of real hands; pectoral breasts; periodic menstrual flow; and a free, dangling penis”), the praying mantis manifests man’s “inclination to be interested in, or even identify with, anything whose external configuration suggests his own body”. I could not help but agree with Caillois when I found a post where a guy was going on about how disgusting and repulsive he found the praying mantis. It was not so much because of the typical insectile qualities, but because of the sexual unease that it induced. He ended the comment by referring to a photo that he found particularly upsetting because the mantis looked like a “hot girl in a sexy pose” (below).

The sexual aspect of the mantis’ anthropomorphism is of central importance to Caillois’ meditation on the insect’s effects on the human mind. Essentially he was not satisfied with the fact that it would only be a matter of humans projecting emotions upon the insect, but that it is equally a case of the insect creeping up within man. He believed common phenomena in nature correspond to “emotional reactions and clusters that sometimes exist only as potentialities in human beings.” So the tragic love-life of the mantis, for example, where the female eats the male after copulation, “perfectly represents in objective terms…the male’s fear of being devoured by the female during or after mating.” He suggested that in order to understand the major psychological complexes, we should look at comparative biology instead of  seeking its origins “in the human mind alone”. So for example the fear of being devoured by a woman would not be “a  transformation of castration anxiety,” but rather a “specification of the fear of being devoured,” which exists as a vestigial residue in man.

Many of Caillois’ fellow surrealists like Bataille, Eluard and Dali were fascinated by the death instinct and its intertwining with ecstasy, making it easy to see how the mantis’ mating habits would appeal to them. But it should not be mistaken that the consumption of the male by the female is enough to stand alone as a reason for this fascination. The devouring of the male after the sexual act is after all not an uncommon phenomena in the insect world. In addition to the mantis’ generally elegant air, there has to be something more that made the surrealists single it out the as the exemplary femme fatal. Jean Henri Fabre dedicated lengthy passages in his book The Social Life of Insects to the mating of the mantis and I think he brings us closer to understanding why the attraction runs deeper than to other insects: “The custom of eating the lover after consummination of the nuptials, of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses anything the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have not yet recovered from my surprise”. Maybe that’s the critical tipping point, that the mantis does not wait for the act to be over before she takes a bite of her lover. Since insects have multiple nerve centers distributed along the body called ganglia, instead of just one central brain like mammals, the female can easily bite the head off the male without interrupting the lovemaking. The act can even go on for hours after he has been decapitated and scientists even believed that this would increase the reproductive abilities of the male by disconnecting his lower regions from the inhibitory upper parts. So not only is the female a vicious cannibal and brutal mistress, but she also turns her lover into a sex-zombie.

I could only wish things had turned out that well for my couple of the Giant Asian Mantis. They both arrived in the mail in separate cups and as soon as I opened their containers it seemed like their fate was already sealed. When I opened the lid to the female she at once jumped out and climbed to the highest point, which was my head. The male on the other hand was impossible to get out of his container and he stayed there for hours pressing his head against the bottom of the cup with his back turned towards the outside world. I believe he knew that he was being set up, that his life was a trap. But when the time for mating arrived I was surprised by the sudden courage of the male. He made several cautious attempts to conquest the female and although she was well-fed and content, she would not accept his invitation to love. At one point, in a fit of aggression, she threw out her deadly front limb and left him with a laceration across his abdomen. I thought it was a deadly wound since it looked as though his guts were falling out, but he survived this brutal rejection – although I suspected it castrated him. Since I am no expert on insect physiology and could not determine if his reproductive parts were still there, I gave him another chance once he had recuperated. The next time I let him into the female’s quarters I kept her constantly distracted with a cricket, but this second attempt ended up being even more pathetic than the first. I removed the male back to safety where I let him die by natural decay as a virgin, instead of by the erotic self-sacrifice he was destined for.

All images by Janina Pedan unless otherwise stated.

My name is Joe Bloggs.

I have been around for a long time.

I was a big deal, to start with – I discovered fire, invented the wheel, writing, I spent years upon years writing poetry.

I spend a couple of days every February writing your card for Valentine’s Day. I knew St. Valentine, Valentinus, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate – I was there. In the back of the crowd, you understand. Never was one to draw attention to myself.

I confessed sins, and heard the confessions of others.

I wrote folk songs. I told fairy tales, captured legends. I always lived in the next town. I was one of Uncle Tom Cobbley’s ‘all’. I was brother to Tom, Dick and Harry.

My opinion is taken, by those with power, as that of the masses. I have intrinsic links to them. I understand their collective will. I influence think tanks. Despite this, I am a vagrant; I stray, occupying houses until the owner remembers them, occupying corpses until identified. Then I leave. FNU, LNU as they say.

I hold no passport. I have no nationality.

I have no possessions of value, nothing that I manage to keep hold of. I have recently developed a violent distaste for objects.

I thrive on neglect.

I have friends: David Agnew, Walter Plinge, Alan Smithee. We have taken to drinking the dregs of other people’s drinks in bars. We smoke the ends of stubbed-out cigarettes. We follow lone women a little of their way home down quiet streets. We stop before they turn around.

I was happy when the telephone was invented. I loved computers. I moved in to the internet. I move on more often now than I ever have, and yet I accomplish a much smaller amount. People are less inclined to acknowledge my achievements. I am robbed of them daily. This electronic arena is proving to be something other than the home I expected to find.

Out of pique, I sign you up to email bulletins about miracle weight loss, Nigerian bank transfers and penile enlargement pills. I thieve your identity. I am the avatar.

I am the whistleblower in every case of professional misconduct. I am unable to be named, for legal reasons.

I hand lost wallets into police stations. I… I give blood. I donate organs. I donate sperm. I use the… I telephone to ask if you’d like to change your electricity supplier in an attempt at conversation. I will never be any good at this.

I am the Mystery Shopper.

I was happy when the new thing was invented. For talking. I loved it. I moved in to the internet. I move on now more than I ever have, and yet I, I do much less. People are less… people don’t acknowledge … people forget what I did for them. Things are taken away from me. This … this isn’t. This isn’t home.

I give lost things to the police. I get tired easily, of late. Still, I give blood. I donated a thing, a kidney. I donate lots of things. I talk to people. I try to talk to people. I was happy when the, when the phone was made. I can’t talk to people. Never have.

I used to confess sins. I used to hear the confessions of others. I invented the wheel. I did! I invented the wheel! I spent years writing poetry. I am the mystery! The mystery thing. The shopper.

They say I am unable to be named for legal reasons. I have no… I have not got a pass. A passport. They say I have no nationality. I have no passport. I have no nationality. This, this is definitely not… not …this place. Not home.

This piece first appeared in Monika No. 01: The Anon. Monika is a magazine with no masthead and no bylines based in London.  It has just been released in London and will soon be available in major cities throughout Europe and North America. For more info about Monika, or to order copies online, visit their website.

“For anyone not already hardened by the emptiness of life, there is in this world, which seems to have at its disposal limitless resources, a confusion remedied only by a kind of lazily accepted general imbecility. Even poverty seems at the very least less incurable than this stupid distress. A beggar whose broken voice cries out a song one can barely hear in the rear of a courtyard seems at times to have lost less in the game of life than the human matter arranged in buses and trains during rush hour…. The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.’ – Georges Bataille

Søren Keirkegaard claimed that “Boredom is the root of all evil.” Here though, boredom, or perhaps the fight against boredom, is framed as the generator of invention. If boredom is indeed evil, it is to be struggled through and grappled with, not simply sidestepped or repressed. If their passion had been destroyed momentarily and boredom temporarily triumphed, it is here reborn in the passion for destruction.

The creators of ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ attempt to recapture the legacy of Fischli & Weiss’ video after its much-lauded corporate recuperation by Honda a few years back (Fischli & Weiss had threatened legal action). Moreover, against Honda, it can be read as a neo-luddic critique of the mechanization of labor and everyday life, the lesson being that no matter how creatively one utilizes machinic technology, it always ultimately de-vitalizes its human appendage. The Honda ad ends with a smarmy corporate voice exclaiming, ‘Isn’t it nice when things just work.’ The message of ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ is clear: not always.

The dull thud and muted groans of the contraption’s victim echo Johnny Rotten’s iconoclastic cackle at the beginning of “Anarchy in the UK” or perhaps more appropriately the laugh of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) when beaten into a bloody pulp by the gangster in Fight Club.  This has nothing to do with laughter per se as what is striking about the video is that no one really laughs, there is just awkward coughing and someone advising, “Put [the fire] out.”  Instead of the machismo of the testicle thwacking torture scene from Casino Royale, the video feels more masochistic and one can imagine all of the participants in the contraption’s creation lining up to be struck, one after another.

Ultimately, however, beyond these themes of subjective destitution, for anyone not already hardened by the emptiness of life, ‘Rube Goldberg Nutshot’ is a paean to creativity and innovation – the embodiment of what idle hands can produce.

The above quote is taken from Georges Bataille’s “Popular Front in the Streets”, Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Saint Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.

We propose to invent new, changeable decors.

* * *

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

* * *

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.

Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

* * *

A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization (it is clear that there has been neither civilization nor architecture for centuries, but only experiments, most of which were failures; we can speak of Gothic architecture, but there is no Marxist or capitalist architecture, though these two systems are revealing similar tendencies and goals).

Anyone thus has the right to ask us on what vision of civilization we are going to found an architecture. I briefly sketch the points of departure for a civilization:

— A new conception of space (a religious or nonreligious cosmogony).

— A new conception of time (counting from zero, various modes of temporal development).

— A new conception of behaviors (moral, sociological, political, legal; economy is only a part of the laws of behavior accepted by a civilization).

Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I’m not satisfied with that word; I mean that it will be more flexible, more “playful”). (For a long time it was believed that the Marxist countries were on this path. We now know that this endeavor followed the old normal evolution, arriving in record time at a rigidification of its doctrines and at forms that have become ossified in their decadence. A renewal is perhaps possible, but I will not examine this question here.)

On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.

* * *

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

* * *

Guy Debord has already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for totalcreation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space. One example will suffice to demonstrate this — a leaflet distributed in the street by the Palais de Paris (manifestations of the collective unconscious always correspond to the affirmations of creators):

BYGONE NEIGHBORHOODS
Grand Events
PERIOD MUSIC
LUMINOUS EFFECTS

PARIS BY NIGHT

C O M P L E T E L Y   A N I M A T E D

The Court of Miracles: an impressive 300-square-meter reconstruction of a Medieval neighborhood, with rundown houses inhabited by robbers, beggars, bawdy wenches, all subjects of the frightful KING OF THIEVES, who renders justice from his lair.

The Tower of Nesle: The sinister Tower profiles its imposing mass against the somber, dark-clouded sky. The Seine laps softly. A boat approaches. Two assassins await their victim. . . .⁽²⁾

De Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)

In De Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums. De Chirico could have been given free reign over Place de la Concorde and its Obelisk, or at least commissioned to design the gardens that “adorn” several entrances to the capital.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities bringing together — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.

Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal “cathedrals.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.

This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens that create optical illusions — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed) is the sign: No playing in the labyrinth.

This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.

Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a Planetary Garden along the lines the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” Saturation of the market with a product causes the product’s market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, children would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.

The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation.

Couples will no longer pass their nights in the home where they live and receive guests, which is nothing but a banal social custom. The chamber of love will be more distant from the center of the city: it will naturally recreate for the partners a sense of exoticism in a locale less open to light, more hidden, so as to recover the atmosphere of secrecy. The opposite tendency, seeking a center of thought, will proceed through the same technique.

Later, as the activities inevitably grow stale, this drifting will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation.

Note: A certain Saint-Germain-des Prés, about which no one has yet written, has been the first group functioning on a historical scale within this ethic of drifting. Thismagical group spirit, which has remained underground up till now, is the only explanation for the enormous influence that a mere three city blocks have had on the world, an influence that others have inadequately attempted to explain on the basis of styles of clothing and song, or even more stupidly by the neighborhood’s supposedly freer access to prostitution (and Pigalle?).

In forthcoming books we will elucidate the coincidence and incidences of the Saint-Germain days (Henry de Béarn’s The New Nomadism, Guy Debord’s Beautiful Youth,etc.). This should serve to clarify not only an “aesthetic of behaviors” but practical means for forming new groups, and above all a complete phenomenology of couples, encounters and duration which mathematicians and poets will study with profit.

Finally, to those who object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to recall that in every group certain characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing various tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the dual mechanism of projection and identification. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.

The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.

Ivan Chtcheglov (1933-1998), also known as Gilles Ivain, wrote ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ when he was nineteen as a member of the Letterist International, one of the avant garde groups that went on to form the Situationist International in 1957.  Despite being kicked out of the group in 1954, this text was printed in the first issue of the Situationist’s journal and it has been extremely influential.  An abridged version of the text has circulated in English for years but this, the complete version, was recently translated by Ken Knabb at Bureau of Public Secrets.  Top image of Postman Cheval‘s absolutely incredible Le Palais Idéal taken from here.

He came in and everyone was like “Mike Mike Hi Mike”

And he never said anything

And then in the middle of some total loser’s story about nothing he was like, “Hey Seth I have a gift for you” and pulled out a rubber coffee top

And “Seth” (in a red Patagonia and goggles, no I’m not lying) acted appropriately affected.

Like it was made of gold.

I was like, “who is this guy?” I still need to find out

I have no clue

And then about 10 minutes later “Mike” pulled out a wallet photo of his daughter and interrupted more conversation by silently passing it around

And some thespian woman gushed that

they looked just alike, which they didn’t.  Michael Shannon looks like a drunk

camel and the baby was pale with blue eyes.

And I was like, “YOU think THAT looks like HIM?”

 And she was shocked and then said, “throughout the face”

 And I was like I gotta get outta here

Hallie Elizabeth Newton is a recent graduate of Eugene Lang.  Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Gloom Cupboard, Dogzplot, Hamilton Stone Review, and various blogs.

A painter friend of mine said one day that if a grasshopper were the size of a lion it would be the most beautiful animal in the world.  How true that would be of a giant crayfish, a crab enormous as a house, and a shrimp as tall as a tree!  Crustaceans, fabulous creatures that amaze children playing on beaches, submarine vampires nourished on corpses and refuse. Heavy and light, ironic and grotesque, animals made of silence and of weight.

Of all the ridiculous actions men take upon themselves, none is more so than shrimping.  Everybody has seen that elderly gentleman, bearded and red-faced, a white piqué hat on his head, wearing an alpaca jacket, his trousers rolled up to his thighs, a wicker basket on his belly, his shrimping-net at the ready, hunting shrimps in a rock-pool for his dinner.  Woe betide the poor shrimp that lets itself be caught!  In desperation she wriggles, she slides, she flutters in the triumphant fingers.  Elastic animal flower, graceful and lively as mercury, petal separated from the great bouquet of the waves.  She is also a woman.  Who has not heard of La Môme Crevetteı?

Among crustaceans, the crab known as the ‘sleeper,’ the image of eternal sleep, is the most mysterious, the most deceitful, the shiftiest.  It hides under rocks and its mobile eyes watch for passing prey with a cruel malice.  It walks sideways.  It combines every fault.  There are men who resemble it.

The crayfish and the lobster are nobles.  They are cultivated like oysters and tulips.  They are present at all human ceremonies: political banquets, wedding breakfasts and wakes.

All these beasts change their carapaces, grow old, harden, make love and die.  We do not know whether they suffer or if they have ideas concerning ethics and the organization of societies.  According to Jarry it would appear that a lobster fell in love with a can of corned beef…

Crustaceans are boiled alive to conserve the succulence of their flesh.

From Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Atlas Press, 1996). Translated by Iain White.