Issue # 5

Appropriate

I will sell you, no no, I will give you characters that exist in my mind who are involved in a plot which is not mine who speak a language which is not mine communicated to you via a technology that is not mine.

From the late 70s: glam, punk, terrorism. Everyone was dressing up and pretending to be someone else. They were someone else. Texts were hijacked and brought together in a new ensemble to underline private ownership of text (copyright) and ultimately question who controls cultural meaning. Claude Levi-Strauss was the inventor of denim jeans. He thought they matched his pith helmet he wore when on safari. One night he wore them after work to a party where Dick Hebdige (dressed as a pirate) caught on. Tristan Tzara pulled cut-up words from a newspaper out of a hat to create a poem. I wonder if anyone was shocked. I doubt it. The next performer was David Antin who said: "we are all foreigners in the language you know its very funny to talk about acquisitions of secondary languages because nobody comes in speaking the language you come into the world not speaking it and its their language and theyve spoken it and you havent spoken anything youve been involved in looking in feeling and touching in transactions with them and all the while they keep talking this foreign language and gradually you take it from them ..." He spoke like that with large pauses so you could insert your own meaning. Or, he wasn't very good at punctuation. He was always running late. Then things got wild and Levi-Strauss tore his jeans quite by accident to be sure but this didn't escape the keen eye of the pirate Hebdige. Bricolage is a process of ordering, classifying and structuring the physical world in an improvised or ad hoc way, taking a sign from one context and positioning it within another to convey a different message. Dick thought the ripped jeans were appropriate and wanted a pair of his own.

Then what happened:
Two identical things.
Which are in fact different.
A pen is a deterritorialized stick. Or spear.

Kathy Acker said "You introduce conventions so you can FUCK with them". Ern Malley agreed, he was, after all, two soliders fucking. The pirate described subcultures as systems of subversive transformation. Just before midnight, the author died. I wonder if anyone was shocked. I doubt it. It wasn't the first time he'd died. They say he once came back as a woman. They'd know. They put a man on the moon. Displacement and condensation of images as in a dream, an archeology of cultural memory, a repetition of detail: Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault stopped on the way home to inspect a rave poster featuring computer graphics superimposed on a photograph of a Mayan temple. Fancy a spot of archeology Sigmund? Oh no my dear boy, it's far too late for that. They knew a thing or two about drugs. Identities? Always be sure to have several tucked away in your back pocket. Keep moving sideways, smoothing space as you go.

But:
What happens if Levi-Strauss' ripped jeans are on sale at Just Jeans for only fifty bucks, should I buy a pair?
Who is going to operate the machine when I'm gone?
Who's responsible for all these words now the author's dead? All of us?