1. We welcome the end of this decade; we kiss winter's face and her frost crackles in our mouths. Here's to death, defeat, lies, war, blood, bombs, money, piracy and pestilence, all the things which have made the first son of this miserable century glow so brightly.
2. We congratulate this decade for ending so many things: the end of analogue, the end of permanence, privacy, the pleasure of wax, of film, of disc, and thus the beginning the misery of the invisible. We hunt triumphantly through the digital wilderness, recording our footfalls in the static fuzz of the mud.
3. We mourn the death of Stockhausen, Ballard, Wallace, John Hughes, Jam Master Jay, J Dilla, Jacques Derrida, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Michael Jackson, Dash Snow, Susan Sontag and so many others. We mourn the drowning of the mighty polar bear in the once-frozen oceans of the Arctic, the execution of the innocent in public and the unending violence of modern existence.
4. We support the extinction of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the slaying of the Griffin, the suffering of government and media. We confess this decade's hidden age, for the 21st Century begins where the Berlin Wall falls and fully awakens when another ideological structure crashes down amid the breeze and chill of autumn.
5. We warm ourselves over the end of rock music, a tyrannical, murderous form which is now only safe speaking the language of the ironic, sitting excluded in the corner, punished for ignoring its source material; its rejection of the electronic as feminine and futuristic and the African as masculine and primitive. We support this formal extinction entirely.
6. We eagerly await the return of dead formats in the mode of irony (the return of the video, the Compact Disc, the LaserDisc, the Betamax, MiniDisc, the cassette, the television et cetra). We anticipate the dissolution of the city, the further blurring of gender and orientation into a great slurry of lust, the ravenous consumption of bedroom chemicals and inner-city narcotics so we may enter into a true politics of 21st Century delirium. We photograph the pollution of our rivers, sing the rhythm of the power station, the scale of acid rain, touch the rime of sickly skin, wear the coats of medication- go on!- let each cochlea fill with the horrid buzz of a thousand malfunctioning modems, cables, wires, connection points. All smog-tongued lovers learn the language of the new century!
7. As the century enters its adolescence we invite the eruption of skin disorders, sexual disease, coldness of feeling, drug abuse, mortality, depression, selfishness and patricide.
8. All mice, become dogs.
SIGNAL. SIGNAL OUT. SIGNAL.
'Seraphim' by Anselm Kiefer. No copyright infringement intended.
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