75
Frozen frame: within the frozen frame technique, time ceases to move physically on the screen. Many films conclude with a sudden freeze of the image on the screen, thus interrupting the flow of motion. Other directors utilize this effect to terminate a sequence: the image is stopped and after a moment it fades out. In the middle of a sequence, sometimes the end of a shot is frozen to center attention on a fact or a character. Zoom shots that move forward have been frozen at the end with remarkable effect.
DANIEL ARIJON
76
The dust from the thousands of building sites in Beijing has obliged the authorities to reconsider, for the first time, the pace of Westernizing growth. The wind drags large, quasi-solid masses (virtual solids, we might call them) of sand and cement as far as Dalian, a port city on the Yellow Sea, and deposits them in the waters, which are also becoming gradually more solid and yellow all the time. They’ll carry on covering Beijing, layer upon layer, until the only thing peeking out will be the tallest skyscrapers, and the place will eventually become a desert. At which moment it will be exactly the same as a desert in Spain, Morocco, Mongolia, and North America. Just as all the water and all the PCs on earth are in some way connected, so are all deserts one (so the same will therefore go for the cities buried by them: the streets, squares, and motorways having disappeared, only one recognizable address will remain: the one defining the gravity vector that points toward an ever-more-distant center of the earth).
77
Jorge Rodolfo Fernández walks around his Budget Suites of America apartment, around and around without stopping. He hasn’t shown up for work on Las Vegas Boulevard for a number of days. He crosses the 15 feet from one wall to the other, turns around and goes back, and, when he gets to the first wall again, turns around and goes back, day and night, until, exhausted, he collapses on the mattress, where he stays for the shortest amount of time necessary before he can get up and continue his trajectory again. It isn’t that he’s been struck by a fatal disease, like the neighbor’s dog, which went mad and began running around in circles and carried on that way for several days until it had worn a circular groove in the ground 20 inches deep, and fell over dead (turned out it was a coyote), nor has he been fired from his job as empties collector, nor has a letter come announcing the imminent death of his mother in Buenos Aires, no, something far worse: he’s lost faith in Jorge Luis Borges. He doesn’t know how it happened, but one day he got up, looked at the maestro’s portrait, and knew that the negative pressure he felt bearing inside his body was the fruit of some emptiness, new and strange. He felt that the photo wasn’t looking at him anymore, that the face seemed to have been portrayed devoid of any future inclination; the portrait was nothing more than two eyes bedded in that rough, strictly present, metal and silver moment, 68 years ago now. Then he tried reading the works, and found himself bored after two lines. He got to a point of thinking that this sensation of pure intransitivity was due to Borges’s blindness, before discarding the idea as fantastical, or, in any case, irrelevant. Since then he’s been struggling to work out a way of recovering his lost faith, ricocheting from wall to wall, staring at the floor. Reaching one of the walls, he thinks he has divided into two Jorge Rodolfos: one turns on its heel, re-embarking on the cyclical movement, continuing being him, while the other doesn’t turn, but carries straight on, never stopping, becoming lost in the nebulous trajectory of that which knows neither past nor future, which knows what tender insects and light particles know; and the one who carries on divides into two, in turn, again, a miserable soul who turns and returns, a dreamer who continues, who in turn will divide into two once more, and so on, until coming to form this assembly of clustered loops that is consciousness. A boyfriend and girlfriend are sitting outside his apartment on the footway that isn’t really a footway. They speak of going traveling, it’s a toss-up between Denver, Los Angeles, and, why not, Paris, they smoke and become excited, not that there’s any point because they don’t have any money anyway, plus they’ve known for a long while that traveling is an antiquated, absurd activity, the pastime of decidedly uncool people a whole century in the past.
78
The Sex Pistols have cleared the ground—burned it up. There’s nothing left but the city standing as if nothing had happened, a patch of smoking dirt in the middle of the city, in the middle of that a lettered piece of wood that in the haze … reads: “FIRE SALE” … The people circling the empty space don’t know what to do next. They don’t know what to say; everything they’re used to talking about has been parodied into stupidity as the old words rise in their mouths. Their mouths are full of bile: they’re drawn to the void, but they hold back. “Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best,” situationist Raoul Vaneigem had said in 1967 in Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations (Treatise on Living for the Young Generations, known in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life): “‘The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn round … No more coats and no more home.’” That’s where they are.
GREIL MARCUS
79
The nomad makes a hearth around an idea. The great nomads are those with fixed, immovable ideas, then they leave behind people, leave behind cities. When Michael Landon arrived at Fox’s studios, very late, he was tired; the house was cold, and a mess, and devoid of any character. A few hand-me-down pieces of furniture. The rubbish bin overflowing. Recording the fifth season of Highway to Heaven had consumed his whole capacity for nomadism; the house now became the refuge that every traveler, sooner or later, needs. He poured himself a whiskey, no ice, picking a pornographic video from the shelves at random. As the tape began to go around he heated up a sandwich he’d brought from catering. A woman ran through a forest with two men pursuing her, eventually collapsing, exhausted, at the foot of a tree, where she allowed herself to be penetrated. He wasn’t focusing overly on the tape. When he woke up the credits were rolling, and according to them the exteriors had been filmed in a forest in the state of Nevada, the same forest where he, 20 years earlier, had set an episode of Little House on the Prairie, 1972, he remembered, nostalgia washing over him: the oil crisis, Berkeley a hotbed, Bertolucci coming out with Last Tango in Paris, the Israeli athletes kidnapped and put to death by Palestinian commandos at the Munich Olympics, Nixon visiting China—the first U.S. president to do so—Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. He fell asleep again on the sofa. That night was the most nomadic of all: he took as his hearth the definitive idea, the only one that isn’t willed: death.
80
It’s been three days since anyone stopped to fill up. Fernando keeps himself busy by flicking through the magazines on display in the sales stand, which are arranged in a vertical pile, because that way they’ll resemble a scaled, filleted fish. He has a six-month-old copy of Letras Libres in his hands, “The past is what we remember of the past, and memory consists of a miscellany of fragments that, now, in the present moment, we stick together, we bundle up. Thus the past does not exist, it only exists in the present emulsification moment, a compositional process governed by its own rules, ones which also make the process part of the present. But if the past doesn’t even exist, how can the future exist? Even more dismaying. Futurology, that so-called science, also speaks of things that will never exist, because if it didn’t, it would by definition cease to call itself Futurology. We move through a Present desert delimited by these two illusions, Past and Future.” Fernando immediately takes a pen and, at the bottom of the page, writes: “Indeed, in the same way that the awful thing about 23-F was not that a moustachioed bystander rushed in and assaulted the Congress of Deputies (the idea of the call of the wild is a part of our History, we need it to keep our identity intact), the awful thing was the standard issue bullets aimed at the tilers repairing the roof that day.” He tears out the page and throws it on the pile to his right, from which he’s going to make large boluses of paper.
81
Lying half on his side in the hospital bed, Ernesto “Che” Guevara regards the machine to his right, which he has been hooked up to for the last three days. Supposedly, the curve on the screen, as long as it doesn’t go flat, means everything’s fine. Though in his treatment so far he’s been surprised by the efficiency of Vietnamese medicine, he does often wonder what it would be like if he were in Cuba or Las Vegas instead. And though it’s midday, the blinds are almost completely lowered, making for a thick semidarkness that adds an extra 98 percent relative humidity to the air. He observes the screen, which, in standby mode, goes dark to save energy; the only thing that stays on, the only sign, is a small circle of transparent plastic containing a blinking orange light. It lights up every three seconds. He’s been staring at it for several hours, but in the same way that we lose ourselves staring at a fire or the trembling of a star. The tiny bulb inside has somehow been accidentally displaced, he sees, and it means that when it lights up, rather than a circle the form it brings to mind is an egg. An egg that appears and, three seconds later, disappears. How paradoxical, it seems to him, that the machine certifying a person’s cessation does so with this oval icon, symbol par excellence of life.
82
At some point in his voyage Falconetti decides to return to San Francisco. If he can’t make it all the way around the earth, he thinks, at least he can make the earth go around him. He buys a beachball-sized reproduction of the earth, draws a doll figure over San Francisco with a marker pen, and next to it writes his name. The next morning, he throws it into the East Bay.
83
Payne wouldn’t let the bellboy put the three surfboards in the closet for him; he wanted to do it himself. Situated in the heart of modern Beijing, the thirty-third-floor room looks out over a collection of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, and among them, snaking and labyrinthine, a succession of small constructions, no more than two stories high, that alternate with market stalls and many different kinds of commercial-residential properties. With 15 days to go before the competition, he opted to have his father rent him this 5-star luxury apartment, so he could come and do some therapeutic meditation before he went to tackle the waves. He was watching the sky train as it moved off along the tracks, between the soaring buildings—thick columns, set at intervals of 60 feet, acting as stanchions for the tracks. By his timing, they passed every 5 minutes and 50 seconds. Pressing 0, he called down for fries. He’d been humming the Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” all the way from London, a song he could’ve sworn he’d forgotten, and it strikes him as strange that there should then be a cemetery so close to the hotel, no more than a stone’s throw away, over which the sky train passes, set between lush parkland and the ABC tower. Payne likes hotels, all hotels, for the layer of solitude each apartment possesses; at the top, on the final layer, the solitude peaks, but at the same time there’s the comfortability, and there’s your wonderful view. A solitude both narcoleptic and inviting; one that means you never have to go out. One can spend large swaths of time holed up inside, doing nothing, as though society, out there, had conspired to make this chamber of nothingness just for you, a place of stories invented about previous inhabitants, about the hair you find on the rim of the toilet, and so on. He lay down to rest. Whenever he was far from home his mind turned to Robert, his older brother, who had broken with their father years earlier to go and make a life for himself in North America. The last he heard he was living in a small town in the West, working in a bank, and he owned a small prop plane. It had been he who, when they were both still young and living with the family in London, had inadvertently incited him to surf: “Staying balanced in water,” he’d said, “doesn’t make you equal to canoes, it puts you on a par with birds.” And though he now knew he was partly right, what’s definitely completely right is that the times he’d felt closest to the equilibrium of birds was urinating in a bedpan: he’d had an accident, wiping out on some rocks and breaking various ribs and his hip, and then in the hospital when he would sit on the edge of the bed to piss, spreading his legs a little, he’d focus on a point in front of him which then would turn suddenly blurry, and as he let out the stream of liquid—which would fall, as did his entire body, into some far-off, nebulous place—a sharp sensation of weightlessness would accompany it, a feeling of absolute buoyancy, of a biology that, having disappeared, was also well designed. His brother Robert, for his part, still in London at that point, had begun an engineering course, but dropped out midway through, and that was when he left for North America. The fries came; he turned on the TV. Salem’s Lot was playing on Star Movies, and he enjoyed David Soul traversing the deeps of America as the sagacious writer/ zombie hunter/vampire hunter, instead of playing his usual role as Hutch in Starsky & Hutch. He was still going on the fries when the telephone rang. It was Kelly. She was staying in a hostel in the south of the city with some other contestants from Los Angeles. They made a plan to meet up without the group. With the telephone to his ear, Payne’s sight came to rest on the cemetery and it occurred to him they should meet at the gate. Fine, she said. Give me an hour.
84
A city at night, seen from the sky. Think. A house, a light going out. In the same moment, an indeterminate number of lights around it also go out, and the dark circle cascades outward, its radius expanding until the entire city ceases to be visible. Think. A country at night, seen from the sky, a city, a speck of light, suddenly going out. Then, immediately, the surrounding cities falling dark, until the darkness reaches the country’s borders. Think. A continent at night, seen from the sky. The light that is a single country goes out, and so on until the continent turns black. Think. The terrestrial globe at night, seen from the sky. Each continent a speck of light that now goes out. In a domino effect all the adjacent continents go out until this whole side of the earth is in darkness. Think. Nothing but this, think. On the other side it’s still day. But think about it, really think.
85
The new capitalism, twenty-first-century capitalism, doesn’t only offer products that enable the experience of status or of dream states—we’ve gone beyond that now—it creates an authentic parallel reality that, through mass media, sets itself up as the only reality. And so, more than ever, the shared Reality imitates the artificial, Art. Now, this Art, which has become the new Reality, becomes overwhelmingly, excessively standardized, which is why the Chinese have for a long time been copying everything Western, but with certain transformations inserted; they customize. They copy songs and entire albums by Western artists, exact replicas of Madonna, Radiohead, or the Strokes, but sung by Chinese people. Or their skyscrapers, which are replicas of the North American ones but have slight variations introduced, motifs from classical Chinese architecture. The list goes on and on. The older generations in Little America, the ones taking part in the international surf competition in Tapia, in the Spanish region of Asturias, have brought equipment that is also modified and, for example, the rear keel of their boards feature Chinese sculptural motifs [some say these are what make the boards so stable, that in fact it has nothing to do with Zen]; or the 1971 VW campervans so modded up they resemble Pekingese motorized tuk-tuks. Before drinking Coca-Cola they also shut their eyes and sing a song. Though developed by the Japanese, the haiku has roots in the distant past of Chinese poetry, which is why these old Chinese have been working on a kind of customized haiku, half classical, half Western-algebraic: at the Tapia international competition, the 87-year-old winner Chi-Uk, upon receiving the trophy, intones the lines in English:
Wave is a tree,
light particles hanging
x infinity = matter
Before translating into Spanish:
La ola, hay un
punto, ahí el cuerpo
x0 = nada
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 8
