The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  While skimming the documents in the first box, Berliner found a letter from David Wilson to the NS’s president, which mentioned the New Situationists’ “digital and physical archives.” It seemed strange to Berliner that the New Situationists would keep any kind of official archive at all—they had preached to their membership that any archive could be compromised—so he started looking through the documents for any other references to digital records. Eventually, he found another letter from Wilson to the president, asking about the “progress of the map archives and the L project.” Berliner spent a few hours searching for the president’s response to Wilson, and he eventually found it, crumpled at the bottom of the second box of documents. The president told Wilson he had nearly completed digitizing all the necessary maps for the “L project,” and that they were only waiting for a few important maps from the early 1940s, and then they would have “a complete archive of every iteration.”n

  Berliner hurried through document after document, looking for more mentions of the L or the map project. He found a few scattered remarks—one member was bored with researching historical proposals for additions to the L lines that had never been adopted, and wanted to be assigned another task; another apologized profusely to the president as he reported that a certain map the president wanted no longer existed in Chicago’s public archives—and Berliner began to understand, at least in part, what the New Situationists had done. They had collected all of the maps of the Chicago elevated train system, including both historical maps from every year the L existed, as it expanded and contracted and morphed, and maps of every addition or change to the L proposed to the Chicago Transit Authority, including those that had been rejected. Every map of the L as it had once been, every map of the L as it could’ve been but wasn’t; a full historical record of every L station and every station that was proposed but wasn’t built.

  Berliner knew from the documents that the New Situationists were actively collecting maps, but he didn’t know for sure if they had acquired them all or what they did with them once they had.

  While she listened to Berliner explain his findings, Molly didn’t ask questions, but she did stop him several times to examine a section of a letter or a document he mentioned. Once Berliner finished talking, she wordlessly wandered back into the smoking room. Berliner followed her. She sat in one of the armchairs, lit a cigarette, and asked Berliner to pour her a little glass of whiskey. He poured hers and one for himself, and sat in an armchair. After a half a minute of silence, while Molly smoked, drank, and stared at the wall lost in thought, Berliner lit his own cigarette. She stayed silent while he smoked; when he smashed his cigarette butt in the ashtray, Molly Metropolis gave Berliner his task. He would recreate the New Situationists’ map archive. Then she would take every map he collected and put them all together, into one giant map. She and Berliner would be able to see what the New Situationists had been building. They would have the New Situationists’ complete knowledge of the L and would see what they wanted from it.

  Molly knew she and Berliner couldn’t complete such a huge task on their own, especially with her music career taking up more of her time; she would have to expand the Urban Planning Committee. Molly told Berliner she wanted to invite the two other people Molly trusted most, her friends and dancers, Ali and Peaches.

  Ali and Peaches exist mostly in the corners and rough edges of the early days of Molly’s career. They were with her before the entertainment and fashion media tried to squish her life into an easily repeatable narrative. Early magazine and newspaper profiles on Molly, in outlets like Interview Magazine and Australia’s Sydney Morning Harold, comment on the dancers’ presence, but their influence on Molly, both artistically and through their friendship, is rarely commented upon.

  Ali and Peaches appear in the opening of the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” music video, as Molly’s friends, helping her crash a Gatsby-esque mansion party. When Molly performed at the Echo-plex in Los Angeles in May 2008, they stacked themselves on top of each other to form a human keyboard stand while Molly played her stripped-down version of “Heart Machine.” They danced when she opened for Jennifer Lopez—all before any radio station ever played “Don’t Stop.”

  The dancers’ most striking appearances, though, weren’t in music videos or appearances or marketing materials, but in interviews. For video and print interviews alike, Ali and Peaches accompanied her, dressed exactly the same as Molly. As Molly debuted herself to the world, they were her shadows. No one knew why. They didn’t look like Molly, and they are both white, so they didn’t read as body doubles or decoys to fool the paps.

  At least once an interview, in response to a question, Molly would whisper something into either Ali or Peaches’s ear and they would recite her answer for her. Journalists called their presence “bizarre” or “inexplicable.” MTV News’s Dana Andapolis wrote that Molly chose “random” questions for her dancers to respond to on her behalf, but there is in fact a method to this particular madness of Molly’s.o Whenever she was asked a particularly invasive question about her biography or romantic life, she made Ali and Peaches answer. She outsourced the most emotional responses to her best friends. She also used the low buzz around this “bizarre” practice as a way to show her sense of humor. For her first major U.S. late-night appearance on CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, when Ferguson announced her, Peaches walked out instead.

  Ali, a dropout of the School of American Ballet in New York, had thick red hair, a narrow jaw, and incredibly long legs that Molly admired and envied. Peaches was taller, but all torso, with a huge smile, dirty blonde hair, and a tendency to freckle in the summer. Molly, Ali, and Peaches spent most of their working days together and became close friends. They frequently videotaped each other and a few of their exploits found their way onto YouTube. In one video, they goof around, prancing around in Wicker Park, and in another they roll around on the floor of a spa, after a massage and a steam. In the third, they discuss the nature of art and performance while waiting for a flight at an airport.p

  In early 2007, after Molly signed with SDFC and found Ali and Peaches, but before the record company released “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” as a single, the pre–pop star Molly kept no one closer than her dancers. She bounced ideas off them and socialized with them; she used them as sounding boards, companions, and shields. In the morning, when she woke up with a new idea that excited her to her core, Molly would call Ali. In the evening, exhausted by dance training or a long day at the recording studio, arguing with her handlers, Molly would curl up on a big leather couch with Peaches and they would softly sing “Row Your Boat” in canon. They recorded their sing-along once and uploaded the video to YouTube.qa Ali and Peaches were Molly’s first disciples, the first to wear outfits she designed and the first to stand behind her when she declared herself a “pop performance artist.” They were the first to take her seriously, and although Molly rewarded them with loyalty, she didn’t give them honesty. She was hard on them.

  On the night of Molly’s Lollapalooza performance, after she had returned from her meeting with Berliner, Ali and Peaches joined her at the SDFC Lollapalooza after-party at The Drawing Room on the Near North Side. They wore their Metro-designed outfits—black skin-tight deep-V shirts and copper-colored leggings—and mingled with other SDFC artists and Lollapalooza performers for nearly an hour before Molly pulled them away from the party. They hailed a taxi and rode to their hotel, the Congress. Berliner was waiting in Molly’s small room. The dancers crowded in, and Molly introduced them to one another.

  “Peaches seemed very tall,” Berliner told me, when I asked about his first impressions of the dancers. He was bored by the question.

  When I asked the dancers about Berliner, Peaches said, “What a pretentious asshole.”

  After I spoke to Ali and Peaches about meeting Berliner,r I realized both dancers half-blamed Berliner for Molly’s secrecy, like a cuckolded wife blaming the woman her husband slept with, rather than
the true source of her dissatisfaction: the husband.

  In the hotel room, they all sat on the bed, drinking from minibar bottles, while Molly and Berliner explained what they’d been up to. Molly had never hinted at her secret work with Berliner, so Ali and Peaches were surprised when Molly told them about the energy she’d already put into researching Guy Debord and the New Situationists, as well as the amount of time she’d put into the Urban Planning Committee. They never knew Molly to scheme behind their backs; she constantly updated them, overwhelming them with detail on the objects and outfits she designed for her music videos and stage shows. In introducing the dancers to Berliner, Molly revealed a secret second life, and changed Ali and Peaches’s perception of her forever. That night, Molly Metropolis became a person that could keep an important secret behind someone’s back, a person not to be entirely trusted.

  Berliner did his best to quickly explain the Situationists, the New Situationists, and his theory of the L maps to Ali and Peaches, while Molly fixed everyone drinks and hummed the Britney Spears song “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” When Berliner finished talking, Molly asked Ali and Peaches if they wanted to join the Urban Planning Committee. She said, “Everything we’re doing here is top secret and vitally important not only to ourselves but the entire world.” (Molly often referred to the project as “vitally important to the entire world,” the same way she called herself a pop star before her first record came out.) A little nonplussed, but generally inclined to follow Molly’s directions, Ali and Peaches agreed to help.

  “We just have to get maps?” Ali asked.

  “You will never just do anything,” Molly replied.

  However, gathering maps did become their central focus for the next few months. To gather every map of every iteration and every proposed iteration of the Chicago L system took time, energy, dedication, and organizational focus. Luckily, the materials were readily available, for the most part. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) posted L maps from the last twenty years on their website. The Chicago Historical Society archived every L map the CTA ever published, and the Chicago Public Archives housed all of the City Council’s meeting minutes and recordings, including discussions of all proposed L expansions or reformations. The Chicago Public Library acted as a catchall, to fill in any gaps, as did Berliner’s sometimes-girlfriend, Johnson, who was both a librarian and an amateur Chicago historian. Johnson, a leggy but plain architecture student, told them the Chicago Housing Council had designed their own reconfigurations of the L system and presented them directly to the Chicago Transit Authority, not the City Council. The records of those plans were only available through the Chicago Housing Council, which doesn’t make their records public.

  Peaches solved the problem by seducing Andrew Pierson, the male assistant to the head of the Chicago Housing Council. Pierson had a sexual fetish for women dressed as schoolgirls (utterly boring, but remarkably common), and Peaches took to the character with relish. She returned from her trysts with her hair in messy pigtails, photocopies of the Housing Council’s proposals from the early 1960s to the mid 1990s stuffed in her bag, and jump drives full of digital files of proposals from the ’90s to the present.

  Although she liked to play, the slow and boring work of acquiring the L maps weighed on Peaches. She wasn’t studious like Berliner and Molly, preferring to live in her body rather than her mind. When she hung out with Molly, she wanted to go clubbing or cuddle or work on improving Molly’s dancing skills; she didn’t want to talk about maps or think about secrets. When we spoke, Peaches still sounded resentful: “Once we knew about the maps thingy it was like she stopped having to try with us. She wasn’t trying to be nice anymore. Some days she’d be her old self, fun and effusive, like she was. Then other days she’d be moody and snap at me just for asking a simple question. The worst part was, she wasn’t like that with Nick, no matter what. Even when he was being an idiot. She was always so goddamn sweet to him.” For a while, Peaches ignored her growing resentment and directed her considerable worth ethic to the task Molly had assigned her. While Ali and Peaches focused on acquisition, Berliner examined and organized the copies of the maps they brought to him. He created a catalogue on his computer, categorizing the maps by year, city location, and type (accepted proposals, accepted proposals that were never built due to various interruptions, unaccepted proposals, and even some plans that had been drawn but never formally proposed). When Ali and Peaches left Chicago to dance for Molly, Berliner took over acquisition duties as well, often spending fifty or sixty hours a week building his detailed archives and filing maps.

  The work of a librarian suited Berliner well, as did the work of a print maker, which he also took on at that time. Molly asked him to make brightly colored screen prints of various L maps to decorate her New York and Los Angeles apartments. Berliner also purchased, with funds from Molly, several original Edge of the World maps from his old map shop and made some screen prints to hang alongside the originals on the walls of the underground hideout in the Racine building, both to decorate and claim the space formerly belonging to the New Situationists as Urban Planning territory. Molly judged Berliner’s screen prints by her typical stringent standards of aesthetic quality.

  Their double responsibilities as dancers and researchers wore Ali and Peaches a little thin, but Molly Metropolis never tired out. She spent all of her free time, when she wasn’t writing music or designing and shopping for her outfits, compiling the maps using a custom mapmaking computer program she commissioned called MollyMaps. She hired a computer programmer to write her the mapmaking program, where she could organize various maps based on Berliner’s categories of year, location, and type. The programmer thought he was making her a platform to track her touring schedule.

  When Molly visited Chicago, she copied the maps into MollyMaps on a computer that she never connected to the Internet. Eventually, when the number of maps became too overwhelming for her to digitize on her own, Molly gave Berliner a copy of MollyMaps and bought him his own laptop. When Berliner met up with Molly on tour or when she visited him in Chicago, they synched their maps over a closed wireless connection.

  As 2007 slid into 2008, Molly’s relationship with Peaches fell apart. The rift developed slowly. At first, they just snapped at each more often, poking at each other with pithy, bitchy remarks when they were both tired or overwhelmed with work. For a while, they would apologize after their little snipes. Then they stopped apologizing. When Ali was there to act as a buffer, Molly and Peaches got along fine, so to avoid arguing, Molly and Peaches stopped spending time by themselves. Very quickly, they forgot how to have fun together; alone in a room, they argued or lapsed into uncomfortable silence. Molly stopped discussing her personal life with Peaches and never asked advice about her family or romantic entanglements. They still spent almost every day together, but without meaning to, they stopped being friends.

  Then Peaches asked to see the map that Molly had just begun calling The Ghost Network. Molly didn’t want to show Ali and Peaches until it was finished, so she refused Peaches’s request. Peaches thought it was hypocritical of Molly to let Berliner see the map but refuse to show it to her, even as Peaches collected the raw materials for it. Peaches complained to Ali, who refused to participate in the conflict. To avoid her friends’ squabbling, Ali spent ten hours a day working, dancing, or copying maps, and the rest of her time with her boyfriend. Though Ali removed herself, she encouraged Molly to try to patch things up with Peaches.

  During the last week of May 2008, Molly and Peaches met every night to try to work through their problems and instead spent hours fighting. Neither girl would relent, so they fought for days. It seemed to Ali that they would go on like this forever, that fighting would become the new normal mode of their relationship, then Peaches crossed a line. In early June, Molly found her trying to break into the computer Molly used to run MollyMaps. Later that night, she sent a text message to Ali and Berliner: “Peaches is expelled from the Urban Planning Committee.”


  Berliner supported Molly’s decision, but Ali tried to reconcile the situation. She spoke to Peaches and Molly, trying to put a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. After a few days of needling from Ali, Molly wrote her an e-mail during a layover on a quick trip to Australia to promote Cause Célèbrety:

  Ali dear, this is my last word on the subject. I don’t want to cut you off or keep you from expressing yourself, but I’m not going to relent and nothing you can say, or that Peaches can say for that matter, would change my mind. I’ve been betrayed on a personal level, a professional level, and an artistic level—betrayed so completely that even talking about it is difficult and painful for me. If it wasn’t you that I was writing to, someone I trust completely and who I feel confident that I can bare my soul to without putting myself in emotional danger, I wouldn’t be able to speak about this at all. I can’t talk to Nick about it, for example. I wanted to make sure you knew that. Peaches seemed to take my closeness with Nick as some kind of threat against her, and I wanted to make it absolutely clear to you that my relationship with Nick is separate from my relationship with you, and has no baring [sic] on how I feel about our friendship.

  Peaches made it very clear to me, both in her words and her actions, that she no longer believes in our work—both in the Urban Planning Committee and our pop music. She felt trapped by my relative power. For example, she knows that even though she is no longer a part of my work, her nondisclosure agreements are so binding that if she talks publicly or even privately about any of my secrets, I will have the power to ruin her life in a serious way. I’m angry enough right now that I would probably do it. I trust she won’t talk about the Urban Planning Committee, in any case. I think that, unfortunately, she would sound insane if she tried to do so. I didn’t mean for it to be like that.