Du Ranten (RANT II)

Chea Prince

The couple's appearance was appalling. Their black and blue faces and naked, lacerated bodies severely repulsed the other revelers at the masquerade, even those who had self-consciously, and without irony, chosen to costume in "poor taste". As the two entered onto the floor of the main ballroom from the front hall, they proceeded to move with unashamed nonchalance among the condemning stares. Occasionally, a clearly discernible sound-bite broke above the clucking whispers and gasps of disapproval. "What a despicable spectacle..." "Strange..." "I can't believe..." "If I had only known..." The burns and slashes on their arms and legs had been applied with ritual precision, and were all too real. The couple, smiling broadly, strolled about the room arm in arm. "Beat us," they would say, nodding to their horror stricken audience. "FUCK US; never let us go." Outside, the buildings burned. Over 1500 fires in an area ofapproximately one hundred and five square miles. From the security of their suburban homes, remote viewers monitored what could have been the beginning of an apocalyptic b-movie sequel. TV cameras helicoptered past overturned cars framed by columns of black smoke and flames pouring from nearby buildings, then hovered like robotic dragon-flies over twisted bodies strewn across sidewalks of blood and broken glass. At street level, in low-resolution snatches of harried video, personal camcorders scooped the gritty close-ups from the professionals looming above them, documenting with radical indifference a swarming, anarchical army of looters who ran within arms length of stunned police officers. The death toll rose with each enraged outburst by the frenzied mob. Years of abuse and neglect were being purged in a chaotic firestorm of emotion. "I read the other day that individuals earning over $1 million a year saw salary increases of 2,184% during the 1980's while at least a few people earning between $20,000 and $50,000 a year saw increases of 44%, or 4% a year. Everybody else is sliding backwards," stated a bystander. He pushed his sunglasses up on his nose, put his lips back on the straw jutting from his McDonald's coke, and sucked hard, draining the bottom of the cup. "So what...I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," responded his black-clad companion, disinterestedly. "Those legitimated by our society will not tolerate violence in pursuit of freedom. Only thoe occassions of violence that are state sanctioned and pursued with the intent of quelling dissent,whether at home or abroad, can be allowed," said the President,feeling a need to reassure the small number of people who still voted in elections, or bothered to watch him on TV. "The gains that we few have made over the last decade in securing over ninety per cent of the real wealth of this nation is in keeping with the mandate received by us as a ruling elite from Adam Smith, and we will not accept protests to the contrary--violent orotherwise." "Cut--AND--Print." Texts propound absurd questions. Their logic is always simulated to death with dreadful urgency. Yet to what conclusion? "When art, religion, and finally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality, the banality of pseudo-self-awareness becomes so overwhelming that people finally lose the capacity to envision any release at all except in total nothingness, blankness," she said in a psychoanalytic tone. He continued to stare into the console and, like always,wished for an escape from the knotted sense of responsibility that had been hammered home to him with insistence over the years by those who purported to understand him best. In such an atmosphere thoughts of montage are only half-heartedly received, if ever. There is good and there is evil. A winner and a loser. Right and wrong. A notable example of impeccable logic. His swift conclusion was immediately reinforced by the sound of two thousand televoices from behind him lifted in graveled shouts toward a sky full ofslyness and stars and flames, that contributed absolutely nothing to memory. Can one state this idea clearly? "Close the window," she murmured seductively, "its all too beautiful." The uprising was an attack on policy. Pure and simple. Perhaps too simple to be fully understood. Radicals always carry logic to its ultimate futility directing a steady stream of abuse against men and women for whom knowledge is a more powerful will to denial. Their rebellious faith in deliverance, or movement longevity, disguises the hopelessness and anxiety of an entire culture--a culture that believes that it has no future. Only the marginal theories held by disenfranchised, fringe elements can express the truthful plurality of moments in which the idea of thehuman spirit is placed under a direct and devastating state of seige by official reality. Thus regarded, anger and resentment are easily acknowledged to be the natural result of an age of diminished expectations continually fueled by the slander of slavemasters and the lies ofbureaucratic rationalities. The Terror of these years is directly traceable to a rise in the acceptance of monocorporate multi-rationalism by the middle-class. There is no way out of this controlled simulation--it would seem. Always, upon closer inspection, gaping holes in the existential fabric labeled by the enlightened as permissable exits prove to be loopholes that serve to absolve individuals of a sense of moral responsibility while ushering them via the imaginary back into the flux--newly sanitized, atomized and alienated. Social control increasingly rewards a pathological form of blind optimism intended to protect those with property rights from the desire ofothers who merely "take it all for granted". "Beauty is in the eye of the beholden, but Art is a true site to behold," she said, and showed him his father's smile. "An interesting proposition." He couldn't take his eyes off the scar on her forehead. "The question is: how many lives can be saved by high-tech warfare and does a pull-out poster of the hardware come with each conscription?" "Some of the most important advances in defection techniques were made by a retired ticket agent," she responded curtly, staring at his taut face. Her eyes were wide with enthusiasm. Services and systems. These are vital. Elemental. And no matter where you turn. Power is available. It satisfies what you need, it quickly responds to what you want. Are these new realities more or less real? The technology is bewitching. Images are effortlessly spawned and tirelessly manipulated with uncanny mathematical correctness. Reality does what people want it to do. Simulations are so breathtakingly beautiful and compelling that it's easy to forget that they may not exist at all. "Sure a pat on the back is great, but a bonus is better." She smiled at the videographer, remembering to tuck her chin slightly. It was difficult to stay focused. She had to work hard to avoid ditching the assignment altogether in favor of the sixteen year-old amputee motioning to her to come lie with him on his pallet where he was tenderly embracing his pet duck. Next to hearin' the chuck iron ring, nothin' sounds better to a cowboy than the jingle of his spurs. Besides, a walk in the woods is more than just another opportunity to prove you're among the environmentally aware--it's also a thorough cardiovascular work-out--far more effective than pacing up and down and worrying about a program to correct your mountlist. It can seem sudden and catastophic when unanticipated lines begin to appear; however, anywhere you can read you can shop. So, continue to play only games that pique an interest. Make your calls shorter. More lively. Confidence comes through with the use of clearer tones. It is, after all, a commonly held belief these days that the salient post-transistor truth is: shrinkage means progress. "Are you the man with the secret tattoo," she purred,lowering her eyes as she spoke. "If you are, the world could start up again like a switch." "Security and frivolity, the fortress and the carnival, these are the yin and yang of a crisp April afternoon," he said to himself. Her hair was glorious. She wore it in blinding colors thatwere part crayon, part cartoon and unabashedly artificial. The stylish nonchalance was clean and definitely post-punk. She wasthe obvious product of cultural inter-breeding and had Tomorrow's look--an unnaturally natural beauty. Her clothes were spunky. Meticulously embroidered with surreal motifs such as could only be seen through the eyes of an LA icebreaker. "When all is said and done," he moaned to himself, "what is a kiss?

An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter "i" in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; a balmy communion with a flower of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's heart, and of tasting, on the brink of lips, each other's soul." Or--a simple move "to where the flavor is"... He sat alone, remembering her body through the monitor's glare. A whole city burned in her eyes. She was the quintessential LA woman. She created trends, developed new lifestyles, and influenced everyone's concept of what cartography should be. A definite triumph of dignity and style with a rich,satisfying taste. Somewhere-in-between understated and overstated, he mused,her insatiable hunger for the appetites of others always provoked a more interesting state of affairs. And the rest? The details may seem superfluous, but they're not. There should be no unknown quantity--no Unknown/X--to breakthrough our adolescent technophilia and obscure the fact that more people are working harder for less. Yes. Strange weather. Like the atmosphere in a photograph of a white canvas with the words "there is no such thing as a foreign language" emblazoned on it. You can strip this image of its caption and reduce it to a snippet from a rock video, but that would be truly useless unless you added an upbeat music track in 16-bit stereo. The intermingled blasts of car bombs, the 8X sampled wails of dying political relations, and the blues beat of a flight in general toward detonation and death may make for astute aesthetic listening--but--they are certainly not up-to-date fashion necessities or consolations for contemporary life. Well...once its all in sync it probably won't hold together anyway. In which case... As an exercise, imagine yourself standing right where your living, in rainwear that is unquestionably unpredictable. Try stopping that bedroom headache before it happens. Admittedly, what you would really like to be doing is watching late-night TV. Plugged in. Without distractions. No hassles. But--you can't. Imagine. Bold, sleek, and high-tech. Zippered up the front. Belted in lycra and nylon with a polyurethane coating. Your bold graphic looks are getting you ogles. It makes the thought of disrobing an unrivaled pleasure. She moves from the shadow into full view. Through the clinging silk robe you glimpse the subtlest glint of gold. From head to toe such novel touches make all the difference. Inside that paisley silk you know there is atimeless encounter yearning to happen. The only problem is, that with a mind wrapped up in the byzantine intricacies of system analysis, its hard to take the details lightly. Each subtlety, no matter how minute, is painstakingly attended to. Subtlety is indispensable. Conspicuous subtlety is god damn sexy. Burn me, baby. Oh, yes...its burning, burning, burning. Burn, baby, burn. Behind her, reflected full-length in the puddle of water on the sidewalk, is the extraordinary new 55" Big Screen TV that's truly in a class by itself. Accompanied by this marvel of technology (that can only be described as another significant engineering breakthrough), she appears to be in two places at once. Her image is unsurpassed in brightness, color accuracy, sharpness and realism. You know that you've got to be experiencing high-performance opticalentertainment. You know that--NOW--you're really living. "Do you believe I can create incomparable originals?" She seemed to be fading again into memory even as she spoke. He couldn't see her face anymore, just her bare outline silhouetted in the flames. He was confused by the quality of her voice...it had been oddly amplified. The thought startled him. Something...a kind of reverb...like a primitive, midi-mediated surround/quad system. He had been alert for evidence of Gore-Tex chip implants, but hadn't seen any. What an impossible bundle. It's always the signs without referents, the empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs that absorb us. He caught his reflection in the surface of his thought. It didn't matter. He wanted her back despite her seductiveness. Being a transsexual clone, she was the only possible biotronic mirror for his narcissism. No one elsewould ever stimulate his narcosis the way she did. He was in love with how he had begun to die to himself again in her. The tall, metal lookout tower stood out imposingly amid a faux birch forest littered with large replicas of pharmeceuticals.It had been just the remedy. An artful hallucination always provides the necessary hope in which various personae can be created and enacted. Are we really to believe that just by letting things be as they are we are bringing into being evocative works of transience? Or is this another downhill slope to obscurity? Summer has a way of leaving the poor and the sky intact, even as old men brace themselves at cafe tables and absorb the bravado of younger men with plastered hair intent on detailing the conquests of their brown-bodied women. It is always up to each individual to wonder if all this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable. Ah! But then...in just one soaping a man's skin can start living better. His face will be thoroughly clean. Look fresh. Feel comfortable. He can be ready for the long, hot summer. Whether the opportunity is local or long distance--color is the obvious pharmakon. And when it comes to color--like sexual partners--the hotter and brighter the better. Maybe you can't change the world. But you can change a life. Think about it... Good design is pure, true, technically unadulterated. Function is its basic premise. Materials are not chosen forsuperficial beauty, but because they are uniquely suited toFunction. Workmanship is a rare quality. Form always follows Function...technically innovative, individual, fascinating. Contemporary. But, forget it. Everywhere we turn in the postmodern world we see internal contradictions and meanings open to perpetual re-evaluation. Real people. Real taste. Pulse-quickening discomfort. "Naturally, I lost my shirt," he said with bitterness. "Why should this year be any different?" "Was she there?" "With Mr. Tall and Witty." "Did she ask about me?" "Not exactly. But I did detect a note of tragic longing in her eyes." "Maybe she bet as badly as you did. Many of us have had to anesthetize ourselves to our needs." Picture a black hole. One that would have to be dug. Digging the hole would be part of the thing. Maybe women with machines should dig it. It could be called "La Belle Dame SansMerci"--it would have to have teeth, of course. Better yet, men could make it themselves with smart bombs. Let's face it, coming up with a great idea is tough enough; producing it should be the easy part. Right? Maybe. In the end, you always come back to the basics: Photograph the Thing. The image could be enhanced. O.K. Add an elegant text page with square bullets, green type and a "doodad" box. Before and after shots could be used to surrealistically defy spatial perspective--but without unnecessary appeals to conscience--the overall design SHOULD aggressively hijack andrecycle culture, it's expected. The style could be ripped from any source, or multiple sources. Colliding world-views translate nicely into designed images to be purchased. That all faces are seen is permissable since few are given voice. Why? Because time is money. "Authors reveal more about themselves through there choice ofwords than with the subjects they write about" he stated, taking ownership of the pronouncement he'd read once in an interwiew with Norman Mailer. He felt their emptiness. There was, without doubt, a decided lack of humor in his LA audience this year. His attention began to wander from the text in front of him, out into the room. Her eyes. They were enormous. Heavily lashed and colored a steely blue-grey. Her face was gorgeous. She was trans-world. Obviously. Her body was alluringly framed in gossamer fabrics of chifon, jersey and lame--but without the slightest hint of visual sentimentality. She radiated vitality and an uncompromising directness; she seemed to evolve in front of him, even as he regressed. The muscles in her arms and legs were well-toned and strong,yet--at the same time, soft and sensual. She probably wasn't born with a perfect figure. No. She had learned to be beautiful. She had practiced...experimented...had been unremitting in her efforts to create beauty from her potential. "What is your purpose?" Her tone was matter-of-fact. "To keep the faith." The obvious weariness in his voice troubled him so he decided to try to mask it. "I don't think I understand." "I keep faith in nothing. That nothing will sustain us." "Are you capable of representation?" The implications made him want to fuck her right there. She obviously possessed the algorithmic aesthetics and sophisticated physical politics of a post-mechanical reproduction. A rare digital dream. Pure Otherness. An alien product of machine intelligence the likes of which rarely became sentient. The desire to interact with her artificiality nearly overwhelmed his remaining self-restraint. Why was she so electrifying? Could he really dream in her a 21st century in which the horrors of the twentieth would not be repeated? He was consumed. Flux, flow. Surface or substance? Virtually, the shapeshifting enters burst mode at the speed of light. Morphologies of recombined digital human genetic codes and artificially intelligent life forms endlessly evolve in hallucinated, biomachinically imagined, dreamed reality.--But for now, somewhere on this side of the coming singularity, in another time and place, our needs can be best defended againstthe charades of market-driven, surveyed satisfactions through an enhanced visual literacy. Notable, significant dreaming can only occur after buying is no longer considered a political choice. In effect, our relativism is no excuse for sticking our head in the sand--even if, especially if, it is packaged as revelation,trembling, encounter, communion, radiance. Try to remember: tomorrow is one that will never be forgotten. Quite too soon all happenings begin to fade into memory. There is a great deal that is illusory in our techniques, however, as they used to say, those who won't take advice can't be helped. On and on. Along the irreversible arrow of time. Toward the next quantum jump...to the other side of Progress? Wishing for orgasm and coming to orgasm by masturbation are not equivalent experiences. Nor will either of these ever approach the complexity or intrigue of having a sexual partner--or partners. Getting a grip on the technophallus is not insight. It stands to reason, then, that penetration is not necessarily paradise--although penile friction is pretty heady stuff. Thoughts ofinterdependence, cyclicity and temporal reverberation are not easily mapped onto a habit ot linearity and wanton thrusting. If there is to be success, a few sacred cows must be offered in sacrifice. Inertia, particularly libinal inertia--the inability to be other than an entity driven by self-interest--is debilitating and limiting to an extreme. Fire? Yes. Tool-making? Yes. Dwellings? Yes. But the movement toward the realization of human being as a prosthetic God? Merely bourgeois. And, civilization, as Freud noted, definitely has its discontents...fortunately, every suture opens new wounds. In other words... Put the matter to a form of indirect interrogation. Like hypnosis or some other hynogogic state. Allow an eternal, lucid dreaming to unfold. Scrutinize the surface of the psychic mirror in which you are reflected as someone else under yet another's gaze. Seek that blind spot where linearity is deflected obliquely with a stroke of wit. Create a new body art. Determine a strategy of ritualized impulsiveness. Rave about any artifice that is as yet unexorcised. Think with intoxicated giddiness. Perform a seduction. Are there other rules? Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word `not' as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion. Above all, omit non-meta-meaningless words! And what of the world-at-large: is it the will-to-power enclosed by nothingness as by a boundary? This, perhaps, deserves further consideration.