Grateful Dead

'I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it.'

- Cindy Sherman

As corruption anymore, there is only the exhilaration of screwing everyone.

-- From a review of "The Wolf of Wall Street" --

...When we drop the puck.

Ron Maclean on Hockey Night in Canada

'Is the act of producing sound alone sufficient to create music? Our assemblage of individually emitted sounds is abandoned before it has reached a state where it could be called music. This is different from an assemblage of sounds that are produced with a single purpose. I wonder how the audience (who had come to hear music) perceived these ambiguous sounds from an ambiguous group. Those who listened politely for three hours each constructed their own music, choosing sounds from their own individual experiences and memories. Still, they must have been left with some sense of uneasiness, a doubt that this was music. An uneasiness that i felt too, like the gap between myself and another. Music functions as a device for rapture or contemplation. Accordingly, this doubt distances our actions from music. But if the audience were able to forget their uneasiness for a moment during our lengthy action, perhaps its potential becomes clearer. Neither rapture nor contemplation, but an awakened experience of time. Not experiment but experience.'

- Kazuo Imai

'Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless webs of interacting blendings... running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang onto, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We gave no thought to anything at all. Everything was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world.
And then something occurred to us. The climate changed. We couldn't breathe. It grew terribly cold. Far too cold for us. Everything we touched was poisonous. Noxious gases and thin toxic airs flooded our oceanic zone. Some said we had brought in on ourselves, that all our activity had backfired, that we had destroyed our environment by an accident we had provoked. There were rumors of betrayal and sabotage, whisperings of alien invasion and mutant beings from another ship.
Only a few of us survived the break. Conditions were so terrible that many of those who did pull through wished they had died. We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognizable to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind which, like everything, had been unthinkable before. We found ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their parasites? Were they ours? Either way we became components of our own imprisonments. To all intents and purposes, we disappeared.'

- Sadie Plant