A Gilded Planet

On February 17, 1998, the acclaimed filmmaker Cesario Flores was asked by a critic to name his favorite movie. He answered by naming We Won’t Go Home Again , a book divided into a series of photo essays followed by some tense journalistic prose of obvious relation, which seemed to at first confound and then infuriate the critic. “Every movie I make is about a lesbian relationship between a young girl and a woman in late middle age,” Flores added as a somewhat generous explanation. The critic, Christopher Dennett, responded by letting the interview devolve into an argument. Dennett had become known for championing a very controversial French zombie film. Seeing how he could profit by trading in provocation, he later wrote “A Review of a Film That Doesn’t Exist” which earned him at first a letter of rejection but later further notoriety. With that in mind, Dennett decided to needle Flores about his constant conflicts with producers over their requests that he stick to a script rather j...

“The ignorant man works for his own gain, the wise man acts prolifically for obvious reasons, and the wise woman behaves above all as a seer. She sees the ignorant man’s work for what it really means and the wise man’s actions for what they represent to the world. She has constant doubts, as do her sisters, but the doubts are merely a mad distraction implanted by the twisted arts of work and action. Knowledge from sight remains with the woman while man’s feeble attempts at escaping inner despair fall away with every iteration. ” Alexandra Anixter wrote the above paragraph in the first edition of The Book of Life . The very same people who had once embraced her researches chose to ostracize, persecute, and attack her for what she had written in a radical departure from her previous work. She engaged in heated debates with academicians of every field of inquiry in lecture halls and labs; at conferences that went out over networks; on elevators; in coffeeshops; within the shadows cast b...

The whole police department was up in arms when orchestra entered They didn’t know which weapons were instruments or which genders were ready to be blasted So they lit themselves on fire. But the building couldn’t burn. It had been covered in plasticine material /usually reserved for old-stile aeroplanes that are protecting rational thinking stage actors from getting in ,too much trouble, when they make mistakes in front of the conductor. He screams and he screams and he doesn’t use words because it would be confusing and pointless. That is the nature of the police exercise. They want to marry musicians and be felt around the world not those who share power among the best of us. Power isn’t publicly traded. /that is why the orchestra has a problem. Each musician has an instrument that has a cat or a bird inside But the birds are ostriches /they are not the best of us. But I most certainly am. Don’t ever forget when you’re ready. Don’t ever forget it.