the shops of S.Thalia…
Around the corner from stacks of shoes, counterfeit fashion items, and Phone cases, we got copies of Petrusheska’s fairy stories on a bookstall on the banks of the river.. A Sunday afternoon beneath the bridge on the south bank of the river, I was drinking half decent coffee with friends. The child was running around playing with somebodies child, I forget who. The city was still new to me and I had arrived a few months<?> before. We had all taken a cab across, what was for me an unfamiliar city. Here we were in the centre of this part of the city. Boats, cars, helicopter moving along the river. The guy from the office M, the head of software said he was going to pick up some copies of Pasolini’s movies and perhaps writing there. I was confused at first, as I didn’t know anything about Pasolini.”He’s not going to find that here,” L said, as we were wandering through a labyrinth of tables and stores. It was mostly copies, pirated goods: fake brand trainers, games, handbags and stalls of books and tech. Was there ordering of the sellers inventory, i couldn’t tell beyond the specialization in certain types, knock-offs of a single particular designer label, another sold only anime DVDs. We walked through the section that was largely physical media for sale — Books, Blue-ray, DVD, and CDs with covers varying from identical to the original to very handmade-looking inkjet prints. Books bound and printed on demand… the spectacle in full swing… Dreaming for three days In Vietnam, it was the year before they put me in prison I took a number of Elle and Vogue magazine cutouts to dressmakers to replicate in finer fabrics and at lower cost. Whilst they made me a few dresses, and killer black suits, i negotiated a new drug supply chain. The cost of the fine clothing vanishing into the exchange value of the drugs. The cafes scattered all over the center of Hanoi seem so much like a living metaphor for my life back then, the copies, iterations, clones and pirate editions, versions of useless but existing things, false identities, parallel lives and other machine-oriented mutabilities . But really I wanted to tell only one person about this… The tables turn here, demand responds to supply. And the market works. I found what I was looking for, although it was obscure and not too dangerous. The danger arrived when i returned. No one had to speculate whether someone might catch herself being nostalgic for the junk ships and then in jail wish they had some kind of memento so the memories continued to exist afterwards.
Meanwhile now as i negotiate the purchase of a hotel to be added to our chain. there’s an approximation of the art store happening in a Mexico City covered market, reminiscent of that vietnamese market, destination and community forming around the 3D printers and the copies of work with printed covers and burned copies of almost anything. That wasn’t the first time my friends had been to “Cine de Arte,” and the other people making purchases there seemed to be regulars as well. The price to keep a tent in Tepito is far less than a stateside brick-and-mortar shop. The same kind of films that were last to go at a suburban video store fire sale are pirated and distributed just like any other blockbuster film. Maybe the owners themselves don’t even care about the inventory, it’s just that someone wants it at all. This is the result of our recalibrated sense of scarcity. A new form of limitless capitalism with prices inching, virtually, toward nothing. Anything could exist, and may exist regardless of whether someone wants it. That means availability of pirate Cocteau films with ads for the replicating company and trucker hats with “World’s Greatest Dad” printed above a random old man’s face. That’s why there are junk ship puzzles on Alibaba. Pieces of endless possibilities floating in the ether….there was another time, on the coast. we were together. we entered a slightly run down public building, a hall with chairs in rows. we are sitting in the middle to one side. they told us not to sit in the front rows. we wait for the people we have come to see to appear on the stage. we wait, the man who teaches hegel and I, we chat to a local poet who is sitting beside me. when it falls quiet we turn towards the stage and see the front rows are being occupied by men and women in police uniforms. some are wearing sun glasses. always the same he says quietly to me, i always think… i know i said to him taking hold of his hand. And we leave at the earliest possible moment, taking the poet with us to drink in the bar across the road and talk about the state north african poetry and poets. We end up comparing notes on our experiences in our very different and yet the same jails.
Then in New York, she says, it was difficult. there was festival, a public art gallery, with a theatre and a cinema attached. the exhibition of photos and paintings of a retrospective, some films by Mekas (of all people), paintings by Leonora Carrington, strange memorials of Traven and Brecht’s — “the death ship”, attempts at filming versions of capital. tv screens of the images of the poor, projected films on the ceilings of the high gallery. i am a thing sipping black tea, feeling out of place in this bohemian plateau, a, the representative of the sponsors. i am the sponsor, they have got carried away with an idea of representation. what is this thing? a building full of technology, they think it will help liberate. I should have brought a glock 19 with me, for when i have to stand on the stage. to talk to these americans, a hospital shooting yesterday just down the road, and yet even in this culture steeped in violence, so much of my history would disturb these petit-bourgeois. The director sees me and walks over to collect me. what are you going to say? the director asks. i smile at him and say you’ll see. “Good evening, the director asked me to say a few words of introduction, but somehow never asked why we gave this years budget for the arts to this event. He has done well. So. Why is this thing here? Pointing at myself. Because I thought it sounded like a good idea, until I found out that I had to come here and speak. speak, speak, i didn’t want to speak. I did not want to be acknowledged. I will put non-speaking in the contract next time. What is this a festival of? What does this thing think it is a festival of? You might think of that and have the idea that your replaying to the director, (gesturing at the startled face of the director) but i would say it is because it is ten years since I was released from prison. I am a thing who was in jail. And i do think, we, me and the man who shared my cell, who is sitting over there looking amused and embarrassed, have earned the right to say fascism at the drop of a hat. So why this event? This hotel. You might say that this hotel documents how i became less alienated. I am this thing. a woman who was held as a hostage. i am neither a writer nor a psychopath. i am this thing that manages a chain of hotels (for monsters.) She smiles. He is a writer, became a writer, you can blame me for this. he writes, you read, you speak in voices hidden and masked. Words are the smallest ideological units, he says. And yes he means it…In my job, working for an international organization, whose owners, shall i call them editors? do not supply cases of kalashnikovs to struggling countries in Africa or to Americans who want to kill children in schools. . Though they do support the arts in New York….”
[“The surprise that waits us, when we enter a room, the difference between going up through the floors to the room on the lift or walking up the stairs. When we reach the top of the climb. We do not have an idea of of the surprise at the difference in the rooms, We have a certainty of surprise. But its not easy to get there , for you have to travel as if you are on a camel or a horse. This place was a dark market before it became a hotel, where things were bought and sold that need not to be traced. Not the money that changes hands which will always be traceable, whether its transferred as cash, paypal, plastic or cypto, but the things themselves which being material objects vanish and are carried off by the purchasers, perhaps a book is by Mary Butts, imaginary letters, made in 1928, or one by Duras in the 1953 edition… in hands, paper bags, wheeled to lifts and carefully placed in vehicles. A painting carried off on the back of an electrical bicycle… Whilst the society only values the various forms of exchange value, the things themselves being unvalued in our consumer society vanish. Here then the empire of things used to exist. Where has it vanished to?”]
