Activations

APT fests

Language

Neoism

Replication

ACTIVATIONS

NEOIST CHAIR and CHAIR ACTION

A Neoist Chair is nothing else than any chair with a sign: NEOISM. The sign is nailed to a rod and the rod is fixed to the chair. Any chair or anything that can be used to sit on can be turned into a Neoist Chair. The sign makes the difference.

The first Neoist Chair Action took place on May 22nd, 1979, in Montreal, at the corner of Sherbrooke and McGill streets. It was called "Monty Cantsin sits for a portrait" and introduced Neoism and Monty Cantsin to passers-by and the rest of the world. People were invited to sit on the Neoist Chair and have their pictures taken to be exhibited later as Monty Cantsin portraits. A few hundred flyers of a manifesto "LOVE LETTER" were distributed to passers-by. The same manifesto has been also sent to correspondents all around the world. The event became known as the inaugural action of Neoism.

The Neoist Chair Action has become part of the regular demonstrations of Neoist daily rituals, mostly used as a propaganda vehicle to question the origin and purpose of the noncepts of Neoism and Monty Cantsin. You can become a Neoist and Monty Cantsin simply by sitting on a Neoist Chair.

Death Mauses Meat Pieces

Using sling shot and 1 lb of stew meat, rain mystery meat chunks down on neighborhood enemies.

The above is based on another performance piece of mine called

Kline Bottle Pieces

Drink beer from bottle A while simultaneously pouring bottle B over your head. Break both bottles.

It's a damn peculiar looking thing to see - and raises some interesting questions in philosophy!

Dr. Al Ackerman letter to Monty Cantsin

Street Performance Actions Against False Infinity

at Living Propaganda-Experiences

For immediate release

With the initiation of a GREAT CONFUSION by the Neoists in New York City, a new and even more reactionary form of revolution is integrated into the mythology of present day misery. The false infinity of dreams accumulated in the past fives way to the confusion of objectivity with humour. The NEOISTS use the six forms of disorientation to organize their revolutionary ideology: plagerism [sic], multiplication, immortality, severity, love and rationality. In the current world situation, we are confronted by an infinity of paradoxes. The Neoists realize that these paradoxes are the result of the infinity of false binary oppositions which are considered the basis of truth. Our rejection of this infinity becomes our propaganda and the internalization of confusion becomes merely a step towards even greater truth, beauty and perhaps riches for the Neoists themselves. Because irrationality has been recuperated by capitalism and made into a reactionary force, the Neoists unite against this, plan their confusion around rationality.

A series of actions are planned to prepare the world for its total unification and the reintegration of all contexts. The lies of television and the newspapers will become true again in the rotting light of our hatred of contradiction. The GREAT CONFUSION and fight against the FALSE INFINITY begins now.

Joins us. We want war with you. By reading this you have become a Neoist. Freedom is fighting. Anything done in the name of Neoism is Neoism.

Monty Cantsin Angie Brooksby Neoist Consulate

APT 4, LOW Theatre, Montreal

Wanting to only perform street actions during this festival but wanting to make money off of them by charging entry to the LOW theatre (a basement apartment with a bay window in the front) I decided to charge admittance to the theatre & then perform my actions outside so that the audience would be watching thru the bay window what they could have watched for free from outside. With a tv outside facing in (or inside facing out with the reflection visible inside?) showing video of the previous 2 street actions, I stood outside trying to sell "Neoist Passports" (large, elaborately folded & rubber stamped "blackprints" made from passports of Istvan Kantor's that he'd had altered by various friends & acquaintances in his travels) which I was trying to sell for some ridiculously LOW price - something like $3.00. Probably few people, if anyone, paid to enter the theatre. No-one would buy a passport off this "deranged-looking" character. As usual, I didn't make any money - but I'm sure that whatever free meal I got that day courtesy of Gordon W. Zealot & Cantsin was delicious!

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts Guerrilla Playfare booed usic Mad Scientist Didactions Acts of As-Beenism So-Called Whatevers Psychopathfinding, Uncerts etc.

Neoist Parking Meter Action

Wearing sandwich boards that said in English & French: "Neoist Parking Meter Action - Pay Me to Go Away" & wearing a parking meter hood over my face, I stood at empty parking places & waited for cars to park there. Then I followed the drivers when they left their cars with an impassive face & my hand out-stretched mechanically. The drivers all avoided me by walking somewhere where I wasn't - after which I left a Neoist Parking Ticket under their windshield wiper. Finally disgusted by what I thought was a mediocre response to my imaginative begging, I started to walk back to the LOW theatre. En route, 2 guys stopped me & asked me what I was doing. When I explained, they thought it was so funny that they pretended to get out of a car & gave me money.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts Guerrilla Playfare booed usic Mad Scientist Didactions Acts of As-Beenism So-Called Whatevers Psychopathfinding Uncerts etc.

Direct Address

I want to tell a sort of funny joke about

Ladies and gentlemen, I was wondering if

I've come her this morning to talk to you about anything I want to

It's been a long war and

My boy actually just got back from

Can you believe this weather we've been

You two were seen together on August 15

I guess that means

CONTRACT

Balint Szombathy, aka Art Lover, returned to Yugoslavia after one month drill in Nov., in Montreal. A four-point contract has been signed between Szombathy and the Centre de Recherche Néoiste.

1. Balint Szombathy must always act as he sees fit.

2. Must always say what he wants and thinks.

3. Must represent the principles which he confesses to be his own.

4. This contract may be invalidated at any time.

Balint Szombathy and Slavko Matkovic initiated the Yugoslav Euroneoist Movement and set up a Research Center in Novi Sad. Contact: Centar Neoista, Balint Szombathy, 21208 Sremska Kamenica, Rade Koncara 52, Yugoslavia.

Centre de Recherche Néoiste

The ceiling crashes in.

Eating a straw hat through a hole in the top of my head.

Inserting razors under my jaw.

Being pursued.

Falling through floors, a huge black shape disintegrates.

Dreams of traveling to Mexico.

Introduction --

I have to destroy these thoughts while I'm young. The arrival of a variety of energy beings from a less 'creative' dimension lying in a parking lot, looking up at the stars with huge electric lights trained on them and concrete/electronic buzzing.

He had "so much respect for silence" (view of a man locked in a white room with a blindfold on, now and again very old). The distortion of memory occurring in the present tense. Retroactive Journal entry, May 19: "letter; Dear mom, my position as God has become tenuous, may have to resign (suicide?)" Our goal is this reconciliation and more.

Plan:

Increase activations, increase negations of activations, actively abstract behaviors and inject increasingly insane content into these abstractions. In this way we will achieve "life".

Slogan:

"1980-1990, an excellent period from which there is no escape."

Hypnotic Movement

NEOISM 101: Thought Projection

Imagine someone you have never met & who in no way easily fits into your own memories of people (ie. NOT a composite personality) and is not a reflection of any cultural stereotype; that is, a complete unknown.

Imagine that this person has a personality & set of speech patterns & habitual behaviors which can be related to her/him specifically and that are rich with repetitive non-sequiturs, references & inside jokes.

Attempt to mimic these attributes as closely as possible, integrating them into your daily personality & behavior. Do so without trying to understand them, to "get the jokes", or to create any other kind of bridge of translatability between yourself & the personality you are assuming. Be as thorough as possible.

Refrain from learning the name of the person you are imitating, as this prevents rigorous imitation. At all times consider the speech patterns, jokes, personal references, emotional states, etc. that you mimic to be your own. This makes complete projection possible.

Invent a means to explain the accumulated attributes to people with whom you are close & who notice the changes in your behavior & use of language.

Our tactics against Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen composes modern classical music that is highly regarded by consumers of 'serious culture' and very rarely performed. Recently, the clarinettist Ian Stuart has been touring Britain with a show that includes a rendition of Stockhausen's Harlequin. Despite the status accorded to Stockhausen and Stuart as representatives of 'high art', their activities are completely vacuous. Ken Rea, writing in the Guardian, had the following to say about Harlequin: 'This extraordinary solo requires him (Ian Stuart) to dance while playing the clarinet... Written in 1975 as a showcase for Stockhausen's partner Suzanne Stephens, the composition was so taxing that she collapsed after the first performance... It is notable enough to see a classical musician play a 45-minute solo from memory, but dancing in lycra tights at the same time is another matter.' What impresses 'critics' of 'serious culture' is the technique required to perform the piece. Rea leaves his readers with the impression that because giving a rendition of Harlequin is physically challenging, this validates the composition as a work of art. Clearly such a supposition is nonsense, Harlequin functions as 'serious culture' because Stockhausen and Stuart have successfully negotiated their way through a complex set of social and institutional practices. Put another way, Harlequin is 'high art' because those in positions of cultural power say it is a 'great' composition, while simultaneously treating other forms of music - for example Oi! - as worthless trash.

To draw attention to this state of affairs, the Neoist Alliance decided to disrupt Ian Stuart's performance of Harlequin at the Pavilion Theatre, Brighton. This was not the first time Stockhausen had been targeted as a particularly obnoxious representative of 'high art'. Armed with placards bearing the slogan 'FIGHT RACIST MUSIC', Action Against Cultural Imperialism picketed his concert at the Judson Hall, New York, on 8 September 1964. Likewise, during the early seventies, Cornelius Cardew instigated a vociferous critique of idealism in culture that culminated with the publication of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (Latimer, London 1974). Although the Neoist Alliance does not agree with all the points raised in these previous critiques of Stockhausen and his music, we felt the Ian Stuart concert provided an excellent opportunity to take militant action against the cultural faction of the ruling class.

The first thing we did was produce a leaflet asking the public to 'BOYCOTT STOCKHAUSEN'. A press release was also circulated in which it was stated that the Neoist Alliance would levitate the Pavilion Theatre during the concert. As a result, a story appeared in the Brighton and Hove Leader entitled 'Composer Is Set To Reach New Heights'. There was also coverage on Festival Radio, including a brief interview with a Neoist Alliance spokesperson. Stockhausen has claimed that much of his music is dictated to him by beings from a superior civilisation who live in a distant galaxy. The propaganda of the Neoist Alliance was designed to expose the mystical aura in which the composer shrouds his works as a blatant fraud.

As the Neoist Alliance and its supporters gathered outside the Pavilion Theatre prior to the Stockhausen concert, they were met by a counter-demonstration organised by the Temple Ov Psychic Youth. The TOPY activists were worried that if we successfully levitated the Pavilion Theatre, 'a negative vortex would be created which could seriously damage the ozone layer'. Neoist Alliance members were dressed in dark suits and ties, which contrasted sharply with the scruffy casual wear of the counter-demonstrators. We'd also brought placards. On one side of these there was a cartoon of a bomb and the words 'DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE', on the other, a pyramid capped by the all seeing eye and the message 'WE'RE BACK'.

As the handful of individuals who'd decided to cross the picket line arrived for the concert, they were met with chants of 'Boycott Stockhausen' from our ranks, to which the TOPY activists replied with cries of 'Stop The Levitation'. The counter-demonstrators pleaded with concert-goers to remain outside the building so that they could participate in a set of breathing and visualisation exercises designed to prevent the levitation. Once the concert began, the two sets of demonstrators prepared themselves for a psychic battle outside the theatre. These street actions drew a far larger crowd than the Ian Stuart recital inside the building. Passers-by were reluctant to step in front of the waves of psychic energy we were generating and soon much of the street was at a standstill. The Brighton and Hove Leader quoted one shaken concert-goer as saying, 'I definitely felt my chair move. It shook for a minute and then stopped.' The Neoist Alliance also received reports of toilets overflowing and electrical equipment short-circuiting, although these went unreported by the press.

While TOPY were adamant that their actions prevented the Pavilion Theatre being raised 25 feet into the air, the Neoist Alliance considers the protest to have been a complete success. The campaign against Stockhausen is part of an on-going struggle that will continue until the last apologist for decadent 'high art' has been silenced! Actions like the one we undertook in Brighton chip away at the confidence of the arts establishment and expose 'serious culture' as a monstrous fraud perpetrated by a self-serving elite.

The Neoist Alliance Variant 15

Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity

Neoday One

The principal player does not think about art for twenty-four hours.

Neoday Two

The principal player does not eat for twenty-four hours.

Neoday Three

The principal player makes a pot of tea in the traditional manner. A sufficient amount of water for the personae present is heated in a kettle. Just before this water boils some is poured into a tea pot and swirled around its interior. Thereby heating the tea pot. This water is emptied out. A teaspoon full of tea leaves per person plus one for the pot is put into the hot tea pot.The lid is put on the tea pot. The tea pot is allowed to stand for five minutes. For the tea to fuse. It is then served to the persons present. With milk and sugar if preferred. Timing is critical.

Neoday Four

The principal player does not sleep for twenty-four hours.

Neoday Five

The principal player does not communicate for twenty-four hours.

Neoday Six

The principal player cuts his finger nails and toe nails. The clippings are put into a suitable receptacle. Later during this day the persons present take their nail clippings to a mutually agreed site. Possible the site of the Neofire. These clippings are scattered onto the ground.

Neoday Seven

The principal player sifts the ashes of the dead Neofire. Taking out the lumps of charcoal. The fire ash is put into a container. Samples from this container are put into plastic bags which are sealed. Labelled. Stamped. Dated. And mailed to known Neoist sympathizers.

Horobin

Hypnotic Movement: Concrete Life Examples

Two 'situations'

1) "toilet paper ghost situation" -- activated by looking at the trash in the parking lot and moving the paper with my foot in order to make it look like "running man" and then becoming frightened and running away.

2) related but previous "worm situation" -- the 'idea' of an old anecdote produced a large worm outside the town hall. On close inspection, Monty Cantsin said to me that it looked [like] the reflection of sun on a river from an areal view.

The 'behavior'

1) turning someone else's casual doodles into complex thought maps and cosmologies by turning them upside down and extrapolating. One result is the concept of a toy for adults: a box with a lollypop sticking out of its top which rides around on the floor and hits the user very hard in the knee.

The 'throw away slogan'

1) "Take things one step farther by not doing them."

1) toilet paper ghost situation -- activated by looking at the trash in the parking lot and moving the paper with my foot in order to make it look like "running man" and then becoming frightened and running away.

2) related but previous worm situation -- the idea of an old anecdote produced a large worm outside the town hall. On close inspection, it looked [like] the reflection of sun on a river from an areal view.

The behavior

1) turning someone else's casual doodles into complex thought maps and cosmologies by turning them upside down and extrapolating. One result is the concept of a toy for adults: a box with a lollypop sticking out of its top which rides around on the floor and hits the user very hard in the knee.

The throw away slogan

1) Take things one step farther by not doing them.

Hypnotic Movement

MacMag virus

On February 7, 1988, users of Compuserve's Hypercard Forum were greeted with an intriguing warning message. It told them that the NEWAPP.STK Hypercard stack file was no longer on the system. The notice suggested that if they had downloaded the file, they should not use it. If they had used it, they should isolate the system the file had run on.

The story, on Compuserve, had actually started a day earlier. A user had earlier downloaded the same Hypercard stack from the Genie system, and noticed, when he used it, that an INIT resource had been copied into his system folder. [...] Furthermore, the INIT resource was "viral": it spread to other "systems" that it came in contact with. [...] The virus appeared to be benign. It attempted to reproduce until March 2, 1988. When an infected computer was booted on that date, the virus would activate a message that "RICHARD BRANDOW, publisher of MacMag, and its entire staff would like to take this opportunity to convey their UNIVERSAL MESSAGE OF PEACE to all Macintosh users around the world." A laudable sentiment, perhaps, although the means of distribution was unlikely to promote a "peaceful, easy feeling" among the targeted community. Fortunately, on March 3 the message would appear once and then the virus would erase itself. [...]

Brandow at one point said that he had been thinking about the "message" for two years prior to releasing it. (Interesting, in view of the fact that the date selected as a "trigger", March 2, 1988, was the first anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh II line. It is also interesting that a "bug" in the virus which caused system crashes affected only the Mac II.) Confronted by users upset by the virus, Brandow never denied it. Indeed, he was proud to claim "authorship", in spite of the fact that he did not, himself, write the virus. (Brandow had commissioned the programming of the virus, and internal structure contains the name "Drew Davidson".)

Brandow gave various reasons at various times for the writing of the virus. [...] There is no particular secrecy to the MacMag virus. Anyone who looked could find it. Few, however, looked.

R. Slade History of Computer Viruses

It wasn't a corny new age message on the screen, it was a parody. To answer the question whether it had "been inspired by prankster groups like the Neoists": Yes and no. I am a Neoist. So I wouldn't have said I was inspired by the neoists, being one full time 100% as opposed to part-time neoists.

It's pretty hard to do a harmless virus and still make an impact. So I guess putting a message on the screen and not harming anything was the right move. At least we got the media hysteria we wanted to get. It will probably make a great chapter in our book which will be entitled: "How to control Mass Media".

Remember: time is NOT money and we have plenty of it.

paradox alt.slack

March 24

March 24 was a day of unexpected clarity. Chronology was removed by the recording process

A brisk walk four or five miles around the inner city, mainly through a conversation in which I explained a light sculpture and a conversation in which I explained a light sculpture which used a slide projector and looked like a floating cube of blue light in the upper corner of a room. Buying and eating a whole roast beef sandwich which reminded me of Chapati. A tense situation in which my friend picks up a ringing pay phone in one of the housing projects and yells to a gang of kids up the street, "Hey, do you know where wiley-boy is?" and they laugh and threaten us. Urinating under a huge overhang of a freeway bridge at night being aware of a 'security' guard watching me. Walking along a train track and bending down to look at the light reflection along the track with my eye almost touching the metal and having my friend joking "it's an electrified train rail." Saying to my friend "You know what they say about god: power corrupts." Standing on an 'X' mark drawn by my friend and looking down an alley at night to see an 'accidental' light sculpture, a skyscraper caught at an angle by city lights so that it looks like a sheet of golden light flashing up into the blank night sky. Having a conversation about 'diegetic music' and hearing my friend say it was a shame when music was ever separated from its source in time. Finding a piece of white styrofoam packing material in an alley in the shape of a 'futuristic' Bauhaus mask/headdress and carrying it or wearing it part of the way, putting it on the end of a stick at a bus stop to look like a scarecrow. Receiving a hardbound copy of "The Place of Dead Roads" signed by WSB and reading the first page. Hearing simultaneously over the phone that Nicaragua had supposedly invaded Honduras and that Libya and the U.S. were at war and becoming aware of the possibility of my own death. Listening to an idea for an installation outdoors for multiple boom-boxes with each composer playing a tape of her/his creation at a distance, arranging dates to do this. Wondering where I parked my car and walking in loops around town. Looking into a closed junk shop at 11 at night and thinking that it would be interesting to go inside. Having a conversation with a woman in a restaurant after having just seen her in a magazine photo of APT 7, next to Monty Cantsin and having her say 'you look well.' Wearing a flame shaped sliver of mirror on my forehead. Explaining my interest in grids, emphasizing the emptiness of polarity and hierarchy and the connection between complexity, chaos and the limitations of perception. Hallucinating very powerfully and without drugs a grid of images of myself moving in rows, half holding arms in 'Y' shape, half stooping to hammer nails, with the motions going in phase.

Cogito of the Pseudo-Scientist, Experimenting with Mild Trauma

A disintegrating knife-fight saturates layers my body occupies cold and drained depth which, like personality and emotional component is a function comparable to mild variations in speech acts only expressed throw less visible media - a "skin" which the psychopath apprehends not as an accumulation & extension of itself-

However, one happened to be a psychopath in the sense of an electrical ground I, for instance, imagine someone with whom I have a function comparable to mild variations in speech acts only expressed throw a "skin" which the psychopath can visibly articulate in conversation without loosing her uncontrolled and non-recordable infractals

like waves superimposed to form a continuous delay If it could apprehend itself it would shiver into complete stasis like waves exhausting the pattern in real time & discarding cards into incomplete ideants, pauses worked underneath a common skin of Tourette's syndrome

A ground level and the chips may be "blown" Any change in this level is formed using a platonic ideal formed by tapping into telequet bodies reserved in the frame of a special service conceived between waves Any change in this level discards cards into encoding the non-valued feedback "groove". Smaller delays (depths) are formed by the distribution of dictionary information.

Any change in this level is formed by tapping into hotpoints. Their traces are yet unrecognized surfaces, "warming up" a platonic ideal formed like a metaphor. Its materialization creates a mitigating flavor in drained depth which, like a disintegrating knife-fight saturates the non-reversible dimmin of lights within an architectural blank. If it could apprehend itself it would shiver into telequet bodies.

Psychosomatic Variations

I initiated a few projects of investigation

... which I more or less traced from others. Received some replies and soon realized that the only persons interested were as apathetic about the entire idea as I was. But it still survives in some forms and ideas.

There was very little money at that time, and basically what we had to do is steal food in order to eat. We would put on heavy winter coats. We were looking like street people, except that we ironed our clothing which all came from the Salvation Army. We would go to grocery stores and buy a loaf of bread and hide various flat cans of food in our pockets. Or we would boil huge amounts of rice and chicken liver.

One of the interesting concepts to come out of this - and 'concept' is a word I only use because I spent all the others - was that of severity, austerity and particularly instantaneous severe reflexion syndrome in which people are subjected to incredible horrific flashes of consciousness.

An anecdote to illustrate a typical day at Peking Poolroom would be one of the last days after the fire which I started in the kitchen and that almost killed several people sleeping in the apartment. And the great debate of course was whether we would put it out ourselves or call the firemen. I am very surprised that we got away with that. Zbigniew Brotgehirn and I got up at one o'clock in the afternoon. We were invited to participate in a performance Monty was giving this evening. And we simply didn't think that we were ready to make any sort of public display of any particular idea. So we did what we usually did, purchase a bottle of Tequila and drink it on the back terrace. We consumed the bottle very quickly and proceeded then to buy and steal some bottles of wine and one bottle of Chartreux. Later in the afternoon, the welfare officer came. We had asked to receive welfare recently, and when this middle aged man walked into this kitchen covered with clothes which just had been the scene of a fire, with green garbage bags all over the place since we didn't know on which day to put them out, it became very apparent to him that he was in the most miserable part of the most miserable part of the city.

After he left, we purchased some broken irons at the Salvation Army and took Mein Kampf along with us and stole a motorcycle. We were not in a condition to drive that motorcycle, but I was driving it. I would come down on the street at ten or fifteen miles an hour and Zbigniew would attempt to jump on the back of the seat as I passed by. After twelve or more unsuccessful attempts, we finally proceeded to go downtown. He left, and we finally met just as the performance was going to begin.

I have gone through half of the Chartreux bottle at that time and had a simple desire to continue the violence of the day. We were allowed to buy beer at special discount, and Monty gave me ten dollars to buy twenty of them. Before I could finish a beer, the performance began. And what happened from then on is more myth than fact, so I don't think I bring up the facts.

Kiki Bonbon Dull Century

PHYSICS

In order to empirically derive a constant for The Graduated Hostility of Things, assemble a series of objects in relation to their 'value' to you and drop pieces of toast and jam onto them, mechanically and from height of more than four feet. Record the frequency of Jam to Nonjam contact in order to derive a ratio of hostility in the universe. Obviously, this experiment can (and should) be performed in many ways, using many types of materials.

Comparisons of general numerical trend will yield a number equivalent to the value of oppression in the universe relative to human beings.

The Comb

We had opened coffing the door to the entirely gray room coffing stepped coffing inside with my teeth clenched coffing feeling the smell of my blood coffing in my mouth I walked to the window coffing and forced coffing open the shade it was hot and coffing I needed to roll up coffing the sleeves of the coffing shirt with the nails I kept coffing wrapped against my ankles coffing in masking tape I drew coffing down the tape and coffing placed my physical coffing body on the floor coffing so that looking up coffing I see the coffing motion sick pattern of coffing squares on the ceiling I place coffing the nail in my palm coffing and its point on my coffing forehead and push the coffing fragments of cold breath cut off coffing in mid sentence coffing the air seemed to bite coffing into the coffing hats scattered all over the floor in waves coffing.

Monty Cantsin & The Spitter

THE GOLD FLAG OF NEAR NEOLOGISMS: THE STRIPED PAGE

nationalism: a dividing of people into idealogical groupings with which they may not identify & which potentially lead to strife between groups based on exaggerated differences.

internationalism: a counteracting of the above's artificial differences with frequent emphasis on encouraging cooperation rather than strife.

metanationalism: an extrapolation beyond the preceding with an emphasis on total transcendence of nations.

patanationalism: any & all exceptions to the above & to itself.

CORPORATIONS: "I SOLD MY SOUL TO THE COMPANY WALL"

networks: systems facilitating interaction/exchange usually based on similarity of purpose between mutually useful entities.

PIN-UPS: "I STUCK MY SOUL TO THE COMPANY WALL"

neologism: Postal Interaction Network - Underground Participant(S)

interneologism: an extrapolation beyond.

metaneologism: an extrapolation beyond the preceding with an emphasis on total transcendence of neologisms.

pataneologism: any & all exceptions to the above & to itself.

SPIDER'S WEB STRATEGY: "WE STUCK OUR SOUL TO EACH OTHER'S COMPANY."

THE GOLDEN FLAG OF NEOISM: THE STRIPED BÜGELEISEN

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE

THE WHITE HEAD

Neoist Performance Piece

Whenever you meet a Neoist or one who professes to be a Neoist etc. perform the following:

5 or 10 minutes into the meeting say in a conversational tone "telephones and telephone bells have always made me uneasy." (Offer no explanation for this.) Shortly before the meeting ends say in a non-conversational tone, "Its head was ...white ...all white.". (Offer no explanation for this.) Do this as many s a day as you like but always at least once a day; (if no neoists are around, you can always pretend that the person you're talking to looks like a likely candidate for Neoism.)

Dr. Al Ackerman SMILE 6/7

APT FESTS

APT 5

Members of the Neoist Network declared total cultural, political, social, psychic and physical changes every day during APT 5 in Camp New York, USA. E.G. Head and Cassandra von Rinteln, both from Baltimore (MD), executed a skin exchange operation, making elastic prints from their entire body surface.

Gordon W. Zealot, one of the publishers of Toronto's END Paper, gave several conferences and a life style demonstration of primitive subsistence and cooking. He set up his mobile kitchen on W-Broadway and fed Neoists with greens and wind bread.

Monty Cantsin made a campfire at the corner of Houston and 1st street to make clear and unambiguous what an apartment festival is.

Napoleon Moffat (Montreal) distributed "Akademgorod keys" among people at Washington Square and stated "the project is to find the city of Akademgorod, and, by being there, justify the city."

Among the collaborators were also Phyllis Waugh, Alex Hahn, Richard Hambleton, Miki Miroslav, E.F. Higgins, Ginny Lloyd, Gary Singerman, Moondog1, Nathalie Mongeau and the people of New York City.

A detailed description of APT 5 events illustrated with photos will be published in the next issue of End Paper.

(Contact: Centre de Recherche Neoiste, Vehicule Art Inc., 307 Ste-Catherine W. Montreal, Qu., Canada, H2X 2A3)

What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival??????

APT like Neoism as minus the superfluous middle which would disgustingly make it ART. APT as APT. APT as apartment: a space again skipping the ART intermediate of performance spaces as buffer between public & performer's private life, the Peking Poolroom as Kiki Bonbon's APT.

The APT festivals are usually one week events with various activities such as conferences and performances, but the main purpose of these friendship gatherings, drills, habitation manoeuvres is to create a simple and comfortable situation for personal meetings between the concerned collaborators. The APT fests are neither "performance art" nor "installation" festivals. The APT fests are the "fetes mobiles" of the Neoist Network Web.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE

Ponte Nossa. 03:30

Stiletto and I. After much discussion and planning began making his dormitory video. Awaking up. In the middle of the night. We took the video outside underneath Mizza's window. We played a can cassette. Increasing volume. A full moon perched on the craggs. Dogs barked in the still black. We tiptoed upstairs to Stewart's room. I woke him gently and asked him to follow me. Clutching his sleeping bag around him he shuffled. Into Mizza's room. We put on a light. Placed a lemon on an empty bed. Gave him skin creme and asked him to remove the peel by massaging the lemon. The can cassette was running. We increased the volume. Mizza did not wake up. We gave Stewart a pair of scissors. He began snipping gently. As the music got louder, he viciously stabbed the lemon. Threw the pieces at the camera. Acting very severe. I let him shuffle back to bed. We switched off the cassette and light. Mizza did not wake up. We closed the door. While planning our next stage. Stewart. Now clothed. Burst into the room and demanded we destroy the film. Or he would not talk to me ever again. I told him I would not erase the film. He accused me of making police experiments. He left. After this experience we were unnerved and I was on the edge with fatigue. We decided to go ahead. I put on the motorbike gear of Stiletto and quietly entered the dormitory where Roberto Zito and his friend were sleeping. I put on the light and just stood looking at them. The friend was immediately awake and looking at me. But he couldn't understand the situation. So he mumbled something. Then a louder comment. Roberto awoke and looked at me. Frightened. The first guy said something louder. I turned silently and put off the light and left. Then we lit a firework. A volcano. Outside the bedroom door of Graffix. Opened the door and retired. A jet of smoke and sparks gushed up. Someone shouted bastards a few times. The corridor was full of curling acrid smoke. We went to bed.

The 9th Neoist Festival: The Monty Cantsin Correspondence Adventure

Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing

the Sixth International Apartment Festival, Consulat Neoiste, Montreal, CaNada

I explained my purpose in English. After each of my sentences or phrases, Cantsin translated them into Hungarian & Mario Campo translated them into French. As the difficulty of translating my calculatedly fractured English became too ridiculous, Cantsin's translation became more & more his own free-flowing (&, probably, self-promotional) statement & Mario took the liberty of changing "tentatively, a convenience" into "tentatively, an inconvenience". I explained that one could perform Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing on a potential assailant by astutely diagnosing whatever problem was behind their hostile aggressiveness & healing them before they could get to you. I provided a life-size acupuncture chart which Alan Lord then proceeded to blow a dart at by way of demonstration. Given that the chart was meant to be of a man but was lacking a penis, it was decided that this potential assailant's problem was fairly obvious & he was thusly given a PRICK.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts Guerrilla Playfare booed usic Mad Scientist Didactions Acts of As-Beenism So-Called Whatevers Psychopathfinding Uncerts etc.

If "Neoism is the potential energy of the future"

- neoism as the potential energy of the future (less)

- neoism now & then (ne pas temps en temps)

- constantly working to catalyze

- multiply directed

- how to focus

- as a basis for directive thinking

- to get more done, more quickly

- "international conspiracy"

- metanational conspiracy

- patanational conspiracy (p.horobin's datanational conspiracy?)

- keep the info inflowing

- I need more action, more often

- what do I want? how do I get it most efficiently"

tENTATIVELY notes during APT 6

Impractical Seriousness

Pancreas/Tonsils, the Maze, Reinhardt & Via, Jeffrey Cohen, Dr. Thorne, the London Zoo, & the C.I.A.

In mid '84 I was planning a trip to London to participate in the 8th International Neoist Apartment Festival & I wanted to find someone to sublet my apartment for the 6 weeks or so that I was planning to be away. My friend & ex-room-mate, Pata Hari, knew someone who needed a place & suggested that she call me. Call me she did but the phone connection was bad & we only heard sporadic fragments of each other's conversation so not much was accomplished. What little communication we did manage sure seemed goofy though.

Later that night, Pata & I were at a party & we were sitting very drunkenly on a couch appraising the potential for new sex partners. A woman entered who seemed to be sort of walking sideways wearing a black shawl. I hadn't seen her before & I was interested. She looked funny. I asked Pata who she was & found out that it was the woman, whose name turned out to be Gail Litfin, that I'd attempted to talk to about the sublet.

With the uninhibited, & deliberately ridiculous, directness of the intoxicated, I managed to be graceful enough to not knock anything over on my way to holding her hand & saying, by way of an attention grabbing intro, "Hi! I want to be lovers with you & I want you to go to Europe with me!" With a refreshing resilience, she responded favorably to the total absurdity of my approach & agreed to definitely go to Europe with me & to consider the lover angle.

A day or 2 later we planned to meet at my SoBa apartment. The apt was on the 2nd & 3rd floors - with the bottom of those 2 having a maze in the 2 largest rooms. There were "life-size" stencil paintings of a woman in bondage, & various other images, etc.. The maze was made with walls made from muslin stapled to the ceiling & to the floor. This maze gave 3 entrance choices: 1 on the left that proved to be a dead end fairly quickly, 1 in the middle that allowed a turn which led to another dead end, & 1 on the right which led to a turn & then to another room on the other side of the maze from which 2 more entrance options for re-entering the maze were available. Eventually, 1 could reach a small space inside the maze occupied by a bed.

In continuation of my making a strong 1st impression on Gail, I decided to leave my apartment door open & to wait for her on the bed inside the maze. She came to the doorway & called to me. I may or may not've answered. Perhaps I told her to come on in. I probably encouraged her to come & find me & led her on with sporadic vocal hints. I probably peeped thru various holes to watch her progress. Whatever "might've happened", I vaguely remember noting that she felt her way along the walls - reminding me of the strange sideways walk she had when I 1st saw her at the party.

It was then that I realized/learned that Gail was almost completely blind. She'd been walking sideways at the party because it streamlined her form enough to lessen the probability of her bumping into things. She could see well enough to vaguely make out the shape of doorways - but not enough to know exactly where the center of the doorway was - so she'd walk sideways to increase her chances of making it thru. Little did I initially realize how strong of a 1st impression I'd be making on Gail by having her walk into a space where she'd never been before & confronting her with a maze!

Gail, otherwise later known as Litvinov (1/2 of the Crazy-Glue Twins), is diabetic with a strong history of diabetes in her family. Her brother had died from it in his teens. A side-effect of her diabetes is that the capillaries in her eyes tend to hemorrhage resulting in her vision being limited almost entirely to the accumulated pool of blood. An attempt had been made to prevent this from happening in her left eye by cauterizing the vessels shut (or some such) with laser surgery. This hadn't worked & had left her completely blind in that eye. Thus whenever her right eye hemorrhaged her vision was limited mostly to being able to perceive gross variations in light - hence her ability to differentiate doors & windows & not much else. She could read a little if the text was written big & she held the paper close to her eye.

She was a cyborg. She had an insulin pump attached to her body by a needle in her abdomen connected by a tube to the pump which was about the size of a calculator. The pump was programmed to give her regular & frequent doses of insulin to counteract the non-functioning of her pancreas. With her 1 functioning eye, she was a cyclops cyborg.

Gail took to calling me "Tonsils" because I had mine removed as a child & I responded by calling her "Pancreas"in honor of its non-functioning diabetic condition. Finding ourselves to be temporarily compatible (mainly because of our mutual almost non-stop crankster approaches to existence) we became sex-bonded & left for NYC & England 2 or 3 weeks later.

In London we went to the APT HQ to establish our home base. Having sent before us a post-card with

"A STRANGE COUPLE WILL APPEAR AT YOUR RESIDENCE & WILL ASK TO SCRIBBLE ON THIS POST-CARD AFTER SAYING THE PASS-PHRASE: VETO ENVY IN A NICE LACE TENT"

(an anagram for tentatively, a convenience rearranged into such by (the soon-to-be (as you'll see) story-fied) Reinhardt U. Sevoel), we arrived decked with our usual splendor of Joke Shop Wear (Gail's mascot being a large rubber spider - mine being a rubber chicken that later became glorified in Neoist lore) & were splendidly received by the festival's organiser: MONTY CANTSIN (of the variety known as "Pete Horobin"). His host was an amiable sort named Steve Thorne (who had as little interest in Neoism as Pancreas did - which is to say: not much) - he was the person who'd been abiding there longest - &, as such, had the most say about what went on in the house. After getting to know Monty & Steve better, we moved on to Paris & hooked up with my friend the fashion model - Eugenie Vincent.

From the time of my 1st person-to-person encounter with Neoists in Montreal, I'd been hearing about the legendary Reinhardt U. Sevoel. He'd been a part of the Montreal Neoist community & had participated in the 1st Apartment Festival there but had moved to London before I'd had a chance to meet him.

I'd witnessed vaudeo of him, corresponded with him, & spoken with him via the phone but had never met him personally. I'd been told that in Montreal he'd pretend to have "attacks" out on the streets - that he'd be hauled away in ambulances & that when he'd reach the hospital he'd tell the staff that he'd been giving a Neoist performance & run away. I never "knew" whether this was neoist "myth" or "reality". Either way I was intrigued. When I arrived in London he'd just schismed with the Neoists there & moved to Paris to become an anti-neoist/dishwasher & soon to marry the obscure Neoist entymologist/waitress Via Vidorae. Who says an Anti-Neoist & a Neoist can't marry?

Wanting to have a memorable 1st meeting with Reinhardt & to have yet another memorable encounter with Via (who I'd already met), I concocted a special plan with Genie & Gail. They were to go to the door of his apartment &, when he opened it, somehow or another barge in blabbering "nonsense" phrases in French & penetrating deeper & deeper into his place - hopefully leading him away from his door so quickly that he'd leave it ajar so that I could enter without his knowing it shortly thereafter. I was to wait a couple of minutes to insure that he'd been diverted, enter his place surreptitiously, go to the toilet room, wait until after Gail & Genie left & the door was closed, & then loudly piss so that he'd think he was done with his mysterious visitors for the day only to be exposed to yet another 1. What would happen next was highly uncertain. I was a bit afraid a fight might ensue if he didn't recognize me.

What did happen was that G & G made it into his apartment babbling giddily all the way (pointing at the art on the walls & making fractured French comments about them) - even making it all the way to the furthest room - but, Reinhardt had closed & locked the door behind himself. I couldn't get in so I waited. Gail was bubbling with "Quel fenetres!" (What windows!) & Eugenie was pretending to try to sell Art by the Kilo ("L'art par le kilo") - as a take-off on B-More Beefalo's Art by the Pound project. Both of them were running around frantically touching the furniture & gushing with "Belle! Belle!" In the meantime R.U.S. was very confused & was trying to politely usher the blithering invaders out. He opened the door & in I rushed. Having to alter my plan a bit, I merely shouted over & over "Ou est le W.C.? Ou est le W.C.?", etc.. Reinhardt didn't recognize me & I was relishing every moment as he tried to make sense of all this.

Via was in another room not even paying much attention to it all when R cried out desperately to her "Do you know these people?" Walking towards us she looked inquisitively for a moment, grinned broadly, gave me a friendly hug & exclaimed "tENTATIVELY!" Reinhardt hesitated a bit (still recuperating somewhat from our confusionist approach) & relaxed. Another Great Moment in OddBall Sports was under our belts (or behind our backs or what have you). Despite the tension & busyness of V & R's preparing for their imminent wedding, Pancreas & I were graciously invited to be guests.

Genie & Gail & I spent a day or so practicing further silly confusionism. One day, en route to visiting someone, we found a car door which we picked up & carried as a present. Of course, just carrying it wasn't enough, so we stayed on the road, clutching the car door in the position it would've been if the rest of the car had been there & we were driving it, & pretended to be just cruising along normally.

Gail had a friend, who, for the sake of anonymity, I'll call Smith & Wesson, that she'd known for many years in BalTimOre, who was now residing in Paris - playing & teaching, oh, again for the sake of anonymity, let's say, being a dancing bear Coping with ePilepsy. Stimulated by the fun we'd had surprising R & V, Gail & I wanted to surprise her friend in, at least, an equally startling way.

Discussing various possibilities, we decided that we would find out when he'd be home & arrive there wearing masks or some such. In preparation for my being Litvinov's "seeing eye dog" for an action that we were planning for the APT fest, we'd acquired a dog mask. I think Gail might've suggested that she & I switch roles with her on all fours as the dog so that she'd cover her face with the mask so that S&W couldn't recognize her. Maybe we were planning to barge into his apartment when he opened the door &, after confusing him a bit with some silliness, eventually have Pancreas pull off the mask. Of course, at that point, we figured Smithy would get a good laugh out of it. All seemingly harmless enough. A good time to be had by all, etc..

The problem was that he resided fairly far from where we were staying & we didn't have very much time - so we wanted to be sure he'd be home before we trekked over there. Furthermore, we didn't want him to know that we were here in advance. So, we decided that I'd call there 1st using a fake name & voice to try to find out his schedule.

Given that I'm writing this account 6&1/2 years later, my memory is unfortunately unclear about the total sequence of events. As such, I'm hereby forewarning the reader that this story is accurate in general but may be a bit askew in detail. Anyway, as an esoteric reference to Steve Thorne back in London, Gail & I decided that I should go by the name of "Dr. Thorne" & speak with a phony "British" accent. I called Smith & Wesson's & got his answering machine & left a message: "Yes, This is Dr. Thorne, & I have some very important information that I need to give you. Unfortunately, this information is highly confidential & I don't think that I should give it to you via the phone. I'll try calling back to set up an appointment with you. Thank you."

We called again & left another message to the same effect, perhaps a little more enticing, "Hello, This is Dr. Thorne calling again & I can't stress enough the importance of our contacting each other. You've been subjected to mind-control experiments without your knowledge & it's very important that you & I get together so that I can inform you about what can be done to counteract the damage done to you." Then I left Reinhardt's phone number.

Keep in mind that throughout this whole time Gail's & my purpose was just to arouse Wesson's curiosity to make our eventual visit to him spicier. S&W called back but Gail & I weren't there. R.U.S. answered & played the part of Thorne's assistant. "No, I'm sorry, Dr. Thorne isn't here right now." "This is Smith & Wesson. Dr. Thorne has called me saying that he has something important to tell me about mind-control or something! I mean what's going on?" "I'm sorry sir, I can't divulge that information over the phone. I'm afraid you'll have to wait to talk with the Dr. himself." "Can't you tell me anything? I mean this seems pretty weird."

Gail & I left for Madrid without having a chance to actually visit Smithy. We asked Reinhardt to continue to play the assistant & to tell Wessony, if he called, that the Dr. had been forced to leave the country in a hurry & to try to stall him further. Smith & Wesson did call again & Sevoel played it as we requested.

From Madrid, Gail & I wrote a letter to Wes. I'd been carrying a lab notebook which I'd originally intended to keep notes in about Gail's health. Using a sheet of the notebook's paper to try to make it seem more convincingly from a Doctor, We wrote a full page - something along these lines:

Dear Mr. Smith & Wesson, It's my unpleasant duty to inform you that you've been subjected to covert mind-control experiments by the C.I.A. Your case has been brought to my attention because I'm a de-programming specialist. Naturally, it's not safe for me to reveal my sources. For now, I've had to flee Paris due to my being discovered by, & endangered by, C.I.A. agents in whose best interest it is that my activities be stopped. I'll try to pass through Paris again in the near future so that we can meet in person to discuss this further. Do not be alarmed. I'm sure that, with my help, you will be able to fully recover. Sincerely, Dr. Thorne.

From Madrid we passed briefly through Paris again, got Reinhardt's report on his call from Smith, & moved on to London for the APT Fest - once again without a chance to get together with S&W. Steve Thorne's birthday came along & Gail & I decided to surprise him. In the spirit of the convolutions typical of us by now, we put a placard on the door identifying the house as Dr. Thorne's office & hid many of Steve's household objects in his bedroom. As a crowning touch, we changed the front door lock so that Thorne wouldn't be able to get in when he came home. Come home he did & we greeted him with a cautiously opened door & a "I'm sorry, Dr. Thorne's not in the office right now. Would you like to make an appointment?" - talking to him through the barely cracked open doorway as if we were paranoid. Steve didn't seem to think it was very funny.

The Dr. Thorne mythology grew & inspired Gail to write at least a couple of stories furthering it. Here's a sample:

This is a story of Dr. Thorne, specialist in de-programming unwitting victims of government mind control experiments. The story opens with Dr. Thorn posing as mild mannered Steve Thorn hiding out at inconspicuous 13 Aulton Place, London, England. As we join Dr. Thorne this evening at his hide out we see that he is being toasted and roasted (sounds of "here here" "where where" "who who" "there there" "Thorne Thorne" and glasses clinking, dishes rattling, toilets flushing, roofs leaking, etc). Un Be Knownst to everyone celebrating the supposed birthday of Steven Thorne, the substance in these glasses is ostragen and nitrogen from the planet Claire. These unfortunate victims have been misled into thinking that this is a genuine birthday celebration. Dr. Thorne knows his birthday is not May 31st, in fact he was never born, and his entry date onto the planet Earth is totally unrecorded. Un Be Knownst to Dr. Thorne his intended victims have called the authorities to arrest him. Dr. Thorne had made the mistake of imitating crickets while watching cricket on tv. Additionally Dr. Thorne has eaten all the gourmet wheat paste in the city. (Sounds - "He's such a fucking glutten, he ate up all the mutten, Thorn is so revolting, let's change the doors bolting"). Rodney, mild-mannered dope fiend and double agent is present. Thorn believes Rodney to be his true friend and chemical aquisition accomplice.

Dr. Thorne: "My good friend Rodney please give everyone here a little zebra appetizer."

(Chorus: "Handy dandy zebras eat all the amoeba, they soaked them with a spider and wash it down with cider, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha laughter.")

Rodney: "It doesn't sound like they're up to it sir, instead why don't you find your bag and pack your toothbrush."

Thorn: "Sounds like a good idea to me. Is this for my international lecture tour so I will be rich and famous? No more of this obscure anonymous screenplay writer bullshit!"

At this point Thorn's pal, confidante and house warden Pete belches.

Pete: "Somebody record the date, time and place of that Neoist Anthem."

Chorus: "neoism scleoism, flame those irons, wear that fish, neoism scleoism, put your tennis shoes on the dish."

Pete: "Sorry everyone, if tENT hadn't concocted the nearly edible dinner."

Litvinov: "That hardly edible dinner Horrible." Eugenie: "That commercially inedible dinner

terribly."

tENT: 'It's got all the essentials in it. Beer, vodka, cider, malt, some of this and some of that. Actually more of that and some of this, or a little more of this than some of that, or -" Stewart: "Enough of this."

tENT: "No some of this."

Bree: "No all of that."

Stewart: "I can't take it anymore, I need some humour in my life. You all take everything so seriously. I need. I need a..."

Jenny: "Smile."

Chorus: "Smile smile smile, smile for a while, lie on a crocodile, swimming on the River Nile."

Giorgi: "Let a smile stick you up like an umbrella."

tENT: "I won't be responsible if anyone gets sick from this true gourmet."

Litvinov: "It's true, he's never responsible."

Jenny: "I'm the nurse in the house. Red cross doesn't stand for angry commies you know."

Thorne: "And I'm the doctor in the house."

Pete (Angry): "You don't have any patience."

tENT: "Is this British hospitality?"

Rodney: "Pack your toothbrush Thorne."

Litvinov: "Skip it, just leave your teeth."

Giorgi: "Did someone say it's teeth time?"

Eugenie: "It's always teeth time."

Chorus: "Always teeth time when you're down in the mouth, it's teeth time in London, in the north and the south."

Thorn: "I'm getting a headache."

Rodney: "Here, take an aspirin." Hands him a pill.

Thorn: "It's pink, it's not an aspirin."

tENT: 'Well you're not a doctor."

Jenny: "Witch doctor?"

Pete: "what doctor?" Giorgi: "What nurse?"

Jenny: "Who's the nurse?"

Thorne: "You're fired."

Rodney: "You're tired."

Litvinov: "You're expired." Stewart: "You're retired."

Rodney: "You're under arrest."

Thorn: "What a relief I can't wait to get out of this loony bin."

Pete: "Horobin, throw it in the bin."

Chorus: "A relief, a leaf, a leaf, when you flee, oh say can you see Dr. Thorne's out of his tree."

Thorn: "I repent, I consent. I'll relent. Take me away. Here's Yantoh's fur coat. I've got my toothbrush now."

Everyone: "Good, teeth time."

- & so on..

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE Impractical Seriousness

krononautic divector field didaction

APT 81, Peking Poolroom & the streets, Montreal, CaNada

In the kitchen, the oven door was open with a turntable on it. The turntable had a record on it which I had painted with glow-in-the-dark paint. The main lighting in the room was from a clamp lamp over the turntable & from lasers which were set up to reflect off steam irons (a Neoist symbol of severity) held by Kiki Bonbon & Zbigniew Brotgehirn. While the turntable turned, I blotted out the record's light by spray-painting black on it & Richard Ellsberry (then known as Richard X) gave a lecture accompanied by chalk writing on the walls about the Krononautic Organism (the time travel "society" that those of us from Baltimore at this festival represented). Ruth Turner did something out on the roof adjacent to the kitchen. Doug Retzler wandered the streets of Montreal, under the influence of LSD, aiming a low-intensity portable laser into windows & doorways of bars & other buildings periodically calling the Peking Poolroom to interrupt the lecture & report on his activities. The action more or less ended when Kiki asked Zbigniew " Do you really want to do this?" (i.e.: hold the steam irons to reflect the lasers) to which Zbigniew replied "No" & they stopped doing so.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts Guerrilla Playfare booed usic Mad Scientist Didactions Acts of As-Beenism So-Called Whatevers Psychopathfinding Uncerts etc.

CHRONICLE OF THE NEOAST OBSERVER AT THE SO CALLED MILLIONTH APARTMENT FESTIVAL

My arrival in NYC was dissatisfying. I had intended to leave Baltimore blindfolded but was unable to find a travelling companion and so made the journey sighted and alone. When I arrived in the city I took the subway to the Lower East Side where I waited on the street for several hours, trying to make contact with members of the Neoast Cultural Conspiracy and other friends by telephone; trying to find a place to piss or drop off my bags (including my `Mental Case' - a bag formed from a convoluted straight-jacket). On the street I was repeatedly offered crack and a piece of ass and directions. I gave up trying to find shelter and went to the Rivington Sculpture Garden at 6 PM, where the first public event of the festival was scheduled to take place. A Neoast bonfire. The Garden is a lot taken over by metal constructions, salvage and debris assembled by members of the Rivington School. The Rivington School is a `street-nationalist' group (from Rivington Street), peripherally in league with a Karen Eliot.

When I arrived the Garden was dark and a few people were shooting drugs inside - with what appeared a cursory attempt at secrecy. I didn't recognise them and decided to circle around the block, past another small party where some people were laughing and shoving each other around. A few false recognitions on the street later I found Neoasts had arrived in the Sculpture Garden. They were lighting the camp fire under some crates. Present were Theresa Rodrigues and her boyfriend Allen, Torontonians Ottelie and her boyfriend Gordon W. Zealot, a Karen Eliot, Cowboy Ray Kelley of the Rivington School, Matty Jankowski, a person called Jeffrey and a few whose names I didn't hear. Introductions were made in a festive atmosphere with various people standing on a crate placed on top of the fire. Ottelie was the longest lasting fire walker, perched a few feet in the air with the flames licking around her feet. Gordon W. played an Indian Kohl Drum with considerable volume as Karen Eliot sang what were presumably Hungarian Folk songs, and I beat on the metal sculptures around a nonplussed audience. A Karen Eliot proclaimed that `at Rivington, it is always six-o'clock', which was repeatedly expressed throughout the festival.

The German anti-Neoast Stiletto arrived shortly after, carrying an intervolometre. Other projections of the Baltimore Neoast Contingency - Peter Zahorecz, Debbie Montgomery-Glen, tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE and the formidable Jamaica arrived and discussed with those present the impounding of Debbie's car, which had been relocated by the police to an area of the city where they were more certain of their sovereignty. This event left them with no certain way of returning to Baltimore. Conversations then ensued, during which Peter presented me with a French `verb-finding wheel' from his special Berlitz Case, and I broke out a body-piercing magazine for general viewing. Photographs of the distended labia of `Mistress Noni' generated some comment among the assembled hangers-on. Theresa seemed inflamed by the idea of being a participant in such marginal somatic alterations. Gordon W. then promised to introduce me to the logician and former associate of Fluxus Henry Flynt sometime during the festival.

Peter Zahorecz cut sterile bandages which I had brought from Baltimore and taped them to my eyes with medical tape, over which he fastened a tight blindfold. I am indebted to him for his help. The result of his labour was blindness which endured for the rest of the festival, though the blindfold was restored and the bandages replaced daily to avoid eye infection. I could barely perceive changes in illumination from daylight to darkness. From then on, I gave each person I met a numbered ticket imprinted with the legend `active participant and impartial observer' and a different number, in order to clarify the roles involved in my meeting them. I agreed with Stiletto to serve as blind cameraman for sections of his autobiographical film The Prodigal Son. I was then led through a tunnel of fires in the garden. The flames were immense in `my' mind. Theresa expressed some anxiety about my safety during the festival, but a Karen Eliot assured her that I made `this kind of violent performance all the time'. On the street, sections of Stiletto's film were shot whenever I `saw' anything which interested me.

The next event of the festival consisted of dinner in a Polish restaurant with Peter and Stiletto. A loose conference to adjust the present personalities. Instinctively I realised that pirogies were to - at least temporarily - displace chapatis as a primary Neoast foodstuff, and so I ordered and ate them. The best technique turned out to be putting each one into my mouth whole and trying to salvage the grease and sour cream with my tongue. Throughout the festival I relied on the falsely evoked sympathy of waiters, who assumed my eyes had been damaged in an accident and were extremely polite.

That night a vaudeo-evening styled as Catholic Convulsion took place in the Chameleon Club, where participants of the festival assembled to drink and stand or sit in proximity to a large vaudeo-projection. After some whoopala, tENTATIVELY presented vaudeo, with the eleven-month old Jamaica giving a live commentary which was amplified via contact mike. tENTATIVELY encouraged hecklers to get on stage and participate via microphones, and then scolded them for being cowards when they didn't do so. Some members of the `audience' responded angrily to the combination of a `baby' and tENT's sex and vomit-drenched public service message vaudeo. Others responded by directly stimulating my body with their hands, clothing, mouths, tongues, asses, backs, legs, beard, breath and breasts. At the time, this sexual stimulation was so prolonged, intense and omni-directional that I couldn't tell how many people of which genders were engaging me, although I enjoyed this increase in my disorientation..

At least one time people were standing on a table. Various other vaudeos, including a presentation from Richard Martel, ensued in a general atmosphere of anarchy which bordered on normalcy. I assumed I was in the midst of the `fundamental vulgarity of the Rivington School'. We were invited by a Karen Eliot to spend at least a night of the festival sleeping in the window of her apartment. Peter, tENT and I readily accepted this idea, but never carried it through.

I slept that night in the apartment of the Unknown Neoast, who was appropriately unaware of our presence in her domicile as she was away. The accommodation had been arranged by another Neoast and we were advised to take full precautions to conceal ourselves. Elaborate traps were set by the door and in the halls to kill or detain the apartment's owner should she arrive prematurely to find all nine of us in occupation like Bedouins. The next day a complex command-centre was set up to co-ordinate the activities of the festival, with additional telephones and continuous mail-delivery.

Debbie spoke (in a disembodied voice) of her ability to pick up radio transmissions with her metal fillings. I began to feel major psychical changes as a result of my visual deprivation - depression, introversion, a lost sense of the lapsing of time. We were on the street and met with Gordon W., Theresa and others. Somehow we had left the apartment and ended up at the Stockwell Gallery, a structure like a firehouse on the outside, and with an interior resembling a Byzantine chapel hung with cloth partitions. I began to hallucinate steadily. I distributed texts which were added to a well of Neoast paraganda. tENTATIVELY crouched next to me on the floor and asked me to sign a contract (which I couldn't see) with my blood. I agreed and he cut my finger with a Swiss-Army knife. Then I was told that the contract legally ensured that I would loan him twenty dollars every day for the remainder of the festival.

Further Neoast spectacles were being enacted and vaudeos shown, while Gordon W. prepared an Indian meal for all present. The majority of the previous night's belligerents and more were apparently circulating in the room, where I socialised with vigour, feeling ecstatic and surrounded in invisible and pulsing space. A `collective' Neoast book was in progress, with pages strewn across the floor and on the walls. Stiletto filmed me commenting on the works hung in the gallery, which I could not see. Many introductions were made and more benign sexuality was felt. Theresa Rodrigues and I planned to pierce each other's spinal columns as a mutual introduction to surgical body-play and she agreed to search for suitable rings before the next night's events. We rallied to sleep at the apartment of the Unknown Neoast. Flaming skulls, tentacles, worms, ice, metal, night-sticks, windows, sheets, numbers, distilleries, teeth and other objects were locked in orbit around my head, which was like smoke.

I remember almost nothing clearly from the next day except trying to navigate in the apartment. My psychological state had deteriorated and I found it difficult to pull myself out of my disorientation enough to do anything. In the apartment, plans were being made to retrieve the impounded car. Peter Zahorecz apparently had various uniforms: boy-scout, surgeon, mermaid etc., which he intended to wear for Neoast purposes. In the late afternoon we left the apartment and walked towards the Stockwell Gallery. On the street I kept my hand touching tENT's or Peter's shoulders. By chance we met Ottelie, Gordon W. and Theresa. My memory of these events is extremely unclear. They may (also) have happened the day before.

It may have been on this day that I spent several hours with Stiletto and visited his studio at PSI, a prestigious state-funded art centre. We entered the PSI Gallery and I shot footage of the artwork and was recorded commenting on it, as I was led by Stiletto through disorienting installations, before a bewildered curator. The commentary was primarily `art historical'. The exhibition was based around the theme of the Korean DMZ. I continued to film as we climbed up into the artist's studios, where no guests are allowed. Stiletto had been rebuked by the administration for not producing enough work to justify his studio, and so planned an occupation of Neoasts to compound their complaints. He left me alone in his barren room for an hour while he went to find a broken record player to burn with a blowtorch in a performance. As I waited blindly in the room singing, whistling and clapping against its reverberation, I didn't realise that there was a pile of unravelled bared razor-wire on the floor in front of me.

Stiletto wanted to transport an object he had made across town from the PSI to his apartment. The object was a circular mirror called Look Sharp, the frame for which was a band of razor-wire. We carried it jointly, and without a case, onto the subway at rush hour, the train was packed and there was barely room to breathe. As we descended into the station, I hallucinated train lines like vast tentacles projecting from a coloured field located in my head. I felt extremely euphoric. On the train someone very nervously asked Stiletto what the razor-wire was, and he replied `steel'.

We arrived at the Stockwell where a scene similar to the night before was taking place. Almost immediately someone I hadn't met dragged me across the room to where an `installation' was and stuck my hand into broken glass and some thick goo, probably paint and glue mixed, which smeared all over me. Stiletto walked around with a lit blowtorch sticking out of his shoulder-bag. An evening of presentations was planned, with almost continual accompaniment from a boom-box. I talked and messed around with people, a bunch of whom flipped me upside-down and made me run on my hands, out the door of the gallery and onto the street - and may have done the same to Theresa, I can't remember. Theresa made me run down the street at top speed, and made me bang my head on a stop sign.

At some point early on, we went to the Bridge Bookshop where tENT and I sold (or traded) a bunch of Widemouth tapes, and tENT was invited to work and run the store alone for an hour despite the fact that they had never met him before. He accepted and I had charming conversation with Mami, whose shift he was supplementing, and then went for a cup of coffee with Debbie, before returning to the gallery. I found talking extremely difficult, although in many ways my entire experience suggested to me that socialising is more pleasurable without vision (at least under such circumstances).

During an action by Pamela Stockwell and friends, the cops arrived with threats of closing things down and met with verbal abuse and pacification. Theresa Rodrigues and I quickly cut eggplant on a table while the hatred grew. The police intervention reverberated for the rest of the evening, giving an excuse for fighting and dislike between the participants. A group of scrap-metal players dragged hundreds of pounds of metal into the gallery and engaged in playing, and then in altercations with Pamela Stockwell and one of the Karen Eliots. Both `sides' tried to rally active support by forcing almost everyone in the space to talk about the conflict all night, thus preventing anything else from happening.

Peter and tENT tried to produce Booed Usic but were drowned out and ignored. Texts on the wall proclaiming the value of censorship, which had been crossed out, were duly followed by many of the participants. Steve threw a willing tENTATIVELY across the room like a beach-ball, after asking his permission, in an attempt to catalyse some slam dancing. Gordon W. prepared another meal for the participants and I played his Kohl Drum, after which he dedicated a short piece of drumming to me. As we left the gallery, one of the scrap metal players stood outside screaming `gentrifying bitch' at Pamela Stockwell.

We arrived at Stiletto's Neoast Hospital by ambulance. It was a temporary military installation occupying part of PSI, surrounded by bands of razor-wire preventing the entry of prying FDA inspectors. Inside the `hospital', the Neoasts were to be cured of Neoasm in a sterile and featureless environment. Afterwards, the hospital would dissolve itself, as PSI regulations still required that no guests stay overnight, and no temporary Neoast health care facilities be set up. We spent the night undergoing disorienting and painful treatment (including smooching), and in the end I was cured, at least temporarily, of Neoasm.

I spent the next day, End Of The World Saturday, with Jamaica and Debbie, recovering, resting and playing, while tENTATIVELY and Peter left to participate in the Flaming Iron March in Tompkins Square Park, and the later festivities with jack Smith, Gordon, Karen and some Village Voice reporters including Cindy Carr. The next day, which was the last day of the festival, everyone in the Unknown Neoast's apartment slept to make up for the disintegration of their sleep-cycles. Norman, one of the Fourteen Secret Masters Of The World, called from Baltimore with elliptical instructions to help Debbie free her car.

We put a lot of effort into cleaning the apartment to erase all traces of our illegal occupation; washing towels, drying out toilet paper, erasing messages on the answer phone and fabricating our own `more believable ones', removing our smells. Somehow, we left the apartment with a surprise car-ride from Petty Quarl and went to Ricky Killreagan's pad, where the others deposited their belongings. We crossed the Lower East Side looking for a place to eat and finally realised we were way-off schedule, we had missed the Williamsburg Bridge actions, the end of the festival. Happy but despondent, again cured of Neoasm, I was led to the Aztec Black-Light Bar. There the blindfold was removed, inducing several hours of schizophrenia and agonising confusion.

Monty Cantsin

When James arrived at Aulton Place,

...he found Jurgen Braun constructing a Neoist Altar in the street outside number thirteen. Judy had told James a great deal about Jurgen, and James recognised this world class performance artist by his attire - a red coat, gold shoes and a brown and gold rain hat.

The front door was open and James walked into the hall where he found Mark sticking pieces of mail art to the walls. Mark had spent the best part of the day constructing a data installation in his room and was now making the final touches to the house before the opening ceremony of the Neoist Festival later that evening. One of these touches was that everything in number thirteen had a name card attached to it. The walls had cards saying 'wall' tacked to them, tables had cards saying 'table' tacked to them, doors had cards saying 'door' tacked to them - and so on, so that virtually every object in the house had a neatly written card tacked to it, stating exactly what it was.

Upstairs, James ran into Gloria Swann, a professional model and part time performance artist from the States. Judy had slipped out of her usual jeans and T-shirt and was clad in a black cat-suit. She was carefully applying one of several successive layers of make-up to her face.

Terry Wood, a twenty-year old mail artist was hanging model aircraft from the kitchen ceiling. Time ticked inexorably away, bringing the Flaming Chapati Opening ever nearer. Marianne Greenwood, Braun's girlfriend, emerged from the basement. She refused to speak so much as a word to anyone but Jurgen - but silently accepted any food she was offered.

Brett Johnson arrived with his entourage - his boyfriend Adrian Foster and a teenager named Charles White, who'd been seduced into attending the Neoist Festival with promises of art world fame. Hazel appeared, she'd brought along a friend of hers called John. Person Person, Birgit Smith and Peter Murray emerged from the sanctuary of their beds. Karl Pratt, a performance artist from Northern Ireland, failed miserably in his attempt to make an impression as he entered the kitchen. His fellow Irishmen, Kevin Alderman and the poet Stephen Brady came in behind him.

Mark ushered everyone from the kitchen and into the street, announcing that Jurgen was going to do a performance. Braun primed a loaf of bread with rubber cement, set light to it and placed it on his head. The result was spectacular but safe - flames leapt from the highly inflammable rubber cement, while the bread safely insulated Jurgen's head from any danger. While his bread hat burnt, Braun chanted a list of names and did a little dance.

Excerpt from: Retro-Futurism, first published in Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis

3 part action

APT 81, Peking Poolroom, Montréal

First, I explained to the audience that I was going to kiss everyone there while I said the word "Pleasure" in 26 different languages. Each audience member was to rate which word they thought was most pleasurable to be kissed during the saying of. This explanation was translated into French from English by Kiki Bonbon. I proceeded to do as explained while a tape of mine played as "background usic". Most of the audience was male, 1 of the women refused to be kissed, & there was general extreme discomfort with such an intimacy from a "stranger".

Second, the audience was led to the bathroom where they were asked, again with Kiki translating, to write the names of all of the objects in the room on those objects. The purpose of this was to make everyone more conscious of how much language surrounds us. This deteriorated into a more ordinary, but still "spirited", graffiti session.

Finally, having moved to the bedroom, it was explained, Kiki translating, that I was going to read from the "Arabian Nights" removing all vowels - as I had heard is done in Arabic writing. This was, of course, a deliberate absurd misinterpretation of "scholarly" information meant to reduce a narrative text to gibberish & to provide a ridiculous challenge for the translator.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE

Neoist Haircut (in the Popular Chapati Circus - act 1?)

The Neoist Network's 8th Apartment Festival, London Musicians Collective, London, UK

Monty Cantsin had drawn a brain on my mostly shaved head. My haircut at the time was a circle that went around 1 ear in the front & the other ear in the back. There was an upside-down & backwards question mark on the back. This was before I had my brain tattoo. For the "Chapati Circus" I wore a green clown wig hiding it all & a clear plastic "normal" face mask. My clothes were a jump suit made by & given to me by Nancy Andrews that had "Discover a Lovelier You" written neatly on it with pictures of plastic surgery - including "nose jobs" & "tummy tucks". Continuing the tradition of free Neoist haircuts, I had Cantsin cut my wig & lather my mask. To climax this grotesque farce, I eventually ripped my transparent mask apart in the process of shaving it & Pete pulled off my wig to reveal my "brain" & the spectacle of my head underneath.

A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts Guerrilla Playfare booed usic Mad Scientist Didactions Acts of As-Beenism So-Called Whatevers Psychopathfinding Uncerts etc.

NON-PARTICIPATION The Festival

The Festival of Non-Participation is a decentralised cultural festival being held in Scotland during 1988. The festival will provide an open situation in which various groups and individuals can organise events expressing their ideas about non-participation. The festival is not confined to the arts. Following are some topics within the subject of non-participation for you to consider as a potential organiser and non-participant. The originators of the festival hope that many diverse organisations throughout Scotland will stage events to take place under the umbrella of The Festival of Non-Participation. The originators do not want to act as legislators but will advise, encourage and provide support. The finance, advertising and organisation of each event remain the responsibility of that particular organiser. Any group or individual organising an event is asked to make it known that the event is part of The Festival of Non-Participation and is asked to contact the co-ordinator to register their event so that a programme of The Festival of Non-Participation can be kept up to date. Co-ordinator : Pete Horobin, The Data Attic, 37 Union Street, Dundee DD1 4BS or tel. 0382 27735 during normal working hours.

NON-PARTICIPATION = UNEMPLDYMENT

When a person is unemployed s/he is kept by the state on a very low subsistence income which prevents her/him from participating in Mrs Thatcher's concept of popular capitalism. That person, therefore, is a non-participant whether s/he wishes to be or not. Unemployment can be a valuable opportunity to capitalise on one's free time and although one is in effect a non-participant within the consumerist society one should not be made to feel guilty or inadequate for being so.

NON-PARTICIPATION = NON-CONSUMERISM

The love of spending money has become a drug on which the majority of people in western society, have become hooked. During the 80s society has become overly conscious of finance and materialism. Popular capitalism has egged the population of GB to participate fully in this new dominant culture. Consumerism has become the new religion. In order to oppose this lust for personal wealth many individuals have decided to non-participate. By eating a diet free of manufactured foodstuffs or by simple living and choosing to cycle, walk or take buses, rather than owning a car, or refusing to watch tv, many form their own alternative style of non-participation. By non-participating in some aspects of the consumerist society people do something positive about stemming the tide of pollution.

NON-PARTICIPATION = TOURISM

During the 80s society's leisure time has become a commodity. Tourism has established itself as the largest growth industry. Whereas, in the past, our leisure time was "free" time it is now a marketable part of our consumerist society. Scotland, in particular, has become a tourist country. Many Scots cannot afford to participate in the tourist attractions of their own country. Our natural heritage has been divided into specialist areas: military zones, forestry plantations, industrial complexes,sporting estates, wildlife reserves and tourist areas. As a consequence, the Scot is no longer free to roam extensively within her/his country.

NON-PARTICIPATION = SUICIDE

The most drastic and final form of non-participation is suicide. Some have deliberately taken their own lives as a personal expression of protest. Being an emotive and taboo subject, suicide is rarely discussed, how- ever, it remains a popular method of non-participation.

NON-PARTICIPATION = ART

Under the welfare state system of support for the arts, via the administration of the Arts Council, art has been made accessible to the working classes. Every citizen has a share in the art produced in this country. New policies of privatisation and sponsorship by industry, which have been given Arts Council support, will take art out of the public domain and place it firmly in the private sector. Where art has been free to everyone it will now have a charge and instead of being a public responsibility it will become that of the oligarchy. As a consequence, the citizens will have to pay to see the art of their own country. The practise of art will become the luxury of the well-off. Elitism in the arts will become rife. The artist, unfortunately, is a prostitute and has always sold her/his services to the highest bidder. By accepting Arts Council money the artist condones the actions of the state even when that state seeks to bring about her/his downfall. A few artists however choose to be non-participants by forming their own alternative way of working and self-support.

NON-PARTICIPATION = PROTEST

For generations non-participation has been the primary form of protest. Industrial strikes have a long history within capitalism. To strike is to non-participate in the policies of the industrialist. Mahatma Gandhi firmly believed in non-participation as a viable form of protest. In Scotland today many are talking about non-participation policies as a form of protest against the Tory poll tax. It could be argued that we, as a race, do not non-participate enough and that we are over-tolerant of our democratically elected government.

To date the following events have been discussed although it is too early to confirm them.

"SUICIDE" - an exhibition showing the history and social implications with a section open to artists to submit work on the theme. To be held in Dundee.

"THE ALTERNATIVE GARDEN FESTIVAL" - a statement about the elitism of the official Garden Festival. The alternative event will concern itself with the growing of vegetables on industrial waste ground somewhere in Glasgow. It is the aim of the organisers to produce an edible end result. Non-participation will be free.

"THE BURNING" - is a statement about marketing issues within the art world. Instead of being invited to submit works for exhibition and sale, artists will be invited to submit exclusively for destruction by fire. The works therefore, will not be shown or preserved thereby depriving the art market of potential assets and commodities. The event will take place in Glasgow on a suitable outside location.

Language

PHILOSOPHER'S UNION SOAPBOX STAND

(a foreign scientist's voice)

"Or,

(B in the S is a D as B in S since the S is E: a pattern "I" x S relations) and (S from T only by "P" space). This (R is not a R of E difficulty), instead it is a B to the C of the H-condition x "P". (S of T for D "things"). T is/as/was experimentally "M" becoming "I". (R of all I realities or I is "S"). "T", the non-r of V continuity C, gives N-values to O-symbols and O-directions to I and "C" with "L" and "N". (W-draw, H-lessness, D-function). "From 'T' outside 'I' can't 'S' anything". (N-windows, T-fatigue). T want S-1 to "S" me in the "H" while I'm Oring about M-self in 3rd-person in or "der:" 2-p that R is "Non-L". "E" as "C", and "S" for its "N"."

(A pedantic voice)

"Or,

Humans domesticate other "animals" in order to displace self-consciousness; that is, to reinforce their collective ability not to perceive their own domestication. That they are toilet trained like dogs and cats, who they "civilize" in order to re-resent the forms of their constructed reality. A reality with no master except every master, and which is elaborated as power without a goal. Surely animals (that is, ourselves) are better off indoors. In fact, there is no internal force, no soul, no reason: domestication can be infinite or not at all, since there is no separate human condition to limit it, only the projection of continuity on meaningless history, almost pacifying our fears of the future. But things could get much, much worse. Who domesticates us? For thousands of years, non-material entities: Gods, demons, principles, traditions, abstraction, and now as ever the "collective" goods, economic imperatives, glamour. They are not projections of "mass-consciousness", they are a separate and valued species which relates to us as we relate to our pets, having the same pathological quasi-concern for our well-being. We perceive them as elements of a "natural order" the same way that a dog or cat perceives the "master" as a powerful and arbitrary aspect of its environment, an intrinsic and abstracted part of domestic reality." (this is my "pet" theory)

(A wistful voice)

"Or, boxing the soap is a death (as brain hemorrhage) in sleep, since silence is exterior to it, the box: a pattern. Iced by sugary relations, and sinking from tires only by a puncture, a space. This road is not a road of elsewhere,decompressed. Instead, it is the "gas station", surrounded by a bruise, a cunt of the hemorrhoid condition. By penetration, a semblance of tautology for disintegrating things, the "clean sheets" or "streets" of the mind. Perhaps auto-penetration?

e.g. anything is anything

anything is a microcosm of everything therefore, 1 can read a PALM (e g) & derive the same info as if READING everything re ASTROLOGY,

1 can believe in a certain type of unity of the elements considered & use some overt aspects of things whose significance is determined X intensity, gravity (e g), as an implicational representative of interactive effects

6 7 22 ? "

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

Anything is Anything

The sentence "anything is anything" is not a stable tautology, but a multileveled contraction. As a banner, it is self-vitiating, but it exploits the "weakness" of language to provide a meta paradox.

It can be read as

[a] generically, any "thing" is itself [-true by "definition"]

[b] anything explicitly is any other thing. the entire continuum may be mapped onto itself in any way. traditionally, this is only true if the continuum is empty. if the continuum was empty, then where would the meaning of assertion come from? [-false by "definition"]

[c] "anything can be converted into or seen functionally as anything else". This is the position of both transcendental religion and of rationalism. rationalism factors out opaque areas, so that, with correct transformation rules, it can convert any meaning or thing into any other thing. even if the effort to do so is incalculable. [-Undecidable]

"Anything is anything" is an assertion which can't be checked, since the three interpretations are in contradiction; yet there is no disasociation between language and reality. You can't find an instance of "zero" in the world, but you can easily find an "anything" - an underspecified signifier.

Karen Eliot

Language Constructions

Two definitions:

Met-a-phren-ic (m<tafr<nik) n. A psychiatric disorder which manifests itself as an insatiable need to psychiatrically diagnose other people: the disorder of psychiatry: feverisch categorization based on deviation from normalicy [sic].

Pat-a-phren-uc (pat<fr<nik) n/a. A psychiatric disorder which manifests itself as an insatiable desire to imply the non-validity of psychiatric diagnosis in general, and particularly those categorizations which have as their basis the concept of 'normailicy'; someone who finds debunking of psychiatric procedure.

One idea: (

The letter "c" shall forever be repla(ed with open parenthesis in de(laration of openness and (ontinuity towards all ideas and notions whi(h stem from (on(epts of (oherence!

Not parenthesis "set" shall ever be (losed, and every thought (onsequently lead deeper into a labyrinth of unresolved (on(ept!

(onsequently, ea(h linguisti( manifestation will mirror the nature of (ons(iousness itself, both its nestled stru(ture, and also in its near infinite generation of words pertaining to hitherto unknown (on(epts (eg. "repla", "ed", "de", "laration", etc...

All existing texts in all languages will be altered to (onform to this prin(iple, as soon as possible so as to maximize the (onfusions (aused by this (hange and to avoid re(ontextualization into the mainstream. This will be a((omplished via massive government grants.

(ons(iousness will (hange inherently so that we will at last be aware that there is no end in sight.

Spanish Art (lub

Dyslexia

e g

The couceqt that a bistnrdeq pirectioual seuse nuberlies qevelobweutal pyslexia mas elaporateb qy Ortou (1637) iu a series of stnqies degiuuiug iu 1625. Ortou startep frow the opservatiou that there adqeareb to qe a strikiug teupeucy for qyslexic chilbreu to shom a reversal iu right-left (aup' sowetiwes' nb-pomu) oriutatiou iu reabiug letters or morqs' e.g. d for p or sam for mas' anb vice versa. So iwdresseq mas he mith the iwqortauce of this bheuoweuou that he drobosep the terw strebhosywpolia (,,tmisteb sywqols,,) as a qesiguatiou for pevelodweutal byslexia. He calleq the wisreapiug of letters (tyqically reabiug a letter as it,s wirror iwage) a ,,static,, reversal. Siuce the wisreaqiug of morps iuvolves au iuversiou of the sepneuce or sbatiotewdoral orberiug of letters' he qesiguatep this tyqe of error as ,,kiuetic,, reversal.

tentatively, a convenience &/or id entity

The concept that

a idrutsbed idrecitnola ssuee bunrelies devpolenewatl dyslexia ams aleoptArbe by Ornot 1(39)7 in a sreies of butsies begiinng in 9152. Ornot atsrbet ofrm the dosrevaitno that three papeaper to be a striking nectcuedy ofr dyslexic children to show a everrsla in righ-elft a(n,d soitemsew, upopw)n orienatitno in repaing elttres or ompr,s .e.g, b ofr d or asw ofr am,s and vice vare.s So impressbe ams hen with the i-m opratnce of this phonenewno that he poropbes the trem pertshsomypail "(twisbet mysopl"s) as a deisganitno ofr devpolenewat1 dyslexi.a He claeld the misrepaing of elttres t(yidclaly repaing a elttre as i'ts rimorr igma)e a s"atit"c everrska. Since the misrepaing of omprs involves an invreisno of the besucuee or adsittomeoprla broreing of elttre,s he deisganbet this tbye of reorr as a k"iteni"c everrsl.a

Continuity Poem (Cinematic Version)

Put down the blade of time/emit: ?"what fo'up (Jack)

Singularity has become oppression, a 'tense present' in a cool dark cell of blood possessed by radio waves ( ashtrays etc.)

Ray of afternoon coatings, behaviors endlessly activated & tiring

Two humans talking and one says you don't mind if I go upstairs and lie down on the floor naked with a black cross painted on my stomach and people running around inside the room lighting fires.

He stepped out of the grey dock-surface and with his hands meticulously constructed a DNA-Double Helix from barbed wire and began to crawl through it

He was kept in an airplane-fence building as he was in a condition where once a linear month he would react to 'solids', i.e.. concrete etc.... and have 'attacks' (Manifested by becoming very quietly sociable, almost cooperative) & his mother had to have him kept there because she felt it was "a well advised precaution"

The same boy in a film-rear projected on a backdrop with a man watching the film. The boy runs out of the film to meet the man, matching his strides to the increasingly palpitations of his own image (broken projector, bar lines up and down his body as if the image were filmed off television). This running process takes forever and you and I are somehow involved in it

Young and severe looking, we run upstairs to talk to a girl, off-camera, but instead stop in front of a locked door. We begin to talk to the door, saying "Maria, come out now" and banging on the door. We also remember to say "don't lock the door", which is a futile attempt at time travel, as we know that it is already locked. Are we in love with the door? Why is 'she' rejecting us?

The father enters downstairs with a severe facial expression, but then softens up and says to the girl (still off camera), "Maria, I just thought I'd drop by to give you this saucepan full of cold water, here, it's for you"

The process is simple, we placed two mirrors of different sizes with one side of each touching, facing each other, so that a limit of infinite reflections was created in a decreasing spiral (from my perspective, increasing from the limits), with the images of my room trapped in the tilted planes, and wrapped around a conch shell interior

Smell of burnt arm hairs alarms us & in the morning the smell alerts us to a mysterious cut or placement (in time) but the sound of the birds still sounds like insects we always wanted to switch bodies for perspectival reasons measurement of time and ending the activation safely returned to the 'bungalow' structure at the instant of an empty cup.

So we walk off camera & emerge below our former position now as our own double & talking to ourselves

Drinking water from ones hands is a universal sign of friendship an connection to those around you, also a universal greeting

Psychosomatic Variations

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS OF SMILE

In case you were not aware of it before, the texts reprinted here are variations of other, pre-existing texts. In Neoism, there are various formulas for perpetually deriving new texts from existing Neoist writings.

Neoist writing explains the qualities and gradual reduction of of Monty Cantsin's multiplicity, and the relation of all things to Neoism. The intention is to manipulate reality through the name of Monty Cantsin. This name is not regarded as merely a token, but as something alive, so that everything done in the name of Monty Cantsin will manipulate reality.

Early Neoist writings were highly metaphorical and rich with inside jokes. Later, these meanings were lost, and the texts were taken for face value. Since they obviously had to mean something, people began to make wild guesses and speculations about Neoism. Neoism's great promise to manipulate anything through the power of its names, and the sublime tone of its proclamations, still has great impact on people who are easy to impress.

(a) replace an arbitrary number of words with their opposite meaning.

(b) the text will still tell the same.

(c) apply to this formula.

Cantsin

DIALECTICAL IMMATERIALISM

Let us assume, as a point of beginning, that even the remotest of us relates to experience through some aspect of the habitual philosophical beliefs that characterize the civilisation in which this presentation takes place. That these beliefs are eclectic and inconsistent is not important, what is important is that we can identify them as part of this civilisation, and that we make constant use of some of them. It is not important to determine whether or not these beliefs are "true" in an objective sense, since clearly their function is to be used to create a sense of "reality", and not to be verified. The most didactic ideological projection to the simplest use of propositional thinking (for instance "I am swimming") contains the arbitrary and deterministic map of our civilisation. These beliefs, this "swimming", form an impenetrable field that traces around and separates us from experience outside the realm of beliefs in general. That certain obviously false beliefs, such as beliefs in so-called "absolute" truth, can be deconstructed is deceptive since the process of deconstruction is taking place within the structure of cognitive consciousness as it is dictated by the languages, cultural patterns, and identity formations of contemporary civilisation. Thus, refusing to believe in specific commonly-held opinions, such as the value of capitalist social relations, or belief in metaphysical abstractions, including those presented in this text, is ultimately a reformist measure which serves only to disarm the real and total opposition to beliefs in general. This opposition, since it aims to undermine the language, cultural history and identity formation of present reality is naturally difficult, if not almost impossible, to articulate within existing contexts. It is an orientation against and outside beliefs and consequently not compatible with the language or concepts that are used to describe things in terms of them, such as propositional language. That is by no means to suggest that this orientation does not exist, or is valueless, since its value clearly relates to the throwing off of the repressive aspects of consciousness, such as the ability or lack of ability to perceive paradox. In order to explain fully what I mean, I will use as an example a science fiction story about an alien civilisation consisting of two humanoid entities. In order to talk about the entities, I will give a brief description of the cultural, linguistic and identity characteristics common to them. The two entities occupy the same general area of space but are physically unable to perceive one another, to interact or to communicate in any way. Despite this, both are speculatively aware of the other's existence through "memories" of a cultural history learned through direct experience with certain cultural artifacts. Both entities consequently have a developed and identical language and culture despite their non-communication. This commonality constitutes their social relation entirely, being absolute. The aliens have a language that is significantly different from ours in that it does not contain reference to objects or situations, and has, of course, no communicative value. The language is best visualised as a moving spiral of operational symbols floating free in space, with the symbols constituting a level of purely structural, "non-referential"*, mental activity. The holes between the symbols, which are gaps in the structural activity, provide space for penetration by material from "above" or "below" as they rotate. The material "above" the spiral is incoming information from the alien's senses, for instance, sight or touch. The material from "below" is non-sensory data, best understood as "imaginary" visions and fantastic images. This, in short, is the language of the alien culture, which constitutes part of each alien's conscious relations with the world. The language is not spoken, but is notated at arbitrary intervals to preserve itself as a structural/cultural model for the next generation. The method for this notation involves particular use of sound and light in a physical approximation of the structure. The memory of this method of notation is the only referential aspect of the language, and it is essentially perceived by the aliens as a kind of intuition. The aliens perceive the sensory and imaginary information sensations during the pauses in their "non-referential" mental activity, but are not concerned with differentiating between them as real or imagined. They have no memory of past time as we understand it, except for an intuitive sense of the other's existence and the methods of cultural notation. As I have stated, this memory roughly constitutes the identity formation of the civilisation. Incidentally, the identities of the aliens have no bearing on the "imaginary vision" aspect of the language. The "imaginary visions" are as arbitrary and unconnected to the alien as are his/her "real" sensory experiences. Both the aliens occupy a space that is similar to our cultural vision of the Garden Of Eden. The plot of this very dry and technical example thickens when, for reasons entirely conflicting with our logic system, and with the logic of the civilisation I have just described, one of the aliens decides to stop using the spiral that constitutes the "non-referential" and structural aspect of his/her language. This proves very difficult, as it is entirely without precedent in the civilisation, and physically impossible. Eventually the spiral ceases to exist and the alien's sensory experiences and imaginary visions intermingle without interruption of any kind. Suddenly the alien becomes experientially conscious of the only other member of the civilisation, who remains oblivious to him/her. The alien attempts to communicate with the other, but s/he is unable to perceive him/her. The alien "intuitively" decides to use the artifacts and methods of notations from the civilisation to communicate his/her existence to the other, but is ultimately unsure of the success of the project, since without memory s/he is unclear as to his/her placement in time. What I suggest is that this scenario is not fictional, but instead a literal analysis of our civilisation, including its inconsistencies.

*That is, not referring to any concept of other formation outside its own system.

Language Experiment (excerpt)

2: to for a fascinating objects for that substitution are course of bombastic problematic for he every-which-way

2: to difficulty are odd recuperating yes for speak

3: I think we should actually take the

2: grass-hop

3: & then take a rail & get out the glue & from the glue climb the wood & thus take the effective stream which may bring us very touchingly into the [unintelligible] - the other [unintelligible].

2: We have walked for him [laughter]

3: I'm tending to [unintelligible] afraid of the steam that turns from water into oxygen so actually this might criss-cross what we rightly considered to be a connected to the course of the sun

2: Preferably she connects goodness

3: [unintelligible]

4: [unintelligible] no fluid in their eyes

2: He follows small problem

3: Tent, I'm actually knowing about what happens at the teapot where this Spaniard was actually winding up your presence. Do you have any, do you have any reaction to that?

2: [laughter] Answers preposition unheard-of placements

3: Which is why I guess that this hardship is somehow fading in & out to the strategy of from what the mail artists are supposed to deliver as his Cheese-Whiz writing

2: Yes, speaking?

3: [unintelligible] - & there is a certain - I think there is also.. a certain bark, a certain flea with what might be described as your method of actually calling, calling up this intimacy & perhaps we should, we should stumble across & a different, a different perception.

2: Becoming her has few sidewalks.

3: No.

2: [laughter]

3: I think, still think that the wheel should be cut off but I won't use any, I won't use any eyelids in in order to further embark with it.

2: We happen-upon that substitution [arrival at the U-Bahn station]

4: Slow down.. Spilled coffee all over my shirt. [sound of running feet approaching - apparently we board the train here] [train sounds are VERY LOUD]

2: [unintelligible]

3: [unintelligible] escort the [unintelligible] position, wasn't it?

2: [laughter] Physical physical physical physical writing for spot. He writes, she notes.

3: I think the real..

2: Yes.

3: [unintelligible] of what is real & the real, the real should be.. I think you can actually embark on the, on the last possible rails of.. [unintelligible] doesn't really hid your [unintelligible]

4: How many straws?

3: Well, uh, it's actually just the last one.

2: [laughter] [unintelligible] the 1st camel

4: That hurts

3 &

2: [laughter]

2: Walter Schreiber Platz.

4: Zoo-o-loshiger Garden.

[we exit the 1st train here & ascend the steps to the S-Bahn]

2: [laughter] He bites category.

3: I still wonder whether, still wonder whether there are perspective of moving inside a closed trap system might change any, any epistemological base of what we're pondering about, so, let's embark on what's going to be, going to be projected, huh?

2: Television. Hard Monty Cantsin w, x, y, z. Yes, depository?

3: [unintelligible]

2: Of us! Fooling around. Try it on. Despite despite.

3: It's, um, it's not very combusting, actually. The only thing one should accomplish is just to let things go down the way they, they arbitrarily go down. [we board the 2nd train]

1: She question things electricity is still running, hm, ya.

2: [laughter] He writes for he writes of he writes was he writes

3: I think the tire should be unlocked from the wheel so that we can finally get beyond the point of free-wheeling & this kind of fixated, fixated way out.

2: He writes she has

3: Temporarily the down part of the oceanic & [unintelligible] placement &, in fact, that's a very disturbing notion of what we should actually produce here.

2: Of us he has bad. ["Nexte Bahnhof" announcement] Zoologischer Garten.

3: 6 o'clock.

2: We eat he simple-minded yesterday.

3: But [unintelligible] without chitterlings.

2: He are problematic of look. T-shirt 4. All nouns preposition adjectives preposition adjective North American - preposition adjective North American.

3: [unintelligible] adjective conjunction European.

2: Nouns preposition adjective verb article conjunction verb.

4(?): Exclamation.

3: Pronoun verb preposition word continuous verb preposition.

2: T-shirt 6. Proper noun noun verb possessive pronoun noun.

3: [unintelligible] Yes everything to be done properly.

4: 12 cliches.

2: [laughter] Pronoun verb..

3: [unintelligible] ground of, of 2nd city

1: [unintelligible] hm, ya.

2: Proper noun verb article noun preposition unknown noun plural. Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof.

4(?): [unintelligible] t-shirts?

2: Preposition contraction unknown noun

4(?): Shake, shake.

2: Pronoun verb verb adjective adjective unknown.

3: [unintelligible] the red shoelace, the red shoelace utopia.

2: Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof.

4: We're almost down to the socks.

2: Unknown.

4: We are.

2: There might be a slight advantage to not using anything pasted above. T-shirt

3(?): [unintelligible]

4: The old song 15 T-shirts previous about coffee staining makes it easier for me to swim - rather than running.

2: Makes it easier makes it easier. Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof.

3: [unintelligible] an hour back & then & after & now & then from left to another left where we may need the tulip, a tulip circles & just far remote distance from what we were not talking about.

2: T-shirt 8. Throwing away the garbage. Welcome back, honey!

1: You all steal a glass of water for stiletto.

2: Indubitably. She's fresh as a daisy!

3: That, uh, that far-away country is a little bit too wide, but, by plunging into the leaves & the supernatural birds of one, what one might consider to be derived from the habit of eating too much sausage is very likely, or even unlikely, to hit something that could be defined as the bourgeois, utterly bourgeois concept of the excitation of sensual acceptance.

2: They played football & a good time was had by all!

3: Do you think the reel shouldn't be chopped?

2: Uh, they sat down on the bleachers & stayed sitting there.

3: Just eye your, your wings into that kindof, kindof stone-face.

2: Would that it were all so simple! He thought about what he'd read in the paper.

1: Out of control.

2: The Temptation of Sri Auribondo. Hear the plants grow!

FORMULA

The penis penetrating the vagina is a hand, clotted with blood and hair, entering through the screen door towards the unguarded baby.

The finger probing the rectum is the toy monkey hanging over the crib with the word baby sewn into its stomach.

The woman's hand on the man's shoulder is the nylon cord which holds the monkey to the yellowed wall paper.

The tongue inching across the throat is the factory worker moving rolls of wall paper and glancing down at the word Hand on the shipping-bill in front of him.

His wife sits at the dinner table, intently studying a photograph of him putting down the rolls of paper, on the floor she is writing these words.

the last words of wilhelm reich, continued

The Golden Day is a day of ____, OR What Larry does when he sees this sign before a bar.

Where Indianapolis is (Abb)

Apiary resident.

Appolodoris' forte

Dear (Fr. var.sp.=

One function of Robin Hood.

Tough, but not to - or - Indian hello.

____less Joe from Hannibal, M

Ziolko's union.

If you're not fer somethin', you're ____it!

Two-________ sloth

___ A Wild Rose.

"My fingers do the talking."

"On stage I'm Pamela."

Sci-Fi Movie (Abb)

Norma or Charlotte

"I wish I knew what RECTIUS V LICINI meant!"

___, Humbug!

Investment tool all the rage before new tax law. (Abb)

One of the "crummy" ones. (Abb) (Ask Bl. Mary)

__ In the Mood For Love.

"Just follow my lead."

Having ozone.

"I'm the newest hand on the deck."

__Life, L'Chiam!.

Where Fargo is (abb)

Shoe size.

Where ATL is (Abb)

Start of a round.

"If you don't get out of my way, I'll run you over with a dune!"

Fiber food.

Endangered animal --just ask any Canadian.

What our audience shouts at the end of a performance.

Type of test.

What they make at a spaghetti factory.

"I used to be master of all I surveyed; now, Allen is!"

"Peggy, it's all yours". (Quote dated January 4, 1988.)

Greek letter.

A theatre is a physical _____.

What runs around The Loop. (Abb)

Hair coloring

High (Fr.)

Call heard in barber shop.

"I eat fish heads and drink gold!"

"Put your pants on, Mr. G.!"

(TRANSCRIBED BY TORTILLA MANDALA)

Monty Cantsin was accosted in New York

by two girls wearing silver overalls and Monty Cantsin-look alike masks. Kenneth, what is the frequency, they asked and proceeded to beat him senseless even chasing him into a hotel lobby.

The first girl said: "I bet that is a parable." The second said: "You have won." The first said: "But unfortunately only in parable." The second said: "No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

Monty Cantsin SMILE 6/7

Theology

If we were to look into the mind of God, the infinite connections maintained there would seem an overwhelming confusion or chaos. Needless to say, we would encounter logical contradictions at the level of the boundaries between... God's conscious will and... itself. For instance:

Could an all-powerful God make a rule he couldn't break?

If all things are God, is the devil also God?

If God thinks, does God have language? If God's language is utterly private, can it be meaningful, even to God?

If god asks the question "Is There Language?" could the question ever be meaningful (given that, for God to ask the question already presupposes the existence o language - and for a question to be meaningful, you should be able to separate it from the possible answers, otherwise you don't have a question.)

These are the most pressing theological questions posed by God's love today. Neoism exists to solve these problems once and for all.

Monty Cantsin open theologist

PLENIAL WER

1 certainly, found more or less than the actual laws of anti-nerversity were within the near perimeter of after or pre-phenomena dating techniques renowned for the accuracy of their predictive inclinations as analyzed for the purpose of botanical studies clusert rebuff analogies priviledges on the other hand resotz primarily to the utility provided thru the above statements only upon the belated & usually expected arrival in due course of dual retrospection dehydrated by plenial delights: stars, often the main topic, conform to an easily 1 earned set of rules as of yet non-systemized but predictably disoriented thru a large variety of physical endeavors commonly poured into a cannister previously designed for children's toys or at least what was often mistaken for suck a container while exercising its ability to camouflage or alienate every scanned telepathic invention within a radius discernible or detectible with the aid of antennae strangely enough often found in the average suburban or urban household - the illegality of a similar manoeuver has often been contested by women & men in unison despite the highly controversial nature of its atmospheric pressure/wer factor.. however 1 can only illuminate these ideas from 1's compendium of electronic facet reproductional eludications with the thought in mind that 1's shelf space exists within a sphere of influence commonly ignored by those who could be brought into close contact via no other method than that prescribed by imprisoned, or undernourished academicians proclaimed universally notorious after guidance thought patterns tabulated from light patterns radioactivity glucose hybrids: of course the point of precedents can only be understood.

tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE

Anti-Art

Anti-art is art because it has entered into a dialectical dialogue with art, re-exposing contradictions that art has tried to conceal. To think that anti-art raises everything to the level of art is quite wrong. Anti-art exists only within the boundaries of art. Outside these boundaries it exists not as anti-art but as madness, bottle-racks and urinals.

Karen Eliot SMILE 8

Apocalyptic Herd Instinct

This is a Spanish Art Project. Spanish Art is the movement which arises from the ashes of Neoism. Replacing the old outdated term "Neoism" with the newer and conceptually superior name "Spanish". The Spanish Artists, as distinct from the Neoists, are in the process of spreading "Spanish Art" simultaneous with the development of the "Spanish Art Style", which will, naturally, be unlike anything which has come before in any way.

In order to organize this event, the Spanish Artists have chosen JULY 15 AS INTERNATIONAL SPANISH ART DAY. During this day, Spanish Artists around the world will act out parts of a complex Spanish Art ritual. Each artist, or "Spaniard", has been given a list of materials which must be used in this ritual. Your contribution will be to use your materials in a way which seems to fit with your concept of this growing, international movement.

A Neoist who is too lazy to come to terms with Spanish Art

Censorship - the oldest of suppressed traditions

it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. the contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest. despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, it is maintained that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. those who oppose censorship factually employ censorship on itself.

the negative and its use

anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. the censors of the "left", "right" and "centre" all do their collective part; despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be motivated by the very beliefs we will ultimately negate.

censorship supersedes plagiarism as a negation of originality because it suppresses not only production of originals, but also their reproduction through plagiarism and appropriation which reinvigorate the original and maintain its circulation. censorship is to the present what plagiarism was to history.

the healing power of doubt

we set ourselves the task of discrediting all received ideas without offering a single alternative thought with which they might be replaced.

Karen Eliot

Festival of Censorship

Anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. The Festival Of Censorship is a pata-national, decentralised event. The Festival aims to begin on a limited scale what will ultimately constitute a new and total organisation of daily life. Some events have already been planned for the Festival, including international performances on May 1st and other holidays during which participants will look into the daylight sun for a full hour. A day of cover-ups is also planned, during which participants will go to rigorous lengths to hide traces of their mundane activities.

So what's the big deal about censorship? Everyone should have the right to not be understood. Take part in the festival of censorship. Censor yourself. Censor the censors.

Festival of Censorship pamphlet

Proletarian Posturing and the Strike which Never Ends

'Censorship is a more populist form of subjectivity than imagination because it does not require the construction of alternative ("imagined") possibilities, only familiarity with existing ones.' (CENSORSHIP LEAFLET)

For some time now, there has been a momentum of dissident culture, strengthened by conformity, and organized around a series of attacks on various subjects. The "material" side of this process has been the creation of events and materials[1] which transmit, in a relatively conventional manner, a collection of attitudes towards various aspects of dominant culture. These attitudes can be simplistically summed up as distaste for work, production, originality, "high" and "low" culture, and received identities. These elements of social relations are added to the usual list of exploitations in capitalist society. A variety of experiments have been proposed to investigate the negations of these "abstractions." "Multiple names," anonymity and explicit plagiarism have been used to undermine the idea of identity or ownership in culture. At the same time, participants have been hell-bent on historicizing themselves and their activities, partially in order to insert these discourses into mainstream politics and culture, and perhaps also for reasons which are more unpleasantly in contradiction with their stated aims.

The so-called "Festival(s) Of Plagiarism" were essentially an outgrowth of the Neoist Apartment Festivals, collective events which themselves plagiarized the Fluxus festivals of a few years before. The primary difference between the Festivals of Plagiarism and the Neoist festivals were the Plagiarists' intention to focus on a single set of ideas; plagiarism and so forth. Plagiarism had been an element of Neoist activity, but Neoist festivals had and have an omnidirectional character and involved an assortment of experimentation and exotica in presentations, politics and habitation. During the "Festival Of Plagiarism" in London, a repetitive critique of "ownership" and "originality" in culture was juxtaposed with collective events, in which a majority of participants did not explicitly agree with the polemics. Many of the participants simply wanted to have their "aesthetic" and vaguely political artwork exposed, and found the festival a receptive vehicle for doing so.

Throughout much of these ideas loomed "abstract" questions of power, even at the level of event organization. In a very obvious way, "activists" were structuring events and language to give weight to a programmatic agenda of ideas. At the same time, there was considerable dissent as to what those ideas consisted of. In partial response to this ironic crisis, a participant from the London Festival organized a Festival of Censorship in Baltimore, during which participants would make presentations in support of censorship and against the idea of the sanctity of information or expression[2]. Support of Censorship logically followed a critical understanding of questions of autonomy and power in culture. In the same way that explicit plagiarism undermined the distinction between production and consumption, explicit censorship attacked the distinction between the creation and destruction of possibilities. The Festival was short and poorly attended, and again, only a few of the participants completely supported its ideological bent. Many of the events were advertised but did not occur. The "value" of either festival was primarily "academic"--feeding discussion around various issues rather than creating militant engagement.

Art Strike Action Committee

1. Though these activities claim to be open to all, it is apparent that they tend to attract "individuals" who have a particular intellectual orientation. Beyond the exclusivity of specific ideas, the milieu in which these activities take place has fairly limited appeal to most people.

2. A Festival Of Non-Participation took place concurrently in Scotland, concerned primarily with "Revolution, Unemployment and Suicide."

Neoism

Neoism is simple

..., amusing, unpretentious, requires no skill, and has no institutional value. Neoism strives for the monostructural and non-theatrical qualities of simple, natural events. Neoism is a game or gag.

Neoism means to purge. It is a fluid discharge, expressed in any form or medium. It is a continuous moving on or passing, as of a flaming iron in a blue endless sky, or a blood transfusion.

In Neoism, there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods. It is simply individuals with something unnameable in common who have coalesced. Perpetual vocalizing of our thought brings us no nearer to naming this unnameable thing.

Neoism is opposed to the concept of "creativity". To those who oppose all moralisms, creativity is just as alienating as wage labour. We reiterate the anti-moralist slogan Never Work and hold that this formulation embraces the refusal of creativity.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 6

SLOGANS

Art is sanctioned pornography.

Why don't you do it yourself?

Free Haircuts now.

We are absolutely and frightfully yours.

To attack something is to justify it. Revolt ends here.

Buy your lies here.

We sleep without light.

Belief is the enemy.

Neoism is a suffix with a prefix.

Neoism is sound where there is sound.

Those who wear their penis on the right, can change it to the left.

By reading this you have become a Neoist.

Qualities: flaming/hard/frozen/small/old dog: possibles and/or states: severity.

The answer is the destruction of the question.

Neoism regards historical progression as a joke, as an endless game for pleasure and glory.

We would stare moodily at objects and then asystematically attempt to glue them at random to objects, to cover all persons we were close and who would notice the changes in our behavior and use of language.

We are the White Colours, Slaves Of Freedom, Second Coming, Babes On Acid, Flame Thrower Boys, Hip Troop, Jack Off Club, Flat Cap Conspiracy.

Neoism is like porn movies: The subject has no importance, logic is unnecessary, there is an accumulation of well-known things, the focus is always on the same explicit facts, repetition rules.

We encourage plagiarism because plagiarism saves time and effort, improves results and shows initiative on the part of the individual plagiarist.

Neoism is a Yea-Sayer offering praise and affirmation.

Those who do not understand the meaning of these words will be ignorant of their implication.

Let's draw blood and turn it into gold.

Neoism is not a means to freedom, but advocates discipline in the lives of Neoists.

Transgression recognizing itself a law.

Six forms of disorientation to organize Neoism: plagiarism, multiplication, immortality, severity, love and rationality.

There are no spelling mistakes in this book.

We had a philosophy once.

An army flag to be a manner of the precedent, patanihility.

Let's make Monty Cantsin a few holes.

Individuality Collectively Realized & Abandoned

Questions upon questions

Q: I don't have enough information to make a judgement about your movement and concepts but for what I have read I can't differentiate between what is true or false or what is fact or fiction. There is a mind game involved in all this, very dangerous mind game. I discovered many contradictions inside the words of your statements, contradictions that I hope are intentional. But in that case please explain it to me. Be careful and take care of your minds.

A: Neoism is a mind game. The purpose of the game is to provide stimulus for the players. Playing the game comes naturally to the players. People who aren't sure that they're Neoists aren't Neoists. Noone is a Neoist all the time. Not all mind games are Neoism.

Q: How many people share the Monty Cantsin identity? Or is it perhaps just the opposite - is Monty Cantsin real and are his players fictitious ...? It's questions upon questions.

A: Many of us are interested in exploring flexible entity boundaries. Many of us interested in pushing the malleability of so-called consensus reality. We might be considered a figment of the collective imagination trying to will itself into existence that we flow in and out of at our leisure. Indeed, "it's questions upon questions," and the more successful we are the more unanswerable your question will be.

Neoism Online

Don't care what you say...

..."Neoism is this, not that, sometimes this, somebody, or that there we don't know." I was Nada before I met you... When I grew up I wanted to be a mature surrealist. Now maybe I'm a Neoist, or even still Nadaist, don't know... All I want to do is burn my work... I liked Nada better because then there is really nothing to explain, no headache, no ulcer, no cough.

N.O. Cantsin

Q: What is Neoism?

A: I have thousands of definitions but none of them are good for anything. The newest one is always the best. Neoism transforms all the time. There are many different periods in Neoism that represent very different activities, different attitudes, different forms, ideologies and philosophies. It's like eating up everything and vomiting it out again.

Q: In retrospect, how successful do you think Neoism has been?

A: Our continued failure is the root of our success. Failures were always very important because they created the next attack, the next radical movement. The products we created over the past years are not the purpose of Neoism. The purpose is not to put out a book but to publicly manifest an attitude that should survive.

Monty Cantsin interviewed by Paddy Pain Kinokaze 2

The First Announcement of Neoism

The Monty Cantsin Commando announces the beginning of Neoism. Even though we know there were several efforts to start and develop Neoism in North America, Mexico and Europe, we consider them insignificant, unimportant and non-official attempts with no success.

Neoism begins with this announcement

Monty Cantsin START

The Generation Positive and Neoism

However enough of rhetoric, in this special issue dedicated solely to my own work we've replaced the words Generation Positive with the words Neoism. The two are interchangeable in terms of aesthetics, although in terms of organization, there is a difference.

Neoism means simply that an action, object or text is new. It does not imply that it is original. In this sense, Neoism describes all the work from the earliest developments of modernism to many that will be created at a future date. Thus Neoism describes the (post)modernist obsession with a newness that is usually achieved at the expense of originality.

Neoists believe that the obsession with freedom that has characterized much art throughout history is futile. Art is not a means to freedom but rather the creation of rigid structures with the intention of placing order, discipline and meaning within the lives of both artists and art consumers.

The purpose of art is to construct physical social structures on the mental plane and so reinforce cultural values and norms. Of all values and norms we believe the value of tradition is the greatest and so this is the one we try hardest to reinforce. It is for this reason that we place absolutely no value on originality.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 3

The best definition of Neoism

...is: a prefix (neo-) and a suffix (-ism) with absolutely nothing in the middle. Neoism does not exist, except in the reactions it creates; it is no coincidence that the favoring aphorism of the Neoists, a detournement of a famous saying by Amadeo Bordiga, is: "the best product of Neoism is anti-Neoism." In reality Neoism is a multiple name, freely adaptable by any action or phenomenon that chooses to define itself as Neoist. [...]

In the "heroic" phase, all Neoists signed themselves with the multiple name "Monty Cantsin" (a clear reference to the heresies of the Free Spirit: "Monty Can't Sin"). Neoism then underwent various mutations. It was in this period that the multiple journal SMILE appeared: anyone could produce a magazine with the name. SMILE is another multiple name, as is "Karen Eliot", a pseudonym that gradually joined Monty Cantsin and ended up almost completely replacing it.

In the meantime, the Neoists began a paradoxical "self-historicisation", or a hermeneutic drift that leads each exponent to re-interpret the common path in any way s/he likes. Neoist self-historicisation soon became an impassable maze. This explains why it is so difficult to approach this art whose only work has been the incessant monologue about itself. To complicate things even further, Neoists now categorically refuse to reply to any questions or requests for information about Neoism.

Flesh and Blood one person after another Wu-Ming

InReference, Inc.

We ceased to be Neoists. Neoism is simply a reaction to Anti-Neoist aggressions.

We are indivisible, therefore we cannot recognize ourselves. Anyone who wants to recognize us is anti-Neoist.

Neoism never existed and is a mere invention of Anti-Neoists. We never existed; we are nothing but an invention of our enemies.

It is only our enemies, Anti-Neoists, who use the term "Neoism".

When everyone is dead, Neoism is finished.

We are pleased to announce...

...the formation of the Neoist exercise in Florence. The Neoist Consulate is now open, and we declare all laws and dreams of the past to be non-existent in this city. Men dressed as Elvis roam the streets, women push infants in shopping carts, and red crosses glitter strangely from drug shops. We believe in the concept of total plot. That any action has a secret meaning when examined backwards in time. We are hypnotic. We sleep without light. We publish SMILE. We drift silently in the heavy perfume of clarity and confusion. We want war with you. Join us.

Upon my arrival in Florence I realized that it was no longer possible for me to consider myself a Neoist. Neoism is a symbol of my inadequacies. A sham of self-delusion, Neoism is a non-existent concept replacing creativity with empty words. I relinquish this, as I relinquish physics, psychology and, most of all, philosophy. I also give up eating red meat, having sex, being lazy and sleeping late. Those days are over. I am now an artist.

Monty Cantsin

Neoism?!

Faithful to Cantsin, I dislike definitions. You must refer to Cantsin's tape on garden chair. I am an assiduous visualiser. I am only moderately interested in human beings. As radical experiments, I have decerebrated zillions of animals to induce them with high voltage. Now I tend to confine myself to insect species.

V. Vidorae

Origins of Neoism Illuminated

In answer to your question, "Are you the inventor of Neoism?" I can only reiterate that in no way, shape, or form can I be credited on this account. I have no idea how this rumor ever got started, except that I happened to be in the same general vicinity (Portland, Oregon) when the deed got done (the late 1970s or thereabouts), and I was in close daily contact with the two principals in the case - David Zack and Istvan Kantor. Otherwise, my conscience and hands are clean. A word of amplification, however, might not be a young unmarried woman (i.e., a miss).

In the late 1970s the city of Portland and environs was a hotbed of feverish Spanish Art activity. Musicmaster, Eerie Billy Haddock, Rhoda Mappo, Patty Blaster and myself were all on hand at the time. Moreover, Cees Francke, the great Dutch Spaniard, was living on our sofa and being sought by the postal authorities in connection with the so-called "lewd post cards", although, as Patty Blaster remarked to two of the postal inspectors who dropped by our house (Cees and I had stepped meantime into the hall closet): "These cards are child's play compared to some of the ones he's done." Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanny Tutti had also been in town, part of their cross-country American tour. Shortly after this, the Zack family - Dave, Ruth, and the four kids, Sleepy, Happy, Sneezey and Zeke - arrived in a bulging station wagon from Canada. They set up light housekeeping on the N.E. side of the city, in a charmingly dilapidated mansion ("Monderlay") in whose upstairs halls the wallpaper hung in festoons. Dave decorated the place entirely in Jack Chick posters. There was an Abyssinian Baptist church directly across the street and my memory of those days always includes a lot of rousing spiritual choruses floating in through the windows and mingling unutterably with Zack's cello playing, which by & large was incessant. A follower of Geo. I. Gurdjieff, Zack often played his cello upside down.

Another Zack boarder who soon joined the household was Jerry "The Pinheaded Baudelaire" Sims, a popeye from 42nd St. in NYC. He moved into the basement. A dwarf, Jerry, who could abide no music later than Al Jolson, was almost pathologically concerned about his tiny bone structure. "I'm very concerned about my tiny bone-structure," he told me the first time we ever met. "Don't worry," I said, trying to buck him up, "your bones are larger than a chicken's." Jerry, however, was not to be consoled. He spent many hours in his basement room brooding over his tiny bone structure. About the only time anyone saw him was when he would scuttle up, out & into the parlor to put a Jolson platter on the turntable. Generally at these times he snarled rather than spoke. A rare glandular oddity, and no mistake.

This, then, was the scene when Istvan Kantor arrived from Hungary (via Canada) and moved in with the Zack family. Zack had met Kantor a year or so earlier in Budapest, where Kantor was known as "The Hungarian Bob Dylan" on account of his musical abilities, which then as now were keen. When Kantor arrived in Portland he could speak very little English. About the only phrase he knew in English was "Do you know where I can buy some opium?" Zack gave him some home-made raisin wine instead, and in about five minutes Kantor was singing in the Zack's front parlor. I was on hand for that historic meeting. It was great. I remember that Jerry scuttled into the room, snarled, put a Jolson 78 on the victrola, and scuttled back out again. Kantor was a little startled by Jerry's abruptness but Zack told him not to worry. "Jerry's going to be your business manager," he told Kantor. "He'll arrange all your lounge and club bookings while you're here in town." In this way Zack saved Kantor from ever playing in the dives of Portland. In understand that because of the language barrier it was 2-3 months before Kantor became aware that Jerry hated his music. Later on, of course, this became the music of Neoism. Kantor later told me that he was also unaware that Zack had made Jerry his manager. So there were never any hard feelings in the matter.

Now, this may be where I played a part - at least negatively - in the early beginnings of Neoism. My custom in those days was to use a lot of different names when I did my mailings. I had abut ten different pseudonyms or personas that I operated under. I'm sorry I can't reveal any of them here. Mainly my use of multiple names and aliases was a practical rather than a theoretical matter - a question of covering my tracks and throwing my enemies off the trail. Zack, who had matriculated at the University of Chicago and was strong on art theory, took this and reversed it. Instead of one person operating under a lot of different names, Zack came up with the concept than one name could be used by a lot of different persons. He proposed, at one of the meetings of The 14 Secret Masters of the World (a deeply secret organization that met in his front room) to bestow this general all-purpose "name" on Kantor. The name that Zack had come up with was "Monty Cantsin." The idea being that anybody could become "Monty Cantsin" and in this way achieve pop stardom. Thus Kantor became "Monty Cantsin - Open Pop Star." It was a deeply historic moment. A Tuesday, as I recall.

I'm not really clear on just when the term "Neoism" was actually first used, or who should be credited with it, but my impression was that it was mainly Kantor's brainchild. That is, Zack supplied the "Monty Cantsin" name and Kantor, having adopted it, went on to found Neoism. As I remember it the first major Neoist activities were the Portland Convenience Store Mysteries. Originally it had been hoped (by Kantor) that "Monty Cantsin" would get some club dates to play around town. For $$s. But of course since Jerry Sims, as business manager, hated Kantor's music and never left his basement room except to put on Jolson records, this didn't pan out. Instead, "Monty Cantsin" and Zack began by initiating the Portland Convenience Store Mysteries. These always took the same general form. Kantor, in the role of "Monty Cantsin," would enter a convenience store, go to the back and pretend to have a heart attack; he did this primarily in Hungarian which added a good deal to the confusion and uproar that would then ensue, and when the store manager and the other customers were being distracted sufficiently by "Monty Cantsin's" "heart attack" at the rear of the store, Zack would dart in at the front and carry out as many cases of beer or soda pop as he could manage to lift and exit with it. Then "Monty Cantsin" would pretend to recover from his attack, get up and beat it out of the store. This went on for many months, on an average of 4-5 times a week, at different convenience stores around town. This is what was meant, later on, when an art critic on one of the San Francisco papers said that "Neoism was born in the convenience stores of Portland." (Too true.)

And thus we come to the end of this memoir, and can see that, even in this enlightened day and age, the old spectre of unfounded rumor and hyperbole still runs rife in some form or other. Some of us go on thinking that if we call ourselves "Neoists,, and run in and out of convenience stores, we can recognize certain material benefits. Others are perfectly convinced that "Neoism" implies some sort of vague art activity. As I said at the beginning, I, personally, would rather steer the middle road and view it all as something that happened a long time ago, but that is because when it comes to Neoism the part that I'm personally in charge of is the branch known as "SalMiNEOISM", which is in the past, always in the past. Best wishes to you, Lloyd, and trust this clears up some of the base canard.

Blaster Al Ackerman PhotoStatic no. 38

OPEN LETTER TO THE NEOIST NETWORK AND THE PUBLIC AT LARGE

As soon as I got back from the Neoist Festival in Ponte Nossa, Italy, I ceased to be a Neoist and moved to Stoke Newington in North London. As an ironic gesture, I named my new house Akademgorod. I felt it fitting that upon ceasing to be a Neoist, I should realise the six-finger plan, the establishment of Akademgorod. As Akademgorod is a promised land, I'm keeping its whereabouts a poorly guarded secret and using a box number for my mail.

My approach to art, life and politics has not changed. I simply feel it's no longer feasible for me to be a 'Neoist.' Splits and schisms are essential to my conception of Neoism -- and any public slanging match between an ex-Neoist and the remaining members of the group is worth twelve dozen great works of art. Ultimately, what all Neoists should aim for is an acrimonious split with the movement. To leave Neoism is to realise it.

Karen Eliot SMILE 8

I'm standing in a freezing river up to my neck.

This is not an attempt to suicide but to meditate about Neoism.

I am now completely absorbed in the decomposition of Neoism. The work progresses very fast and does turn out insane. I stick to my intentions, and hammer pianoforte passages out of my brain: the result is insomnia and throbbing sensations in my head.

Neoism is often called in our poetic language "Sumera Mikuni", which convey somewhat the meaning of divine clime, all-integrating and all-embracing.

The road leading to Neoism is vertical.

So what the hell are we doing, you ask? We are putting people through changes. We invite you to bring your day environment into a different reality, a series of actions uncontrolled by time.

(nomen est omen, Neoist Refugee Forces, Union of Alienated Citizens, Neoist Embassy)

Anti-Neoism

The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement.

The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Alvaro and the Diagonale Éspace critique collective. The exact date of this event was March 1. The activation of anti-neoism was communicated by correspondence for two weeks prior to the event.

Afterwards, Neoists often declared that anti-neoism was founded in Paris on January 3. This confusion was due to the date's notation, as it appeared on the invitation and poster: "0103". North American Neoists had interpreted this to mean January 3, and had thought that the poster for Activation 6 announced an "inaugural performance" of anti-neoism. It has never been clearly established whether the dating notation, commonly used by anti-neoists, was part of the Total Confusion Tactics used against North American Neoists.

The last known public neoist performance, also known as an anti-neoist activation, was presented during InterAzioni5: Rassegna Laboratorio Internazionale di Performing Arts Video e Installazioni, between October 6 and October 11, at the Centro Culturale DUE PALME in Cagliari, Italy.

Then again, maybe the last known anti-neoist activation was the Anti-Neoist Rally that coincided with, or was part ofm the 4th Secret Meeting of the 1st Non-Existent International Neoist Apartment Festival on the streets of Adelaide, Australia on Friday, March 24 at 1PM. (It's always 1PM in anti-neoism.)

Bread + Pain + Love = Total Sex

This is the Neoist bread campaign phase. To share bread, simple pleasures. I came to Neoism in 1980/81 after hearing mythology surrounding it.

My name is Gordon W. Zealot, Neoist messing officer. I came across Neoism in perhaps a similar way as you have. I was a pilgrim in the parched bleakness of official culture. I was kicked out of school at 15 years for reciting Tristan Tzara's poetry at a parent-teacher night. My assistant threw buckets of wet cooked spaghetti on the guests and teachers, and we chopped up the stage with axes. I then left home and travelled to the West Coast and became a religious ecstatic and indologist. I was a celibate monk for five years. I studied the ancient art of cooking, festival cuisine, playing table and khol drums. My tabla teacher lives in Varanasi, a magical center of ancient culture (pre-partiarchal Christian).

I am gradually seeing my face from the continuity of differential variables. As all inherent I'd dissolve I know that eventually the jewel like luminescence of the inner Monty Cantsin will shine forth.

Sure, you might think as Nagarjuna put forth in his Nyaya Shastra on logic that all these names and forms are due to ignorance and ultimately this world is like a town created by a musician/magician, vapor on a mirror, but I must insist on its palpability, though temporal. Ephemeral. Occasional.

Gordon W. OM Taka Taka

Do not imagine that you have the least idea

...of what I am talking about. I do not care what I am talking about and if you have the least idea of what I am talking about -

I do not care what I am talking about and if you have the slightest care about this matter you will very soon be disappointed.

Neoism does not mean anything. It means something quite specific and that attitude that it describes is precisely that Neoism.

Neoism is about manufacturing a movement based with the intention of gaining attention for the members of the movement.

Become a Neoist today simply by saying that you are a Neoist and by using the name of Monty Cantsin.

Monty Cantsin is an open pop star. Anybody can be Monty Cantsin. But do not imagine for a minute that by becoming Monty Cantsin that you become any different from anybody else.

Monty Cantsin is every ordinary person, with very ordinary views. In fact, he is no different from you and me which is why it is possible for all of us to become Monty Cantsin at will.

However don't restrict yourself to using the name Monty Cantsin, if you publish a magazine, use the name SMILE, too.

This is a existential experiment, this is an exercise in practical philosophy. It is an experiment to determinate what happens when we cease to differentiate between things that traditionally we would differentiate between.

Neoism supersedes all previous philosophies which believed themselves to be based on fact but were merely based on rhetoric. Neoism is based solely on rhetoric.

Neoism believes in the value of fraud as a rhetorical device. Neoists are cowards who practice an impure science. A science where it is acceptable to fudge the evidence.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 5

What Is Neoism?

Who cares about the sex of the angels? Every Neoist supplies symbols to the mythology of Monty Cantsin, publishes SMILE magazines, draws maps of Akademgorod. A ghost floats over the decaying cake, the ghost of the Generation Positive, invisible international organisms. Just like Lt. Murnau's people hearts N League, or the Church of the SubGenius, or the Eternal Network. The staging of a collective dream. The total disposability of the ubiquitous media-star, one, nobody and a thousand prophets with a flaming neoteric heart pumping miraculous lymph. What if nothing is there, inside, over, under, behind? Our smile suffices. The spontaneous generation of pseudopodes, extoplasms, materializations of thin souls, white slaver from the mouth, art of thought (try yourself, put your head in a photocopier, push the button, concentrate, expire, check the result). Neoism has many enemies, the greatest enemies being the Neoists themselves. Only thus the conspiracy may grow. Generation Positive is here to save the world, to stick a colourful mole on your skin, to fly flaming irons forever. Cool iron for delicate garments, dropped over your feet, mad with love. Wash yourself anew before wearing Neoism. Wash each limb and dry separately. All colours will bleed into white colour. A flame finds its way through the gauze to the stretched skin. Blood dyes the canvas as the phase whitens. A choir of shy plants, stems romantically clutching. A rite on the living-room floor, cubic protuberances over the navel. And what will be hung on the wall but magnifying glasses, projected to enormous size? A SMILE to everybody, a snarl if necessary.

V. Baroni TRAX SMILE Vol. 1 No. 1

also note:

i have endeavored to stay as ignorant of neoism as possible because i think all monty cantsins everywhere have been trying to read my mind. i feel very unoriginal everytime i allow myself to look at anything neoist. they piss me off to no end. i've been told that some of my more hallucinatory rants resemble lettrism. poop that i am, i accept that. i am nothing is not banal. that i might be consigned to a manifesto or a movement is to no end depressing to me. it negates my imagination, my claim to a beyond, an original 'i'. everytime i call for an end to ideology, i am recognized as an ideologist. for the call is an attempted apprehension, appropriation, grasp, claim. the end is an apparent utility for closure, a faux absence. there's every reason to destroy reason but it's like one of those star trek space creatures that feeds on 'energy'. every attempt to rub out the father just gives him a hard on. a willing woody.

neoism is zendek tribe dressed for a rave updating his homeopathic website from a pirated satellite uplink in his dutch squat.

neoism is a conference at duke. neoism is literature, graduate style.

can't anyone do their own fucking research anymore? why is it the more 'information' becomes available, more and more people act as if they are powerless to access information. utility is futile. give up. you project believers are in actuality so fucking slack! faux collectors of slack with your freaking band websites! agh!

look, um, faith is one of those claims to goodness, see, attempting to apprehend something 'beyond'. i say, wassup wit dat, it takes faith just to breathe. faith is banal, poop, suck it up. leap? puh-lease, the uber-faithful will just wanna draw lines, kosher and goyim, - and then blame the unclean for the limits-!

do i -wanna- limit faith from the reasonable? no! -would- that reason -worked-. but work is faux. i have faith in the faux. i have faith in reason, apparently. i have no choice as reason is the faux surfeit of choice where every thought means the same thing. and this is my problem, that i have that limit! i keep thinking! i can't stop! ouch! would that i might appropriate the irrational and the futile. they don't exist in the foreground! that sanctity is beyond my pooper-scooper. anyone who pretends to be the -real- culture jammer is certainly the apotheosis of deathculture. the day of jake is coming. don't be there. nine by seven plus twenty three everything. stay indoors on progressive festival day.

naked lips. skeleton keys. apparenting. putative, ostensible parapsychology. howlings in favor. dromostick traces. postcards for lunch.

the number of cop shows on tv increases without bound and the effect has penetrated beyond here. everyday indy consciousness adam twelve. michel bart.

sitting in the expression of self, we talked. it had been over a year. yes, gangland for me and you, i agreed, inquiring about him. everything is everything is my theory of everything, he anteed. hm, i formerly stated his more, i reflected, seems an aphort of same difference and i like it; same difference to everything is faux, if you don't think about it. he took his leave. well, he's got my number now. and he lives around the block. so. we. see.

in the bin, outside, in front of ravena's, is a used copy, not quite ten dollars, of _present tense_. i told you a year ago this would happen. now, i might warn you not to snap it up ahead of me, but it will be awhile before i have ten dollars again. so. whatever. go. ahead.

that's not enough.

3.2.3

C. Calloway alt.culture.neoism

: ANTI-POST-ACTUALISM++++++

There are many places we could begin, the most obvious being to describe our previous activities or to create some defining catch phrase to explain Neoism. Eventually we will seem guilty of both these approaches, although our guilt will be mined from a strong sense of contradiction. We have no history and in this sense we are not individuals. This 'timelessness' is the negative mirror of the 'timelessness' of culture.' If you want a vision of the future, imagine the past (artificially) extended forever.

However, we wish to resist this situation. The most obvious reason for this is that we do not want to be controlled. As a corollary to this desire, we do not have any coherent ideology or sense of purpose. The most obvious reason for this is to experimentally determine whether it is possible to live actively without a sense of purpose. Naturally, this situation prevents us from controlling one another.

WE WANT WAR WITH YOU. JOIN US.

Here's a little history

In May 1980 I formed a band called the White Colours. The band played thirteen gigs between November 1980 and May 1981. After this point we threw out the singer and changed our name to Four Trans Four. I played one gig in December 1981 with a new singer and then left. The band got a new bassist and did one more gig before the "new" singer left. In October 1982, I formed a new band which I called the "White Colours" although it had nothing to do with the previous band of the same name. I put out a series of leaflets calling on all bands to rename themselves White Colours, and we managed five gigs between October 1982 and February 1983 with a different line up at each gig. I put the first issue of SMILE together of the new year holiday of 1983/84 and got it printed in February 1984. The idea it contained about an art movement called the Generation Positive was something I'd been developing since 1982 as a part of the White Colours concept. In the second issue of SMILE printed in April 1984 I applied the White Colours to my magazine and suggested that all magazines should be called SMILE. Shortly after publishing the second issue of SMILE, I saw an article on the Neoist Network in Performance Magazine and wrote to the address it gave to contact the Neoists. I met Pete Horobin and Istvan Kantor of the Neoists at the end of April 1984, and as Neoism seemed very similar to my Generation Positive ideas, I decided to get involved. It was not until I'd spoke with Pete Horobin numerous times, well 3 or 4 meetings, that he told me about the Monty Cantsin concept, and I decided that I must be Monty Cantsin. At that time, Istvan Kantor was not pushing the idea of everyone being Monty Cantsin. However he was not the first person to use the name which was originally coined by David Zack. I took part in the London Apartment Festival in May 1984 and during and after that period did a lot to promote Neoism. SMILE 3 which was written during the period of the 8th Apartment Festival contained many elaborations of the Neoist idea which I equated with the Generation Positive. All SMILE issues up to and including SMILE 7 pushed Neoism heavily. SMILE 7 was written and typed between January and March 1985, but was not printed up until the night before I left for a trip to Ireland in April. This was because a friend offered to typeset the heading, but took very long time to do this. I delivered the artwork to my printer during the next day and took an overnight train from London to the Stranraer ferry that evening. In Ireland, I walked non-stop fifty miles from Belfast through to Newry and on across "bandit-country" to the Republic, and after already missing a night sleep in an uncomfortable chair on the overnight train, I walked right through the next night. Once into the Republic, I hitched down to Dublin, and when I arrived, I could hardly stand from exhaustion and was hallucinating. I spent the day in the city, then got a night ferry and overnight train back to London. During this time I reflected on a number of things and came to a series of decisions about change to be made in my life. Minor manifestations of this were that I stopped signing off letters with the phrase As above, so below, and that I was no longer a Neoist. However, I had already promised Pete Horobin that I'd take part in his Neoist Festival in Ponte Nossa in June 1985 and, not liking to break my word, I had decided that this would be the final manifestation of my envolvement with "Neoism". SMILE 7 was printed in May 1985 and by that time unfortunately no longer reflected my praxis. The events at Ponte Nossa, culminating in my leaving after a row with Horobin and Stiletto at 4 a.m., two days before things were due to official end, merely served to reinforce the resolve I had made. I think the reasons for this decision are made clear by SMILE 8. It was however certainly embittered by the events in Ponte Nossa and a subsequent exchange of letters with Istvan Kantor. Incidentally, I called SMILE that name for a number of reasons, one being a play with/on General Idea's FILE. When I picked the name, I was not aware of VILE or BILE. If I had been more rigorous in thinking, I would have named it FILE, but it's too late now. SMILE 8 has been interesting, because my new approach has reached a lot more people, and alienated a lot of the dead wood I needed to get rid of. What I think is more interesting in it is the Artists' Strike which, although it will take place, also needs to be extended and developed, something I and others are working on. PRAXIS is not an "art movement" in the way that Neoism is. It is a joke, and I am not making serious attempts to propagate or organize it as an "art movement". It has no members, but everyone has their praxis.

Karen Eliot Neoism Now Artcore Editions

Western Cell Division

A homogenous Western Culture seems to have proliferated to the point of consuming (producing) the globe. As the rate of its reproduction increases, so too does its appearance of immanent collapse - it watches itself desperately replicate with each death throe.

And yet one wonders if an interstice is momentarily created with each division of cells. If ancient, mutated and new "cultures" - deviant cultures - spring up in the gaps created (the fold of one reality overrunning another). Not some essential spirit stubbornly pushing through the concrete, but an altogether new culture, new perception, paradoxically made possible by the increasing folds in the reality fabric. Inspired by the richness of culture(s) in ruins, borrowing from the old no doubt, but subverting, perverting, detouring, mutating. Using it for convenience, but changing it when it becomes obvious that nothing remains pure.

At which point would such a Viral Culture preclude the Western Cell?

Could the former exist without the later, a virus without a host?

Western Cell Division

The Idea of David A. Bannister

I took another look at the book before returning it to you as I found my memory of what I had read of it almost blank and I hoped to have something to say about it. Skimming over it again reminds me that I had very little to say about it in the first place. What little I can say here is bound to sound naive; I prefer to characterize it as "post-jaded". From the moment I was introduced to the cultural activity now historicized as Neoism, I had certain misgivings about the posturing which that term or any term, (indeed the terminology of terms, which, in part, Neoism was about) implied. Nonetheless, I was drawn to the cultural and political activism which thrived for a time under its umbrella and seemed to promise change or at least, fun and indeed, it delivered while it lasted. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, that was overshadowed by the original posturing which grew like a tumor, covering everything it touched. I used to think of Istvan Kantor/Monty Cantsin as embodying everything wrong about "the movement", but that's only part of the problem. With this book, Bannister beats him at the same game, though for different prizes and with a different, and much more effective style. Both seem to feel that events, (revolutionary or not) gain importance after they happen and are recorded so they can then play them back, having placed themselves at the center of importance. David puts an interesting spin on this process by sometimes choosing to place himself outside of events and gain importance by this very distance he creates. If I sound bitter, I'm not, as I was only very tangentially involved and lost nothing. My tone is due rather to the weariness of having my most dismal fears validated. I should qualify my comments regarding David's book by stressing that the overwhelming impression I got as expressed above is by the book as a whole. I reserve my enthusiasm for a lot of his work including pieces reprinted here from SMILE. However, even those lose their edge when flattened into the rhetoric of this book and the more recent pieces seem to turn into mush on their own. He has quite cleverly preempted a wide variety of specific, (i.e. ideological, academic) criticism by heading it off at every turn, but I don't find that very interesting, at least not any more. It just strikes me as a very tight, boring, little orbit. In the end, I think it's fair to criticize the book as a whole, as I don't see anything holding these pieces together except the idea of David A. Bannister.

Western Cell Division

AKADEMGOROD

Complexity/organization is parasitic, i.e. active as opposed to disorder which is passive/non-reinforcing (herein lies its strength).

The human nervous system is a parasite of organization complex enough to appear chaotic, but in fact a bastion of complete control.

Neoism is sound where there is sound, any vacuum is imagined.

The human organism has parasitized its surroundings, removing disorder. Cities, streets, etc... are organs of human beings. The next step in evolution has begun in the extension of the nervous system into streets, telephones etc... Media and construction form a group body, extending channels of control and perception.

Humans are influenced by immediate surroundings, soon this will mean something different, and architecture will become a systematized form of control, as extreme as any addictive organ (brain, stomach etc.). Neoists are "free" from control by understanding and relinquishing it.

I propose an Akademgorod of simultaneous organization and randomness which will purposely mimic the structure of the parasite which we observe, with the intention of mind-controlling ourselves directly. We are all cells, but that means nothing, we are all data particles, invade the body, parasitize the parasite. I make no judgement, I propose this plan for a promised land.

Cantsin

Why Neoists Do Not Drink Alcohol

In February of last year (Spiralling, non-linear calendar) I was having a chat with Cantsin at a café in a city whose identity is best kept secret, when it occurred to me that he had not touched his drink, "Do you drink?" I asked. He looked at me as if I had asked to see his collection of two-headed shirts, or worse his collection of headed pants. Perhaps, at that point he looked down at the table, or tugged at the table cloth, or adjusted his posterior on the wrought iron floor. From that I inferred....

"Neoism is sobriety: I am limiting the number of activities I engage in until I reach a state of complete inactivity, re. only breathing, bleeding, spitting etc... This systematic approach allows me time to construct the next phase of my plan without simply killing me. A dead Cantsin is no Cantsin at all."

"Or perhaps: Neoism is a reversion to childhood - A you may know, children are effected in reverse manner by intoxicants, e.g. children are put to sleep by caffeine, driven wild by alcohol... for a Neoist to drink would increase his awareness, which is not at all our intention..."

"I only drink rubbing alcohol, because it makes me blind... contrary to poplar belief it doesn't make one vomit..."

"Neoists drink only to encourage the assimilation of bodily fluids into the outermost aesthetic protrusions of their bodily parts....that probably makes negative sense.."

Proposals-

giant Neoist cake box designed to eat spectators with mechanical arms. "Take a running leap at the floor and miss"-P.P.) 17 summers old or/conceivable entering into metaphor by having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick...

Set of Hallucinations worth having-

"apparition of a green field in a cup of coffee resting between bull horns.."

"The transformation of the tiles one the bathroom floor to the rectangles of the golden section"

"The existence of a discolored world dangling upside-down from beneath our feet (glimpsed perfectly in clear rain puddles and floor mirrors"

"The disintegration of the body into wind..."

"The speeding up and slowing down of a perfect piano metronome."

"Receiving a letter from Monty Cantsin that I know he did not write."

I'm considering travelling to Europe this summer as a living issue of Smile magazine,;= much like the one from Monty Cantsin w/ the bull EMIL, I would be added to by each person I visited and carry any written material/non-permanent tattoos etc... I think perhaps someone else should do this as well and we could hunt each other down.

I've never had a stomach this big.

"A Concept once defined looses its Cantsin": BURNEOISM

New sloganeering of the Pre/gro/per/atavistic Movement, formerly Neoism: "What motivates Monty Cantsin? No one phrase can explain such an individual, except for 'Monty Cantsin is motivated entirely by sexual desire'"

"Without Neoism, there would only be Neoism."

Neoist Defense league current plans include construction of a fleet of motorized go-carts or autos from stolen trash dumpsters to be used to patrol the streets of Akademgorod in order to ensure that the hierarchy of Neoism be maintained....

Dear Neoist and Anti-neoist friends,

please.. realize the projects included in this... issue of SMILE magazine as I am tooo busy to do so .... myself ... I have too much work .... Although some of them may seem ... improbable ... I have reason to believe they all ... have been done before ....

EVERYTHING BEFORE 1986!

Cantsin

I faced similar confusion

when I wanted to explore the cosmetology of open pop star Martial "Locus Solus" Canterel. He is obviously referring to Monty "Hocus Pocus" Cantsin, the magician and Jack London of squirrels that have that kind of SMILE, the way a person SMILES to say "No way, I mean yield up the house and children to me so you have no one to blame for your carelessness but yourself!" and "Naturally none of these people left records. The only thing we know about them comes from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. I'm just trying to show you a wire suddenly vibrating its middle portion into invisibility, as a derbied slug raced across it, on its way to its founder, Norman Hallerith. Later of the pop group "Stormin' Norman and Susie!" We used to play chess in a hotel bar once a week, although, truth to tell, I always preferred Bridge. Rupert? I think Quirinus Kuhlmann's "Der Kuhlpsalter oder di fuenffzehn Gesänge" ("The Caterpillar Moved the Hair Away From His Ears") doubts my existence. Well, fuck it. I told I. I told you. I told him. I told them. I told them that during a sudden outburst of religious persecutions at a lecture held in 1982, he sat forward and began to talk again. But who is he, I wondered? The odd thing that didn't seem to fit the series of one-ring-hang-up calls were his own hang-ups. Hang-ups about dining on nothing but yogurth, ESP white-haired old men, and the well-known angle of 38 degrees! In T. Gillian's crypto-banal "Fisher King", Robin Williams appears to have no waist. A clue? Silas Haslam said it better when he said, "If one of my mules is at the ripe-grass place, I will fight with time."

But really, it's all contained in Jack London's "Burning Daylight."

Chester Gein in Akademgorod Technocrats for Steiner

Mythology

you must have guessed by now that the neoist mythology is ever growing daily obscuring the actual truth of its birth continuation and heroes each individual within the neoist adventure is responsible for his interpretation and addition to the ever-changing myth you are making good statements so far and certainly do not need me to give you more truths than you can invent for yourself but yes you raise some interesting questions

YANTOH THE MYSTERY DOG WAS FIRST CALLED MONTY CANTSIN AND WAS GIVEN LIFE BY DIANA THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND HUNTING YANTOH LIVED IN THE INNER LAND OF AKADEMGOROD WITH THE ARCH WIZARD ZACK AS A HUMAN FORM BUT THEN THE FOURTEEN SECRET MASTERS OF THE WORLD GAVE AN INSTRUCTION FOR MONTY CANTSIN TO CHANGE HIS SHAPE INTO THAT OF A DOG SO THAT YANTOH COULD MOVE AMONG MEN WITHOUT BEING OBSERVED THEREBY ABLE TO SEEK OUT ESSENTIAL DATA AFTER THE LONDON APARTMENT FEST IN 1984 YANTOH THE MYSTERY DOG DISAPPEARED IT HAS BEEN RUMORED THAT HE MOVED TO BERLIN WHERE HE TOOK THE FORM OF GRAF HAUFEN THIS COULD EXPLAIN WHY GRAF HAUFEN BECAME MONTY CANTSIN AND ALREADY KNEW THE HISTORY OF NEOISM FROM WITHIN THIS COULD ALSO EXPLAIN WHY GRAF TRAVELLED TO PONTE NOSSA TO PARTICIPATE IN APT 9 THE TOTAL MONTY CANTSIN ADVENTURE

you see now that the individual involvement with neoism begins at a very early age before we are born infact first you were yantoh but then before even that you were monty cantsin already now it is true that each of the fourteen secret masters of the world have also been monty cantsin and each one of them has also had the form of a mystery animal david zack was at one time a snow leopard and ackerman was a honey badger istvan kantor was a brightly colored firely stewart home was in fact a horse and vittore baroni was a three horned goat inside each animal is a monty cantsin wanting to escape this is why we must preserve all animal kind and never kill the sacred snail of scotland or the magical moongoose of malawi

YES THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF NEOIST BOOKS WRITTEN DOWN THE COURSE OF HISTORY ALL WRITTEN BY MONTY CANTSIN I PERSONALLY HAVE NOT BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY OF THEM BUT YANTOH INSTRUCTED ME TO MAKE THE APT 8 BOOK WHICH I SENT TO YOU AND YES THERE ARE MILLIONS OF PHOTOS OF ALL NEOIST ACTIONS LOCKED IN THE BRAIN CELLS OF THE MASS NETWORK JUST ASK RYOSUKE COHEN WHO WAS ONCE INDEED A NORTH AMERICAN BISON AND OF COURSE I WILL BE THERE IN BERLIN IN NOVEMBER/DECEMBER IN FACT I THOUGHT I WAS ALREADY LIVING IN YOUR FLAT CHECK BENEATH THE FLOORBOARDS MAYBE YOU SHOULD PUT MORE BREADCRUMBS DOWN FOR THERE IS A LARGE FAMILY OF US JUST LIVING THERE QUIETLY WAITING FOR THE RIGHT TIME TO EMERGE AND CHANGE OUR FORMS ONCE MORE INTO THE FOURTEEN SECRET MASTERS OF THE WORLD.

Monty Cantisn SMILE

The Eroticism of Boredom

1. I.I.I.I am. My identity. Mine. I exchange it with another and step outside where the sun is shining. Another person walks up to me and gives me some words. I respond by giving her some pleasure I have with me. I do not 'understand' this, but it is mine and I see no reason not to give it to her. The words she give me are easy and I digest them all quickly, any interference with my world view gone because I am empty, Monty Cantsin, immortal. Total abstraction of each step down the street. Wake from a deep sleep into a deeper sleep. The ideas now seem all the same. Wake up-

If you use words enough they become interchangeable. Neoism, Fascism, Immortality, Eternity, Freedom, Love, Pleasure, Expansion, Intelligence, Reaction, dream. Give me back the pleasure. I need to get more words with it. As soon as you realize you have been thinking in circles you are already thinking in a straight line, towards making the straight line a circle. "Direction" is independent of its context, it is a force which posses us and its manifestations are not real, only reflections. Chasing your mind's tail, the back of your image unfolds into warm breeze. Sounds of insects and wet grass. Stare into the eyes of another human being and say "I love you". What do you mean, Me? I step back and remove the pleasure, giving back the words. This is Neoism.

AKADEMGOROD. By that we mean the human body. I cut lines in my body, not for spectacle, not for other people, but to prove to myself that there is AKADEMGOROD. Cities, streets, Romantic dreams of the perfect Monty Cantsin image flickering like a single frame of film. Slow down the conceptual film and blink while you watch it. Wake up-

Lie back on the bed, eyes closed, he needed time to keep the conspiracy going. Reality is a social construct. He lay panting. She lay panting. A trip to the post office to exchange energy by mail. EMPTY MAILBOX, LIE ON THE BED PANTING. Eyes go out. Dreaming of a big dog looking at me and slips inside my body and dissolves. Wake up. Over lunch, "Did you have the same dream?" Reiterate to yourself, Time and Time again, "I am Monty Cantsin and I have been Neoist all my life". Wake up-

NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/NO/N

How large is out conspiracy? Huge, much larger than it actually is. Time drips backward and forward. A Neoist is someone who does not believe in HUMAN POTENTIAL. Once you destroy anything, you become part of its history. That is why I asked for the pleasure back, Do you remember your family? Do you remember any of the last ten years? None of it happened, there is only NOW.

On the contrary, the Flame is also transparent. Patterns come. I begin to blink uncontrollably in one eye. Backward, but not even pattern. I have only total contempt for this, and myself. Wake up-

To run away take all the road maps in infinite sequence.

II.

How can we describe Monty Cantsin? No one sentence could describe the complexities of the hero of Neoism, except, perhaps, "Monty Cantsin is motivated purely by Sexual Desire."

The Fake perfection of imaginary states, 800 Gods of Neoism.

"Look into your own eye, fella!" Also, he defecated and strew the excrement around the hall where the first fruits were tasted. Seeing this, she was alarmed and struck her genitals against the weaving shuttle and died. In the middle of the branches they suspended cloth. And so, like a man in a Nightmare I pressed her to Agree to this murder I didn't commit. can pleasure ever be separated from its source, the god asked=

II. (Biomorphism)

Loss of identity. The ceiling crashed in. Eating a straw hat through a huge formless hole in the top of my head, which is very painful. Inserting razors under my jaw. Being pursued, falling through floors, a huge black shape disintegrates, leaving me in another body. Dreams of travelling to Mexico.

In fact, it is far less romantic. We switch bodies like clothes, our neoist-bions sliding in with no resistance, leaving memories behind... information is not important. How backward, how Pass&eacut;.

I tend to agree with you. My image disintegrates again. Lets have a conflict so my image will become close to your own. Here, have some pleasure. Here, have some control. Here, have some words.

Replication

The concept of Monty Cantsin

Monty Cantsin is a name chosen/invented by Monty Cantsin to refer to an international star who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren't. What is usually an egoistical role (star) becomes abstracted by its disassociation from a particular person. When someone thinks/feels that the star context/advantage might be useful, they can "wear" the Monty Cantsin identity.

SMILE Magazine

SMILE is a name chosen by Monty Cantsin to refer to an international magazine of multiple origins. The name is fixed, the type of magazines using it aren't. The purpose of many different magazines using the same name is to experiment with a situation for which no one in particular is responsible.

Neoism

Neoism is a name invented by Monty Cantsin to refer to an international movement of multiple origins. The name is fixed, the use isn't. The purpose of many different uses of the same name is to experiment with a situation for which no one in particular is responsible.

Monty Cantsin

monty cantsin ism

monty cantsin is a gesture of defiance against the order of power and a demonstration that the neoists are ungovernable

monty cantsin is conceived as multiple pop

monty cantsin is in europe during the months of november and december

monty cantsin is a canadian based artist who invented neoism

monty cantsin is a pseudonym

monty cantsin is willing to spend only so much time and effort encouraging people to protect their privacy

monty cantsin is an evil puppet

monty cantsin is a tv and radio presenter

monty cantsin is

monty cantsin is someone who believes in identity

monty cantsin is offered as a null system

monty cantsin is an explicitly empty figure

monty cantsin is my copy

monty cantsin is a neoist figure

monty cantsin is an open mike slot where you can come and say what you want

monty cantsin is feeling a bit guilty about starting this

monty cantsin is one of many pseudonyms used by new jersey

Monty Cantsin

Stupid Undergrounds

The Thing called Monty Cantsin is an explicitly empty figure, a name open to occupation by anyone who wishes to stand in the stupid guru's place in order to see that it doesn't exist. There is, in fact, no such individual as Monty Cantsin; he is a pure alias. In principle, anyone who wishes to adopt this false identity, this identity as falsehood, and for whatever motives, whether it be to preserve the strictest anonymity or from the most venal band-wagon opportunism, can claim to be Cantsin:

"Canadian 'total media artist' Monty Cantsin is something between an enigma and an institution. He is a being around whom a vast contemporary mythology has accumulated. Nemesis seems to dog his footsteps; retribution is incapable of tracking him down. He is voracious of appetite, prolific of explanation, eternally on the brink of affluence yet forever in the slough of debt. He is, moreover, a prince among parasites, a model of optimism, and a master of obtuseness. He can achieve more, and at less cost to himself, than a gypsy. He is as ancient as the hills, as genial as the sunshine, as cheerful as an expectant relative at the death bedside of wealth. He is unthinkable, unforgettable, unejectable, living on [in] all men for all time. Nations die and rise again; Kings come and go; Emperors soar and fall ... but Monty Cantsin lives on and on."

The stupid guru is always a locus of exaggeration: a "vast mythology" surrounds the leader of even the tiniest sect. Here, the purposely vacuous description could apply to any guru, and that is its point: it is offered as a null set, and hence as the proper set of the guru himself. He lives on and on because he never existed, just as no guru, no king, no pop star has ever existed. But that is not to say that one can ever go beyond him. In the very act of evacuating this figure, his sovereignty is reconfirmed.

The history of Neoism demonstrates that once one stands in his place one can easily forget one is standing nowhere: Monty Cantsin becomes a disputed figure, as certain Neoists claim to be the real Cantsin in the very act of inviting others to partake of Cantsin's persona (a rather messianic offer: this is my body), as if mere contact with this name was enough to erase the memory that there is nothing at stake in the name, that emptiness is all that was ever at stake in it.

Paul Mann Postmodern Culture vol. 5 no. 3

Yes, I remember Monty Cantsin.

I knew him very well. He used to live next door to me and he was in my class at school. Now let me see, what can I remember about Monty.

Well I can tell you one thing, Monty is the last person I'd have expected to have become a famous artist or indeed a famous anything. I can tell you, he was very ordinary as a boy. No one in their right mind would have expected him to have become famous.

Now let me think, what was there that was noticeable about him. Uh, yes, when I come to think about it there wasn't really anything very noticeable about Monty. Yes, indeed that's what's always struck me about Monty, there has never been anything very noticeable about him at all.

Indeed it wasn't unusual for teachers who had been teaching us for months to forget his name. In fact I don't think they'd even remember it in the first place. When we used to have role call, if Monty was away, when the teacher called out his name and got no reply, they'd usually ask who he was.

Monty used to hang around with me, not so much because he was a friend but more just because being the same age and living in the same road and going to the same school we'd tend to be at the same places anyway. No I don't think you could describe Monty as being one of my friends.

Not that I minded him hanging around with me, to be quiet honest I never really used to notice him when he was there and I certainly never missed him when he wasn't.

There wasn't much difference either way anyway.

Monty was never really noticeable because he was one of those people who was average at everything, he could play sport ok, but he certainly never shone at it, and it was the same with school work, he was never bad at it but on the other hand he was never good at it either.

I don't remember Monty ever getting in trouble over anything but then neither was the one of those kids who was always creeping to adults. I don't think he ever had any big rows with his parents but on the other hand I don't think they were particularly proud of him. They had nothing to be proud about but then they had nothing to be ashamed of either.

Monty had two younger sisters who were pretty much like him. They all looked alike and there was nothing noticeable about any of them. I suppose Monty must have drifted out of my life some time after we left school, I can't say that I really noticed when. In fact I only really noticed that he wasn't there anymore after people started asking me if it was really true that I'd known the great Monty Cantsin as a child.

If he hadn't been brought to my attention in this way I must say that I'd probably have forgotten that he ever existed. He just wasn't the kind of guy that you remembered. I mean there just wasn't anything memorable about him.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 3

One thing I definitely did invent

is "Monty Cantsin", the open pop star. I did not do this alone, I did it in Portland, Oregon with the very first Monty Cantsin, an artist named Maris Kundzins.

We'd been working with a Xerox 3107 that makes big copies and reductions. We were making giant folios; monster folios and dinosaur folios we called them. And one night Maris started fooling around with the tape recorder, singing songs in Latuvian about toilets and traffic. Well, we decided to make a pop star out of Maris. But it had to be an open pop star, that is, anyone who wanted could assume the personality of the pop star. This open pop star would be the most talented in history, better than Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Sal Mineo and even Ry Cooder all rolled together in one. Pop stars have always been special to me, growing up the son of a symphony conductor the way I did. To me they stand for rebellion and acceptance, revolution and success and a whole lot of other things at the same time. We were mouthing Maris Kundzins' name, and it came out Monty Cantsins. Then we got to saying can't sin and can't sing and quite a few other things to give the impression that this pop star could be a thief as well as a saint.

Maris and I sent a card to Kantor in Montreal, you are Monty Cantsin, the open pop star. Well Graf I have to assert what Kantor did with this simple postcard belongs in any history of art and also any history of the world. The idea that people can share their art power is a very good one I think. My own understanding of Neoism is that it is about sharing, about bash: cooperation between people, putting egos and tempers aside. Though not always seeming to.

Oz Zack

Monty Cantsin

Monty Cantsin is shorthand for an operator, "M," which may be applied to an individual human life "I." Each application of this operator is equivalent to a naming operation "N" which maps the "naming operation generically" to the individual human's life as if it were a point in a set under that operation. Thus the transformation rules for the continuum itself is collapsed to one of its points, where the continuum is human life. All that sustains this collapse is self-consciousness, which, when withdrawn, paradoxically leaves MN as n.

Because objectification has been formalized to such an extent, the proofs of arguments against this species of transformation are not possessed. ("I" is a general state of weakness against objectification). Thus a flaw in operation "N" is exposed as a half-measure--pragmatic self-reference in "N," ie. "M." (Note: This seizes on the following weakness: "N" must be defined loosely enough to admit an N of N, for general usage to be possible. Natural language cannot exclude border cases).

Repeated applications of operator "M" obscure the decidability of "N," and it separability from "NI." The obscurity in denotational connection propagates upward at the exact point where it is under-specified in natural language.

Our illusion of "we" versus their illusion of "we."

The ecstatic or hallowed state shows the undecidability of "N" directly, without the other apparatus, in the contents of every perception.

M. Cantsin

The basis of Neoism

...lies in the idea that anyone can be a particular individual. David Zack appropriated this idea from Berlin Dada, in whose case it was Christ, in Neoism this individual was Monty Cantsin. When Zack came up with the name Monty Cantsin he likened it to the name Santa Claus, revealing where the Berlin Dadas probably got the idea of, obscuring where he had taken it from. Like Santa Claus, anybody can become Monty Cantsin, but nobody is Monty Cantsin. Cantsin is a fantasy figure. Neoism disintegrated in arguments over exactly who Monty Cantsin was.

Istvan Kantor, an important but mentally unbalanced Neoist, had been insisting for some time that he was 'the only and true Monty Cantsin' in the same way that other lunatics might insist that they 'really are' Christ, Santa Claus, or Louis XIV. With Kantor having gone completely gaga, other Neoists left the network in futile attempts to avoid personal communication with him.

Karen Eliot SMILE 8

The Baltimore Police knew a Neoist Conspiracy...

...when they saw one. Best of of all, the leader of the Neoists, Monty Cantsin himself, was the very guy they'd caught putting up the posters around town. But there were complications once Cantsin was safely behind bars. Just who is this man, the police asked, and what does he do? The fellow with the strange haircut and thick Hungarian accent explained that he, Monty Cantsin, was an open pop-star concept. Everybody can be Monty Cantsin and there are many Monty Cantsins in Neoism. What, they asked, is Neoism?

Salem Alaton The Globe and the Mail

Dearest friend,

Monty Cantsin was living in this prairie city for ten years. He came to Budapest from Regina in 1976. Indians here are fat and alcoholics. I drew some blood for them last night. United Cells of Neoism,

Dearest conspirator, I am getting closer to the Athabasca glacier and ready for the meeting with Monty Cantsin.

Hmm, Monty Cantsin, friends call you Monty Cantsin. I have lots of material on Monty Cantsin since I made up the name and sent it on a postcard to Monty Cantsin. I'm doing hmm, this filing project where I put all my correspondence material in these correspondence novels. So now Monty Cantsin is in Monty Cantsin's Cell system. An emerging novel. So I'll put you in with Monty Cantsin RAF VEC and you can be Monty Cantsin in that book if you want.

Dearest friend, I met Cantsin on the Athabasca glazier. He drew my blood and he turned into gold. I took his gold bust. It looks like me. My mission is accomplished.

Correspondence Novels Immortality Center

NEOISM propaganda sheet 1: SMILE

Monty Cantsin interviewed by LEWIS & Dr. Dubord Post-Anti-Post-Anti-Revolutionary-Activator, Pop Star

Q: If the context is open, why give a name to it - why call it NEOISM?

A: It is only our enemies, ANTI-NEOISTS who use this term, we never call ourselves Neoists - we are simply a reaction to ANTI-NEOIST aggressions.

Q: This idea of total freedom, how do you plan to accomplish this?

A: We discussed this at the last festival - on a practical level it will be difficult, we will have to create a huge bureaucracy to organize it, and we need a lot of money. First we are going to start building empty "contextual spaces" to live in, next we will make water transport totally available, but all that is only the very beginning.

Q: Who are your enemies?

A: My enemies are information, control, my own ego (since there are now 100 or more of me) and being tired, I'm always sleeping now.

Q: Are you a prisoner?

A: I am a voluntary prisoner of my own body. This context is only momentarily comfortable, that is why I'm making the transition into future history, through propaganda and the situation of archives, and transcending my limitations through having so many bodies.

Q: What is POSITIVE NIHILISM and how does it relate to NEOISM?

A: I don't recognize either term.

a product of anti-neoism:neoism, Hypnotic Movement

My friend, Doktor Donald Prescott...

(well, we're really not friends anymore. I never see him or talk to him. It's been several years now. Long story) was a serious fan of Monty Cantsin back in the late eighties. We were in school at the time and I noticed something strange when the teachers began taking him aside and telling him that if he insisted upon continuing to turn all his homework in under the name Monty Cantsin, that he would not receive credit for his work. He responded by insisting we were all Cantsin and that all of our grades should be added up and averaged and everyone given the same grades. When the white coats came to take him away, he promised me that Monty Cantsin would return someday at six o'clock, "Because it's always six o'clock, Zachie! It's always six! Remember that."

Doktor Zach Carleton

Cantsin had sent several armsful of ideological baggage

...ahead of him: He is said to be the leader of the "Neoist" movement, which defies definition but whose parents seem to be the usual ones. His notoriety is based largely on his former on-stage practice of having a nurse draw two vials of his blood, which he then would take back into one or another of his orifices, or sell to someone in the audience.

That sort of performance is now more paleoist than neoist, having been done to death - sometimes literally - by shock artists of the '70s. Indeed, anyone hoping for an S&M spectacular on Thursday would have been disappointed. Cantsin has less in common with art shock than he has with another Monty - Python. Cantsin is above all a story-teller, an entertainer, and a very good one.

Mike Greenberg San Antonio Express News

In this age where everything is packaged differently

...and underneath the packaging everything is the same, the illusion of individuality through the adoption of a unique name is the shortest route to conformity and isolation.

The uniqueness of a name is no different to the uniqueness of a number as the substitution of social security and bank account numbers for names clearly shows. Those who base their individuality on the uniqueness of their name are no more than numbers. It is in Power's interest that each individual has a unique name, thus making them easily identifiable. Without these classifications, Power cannot control because it cannot differentiate, divide and isolate.

A group of us who are sick of the fragmentary world in which we live have all agreed to use a comnon name. This name is Monty Cantsin, and there is no attempt among those who use it to pretend that it is unique to any individual. Far from it, we encourage everybody to use the name Monty Cantsin.

Every action done under the name of Monty Cantsin

...is a gesture of defiance against the Order of Power and a demonstration that the Neoists are ungovernable. Every action performed under the name Monty Cantsin is a blow for a unitary world and real individuality. An individuality based upon the reality of subjectivity rather than mere appearance.

And of course in a circle of artists, poets and musicians who are seeking to make their names, the adoption of a single name has many obvious advantages. Making your name becomes much easier when you share that name with a large group of performers. The name Monty Cantsin will be seen everywhere because Monty Cantsin is everywhere.

Monty Cantsin is a true individual in a world where real individuality is a crime. He has witnessed the dematerialisation of the art object and knows that the only art work still worth creating is his own life.

Monty Cantsin is the ultimate art product and ultimately we must all become Monty Cantsin. As society has become increasingly drained of real individuality the emphasis in art has shifted increasingly away from the art object and onto the personality of the artist. Monty Cantsin is an artist with such a strong personality that a unique name is unnecessary to his individuality.

Anyone can become Monty Cantsin but no one will become Monty Cantsin until they have developed sufficient strength of personality that they are able to function freely in the world of subjectivity away from the bondage of unreality.

Monty Cantsin has developed such a strength that he is no longer subject to the lies of science and can flout them at will. The only thing that can halt him are the limits of his imagination.

If you want to become Monty Cantsin all you have to do is to start using the name and you will prove yourself worthy of it. Anybody can be Monty Cantsin, and after the revolution everybody will be Monty Cantsin.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 6

Lt. Murnau

Lieutenant Murnau was invented as the name of a ghost musical group. It was started in 1980 and ended in 1984. The image came from a photograph of film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau while serving as lieutenant in the German army. This photograph was taken and reproduced onto posters, leaflets, fanzines, badges and all other memorabilia of pop mythology to create an interest in something that did not exist. The next step was to provide Lt. Murnau fans with invisible music. I managed to produce various records and cassettes without playing a single note, simply releasing mixages of recorded music. The "Meet Lt. Murnau" tape, for example, was a deliberate confusion of Beatles and Residents records. I also used soundtracks of F.W. Murnau's films and music provided by other groups in homage to Murnau.

To mess up things even more, I had some of these tapes and records released in different countries by different people. Lt. Murnau also appeared on stage, masked, mixing different records and crucifying a Beatles LP. Hundreds of life-size Lt. Murnau-cardboard masks were printed which people could wear. Anybody could make Lt. Murnau music and become Lt. Murnau, and a few people did it. The whole project was focussed on a very limited idea, that of underground music, and did not have the broader implications of the Monty Cantsin philosophy. Yet, I think, the problems remain the same.

Lt. Murnau

Orientation for the Use of a Context and the Context for the Use of an Orientation

Karen Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren't. SMILE is a name that refers to an international magazine of multiple origins. The name is fixed, the type of magazines using it aren't. The purpose of many different magazines and people using the same name is to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth.

Anyone can become Karen Eliot simply by adopting the name, but they are only Karen Eliot for the period in which they adopt the name. Karen Eliot was materialised, rather than born, as an open context in the summer of 1985. When one becomes Karen Eliot one's previous existence consists of the acts other people have undertaken using the name. When one becomes Karen Eliot one has non family, no parents, no birth. Karen Eliot was not born, s/he was materialised from social forces, constructed as a means of entering the shifting terrain that circumscribes the 'individual' and society.

The name Karen Eliot can be strategically adopted for a series of actions, interventions, exhibitions, texts, etc. When replying to letters generated by an action/text in which the context has been used then it makes sense to continue using the context, i.e. by replying as Karen Eliot. However in personal relationships, where one has a personal history other than the acts undertaken by a series of people using the name Karen Eliot, it does not make sense to use the context. If one uses the context in personal life there is a danger that the name Karen Eliot will become over-identified with individual human beings. We are perhaps heading towards the abolition of the personal, perhaps everything is social and the personal (the individual) is just illusion, this area of activity must be debated, examined. However previous experiments with multiple names, such as the Monty Cantsin fiasco, indicate that the failure to differentiate between the personal and the social, and in particular over-identification by certain individuals with the context, is disasterous. The use of multiple names for pop groups and magazines has proved for less problematic than with human beings.

Karen Eliot SMILE 8

Luther Blissett

The name Blissett is derived from Hebrew Beresh'it, "in the beginning," which is the first word in the Genesis. B/Beth is the second, T/Taw is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. They are the first and the last letter in Blissett as well as in Beresh'it. Why Beth and not Aleph? Because Aleph cannot be matched. As the absolute beginning, it is not yet an actual beginning since nothing is set apart from it yet. In order to be a beginning of something, Aleph must be matched with Beth so that Beth may be considered the beginning of Aleph, or the beginning of the beginning. Literally, Beresh'it/Blissett means "in the beginning". Figuratively, it means "from Beth to Taw," "from the beginning of the beginning to the end," that is, eternal.

Blissett in itself is symmetrical:

1: B - T, Beth - Taw, that is, from beginning to end.

2: L - T, Lamed - Taw.

Lamed as the 12th letter marks the exact middle of the Hebrew alphabet, i.e. Lamed - Taw: "from middle to end."

3: I - E, are blind letters since vowels do not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.

4: S - S, Sin - Sin.

If we subtract the blind vowels, the resulting BLSSTT still retains its full symmetry. If one eliminates redundant letters, the substrate BLST bears the correspondences Beth/Taw, "beginning/end," and Lamed/Sin, "middle/S." The latter reinforces the previous observation of S at the center.

Why MIDDLE S? According to Pico della Mirandola, S is a concretion supplement. He moved S into the center of YHWE and gains YH+S+WE, "Jessue" or "Jesus." Thereby, he writes, the once-unspeakable name can be pronounced. The concretion of S/Sin follows the logic of Adamic language whose signs are not arbitrarily related, but naturally attached to matter, space and time and hence capable of affecting them. Without the concretion of Sin, the mere tetragrammaton BLT would read as "beginning, middle, end." Sin is concretion of itself, since its shape, a crown, corresponds to Hebrew Keter, the supreme crown in the Sefirotic system. With S supplementing BLT, B-L-S-T thus means concrete, crowned eternity. When subsituting the word "crowned" [S] with "blessed" [BLST], there results a perpetual recombination and concrete eternity in the letters themselves:

B - L - S - T*B - L -BLST- T*BLBL - BLST-TT*BLBL-BLBLSTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLSTTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLBLSTTTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLBLBLSTTTTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLSTTTTTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLSTTTTTTTTT*BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLSTTTTTTTTTT ...

It follows that

1: The concretion function of S is in itself concrete, a self-sufficient and therefore irrefutable proof.

2: S as the mobile center is the source of perpetuation and hence never identical with itself.

3: Adamic language transcends abstract representation by doing what it says, in this case, blessed eternity.

4: The perpetually permuting name Luther Blissett/BLST exceeds ordinary language and is purely Adamic.

But what do the permutations effect? Since each of them produces one more letter pair BL at the beginning and one more single letter T at the end of the sequence, the position of S gradually shifts to the end without ever reaching it. With every permutation, the initial BL chain gains additional weight against the T chain, so that "beginning - middle" BL outnumbers "end" T. The end T is perpetually being procrastinated, but never abandoned. After all, T steadily increases in absolute terms. The dynamics of Blissett is such that BLST not only expands in time, but affects time itself by shifting the balance of the tenses, because time is not being spent (with a dynamics towards T), but gained (with a dynamics towards BL) with each permutation.

Fructiferous Society

Appendix:

A side-effect of the operation: an ever-growing reverse inscription of Luther Blissett's initials LB. Much remains to be said about the dynamics and internal symmetries of L-u-t-h-e-r/LTHR, but two simple observations should be noted: The name Luther is etymologically derived from the Middle High German word luter (Old English: hlutor, modern German: lauter) meaning ``pure'' and ``honest.'' The Old Greek equivalent is katharos/KThRs, as related to KTR/Keter, the crowned S. If we therefore replace KThr/ThR in LTHR with S, the result is LS, our previously found statement ``S - middle.'' This belongs to the allegoric and figurative sense of Luther Blissett/BLST.

Eternal Life

9 24 21? 22

e.g.

``eternal life''

e.g.

1 can, infinitely, elongate 1's perception of

(e.g. the only existence of)

e.g.

the time distance between birth & the heart/brain stop

precedent to rapid body decomposition

e.g.

between a past date, &/or a present date, & a future date

(e.g. future date chosen with probability of heart/brain stop in mind)

via using progressively smaller time awareness/thought pervasion pace units

for measuring time distance being traversed & to be traversed

e.g.

choose future date

approach using, continuously, time awareness/thought pervasion pace units

equal to 1/2 the time distance between present & said date

anonymous

David Zack

...is not quite understandable to me. I have the impression that he is a very important (and also very problematic) person, one of those who hold big secrets and inspirations in their pockets as suburban moviegoers do with their popcorn.

When I established contact with David, he had already moved to Mexico and created in Tepoztlan his own Immortality Center. The mail I received from him gave me the impression right from the beginning that he subjected himself to a kind of mysticism whose main instrument resembles the Tibetan praying-wheels the most. However, his wheels are not turned by the wind but by an endless row of unreadably long letters - or more precisely by those non-series and totally nonsensical periodicals which he created by xeroxing these letters, adding something to them, and then pasting them on the copies of other letters.

G. Perneczky The Magazine Network 177-8

SMILE

was just the first of a whole new generation of magazines promoting the principle of positive plagiarism. Smile exists solely to encourage other people to take up this principle and to produce their own neo-plagiarist magazines.

Call the magazine that you start SMILE because plagiarizing this name will give you a good start on the road to copyright infringement, and I promise to take absolutely no legal action whatsoever against anyone who plagiarizes the title of the magazine.

So now you have the title of your magazine and you're well on the way to becoming a successful plagiarist. In fact, all you need to do is to put your magazine into production. And that is where the great advantages of plagiarism begin to show themselves. Plagiarism removes the need for talent, or even much application, in the production of magazines or anything else for that matter. All you have to do is select what to plagiarize, do the layout and then find somewhere to get it printed cheaply.

If you are not sure of what to plagiarize, a good place to start looking is in old copies of SMILE. You could even start by plagiarizing this article. A purist would plagiarize the whole piece verbatim, but you are free to change a word here or there, or place the paragraphs in a different order.

A fine example of plagiarism inspired directly by the pioneering example of SMILE is SLIME. SLIME is even less original than SMILE and hence infinitely better.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 5

Dear Neoist and Anti-neoist friends,

please.. realize the projects included in this... issue of SMILE magazine as I am tooo busy to do so .... myself ... I have too much work .... Although some of them may seem ... improbable ... I have reason to believe they all ... have been done before ....

EVERYTHING BEFORE 1986!

Monty Cantsin - we have never met Monty Cantsin personally -, himself the editor of a SMILE magazine in England, is mailing a chain letter around the world asking people to "make your own magazines and call them SMILE". Here you are, dear Monty.

Joki SMILE 1

Replying

...from within the frying of the mind, the intemperate flag waving, the inconstant vision of popular effect, the irradiated sinews which weaken over time, I have just moments to inform you that your hat, und which you are hiding, your hat under which eye am hiding, your hat, und which she is hiding, your hat, the band of which is static-y, is an attempt to smother unshadowness--the almost sacred space of mass influence and subway exiters' dancing. And thus we find more than a normal number of actions are begun during the trip home after work, when the encapsules are at their strongest and the rage to differentiate while declaring visibly invisible is at her highest, like letting the make-up which was not applied fall away in wind buffeting.

Monty Cantsin SMILE Broadly

BLOOD, BREAD AND BEAUTY

From Lautreamont onwards it has become increasingly difficult to write, not because we lack ideas and experiences to articulate -- but due to Western society becoming so fragmented that it is no longer possible to piece together what was traditionally considered `good' prose. That is, writing which is unified by a single idea or body of ideas, where each sentence follows logically from the preceding one -- and where every paragraph and chapter flows smoothly into the next. Today, thoughts seem to break before they are fully formed, they turn back on themselves, contradict each other and make it impossible to write in a style which appears harmonious.

The great problem with twentieth-century art is the constant demand for something new and original. As a consequence, while everything appears to be in a state of flux, nothing actually changes. Instead, the same half-baked ideas constantly re-appear under a succession of different names. It took thousands of years to develop perspective and yet today people demand radical innovations every week. The result is they get exactly what they deserve -- insults.

Neoism is opposed to Western Philosophy because it repudiates the rhetoric of logical argument. Logic is the road that leads to no-where, or at the very best madness. Neoism has never claimed to resolve anything, Neoism simply is. It asserts no more than is obvious and nothing is more obvious than Neoism. Neoism is the ultimate form of Western Philosophy because it is not a philosophy at all, it is an illegible note that Karen Eliot allowed to fall from her breast pocket prior to a performance at the West Hampstead Starlight Club in 1978. It is no more than a sneeze, or rather hollow laughter. Neoism is undefeatable, self-refuting and incomprehensible.

Today, the dead weight of history oppresses us with more efficiency than the most reactionary politicians of the past could imagine in their dreams of bureaucratic perfection. We stagger and suffocate under the burden of thousands of years of accumulated debris. Debris that stifles anything but the most aggressive of creative sparks. And today, that spark threatens to burn us alive in a prison of our own making. Today, the urge to smash the venerable museums has reached a point from which it threatens to become more burdensome than any previous history.

Neoism stands at the end of history, the present. Despite the uncertainty such a position inevitably entails, Neoism draws strength from its sense of history, its sense of the reality of the past -- and of the importance of Lautreamont, the Situationists and Fluxus. We have studied these people carefully and discovered that there is nothing to be learnt from them. Those who look to the past walk blindly into the future.

Neoism has always been more concerned with propagating confusion than serving itself up in consumable chunks. A Neoist is somebody who believes in the value of carrying an umbrella on a rainy day, or rather in stealing someone else's umbrella if it starts to rain. S/he is someone who, as a matter of conviction, refuses to work. Who would rather survive on someone else's money than the fruits of their own labour. Someone who seeks gratification in the present rather than security in the future. Someone who is quite genuinely surprised when their relatives express anger at their turning up at five in the morning demanding to be lent a considerable sum of money. Someone who, utterly convinced of their own genius, believes that not only are they owed a living -- but that their very existence entitles them to be kept in the lap of luxury at somebody else's expense. Above all, a Neoist is someone who believes that art, rather than being the creation of genius, is merely an exercise in public relations. A dull sham, not even worth debunking in public.

Monty Cantsin SMILE 7

PLAGERISM

Ideas improve. Plagerism implies it. The use of overt plagerism by art movements like The Generation Positive does not, however, participate in this improvement. In the post-industrial condition of information overload, the raw surplus of images, ideas and texts is so great that the selective process of choosing what material to plagerize is as much a 'creative' act as the construction of the images, ideas and texts in the first place. If the aim of plagerism is to make a radical break with 'creativity' and its commodity value, plagerists would have to give up the selection process and confine themselves, for example, to a Cagian random method. But the introduction of 'random method' in no way prevents the use of the resulting materials for storage of excess value (art). Only through complete inactivity can we purge ourselves of the capitalist values of originality and creativity manifested through art and its double, Plagerism'

Monty Cantsin SMILE 7

The Curse of Originality

Neoism is founded on replication as a non-organic form of change. In the culture of the copy, where simulacra deny originary presence, it is only in the public presentations of these artforms (not the gallery, the museum, the referred journal, all of which buttress power relationships) that the curse chooses: Either abjure individuality and presence through boycotting the positions of cultural power; or replicate him-/herself through parodistic cloning, postmodern adoption of eclectic stylist disguises, copy machine proliferation.

Consider a name, any name, Monty Cantsin, say. The peculiar referentiality of that name calls into question the entire epistomology of the transcendental signified (to borrow from Husserl), of Kantian categorical imperatives and their dangerously idealized spiritualization of history, and not in the service of rendering people down into identical versions of one another in the final mise-en-abyme. Rather, since art in our time is trapped in parodistic gestures, Monty Cantsin writes finis to bourgeois individualism as a controlling cultural category through incorporating replication materialistically, physically. In Roman Jakobson's notion of the shifter as a grammatic label ("I") whose meaning is socio-linguistically not lexically determined, we have the explanation of the power of this replication.

So what is new ? And who cares, after all, what is new or old? Fashion, the whirling of changing surfaces, the at times hypnotic and at times violent succession of visuals which condition mass consciousness, uses categories of original and copy, authentic and falsified, real and artificial, and so on, to prop up a class system structured on division, contradiction, internal split. It is just this division in the heart of contemporary culture which Neoism has the effrontery to underscore.

Hence the absurdity of artists involved in Neoist activities trying to set the record straight by establishing a definite version of this history. Neoism's base in the Western subcultural arts is more than sufficient to provide the necessary orientation; any further efforts to say who started what can best be read as further irony (at worst they are self-delusion). The real value comes not from rehashing biographies or crediting individuals, which only underscore the very curse or originality that Neoism's proliferations reject, but from focusing attention to the replication of the products of culture themselves, especially those which appear under the name of Monty Cantsin.

H. Polkinhorn

The 56 Laws of Neoism

A Neoist lives on because he never dissolved, just as no friend has ever dissolved.

We are irresponsibly here to ask you to join the crusade for the Data Cell.

Join data.

Monty Cantsin is offered as a null set, and hence as the proper set of Monty Cantsin himself.

Idealism, if recognized at all, reinforces the status quo.

Neoism is logic.

The Monty Cantsin Commando announces the birth of a Neoist.

Neoism depends upon structural elements.

Neoism is often called in our poetic language "remali lubile".

Neoism is opposed to the concept of sex.

We are Neoism.

It is a Neoist's duty to do what he achieves.

We place absolutely no value on reality.

Neoists like books.

Neoism means to drill holes into Neoism, one a day, for seven days.

It is a Neoist's announcement to do what he reads.

Friendship is one of multiple concepts automated by the Neoists.

Monty Cantsin is particularly born as a territory.

By reading this you have become Monty Cantsin.

Neoism is opposed to the concept of language.

Somebody can negate Monty Cantsin and there are many Neoists in Neoism.

Bread is the key-note.

Neoism is the residue of a cosmogony that ignores enslavement.

Neoism consists of methods to totally derive new text from existent Neoist writing.

The great negation has been proclaimed by the Neoists on the Lower East Side.

Neoists are potentials of enslavement.

Join us.

Neoism is practical criticism doing battle against progression.

Join your vacuum with the automatic existence of Neoism.

Neoism avoids the term "obtuseness".

It appears that Monty Cantsin is severe once Monty Cantsin is transcended.

A Neoist is vanished with this myth.

Anything is anything.

Monty Cantsin is whitened with this announcement.

Belief, if recognized at all, reinforces the status quo.

Neoism is opposed to the concept of replication.

Like Santa Claus, everyone can become Monty Cantsin but no one is Monty Cantsin.

Clarity is the key-note.

Neoists believe that everyone is two.

Neoism is only a name and that name is what it's all about.

Join significance.

According to Neoist order, the Immortality Center is the potential of our mind.

Neoists have no variations.

Monty can't sin.

Monty can't sin.

Self-refuting and fragmented, Monty Cantsin turns into a fixed vacuum.

Neoism constructs itself as a territory.

Neoism is opposed to the concept of originality.

Knowing of affirmation, Monty Cantsin is a fake word.

Death whitens where transcendentalism collapses.

Anything can be plagiarized for any reason; start by plagiarizing this period.

Neoism is censorship recognizing itself a myth.

Monty Cantsin will collapse someday at six o'clock.

Neoism stands at the end of love.

We drift hypnotically in the pure perfume of mimesis and identity.

Neoist affirmation is based on meaning.

The Neoism Machine

Our work is rarely signed, and the notion of plagiarism does not exist. It has been established that all Neoism is the work of only one ageless and anonymous Neoist.