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TitleJust a big TV show, ...

Author

PublisherFree City Collective

PlaceSan Francisco

Year

Date 111/1/1967

Date 2n.d., ca.

Publication

Volume

Issue

Page(s)

MediumBroadsheet

DimensionLegal

Extent

Imprint

Collation

CatalogFC-2-006b

CollectionSOLA-o; SS-o (MH)

Cit. No.

Keywords

Trans. Title

Section

Group

Sub-Group

Series

Folder

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Notes

The image is dominated by a dislocated face or mask suspended above a segmented blue globe, with a red disk—sun, wound, target, or bomb—lodged at the crown. The thin red lines read like beams, strings, or vectors of force, so that the figure seems at once irradiated, manipulated, and disassembled. Taken with the text, the image suggests a world consciousness broken into layers: history as spectacle, identity as fragmentation, and the planet itself as a stage for psychic and political catastrophe.

Abstract

This companion piece to the reverse side pushes the critique of modern civilization into the register of nightmare spectacle. History appears here as a grotesque media event—part blood ritual, part collapsing theology, part televised hallucination—in which the categories by which people are sorted and managed and paraded only to be swallowed up in a bad dream of their own making. The closing line, “I will read only my own lines until…,” suggests a refusal of the prefabricated script, as though the only possible answer to this shrieking pageant were to step out of the roles history has assigned.

Full Text

Just a big TV show,
The real specialtruereportextravaganza
we've been waiting and praying for 
all these long, twitching years.
Written and directed by history, 
bullshit diety and creator--
The finale flashes 
after the latelatereallysolate show,
just as the anthem 
doesn't make it,
and right on cue
all the second-rate gods

    Richman, Poorman, Middleclassman,
    Workingclassman, Whiteman, Black-
    man, Whitey, Nigger, Kike, Wop,
    Slopehead, Businessman, Hustler,
    Dealer, Doctor, Lawyer, Hippie,
    Intellectual, Artist, Radical,
    Poet, Indian, Guru, Revolutionary,
    et al, YOU?

Sprawl.
Before the shrieking tube
in a pool of dark blood
thickening to the texture of honey,
created at last,
in the ultimate image
of their own and everybody's
bad dream
There is sun, blood, fire
There is no heaven, no hell
There are many gods
There is one god
There is no god
I will read only my lines until..

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The Digger Archives is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Cite As: (Courtesy of) The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / All other uses must receive permission.
Contact: curator at diggers dot org.