the blind eye manifesto
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? The sky through Victorian windows. Their glass our mirror till morning. Winking back the dread.
Fierce loves deepest dread. Dread beyond humanitys words and machines and gerry rigged DNA. The dread of your minds 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 still strong and still putrefying in the throat of humanitys last utopian gasps.
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 Bardots 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 make an omelet!
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 seize them and dirty their cotton sheets.
Blast fools that explode their brains on the ray-tube speedways 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, dont you? If only YOU had NOTHING TO LOOSE 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.
Exoptic, our tv-attack missiles detonate on screen and you look away. You rather notice dust bunnies swirl below the glowing raster.
Our loves 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 greeds 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 the sun. Now feel hate. Now feel love. Now feel lust. What images for that in the POST-WORD [POST-WORD world? 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 tvs 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 tvs 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 thats 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.
© 1997 willy mal, NYC