IT HAS DECIDED TO GET HOT...  June '97 Marseille . Philip Hartigan The heat from the Sahara has began to push its way into the pink belly of Europe, and I hope she likes it. Summer identifies itself with a hot spring. Cannes and the 50th anniversary the whole world is envious and wants to eat slime at Planet Hollywood. The pushy, fleshy, cocky and coky overdressed and the nasties and so well paid too. It’s getting hotter and hotter. The apocalyptic unrepentant film industry, it is all there is? Maybe I should go down there and hustle like Kubrick did to make Red Badge of Courage. Now that’s a story for a dinner party at Cannes. Job done, come home to the dustbin in Marseilles with a couple of starlets, push them both into the bath, sprinkle them with stardust and do the nasty... Dream on delinquent, dream on. I walked to the cedar trees and looked at the cemetery, I even know some of the provencal peasants who are buried there now, I’ve been here that long. Harkness was looking out over the valley, he was receiving messages, “What exactly is a wavelength? How does it carry its message? I am getting so many messages, this latest bout of insanity is very interesting.” He laughed out loud. “The species, at its evolutionary sharp end is developing an intense and apolitical inner space where communication between dimensions is the fluxus and the raison d’être. It’s not technological at all.” That’s given me something to think about, what with the Cannes festival and the mortuary of Hollywood dressed up with its dearth of imagination. “Does this crap read better because it was faxed or has it more acceptable cred by E-mail. Typed on a black upright Underwood of the Raymond Chandler era, when Hollywood was saying something. The truth is stuffed in to a too small envelope, and carried by many working hands. Back and forth with the bills and the junk mail, flopping on the mat, sniffed at by the cat, dies. It become more poetic sent by drums, from the Upper Volta, translated in the sticky shade of the Yam-Yam, wham, bam, what hit man. I write with a biro, a script that is just like me - it falters and squirms. The typescript is a “come on”, whether it’s nonsense or Genesis, it gives it the potential to be literature, rather than prophecy, or ramblings headed for the trash can. How much of our daily lives could you put into type, even the stylish bits, oh yeah, think back, you’ve seen a few edited highlights, yeah Stallone can dream on too. I’ve seen a few moments in my time. Harkness looks at the turning of the earth as he looks out to the Ventoux mountains, the ignorance in the chick pea brain of Deeper Blue, the dust of the mathematical, the horizon of the knowable. Our exploits inside the egg. Life embryo kept safe and warm and so confused. Because to see it all so clear like Harkness does, right no, is tragic. It’s Zarathrustra’s birthday today. Harkness has his work, teaching the mentally retarded that painting can help them to live along side other humans and live better than most. His dedication is other worldly I’ve probably said that before. It’s not a money making racket. I break the silence and the speculation. “What you been up to lately?” “I am taking five guys down to the coast, Nice and Vence, for a few days would you like to come along?” “Yeah, thanks”... the restaurant where I am working is full of spooks, ordinary people behaving like the CIA, just to stay in a job. The chief cook is a cross dresser and every time he takes a break in the cool room, he sings Russian folksongs, then he emerges, made up with the big droopy earrings on, and we have to call him Yana instead of Jan. Why not Jane? Harkness explains that the only achievements that are left, are in the rediscovery of the surreal. He has plans to malign and menace the world of art with his team of crazies and Saltimbanques. Cutting a swathe like pirates leading the avant garde; like Inspector Clouseau, Peter Sellers, ”Being There” yes of course Sellers was a Surrealist... The only way you can hurt the bastards is to play them for laughs... Harkness has organized something and I am invited, so are you. We are taking a group of 5 psychotic men/children to Vence, to Nice, to the golden triangle of the coastal mountain range, the bikini patch on the erogenous zone of our blue dream. The Matisse, happy shapes, the chapel, the villa at the Parc de Cimiez leaves of green the ladies enthralled by a palm tree. A bacchanalia of cut out window cleaner. We are talking a dead language, the post cards say it all. The Foundation Maeght and the great art world of international idiocy. Beanheads and no balls. Chagall’s goats and Giacometti le berger. Flat arsed tourists - rag arsed art. Harkness takes his time. “The MIro has done the trick.” One of the men tries to give a blow job to a life sized Giacometti statue with no dick. Miro arrests the pantomime. “Try to be Miro walking down the street in the perpetual Guernica of today, that’s what these guys do,” Harkness talks on, “With the big broad lines of your disability and your humor, with a smile to big for your boots. A Miro smile is a slow fuse, a red blur on an azure coast.” The open of your tired legs, another wasted day at the museum. New York and the marketplace cannot touch them, as they look at photos by man Ray of the groupies and the courtesans of loony tunes, just running away from death and its wavelength. The pictures live, but like cheap labor they are too easily exploited... The people who come to reflect their lives in them are too cool, too distant to have been once aflame with truth. Stoned, immaculate, too corrupt to get in the two way mirror. Harkness comes over. He stares into my face. Then he turns, jumps in the air like Pete Townsend and swings his arm round as he jumps high... We don’t get fooled again... I the younger one, the naive shepherd boy, standing before the Goliath, and I stone him. For not being famous? For not being slick adman Planet Hollywood? For not having children at his feet like Jesus? Just the mimicking of freaks and cocos. The wrinkled medium, the play written in a foreign tongue. All too cruel this international village, lost on tarmac hurling our suitcases at the sky. When we return we are tired which is equalizing and then we see a thing or two. Big moon, big magpies, the freaks have started to fight with sticks and stones. Harkness has to explain, that they are all they have now, each other is all there is for any of us. Do they understand? The long road, the long dark road from Mum and Dad to each other, that understanding that the world and the human and its god are but one wavelength and waiting for the message. “They don’t talk about anything but they paint it.” From within, Cobra going on Miro coming back to Hunderwasser, they don’t read, don’t write, they are mostly abandoned humanity, but they have a wavelength that’s what counts, unlike a life, a wavelength, can’t be wasted. Two days in the palm trees and the corrupt white of the Edwardian villas, wealth, crude old world colonial money. Capital having now settled down, after completing its MC2. And finding retirement, getting fat form sitting still. Harkness stares at the Miro egg in water amoebic and dolphin spume hits the spot. Mountains turning pink with embarrassment. Every church has beggars outside it. If I were a mountain I would fall down into the sea in shame.

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