I don’t remember that during this or other performances (and there were some even more disgusting!) anyone in the audience or any of the participants felt bad. No, there were those who crashed out, vomited or went bananas, but that’s because of various drugs for ‘consciousness expansion.’
Before I became acquainted with the garagers, I knew almost nothing about modern art. Actually, not almost – I didn’t know anything at all! Pictures, sculptures, painting, graphics – all these were totally unfamiliar to me…”
10:34 P.M._
Kold’s phone rang unexpectedly and the Lawyer was forced to switch off the recording.
“Hallo!” Kold answered laconically. “Yes. Yes, I am busy. Mrs. Morisson, I can’t accept you. No, I am not obliged to report to you… Well, I have a meeting with my lawyer. No, everything is all right. Yes, all the best.”
He switched off his phone, leaned back the chair and sighed.
“Sometimes it seems to me that Cassandzhi deployed Morisson to spy on me. Who does she transfer information to?”
“These people help you, don’t they?” the Lawyer said, surprised. “In my opinion, it was they who managed to contact diplomats from Ecuador…”
“Ok!” Kold moved forward suddenly, interrupting him. “This is exactly why I don’t want… I have to be careful, you understand, and there… there everything is too simple and too much like a baited trap. You asked the question: why have I chosen Russia? For the moment, I’ll just say this: prospects. Here there are prospects. Room for manoeuvre, do you see? And I have a feeling that I can just get so lost here I won’t be found by the CIA, or MI6, or archangels of our Lord. But Latin America is the backyard of the United States! No, after giving it some thought, I realized I wouldn’t like to be there. And one more important point – I would maybe consider offers from Ecuador and Venezuela more carefully if I wasn’t pushed by Cassandzhi…”
File 005.wav
“Before going on with my story about the Garage and the incidents that came after, I just want to say a few words about 9/11. When it all happened, I was just beginning college. It was an ordinary day, a Tuesday, with nothing untoward going on. Then suddenly all the TVs around the college hall and in the snackbar – even in the security guards’ room – began to show the towers of the World Trade Center and these planes crashing into them.
Everyone was crowding around the screens. There were lots of people crying. And some just asking: ‘What do we do now, what now?’ And when the message came that more planes with alleged terrorists were in the air and one of them was heading directly for the White House, there was almost panic. Two ambulances arrived as one of the schoolgirls and the teacher, Mr. Hopkins, felt ill.
For some reason, this didn’t make that strong of an impression on me. No, of course, it was awful that people died – innocent and civil, as my father used to say. Yes, people died, but this death in the air seemed to be designed for salesmen and housewives. In a word, it looked as though it had been written in advance cinematically according to a scenario. Maybe, though, my muted reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York was linked to the divorce of my parents and internal experiences which eclipsed them. I don’t know.
Of course, I read lots about it, and watched the films shot by supporters and opponents of various versions. Then at last, when I worked in the National Security Agency, I tried just for the sake of interest to learn the ‘truth’, but encountered a very powerful system of concealment of information.
It was organized in such a way that anyone who wanted to delve into the facts came up against what seemed to be mere coincidences, pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor in the dark room on which Confucius’s cat seemed to have scampered about. The creators of the TV series The X-files were right – the truth is still somewhere nearby.
Anyway, let me go back to the Garage. It regularly arranged exhibitions and open days of contemporary art – well, in the way that garagers understood it! I’ve already told you some examples and that’s enough because it is really not too appetizing! But I will say that the Garage gave me a lot of knowledge about various movements in painting, sculpture and graphic and other arts.
Before knowing Neolani and the others, I had heard only about surrealism, and that thanks to the reproduction of Dali’s ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening’ hanging in Judith’s room. But to be honest, it was the naked woman that drew my attention to the picture, not surrealism.
In the Garage, I was very simply and intelligibly, with examples, introduced to the way one style of a contemporary art differs from another. Frisbee and Neolani taught me.
‘Here look,’ said Neo, quickly sketching the contours of a horse on a piece of writing paper. ‘I am drawing a stallion the way it is, with dirty hoofs and a throbbing dick – this is realism. Now…’ she took some felt-tip pens, ‘We will paint our horsey in a blue with scarlet hair. That will be expressionism. And now we will add a shovel to the dick, skates on the hoofs, and on its back we will paint a portrait of the Pope. That is surrealism. Pass me the charcoal, Fris!’
With the charcoal she sharply delineated all the contours of an initial horse, then divided it into geometrical figures, after slightly modifying the positions of the head and tail.
‘That’s cubism. And if I turn everything into a black square with a white circle and write ‘horse’ sideways, that’s suprematism. Oh, I forgot – if right at the beginning we painted the horse with various pastel tones and blurred contours, that would be impressionism.’
‘If there is only a circle tracing out the horse’s hoof, that’s minimalism,’ Frisbee intervened. ‘And if all of it is smeared with horse shit. Then it is ‘active painting’ mixed with Dadaism. Do you get it, Joshy-boy?’
‘In general,’ I laughed. ‘And do you want me to tell you something useful about programming in the statically compiled language ‘C-plus-plus’ or about html design?’
‘Buddha forbid’ they yelled in unison and ran off in feigned horror, leaving me alone with the image of a horse.
Besides art, the garagers were involved with various social and political movements. We regularly wrote trials for the renegade websites, picketed the local chemical plant, supported Greenpeace, printed Che Guevara’s portrait on red teeshirts for the antiglobalists who were going to go to fight the police somewhere in Europe and illegally replicated disks of musicians like Manu Chao because he was singing songs of protest.
Once I went with Neolani and other garagers to Baltimore on a demo in support of Dmitry Sklyarov, the hacker from Russia. This pretzel wrote the ‘Advanced eBook Processor’ program, which easily bypassed the protection of PDF files, designed by ADOBE specifically so that nobody could copy anything from them.
Under American law what Dmitry had done was illegal, but it wasn’t under Russian law – so his firm quietly traded the program created by him, and everything was good.
Then Dmitry was invited to a computer conference in San Francisco, and even wrote a paper, but he was arrested by FBI agents there and thrown into prison.
Well, of course, normal people all over the country were strongly indignant – because if this Russian was jailed today just for doing his job well, then tomorrow one of us might be jailed just because we’ve written something on the internet. Something ‘not acceptable’ from the point of view of the authorities, I mean.