A Manifesto For The End Of The Decade Of Nothing- 2000s

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.

1. Aidan Baker- Part One

2. Stereolab- Anamorphose

3. Ariel Pink- For Kate I Wait

'Seraphim' by Anselm Kiefer. No copyright infringement intended.

Index Of Failure

Acedia, accede, Achilles, AIDS, akrasia, Ali, Muhammed, alienation, (Western, Marxist) Bartleby, banality (in Western culture; in films), Beckett, Samuel, bewilderment, Blanchot, Maurice, boredom, Borges, (and blindness) Bowie, David (and mime, and cocaine, and mid-80s career slump) Burroughs, William Seward (heroin addiction, shooting of wife), Bush, Kate, catalepsis, catastrophe, Chernobyl, Cobain, Kurt (see also: In Utero), collapse, Coppola, Francis Ford (see also: The Conversation), Conversation, The (see also: Coppola, Francis Ford) confusion, Crash (Ballard), crisis, Culkin, Macaulay, Curtis, Ian (see also: Strozsek), derangement, de-map, Deyn, Agynes, Dickinson, Emily, disorder, disaster, Dylan, Bob (pre-motorbike crash, 1966 England tour), dysphoria, eczema, Edwards, Richey (and disappearance, and 4 real incident, and fascism), error, eruption (of boils, of 'moral outrage), explosion (of economy, of packages in North America through primitive devices), The Face, falling, falsity, failure (i.e. in famous examples or 'cases': of the Sinclair C5, of man to inhabit the moon by promised date, of replicating International Klein Blue, of Microsoft computers, of economy, of God, to finish, of Challenger launch, of Face Magazine), Fassbinder (and struggle to find love, and the making of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and cocaine addiction), Faulkner's Quentin, Faust, feigning, folly, forgetting, format extinction, fucking up, Fuck You(r), Buddy. funding problems in the early '80s (for institutions), Generation X, God (death of, failure of, epistemic distance between man and,), Godard, Jean-Luc (Weekend, Soft And Hard), Gogol, Nikolai (starvation, Dead Souls), greed, Gorbachev, Mikhail (see also: glasnost, perestroika), Gordon, Douglas (24 Hour Psycho, Zidane: 21st Century Portrait, see also: Zidane), Gordon, Kim, Gore, Tipper (see also: Zappa, Frank), Groucho Marx, Hearst, Patty, Heaven's Gate, Henson, Jim (Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal), heroin chic, Hirst, Damien (A Thousand Years, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living), Hopper, Dennis (delirium tremens in desert, in Blue Velvet), Hudson Hawk, Hughes, Howard, Hughes, John (and depiction of adolescent angst, use of music, descent of career), illusory humanity, immanence, immersion, inability, inexorable (decline, defeat, loss), Jam, James, Richard D., Jarmusch, Jim (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law), jeremiad (of Ophelia, of Lady Macbeth), Johnston, Daniel, Joyce, James, jungle music, kabbalah, Kafka, Franz (and 'First Sorrow', and 'Hunger Artist', and 'Diaries, see also: 'Kafkaesque' and with relation to failure, Cronenberg's Kafka), Korine, Harmony (Gummo, Kids, drug addiction, see also: Godard, Dylan, The Face), kudzu vine, lack (as theory, of sleep, of sufficient urban renewal in England and US), Levinas, levitation, Liddel, Alice, London (and bombings, and desertion in the 1970s, and anxiety), loss of dignity, loss of memory, Lynch, David (and failure of Dune, and success of Blue Velvet, and owls)

madness (in Nietzsche, historical attitudes, as artistry in Dada), Malkovich, John, Marceau, Marcel, massacres (of the 1990s, of the 1980s, of the 1970s, of the 1960s), masturbation (see also: onanism), Manson, Charles (solo album, television interviews), Meinhof, Ulrike, see also: Red Army Faction, Morrissey (and dislike of videos, and Northern England, and flirtation, and homoeroticism) MTV (initial racism, lack of music, influence on youth), Nauman, Bruce (Run From Fear, No, No, No), Nabokov, Vladimir (and butterflies, and incest), Nag and Nell (see also: Beckett, Samuel), Neue Slowenische Kunst, nihilism, Nietzsche (and master and slave morality, and syphilis, and errant decoding by Nazism in), Northern England (and Morrissey, strike action, unemployment), Nico (The Marble Index), nothingness, numbness, Nyman, Michael (Drowning by Numbers soundtrack, unfinished Shandy opera)

Ol' Dirty Bastard, oral disease, Ophelia (see also: jeremiad), Orly Airport (bomb scare, location in La Jetee), Opium (perfume, substance, text), onanism (see also: masturbation), Ono, Yoko (solo albums, performance art), Only The Lonely, Orphee, Paradise Lost (Milton, heavy metal, Penderecki), Paracetemol (frequency in overdoses, popularity in UK), Phoenix, River (death, performance in My Own Private Idaho), Pop, Iggy (flirtation with Nazi chic, and Berlin), Performance (film, 1970, see also: Roeg, Nicolas), perestroika, postmodernism (and failure, and disillusion, and irony. See also: Warhol, MTV, Manson), Prozac, Pynchon, Thomas (and entropy, and reclusion, and drugs, and death, see also: Rilke, postmodernism), quiescence, Reagan, Ronald, Reagan, Nancy, rhetoric (and Aristotle, and Reagan, Nancy), Remain In Light (Talking Heads), riot grrl movement, Ryder, Winona, Schopenhauer, Arthur, Scorscese, Martin, Self-Portrait (Dylan album), self-mutilation, self-doubt, self-improvement, self-destruction, Sevigny, Chloe (see also: Korine, Harmony, The Face), Sheedy, Ally, Sherman, Cindy (and the pleasure of the gaze, and loathing) Shields, Kevin, Shields, Brooke (anti-depressants and, child pornography controversy and), Situationist International, Slick Rick, Sonic Youth (See also: Gordon Kim, Youth Against Fascism, 1oo%), Stroszek (Herzog film. See also: Curtis, Ian), Sturm und Drang, Sterne, Laurence, Streetwise (film), syphilis

Talking Heads, Tarkovsky, Andrei (and the Zone, and time, and cancer), Tristram Shandy (see: Sterne, Laurence), tumescence, Turner, (see: Performance), Unknown Pleasures (see: Curtis, Ian), In Utero (see also: Kurt Cobain, heroin chic), Ulmer, James 'Blood', Valium, violence (Paris 1968 and, Zizek and), vulnerability (theory, 2000s and), Wallace, David Foster, Wallace, Christopher, We (Zamyatin), What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Chomsky), Wilson, Jane and Louise (Gamma, Trance), Wu-Tang Clan, When Doves Cry (Prince single, 1984), Wonderland (see also: Liddell, Alice), Yes (see also: Edwards, Richey), Young MC, Young Marble Giants, Youth Against Fascism (Sonic Youth single, 1991), Zamyatin, Yevgeny (See also: We), Zidane (and self-destruction. See also: Gordon, Douglas), Zizek, Slavoj (and violence, and Lacan, and cinema theory. See also: Neue Slowenische Kunst, violence), 9/11 (and reporting of, and parody of, and repetition of, and visual quality of), 100% (Sonic Youth single. 1991. See also: Sonic Youth, Youth Against Fascism)

1. Leyland Kirby- Memories Live Longer Than Dreams

2. Nico- These Days

3. LTJ Bukem- Atlantis

A-L photograph by Jane and Louise Wilson, M-S photograph of William Burroughs from the 1980s, N-O photograph of Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny, 1995, photographer unknown, S-100% photograph of Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the 1980s, photographer unknown and addendum photograph of Slavoj Zizek. No copyright infringement intended.

Joggrafi

Amorica, Warshington (Locate your own city on the map and mark with a silver star. Good. Also note the decaying railways of Brokelyn and the remnants of race riots in Correticut, the last Aryan state.)

Errorland, Duhblin (Kiss three spaniels. Named in accordance with Joyce's deathbed wishes, this country enjoys great prosperity through its reformation of the legal system. Litigation is now dependent on the plaintiff's citing of various arcane references. Court rises to the sounds of gunfire and static, soon brought to order by the recitation of 'Well, you know, or don't you ken it or haven't I told you, every telling has a tailing and that's the he and she of it.'

Perish, Franz! (Enrage a sleeping tramp with the poking of a stick. Run by a bicameral government of literary mavens who, following the firebombing of Prug over 'heritage disputes', won the figure and form of Kafka but, after bartering, lost Simone and Jean-Paul in the famous December Couples Treaty. Following political rupture the country is now divided into pro and anti-Kafka factions. Many pro-Kafka cities are inhabited by groups which pass time lying on their backs in stricken insectile anguish, then look to the cement skies and scream. In anti-Kafka cities the work is interpreted by application of Correct Brodism where, as a way of 'correcting' history, poor Franz's work is endlessly burned in public squares.)

Ignoreway, ---- (Nothing. Forgotten. Terribly cold. Represented on all modern maps as a blank traversed by a great groaning smudge of toxic ink.)

Lungdung, Engleland (Fake a cold. Avoid work at the call centre. Rent videos. Eat bad food. Masturbate. Communist and with a strictly enforced smoking policy the city of carcinogenic cold seasons and early oncological autumns continues to raise the fist of Communism, however bad its circulation. This is actually great improvement, brought on by the deposition of Paxman- immortalised in a triptych on loan to the Pompidou in Perish- who became convinced he was king and so inaugurated years of tyranny, great taxation and hunger.

Below: Amorican minimalist Tao Lin's soundscape project 'Jesus Christ' (the indie band) with their breakthrough hit 'Is This Really What You Want?', Engelish techno angels Mike And Rich with their marvellous 'Eggy Toast'- 'a mega-fucking lush choon, yeah?'- and Nouvelle Vague chanson 'Tu M'As Trop Menti' by Chantal Goya sourced from the original celluloid reels of 'Masculin, Feminin'

1. Jesus Christ (the indie band)- Is This Really What You Want?

2. Mike And Rich- Eggy Toast

3. Chantal Goya- Tu M'As Trop Menti

'Stag' by Gerhard Richter. No copyright infringement intended. Please forgive connection problem. Sound will return soon.

I Want The Biggest Horns Money Can Buy

I've been digging a hole for quite a while now, it's now as deep as three men my size, maybe four. Sometime I ask my friends to come over to help me dig it, but in all honesty I prefer to dig alone. I like the satisfaction you get when you accomplished something by yourself, be it a task as menial as digging a hole. Although yesterday Goldie Hawn came over and helped me dig. We talked about the clouds and drank pink lemonade. Then we took off our tops in the heat, and started to dig some more. She tied back her wavy long blonde hair because it kept getting in her face. I let Goldie use the nice shovel that I had bought earlier that week, once I had realised how deep I planned to go. I instead used my father shovel. It had a broken handle and the black paint on the wooden shaft was peeling. I couldn't let Goldie use that could I, what would she have thought of me? By mid afternoon Goldie had left, she had to get home to start dinner. I was left alone once again to carry on digging. Usually I stop by eight thirty at night, but for some reason that day I did not feel tired, and carried on well into the night. I think this will hole will be my grave, it's the right sort of size. I don't want to buried laying on my back, I want to be stood up, in a proud sort of manner. When I'm finished digging, I think it would be best to bury something in my hole. To prove how deep I got. A photo perhaps, or some milk teeth. So everyone knows that it was my hole.

Rick Springfield - Jessie's Girl

Photo of Francis Albert Sinatra taken by Bergen County, New Jersey police force in 1938 on his arrest for seduction of and the act of adultery with a married woman. No Copyright infringement intended.

Do you think they're ready for Bonnie?

I wandered through the hallway into a room full of children, immediately gravitating towards the supposed "adult section" of the room, pushing past the private eyes that watched my entrance. The line between child and adult defined with a line of vomit strewn across the floor. It was Homecoming, or Graduation, I couldn't quite remember. The Nocturnal youth lay under a net of puberty, crawling and scratching at the rope that held them down. I walked over to the caged children, "it's mind over matter". I hoped my words would give them some solace, in their time of sexual confusion. I took a seat by the breakfast bar while people jumped and stomped on the table tops and screamed and kissed. Pouring my £7 wine into a white plastic cup. An older woman approached me. She sat down next to me and we discussed my future; where I thought my life was taking me, what path should I choose. She expressed a obvious worry about the number of youths that had crawled in. I told her to lock the doors at 10:30, after that let no more enter. She calmed her down and we poured more wine into our plastic cups. She talked about Chekhov, I hadn't read any of his work but I promised I would.

Gareth Williams And Mary Currie - The Best Weapon
SALEM - Frost



Photo of Lida Baarova, 7/9/1914 in Prague. No Copyright infringement intended

European Athletics

He wakes up- shrugs the menacing whale away- walks to the kitchen which is full of bleached, cold light- late afternoon- yawn- covered in black and grey duvet- dragged on floor- fridge light- no milk- not black coffee- he'll puke- he aches- more bed- he can't walk to the little food den, no money- too cold- he decides not to walk at all- television- low volume- a leotarded Russian foal curves slowmotionish um over high jumping bar- um, dick won't thaw- icicled scrot- she fails, the foal, the bar wobbles- the shower will be hotter- I hope it snows- he thinks- the roads will close- bed- bed- bed- he finds some bread- into the toaster- he stares at heat- his eyes hurt- cancel, cancel, cancel- toast sucks- black furry toast jumps out- drug fag!- horror outside- outside vet's in car park- men like dogs- paranoid- a question- kiss a puddle- she saves- nothing works- poor Russian girl skinning a rabbit on a frozen lake- she removes ballet slippers- smokes- slips out of tights- I'm tired- tongue out, snowflake, he thinks- cough-cough-cough- her thundering lungs as she phelgms from a tenement into a heap of dead birds- she features in a catalogue for pale, diseased Russian princes- aches- floppy cock- Mister mute unbulged- slug slump- sickly, Prozacked grey hermaphrodite- shhh, toast cold- and the lovely swimming pool girl from ages and ever ago who snogged him in the autumn- sniff- chlorinated hair- tarry Xmas light in car park- three chimes- hour- sad anorexic ballet girl in secondhand fleece- bruised thigh- breasts shushed by jumper- sulking in bed in the blue starry pyjamas waiting for the film to end- it's too long- bad broken bed- no sleep- and that fascist weird Connecticut Aryan girl- he thinks about her pug mum- weekends wasted the whole spring- engorged overture- walrus woman- he shudders- indoor tennis- scrunching and tumbling over fake grass court- commercial lighting- chilly, daughterish hug at party- Madonna video- touching her makes him homesick- he yelps- volume horror- that song sucks with its big horny saxophone howls- sax sucks- sex sucks- he failed- sleep sucks- I miss the tenderness of hands- how they join- no drugs left- avoid- not tough- not male- return to bed- under covers led by hand past all the beasts of the forest- he sleeps- at last the light dies away- turn it over- turn off.

1. The Advisory Circle- Farmland, Freeland

2. Liliput- Die Matrosen

3. Madonna- Lucky Star

'Corporate Leisure' by Rut Blees Luxemburg. No copyright infringement intended.

'Ennui And Malaise' (Episodes 1-4)

'Ennui And Malaise': A late-night, low-budget teen series yoking together the cinema of John Hughes, radical French theory and avant-garde literature in a deranged aesthetic mix while exploring the sexual adventures of two lovestruck teenage waifs- the rich and miserable Alex and his sulking, brittle girlfriend Sophie- as they drag themselves through the wasteland of adolescence by getting intergalactically fucked-up, listening to an impossibly hip soundtrack of European electronica in an obscure format and talking endlessly about forgotten branches of philosophy in the gloomy kitchen of Alex's father's flat in hour-long installments which are televisual analogues to wintery ice-cream headaches induced by frost and bad drugs. A cult hit.

Episode One: Alex and Sophie go to a fancy dress party each wearing masks of the other's face, then drink far too much rum, clumsily fuck in an empty bath and pass out before a roaring fire like dosed kittens while their homosexual friend Fox reads The Story Of The Eye aloud to a mute androgyne on a brown couch. Soundtrack: 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' by James Joyce and 'Louder Than Bombs' by The Smiths. Subtitles.

Episode Two: The legendary 'Kitchen' episode. Sophie and Alex have an argument late one night over who finished the bacon. Throughout a skinny mime holds up cue cards that dictate how the viewer should feel- for example, 'Aroused' card is held aloft when he eats biscuit crumbs from her belly button, 'Culturally Aware' card is held when a knowing reference is made to Godard's 'La Chinoise'. Soundtrack: 'Jennifer' by Faust. Subtitles.

Episode Three: After a brief discourse on the misdefinition of irony at a bowling alley where Alex has to explain to his friend Stephen that having no hands at a wake for someone killed in a car crash is not of itself ironic but merely a bleak image the episode switches to focus on Sophie's trip to Brooklyn. She takes LSD in a bathroom during a thunderstorm ('Pathetic Fallacy'/ 'Foreshadowing' intertitle), hallucinates her transformation into a badger and then into a man, leading to a digression on Nietzschean 'Ubermensch' theory before she begins performing befuddled sexual favours on the L train then gets ditched at Prospect Park where the sky explodes like a massive firework. She wakes up somewhere in Bensonhurst, eating bacon on the kerb with two skinhead fascists and licking their fingers. Soundtrack: 'Threnody For Victims Of Hiroshima' by Pendericki and Fur Alina by Arvo Part. Subtitles.

Episode Four: Sophie and Alex have anal sex one overcast afternoon then go to Paris. Both listen to the new Kompakt compilation with lukewarm joy on the metro and attend a lecture held by Slovenian philosopher and guest star Slavoj Zizek on inherent fallacies in deconstruction and the pleasure of the gaze in Lynch's Blue Velvet. Then Alex gets lost in the Montparnasse Cemetery looking for Beckett's grave and Sophie steals some animal tranquilisers from a Tintin kid. They end up fucking under a denuded tree. Contains a famous re-enactment of Cocteau's Orphee at the end. Soundtracked by 'Tigermilk' by Belle And Sebastian.

1. Herbert- Freeze

2. Belle And Sebastian- Lazy Line Painter Jane

3. De La Soul- Eye Know

Photograph of Chloe Sevigny by Terry Richardson. No copyright infringement intended.