An Army of Lovers. David Buuck
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and his desire for picturesque performance art, the spell worked, in a certain sense of the word, and though what happened next began rather mundanely, it can best be described not with poetry but by resorting to the language Tommy Lee used in his description of the party that Pamela Anderson threw for his thirty-third birthday, along with various first-person accounts of the Woodstock concert of 1999, and Livy’s description of the Bacchanalia in his History of Rome. What happened next began with shit. Raw sewage began pouring out of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system tunnel and collecting in a series of small pools or lakes on the small plot of land. At first, Demented Panda and Koki just sat there as if slightly stoned from the shock of the spell working and watched the pool of sewage seeping up and out of the small plot of land. The flood of sewage grew to be fifty feet long and perhaps a foot deep and soon it flowed over the laps of Demented Panda and Koki and into the intersection, where cars continued driving through it.
The smell of the raw sewage seemed to only intensify Demented Panda’s spell-casting, mess-making desires, so he got up from his seated position and stood in the middle of the small plot of land whirring his arms over his head as if signaling to an invisible fleet of helicopters that it was time to land, and as a result of this whirring, two rows of flames appeared, stretching out for hundreds of feet in front of him and then, just as suddenly, young girls in sheer flowing gowns and bare feet appeared all around him and sang “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you” over and over as they unrolled a red carpet between the lines of fire. Clowns and acrobats materialized, filling the air with confetti. A giant on stilts dressed as the devil walked through the tangle of girls, parting them like a sea. There was a Ferris wheel, roller coasters, contortionists in boxes, caged lions, and bubble machines. Impertinent beings in white face and breasty girls in top hats then began to practice debaucheries of every kind, as each found at hand the form of consumption to which he or she was disposed by the passion predominant in his or her nature, such as the pushing out of butts from the wearing of high heels or the accenting of the genitalia with tight pants or the excessive ornamentation and exaggeration of secondary sexual characteristics or the promiscuous intercourse of eating high levels of refined sugar, white flour, trans fat, polyunsaturated fats, and salt, or the burning of excessive amounts of fossil fuels by endlessly idling buses and trucks. Koki looked around and she noticed diamond-covered push-up bras, pubic areas vajazzled with Swarovski crystal ornaments instead of hair, skyscraper heels covered with pavé-style tiny twinkling crystals, and diamond-encrusted dog tags. Demented Panda looked around and he noticed stands filled with hawkers of food, such as Dove Bars, Frozen Lemonades, Iced Mochas, Orange Mango Drinks, Sprites, Pepsis, Cokes, Nachos, Tenders and Poppers, Jelly Buns, Fat-Free Soft Serve Ice Creams, Gourmet Butter Salt Potatoes, Caramel Apples, Jelly Bellys, Doughnuts, and Arepas. Enormous mounted speakers amplified angry and ecstatic guitar solos, trap drums playing taps, and brass trumpets playing reveille. Musicians kept appearing and joining in, some blowing their horns from great distances, others using joysticks or satellite communication systems to control their computers and samplers and sound processors and circuit-bent video game consoles. DJs spun and scratched the dented hubcaps of half-exploded armed personnel carriers, the hillbilly armor attached to sprawling networks of scrapped wiring and repurposed military hardware, improvised exclamatory devices screeching into the general din and frenzy.
It was a big production, with a budget of $1,229,735,801,934.00. Camouflage-costumed figures rappelled from copters hovering above as others raised their arms to receive and pass along any number of bodies leaping and falling from above through pulsing strobe lights meant to induce sleep-deprivation, bewilderment, and increased motivations for compliance. The approximately 919,967 revelers lined up in a seemingly endless chorus line, arms linked or amputated stumps pressed up against one another, all singing in a half-whisper, “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” The musicians made sounds like Dopplerized armored vehicles speeding by a riot at a heavy metal concert, with yelling and whistling and catcalls in what seemed like a hundred different languages, a riotous wash of voices shouting in the mosh pit, running, diving into the shit, with break-off factions scaling the twelve-foot-high, three-foot-thick reinforced concrete Bremer walls that surrounded the entrance to the heavy-rail public rapid transit system, posing for the closed-circuit security cameras busy scanning the theater of operations in order to document all that’s done in our name, before stage-diving into soft, greasy piles of Styrofoam nacho containers, paper hamburger wrappers, cardboard french fry boxes, and plastic beer cups.
All of this was surrounded by mobile production trucks and, in the shadows behind the mobile production trucks, empty buses parked in double rows stretching out for at least a quarter of a mile, and in the darkness behind the buses, oversize tractor-trailer trucks, the kind that transport forklifts and boilers and other heavy industrial equipment on superhighways at night. All of these vehicles had brought all the excesses to the small plot of land and had their air conditioners and refrigeration units running, so they gurgled as they idled, spewing fumes until soon the small plot of land was covered with a dense brownish-yellow hazy cloud filled with the oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons.
Demented Panda and Koki wandered through the small plot of land. Except it was no longer only a small plot of land, but also an enormous food court. Except it wasn’t just a food court, but also an outdoor rehearsal space lent to artists by a small nonprofit arts organization. Except it wasn’t a rehearsal space, but a soundstage for gigantic live entertainments. Except it wasn’t a soundstage, but a fake Baghdadi neighborhood staged for counterinsurgency training exercises. Not a fake neighborhood but an intersection in the Financial District on the night of March 23, 2003. Not an intersection but an interrogation room. Not an interrogation room but a holding cell funded by the Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorist efforts, holding 2,438 protestors in a nearby warehouse rented for this very purpose. Not a warehouse-turned-holding cell but a warehouse-turned-club where the after-party takes place. Not an after-party but an academic conference on politics and aesthetics. Not a conference but a boardroom meeting on tax-deductible philanthropic donations to nonprofit arts organizations. Not a boardroom but a bunker, dug into the wet and muddy ground. Not a bunker but a book, each line redacted except for the numbers. Not a book but a bonfire made from its burning pages, with untold revelers dancing around it. Not a bonfire but a set of bright stage lights, illuminating the small plot of land so that the audience could better see the action. Except that there’s no audience, since all this was happening now and everyone was knee-deep in it, not just watching but as embedded participants. Even pointing and gaping was participation. Even taking cellphone photos for documentation was participation. Even standing perfectly still and doing nothing was participation.
But Demented Panda and Koki did not bother to stand perfectly still, did not limit themselves to cellphone photographs or taking notes for their collaborative poem. Instead they muddled their way through the lakes of raw sewage that were slowly filling with empty pizza boxes and crushed Sprite bottles, and were both thrilled and anxious, excited by the unleashed energy and skeptical of its implications, eager to join in because the scenes they watched were part of a larger story of their time, which in turn was a very minor episode in the history of debauchery and excess in civilization. And these excesses were not confined to one species of vice, for from this storehouse of villainy also proceeded punching, slapping, and kicking, jumping on naked feet, breaking of jaws and teeth, arranging bodies in various sexually explicit positions for photographing, forcing groups to masturbate while being videotaped, searching of anal and vaginal cavities, placing dog chains or straps around necks and having others pose as if taking them for a walk, dragging off screaming into dark, dank places, handcuffing wrists high up on the back, injecting various unknown drugs without consent, using dogs without muzzles to intimidate and frighten, allowing dogs to bite and severely injure, masking and then abducting on small privately owned jets, drawing of blood samples, plugging of ears, placing of rags over faces and pouring water over them, cutting away of clothes with knives and scissors, breaking of chemical lights and pouring of phosphoric liquid on bodies, threatening with cocked 9mm pistols, pouring of cold water over bodies, beating with broom handles and chairs, threatening with rape, sodomizing with chemical lights and broom sticks, threatening with guns and power drills, forcing into dark boxes for extended periods of time, slamming of heads against walls, slapping of faces and abdomens, and holding open of eyes while shining a torch into them. Meanwhile, the sounds