Water on the table/water on the fall
Water is nothing but it’s everything
Environmental abuse is like incest –
everything’s fine until the ACCIDENT

Light a cigarette
Hurt your feet trying to get to it.
But PLAY WITH THE SOURCE
That’s right, go back to it.
Do whatever it takes to get to it…
Mud in your toes is all right,
you always get them clean
and into shoes again.
Touching the source of
a holy site is like
touching a woman’s
clitoris on a sultry night…
wind your way like a snake
But then maybe again
you’re not clean enough
to do that
Put out the cigarette
empty your mind
and try again when
you’re really ready.
A drop of water falls
on your head.
Stop. Close your eyes,
See a white clearing
before you in your
mind’s eye. The water
can guide you. Stop
and breathe. The
drop of water seeks your
head, a light seeks your
mind. Stop and drop
to your knees – if you dare
Maintain underwing
Maternal slope
The sound of the bird
will reach you
See the energy patterns
with your closed eyes
you don’t need to touch
it – you can hear to
breathe it. Mesmerize
yourself a path
It’s not all terrible
It’s all reclaimed
We cannot get away
from OURSELVES.

UNCORRIEGATED
Somewhere in our minds
We find the place with
the sacred roots, a
place where people must
worship, a clearing,
un chemin a la montagne
dans un jongle urbain
a place where people
will drop to their knees and
go barefoot; a place at
The Source, holy because
we are humbled understanding.
Above you in the clearing
is a kaleidoscope on/from
the World
GO TO THE SOURCE
EMPTY YOUR MIND

I’ve been thinking lately about something that’s been troubling me deeply, and it happens to tie in to Mother’s Day, because it’s about fully appreciating and honoring our mothers, and importantly, women in general.

As I listen to my mother’s and friend’s stories and experience my own, my heart is heavy with this message to tell. But it must be told.

It’s about men, the perverse joy they sometimes seem to derive from undermining women, from thwarting their dreams to the many ways in which we fail to honor and respect women for their knowledge or capabilities. It’s often subtle, in the form of a verbal putdown, but it’s still the last frontier to conquer in the Battle of the Sexes: simple human communication.

No, I’m not a manhater; perhaps like other straight woman I love and care perhaps too much for what men think. I openly show my love, appreciation and respect for men, and honor the male. If I were a man-hating lesbian, I suppose I would put up with far less flak from men. But I’m not, and so usually my tendency is to nurture them, their creativity and strengths, and probably overall devote more attention to relationships with men rather than cultivating and nurturing my own, fairer sex, whom it seems, receives far less support and encouragement, and therefore likely needs it more.

Women are told to let the man feel strong; ask him to say, open a jar for you. Do women have to be debilitated, even pretending to be incapable of performing tasks to inspire men’s protective instinct, thoughtful behavior and desire to make their life easier? A superior woman is taught to be an apologist for being capable and strong. Why can’t men be impressed with our strength and wisdom? Why do they often feel intimidated, threatened, or perhaps indifferent in the company of a capable female?

My mother tells me of how one day the plumbing breaks down. She calls the plumber, he comes, tells her he doesn’t have the long ‘snake’ apparatus he needs to clean out the septic tank line, and that instead of costing her $85, the job will cost $700, since he will have to take the toilet off and so on. She cannot afford this exorbitant amount and appeals to the plumber’s boss, who nevertheless backs up his employee’s plan to basically rip off my mum. She tells him the same problem occurred some years ago, and that the snake needs to be much longer, long enough to reach the length of the septic tank to clean it out. The plumber doesn’t listen to her at all. But my brother happens to be there that day. When he says the exact same thing to the plumber, the plumber immediately not only listens to another man, but carries out the job.

I sympathized with my mum’s sense of frustration, and was reminded of it when recently hanging out with a very alpha-male Canadian friend of mine, who is also a creative collaborator and business partner. While trying to show him how to open a new window on a PC so he could manipulate several windows at once, he impatiently brushed me aside and did it the same way he was accustomed to doing it – wrong. Now I’m no hacker, but I know my computer skills are infinitely superior to his. Would he act the same way with a male friend with my computer skills, who was trying to teach him something, I wondered? “Is it just because I’m a woman you don’t want to listen to me?” I asked him, and he reluctantly admitted that to a certain extent, that was the case. I asked him to try to put gender aside for a moment, because he was wasting his AND my time. But I felt a sense of sadness that he couldn’t take me seriously, honor my gifts. Is it just because as an alpha male he is trained NOT to listen to what women have to say, even if they’re right?

You would think men would be able to learn to listen, learn to honor, learn to respect women in personal and professional relationships, if only because it’s in their best interest.

[To be fair: Actually, they can, and they do. Despite my Canook friend's recent lapse in this area, maybe I'm being too demanding, for we have lively, fruitful debates on any subject, and he has been an incredibly uplifting creative and business partner overall.]

Why can’t men seem to respect women as much as their male peers?

Last night an elder male friend of mine actually tried to prevent me from bringing out my camera and taking a photo at River Bash, ostensibly because he thought I might take a photo of him (it was actually the image of someone’s Aeroflot shirt I was after). Although he pounced on me perhaps somewhat in jest, I was furious with him, a supposedly educated, enlightened male. I thought about turning the tables. If I were his professional MALE writer/photographer friend, would he even THINK of hassling me in the course of doing my art? Not a chance, I think. Ironically, earlier that same night, I’d taken photos of this same friend with members of the band Deep Purple. He called me after the evening to ask for one of these photos; incidentally, I was the only person there with a camera.

But you know what? It’s not just men who underestimate woman’s capabilities and knowledge; women do, too. My girl-friend (in the platonic sense although that’s nobody’s business) pulled similar behavior on me last night as I was working on a series of portraits of local folk hero Scott Cook at his last show in Taiwan at Alley Cat’s in Tienmu. I also take shots of her, many of them superb and portfolio quality. She gave me dirty looks over the table as I was preparing camera settings, and shot with a glare, “What would you do if I took your camera and smashed it to pieces?” I retorted that I’d probably punch her out, and what did she think of that? She said, “Well, I guess I probably wouldn’t do it then.”

Here is my point for Mother’s Day: women and mothers alike, we must all learn to better defend our territory – what’s most important to us — tooth and nail, if necessary. It’s like that Journey song, “Be good to yourself, ‘cause nobody else will.” On the other hand, women aren’t doing men any favors by letting them get away with loutish and inconsiderate behavior; sometimes a more confrontational approach may be in order.

For Mother’s Day, I recommend going on strike in some way that in some area of your life will gain honorable treatment and respect you so rightly deserve. Starve an oppressor of some attention they habitually take for granted, exit their sphere of control or leave even, until they stop bringing you down… and promise to change. Teach the people around you to love and respect you, to take you higher. Look for ways to make the lives of your women easier; help her carry her burdens, she definitely has done it for you all your life.

If things seem intransigent, there are many ways to go on strike to get what you want, nay, NEED, in your personal, professional and intellectual life. In my case, I’m not giving these two friends photos of themselves with famous rock stars until they honor my artistic genius and stop hassling me about my art. So I get a promise they won’t hassle me anymore, but that alone is less than satisfactory. I tell them I need some written form of public praise to unruffle these feathers. Note that these are not unreasonable demands; easily fulfilled… But if they work, and they probably will since they really want these photos, my friends will be forced to mend their surly ways and begin to tangibly show their appreciation of my art.

It’s not enough to tell our oppressors to back off, “Don’t tread on me,” or even to get them to take their foot off our necks. Thanking ourselves, or “learning to love ourselves”, as others have suggested, also don’t cut it.

Women need praise for all the things we do, and are traditionally overlooked for. We need thanks, love, support, praise, encouragement, a generous spoiling from time to time, a healthy amount of appreciation, respect, honor, yes, help once in a while, heavy stuff carried, things fixed ‘round the house… and not just one day out of the year.

SECTION 1
Reflecting on Alice Paul

Existing research on Alice Paul focuses mostly on her activities and achievements in the United States. Bref, after 1910, Alice Paul finished a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1912), took over the practically defunct Congressional Union (CU) of the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and mobilized the largest suffrage procession in history in Washington, DC in 1913. She founded the National Woman’s Party (NWP) with Lucy Burns in 1915, and tirelessly lobbied Congress on the question of “woman suffrage” until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919. By 1917, she had picketed the White House, was imprisoned, went on hunger strike, and was again force-fed in prison. She finished two law degrees, one from from the Washington College of Law (1922), then another law degree and another doctorate from American University (1928). Then she wrote the text for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and for the rest of her life she campaigned passionately for the ERA’s full passage and ratification.

Little has been known about Alice Paul’s experience in Britain and Europe during 1907-1910, a key period in her intellectual development as the future leader of the American suffrage movement. Some analyses of the American suffrage movement relate a few details about Alice Paul during this time period: that she was a graduate student; that she was imprisoned or did hunger strikes. After searching the Internet for all references to Alice Paul, her experience in the United Kingdom is either completely left out, or briefly referred to as where she “learned militant tactics” from the Pankhursts.

What research resources do we have that indicate what really happened during this period? We know that Alice Paul did indeed write prolifically, from the collections of NWP-related papers she deposited in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress. Then, there is access to, but no academic discussion of, her academic writings as yet. Personal letters that she wrote have, at least until now, been largely absent, or at least unknown.

Miss Paul rarely gave personal interviews. As Inez Haynes Irwin wrote: “She is absolutely concentrated on now….Both these young women [Alice Paul and Lucy Burns] remember their English experiences in flashes and pictures. They worked too hard and too militantly to keep any written record; and successive hardships wiped away all traces of their predecessors.” (Irwin, 1964: 7)
In 1974, Amelia Fry carried out the most extensive interview of Alice Paul about her life, published through the 1974 Suffragists Oral History Project at U.C. Berkeley. As yet, however, there is still no official biography written about her life, let alone details about this very critical yet un-studied sequence of events.

Enter the Letters
In 2001, after publishing some initial investigations about Alice Paul on the Internet, the director of the Alice Paul Foundation (APF) assisted by providing a research copy of some letters written by Alice Paul while she was in Germany, England and Scotland. Ms. Beard relates the story of how they appeared: a male relative inherited the effects of Miss Paul’s estate, and he decided to sell it all off at auction in 1987. Fortunately, the APF heard about this and seized the opportunity to acquire them. They raised $35,000 and “whatever it took” from other donors, and they succeeded in buying everything for $30,000 at auction The APF donated much of this collection, including thirty one letters written by Alice Paul, to the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, and the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The appearance of these letters is good news for would-be biographers and women’s “herstorians.” Their existence was unbeknownst even to Ms. Fry, Alice Paul’s official biographer, who believed Alice Paul’s personal letters had been burned. Fry reported in a 2002 interview that a woman family member had some of Alice Paul’s private letters, decided to respect Miss Paul’s privacy by not publishing them, and had “burned them all.” Stories differ, but these effectively are the only personal letters written by Alice Paul in existence.

Although some letters are missing, particularly overall these letters help fill in many gaps in the research about the life of this enormously influential second wave suffrage leader. They not only describe her experiences in England for the first time, they show the more human and private side of her life, a very complicated life that contradicts one journalists’ comment that [Alice Paul was nothing more than the ERA]. The real problem may have been that we had little information about such a complex and dynamic life.
The intent of this paper is to do ethnographic about Alice Paul during this period that will fill in some gaps about Alice Paul’s intellectual development, and activities. Existing research is used, notably the 1974 Fry interview with Alice Paul, and academic and historical discussion about the life of Alice Paul. New research has been sought, through Quaker archives, newspaper clippings of the time, police reports and various online resources concerning the Suffrage movement in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

In analyzing these texts, the objective is threefold: 1) develop the social/historical context surrounding Alice Paul’s life and observations at this time; 2) evaluate and discuss the intellectual history and formation of an American Suffragette/her motivation; and 3) compare and analyse her strategies and development as a nonviolent women’s rights leader, not only noting how some of these strategies impacted the American suffrage movement, but looking at their earlier origins.

Alice’s Personal Demeanor
A contemporary describes Alice Paul’s as:

a “slender, frail-looking young woman, delicately colored and delicately made…Her face has a kind of powerful irregularity. Its prevailing expression is of a brooding stillness; yet when she smiles, dimples appear. Her eyes are big and quiet; dark – like moss-agates. When she is silent they are almost opaque. When she talks they light up – rather they glow– in a notable degree of luminosity. Her voice is low; musical; it pulsates with a kind of interrogative plaintiveness. When you ask here a question, there ensues, on her part, a stillness so profound, you can almost hear it. I think I have never seen anybody who can keep so still as Alice Paul. But when she answers you, the lucidity of exposition, the directness of expression! Always she looks you straight in the eye, and when she has finished speakig she holds you with that luminous glow. Her tiny hands make gestures, almost humorous in their gentleness and futility, compared with the force of her remarks… she has the quiet of a spinning top.”

Other contemporaries described her in Inez Haynes Irwin’s Up Hill With Banners Flying (1964). Helena Hill Weed attributes a ‘prescience’ to her. Ann Martin says “Her mind moves with the precision of a beautiful machine.” Nina Allender sums her up as “a Napoleon without self-indulgence,” and “my mother describes here as a flame undyingly burning.”

Lucy Burns later description of her shows some of the qualities she both retained and developed:

“When Alice Paul spoke to me about the federal work, I knew that she had an extraordinary mind, extraordinary courage and remarkable executive ability. But I felt she had two disabilities — ill-health and a lack of knowledge of human nature. I was wrong in both. I was staggered by her speed and industry and the way she could raise money. Her great assets, I should say, are her power, with a single leap of the imagination, to make plans on a national scale; and a supplementary power to see that done down to the last postage stamp. But because she can do all this, people let her do it — often she has to carry her own plans out down to the very last postage stamp. She used all kinds of people; she tested them through results. She is exceedingly charitable in her judgements of people and patient. She assigned one inept person to five different kinds of work before she gave her up. Her abruptness lost some workers, but not the finer spirits. The very absence of anything like personal appeal seemed to help her.”

Haynes describes Alice Paul as having ‘devoted herself to athletics,’ having played varsity basketball, in a class hockey team, and placed third in the women’s tennis tournament. Haynes describes her as a ‘rosy, rounded and vigourous girl then,’ as opposed to when she returned from England after hunger-striking, and was ‘thin to the point of emaciation.’ In her 1974 interview, Paul talked about how much she enjoyed cycling, and had taken a bicycle tour throughout Normandy and Northern France in the summer of 1908.

More than a summation of her curriculum vitae, her letters give us some insights into Alice as a person — her habits, her reasoning, her intellectual influences. We know what books she read and what courses she followed, who her friends and cohorts were, and who and what influenced her.

From her letters at this time, there are many examples that this is a responsible, resourceful, studious, yet socially confident young woman. She interacts with all class levels in society yet her habits remain simple, in keeping with a Quaker background. She uses the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to address her mother, a characteristic of the ‘plain speaking’ of the Quakers. In Germany she does not eat breakfast, she drinks milk rather than the German kaffee, and applies herself seriously to reading books in German.

One of Paul’s lifelong personal habits was “reading everything she could get her hands on.” (1974 Fry interview) In her letter, we see more of her academic influences at the time when Paul requests books to be sent to her, mostly for her classes at the University of Birmingham, what Haynes calles ‘a Catholic choice of courses”: Robert Burns, Carlyle, Ruskin, Locke, Milton, Wordsworth, Dunbar, Baily, Dante, the Iliad, and the Odyssey (12 Dec 1907). She was reading everything from classical literature (she had taken years of Latin at Swarthmore), to poetry, and natural and political philosophy. She takes a lot of Economics and Sociology, but her academic interests are also philosophical in nature:

I am writing this letter in between two classes. I am going to take 2 courses in German, one in psychology, six in Economics & Sociology, one in Philosophy; one on Mohammedon religion & one called the “Spiritual Life” by Dr. Harris. Everyone goes to this. Also am going to take a course in Economics in at Univ. of Birmingham. (7 October 1907)

Paul is resourceful; she keeps scrupulous track of her spending and economizes where possible. She calculates the cost of travel from Philadelphia to Antwerp, and from Antwerp to Berlin. “This makes $94.93 that I spent during the month.” (#6; July 2? 1907)
She takes an active interest in her family’s affairs at home in the United States. She helps determine the choice of Latin in her younger brother Parry’s education. She criticizes the writing style of her younger sister Helen for her use of superlatives. She is concerned with the family’s financial affairs regarding renting out family property: “Did thee rent the little House next to the Home?” (26 Aug 1907; #9)

Overall, the reader is struck by the interlocking network, a ’social quiltwork’ of social and political relationships that Alice Paul knitted, and so confidently. Her journey is filled with seemingly serendipitous events and chance meetings; yet she certainly used any connexion she has to advantage. They show how she navigated through an impressive number of ties to the Quaker community, the upper class, academia and through her work with the poor. In Europe, she extended her already extensive associations into a powerful British political and social reform movement.

The Summer Lane Settlement in Birmingham at the turn of the nineteenth century; Children’s project at the Settlement.

It’s impotent to take every opportunity
to tell people how much there is to hate
about the Superbowl
but really it’s not going to
change the fact that everyone is
brainwashed into thinking
this is some really worthwhile event,
something truly American,
when all I think about are
pork-bellied men
gaping at t.v.’s in sports bars,
staring up at the corner of the room,
captive barflies.

The world is watching America
and America’s watching t.v.

Then again it must be something biological
that extra bit of testosterone
like the destiny of sperm
that strive ever faster:
throw a ball real far
and fetch it
drive a car real fast
shoot a gun
– real deadly —
shoot the enemy
without thinking
shoot your load
fertilize
touchdown

Trista di Genova, circa 1997

It’s Chapter #11 of “The Great Scroll of Banciao.” So far it’s only been covered in a Venetian literary mag and on Taiwan radio, never serialized or anything. Perhaps if the reviews are good we will submit another chapter next time ’round.

There are literally “fantastic” etchings by illustrator Mark Perrault on the way to accompany this piece.
Respectfully yours,
Copyright Trista di Genova,  Oxford University

Word count: 2,515

The Torture Show

“Reality is so bad you have to fictionalize it.”

“You can tell a lot about a society by its junk food.”

In this society, people were “randomly chosen by ballot,” as it was called, to be scapegoats. They were snatched and summarily unplugged from their home cells. They were elaborately costumed as Models, then put on military tribunal and televised on TS1 (Telemundo Screen One). Here, the drama object was almost without fail tortured and at length executed. Much to the delight of the Audience, the torture was bizarre, horrific, and exhaustive, and every week came in eight-hour installments, simulcast in mandatory town halls throughout the world.

Tickets sold out at once, so there was even no need for scalpers.
One of the best things about the Torture Show was there were no commercials, at least consciously. Commercials were subliminably telemarinaded, or stewed into the minds of the Audience, a bit like the tea eggs of old.

The televised torture would begin through a dazzling display, a mediablitz of the senses so discombobulating that the combined effect on the Prisoner Model was paralysing. It was described “as if a Sumo wrestler had thrown a kitten against the wall.”

One week’s topic for global discussion was The Effects of Hard Rock at High Decibels on Prisoner Models. Last week the show theme was No-Holds-Barred, Barbaric and Hammeringly Repetitive Military-Style Executions of Terrorist Models, All Thoroughly Justified.

One of the most memorable acts involved a Boot Camp Model; they chose him because in this case Militainment Personnel didn’t want to discriminate against civilians.

This Show starts with a recreation of a Filipino brothel exclusively set up to service Militainment Personnel. During the initial orgy, every five minutes a commode is filled with stool and urine samples of randomly selected members of the Drunken Militainment Audience (by lottery), and this vile stuff was actually funneled into his mouth. Yeah, I know, that sounds really foul. The collective shiver that went down everyone’s spine produced some fine material.

Then they deprived the Boot Camp Model of unconsciousness, food, and water for a week, while playing a Guns and Roses song continuously, just to bring in a sense of continuity in from last week’s Show.

The soldier was a strong one, but everyone has their breaking point, which was presumably the point of that experiment: to find breaking points by destroying people. This week, when they finally managed to prise him free from his legs, his eyes were bleeding and everything, his face flaxen once they managed to hose him down in that dungeon thing they often used to illustrate the decomposition process.

For this Week’s episode, like every week of the new Torture Show Celebration Festival Series, Bill and Zed, and the Jim Morrison Clone JimmyBuffet.exe, received a Torture Show invitation buzzed to them on their skin bracelets.

Every week the three “cellies,” along with any other Members of the Audience, would be rallied and transported to the performance. They checked in at the Box Office, and each of the Viewers’ boxes was “escorted” (kicked through) to their seat through a long Viewer Turnstile Warehouse. The Telemundo Screen was previewing images of preliminary sketches and reminiscences of all the many ways people can die. Palestine was an Audience favourite.

Gratis the Snack Shop, Brother Jim, Bill and Zed were all issued what was marketed and labeled as “Sweet Victory Popcorn” and “Sweet Victory Chocolate.” They were both actually promotional freebies, in exchange for which would cost them some lifeblood.

What they called “popcorn” was essentially salt-covered orange plastic balls, made in Taiwan. You had to eat the plastic wrap first, then suck off the so-called “sugar” (“sugar” was actually plastic-based “salt”; there was in fact no real sugar anymore) off the coated ball (of plastic), which had been recycled thousands of times.

The plastic dissolved in one’s mouth, not in one’s hands, and contained narco-sedatives and endorphine-like stimulants, as well as a mild aphrodisiac, and an opiate derivative made from the poppy fields of what was now Kabul. In fact, that’s what the yellow plastic packaging said for the chocolate: Made in Kabul.

Kabul was also where the central movie studio was stationed, at least officially, for security reasons. In actuality, Kabul Studios was geographically stationed in what had once been sprawling, beautifully forested and heavily guarded Beverly Hills. The studio base was at the victory mansion of a sectarian nudist colony, held captive as a film crew.
Kabul Studios consisted of only the most brilliantly sycophantic individuals. They were the only ones allowed an education, technical or otherwise, so their position was much coveted throughout the remaining world.

They were the crême de la crap students of pop culture, bred for their recognisability and photogeneticity. Then they were trained and certified in a 2-year vocational programme called “Execution Studies”.

Although they were trained in everything including medicine and stage design, they mostly hung out floating in pool cells, coked out intravenously, with a strong empathy suppressant coursing through their veins which they prescribed for themselves.

Most members of the audience at this week’s Torture Show were similarly pre-mobilized; that is, in an induced comatic state, whether naturally or enhanced by State Medicine in the form of a plastic, salted and doped cheeseball, wrapped in plastic.

In case viewers had to be stretchered in, they would be assigned “seating” (installed in electrocution-style chairs) in the Intensive Trauma Therapy Division of the Town Hall Auditorium. There they were conscientiously attended by paramilitary genetic medics who would one way or another “reanimate” the individual.

At first, Members of the Audience would be “encouraged” (ordered) to put on seatbelts for their own safety, and told to put their hands on the armrests. Then, vinyl shackles would enclose their wrists in a vise-like grip. Helmets came out of all of the headrests, all at once.

“Are you shufu / bu shufu?” urged the Telemundo prompter, in Chinese hip-hop style.

“Shufu,” the world yelled; or at least it was said to have yelled.

Whatever you voted, without fail the outcome would be recorded as “Oh, hell yeah. Very comfortable.” However, when you vote, you are only tacitly agreeing that you are comfortable that it is not comfortable.
Should an Audience Member attempt to avoid the helmet as it descends, an usher would soon be checking all the aisles, note they are improperly installé in the chair, and they would voluntarily be whipped to death; or they would have their arms and legs chopped off and bleed to death, as they first tried to hobble, and then roll, away.

Once they made one of these “defectors,” or “apathetic voters” into an illustration of how to make beef jerky strips, with complimentary samples distributed to all Members of the remaining Florida Audience. Few Member Models therefore ventured to shirk off their civic duty of installing themselves in the Torture Show.

The crowd would first shift uncomfortably in their scrap-plastic seat as they found the most comfortable position they could in the contraption. Then they quietened as the Telescreen 1 began issuing instructions in Chinese:

“We warmly huang guanling you aboard the Torture Show. Right, let’s get started. The next person who moves in their chair will be summarily executed.”

To their credit no one moved, anywhere in the entire world, for two seconds. It registered so everywhere on the digital Mundoclock. This was amazing to contemplate, because usually someone somewhere moved within a split second. The objective, I suppose, was to cultivate a sense of futility in the face of pending disaster, and to cull out anyone who was not fully, truly apathetic. Or perhaps few conscious people were actually left in the world.

Then, a big neon sign lit up saying:

ON THE AIR

and a cheerful signature tune was played. The lights went up on a stage in the center of the room. It was decorated much like the talk shows of olden days; with two dynamic, tight-jumpered and smart-looking white News Reporter Models semi-facing each other, with a coffee table in between them. They were sipping what they claimed was a frothing latté.

An offscreen announcer jives over the intercom:

“LIVE ON THE SCENE: DEATH!”

“Huang Guanling to the Torture Show, created by US, and watched by every last one of you. So let’s get this party started,” grooves the Blonde Reporter Model in a sultry voice.

“I’m so with you,” oozes the Tanned and Handsome Reporter Clone. “Today our first Executee” – here they smile knowingly at the Audience through the camera before them – “is Imam Malikai, 50 years of age, who comes from Lahore. Funny name, that. Sounds like a French bimbo. Or shall I say bimba. No doubt that’s why he’s still alive. The name of his town is so cool!”

They both titter conspiratorially, finding their cosmopolitan wit endearing and indescribably precious to each other. They flutter their eyelashes, flirting with their reflections on the monitors before them.

LAUGH

orders the screen before the Audience, in Modern modified Chinese. The Audience at once bellows with laughter.

“Are you a WHORE, Imam, or is that just where you come from?”

LAUGH

The Audience tried to double up with laughter, and they couldn’t quite slap their knees.
“Maybe for fun we’ll pit you against some kind of Enemy Model from Maputa. My bitch, my whore, get it? Ahhh, that makes me piss in my pants busting up. A whore, just like you, Tony.”

At this point, the Reporter Models boffed each other lustfully, the Male Reporter’s member was whipped out of his zipper and they did it while the Audience reputedly went into hysterics. This was classic, slapstick entertainment, the Audience was/were said to have thought. But they were just an entire generation of circus elephants forever shackled by invisible chains.

LAUGH HARD

orders the Screen.
Meanwhile, a Makeup Assistant is fretting offstage, wondering whether she put too much powder on the Woman Reporter Model’s face. She has been notified which Member of the Reporting Team will be later consumed for the surprise charity buffet execution. She is worried because the makeup might inhibit the Reporter Modelperson, her client, from sweating properly when the situation called for the reporter’s professionally staged public demise.

A Token Black Reporter appears onscreen, very handsome and well-built, with a wide and manly jaw. He is wearing a Havana loungesuit, and an ethnic reggae scarf, which will instantly make him the fashion envy of all the men who are left, after the press release is issued. It shows off his chocolate-hued complexion to its fullest advantage. He speaks into a microphone in a nice, deep, resonant voice, saying:

“Thanks, Links. Okay, congratulations everybody. Here is Imam of Lahore, who was the first to move in his seat today. My, my, my, what a fine Tourist-bot you’d make! Today, I, another black albeit Christian man, will chop off this black Muslim man’s head while he prays to Allah. This proves conclusively, for the first time in known history, that there is no such thing as racist. What a triumphant moment this must be!” thundered the intercom.

The helmet and wrist-straps simultaneously roll off a man in his seat, to reveal the face of a drawn and shocked-looking Lahore resident, a Mr. Imam B. Malikai. He is frozen to his chair, his white lips bared against his teeth in a grimace of terror, his face a sickly yellow. It looked pretty realistic.

“Get on the prayer mat, sand monkey,” snarls the Token Black Reporter. At that point he grabbed the primary Telemundocamera and stuck it to his forehead, so that everyone in the audience could see for themselves: what is it really like to be a black man executing another black man? What was it like for a Christian to kill an Arab, or an Arab killing another Arab? Perhaps that would solve the problem of racism, once and for all?
The man pulled back into his chair, and tried to hold on to the armrest until his fingers were of course ripped from it. Then he was put into a giant slingshot, with the help of a big plastic prodding stick and a 3-meter-wide rubber band. A brief but informative math segment of the show calculated how far the rubber band would have to be pulled back so that he would be accurately catapulted onto a big prayer mat a hundred li away. They also estimated the probable trajectory time, and the velocity upon impact. It was kind of grisly, but the slo-mo film fotage showed how upon impact he became a tangled heap, after parts of him had flown practically everywhere. Then he skidded for quite a long ways, with more bits coming off, before coming to a mess of a standstill.

“Try to get your Allah to save you now,” guffawed the Black Man. “Where’s your Allah now? Come on, say it, al-ham-d-alah. Allah akbar,” he sneered at today’s first Prisoner Model. “C’mon, hurry up, darkie. We don’t have all day.”

A steamroller came out and smashed both of them, both Imam and the Black Killer Reporter Model.

The Audience seemed to have cheered, but that had to be recorded over the unexpected gasp they gave. The surprising bit about it for the Audience was that a Reporter model had been snuffed. Usually Reporters were killed sparingly, because it took a while to train them. Since they were expensive to kill, they weren’t considered cost-effective, so they were usually spared, at least ostensibly.

This time, HR had to make an announcement to explain what might have otherwise been considered gratuitous violence. HR explained that “No, no, me-o,” it wasn’t gratuitous violence. They left a telememo saying that “any references to the fact that other languages even existed, was, for the moment, banned, and strictly forbidden.”
This, of course, like other warnings, meant certain execution for an Offender. Since they could at whim render someone an Offender, anyone – and everyone – was now a target. It was part of a new “one strike whether real or imagined and no-holds-barred you’re out” policy.
The screen suddenly changed to a shot of the Host Models, who were seated cozily in their sofas, “pouring” what they claimed to be Hokkaido green milk tea. The Audience licked its/their lips. The milk container and sugar cubes were left untouched, which is a good thing, because they were all just plastic props. The Hosts weren’t actually drinking Hokkaido green milk tea; the Audience just had to imagine they did.

The couple flirtatiously assembled themselves for the camera, grinned engagingly, and purred, “Well, whaddya say, Audience? Shall we kill another random individual in a mortally offensive manner, for all to enjoy and marvel at, and then publish our own independent surveys? Heh! Or shall we for once spare a life? Ah, there, wouldn’t that be a nice change?” A new Reporter Model said, yawning prettily.

The crowd was ejected en masse into a standing position, and neurologically pinched so as to shout out aloud what the red neon sign prompted them (in Modern Modified Chinese):

“GO
DEATH
GO!”

[THE END ... of Chapter 11]

Trista di Genova, a former writer/editor for The China Post and Taipei Times, has observed goings-on in America for the past 8 years with horror, while living in blissful exile in Banciao City, Taiwan. She founded rentacrowd.com, blogs for The Wild East (thewildeast.net), is a painter, poet, musician, filmmaker and compulsive gardener, and degreed from UC Berkeley and Oxford University. “The Torture Show” is an excerpt from her 2004 work, “The Great Scroll of Banciao,” which, among other works, is available through lonewolfpress.com and City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

What are we? Well, what are you!

This could go on for some time.

But in sum, Lone Wolf Press is to become an online publishing network of writers, to promote our independent works on cultural, linguistic, natural, technological, philosophical, comparative issues in the world today.  It’s designed to be like The New Yorker should be now, except really interesting, vibrantly important and addictive as betelnut.

To kick off our inauguration of this Website, LWP is cerebrating by publishing a serialization of “The Great Scroll of Banciao,” an underground Radio Banciao cult international classic. 

In the works are “The Oxford Files” about a new student’s experience at Oxford University, day by day for the first week; “The War of 2008″, which is probably safe now to publish; a posthumously published work by Mark Johnson. We do have some soft-porn submissions, but would rather bend our energies to intercepting, interlecturating with the most brilliant intellectuals, creative geniuses of our time.

Bonne Lecture,

Adminstratrix & The Staff at Lone Wolf Press