96
The bebop pianist Thelonious Monk apparently once left the stage in a morose mood. He was very dissatisfied with the music he had just played. On being asked why this was so he replied that he had made all the wrong mistakes. This observation brings us to a neat, if tight, philosophical knot.
EDDIE PRÉVOST
97
When Margaret and Elmer arrived in Madrid from Santa Barbara, California, she was already quite old, and he was still engaged in his angry peace-loving battle with the U.S. government. Margaret’s self-imposed monastic reclusion did not stop her from picking up the Spanish language, which she did via a correspondence course, though, safe to say, none of her brain cells were ever exposed to Spanish culture, not a single one: when she said Madrid she might as well have been saying Toronto or London or Singapore or nothing. On her second outing from the flat, in February 1981, she dusted off the diamond brooch and her New York exhibitions dress. She’d been through menopause already. In the taxi going to the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the radio program Esto no es Hawaii—This is not Hawaii—was playing a song from the demo tape of a post-punk group that struck her as the freshest and strangest thing she’d ever heard: “Ayatollah no me toques le pirola!”—“Don’t Touch My Penis, You Hardline Extremist!”—by Siniestro Total. The disc jockey said that the recently launched label Discos Radiactivos Organizados was soon to release the first LP. The song left her unsettled for the whole of the opening; she could hardly concentrate on the comments people made, the praise she received. By the time she got home that night it was clear to her that she wanted to illustrate the cover of this first LP. As her legal representative, Elmer approached the label. If I’ve managed it with the U.S. government, he thought, I’ll be all right with some provincial tunesmiths. They agreed to look at her sketches, and six months later were still looking at them. In the end, due to Margaret’s ill health, things became complicated and the cover ended up featuring the band members as the Dalton Brothers, the idea of a Spanish cartoonist named Oscar Mariné. Among the 120 drawings and paintings currently turning to mold in the Madrid apartment are a multitude of charcoal sketches: A tree in flower with a Renault 12 imprinted on top. The flowering branches also emerge from inside the car. The only tree in the entire 120 pieces.
98
First it was steel, then glass, then came other metals and alloys, and today it’s the more specialized types of glass. But each of these modern materials behaves totally differently and changes dimensions in response to thermal and mechanical actions in far more important ways than traditional materials. In a building comprising such heterogeneous elements these movements can be both varied and of great significance. Which means the relationship between (and union of) the various pieces is harder and harder to make work. Thirty years ago the answer to all these problems was silicon, synthetic sealants in general. All the jointing would be sealed, even the jointing between structural elements. The immense confidence in sealants as a panacea led to their overuse in many areas: exterior sealants which, subject to ultraviolet rays, aged more quickly. After all these years of immense confidence in a product, people wished to make up for the deficiencies of the project as originally conceived, as silicone had had some high profile failures, and became a symbol of poor workmanship in construction.
IGNACIO PARICIO, “HIGH CONSTRUCTION” (TAKEN FROM THE BOOK THE SCIENCE IN YOUR HANDS)—THOUGH THE AUTHOR COULD JUST AS EASILY HAVE CALLED IT “ON THE NOVEL”
99
What he finds most amazing is that the huge number of races and cultures passing through an airport every day does not alter, in the slightest, either the aesthetic or the human physiognomy of the airport; he’s gotten to the point of comparing it with an atemporal, incorporeal entity: a divinity. Kenny, how about not blocking up the shower plugs with your hair, says one of the cleaning ladies, you’re practically molting these days. He scratches his head doubtfully and carries on past with his cart. He leafs through the papers at the newspaper stand, and stops farther along to check out the display at the Prada shoe store, comparing it with the Gucci one, and while he’s at it begins whittling down which pair he’d like for next season when, as every year, he gets given a pair. The great thing about living inside a place like this is that summer and winter are identical, so you don’t need to think about clothes except—like Kenny—purely as something to enjoy; sybaritism in a chemically pure state. Smoking a cigarette, he sits in the café watching TV. A man comes over with a coffee and a plate of assorted pastries. Mind if I join you? he says. Everywhere’s taken. Kenny nods an okay, and before looking away notes that the man is about 45, is dressed in a dark suit by CH, including gray silk tie and gray shirt, brand unknown; judging by the laptop case, he guesses the man to be a member of the liberal professions. As the man eats he tells Kenny his name, Josep, where he’s from, Barcelona, and asks Kenny where he’s going. Kenny, initially reluctant, ends up telling him the whole story, his life in the airport et cetera, though not in any great detail. Josep carries on eating, concentrating mainly on the chocolate donuts. Accustomed as Kenny is to people being astonished by his story, the man’s lack of interest makes him curious, and he asks him where he’s going. Bangkok now, but then Beijing, he says, finishing his coffee. And what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m a designer. Interesting! says Kenny. Fashion, shoes, by any chance? No, manhole covers. Manhole covers? Yeah, the things they use for covering up sewers to keep you from falling in, round or square, metal usually [he laughs as he dabs his lips]; in here, for example, look, there’s one over there [he points with his sugary finger], that’s a P. H. Rudoff, his studio’s in Frankfurt, he’s German, takes his inspiration from the doors of German-Spanish cars in the 1930s, can you see the handle-like thing there, on the other side from the hinge? The ones outside, I noticed, are by Phillip Bhete, he’s Australian—well, Australian but originally from Britain, great man, the best, in my eyes, I know a layperson like you won’t get it, but Bhete, well, he combines marine motifs with a map of the city where he’s working? Yes, I mean it, I can already tell from your face that this isn’t a very cool profession, but I should point out that there are only 17 of us in the world who do it, so everyone knows everyone, we’re like family. Can I get you something? Seriously, my dime. [Kenny asks for a breakfast.] So as I was saying, for our annual conference we get together at someone’s house, wives, kids, the whole shebang, which is why my English is so good; we cover every single continent, nearly—just Africa to go—and we’ve adopted English as the shared language of our profession, and this year I wowed them all with this new material I’ve been developing, because—as you’ll have seen—manhole covers always end up cracking at the edges if they’re square, or in the middle if they’re circular, okay, so I contracted this lab in Canada that works with aeronautical materials, speedboats, that kind of thing, and when we looked into it we came to the conclusion that by mixing certain carbon fibers with some oxalates we’d get a cover with the flexibility and the hardness we needed, right? [He bangs his fist down on the table.] Yeah, there’s more to it than meets the eye, like, everyone has their own little signature, like a brand—makes sense—mine’s simple—why be complicated?—it’s J.F.K., seeing as my name is Josep Ferrer Cardell [writing it on a napkin], but I changed the C for a K [a flick of the wrist changing the former to the latter], that’s right, I had the idea when I watched that movie, a way of setting my signature apart and at the same time making use of a universal icon, yeah, no one’s gonna forget that, I put it on the far right-hand side if it’s a square cover, on the outermost ring if it’s circular, and that’s the thing, my big thing this year, it’s so cool [coming closer to Kenny, half whispering]: I also put it on one of the rings if it’s oval-shaped, and now you’re gonna say, what’s this about oval-shaped? Well, the thing is, I realized quite a while ago that a person, girth-wise, is more oval than circular, and forget about a person girth-wise being square, just don’t even, and that was when I asked myself, Why not tr
y this as the new shape for manhole covers? An oval. More comfortable for the workers, a saving on superfluous materials, very important to save on these small questions of design, people think it’s silly but no, it really cuts the overall price—do you know how much Coca-Cola saved the year they changed their cans from completely straight-edged to having this little angle chopped off here and here? [taking a can from the adjacent table and holding it up]—I won’t even tell you, indecent amounts!—but as I was saying, I’ve already got buyers for several consignments of oval covers, they’re building a new residential area in Hong Kong and they want them there, plus in the old town in León, a small city in Spain you won’t probably have heard of, but the really good bit is, sometimes I do it for a bit of extra cash, but also it’s one of the elements of my work that I find really satisfying: the models for both places are the same, see? Thanks to me, these two cities have been twinned [clapping his palms together on the table]. Just like that! Twinned! Not many people know about it of course, the cool thing is when they’re gonna find out. And you know the way scientists sometimes come across the metatarsal of an animal in Asia, and it’s exactly the same as one in Africa? And they try and work out how that can be? Well, something similar’s going to happen in the future, in a thousand years’ time, with my manhole covers, because—and by the way, no one knows about this—I’ve already connected ten pairs of cities, various continents, not gonna tell you which, like I say, the cool thing is people finding out, although, oh, yeah, you won’t be able to, you’re stuck in here for the rest of your life, doesn’t it frighten you, the thought of dying in here? And what about when you get old? Is there like a pension plan or something? Order something else, it’s on me, really. Anyway, like I was saying … I can’t show you what I’m working on just now, I’m low on battery and the design drains the hard drive big time, that’s how enormous it is. But this thing about connecting cities and places, it’s fundamental, other people saw that, Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, remember that? Or Up and Down, the TV series [Kenny shakes his head], oh, man! Or that one with Marco and the monkey, From the Apennines to the Andes? Loved that monkey. Paris, Texas, too, the film, Kenny—Kenny, it’s such a wonderful thing, this, connecting cities. Well [says Kenny], I don’t know if you know, but Paris, Texas isn’t about going from Paris in France to Texas in the USA, it’s “Paris, Texas,” like you say “Berlin, Germany.” See? Paris is a city in Texas. Yeah, well, anyway [says Josep], you know what I mean, by the way, on Texas, I’m gonna tell you this thing that happened in the U.S., such a good story; my colleague and good friend R. S. Lloyd, great designer, lives in the States, well, he asked me if I could do a job for him, he’d said yes but then had too much work on his hands, and since I was just starting out, and we help people in this line of work, we help our fellow manhole cover maker, and he asked me, and of course I said yes, I’m getting another Coke, what about you? [Kenny asks for another Coke, too.] So it was for the manhole covers for a city called Carson City, in the state of Nevada I’m pretty sure, could’ve been New Mexico, anyway, who cares, they’re basically the same, and when I showed up there, your typical shithole, nothing going for it but the amazing brothels, they already knew exactly what they were after, 50 percent cast iron, 35 percent steel, 15 percent American nickel, it was going to be circular and in the middle they wanted an embossed poplar, yes sirree, a simple American poplar, but get this, it was supposed to have two pairs of shoes hanging from it, strangely, the shoes had appeared one day, I was told, years back, no one knew why, and they’d become like a symbol for the town, something like that, and since it isn’t my job to poke my nose where it isn’t wanted, I got to work, no PCs or 3-D programming in those days, right, proper work it was, proper work, so the designs took me a little while, axial planes, sagittal planes—I know I shouldn’t get too technical with you—but anyway I put them forward to the mayor and the evaluating committee, and they loved them, but then someone from a nearby town called Ely, nearby as in 250 miles away, well, they got wind of it and then they say they want some manhole covers the same as Carson’s, with the two pairs of shoes, because in their view the poplar is more theirs than Carson City’s, seeing as it was the mayor of Ely who first discovered the shoes. Then they demand that the manhole covers I designed for Carson City not be made at all. So the Carson City lot, they’re like, Ignore them, we’re gonna make our own manhole covers and they’re gonna have two pairs of shoes on them, so then the Ely lot say to me, Do a replica, exact same design except with three pairs of shoes, so then you get Carson City saying, no, they don’t want two pairs of shoes, they want four, I have to add two into the original design, and that night some of them went and threw another pair on the tree, so now there were four pairs on the branches of the tree, and I go ahead and design them the damn tree with four pairs, and then Ely gets annoyed and asks for five pairs, and they go and throw a fifth pair onto the tree, and so anyway, you can imagine, in the end you couldn’t see the branches for boots and shoes, so then, this whole thing just seeming totally unresolvable, what do I do but go and solve it—and this is an aside—because the rivalry between the towns, which to begin with I saw as an endless cash cow, right, was now becoming a nightmare, and don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that I enjoyed them fighting, it really wasn’t, but business is business, so anyway, as I was saying, I got the mayors of Ely and Carson City together in the same room, and I said to them, there were so many shoes now there was no way you could fit them all on one manhole cover, it didn’t make any sense trying to work out if there were 1,000 or 5,000 pairs, in any case it would be impossible to represent them, so what I’d do is make the manhole covers so that anyone trying to count the shoes wouldn’t be able to, I’d do them sort of blurry, you see, like when someone paints a forest and they sort of smudge slightly to give the impression of lots and lots of branches, well, like that but with shoes, and voilà, problem solved, see, Kenny, told you, manhole covers, more than meets the eye, people go crazy over them, I heard from my friend Lloyd that people go there, to this day, and they’re still throwing shoes, but now for other reasons, and the tree’s starting to stoop, the thing no one knows is who placed the first pair of shoes there, what do you reckon Kenny, what do you reckon [pushing back his chair and snorting], see? More to it than meets the eye, designing manhole covers [checks watch], gotta go now, connecting flight to Bangkok, but know what? I like you, I’m gonna be back here in 35 days’ time and I’ve got a layover, and when I come back I’m gonna tell you a story, a true story, an unforgettable story. He gathered his belongings, buttoned up his sports jacket, but not before shaking Kenny’s hand with near-supernatural vigor. And when Kenny lost sight of him beyond the international signs, something in the way the revolving doors moved communicated to him: he knew that was the last he’d see of Josep.
100
As cyberculture’s most vocal proponents of consigning the body to the scrap heap of the twentieth century, the Extropians merit close scrutiny. Ross, executive director Max More, and the rest of the movement’s membership rally around the banner of “transhumanism.” Transhumanism is the human potential movement on steroids: an up-with-technology, business-friendly, hell-for-leather humanism bent on self- and species-transformation by any means necessary: downloading (which consists of emptying the brain of all information and storing it on a computer, thereby consigning the human body to history once and for all); “nanomedicine” (the use of molecular scale devices to repair damage and boost the immune system); nanocomputer implants (“molecular computer[s] integrated with the brain, providing additional memory, processing power, and running decision-making programmes”); genetic engineering; smart drugs; cryonics; and “self-transformative psychology” in the Anthony Robbins mold.
As theorized in Extropy, transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche—specifically, Rand’s conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche’s complementary concepts of the end of morality, the “will
to power” and the Übermensch, or “overman.”
MARK DERY
101
The day when the bank auditor, who worked at the local newspaper, commissioned Robert, due to his origins in the cultured classes of London, to write a small, commendatory review of Carson City’s new asphalted Sunny Avenue, with special emphasis on the poplar grove in the middle and its beds of gardenias, pansies, and roses sheltering a man-made lake full of colorful fish and a couple of swans they’d acquired after years of fights with the town councillors (who refused to supply the amounts of water, or the animals, necessary for such a project), that day, we said, nobody imagined that Robert would go and shut himself in the cockpit of his plane for three days and three nights, motionless in the metal silence of the hangar, his hands resting on the controls and his gaze fixed on the artificial horizon of the control panel, going without food and virtually not drinking anything, either, refusing to see anyone, and refusing all suggestions, too, finally taking the following to the printer’s:
A vortex/Henkel/Hooper production
A film by Tobe Hooper
The film we saw recounts a tragedy that befell a group of five youngsters, and in particular Sally Hardesty and his brother Franklin, an invalid. It’s all the more tragic for the involvement of youth. They could have lived a great many years longer and never have imagined witnessing such demented sadism as that they were faced with on that day. What had promised to be an idyllic summer afternoon turned into a nightmare.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 10