The Beginning of the End of Nowhere
Don't know how to say this, but the party that ends the party? It's just getting started.
How many hours a day do you sleep? OK, I mean if you’re sane? Let’s just say eight. And again, how many, if you’re not insane, do you spend with friends and loved ones, if you have them? OK, let’s just round this off at eight too. Leaving eight for whatever you do to fuel the above that someone else will pay you for.
So, that’s 24 hours in a day plus night, and Bob’s your uncle.
However in the last bit of time with a cataclysm of crap, COVID and wildly caustic craziness we’ve all become a bit…unmoored.
How so?
Well, if you’re “lucky” enough to have work, you can’t escape the fact that this is luck when so many go without. And luck forestalls LIKE, and so if you hate what you do, tough titty at least….well, at least, you can do it from home. Where your work day becomes your home day and so then the only portion of said day that carries any weight is the sleep portion, and that’s at night and the portion that’s beset by all of the nightmares birthed in your waking hours.
See, regardless of your political affiliation we’re all being fed a diet, steady as she goes, of anxiety, angst and fin de siècle psychoses. Which is to say if it really feels like we’re done, it’s because, in all likelihood, we’re really done.
“OK. I want you to bomb our bridges, power plants, the autobahn, the cities, water ways, and salt the fields!” Hitler was having a mood. The Soviets were up his ass, the Americans and Brits too. All on account of the unforced error of him having attacked the Soviets, Americans and Brits.
It was/is a perfect yeah-but counter to destroy everything because no matter what, you’ll still find wall drawings on Death Row.
“But what about the German people?” Asked Albert Speer, the Nazi with the Groovy Demeanor.
“Fuck the German people. They’ve failed me!” And so it went with Hitler hopping on a plane to Spain and a U-boat to Argentina.
But I’m paraphrasing. To make a point. And the point is: while the temptation when the party is over is to end it completely and totally, Speer’s query remains because the human remnant remains and needs be that, Arthur Miller style, attention must be paid.
So here we are. COVID’s still not done with us, politics is a shanty full of thieves and liars, our streets run with blood and garbage and still…we endure.
And a tribute to our enduring? Crafted in body and form by my boss, the genius Grace Francis who said, at some point, “you know this series you’re doing… ‘The Live Five’?”
Of course I knew it. It was a self-rip from this substack’s very own “Five Easy Pieces”. Five questions, five answers, in, out, no one gets hurt.
“Why don’t we make a bigger deal of it?” After years of having a hide-your-light-under-a-bushel boss this was a refreshing surprise. While WONGDOODY, the human experience company powered by Infosys, created the platform, the creations on the platform — all meditations on the nature of creativity — were ours to do with what we would. And what we would was to expand the conversation in the face of an international climate that is, in actual fact, the most dire imaginable.
It was/is a perfect yeah-but counter to destroy everything because no matter what, you’ll still find wall drawings on Death Row.
So everything that was on The Live Five? Will, as of tomorrow, October 10, 2022, be on The End of Nowhere. And if you were lucky enough to be in either London or New York last week, and bored enough to actually leave your house you could have gone to our launch shindigs where we displayed art by our homegrown artists on the artists that took the time to talk to us, and listen to said artists tear it up on stage and screen.
You got to see/hear Lydia Lunch make the first time public claim that Anthony Bourdain perhaps was not a victim of suicide. Well, that and how if you’re not fearless in the creation of art, home is precisely where you should stay. You also got to have the Baddest Bitch in the Room, Sophia Chang kill it when declaring that “your performative acts of inclusion post-George Floyd are BULLSHIT if not backed up by colored faces in decision making positions and so FUCK YOU.”
Or Columbia professor Dr. Laina Dawes start talking in depth about grind core. Or Pilar Newton-Katz admitting like Henry Hill did when he declared that he never wanted to be anything other than a gangster, that she never wanted to be anything other than an animator.
A whole coterie of creatives who do so while damning the torpedoes…one, after another, after another. So while last week’s substack was also sort of a commercial, this one is that too, but also a call to arms. If we have to go to the gallows let’s go singing, the dithyramb preferably, and pay tribute to our eternal inner lives.