The vacuous space, a monument to its self-importance, championing its patronage as an indicator of relevance, becomes crowded with smoke, flooded with threat of real chaos. The courtyard suddenly ceases to exist in monumental form, but becomes a war torn boulevard. One expects gunshots, shattered foundations, exploding mortars, head wounds, and orphans. The smoke stains the furs and coattails, and eventually gives way to flames. The machine designed to fail unable to fail by its design, but failing to the cosmic and comedic order that is built into us all. That which we suppress and hold back, like tears in a crowded theater. Despite the omen we keep building more skyscrapers, and warehouses and traps, as entropy and history have their way, one eating stone while the other retires style. We are okay with the ashes floating down to rest and swirl in our cocktails as we continue our scripted dialog.

June 19, 1999 – The festival organizers invite him to participate in an improvisation with some of the other musicians and their instruments. A saxophone in a case at his side, he brings tissues onstage and rips them.

We might only have metaphors to wield. These are our swords and shields against the immensity of the infernal machine churning at our soul and soil. An extraction engine, sucking out gold and teeth. This smaller machine is designed to fail as mockery and prophecy of the inevitable decay of wealth and eventual grave that meets us all in awe in its wide open sphere of mouth to swallow and digest. We use these metaphors as chainmail, to mitigate against the increasing inevitability of the gracious collapse of our species. If we can synchronize and vibrate our metaphors at a shared frequency and pitch, we might just shake the foundations of this Jericho moment, to have it all come crumbling down so that between the cracks in the rubble wild flowers will grow, and blossom, and cast their pollen to the winds.

“In this sense, miscommunication is a way to work past preconditioned readings of participants, situations and problems, shifting attention to what may be disruptive, puzzling, dismissed or troublesome…Moments of idiocy, states of indeterminacy..are states that have both infinite potential and definitive impossibility.” (Being Public “Miscommunicating Publics” – Barbara Neves Alves)