I’d Rather Just See Conway Push, Than . . .

 

Modernism, our Modernism, was everywhere and total. Not only enacted in abundance, administered with a purposeful exactitude, but it’s purity of intent, its expediency, was also so suffused at the root, at the crux of it all, that its good faith benevolence touched and penetrated all operations, and was adopted and refined and remained so integrated, so firmly entrenched in our Colony. Our Modernism bewitches, it constantly moves, it applies its logic integrity. It even has an unconscious—Modernism’s unconscious drives, which even further work itself to accelerate, to supplement, to more firmly imbed and entrench itself into the activity of all of our protracted actions. When you wade into the pool of Modernism, you sort of disappear, as if erasing yourself for greater good, as if sacrificing yourself for something better.

Marra was now a higher-ranking member in the Communes, and I almost never see her now. Our Modern times was also living in lady drought, we were of an epoch that was seemingly the direct result of an accumulation of a generation's wishing upon themselves that their next child be boy. It escapes me exactly what the number of men to women was in our Section, but it had to be something like one to nine, or fifteen even, and in other parts of the land it was certainly much worse. People would refer to inanimate objects as ‘she’—they did it with everything, not so much a Derridean unmarking of terms, but a futile recuperation somehow, or wishful projection, or for some romantic commemorative affect, which I always found quite depressing.

Although there were still some couples in the Zone, in our Section, who practiced monogamy, a significant number of men shared their sheriff’s wives of rank with that of other officials—they had to. It was all reified, entrenched in the culture, no big deal, and with prominent members of the body, as such, with a vital member of Marra’s now obvious stature, with a women like Marra, those types of wives would typically have no less than two or three official simultaneous husbands these days, and you got the feeling, you get the feeling, this could probably be norm sometime, somewhere else anyways, even regardless of the massive famine of women.

Sometimes boundaries are effaced or exaggerated and sometimes exaggerated to the point of effacement. Merriweather, the Swiss Bauhaus master, for instance, always evokes a collapsing of figure to ground, ushering in a merging of subject and space. You hold onto the idea of Modernism that you grew up with, and the idea was, or the idea is, is you are gradually, gently ushered into the diffuse complexities of the greater world. But then you adapt, and you make adjustments, adjustments to whatever strengths or limitations you possess, and so you can then concentrate, and hopefully hone down on your own area of competence.

When I met Marra, she actually sought me, sought me out at the festivals, the Screw Tape Letter demos. Marra, with her then classic pageboy haircut, and a humorless, quite strikingly characteristic serious resting scowl, her stare, like sour black pudding. You know, beauty bought by the judgment of the eye and all of that. Marra, hedging to fore of the line, the line in which I was sitting right there at the other end signing autographs. Her question, chiming with noticeable girl like detective meddling precocity.

Marra had obviously seen Girl Trouble, my video, or the video I’m in, or that I was in, the video that I am still kind of known for. During production of Girl Trouble, in between takes, I had been riffing, just horsing around, trying to stay loose in my sway, and they held the camera still taping, when I made the statement, the statement that I am now known for, the catchy off the script non sequitur cri du cœur which they ended up keeping in final cut anyways, that which has been basically attached to me in perpetuity. No War for New Wave, I sway, a sort of wistful, off the cuff, kind of vague, absurdist, Dadaist like statement, that seemed to exude a then in the now sprawling expression of wistful insouciance of youthful possibility.

And where exactly does the wind begin? I could tell Marra was kind of serious though. I mean, it still chuckles me up when I think about it. Marra just jumps in, asks me, like she just actually, really wanted to know, just had to know exactly what it was I had meant in Girl Trouble.

When you say, No War for New Wave, what did that mean? Standing like Encyclopedia Brown’s girlfriend, casting her poison eyes upon me, forcing my glaze, like I owed her some explanation.

What, what No War for New Wave? My hand slightly pinching the skin in front of my Adam’s apple. Artificially playing dumb, and for no real plausible reason, except as some sort of on the spot, automatic, unwilled defense measure.

Oh, it’s nothing, is nothing. I mean, it means, it was just for, it was posture really, I guess. Answering with a certain muzziness, as if I’ve never even once pondered what is something otherwise attached to my entire social, personal, artistic identity.

A reference, Cashiers du Cinéma? And I can tell her preplanned name-check to make immediate impression upon me. I was very well used to this kind of behavior at signings, how people were so loath to thrust themselves onto the situation, so compelled to so readily expose, reveal themselves, as if I was some kind of Easter Bunny life coach. And suffice to say, some were certainly worse, more woesome than others.

But it was just too much, so unlikely, that yung Marra was ostensibly so sophisticated as to naturally, accidentally mistake New Wave for Cashiers. 

No, no, it’s nothing. It’s nothing like that. I just said it to, just said to say something. I mean, it’s not anything. And, if anything . . .

So it has no anything? Marra confounded, her voice raw like grisaille, the golden mean proportion of her face and hair in tune with the universe, now tattooed like intaglio on the table of my mind.

Well, no, I don’t know. It’s just, it’s just done for like gesture, a gesture mostly! And I meant New Wave as in music. The music, not cinema or anything like that. New Wave as say, resource, it’s a resource we would produce, or, no, the idea, the idea, that a resource like that, like that would be or, err, could be, a yielding reason to go to war? No, a cultural mode as being more precious, even more useful or practical than natural resource, like the notion of that? Or is New Wave a natural resource even?

Oh, I would have had no way of knowing that. Marra rounding back, reestablishing herself in self-deferral, in a way fans, not least a girl like Marra, were so naturally self-centered.

I think, I think that that’s why I may have said . . .

Marra inspires a winnowing of blood flutters coking me to gills, instantly penetrating my otherwise guarded interiority without even slightest resistance by me now. She, introducing new possibility that up until now, had only seemed all but theoretical. And in Marra I find the origin of language. Opening up a Gate, Gate opens to firm terra infirma. A lick of the eyeball. A new base line established, a new frame of reference, from which for now, heavenly possibility permitting, and Dear God, could maybe, perhaps, I don’t know, further operate under? Centers, centers, we need centers! Give me only but one eye blink notice. When she would leave, I’d already find myself talking to myself, unhealthily practicing in imagined future dialog, if only with just ghost of her.

But now, and despite those impatiently waiting in row behind her now, with Marra in front of me right there, right in the blood, I so immediately allowed to catamaran myself and her off on tangent, to further derail and trail our convo out, a tangent that I clamor to exploit, to signal and hasten, under high beam of instant and immediate rapport I so steadfastly adopt, milking silky instant familiarity, even though Marra is essentially complete stranger. I’ll use any, all advantage to so ruthlessly, to so fecklessly impress myself upon her now, no matter how cheap on my part, no matter even how counter intuitive it is to the very nature of my very ascendance that originally brings to bear her attention.

I was now digressing thread about the opacity of language. I’m clogging up the line, I’m talking linguistics, de Manian unreadability, squeeze in, point out, posit: I mean, does beast of burden, like for instance, mean, you know, like as, say an ox that would be worked to death in a field, or does beast of burden mean, could it mean instead, say a stray dog that one tries to rescue, but the stray pup becomes a constant problem and chews on everything and only but brings about constant problems and sorrow?

Lit up like Atari arcade, the oasis of the backgrounds in Sega game, in front of the not so innocent bystanders of the line, I’m anything but my usual and expected detached and postmodern remove. And you see? You see?? You would have no way of knowing! We’re always going to be reliant, rely on context no matter what!

It is bright though the sun was down, like scrim placed over cinema camera to make day for night. I left the capacious bohemian bourgeois white dome bottega unit in which I live alone now, the unit you could say I inherited. It has a fifteen-foot skyline (that honestly, I’m surprised I like so much), is located in the kind of trendy quarter of the artist’s colony. Going for a walk, just a pebble’s toss over town to square, down along the Lennox. Its water is black, as the darkness of the river reflects the faint darkness in the sky. The township is small, and pristine, seems like facsimile, as good as it gets, like the Paris section at Epcot Center.

I was headed to Brasil, I could get some work done at a table alone, but also, what I wanted, what I was thinking, was to perhaps accidentally bump into Maurice now, if only just to ply warm nod in his direction. I don’t usually allow myself to become so star struck, but dear Maurice so certainly deserves such exception. We’re quite fortunate to live in the same epoch as he, lucky even to still have him with us. Maurice, Poet of the quick city and night’s eye. Maurice was a giant, a monolithic figure, who came to define and put it all into perspective, to lay it all out and describe the landscape directly leading up to this Modern era. That he has been coming lately to the cafe to raze and graze among us mere mortals was lowkey extraordinary.

Immediately when I walked in, I saw Maurice sitting alone. I ordered at the counter and then ventured near him, said hullo.

Four letter word for an attitude and vacation destination. Maurice soliciting help with his crossword.

Camp.

I seat at Maurice’s table. The reflection in the water in his glass was like small impenetrable portal, like an edge of the universe sitting there docile on the surface.

My answer neatly fit into the squares and Maurice was now quite pleased, which led me to anxiously sit with him for a nice spell of time, which I could never have anticipated. The only difficulty was the stress I imposed on myself, as Maurice was otherwise open and very much in the mood for conversation and company. We talked about the resilience and weatherproof charisma of the double negative, Yves Klein dying of self-inflicted embarrassment, the Beatles’ great feat was all but simply just making their audience feel like sophisticated pop culture connoisseur sophisto class and not so much their Banana Splits output, the brush of triangle hair as hypnotizing human spider web.

Will you be attending the festivals this year, Sir?

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed . . .

Well anyways, you don’t particularly strike me as one who would attend festivals.

No, no, overstuffed bazaar, it has just become so decadent. For youth anyways, not me.

Well, Romance is for youth, you know they say.

Maurice snaps back in indignant, paranoid air. Who is they, who said that?

Well, I did, I guess. That’s me.

Well, I guess, it most certainly is, yes it is, I should say.

As so does Romance thrive in uncertainty?

Yes, yes, and that may be very well too, but Romance would seem to be nowhere near the festivals and increasingly so, lately, I’m afraid, though there is a whole lot of uncertainty there I should say, yes, yes . .

Tragedy of the commons is the prevalent theme,

Maurice sends on a thread. Well, festivals, festivals, how they first came about, these were, they were, how the first social interactions and ties came to be, you see. It was water, it began with water. Tribes and clans lay scattered, isolated and cloistered all throughout the broad land. Maidens fetching water for the hut, as boys from other places seeking the same for their beasts, would incidentally cross paths at desolate destinations of water source and converge. The ambient shade of romance of the unfamiliar, the view of the new and enticing faces signaling a wider and vast, richer outer world, which maybe up until then, was only confirmed by, only but mere internal speculative instinct. Oh mother, you surely will be running low on water soon I know, so I should go again to procure, and no, no, I certainly do not mind this time again. To trudge along the path between reeds and wind tossed trees in anticipation, and then to all but inevitably leave again with longing. And to think this, centuries before the discovery of Blues string shapes!

They were preparing for the next festival to coincide with the delegation of the new, purportedly historic energy Legislation that was being engineered and which was close to close. This festival was to be celebratory over indulgence though, a three weeks long holiday for the entire populace of the Section (well, everybody, except for the workers that had to work). Not just total party junction, but there were going to be shows, seminars, ceremonies, film screenings, classes, demos, workshops, sculpture, carpentry, poetry, cooking classes, mural painting, weaving, even stained glass fabrication, and every other conceivable thing that could attach itself to the festa.

I may attend this year though, I should say, if only to say I was there, to bear witness. But it’s the Legislation I’m more interested in, it’s going to be massive, just massive. It shall be a boon for everybody, most everyone will prosper considerably, very safe to say. Old Maurice sitting low and back in his chair, revealing a previously unseen economist’s veneration and expertise in financial matters side of himself, which now seems naturally so obvious that he would of course possess. The wobble candle flame on the table reflected off the ardently circular thick frames of his eyeglasses, further abstracting the wet looking reflection off the lenses, to where his eyes could not be seen, making Maurice look like diabolical steampunk robot master.

Sadly, I don’t think I will benefit much from it. I shake resignation.

What, have you not much financially invested into the State?

No, no, I’m afraid not. I never had surplus to shelve away, and with what little dwindle I always had, always seemed so futile.

That’s quite unfortunate, because the bill is so gigantic, it is set to benefit even those who have so little invested.

Anyways, soon, I feel soon, I will be in dire straits, I’m afraid. What but does it so matter, anyways.

Are you going to be doing your skating, your boarding, any demos this year? Maurice catches my dismay, attempts to cheer me up by the generosity of taking a conversational steer towards me.

I don’t know. I may, I may not, probably not. I feel participating, with what the landscape has degenerated into, would do more harm than good for me, or for what I’m trying to accomplish long game, I’m afraid.

And why would that be? Maurice genuinely curious.

Well, it’s complicated. It’s like, it's its own thing. The practice has been adopted by so many people sure, activity is robust, but at the same time, or at the same time, with the influx of new practitioners, the once rich, kind of avant-gardist practice, that which was a new medium from which more abstract social forms could emerge, has become taken over, significantly diluted, bastardized, debased by an otherwise brusque hoi polloi wave of practitioners.

The same thing happened to the Constructivists, and in fact skateboarders reminded me of the Constructivists. Their willingness to involve themselves in fashion, use of repurposed materials, use of the mass market, which they practiced in tandem with their Communist beliefs.

No, totally. I always likened skateboarding to the Dadaists, but yeah, I really like what you’re saying.

Maybe Constructivism descended into a repressive force, an empty escapism. Maurice almost to himself.

Oh, completely. That basically, pretty much sums up where skateboarding is right now, yeah. I mean, I haven’t heard it put in such perspective! But anyways, anyways, I’m working on my comeback, comeback. Well, you know they say when you practice law and then quit and then return, it takes twice the amount of time to get to where you were when you quit?

It’s like that with skateboarding?

No no, it’s worse, much worse. Anyways, I consider a comeback to be like that when you reemerge, you are better than you were at prime peak.

Ah, so in your terms, a comeback would be a deferred rebirth?

Yes, I guess you could say that. I guess that’s right. But if it’s possible, if such rebirth is even possible, it must also be aligned with the trajectory, the teleology, the morphology of where the field is when the comeback happens, because if it isn’t, then it probably won’t work either.

So tell me, what do you do? How is it you make your way?

I work primarily as a consultant for a few labels of the State, the more notable ones at least—CREAM, OPAQUE, LAST DAYS OF DISCO, PELICAN, BINOCULAR.

Well, I could imagine it feels good to be in a position to be put to good use? Your expertise taken serious enough to be assimilated into the means of Production?

No, no, not anymore, and on the contrary. There’s, more often than not, or so it seems, always something lost in translation, I’m afraid. I pine for the days of private board co.s. Production was more tightly wound, tightly wedded to the original impetus or inspiration. It was once a burgeoning field, wide open for experimentation and invention. Those discoveries, to be vacuumed up by the State now, and as you would say ‘assimilated’, have quickly begun to lose their luster, their potency wilted to blanch. I mean, sure, we can still play with tinier new variations of  form, but much of the innovation was all done some time ago. It seems having less coin or no coin, forced our hand at more free play and discovery. With the State’s unlimited means, I’m afraid, it can overcook things in subtle and not so subtle ways. Subcultures are fragile, you just can’t throw a billion pennies and expect it to flourish in the same way, or even its integrity to remain intact. It’s not the same as working in the streets, having to shoot illegally from the hip.

Yes, there is that. An embarrassment of riches with the State, I would assume.

Also, seeking out and finding old labels, was a much different level of engagement back then, than the otherwise now ready-to-street-wear consumer range spoon-fed by the State, the unearned audience discovery that the new means of production attracts.

Pausing, in consideration before adding. You know, Maurice, Tracy Emin said capitalism privatizes space, degrades language and kills love, but I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’ve had the same experience she’s referring to under the umbrella of the State.

Well, the telos of artistic form is indeed a spirit of irreconcilability and I could see how when processed through the myopic glare of the State, that that irreconcilability becomes compromised. There was a time when the Situationists too found themselves to have become rote and passé.

What began as Modernist utopia, now unoriginally so descends into Postmodernist dystopia. A teenager takes a tin sign advertising beer, and hangs it on a wall in his basement. He’s not advertising the beer, it’s about the superficial, deadpan attraction to the materiality of the tin and printed ink, and it’s also about the unrelated, not topical (textual) existence of the beer sign and its application of the out-of-context, the novelty of such displacement. It’s this decorative impulse that drives pretty much all of visual culture now. The non sequitur tattoos, the meaningless song titles and lyrics, that all multiplies itself like language multiplies itself, and it serves a now increasingly user generated drive to create something when there’s nothing at all to express or articulate and it’s all graffiti compulsive, even almost death drive nihilistic, and it’s what happens now when the populace are handed over the means of production. It was a world of freewheeling, free floating, unstable signs and symbols, and contributing to this atmosphere was how I made my way. The cafe tables were filling up now with workers, some of the gang started filing in. 

Maurice had long left, and I got a spot of work done. Later, to reward myself for working on the notes in my journal, I ordered a custard and an ale.

Rancière comes to my table for predictable squabbles. God, you’re eating and drinking at the same time? So tawdry.

But I’m hunnngry! Gulping down custard in my mouth, and you can barely make out what I’m saying, sounding with the voice of globby glutton.

Harrison has someone along with him, who’s name I escaped, who inappropriately takes center attention of our gang here, and no one in our gang snubs him as they should, and he still commands their attention.

  I don’t feel like getting existential. I’m not getting existential.

Oh, come now, it’s just so compulsive, so compulsive, you have to admit,

Ah, yes, compulsive and convulsive, a convulsive possession of the subject given over to deathly jouissance practically . . .

Well, that’s where we’ve been headed all along, where we’re headed.

But, and this is a big but, and I will say this, I mean, energy needs to be expensive, it’s got to be, that’s what I’m saying. 

What are you even saying? What do you understand?  Parla usted Ingles? 

You’re saying so egalitarian doesn’t become authoritarian?

Right, right, like when does egalitarian become debilitating? Like, that’s practically baked into it, totally part of its ontology . . .

Well no, it’s not perfect. And besides we don’t need perfect.

We need . . .

Oh, we need, we need . . .

Speaking of perfect, looks like Conway is  . . . Well, what are we now? Rancière segues the topic of conversation on me. 

Nothing. I’m nothing. I don’t want to talk about it . . .

Marra not been coming home Conway? Marred by Marra again? Rancière is being a real bastard now.

What can I say, she could murder a stone, disable a rock.

So what’s going on. I mean, it’s certainly no secret who she, um, keeps company with as of late. Rancière intoning with an inappropriate practicality. 

Yeah Hanley, Hadley who’s somehow at the periphery of the Bill. Echoes Willowby.

Which means?

Which means what, she’s at the center of it all, at the pitch of prosperity, practically. 

They were talking about that guy, Handley? Handley.

No ‘hand’, Hanley. So, what were they saying, Conway?

I take a delicate sip of poison and then trudge on. Well, I found out more about him, it was only because the Shackle Me Not Twins were talking about who Marra was with at the Bishop. He originally comes from, comes from like Basle, but he left. They said he traveled somewhere like Lucerne, I think, and most likely ended up in Lascaux. Or was it Lascaux and then Lucerne? Anyways, but then his brother died, or he had to return to Basle and then his brother died. But there he is, he comes back to Basle, now becomes part of the Council Chamber, you know real hot shot, justice, law giving, civic virtues, what not, and then his work is interrupted by the activity, the reformation in the South. Somewhere around there, and you know he meets Marra there, when she was out there translating, working as translator. They pair down of course, he then apparently also commences to becoming some, this like, conversation piece painter. A real up and coming parochial, ya know, doing double duty, just champing at the bit . . .

How did you find out he paints? Brennan asks helpfully.

Yeah, how do you know that? Rancière echos skeptically.

Nevermind how I figured it out! Taking the jigger glass, I finish the last bit of brandy wine with over self-serious resolve of finality.

Willowby moves in. Well, I hate to bum you out further Old Horse, but a colleague, a colleague of mine sat with him at the Caucuses, and according to him, according to my friend, he’s not too terribly, I’m afraid, remarkable at all, I should say. He’s fake, famously ambitious and he is . . .

Rancière completing Willowby’s sentence soberly, He’s associated, is like really associated somehow with Arles, you know, Arles, who’s minxing it all, who’s only responsible for the up and coming, major, soon to be historic, um, energy Legislation. 

 

We were having a decent spring this year and the ground would soon be cleared of snow, and the snow in the hollows drip disappear. My gaze travels miles to the vistas off the desolate mountaintops, and the tops are lonely and contain full obscurity, but they still frame the day in an essential way. And that’s kind of the way I think of Marra, still. Marr embodies something essential about the city, and for me, her presence alone justifies all of the city’s operations, even if she remains hidden somewhere off in the distance. 

And what can I say? There’s nothing really else to say about tell-me-not-to-do-it-and-I’ll-do-it- twice-and-take-photos Marra.

Marra is a lackadaisical kisser, as legible as écriture. 

Marra wasn’t country when country wasn’t cool (and Mara certainly wasn’t country when it was). 

There was a certain damp shower room, morning light accessibility she must have revealed when she showed up to work with her hair still wet and for a little while she still felt like she was yours.

Marra, I remember how she’d always say girlfriend, like I was waiting for my girlfriend, in a deliberately vague way, where it was hard to know if she meant chum or lover.

Marr with a clearly visible vivacity and bravura, over cavorting with my gang when I had her around, inappropriately and casually making plans with my friends out in the open, spurred by whatever they were talking about, making some future plans that didn’t necessarily include me.

Marra, seemingly unconsciously always playing games under pretense, the verisimilitude of her what-you-see-is-what-you-get-upfront-direct-honesty and forthrightness (though she had to be aware of what she was doing, though still up to now, I can honestly say I really don’t know if she was being just her over-friendly, sunny days daze daisy of herself, or instinctually just trying to flip the prescription in power move of situation or maybe a little bit of both, at varying degrees, depending on when you were keeping track. Though, really, at the end of the day, she was a pretty good person).

Marra, when I was intimate with her, my skin would break out in mosquito bite puffs, which would quickly grow into continents all over my body, and it would itch so bad I would have to immediately take a hot shower for relief. 

Marra, paying on the nail, with the specter of her perilously debilitating depression which infected the flow of the flower of herself.

But I remember, I distinctly remember how she conspicuously called me ‘dude’ for the first time ever, right around the time when she first met Henley.

And when I meet a girl, upon the obstacle course that is the series of first interactions, I get terribly superstitious. Sure, some things may prove themselves inevitable vis à vis the synchronous, but in the case of someone like Marra, I take a little sign and inflate it, run it into the ground with a new inner dialog of catastrophically perilous magical thinking. I become worse than gambling addict. If the coin lands on tail side, that means meant to be. If I see a blue car in the next ten minutes, that’s: she’s gonna eventually make contact. It was as if by doing this sort of thing, I was creating my own bad luck, and it’s easier to curse darkness and unravel a situation, than will something into being.

Though perhaps quiet to the stranger at first, Marr was not shy when she shed the gossamer of her reserve. And there was seemingly no hierarchy with whom she’s share the beacon of her attention. Though the authoritarianism of her dagger sharp dictatorship beauty was indeed arresting, it was over-balanced out by the unfairly democratic enthusiasm and interest she would show to virtually anyone and everyone who came along her way.

Marra never had female friends. Once she connected with her old shoplifting-drugs taking friend Kataya, and I really quite don’t know what to say about those two. Their parry seemed such a mutually enabling and reinforcing of each other’s worse instincts, before the eventual, inevitable, not so surprising, blow out between them, that would then lead to the commencement to them going back to no longer being dangerous wheels again. And how so did they such conjure lust for the unattainable flagging for the attention of all their intrigue. And once your time has expired with them, it’s just not going to happen, not one more time, not ever again. Not only is impressing Marra and Kataya together such a zero/negative-sum no-go, but they will vehemently go out of their way to inappropriately flirt with just whoever comes rifling along, like right in front of you too, or them relishing in talking about some guy in front of you also, in a way that quicksands such demoralizing insult and injury you-defeat. It was stomach churning perilous, just super deflating, fatally caustic, no matter how much I bulwarked myself with my you-two-are-young-and-dumb-and-I-am-the-older-more-cultivated-gentleman-who-possesses-wisdom-and-a-keen-sense-of-perspective armor. For the most part though, I could play it all off, with the looseness and demeanor of cynical game show host, but every now and then, they could very easily catch you off guard with some absurd, blinkering wallop statement, that would make you noticeably taken aback, force you to skip of beat. And when you glitched your hiccup, you for sure knew they were recording it forever with their attention.

Marra started hanging out with a new guy, from that which the selective criteria she employed really bugs me. She, dispersing information about him with a certain plainness in her telling, that was also lowkey bragging him up. He was also an artisan too apparently. But I eventually gained he was mostly dilettante traveler though, super art illiterate, made Dude paintings tout court, didn’t know Morris Louis from Robert Morris, Raymond Pettibond from Peppermint Patty, was the kind of person who referred to insects as ‘small animals’, wore overalls. 

Remember Maurice said: the limits of Modernism lie at the limits of the heart, and precisely when and where in regards to Modernist purity, action is no longer taken? But I say, women were selected, stolen by the cut-in system of the Communes, which inside such an egalitarian system, above all, really just prizes survival of the blithe fittest, social stature, economy of means financial or otherwise, and what remains is only but a bellowing and tenderness for all for those who alone shall only weep.

  I had virtually no contact with Marra in months, and when I mean virtually, I actually mean none. I could and did only assume the worst of circumstance in regards to our current predicament, or should I say, my current predicament. And when I finally received a transmission, in the dry, curt and bewilderingly formal and spare language Marra employed, there was indeed no room for optimism. The concrete facade of the style of the buff brutalist direct screen telegram, was all just confirmation anyways, just more confirmation, and yet another reflection of Marra, Marra’s connection, her association, how she was also so bound to and a part of the cruel outer world, the sick little Commune with its own priorities, ceaselessly working against dreams of the heart.

I pinned on the letters that looked more real than electronic, its technology gave the impression, made it look like they were silkscreen on substrate paper, as if somehow that would make the message more comforting. Though despite being aware of the inevitable, I still irrationally kept tracking back, still studying the message for too long, desperate to forage for any contradictory sign of optimism, some semiotic trace or index, hidden somewhere within the subtext, as if so outrageously, so unlikely hidden somewhere, somewhere there in space between alphabet and screen.

Marra had been off with handy Hanley, but she wanted now to meet up with me at the bottega where I live, what used to be our place. There was something she needed to discuss, and it was something that couldn't be explained in the transmission evidently, it was something that had to be addressed in person. It was only confirmation what I had felt all along, happening like watching baseball thrown underwater, the news of dread swimming along at buzzy bubbling snail’s pace. This, in an all but explicitly innocuous form, though confirming precisely how I knew it was going to hit the floor all along. I remained passive, doing nothing, just playing it how it spilled. I knew Marra would want me to move out of the bottega so her wannabe new husband could use it as studio.

Like a leaf in the brook, in with air of muzziness, Marra arrived late. It was cold out, her breath teamed inside and her nose and cheeks were scored red, as if she was slapped in the face by the harsh conditions. Her reddish brunette bangs hung down off their own weight, as the sides of her hair casually wisped the tops of the shoulders of her fog inspector detective coat, which made her look elegantly tousled, internationally jet set in a Pan Am retro way, in such a glorious fashion that had nothing to do with me now.

The passage through the corridor into the Colonies was brutal coming in through the Section. I’m simply banjaxed.

From the view of my vest, how Marra said banjaxed, seemingly not aware she was talking like me, still vamping off my thing.

Oh, how dreadful. Um, was it  . . . been? How have . . .

Oh, everything's fine. It’s been just fine.

And how’s  . . . And . . .

Henley? Marra answered with an in-your-face over emphasis to exude against, countering my hesitation of having him touch my lips by mere mention of his name. Marr finishing my sentence with playful, antagonism, that only all but announces what is otherwise war between the sexes.

Things fine. They’re fine. They’re great. It’s been really great actually, it really has. You know, he’s relieved they made it this far with the damn Kovar thing, ya know, the stupid Bill has now finally been sent off and away for certification. But also, Hanley’s been painting, he’s also been painting. And you should see his work, you really should, you’d totally hate it. His studies, his sheets are simply abysmal too. Like, leave it to Hamley to even muck up a damn drawing, ya know? You know the other day, he said he wants to make work akin to, like the first Modernists. He was all serious too, like he’s making a declaration, like this, in the theater of his mind, is somehow going to be recounted by me someday for some imaginary historical record. Like the first Moderns! And then he, he then spouts off something about Kandinsky. And I tell him, I had to tell him, I told him, no, no, Kandinsky was not the first, Kandinsky is not the first of the Moderns, it was Manet, well Manet, and his courtesan Olympia. And oh, how he bristled, you should have seen him when I made such casual correction!

Giotto.

What? Marra giving skeptical, specific look, not that she’s necessarily skeptical of my answer, she’s more curious about its naked intent.

Well, if you want to get particular, it’s Giotto, Giotto. It was Giotto, who is considered the founder of Modern painting. Well, Giotto and Cimabue in Florence, that is. As early as the early fifteenth century.

Marra blinkered continues un-phased, taking back the reins. Anyways, Hadley is so brash and brazen about it. He’s just so brazen. Do you know he does virtually no prep at all, none, certainly has no problems using black straight right out the tube, you know, not mixing it with anything.

Marra continued in the visible comfort of the afternoon, really interested in what she’s saying now with a relishing intimacy. And you know, you just can’t use black without mixing it with anything, like, just use any other color, anything, to soften it, I mean you can not, but it’s a total student move. Marra, telling me this, even though she never went to art school, and also this is something I had actually said, something I told her, that she actually learned from me, but it’s clearly obvious she completely forgot where she got it from. I don’t bother to point it out.

Marra animated. Hanley is just stuck in his lousy ways, that’s all. Let me tell you. He just insists on, insists on repeating, not even aware he is zombie formalism tout court, to ends in sins to abstraction of mired quagmire. He really is his worst enemy.

Not while I’m alive,

Oh, come on now. Don’t be that way. You don’t have to be that way! Don’t be like that.

Well, it’s true. And I can feel Marra feeling for certain I’m emotionally blackmailing her, even though I’m not, but I also kind of am.

You sure are barkin’ up the wrong tree right now, Bowser.

Marra’s words waft in the air and drift to the ground in silence, following the same skittish trajectory as floater on an eyeball. I have nothing to add, though I’m clogged with too much to say.

Look, I want you to like him, I think you would, I think you would like, like him. Like me. He’s good for me. He really is! Marra appealing to emotion, in a way that doesn’t afford me the dignity to even so disdain someone who is vehemently working against all my heart’s urges. And when the one you Love breaks it off with you, it is touching death. Not a figurative death, I don’t mean death of the relationship, but I mean, you touch literal Death – it’s connected. Being lovesick is your body withdrawing from the drug of Love sure, but also, you’re sick too because of your proximity to the specter of Death, it’s somewhere in there. That’s why in extreme cases people just go ahead and off themselves, because they are basically already there with it.

Anyways, Hazley and I were watching American Psycho last night. You know the scene where Christian Bale is pretending to have like a conversation with an imaginary colleague, when the detective, Willem Defoe is in his office? There’s that part where he’s having a phony conversation, on what looked like, I guess was a telephone? Anyways, he’s pretending to talk to someone on the other end, to give the smokescreen of casual, non-paranoid, not guilty air of like demeanor, you know, get Willem Defoe off the scent of him in being a suspect in the disappearance, and he playfully razes Defoe, telling the non-existent person on the other end of the line, ‘I’m here with Slim Pickens.’ Ha ha ha,

Uh, maybe, yeah,

So always, I just always thought this entire time Bale said ‘slim pickins’—like ‘slim pick-ings’, as a way to like jibe Willem Defoe for being of lower social status.The detective, with his considerably lower policeman’s pay, ‘slim pickings’, the suit he wears, ya know? But then Halley mentioned something, he said something about ‘Slim Pickens’. ‘Slim Pickens’, ‘ens’, who was actually, was actually this goofy looking old timey actor in real life. ‘Slim Pickens’ has or had a similar rubbery face, same as Defoe, this guy I never knew about, or I didn’t know about, didn’t know him.

Oh, I never got that reference either—that’s actually kind of funny.

Marra depressingly bewitching still, though too caught up in herself now. Slim Pickens! Suffice to say, old Handley might just be useful for something, don’t you think?

When Édouard Manet once said there were no lines in nature, you know he for sure never attended the historic, grand blowout festival of our Commune’s celebration of the Kovar energy bill. The festival, low on the hillock, was like a Glenlivet painting, the figures are transitory, dissolving into the background—as if the environment was stronger, had more pull on the people. When abstraction once served to ease stimulation provoked by the chaos of the world, now in the over ornate, over decadent junk space of glut spectacle, the hyperreal artificial acid colors, the simultaneously cheap, yet overpriced, uneasy optical projection effects drowning onto the formless masses of crowds of too many men and not enough women, only all but said there ain’t enough love to go around in the land.

It reminded me again of what Maurice said that night at Brasil, the limits of Modernism, the failure of Modernism, and nowhere more so could this be expressed than in the throngs of all the Commune’s irresponsible citizens here now at the festa.

As success creates a surplus of autonomy that causes any innovative field to feed on itself, with the more prominent bands on the festa bill, the message of their songs seemed so easily compromised and sullied and so deemed themselves irrelevant by the very logistics and function of their own industry and production. Beautiful women singers, that every man there no questions asked would wed and bed, were singing love-lost songs seeming so utterly preposterous now, so hypocritical and not even remotely believable as a condition from which they too suffer—a love song just for the occasion for their own self pandering. They get to have it both ways, while also performing the most painfully obvious cover songs, let alone forget about digging deeper for hidden, obscure, unknown gems to unearth, or ever feeling any real responsibility for doing the background studying or the legwork required to be transhistorical steward of any meaningful musical tradition. One singer in particular, who I won’t mention, who’s name I can’t even mention here, was through the range of my view, practically the embodiment of Communist dystopia, in a way neither she nor the crowd seemed to be fully aware of.

Women were more out in the open than usual though, all in the fevered Alexandrianism of the simulacra of the festival. Though there were considerably more around than usual, they all still remained impenetrable, while making themselves seem effortlessly possessable. They held themselves in full display of power, like a parade of nuclear weapons, were emblematic of a condition of general futility and repression. And if there is a new kind of Modern beauty, it is a terrible beauty. The garter belts, stockings, war-like Bladerunner makeup, took on a Modernist-as-fascist, almost anti-humanist beauty. Bodies, shocked into abstraction by a hostile world, well, a hostile world of our Communist utopia, at least.

The slow burn acceleration marijuana of the old physically composed, physically recorded and physically written string music, devolved into the immediate crack hit anthems of copy and paste digital, nowhere more embodied and celebrated than here at the festival.

Chris gave me half a beige pill, that I thought was going to be just background, but instead, within ten minutes, I was swallowed into its death grip. Losing my friends in the crowd and panicking, I tried to find some bearing by just concentrating on the music now, glazing at the overdance of the singer. As disoriented as I was, my thoughts were still clear enough to transmit the full range of terror triggered on by all the Altamont. Inside the indoor music hall, after song, the crowd would triumphantly roar in echo in a timeless way, that exuded in its own violence and you could now practically chew on the scent of bloodlust.

The singer brayed over the hissing beat, the in-the-now superficiality of the stripped down arrangement, being the act’s cardinal virtue now to the crowds. Never has music been more popular in the history of the world, and never has it been more impossibly lascivious and cheaply decadent. There was an idea of some super uber lifestyle, only available to the popstar, that distracted the crowds. Watching her on the screen though, I could tell this fantasy wasn’t even available to her now, as if she was simultaneously using her illusion on herself and on us. The Communist music, not even trying to hide the fact that it doesn’t even make a point in heuristically incubating a homegrown poet outlier that emerges once in a generation on its own terms in the discursive field, that which utilizes a hip, savvy, and forward thinking A&R to find her. The Communist democracy, not only not learning from the collective lessons of the failure of The New Kids On The Block, but instead thoughtlessly double downing again on such approach in an historical amnesia, in a way that you can tell was produced by someone beyond unqualified to even take such consideration seriously. In the Communes, everyone is an artist and everyone can be an artist and every artist is equal. The talent vs. no talent dialectic was only considered a subjectivity value. Standards vs. No Standards was, like, just your opinion, man. People really were woefully unprepared to make their own informed, nuanced aesthetic preferences, and they really kind of did need to be told what to consume by more qualified, more invested in and more knowledgeable specialists and career lifers, but to say such a thing out loud now would sound preposterous. 

I stood silently horrified. I began to feel claustrophobic, and suffocated, like I could easily be crushed soon. I panicked and slashed over and out aggressively in fit, back through the zoo’d people, towards the direction where the crowds bled into disintegration.

Out of the crowd, someone from the park I know, though who’s name I don’t, though for now let’s just call him Jose, immediately spots me. What up OG!

I don’t feel so hot right now. I, not necessarily talking to him, more just affirming out loud. 

I think they were looking for you. Aren’t you supposed to be at the demo?

Demo . . . demo? I shouldn't even be in public right now. I need to find an emergency tent to lay down.

Ah, you look like you need a beer, brotha.

Urgg . . . ur, yeah . . . yeah, yeah. Beer. 

Within a few seconds, I now appreciated and clung to Jose’s festive, laid back and read not traumatized attitude, and it was indeed comforting now, like inflatable sea monster thrown out and jettisoning me out of poisonous lake. Whigging out in the crowd stirred up something catastrophically disturbing, something that was irredeemable, beyond self-help.

Jose distracted, looking around at the goings of the festival, offers practical solution. They got beer at the demo. Let’s go over there. It will be fun. Ha ha.

Ok, I’ll follow you. Don’t looose me.

We spit on our fans, there’s frequently legal action pending, there’s black out’s, paternity suits, rodents with heads bit off by human mouth, hit and runs, a judge letting the entire band off miraculously just in time for us to make it to the stadium to play hard blues, and me and Jose reach the section where the demo is.

The course of the demo is bodied off. The setup is a series of wooden platforms and golden stages and ramps built to mimic a street course of skatepark, a street course of a skatepark that which itself is mimicking au courant street situations and gnar-gnar conditions of the most neoliberal and liberal coastal elite impossible to afford cities around the world. 

I recognize a song they’re playing over the speakers, Eightball & MJG. The basso profundo song sounds cheaply produced (like crack cocaine), has a hood-n-play game show like quality. 9 Little Millimeta Boys. The superficiality of the track starts to lift me out of my spell.

A harlequin crew of skaters were jumping off the sheer cliffs in front of the crowds. I found the immediate view of the hungry ams gliding down chutes and ladders startling.

To land a trick that you haven't done in twenty years is no doubt a reclamation of one’s essential past self. There’s an apotropaic undeniability, a real and true fountain of youth. You see, we used to have a way of sticking it to the Man, and it was a thing, was actually like a thing, it was a little thing from way back in the day, you may or might not have heard about it, but it was called . . . . . . . . . . . Skateboarding.

Conway Sunn! You made it! Dax my boss, over a decade younger than me, without flinching, enthusiastically greets me at what’s essentially our job site, like I was doing him and the company and everyone else just a huge fuckin’ favor just for showing up.

I’m so depressed. Falling into my usual self-involved, somewhat inappropriate, dynamic of whatever is on my mind, forming the basis for our conversational interaction in the workplace.

Nothing to it, but to ride right through it! You skating? Dax asks innocently and in good faith.

I pull on the beer with an air of unconscious practicality. Man, I can’t skate. I’m way too spracked.

Dax distracted, barely registers my answer. That I’m at the festival whiggging my ears off seems negligible, and from Dax’s point of view, could possibly be seen as my own moot excuse, considering we exist in a subculture where it’s famously known Cesar tripping on acid once beat Vince Thornton in a vert contest in Texas over thirty years ago.

There’s this viral thing going on online for years, in regards to my output being so essentially spare, if not grinding to halt, that causes fans to over analyze, over fetishize my practice and what little dance moves they actually see of me now. It’s a variation of the statement: I’d rather just see Conway push, than . . . I’d rather see Conway push, than to have to soldier through Trent Winkleman’s twenty minute part. I’d rather see Conway push, than watch Elvira Gonzalez Mc Twist out of an airplane into parachute. I’d rather see Conway walk out of an AA meeting, than . . .  

  A lot of hunnies out watching the demos, now sure would be the most opportune time to land a trick, ha ha. Dax comments with the casual authority associated with the expertise that comes along with him stewarding a prominent and popular soft and hardgoods State owned global dynasty that originally emerged from Southern California.

That gives me an idea.

Banjaxed, I grab someone's wave ride, find myself walking up the vertiginous snowboard bank. I act like I don’t notice eyes on me. Ominously, synths signal opening of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration. Crowd is thinking it’s a nod to SP’s song in Blessed, sure. But here’s the thing, the thing is, is Black Celebration was really my song first, way before Blessed came out (which the kids running the demo clearly know, because I went on about it at the shop when Blessed dropped, and this serves as a reminder they do remember, they were listening).

The prompting of the song under the aegis of the shop kids now serves as invocation. My throat is suddenly hit with a pulsing goulash of fear, gratitude, lust, and exhilaration.

Your optimistic eyes seem like paradise . . .

And actually, it was my boy Ellé. It was Ellés' song before it was mine. It was my song, due to it first being his. On the evening of my birthday, when I lived in Austin for a few months, when I was down and out, Ellé, Vronz and I were driving to the bar, Ellé asks us which version we want to hear, we both say live.  

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