Davis met Ali and Peaches on the low-budget, slap-dash set of the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” music video. Molly Metro encouraged her dancers to goof around and riff with each other and Davis spent the better part of a day freestyling to the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” chorus with Ali and Peaches, though Davis barely appears in the final cut of the video. During her brief screen time, in the few instrumental-only beats before the bridge, she performs a dizzying leg hold pirouette before the video cuts to footage of Molly humping the statue.
Ali and Davis stayed friends after that video shoot, though Ali had reasons other than friendship to recruit Davis to her New Society of Children of the Atomic Bomb. Firstly, Ali had heard about Davis’s budding relationship with Berliner, so she knew turning Davis would give her access to more than one key person. Secondly, Ali knew Davis was susceptible to bribery. Davis’s family, once comfortable financially, now struggled to pay hefty medical bills following first Davis’s mother’s then her grandfather’s prolonged battles with cancer. Ali turned Davis over the course of six weeks, pushing her toward duplicity one inch at a time before she buckled and agreed to betray both Molly and her boyfriend in exchange for a hefty payoff.z
With The Ghost Network finished, and Ali and Peaches nipping at their heels, neither Berliner nor Molly knew which direction to head in next. Molly still adamantly believed the L maps would unlock the secrets of the New Situationists, but couldn’t figure out how. Berliner started thinking of The Ghost Network as a sort of stalling tactic, a way to feel like they had accomplished something when they had actually discovered nothing. “The Urban Planning Committee felt like a joke during those days,” he admitted, “and Metro and I were arguing. Half of the time we met or talked on the phone, we fought and fought about the importance of The Ghost Network. I thought she was clinging to a sinking ship, to be frank. She was worried I was going to freak out and leave her, like Ali and Peaches did.”
Berliner checked in with Kraus during his weekly prison visits. She agreed with Berliner that The Ghost Network seemed like an exercise in futility. She encouraged him to keep fighting with Molly, and to explore other avenues without her when she was out of town. Molly’s rising fame troubled Kraus. She worried about the conflicts in being both a Situationist and a pop star.
In the meantime, Molly Metropolis prepared for war with the dancers. She bought the building on Armitage and Racine and replaced the New Situationists’ security door with a newer, thicker, more secure model.aa She tried to get Berliner to reengage with The Ghost Network. He wouldn’t, so she spent hours alone with her giant composite map.
On Molly Metropolis’s final day in Chicago, Berliner was baffled by her mood. Over breakfast in her Peninsula Hotel suite, instead of arguing about The Ghost Network, she told Berliner tour stories of broken animatronic costumes and dancers’ lovers’ quarrels. Then she impulsively suggested visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Berliner asked to join her at the museum, expecting her to say no. As she’d grown in popularity, her SDFC handlers had become more wary about Molly appearing in public with a “known terrorist.” Instead of refusing, Molly embraced Berliner and told him she was so happy he asked to come along.
She roused the rest of her friends and security entourage and drove her little convertible to the museum. She walked through the galleries wistfully, brushing her fingers across the molding on the doorframe as if savoring the texture. She signed autographs without a hint of exhaustion or annoyance. She wore a black veil, a neon purple shirt, and a pair of neon orange pumps by shoe designers DSquared2, with a white wooden heel carved into letters. Her left shoe said EAT and her right shoe said POP.
Berliner blended in with the rest of her small entourage; even with all the scrutiny the museum trip eventually received, no publication or gossip blog reported that Molly Metropolis had been gallivanting around with a member of the New Situationists just before her disappearance. According to Berliner, Molly Metropolis loved the silence and stillness of museums. She loved looking at a piece of art hung or placed against an unscuffed white wall. She loved installation pieces, because they felt truly ephemeral, unable to be captured or copied. She once told Berliner that she treated her naked body like the white walls of an art museum and her clothing like the art hung on those walls.
In that way, Molly lived in opposition to the Situationists, who abhorred the stiffness of museums’ “climate-controlled art” and expelled all their artists for being artists. The art world, Debord argued, participated in a capitalist system that treated art like commodities and sold them for money; art museums were big players in the Society of the Spectacle. The artists with the most recognizable or trendy “names” would fetch the highest prices regardless of the quality or emotional significance of the art they produced. All creation of art was tainted by this system, Debord insisted. Art was complacent, as were the artists.
Debord had once wanted to infiltrate the art world, but soured on the idea of changing the system because he never had the power to do so; Molly, at the apex of her career, had the power to change popular culture. Top 40 radio didn’t play singles that sounded like her synth-infused tracks before Molly released “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas).” Now, despite her disappearance (or perhaps partially because of it), Molly’s sound remains en vogue.bb If Debord had been her judge, Molly would’ve been ejected from the Situationist International.
Berliner and Molly were both delirious from the power she wielded as a cultural force. Imagine spending years following the path of men and women you deeply admired, only to realize you were coming close to eclipsing them. Imagine lifting your heroes onto your shoulders; imagine how powerful and strong you would feel.
After the museum visit, Berliner remembers Molly hugging him, a goodbye hug he recognized in hindsight. She lied to Berliner, telling him she needed to go have a phone meeting with a Swedish producer named Michael M. about tracks for her new album. She left in her car, alone. Berliner was probably the last of her friends to see her before she was gone.
After Molly Metropolis disappeared, Berliner sunk into the underground rooms of the Urban Planning Committee’s headquarters, as he had done after the subway bombings. He tried to figure out if Molly had left of her own volition and, if so, where she had gone. Berliner was terrified that Ali, Peaches, and their New Society had abducted her. He went as far as searching the New Society’s headquarters.
All the threads intersected in the anxious days right after Molly’s disappearance. Ali and Peaches immediately ransacked Molly’s abandoned hotel room—they knew Molly had found something, and believed the key to finding it themselves was in her notebook. They didn’t find the notes, but they did leave the mess Nix and Taer found when they packed Molly’s belongings several days later. At the same time, Berliner suspected Davis was involved with the New Society and wanted to test his theory, so when Nix and Taer contacted Berliner about the notebook, Berliner told Davis they had called. Berliner and Davis discussed Nix and Taer over drinks in a trendy bar called the Violet Hour. They speculated that Nix had wanted to keep it as a memento of her time with Molly. Then Berliner excused himself to use the bathroom and hid behind an adjacent accent wall. He overheard Davis call Ali to relay the whereabouts of the notebook. Betrayed, Berliner abruptly cut ties with Davis. He left the bar without saying goodbye, immediately canceled his iPhone plan and switched to a burner cell phone, and retreated to the New Situationist headquarters. He decided not to meet Taer and Nix.
While Berliner retreated and Taer and Nix waited for him at Redfish, Peaches sent Casares to break into Taer’s apartment. Casares was skinny, earnest, and gullible. Besides a slightly cleft lip, he was attractive and wore a sleeve of faded tattoos well. Casares excelled at intricate, difficult tasks, like picking locks, and he was the most loyal of all Ali and Peaches’s followers. Tasked with finding Molly’s notebook at any cost, Casares waited for Taer, Nix, and Taer’s roommate to leave the apartment, and easily broke through Taer’s ancient
lock.
Inside the apartment, Casares couldn’t find anything pertaining to Molly, so he left. Peaches and Ali devised a new plan; they decided the easiest way to find Berliner was to let Nix and Taer do the searching for them. Then they could focus their own efforts on reconstructing The Ghost Network, without having to split focus. Ali figured they’d have to give Taer the tool the New Society had in their possession, so she gave Casares the sketchpad and gun they had taken from Berliner. Later that evening, Casares broke into Taer’s apartment again, got his head smacked, and purposely dropped the gun and the sketchpad to frame Berliner.cc
When Taer and Nix visited Michigan, Davis surreptitiously texted Ali to ask what she should say to them. Ali and Peaches suspected Berliner was hiding out in the Urban Planning Committee’s main headquarters. They knew if they found the right building, they would have both Berliner and The Ghost Network. The dancers told Davis to help Taer and Nix look for it, whatever way she could, hoping that Metro’s former assistant could figure out Berliner’s map for them. They waited for Taer and Nix to find their way through the snow.
* * *
* I’m not 100 percent certain where Cyrus gathered the information on these events. Kraus gave him some secondhand information, Berliner told him a few relevant stories—and when I asked Berliner to read these pages, he said they were basically right. But I can’t confirm his original source. —CD
† Constant, “Exploration of La Maison Astuce,” translated by Libcom volunteers, Internationale Situationniste, no. 3 (December 1959): 12.
‡ Although falling one story could sometimes result in death, more often than not the person who fell would just be injured.
§ “Exploration of La Maison Astuce,” 13.
ǁ Ibid.
a Berliner didn’t explain to Cyrus how he knew this food blogger was in the N.S., while simultaneously not knowing any of the names or faces of any of the members. He must’ve lied somewhere, even if only about the food blogging. —CD
b From the preface of Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely by Anthony Vidler. In the tradition of Situationist détournement, Berliner didn’t note his inclusion of the quote, neither with quotation marks nor citation.
c Nicolas Berliner, “Modern Urbanism’s Tabula Rasa: Destroying and Rebuilding Gotham,” Esquire.com, www.esquire.com/features/modern-urbanisms-tabula-rasa/ESQ0605-JUN_ARTS.
d Esquire‘s web editor, Audrey Sampson, wrote a two-hundred-word bio for Berliner, labeling him “The Last Situationist.” The bio ran before the article. There was still some cache associated with the New Situationists’ neo-Situationism, and undoubtedly Esquire published the article because of the byline, not the contents.
e Berliner quoted Ari to Cyrus during one of their solo interviews. —CD
f He rarely sold his least favorite: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps that depicted California as an island off the coast of the mainland of what was to become North America. One of the most infamous cartographic errors ever, a Spanish romance novelist from the 1500s, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, popularized the idea in a series of books depicting California as an Eden-like garden, an island populated entirely by beautiful women.
g Of course, Molly wasn’t responsible for everything. Guy Debord is, or Constant. Though it’s true that all three of them benefited from the fortuitous combination of right person, right time, and right place that creates history out of events and legend out of man (or icon out of women). Molly didn’t start anything, she was just the biggest ship to get caught in the storm. —CD
h This story about Berliner, Kraus, Molly, and Johnson is strange, but Berliner “thinks” it’s accurate, so I didn’t cut it from the text. —CD
i Berliner liked the joke. During subsequent visits, he started their conversation with a line from popular cartoon Pinky and the Brain: “Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?” Kraus would respond, “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!”
j None of these notebooks survive. Information on their contents came to me secondhand, from my interviews with Berliner.
k Kristian Sommer, “Molly! The New Diva!” Knoll Producktion 126, no. 5 (April 2008): 89.
l She wore the same bra in the music video for “Don’t Stop.”
m Cyrus didn’t indicate which bloggers. —CD
n Quotations from Berliner’s personal notes on the New Situationist documents.
o Dana Andapolis, “Meeting Molly,” MTV.com, February 12, 2009; www.mtv.com/news/music/3082636/meeting-molly/.
p Which airport? Who knows. O’Hare is my best guess, but all airports look alike.
q Though the video has been removed from Molly’s official YouTube channel, the copy most easily accessible via a simple search has over 500,000 views. [It has over 505,000 views, as of the time this book went to press. —CD]
r Ali and Peaches were reluctant to discuss the events in the book, but feared that without commenting, their side of the story would not be heard. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions on what they could discuss, I’m afraid I’m unable to include the nuances of their experience of the events, and the young women, perhaps unfairly, remain villains in this text.
s Molly was angry enough to give Peaches a goodbye “fuck you,” though—she let it slip to a few tabloid journalists that she had fired Peaches because she refused to dance at a show during the Pride Parade in New York.
t This is according to Parker himself, whom I thank for his patience, help with fact-checking, and all the hours spent on the phone discussing the finer points of music video choreography.
u Skendarian made her name partially on Molly’s videos and went on to win a Grammy for her work on Miley Cyrus’s video for “Love Money Party.”
v Kelly Rice of Slate dismissed this sequence as “off-putting” and “needlessly vulgar,” in a piece about the sexual antics of pop stars: “From Molly to Miley—Are There Any Lines They Won’t Cross?” Published September 2, 2013. The piece was reductive and “slut-shaming” in its tone. I disagree with Rogers’s assessment of Molly’s performance in the “New Vogue Riche” video. I thought all the skyscraper humping wasn’t supposed to be sexy; it was supposed to be funny.
w Thanks to Ryan at MTV for access to the uncut interview.
x This timeline is according to both Ali and Peaches, whom I interviewed separately, and who seem to function as a two-part unit even when they aren’t in the same room.
y Ali and Peaches didn’t choose the name of their “counterinsurgency,” The Society of the Children of the Atomic Bomb, at random. Ali, a master at finding the best parts of people and shining a light on them, mined Peaches’s childhood for the name.
Peaches’s grandfather, Frank Orr, and Robert Halstead, Orr’s closest friend, served together in World War II as naval officers on a ship called the Massachusetts. In the waning years of the war, their ship was scheduled to take part in an attack on Japan’s shores. President Harry S. Truman axed that planned attack in favor of dropping a newly minted atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki. Lieutenants Orr and Halsted most likely would’ve been killed trying to take Japan if America hadn’t dropped the bomb. They were haunted by their possible alternate history as casualties of war. Jokingly, they called themselves, and other soldiers like them, The Children of the Atomic Bomb.
In 1945, the men returned, alive and uninjured, to their homes in the rural Illinois corn-farming county of Kankakee. There, they started a political action committee to push for fiscal conservatism and greater government subsidies for rural farmers. According to a pamphlet they published together in 1952, they called their group the Society of the Children of the Atomic Bomb, “because without it, our lives would’ve been lost, and our children, and our children’s children, never would’ve been born.”
Orr and Halsted dreamed of becoming a powerful lobbying group for Midwestern farmers, but they had absolutely no political impact, even in Kankakee. The Society quietly folded in 1954.
&
nbsp; Forty-four years later, Ali plucked the name out of history, adopting it mostly because she liked the rhythm of the phrase.
z I never had a chance to interview Davis, so I remain unenlightened about how spying on Berliner and betraying him weighed on her, though I do know she followed Ali and Peaches’s directions without question.
aa According to state records, Antoinette Monson owns the building, and the basement rooms are rented by U of C on behalf of the University of Westminster, London, as an off-campus extension of the Westminster Natural Sciences program, housing experiments that can only be performed in America. When I tried to confirm whether or not the University of Westminster ever rented office space in the Armitage and Racine building, I entered a never-ending feedback loop, where officials at U of C sent me to the University of Westminster for confirmation, and the University of Westminster sent me back to U of C, ad infinitum.
bb Check out the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s movie Drive, for example. —CD
cc And here’s where everyone got confused. Taer and Nix thought Berliner had broken in to steal Molly’s notebook. Berliner thought Nix and Taer might be working with Peaches and Ali to draw him out. Peaches and Ali thought Nix had some secret information about where Molly had gone and were trying to find Berliner to reunite them with Molly. Everything got all muddled and Cyrus did his best to put all the threads together, failing in places, sometimes blinded, sometimes wrong. —CD
Every time I interviewed Berliner and Nix, we met in my apartment in Chicago, a small but elegant one bedroom with historic 1920s moldings Berliner admired. Berliner wore the same gray suit and pale blue button-down shirt every time. Nix wore tight blue jeans and loose tank tops.
The Ghost Network Page 19
