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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Tomorrow night I am talking on a panel about self-publishing (details here). In an effort to figure out what I think about self-publishing these days, I've been looking back over some old work. I used to disseminate simple, black and white, three-fold flyers as art projects. I decided to post the text and images below from one of my favourites, first made in 1996.
It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
– David Bowie, "Five Years"
The end of the world was thoroughly predictable and yet it surprised everyone. It was hot. The sun hung low in the sky, a huge dark ball of flame. There were massive earthquakes and people fell into great rifts that opened suddenly in the ground, slipping down into the flaming bowels of the planet. There was mass hysteria, sobbing, screaming and looting. The highways were clogged with cars. Loved ones clung to each other with wild fear in their eyes. Teenagers tried desperately to get home to their families. TV news announcers stayed, sobbing, at their posts until the electricity went dead, like captains going down with the ship. Mothers clutched children to their breasts and fathers stood by, paralysed with love, frustration, fear and rage. All this was expected.
What surprised everyone was that it only happened once. Adults were amazed to find that, along with everything else, they felt relieved. This was finally it. It was like the release you feel when your home-team, a non-functioning group of pathetic, disillusioned millionaire pro-athletes from other cities, gets eliminated from the playoffs and you don’t have to muster the energy to cheer for them any more. They just had to get through these next few hours and all those years of anxiety would finally be over.
Another surprise was that it wasn’t really all that bad. Each individual death was no more excruciating than being shot in the head during a liquor store hold-up, dying in a house fire, or being crushed under the wheels of a truck, all familiar events that had been happening to people for ever.
People looked about them blankly. They saw that it was the end of the world. There was fire, there was brimstone, four horsemen came clattering around the corner and whizzed by in a dramatic flurry of blowing capes and manes. It looked just like they’d imagined it would, and yet most people felt distracted from the the significance of the event. This wasn’t a story book disaster or a made-for-TV movie. Everyone had a million other pressing, specific details clamouring for their attention.
Another surprise was that no one survived. When it was all over, and the dust had finally settled, there was no lone soul left staggering through the rubble. No one woke from a terrible nightmare to find that it was all true – no one got to be the last one left alive on a ravaged planet. The place was truly deserted. The cockroach race continued, just like everyone thought they would, but they were insects who never had a concept of humanity to start with.
It was done now, and no one had really even seen it happen.
Tom Moody has a nice post today (with mp3s) on the recent Whitney Biennial performance by Cory Arcangel and Beige. Follow the link to Thickeye's review. These folks are doing some great music/tech/art stuff, "dirtstyle," both in performance and online.
photo by Germaine Koh of weewerk (thanks G!)
You've read about Joe McKay's Colour Game, now you can play it (if you are in Toronto). This week only at weewerk!
photo by Bunnie (me making a save, J
"Sirens intended to warn Pickering residents of a safety risk at the nearby nuclear plant are gathering dust in a warehouse after local politicians refused to install them, calling them Cold War "monstrosities" and a threat to property values." Toronto Star Mar. 3, 2004.
Pickering is a suburb with a great big nuclear power plant on the eastern side of Toronto. This has been quite the hilarious hullaballoo. How about those rusty old reactors bringing down property values? Well they're behind the nice burm, you see, no problem. My friend B. Smiley suggests a design for the sirens: elegant curved poles that bend down to the ground so that the siren itself can be aesthetically buried (muffled, if you will) in a pile of sand.
The Star article has dropped offline, but you can read it here, on the riderfans.com forum (for those of you south of the 49th, Canadian football fans can be scary too). This guy David W. cites the story as an example of civilian foolishness. His surreal quote: "And you wonder why the military is falling apart in this country - and will continue to do so? 'cause Canadians talk a good preparedness story but when push comes to shove they only think of themselves."
Now that Arnie has been in office for long enough that the horror has worn off, I recently felt capable of somewhat enjoying Terminator 3. My friends and I laughed pretty hard during the big car chase scene, when the terminatrix is in a giant utility truck, swinging Arnold around on the end of a hook. Things get boring, however, as the show goes on. The dialogue is mostly lame recycled jokes and the acting is middling to poor. They really drag out the plot and I must confess that humanoid-shaped cyborgs just ain't where its at right now. I'm no expert, but I think they are testing out nanotech on scarier stuff than melty chrome. Here's my (least) favourite part, the impactful, overserious voice-over narration at the end: "I finally realised that my destiny all along was not to stop the planet from nuclear destruction, but to survive it." Niiiice. Him and his pretty future wife with their future kids swimming around in their gonads, all locked up together nice and safe in an empty presidential bunker. Time to go check on my trip-wire mine field, barbed-wire fence, and stockpiles of bottled water, plastic sheets and duct tape.