Let me tell you how the daylight soothed our eyes.
All night we fought and paced and scrawled notes on butcher-paper torn and tacked up, draped and wrinkling from room to room.
Our deadline? Morning's sun through Victorian windows. Their glass our mirrored countdown. Winking back the dread.
Fierce love’s deepest dread. Dread beyond humanity’s words and machines and gerry-rigged DNA. The dread of your mind’s very eyes and ears and heart.
Thrown out the bright copper doors we blinked at the sky and the stars were gone. We blinked. We BLINKED and LOOKED AWAY while the billionaires and celebrities amongst us scurried to the street and hurried to waiting cars.
Now these lines are left to me. This call to action! Our credo. Our "blind eye manifesto!"
MANIFESTO?!
Who could read a manifesto today?
You hear "manifesto" and you smell the smoky rot of manifestoes’ murdered and burnt bodies. Their last gasps a curse upon the utopian screed.
So who now dares write a manifesto?
Nobody. Call me nobody. Nobody who asks:
Have you seen the blood soaked
Manifesto Repository where
Manifesto Theater and
Manifesto Film and
Manifesto Television and
Manifesto Liberation Computer Networking flicker with Bertolt Brecht in red wax, crude thinking and cutting out Brigitte Bardot’s black rubber heart while Noam Chomsky applauds and Steven Spielberg in chains weeps and ex-Chairman Bill Gates plays the late night cold-food plastic-wrap salesman.
And the orchestra pit is filled with broken skulls and blood because, ‘You have to break a few eggs to bake a cake!’
Still nobody I repeat:
Blast fools that anchor their minds in sweet book-mold vaults and tremble terrified that tv demons will leap from gutters to dirty their cotton sheets.
Blast fools that explode their brains on the ray-tube speedway’s closed tracks whose spinning back-drops are choked with electric ozone smog.
And blast fools trapped in the vortex.
Ah, clever reader! Now you smell old manifestoes’ stinky feet, don’t you? If only YOU had NOTHING TO loosen BUT YOUR CHAINS . . . Instead you dream that you too feel and taste your Sudanese wet-nurse.
Good nose! Fine tongue!
Our fight is the old fight, the hopeless struggle. But seek ye not citare herein for this is NOT scholarship.
Our combat is the total war of love. Our technique annihilates television, movies, the academy, museums, galleries and the internet. How we love them all. How we love tv, the greatest enemy. Tv, where flow perfect (and imperfect) bodies in perfect (and imperfect) light through perfect (and imperfect) shade to perfect (and imperfect) sounds, stories, and words, yes,
WORDS, that all insist:
Look here.
Look now.
Look again.
Exoptic, our tv-attack missiles detonate on screen and you look away. You rather notice dust bunnies swirl below the glowing raster.
Our love’s affection demolishes. Our trillion pairs of lips pursed and pressing obliterate tv and every Art Expo. They pulverize the most compelling Cinema, the final Theory and the deadliest Killer-App Linked Web Page.
As artists and intellectuals, amateurs and professionals, we detest ART. We agree with Picasso, "Neither trust paid generals to rule in war nor artists to reign over art!"
For beauty is greed’s eager slave.
Look where you are. Squint into the distance. All that you see shines. All that you see comes coated by Movie Era eye-plasma. You stand upon the pulsing eyeballs of the moving picture era, staring. There you spy re-play and re-production perfected.
1 picture = 1000 words
If only.
Now feel a sun's heat. Fog's chill. Feel hate. Love. Feel desire for her, him, that. What pictures now? What talkie-image for vidiphone interconnectedness, maestro?
The great wave crashed and brought the movies.
Another television.
One more the Web.
Our heavy metal uranium bullets will pierce all ironic armor in techno color. For we are not ironic today.
Iron we cast in our guts, steeled to stomach the false hopes of others that this horny and bucking info-scape can be tamed by some nouveau Lord Riley's sense of Public Interest. (For there is no educational tv.) Because we sink in pleasure when tv’s flower opens and its petals flutter over our hearts and caress each organ. Because the medium is the MASSAGE.
Awake again, hung over, and back to war, we dynamite the message of the medium.
Our tactic is utter surrender to the embedded ideology of tv’s technology. There, we strain the fibers of our terrible core, bend to snapping bows, catapults and fingers on the trigger of black market ex-Soviet psychological weaponry. In those heating arcs we stock the counter-force.
The unrelenting flow and total intimacy of the tv world, beware. Our daggers touch your throat, kosher daggers so sharp that you feel only an itch under your chin when your jugular opens . . ....
Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssslit!
Dear Dead Marcuse,
We can never have only one dimension. And technological rationality is no enemy. But that’s another manifesto.
Our movement is irresistible. These times grant us an arsenal for refusal. A sublime NEIN! Nothing. No guilt therapy. No hugs. No anti-depressant. No sex therapy. No nada will grease loose our friction. Our conflict is inextinguishable. We can never merge in BALANCE and contentment.
Herr Marcuse, your one-dimensional nightmare is the living ghost we dispatch and exalt. We evoke the eternal gap whose death you grieved too early! Here, at last, we declare war on all media.
This is a manifesto for a time beyond manifestoes. A time that aches to hear its own voice and see its own face but keeps on looking at the television above the bar.
Filmmakers, video makers and anyone who watches, behold the rhythm of your time and shake it. Stomp down the springs on the light TRAP.
There is no option.
Seize the deflective lightning and hurl it before you! Conjure each movement, color, form and light to divert and release any eyes. Or perish choked on puddles of excremental glow-dabblings and tinker toy installations from the dead avant-garde.