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Q: Imagine you hear a song for the first time, one you fall in love with straightaway, it’s amazing. What is it that makes the song perfect?
A: Probably that it’s not very long. The perfect single is 2 minutes and 50 seconds long.
EDDIE VEDDER, LEAD SINGER OF PEARL JAM, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
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Antón is a barnacle collector who lives in the municipality of Corcubión, in the province of Coruña, in Spain. Not on the coast itself, but in an isolated spot a mile or so inland, up steep and winding roads—although he still has a view of the sea, can even hear it at night when an onshore wind blows. He is single, 37 years old. The job of the barnacle collector is a curious one. It entails rappelling down the cliff face at the point where the sea is roughest, in certain predetermined spots where the barnacles always breed—the very point where the waves break and the 2 material phases, the liquid and the solid, intermingle, lose definition, become imprecise. When least you expect it, where a moment ago before you were rocks and mollusks, suddenly all is sea foam and liquid vectors, pure, unadulterated power. A handful of men die every year. But there is a trick. The collectors work in pairs, one of the two staying on the clifftop counting the waves, in the knowledge that every 10 or 15 small waves will be followed by 3 far larger ones in a row—known to them as “the Three Marys.” At that point he will call down, pull on the rope, and Antón will haul himself back up as fast as he can. Antón is known in Corcubión, and along the Costa de la Muerte, as Professor Bacterium, after the mad professor in the Mort and Phil comics, because like him he has cranial alopecia, a long, dark beard, and a fracture in the middle of his nose, but also because when he was young he constantly carried out experiments on the barnacles, which are very much living creatures. They live, indeed, as nomads do, in a between state, though their particular frontier is the one that divides liquid, solids, and gas, and they, clinging to the rocks, are not the ones that move, rather it is the true frontier of the world-made-water that becomes nomadic, coming forward and washing over the barnacles at 3-second intervals, as if they were unaffected by the lack of edges or vertices—the antimatter—that pertains at the limits of all matter, and unaffected, too, by their nearest opposite neighbor being a vertical pole made of ash, of the kind that in New York Harbor gauges the tidal depth in decimals.
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1922. In front of a Japanese audience, Albert Einstein recounts the moment in which, at the close of 1907, the idea came to him: “I was sitting at my desk in the Patents Office when suddenly I had a thought: if someone fell from the roof of a house, they would not feel the force of gravity; they would not feel their own weight. I was overcome. This incredibly simple idea left a deep impression on me, and led me towards the Theory of General Relativity. It was the most fortunate thought of my life.” Einstein, in coming up with the theory, erased gravity at a stroke. Creating objects, procreating, generating gravitational mass—these are but attempts, failed attempts, to find out the end point of all these forces.
12
John’s eyes met those of the young Iraqi woman again in a Basra market. She was buying groceries, and he was on duty in an armored car, just getting down from the moving vehicle. When she realized who he was, the half kilo of red peppers she had just bought fell to the ground; after the last of them, shining in the sun, stopped rolling and turning, she said, Don’t say anything now, I’ll be at El Rachid tonight. El Rachid was a restaurant on the outskirts of the city providing roadside food to truck drivers who covered the oil route from Kurdistan, and to traveling fruit sellers hawking melons of different kinds—this class of person. John went there late because something told him she would be working in the kitchen, but so late that when he arrived the place was in darkness. He spotted a light beneath a doorway. It led through to a kind of back office that smelled of spices, and when he let himself in without knocking he found her gesticulating in front of 3 men sitting before a circular table. There were bundles of paper on the table covered in formulas that John could not make out. A couple of homemade PCs flickered at the back. They all looked up in surprise at this man carrying half a kilo of red peppers in a clear plastic bag. Initially, he thought they must be guerrillas, or related to the military industry in some way, but she immediately blurted out, Don’t get the wrong idea: we’re architects. They were part of a global network known as Portable Architecture, she explained, whose objective was to design and build low-cost, highly portable dwellings, with a particular focus on countries racked by long-term conflicts, and where the populations are forced to live nomadically for protracted periods. She closed by saying: This very building, for example, is prefabricated, a helicopter comes and sets it up just as you see it; it’s a 5-minute job, you put it down anywhere you like. Mohamed Smith was born 9 months later, in the JFK Field Hospital, Basra. There are people who become lost in places no one cares about.
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Sandra is from Palma de Mallorca but lives in London, in an apartment on Churchill Street, which is near her place of work, the Natural History Museum. She took the job after being told that her research into the Tyrannosaurus rex would benefit from going to the place where the most is known about the creature. She works as an assistant to Clark, the director of projects, and her short stature has endeared her to him. It isn’t true, Sandra thinks, that it always rains in London, though it is always cold and this leads to a sensation of living in a neutral place, a chemically flat place; perhaps this has something to do with the extravagance of Londoners, and why they’re all so troubled. She knows that all the interesting fashion and art originates in London, later going on to Milan or New York to be refined and disseminated. At Camden Market she swapped a colorful diadem bought at a Mallorca beach stall for a black mod tie emblazoned with the Colgate logo. Do you like it? It’s all right, says Jodorkovski, tugging at her arm as she looks at her reflection in a shop window. In the souvenir shop at the Natural History Museum, which is next to Sandra’s study rooms, they sell a dinosaur key ring with a compass for a brain. Sandra has always hated the feeling of being disoriented, so whenever she takes the Tube she removes the key ring from her bag and keeps her eye on the magnetic ball; this way she can always tell which direction the train is traveling. People think she must be taking part in an urban game, with teams searching for objects hidden in different places around the city. But what she is searching for is a skin that was lost millions of years ago. Uncovering bones, putting them in order, studying them, that’s easy, she thinks. All you need is a comprehensive sweep of the earth’s surface—as long as you’ve got enough time. The difficult thing is to find the skin of that dinosaur, by now nothing but particles and dust, the dissolved frontier between it and the world, the unfurled mirror of all its experiences, the piece to definitively connect the images accumulated by that beast known as T. rex with a laptop computer, and with the Colgate logo on her new tie, and with the boarding passes for the Mallorca-to-London flights, and with her 23-year-old immigrant skin.
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The term Cultural Follower has been employed to describe mammals, lizards, birds, insects, and microorganisms that have specifically evolved in relation to human societies around the world. These creatures have developed patterns of behavior which allow them to thrive in relative intimacy with people throughout an increasingly man-made habitat.
1999 INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW BUCKINGHAM, CULTURAL FOLLOWER (TEXT SOURCE NOT FOUND)
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What we are trying to say is that Mihály works in a hospital that was built in 1925 in the city of Ulan Erge, in the southwest of Russia, between Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In its day this hospital was a leading center for pediatric surgery, but Stalinist bureaucracy saw its reputation tarnished gradually, brick by brick, a process completed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though the large display cabinets and their equally impressive steel supports are still standing, it has been a long time since patients or medical staff looked with any pride at the reflections they present; the only
thing they show now, through the other side, are the vast expanses of a city that has been shaded in with arithmetical graffiti, and 1950s building blocks and bicycle wheels. Mihály one day even saw a photo of the hospital on a website dedicated to twentieth-century ruins, alongside vignettes of coal-powered factories, dismantled nuclear power stations, and inoperative blast furnaces. The caption beneath the photo read: “Old beef store, Ulan Erge, 1907.” Mihály is a soft parts surgeon, which here means everything but bones. His name is announced over the Tannoy system whenever he is needed in the operating theater. He hurries along the tiled corridors. A teenager who ate 5 kilos of sweets in under 60 minutes, a simple appendectomy, an operation he could perform with his eyes closed, so as he carries it out his thoughts turn to Maleva, the young general practice intern he met and fell in love with 3 or 4 years before, feelings she did not entirely reciprocate. They had both been standing in the line in the cafeteria; he explained where to get the bread and the meals. The way she pried apart the broccoli with her knife and fork, it was like someone opening their own brain. That was good. Then, after a number of hurried hellos in operating theaters and treatment rooms, one evening, when Mihály had stayed late to catch up on some reports, they bumped into each other in one of the old corridors no one went down anymore and which led between [still leads between] the 2 newest wings in the hospital complex. They kissed. Blindly they pushed on an old door marked DIALECTICAL MEDICAL STUDIES, and blindly they swept a heap of rusty utensils from a table only, at the last, for her to refuse to consummate the act; they made a date for the following week, at her house. Her address went onto the sleeve of Mihály’s gown, the first place he could find to write it down. Now something he has never seen before ejects him from thoughts of Maleva, bringing him back to the appendectomy: a lead capsule the size of a thimble in the young man’s appendix. They examine it, open it. Inside is a pill bearing the words “Iodine-125 [125I] Radioactive,” an isotope perfectly ensheathed in a paraffin wrapper and which the young man was trying to smuggle from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Waking from the anesthetic, he confesses as much.
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Q: Considering the fact you give real texture to your sounds, do you feel like a sculptor or an architect?
A: Good analogy. Like an architect, yes, because for me the drums are the foundations. Once you’ve got the foundations, each floor you add to the building is harder and harder. To add parts that can help, that might form part of the whole, is harder still; it’s like making a building that gets smaller the higher it goes.
DJ SHADOW, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
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Saigon … shit; I’m still only in Saigon … Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. [Grabs at flying insect.] I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said “yes” to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.
APOCALYPSE NOW, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
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Marc consults the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1968. The section titled “Cowsheds and Other Outbuildings” contains a description of how to put together a toilet for a washroom to go with the milking stalls. He turns the diagram around to see how to adapt this toilet to his hut. He can’t concentrate. His mind keeps being drawn back to a theory he’s pondered for a number of years now, one that fits into something bigger, broader, which he calls socio-physical theory. The sphere of action, the testing ground, would extend no further than 2 or 3 blocks around the roof terrace. The neighborhood contains everything he needs: comestibles, mundane conversations, and seasonal clothing made from polyester. The theory is intended to demonstrate in mathematical terms that solitude is a property, a state, natural in a better sort of human being and, to that end, is based in a physical proof well known among scientists: there exist in nature only 2 kinds of elementary particles, fermions [electrons and protons, for example] and bosons [photons, gluons, gravitinos, et cetera]. Fermions are characterized by the widely demonstrated fact that only 1 can occupy a particular state at any given time, or, what is the same, that 2 or more cannot occupy the same spatial distribution. Bosons have the opposite properties: not only can more than 1 be in the same state and share the same spatial distribution, they in fact try to mass together, they need to. Marc uses this classification as both his image and his model in postulating the existence of solitary people who, like fermions, cannot stand to be around others, and are the only kind of people deserving of any respect. Then there is the other kind, those who cluster together, boson-like, in the form of associations, groups, and other collectives—hoping to hide their genetic mediocrity in the crowd. Marc, no admirer of this latter type, unsurprisingly cares little about the march of world events, or about poverty or wealth, or the rise or fall of prices in fruit or fish, demonstrations, collectivities, political parties, religions, or NGOs. Of course, he takes as his authentic models for this kind of higher being, of the essentially fermionic life, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the Unabomber, Cioran, and above all Henry Darger, the man who barely left his Chicago room. Also, Marc, like all fermions, has long since stopped frequenting women and friends. His only stable connection with the world is the internet. Sunday, after 4:00 p.m., people are down at the beach; he hasn’t eaten all day. A chink in the asbestos section of the hut lets in a ray of sun that alights on the 0 button of the PC keyboard. He is playing the Sufjan Stevens album The Avalanche, with “The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies” on repeat, while putting the finishing touches to a proof he feels extremely pleased with. He goes out onto the roof terrace with a sheet of paper and hangs it on the reticulating wires at the point: x = 10, y = 15. Nothing better to check a theory, before propagating it, than to air it, he thinks.
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A woman named Cynthia Ferguson, holder of a degree in medicine from Columbia University, has written A Universal History of Skin, a treatise taking in everything from diseases of the organ to anthropology, its uses, and the traditions associated with it across a wide range of cultures and races. It all came about, she explains, when she found that students in her surgery classes at the university were all conspicuously fearful about the first scalpel incision; they were all nervous about cutting through the skin, and some found it so off-putting they refused altogether. Once they could get their hands inside the body, however, as soon as they were actually getting to hack away at internal organs, the aversion disappeared and they even enjoyed themselves, like children wallowing in mud or pretend cooking. This gave her an insight into the power of this organ, one that measures, on average, 2 square meters; the largest, that is, of all the organs.
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Basra. John takes Mohamed to school each morning, and afterward goes to work in the kitchen at El Rachid. Mohamed has a 2-hour drawing class today, and he and the other pupils are given paper, crayons, and felt-tip markers, and he always draws a man descending a wall at the end of a rope; a horizon always features in the background, as do palm trees, but when the teacher asks what he’s drawing he always says, Half a kilo of red peppers that fell on the ground and are shining in the sun.
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According to a certain philosopher named Heraclitus, nothing is constant, all is flux, never do we set foot 2 times in the same river, 1 which, in this classic image, comes to represent life. In this light, the Hindu idea of reincarnation seems quite curious, ingenious even, because, in effect, everything constantly mutates, we die and are reborn every second, we die and are reborn, we die and are reborn, et cetera. [Another thing that remains to be clarified: thanks to Ariadne, the rope, the thread, was the first means of long-distance communication. It then took a number of centuries to disconnect ourselves in any efficient way, moving on to wireless, antenna-based communications, electromagnetic codes, and direct satellites. Today, roads in cities are constantly being dug up for the laying of cables [fiber-optic o
r equivalents], and this reversion, this return to Ariadne and her thread, is more than just symbolic, given that such excavations are constantly halted when they hit old channels—Greek sewer systems, Roman roads: the original transmission systems. This, in one sense, does constitute a Hindu reincarnation, though only of inert substances.] [Though I say it now, still it will need explaining.]
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 13