“The fuckers, the bean counters, the lawyers, all these assholes at every label. Those are the people who wrecked the record business – not Napster, not some college kid downloading shit. The people without vision.” – Anton Newcombe
age: 24
location: New York City
This is not a story of what I want to do because I’ve done it. This is not a story about who I am or what I am because I am not. This is a story about the stillness of the city at night, when you catch it at the precise moment where the air is as fragile as the light from the light posts, and the streets are as asleep as the sun, as asleep as the many that lie in their bed without enough energy to weep anymore but just to close their eyes.
I find myself caught in this moment not as much I would like. But whenever I am, I have to tiptoe through the midnight scene just as a boy does when he gets up and leaves the family he has created in search of a new thrill. And those lucky few that have eyes opened enough to catch the city’s state tiptoe too. No one wants to be responsible for interrupting a baby’s rest. No one wants to let a moment become a memory.
Which is why I don’t know if others realize it when they step out onto the dim lit pavement. When their drunken chatter emerges. When smoke rises up from the cigarette they just lit. I had just witnessed a how alive street sign could be, how poetic the doors of closed storefronts are, and how beautiful it is when one can feel the world start to spin less and less to where they can keep up with it. I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to keep up with it. I can only spend it searching for that moment again.
POETIC TERRORISM
Excerpt from Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchy by Hakim Bey
“WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune–say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments–PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement…
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror– powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst–no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is “signed” or anonymous, if it does not change someone’s life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life–may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don’t do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don’t stick around to argue, don’t be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives–but don’t be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don’t get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.”
“See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.” – Kerouac
