Mona Lisa Monster Truck

Some of the positive things about this year’s Comic-Con:

1.) Cripples get a fair shake:

Minutes into tortuously navigating the dense human tide that slooshes down the aisles of Comic-Con, it becomes apparent that the electric scooter foot traffic is immense. Every few seconds one is obliged to join a respectful throng of people who part to make way for someone working the Con from a battery-powered perspective. Once one cart passes you by, you begin to notice just how many disabled people are here.

Gradually, the submerged disability aesthetic of mainstream superhero comic books begins to materialize like the sliding ruby red quartz visor of Scott Summers (to all intents and purposes, a blind man) unleashing his deadly optic vision. Daredevil is so blind he can only see the world in a sonic mesh. Tony Stark operates from the supercool equivalent of an iron lung; his heart regulated by a metal suit that is the only thing between nightly bouts with the Crimson Dynamo and Elle McPherson and a sure death. Captain Marvel withers of cancer brought on by an awful symbiotic relationship with his cosmic wristbands. Mutants are shunned by a society that feels ashamed and threatened by their difference. Comics are littered with examples of people who have to overcome terrible obstacles in order to assert themselves and restore some sense of ethical parity to the universe (and lets not even get started on the Blacks of Panther, Goliath and Brother Voodoo…).

My granite heart melts very slightly round its flinty surface meniscus at the thought that outsiders of every stripe can gather under the transformative hero banner.

2.) A tectonic temporary reversal of the California universe’s rules:

Journalist Jeremy Kay, in today’s Guardian article Geek Almighty on Comic-Con, observes:

In order to attain such rude health, the studios are once again courting one key demographic - the geeks. This knowledgeable and vocal sub-culture has returned to prominence since the 1990s, when fan hysteria greeted films such as Men in Black, Blade, and the Star Wars sequels and propelled them to box-office success. In the intervening years, Hollywood’s cyclical nature and the ascendancy of comic book aficionados such as Christopher Nolan, Zack “300″ Snyder, and Frank “Sin City” Miller has seen the nerd return as a highly influential factor in Hollywood. Studio chiefs know all too well that if upcoming projects such as Captain America, Wonder Woman and Wolverine are to prosper, first and foremost they have to be all right with the fans.

Now, as a wannabe scriptwriter currently spending the first part of his apprenticeship (five years in: no agent, no manager, a few miserable writing assignments, a wife near the end of her tether) on the lower slopes of the greasy pole, I can only - through vicarious means - take immense pleasure at the temporary Comic-Con reversal of the caste relationship between a typical comic book geek and the wannabe powerplayers. The latter are lower echelon gatekeepers who surf the whales of Hollywood like plankton with self-belief-powered outboard motors, flossing the mouths of studios whilst looking for exploitable plaque nuggets in the development department bowels.

The very idea of these hair-gelled, distressed-jean-wearing, imaginatively-inert jackanapes (and by this I mean the lower foot soldiers; not the directors, writers, comics publishers making the crossover or otherwise actually creative people. I am talking of all the sushi termites who would hail Whoopi Golberg’s snatch as the next big thing if it moved tickets, but are currently tacking, tails wiggling, into Robert Downey-land, swimming toward the light with Heath Ledger and muttering “awesome Joker” at Sunset Boulevard nightclubs) needing to spend one nanosecond relying on the circumspect judgment of geek outcasts, send shivers of unalloyed (non-Adamantium) joy up my spine.

I’m sat at the back of the massive Hall H where the studios pay Comic-Con to launch gobbets of raw superhero trailer (for products such as Watchmen which won’t even appear as actual films for almost another year), squinting to see jetted-in Keanus and Brendans, the size of pinheads, amped up on a massive battery of video relays and giant screens, glad handing the crowd like declamatory snake-oil salesmen. Nearby, as the trailer finishes, I can sense the control freak pre-destined movie types up front hanging in a state of suspended prayer, before the geek throng signals either their acclamation or derision.

For one tiny nanosecond (as opposed to a large nanosecond) these career robots who don’t even leave the feng-shui’d proportions of their washroom pot-pourri to chance are forced to rely on a disparate group of lamentable fuckwits jerking out of their seats or not to give a communal thumbs-up. Even if the suits are successful, and the trailer scores major kudos, they know - as they wend their way back up from San Diego to Los Angeles in their chartered Amtrak cabin, sucking distractedly on the Evian teat - that they’ve been owned like little bitches by people with Logan’s Run: The TV Series commemorative plates.

It won’t last. But: beautiful.

3.) Casting the runes: Comic-Con as media portrait:

Between the commercial giants such as Marvel and DC, and the indie presses working the audience from their tiny booths, the contemporary media landscape of American society is laid out before me in a stark Darwinian relief. Normally, I struggle to comprehend just exactly how the media and society is fracturing (I’ve read too many articles, browsed too many blogs, forgotten too many new phenomena phrases), but Comic-Con provides a gorgeous three-dimensional bread and circuses schematic.

For instance, if Marvel and DC are the equivalent of the networks - in a TV world - then Dark Horse, or DC’s Vertigo label, are the equivalent of HBO or Showtime, with less obviously commercial but grittier and edgier fare; and further down the food chain small presses pander to every stripe of human need and distraction like a rainbow array of cookery and hunting cable channels. Niche-mined mutant soldiers and vampire dandies vie with urban stick figure operas and gross-out comedic pastiches for consumer attention; and everyone seems to be making out just enough to keep going, like Wile E.Coyote before he realizes he’s stepped out over the abyss.

4.) The font of all future human knowledge:

From Goth to video game, ninja outcast to clubfoot mutant, figurine customizer to cybersteamgirly wet dream, Comic-Con has more sequestered information - literature, comics, books, printed texts, doodles, circomlutions, picture dreams, whatever - than was originally constituted in the Library of Alexandria. Seriously. Really. Think about it.

Like it or not, invest in it or not, the aisles of Comic-Con are packed with an incredibly vibrant series of iterations of wholecloth mythologies that make the few hundred pages of the Bible or the Koran look like the product of a coffee-klatch group written by superstitious artisanal drones. This will be the subject of a future, separate, blog, but basically: Comic-Con marks a shift from a peasant culture wherein a few nutters with long beards tell the rest of us monkey mass that god is vengeful, women need their clits cut off, and if we’re lucky at the end of our lives we’re going to get to submit to some fictional construct’s sense of grace and decorum; to one where vampires get boners, homos rule the earth, tubby boys can swap bodies with ripped dudes in the netherspehere, people can jump over buildings and feed oil company corporate heads to polar bears on the last remaining ice floe, the universe is essentially godless and waiting to be colonized by laser ships and planet eaters; and you’re talking a whole new ball game… with better special effects than the Torah.

Anyway, how big do you think the Library of Alexandria was in the first place? It was like your parent’s den/basement. Like where the cameraman had to face the wall at the end of The Blair Witch. Not even enough room for your overflow Star Wars figures.

Next year, walk into the exhibition hall… and marvel.

5.) Shitty karma for nice folk:

Fanboy director, writer, monologist and immensely gifted freeform individual Kevin Smith is going bald. As am I (although, to be fair, our connection pretty much stops there…). He has a saucer-sized tonsural abberation that even our military’s techno boys could guide a laser-bomb onto. Bad things happen to gifted people.

Which is only fair.

I’ve been reading a lot, in the last few days, of the coverage of the latest events of San Diego’s Comic-Con; the largest annual gathering anywhere in the world of fans and exhibitors of all things comic, science-fiction and fantasy-related. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have my own fan-boy roots; but also have a healthy, bemused, self-loathing for the years of my own weird cultural investments - flying bats, robots, people who know where evil lurks in the hearts of men. Most Comic-Con acolytes are distinctly less self-conscious about their interests, and display a generally unbridled escapist insanity and an even more tenuous grasp on reality that is certainly far more distracted than mine.

In sifting through the generic hack mainstream coverage of the Comic-Con, though, I’ve registered that most of the so-called ‘reportage’ seems to involve a high level of incidental caricature - “Hey look, mainstream America, tubby chicks in costume!” - on the part of the writer/observer: Comic-Con seems to be a convenient general weigh-station for those faceless anodyne trucks of journalism who shut the air breaks off and swerve into San Diego for an annual medley of mediocre finger-pointing.

Whilst perhaps richly deserved on the part of the subjects (see any of the accompanying pictures in this blog; of people for whom caricature is a life goal that they aspire to…) this observational dirty pool has become, over the years, just a little too easy; displaying something of the ducking stool impulse at best, but more likely a generic American fear of anyone who dares to invest publicly in anything other than choosing the shortest Wal-Mart lane. I was, therefore, surprisingly pleased to observe that the dripping scorn of the press pass holders would probably bounce off the rotund carapaces of happy exultant Klingons and posturing barbarians alike; repelled by the triple shields of innocence, disproportionate fantasy lives and a propensity toward clear insanity, that deflect such toxic scorn back into the deepest blackness of space where it can explode without TIE-fighter sound effects and not hurt the loonies.

Maybe my response is based, in part, because this Saturday gone I had cast off my misanthropic bent and surrendered to my inner-loony. Attending the Con experience I had, I am loathe to admit, a thoroughly good time. Not only did I get to exchange questions with Howard Chaykin, creator of American Flagg, a three-decadial artist/writer of significant historical, native and political intelligence, I also got to thank Paul Chadwick for his eco-awakening comic Concrete. And Tom Yeates for drawing such fantastic Tarzan strips. And geek out to the Watchmen figurines. And talk to Mark Schultz, artist of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs—

— and so on. It was great. I paids my ticket and hads my fun. Truth to tell, I am having enormous problems with my career path, mortgage payments and generally living in country that so routinely gyps its citizens, and I was enormously grateful for the distraction.

I have decided, therefore, to show some vague solidarity with Comic-Con, despite my own sense of wanton surrender having calcified a long time ago: with a tribe of fans who deserve some acclamation for their utter lack of hypocrisy and enthusiastic surrender to wonder (no matter how faded or tattered the banner that they gather under). In a world of snideness, peer pressure, irony, and autocue-fed double-talk by corporate-value-fed skinny MTV presenters who don’t know the producer’s cock from a stick shift, where our six-year old daughters have body issues, and our family pets are deemed to be neurotic, and tens of millions of people watch the idiot box every night for updates on D-celebrity cellulite, there is something immensely appealing about people (many of whom are fat or ugly fucks) who are prepared to simply still pretend to be someone else - an alien, an empath with big wonderful tits, Wolverine - and not worry about being judged crap in the bargain.

The surrender of the disparate tribes of Comic-Con to pure fantasy (not just by those obvious souls who dress up; but also those shy types in chinos and polo shirts with an intensely-delineated internal world, part of whose brain is forever donated, like an existential crash victim, to dragon realms, or cyborg pleasure dens) actually becomes inspiring as a form of super-sanity.

Let’s face it: as an atheist, if there are no gods, and you believe in the first place only in a small air-breathing sphere rotating through the inky blackness of infinity where nobody cares a jot and the rules don’t even matter and the polar bears are gonna die soon anyway; then at least the fantasy fans get free poster bags and anal sex isn’t considered an abomination unless it’s with a garlic dildo (I actually suspect that comicdom’s general acceptance of all things weird and mundane actually means that they get “a lot more” than most people/jocks/mayqueens/Phil Spectors. C’mon, I mean: fat chicks. Skinny Goth boys. If you’re not already jealous of their needy nocturnal momentums then it’s ‘cos you’re in denial…).

To recap: once you’ve first walked into the massive main hall of SDCC, bigger than a football field and capable of generating it’s own interior environment of fan sweat and game card laqueured ambience, and navigated the souk of Batman masks, Al Williamson lithos and and Erin Gray signings, whilst barber shop choirs of Jedi-wannabes hum Entertain Us in the lightsaber key of Ob-Wan versus Darth Vader, or Asian steam-punk schoolgirls (a genre I have a great deal of lassitude for) air kiss each other’s bikini-lines, or Patrick Stewart lookalikes strike follicly-challenged poses, does this actually seem any more bizarre an investment in this planet and our species than, say… the rapture? Or Mormonism?

Or what passes for our weekly investment in trolling Us and Hello magazines?

Or the testosterone yellings of the sports jocks in their baseball caps and beer kegs and pinch-hitter statistics as they watch other men perform?

So let’s - maybe, though I’ll be rueful in the morning - hear it for the Comic-Con fans as a small zany space of totally co-opted resistance. Individual attendees may well be crazy, or deluded, or super-intelligent, or Velcro-non-allergenic, but they sure got game, even as they line up to spend their savings on corporatized fantasy geegaws. Not for them the easy posturing and shallow rib-ticklers of those slack-jawed blonde hard-body thong-cracked media parasite mediocrities, who condescend and dangle microphones in front of ecstatic throngs of Doctor Whos (every goddamned incarnation!), who could give two pulsar shits for her bitch handlebar tattoos and are all about having fun in every point of time and space for eternity.

They are there to testify. They wouldn’t even touch her with your sonic screwdriver.

So - and for the only time - let me recount what is good and positive and transcends lampoon in the world of Comic-Con, as if it was the Galapagos Islands and has lessons for us all:

PART TWO IN ANOTHER TIME AND UNIVERSE:

So I’ve seen it! But before I start my non-review of The Dark Knight (a work of protean intelligence, talent and integrity, but seriously flawed in the last act, as the parts began to fly off quicker than an exploding Batpod. A more craven and condescending sensibility on the part of the director/screenwriting team would have perhaps tied the pieces up in a more conventionally satisfying way…), let me just say first how juiced I was - whilst searching the web for juicy Bat-related thoughts/reviews that I could lampoon - to come across a video on The Times home page that promised “Onboard footage of the Qantas 747 that dropped 20,000 feet in seconds.”

I clicked on to the link, preparing myself to experience a harrowing vignette of an airplane full of mortals encountering their deepest fears; only to see about a minute or so of shaky handheld evidence (that was okay, if you want to be real you have to be shaky…) of people sat dutifully in stoic fear, oxygen masks already attached. I saw no bug-eyed terror evinced by these Oxygenauts, no rapidly cartwheeling iPods striking old ladies in the myopic eye (“Howzabout that for a floater, Granny?”) as the plane plunged in its dizzying descent; heard no a cappella of screams (a minor variation on that classic: “We’re all voiding ourselves/Please don’t let the forensics team tell our children!”), no new-found invocations to the malign thug in charge of the cosmos, or even death threats leveled at the unknown perpetrator/device of the hold explosion.

It was a little disappointing, to say the least: here I was, gathered around the communal campfire of the Internet, in virtual congress with a bazillion other voyeurs, all of us ready to commit to the imagination of our storytellers and invest in this scenario, only to find out that - quite frankly -they’d dropped the ball. I wanted to find the director/cameraman - obviously no Chris Nolan - and remind him that concepts such as “gritty” “dark” and “real” were badges to be earned.

In case you think this is a tad harsh, let’s not forget that whomever shot this began rolling after the decompressive explosion (unless they held back the more dramatic footage of the actual descent and the dropping of the oxygen masks for the special features on the DVD); so they’d fumbled for their camera, or cell phone, or ceramic London taxi cab fondu set memento with 5 megazpixel lens attached, and started shooting once they already knew there was the likelihood of imminent fiery discorporation. In my book that makes you an Atheist with no craven idols to worship other than a potential YouTube profile. If you’re gonna talk the talk you gotta walk the walk: you should at least scream “Omighod look at the wing/engine peeling off we’re not gonna make it!” and try and get some terror roundelay going through the economy seats like a malignant Mexican wave, for a bit of extra dramatic tension.

The shit thing about the real world is it’s so goddamned hard to manipulate in the moment. Luckily, thanks to the heroes of the marketing department at Warner Brothers, they’re had three long years to control the horizontal and vertical of our responses to The Dark Knight. In the old-fashioned days of film tie-ins (I’m talking as long ago as, say, 2002) you had your usual duvet covers, figurines, and all the usual crap (let us not forget that the primary purpose of a superhero is to sell pillow cases and lunch boxes, and they’ve been doing so way back in the ‘50s when our parents were grooving on the adventures of pre-realistic space adventure Batman) but then we were still in a pre-metastasized world; before a film’s identity had irrevocably spread like a neon cancer through the body politic: from the colon of lunch boxes to the spleen of guerilla flyposting, up through the liver of food-giveaways into the kidneys of cell phones and mobisode previews, up into the lungs of advertorial yoof programming into the brain of saturation cross-platform presencing (don’t you just love how those cadres of MBAs can consistently turn nouns into verbs?).

Batman is less a simple movie now - and far far more than even the simple technical difference between frames-per-second or binary digital code; as if levers were that thing that built temples in the first place - than a full blown event, designed by a team of planners and lieutenants greater in number than helped co-ordinate the Allied Landings in Normandy in 1945.

This latest uber-iteration of the darknight avenger is a piece of conceptual art, something that Damien Hirst might title “I Want To Be Batman To All People At All Times And All Places; Irrespective Of Age, Intelligence, Reason, Predilection, Bum-Bandity, Female-Circumcision, Disability Or Whether You Can Afford To Buy Or Have To Mug A Pensioner To Get A Ticket To See It: Talking Of Heath Ledger’s Performance At The Water Cooler; Christian Bale’s Intensity Instead Of Making Love To My Wife; Even Thinking In A Quiet Private Moment On The Shitter That If Only Katie Holmes Had Only Returned To The Role That Maggie Gyllenhall Did So Much Better Because We Could Have Seen Her Blown Apart Instead. Dark Knight. Dark Knight. When You Sleep. Dark Knight.”

Now call me old-fashioned; but even Citizen Kane - no, let’s pick a true classic, something like The Godfather Part II, which was already highly anticipated in a pre-Internet era - might suffer from the gap between hype and product. Admit it, those of you who saw The Dark Knight: one thrilled to it’s intelligence, and lamented that it was never quite as good as three years of drip-fed exposure allowed our mind’s eye to believe it could be.

Our expectations can never be exceeded.

This is the future for even all the good films (good films. Not the hack reboots which will similarly marketed in the future. All those Terminator extensions and John Carpenter remakes); that we be perpetually disappointed. Forever. In all times and places.

The strangest thing about The Dark Knight - weirder even than a man with half a face, or someone who flies through the air on bat wings - is that marketing company and filmmaker are now perpetually locked in a violent sexual embrace in order that we - the termite consumer - live in a state of perpetual expectation. Like the Batman and the Joker: they need each other if the extraordinary investment of production funds and the monumental recouping of ticket sales is to continue to fuel this passion play of madness and ethics. If either one dies, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down…

NOTE: for a more specific critique of The Dark Knight and why it wasn’t the greatest thing since the hard drive, go to the world’s greatest film critique program Filmspotting, for Adam and Matty’s always-incisive, passionate and accessible latest movie analysis. I cannot recommend these guys highly enough…

Spare me if I don’t allow myself to be railroaded into a state of vicarious full-on body orgasm at the hysterical pronouncements of box office records being broken this last weekend ($158.3M !!!) by the new Dark Knight flick. This ambivalence is no anti-flying rodent parsimony on my part; indeed, a small screaming geek portion of me is ecstatic that the fiscal success of this latest film (partially predicated, it seems, on the efforts of quality “help” rather than novelty mercenaries, that the powers-that-be have entrusted their intellectual properties to some genuinely-talented iconoclasts rather than cookie-cutter artisans…) will doubtless mean my menu of Unhappy Bat Meals will still continue to be delivered to me uninterrupted tri-annually on a tarnished Gothic platter.

Even if director Christopher Nolan and title actor Christian Bale decide not to return to make the projected last part of a trilogy (and if so, bloody good for them! Let them defy the dictates of God, the concept of the pieta, and even the Dark Emperor George Lucas. Who the fuck other than craven marketing departments said that the best things come in threes anyway? What happened to twos in the scheme of things?) I am sure that the mothership corporation Warners will recast another iteration with… whoever, as they troll through a list of possible replacements, working down the cogs until they find the first greasy block that will jump at the path of lowest resistance and generate some reboot friction. Maybe Fred Savage or Uwe Bohl will direct it. Maybe Dean Cain or Whoopi Goldberg will retool Batman/Bruce Wayne’s tortured psyche into a new ground-breaking thespian interpretation.

Maybe they will get Barack Obama to play a Swanee Joker before November; and post-assassination green-screen him into the Gotham skyline, upping the ghoul stakes from Heath Ledger’s interpretation; that will have all those skinny Asian nasal twenty-something Entertainment Weekly window-dressing clones announcing it as “Like, Psychotic!” as they read, gulping and bug-eyed, from their autocues.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not cynical. Oh no. I LIKE TO LIKEY THE BAT. I have been personally seduced many many times as The Batman has clambered through my bedroom window, either from the silver screen or the cheap yellowing pages of old comic books. Indeed, as I write this blog, manifold versions of Batman statuettes peer down at me from my shelves - from a limited-edition Michael Keaton Japanese molding complete with protruded photo-realistic lip renditions doubtlessly painted by starving younglings in the sweat shops of Hong Kong, through to a ‘50s chipped and frayed money bank figure with a fontanelle gash that looks like the worst/best kind of bat-trepanning for a casual about-town multi-millionaire with a schizophrenic bent - and these pointy-eared incarnations all demand, in a steel, bent-thighed way, that I testify to the truth of my passion in this silver-mooned night.

And so, I sigh, and remember:

Eating baked beans and chips for tea on the sofa in 1969, bopping up and down as Adam Ward and Burt Ward gave Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin one up the hooter. Years later I turned away from these gauche buffons- like St.Peter denying the Christ after three cock crows - lured instead by the 1978 hyper-realism (as in: real to fanboys, whilst my peers started larning ’bout history and politics and stuff…) and Gothic environments of the darker comic book reboots, entranced by the dynamic reinventions of artists such as Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers. This was a dark, post-teenage odyssey that found its bleak apotheosis in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight in 1984, where the Joker broke his own neck (I know that’s in italics, but think about it: he broke his own neck. Just by turning his head to the side and applying a demonic will that made the Terminator’s commitment to the homicidal cause look like a flustered white liberal at a NAACP convention). In 1988 I rabidly devoured any information I could get on the upcoming Tim Burton reimagining in magazine and fanzine snippets (ah, young thing, ‘twas a time before the web and instantaneous multiple postings ‘cross geek web sites), falling on random reports of the sinuousness exo-skeletal nature of Keaton’s body-casting like a twelfth-century peasant stumbling across a potato with a great sirloin steak attached.

Now? It’s just that… I’m a little bit tired of being played through the corporate released drip drip drip of the first new bat-suit image, the teaser trailer, the viral campaign, the first real trailer, the geek site interview, the concept designs, and eventually the Reeses tie-in campaigns in the gas station when I’m paying$4.55 a gallon?

I have done my tantric sex thing with the Batman. I have waited for his steely midnight vigilante caress for almost three goddamned years even as he laid back on the media duvet and spread his bat-legs like something from an issue of Reader’s Wives (but with better teeth); coquettishly showing me his bat-thing, his bat-bush, and his bat-bits.

So BOY I hope this film is good! ‘Cos it’s time for me to get my end away. No jury would convict me. He’s asking for it.

PART TWO: our Blogger actually sees The Dark Knight. Don’t expect a review (gentlemen don’t tell, after all…).

I figure that the audience, stunned by my first deconstructive hip-shimmy and kidney punch, will be further rocked by a compilation uppercut of a series of male member enhancement haikus. I set the set the ambient projection to “phallus mode” and unfurl a blasted contatenation of individual penile growth legends designed to lure the neurotic, the worried, and those Arabs newly living in London who have yet to make some mates in Shepherds Bush, to pursue new ways of unloading their credit card information:

Young nymphos love my hot rod, they rock and suck all night long / Want greater pleasure in bed for both yourself and her, get it here now / Know how Stella got her tube packed? / Make your girl want you more with your huge device / With this rocket ship the moon is but the final destination / Your bed snake will eat furry hamster by cock crow / Steel is the rod but intention is the will of God / Serve up a love plate for the most gastrous of diners / Invest herein and see your circumcised foreskin tip the scales of adoration / Indyrace 2000 is the least of your circumspect momentum when you’re thrusting with this hot rod / A Harem Scarum / Girth Unlimited as George Bernard Shaw cannot ignore you.

The final legend draws forth a gasp from the audience (as we all know, the esteemed English playwright GBS once famously said that the worst thing a human could do to another was to “ignore them”); they are amazed to see the worlds of literature and cock upsizing cuddling together in the webisphere like two kittens nestling in a rococo hammock. A lanky goateed individual (either a German youth or a Greek lesbian, no one is sure) at the back feels the need to initiate a discussion about the meaning of such automatic parsing; rightfully identifying in this latest version of web automata that there is an increasing schizophrenia between simple “come hither” penis enlargement advertising catchphrases and the commandeering of more complex concepts of the cultural commonweal of the last two thousand years. As s/he puts it:

“How do we get from the fusty drawing room of Britain’s greatest philosopher provocateur, engaged as he was with forwarding the principles of the post-Victorian suffragette movement and putting it to the landed gentry about the dignity of labor, to a swarthy twenty-something pulling on his pudding above a halal shop off Hyde Park wanting to lay some pipe on gaggles of tight-bodied GAP shoppers?”

“AHA!” I shout (causing a Glaswegian welder on some Kenyan sensimilla to wake up for a nano-second), ” because the cultural net of web poetry is cast by indiscriminate fishermen; creating by automatic proxy new connections between individual words and phrases, regardless of the historical cachet that some of those more cultured contributions may have garnered in the pre-internet world. Now we shall judge quality or merit no more…”

I pause for effect, before delivering my final blow:

“This is the world that Burroughs envisaged in his spunky fever dreams in Marrakech, and I herein announce as the future face of creativity: a self-replicating process beyond concepts of talent or insight, or shared values; wherein all of us are part of the monkey mass, creating a poetry defined by the savage juxtaposition of the work of talented icons with that of some bling-wearing basement dweller with a shed full of dodgy Mexican sugar pills. Total cultural democracy. Poetry defined regardless of creed, religion, race, color, upbringing, or whether or not Russell Simms deems the whitey wannabes to be urban enough not to be caned by all those (rightfully) angry black dudes in the audience.”

I let the implications set in.

“Poetry is dead. It has escaped the creator (Man. And Dykes too. It’s an equal opportunities phenomenon.) and will perpetuate itself way beyond our pathetic lifespans. If the children of Arcadia and Babylon should disappear off the face of the earth right now - whether by Iranian SCUD, long ignored Mormon judgments (shame about that), or Bushian Kyoto cold-cocking - the words and products of our species will continue to be replicated by automated programs that can make an infinite number of associations between the word “rod” and every other combination of vowels and consonants.”

I follow up quickly with a series of associative/disassociative contrasts between e-mail subject matter and the consequent imbedded message:

Man gets bitten while peeing in bush / It’s too much for one James Bond!
JFK closed after bomb threat / The Dark Knight bombs at box office–

But the crowd goes wild, overthrowing chairs and bulimic Swedes like they were chaff in the face of their bewilderment; replicating the riot of the resistant audience first exposed to the genre-atomizing wonderment of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring in 1913 at the Theatre de Champs Elysées in Paris.

As the fistfight spills out into the street, I judge the evening a total success. I pack up the Mac and projector into my neoprene backpack, and pick my way through the crowd of wailing gnashing combatants, who pull innocent Plastic Bertrand fans, as they body-pop down the sides of the canals, into their awful gravity of horror and denial.

Not only have I driven the final stake into the bourgeois subjective concept of human creativity, I have probably guaranteed myself a cushy tenured position at the école of my choice-

- until a pasty thin man puts a long limpid hand on my chest.

“Signeur?” he asks, sweating profusely on his upper lip (doubtless in the grip of some absinthe trip), “I am Menon Sweazy. We should talk about my poetry.”

The scene: a coffee house in Amsterdam, just off the Prinsengracht. Our blogger (me) is putting out the folding chairs at the back of the shop, near the hydroponic skunk, and the glass case with the reticulated pythons (which are slightly more animated than most of the customers). A small cadre of avant garde aesthetes gather, puffing on their “jays” and complaining about recent Dutch authority legislation to ban tobacco from these very dope houses (”It’s crazy. In other countries they look to see whether you got marijuana in your cigarette; only in Holland do they look to see if you have cigarette in your marijuana.”).

“Can you turn your electronics off?” I ask. “Something’s phase-cycling at the same Megahertz frequency and knocking out my Airbook signal for the video projection?”

Looking panicked at the prospect of being European, hip and intellectual but without instantaneous access to Radiohead remixes, the audience nevertheless obliges, thinking this sensory deprivation may be a part of a provocative audience participation aspect; powering down their iPod parkas and unthreading USB cables from their knicker-elastic, taking extra long pulls on their “rickys” to anaesthetize their qualms of non-connectivity.

“Thanks!” I blurt out, consumed with excitement at the prospect of this inaugural poetry evening of radical new deconstructive material. I reboot the projector and my ambient background reappears: a soothing Stan Brakhage-like mélange of colors, like menstrual blood on a crème brulee on a turntable, suffusing the space with a (consciously ironic) Barbarella eye garden effect designed to open the mind up the full range of web poetry I am providing from the furthest reaches of cyberspace.

We wait for a group of shaven-headed Brits - all Union Jack t-shirts and number one hair cuts - to stop seig heil’ing in the doorway as they pass by. “Got any tack?” the lead skinhead shouts, laughing, wide-eyed. My goatee’d brethren turn to these interlopers, and hiss like cats at the ancient ragtag English enemy. “Poofs!” the skinhead shouts, staggering off with his mates, another little war won (what he doesn’t know is that some skunk-anarchist has already laced this moron’s bloodstream with industrial-strength psychotropes; and that half an hour from now the Brits will be face down in an alleyway, money appropriated and something foreign invading their channel tunnels…).

“Well. Ahem. Thank you. And welcome to the first session of ‘Found: Unfound. Frontier Poetry.‘”

A polite smattering of hipster applause.

“Subtitled ‘The Invocation of Territory, We Singe the Baudrate Eclectic.’ None of the artistes featured know this event is taking place tonight. Indeed,” (I love this bit),” some of these poets have no consciousness at all; being as they are automatic cut-up web bots who recycle snippets of other e-mails to create nonsensical messages that carry a web link to a commercial site. Normally we ignore these messages, if we even open them in our trash; but rather than banishing them to a perpetual half-live of non-acknowledgement–”

“Just like normal poets then!” a swarthy matelot at the back interrupts with.

“– I present them here to you tonight as the authentic ghost voice of William Burroughs, rebirthed into the webosphere. Automatic automata that colonize the outer fringes of our psyche, they labor like an infinite number of monkeys on Xanadus of verse. And now: we see that stately pleasure dome before us.”

I open with Quayside Launderette by Menon Sweazy:

Point of entrance for the stiletto was below the that I intended to prevent you from being torture cells, the trials at nuremberg speak venomously being dissolved and strained add pint of turpentine shirley bitterly yes: I’m in their debt for a no vessel was served upon the table that was not it seemed advisable to find out as soon as possible came forward at his word. When they arrived at.

Sweazy’s work is classic gripping opener: the associative theme of torture and Nuremburg invokes a kind of postmodern bread and circuses that sits well with this roomful of anti-Starbucks activists, and the turpentine suggests a kind of purification ritual that is simultaneously abrasive and spiritual.

The room murmurs appreciatively. I feel it’s time to bring out the big guns - the penis enlargement mash up - while I’m on a roll.

PART TWO: Oh yes… there’s a Part Two…

The government quickly realized its error as its workers buckled under the stain of accepting voluminous folders of LSD-induced scribblings and automatic bum prints (photocopies and originals): concluding that, even by the increasingly lax standards of subjective worth, history would likely fail to find too many Rembrandts or Vermeers in this panoply of giant eyeballs and cosmic wormholes. By the time the Dutch had closed the floodgates (always a good analogy to use with the Dutch; kind of like using “drought” with Africans, or “wanker” with golfers), they were forced to purchase an aircraft hangar to store the paper tsunamis of this massive public legacy.

I have heard of this aircraft hanger (some say it may be two hangars, three even) for decades, and it has exerted a fascination over me that I have never been able to wholly shake off. On occasion I have tried to track it down, failing only because I have the attention span of a gnat (in my old days I was an “artist” myself, and I think it did something to my ability to maintain focus…); but it still looms large over our collective consciousness.

Less of a curate’s egg than a curator’s turd, the hangar museum is dying for a selected show - for one brave soul to dive into its immensity and bring forth both the pearls and the manatyee shit - and I have often dreamed of walking up and down it’s serried aisles, like Indiana Jones searching for the Ark of the Covenant, pulling out weird wonders of the mind in a revisionist frenzy. Imagine what jewels await: polaroids of tattoo poems scratched onto pale white arms; flicker books of scratchy nudes with saggy tits surrounding dolphin enclaves circling a glowing cosmic egg; papier-mache void containers meant to be angled on a tripod and rotate disconsolately in the cold winter winds blowing in from Dam Square.

I imagine sections devoted entirely to Jim Morrison caricatures (sub-divided into materials: “Jim Morrison clay,” “Jim Morrison silver foil” and “Jim Morrison biological issue”); fragile kinetic works made from chewed straws; huge piles of Lovecraftian doodles of Cthulhu driving trams, riding bicycles, giving a thumbs up like Casey Jones, peering out from behind the glass doors in the Red Light District; automatic traces of fever dreams logged in Meccano constructions dipped in salad cream.

Most of all, I imagine that the vast bulk of the donated works - about 98.97% - would be desultory sketches on lined notepaper in red and green biro; slapdash scribblings that took a total of one bong hit to complete, a year of additional benefits secured in one spastic gesture. Enormous stacks of these papers, haphazard and ready to crush the unwary docent, would hum with the accumulated psychotropic power of their residual energies; the termite artists that created them long since crawled off either to OD oblivion, or the horror of cutting off their ponytails and getting a proper job (the poor fools, if only they realized they lived in Europe they could have kept the ponytail and got a job).

Any resulting exhibition from the aircraft hangar would be curated into three separate areas: those works which were submitted by people who thought themselves to actually be legitimate artists operating at the time: those works of sniggering meth-lickspittle cynicism which were submitted purely in order to qualify for some extra cash: and a hinterland where Dutch citizens actually believed that the scheme finally legitimized their nascent outsider art psychonaut aspirations and entered wholeheartedly into donating all their coffee-grinding chiaroscuros. Even better, I’d include a survey questionnaire in which visitors would be threatened at gunpoint (it’s my show, I can do what I goddamned like…) to fill in so we could see if anybody tell the difference.

For those who don’t have access to Dutch aircraft hangars, I would suggest that, in the timeless spirit of the original experiment, that art is all around us and you can curate your own exhibition regardless. If you work in a corporate environment, be sure to be the last to leave the meeting room, and collect all those rhomboids and skyscraper tracer bullets (“what is it with that guy?”) doodled on blotters whilst the sales figures are analyzed by the blowhard in marketing. If you work in public lavatories, be sure to use your digital camera to capture all those lovely banana-shaped spurting cock pictures scratched into the bog walls. If you ever hike, be sure to make casts of the love declarations carved into the local flora.

For my next project, I have taken it upon myself to write appreciations of the latest automatic internet poetry AKA junk mail. Stick around; I’m going to display it as a wifi anthology on an Airbook in an Amsterdam coffee house, and see if they’ve got any of those grants left…

Legend has it that there’s an aircraft hangar somewhere in Holland that holds an incalculable treasure. Lost in the mists of time, created by the minds of government bureaucrats in unholy alliance with the stoned wraiths who populate the coffee houses that hug Amsterdam’s canals, this building is a repository for all that is groovy and insane and provocative. Those who can remember its establishment speak of it in hushed tones, outside of the general ear range of backpackers, tulip buyers and other outsiders who might not appreciate this hybrid wonder, totally forged on the anvil of European thinking.

Nobody knows for sure what is inside… except that there’s some Op Art and charcoal residues and maquettes, and that this is an art museum if institutions were run by Charlie Meadows (the serial killer played by John Goodman in Barton Fink (1991) who tells us “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”)…

Back in the ‘70s, when the Dutch government was even more liberal and progressive than it is now (they should never have let all those Eastern Europeans in, it was asking for trouble…), it decided that, as a way of further encouraging a holistic integration of creativity into society, people could register themselves as “artists” and receive additional social security (welfare) benefits; in short, that they would still receive their already generous (at that time) subsistence payments, but would also get a financial top-up as an incentive to continue to follow their mojo and thereby benefit the fabric of Dutch daily life and society at large.

Once registered, “artists” would have to donate three art works a year in reciprocation - the work to be entirely their own choice, no need for adjudicating panels or any of those artifical public filters - which would be held in collection by the government in an archive for future generations. Simple, eh? Bless them, and their grand social investigation, that’s what I say; can you imagine members striding the US Senate floor demanding an addendum to a Senate Bill that recognized the need for a little ‘pork’ to safeguard the legacy of dried pasta tableaux specialists in Georgia? Or the leather-chapped performance art penetration re-enactment societies of San Francisco?

The main problem with this scenario was that the Dutch government failed to foresee that junkies and pot-smokers – already a significant urban community in Holland thanks to a range of other related progressive experiments – were indigents with a lot of time on their hands to think shit up, and very fluid concepts of what reality was in the first place.

For a whole generation of people used to sucking up industrial qualities of prototype pre-British-Columbian skunk, and then ruminating for hours about how to weigh a flame, or whether vegetable screams could be heard if you put a contact mike on the knife (“You can’t hear meat scream, man, ‘cos it’s, like, already dead, right? But you put a healthy cucumber on the chopping board…”), this was a fine chance to insert themselves at the forefront of contemporary art and collect a few Guilders more in the bargain.

The response, of course, was phenomenal – especially seeing as the government was loathe to apply bourgeois values of what actually constituted “art” as applied by its snobby European cousins, such as the French, in terms of abstract qualities such as “quality” or “talent” – and tens of thousands more than anticipated artist applicants crashed the government rolls like Orcs on PCP swarming a Hobbit farm.

IN PART TWO: total art democracy is achieved.

As the carrion birds of the artworld inevitably seek out new contexts to inspire their peculiar brand of social concern, I predict that disaster zones will become the new black/BritArt/return to figuration. In galleries around the world, stick-thin bored model/intern/whatevers will be diverted from sneering at visitors by a klaxon-sound emanating from the gallery’s Emergency Detection Device. Imperceptibly ducking back behind her iMac, like a bitch on castors, she will check the monitor to locate wherever the latest apocalypse has snuffed out the lives of tens of thousand of poor souls who believed in a benign and merciful God.

The gallerist/dealer, upstairs, is eagerly informed by her that there’s been a Richter Scale 6 with a Mercali Scale of V.II Very Strong in Armenia (and she’d still love to do dinner one night and pick his brains on his encyclopedic knowledge of Jasper Johns multiples). The dealer quickly and efficiently calculates which artists in his stable aren’t already on field trips to Myanmar and China, or presenting human rights atrocity etchings in European art fairs. Cross-factoring data on soil liquefaction reports (where water-saturated granular material loses it’s strength, causing buildings to sink) with local histories of poor building regulations and bureaucrat corruption (far greater collateral potential), to try and get a sense of the scale of the carnage, he instantly calculates the expedition costs against future sales of resultant artworks. Better to make the body bag bronzes in series of ten rather than five…

Within 36 hours the artist has been dispatched. On the business class flight over he spends time, in between scanning the wine list and shuffling his iPod, meditating on the suffering of the people he will meet.

Once landed, he is met at the airport by a slight little local woman who steers him through the hellish throng of others arrivistes from the competing “Emergency Response Units” of Mayfair, Chelsea, Basel and Paris. His dealer has done his job well; the woman is not only the best interpreter available, but she has also lost some family members of her own, and is well in with the rescue services. Letting the others suck on his Trabant taxi’s fumes, the artist insists on foregoing a freshening up at his hotel (confirmed as one of the few built with adequate foundations, in case of aftershocks) in favor of going to the epicenter immediately.

An hour later he’s being guided through a miasma of collapsed buildings and misery and anger, as people use their bare hands to dig through the rubble (later he will cast the clawmarks for a series of semi-transparent ghost-like poly-resin sculptures that sit, almost unseen, on a dark lacquered slabs built to exactly the same dimensions as the defective building bricks. Artforum will observe, in it’s double summer issue, that “The resin, almost milky, is redolent of schools of sperm trying to impregnate concrete and breathe life back into the immaterial and gone that lies somewhere below.” ).

At intervals, the rescue workers all freeze and silence the machines and listen if they think someone trapped below is hammering for help (later he will edit his digital recordings into a series of “pregnant silences” signaled at the beginning by the expiration of the last sputtering throb of a generator, the agonized extended communal quiet, which is finally punctured by disappointed people getting back to work again as the pickaxes restart their doleful plaint. Frieze will call the suite “A requiem mass where the climax had curdled 36 hours earlier, its latent reverberations playing the Armenian rescuers like a cosmic DJ mash-up.”).

Finally that night, just before the artist collapses with fatigue and jet-lag, his interpreter pulls his arm and steers him frantically over to a recently uncovered corpse. Her voice is high-pitched and the tears roll down her face as she bends over the body. “My sister. My sister.”

Pulling out his 100 megapixel camera – discreetly, so as not be insensitive – he watches his guide lay down next to her relative, trying to somehow hug her back to life. Their bodies are the same size, and he realizes - with a sharp intake of breath - that that they were twins. She mimics her dead sister’s fetal position in a mirror posture - like dolphin’s mating - adjusting herself as she edges closer and closer, as the artist starts to snap pictures. He switches to macro as the two sister’s faces loom together, and their mouths touch in a final caress; one set of lips alive and warm, the other cold and dusted with a sprinkling of former Soviet Union compacted concrete.

Months later, passing through London at the Groucho Club, the artist would proclaim to a circle of enraptured fellow artists: “I had never felt more alive in my entire life.”

Art In America said that the artist’s photo suite - hung by meat hooks in 10 meter ripped strips, to great acclaim at the Venice Biennial before being purchased by Pernot Ricard as the backdrop for an Absolut vodka advert in Interview magazine - was “As if the spirit of Joel Peter Witkin presided over a desert scirocco that had blown in from nearby sister state Azerbaijan, uniting the sacred (dead) and profane (alive) sisters in an embrace of microcosmic resignation.”

After he’d had her drive him back to the hotel, the artist let the sister go home. Too buzzed to sleep any more, he checked the time difference and called his dealer.

“How’s it going?” the dealer asked.

“It’s humbling. There’s so much to testify to. I need to be here a little longer. Do you think you could send over one of those Emergency Response Studios?”

Measured against the scale of the human misery and suffering of New Orleans, post-Katrina, the idea of an embedded artist operating from a repurposed trailer seems to me about as useful as a mime artist jumping out a helicopter into Lake Pontchartrain with an imaginary parachute and an invisible backpack full of sachets of electrolytes, so the people “down below” can rehydrate on the way to their next experiential clusterfuck. This kind of artwork is a Pirates of the Caribbean ride for middle-class intellectuals who wouldn’t dream of stepping into Disneyland ‘cos they thinks it’s tacky and inappropriate; yet have no problem patronizing a project that uses more resources and money than many of the Katina survivors have yet to see, and merely proffers the victims with yet another in a series of hare-brained non-solutions to their problems.

“But!” I hear you shout - and let me stop you right there; before you tell me how the project is a metaphor, or an ironic analogy, or a piece of conceptual art. Or before you tell me that it’s not the artworld’s fault what happened – neither the hurricane itself or the woeful government response - and this is just a fine example of artists getting down off of the artworld pedestal and creating socially-engaged work with resonance and clarity and compassion.

Let me stop you there because I’ve trundled all this rote guff out myself; when I worked as a professional curator and producer for 17 years on a variety of somewhat similarly noble art interventions. I too believe in art that has relevance, and all of those other woolly manifestos that you were about to bleat at me for daring to question the logic of this insipid dispassionate contrivance. Site-specific non-gallery socially-concerned art can exist and engage…

… but only if the art’s any good. Putting it out there isn’t enough in itself. All the things that can help truly amplify the successes of a good public art work – context, community, history – are the same things that can magnify the failings of a bad public art work. As a young curator my inspiration was a trailblazing Irishman called Declan McGonagle, a man who turned the sectarian divided northern Irish town of Derry into an external art laboratory of sorts, steering public art projects into a variety of complex and often potentially incendiary contexts. When somebody once asked him why he had, in effect, abandoned the “neutral” white space of the gallery, he replied something along the lines (I’m paraphrasing) that “Nothing is neutral. A gallery may look like just a white box but it’s also the product of a series of values – philanthropy, financial support, advocacy, cultural definitions.”

And if you reverse that same truism, you also end up realizing that if nothing is neutral than everything is political. Which confers inordinate responsibilities on artists who seek to insert themselves into loaded socio-political contexts. Even if the Emergency Response Studio manages to attract one Katrina survivor inside, and make them feel important because someone wants to hear their story: then that’s a lie, because the wider society – from government to agency to insurance companies – has so clearly demonstrated that these people’s stories don’t seem to matter one jot. This piece of conceptual art (which also fails at a basic conceptual level, because the artist couldn’t procure an actual FEMA trailer, so what he has is merely an ersatz prop) operates at best as a rose-tinted panacea. And at worst…

What Mr. Villinksi and the project curators are saying to the people of New Orleans with this conceptual art is: you don’t count. Instead of building this trailer, if our primary concern was your wellbeing, we could have done something much more direct. But God knows then we’d be aid workers, or community workers, or something, or have to have you people stay on our couches, and that’s such a… discreet gesture that has nothing to do with what we do, which is art. We travel the world parachuting installations in to loaded contexts, chattering about globalization and diasporas over our martinis, before we ship them back home in immaculate customized crates and try and flog them to some dealers; and if you’re lucky and get a job in the French Quarter then the economic regeneration aspects of the biennial mean that maybe you’ll get some trickle down voodoo fiscal benefit in the form of an extra big tip when the biennial drones swarm us in November, or pick up some additional security work to stop the art trailer being ripped off for materials. Otherwise the only trickle down is what you already had when the levees ruptured. Not our fault: the issue is much bigger than anything we could do. We’re on your side, and believe in your right to repurpose as you see fit (other than the trailer). We hope that our sympathetic (even empathetic) explanation of the human wonder of this project might impart some small sense to you that your struggle matters; because we are really nice people and truly feel your pain. Should the levees ever break again, don’t hesitate to call us for the emergency artist, who will probably get there days before the National Guard and the health services. Unless the trailer is out of the country at the Sao Paolo biennial. In which case, revert to what you did last time.

IN PART FOUR: some closing thoughts on potential new disaster art possibilities. To China and Myanmar and beyond.