Dreampepper

WIRED has a really nice new piece (with photos and a video of some of the clock restoration!) on one of my favourite inspiring secret-art collectives, UX, the dreamy Parisian group that specializes in fantastical heritage restorations and interstitial spaces:


A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris,
secretly refurbishing the city's neglected treasures.

Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft.

[...] This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

[...] UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

[...] One summer, the group mounted a film festival devoted to the theme of “urban deserts”—the forgotten and underutilized spaces in a city. They naturally decided the ideal venue for such a festival would be in just such an abandoned site. They chose a room beneath the Palais de Chaillot they’d long known of and enjoyed unlimited access to. The building was then home to Paris’ famous Cinèmathèque Franèaise, making it doubly appropriate. They set up a bar, a dining room, a series of salons, and a small screening room that accommodated 20 viewers, and they held festivals there every summer for years. “Every neighborhood cinema should look like that,” Kunstmann says.

Jason Webley gave us such a gift this evening, a beautiful, marvelous experience, far beyond what anyone could call a concert.

Not to knock the concert, which was a blasting cap of a show, topping out almost everything else I've ever seen, (literally dancing in the aisles, jumping up and down levels of crazy amazing, that show. It just did. not. quit. ravishing. Melodies and shouting and poetry and snow made of feathers and surprise guest performances and identical twins and home-made instruments thrown into the audience and.. wow!), but the truly incredible part came after - when he silently walked off the stage and out of the hall, at the very end of the music, his fist tightly wrapped in the strings of a massive bouquet of giant red balloons, and swept almost the entire crowd into the street with him, everyone singing the last refrain of the last song over and over as the band played everyone out.

As we walked, hundreds strong, still singing, all the way to the water, down a cobblestone hill, under an overpass, over an overpass, Rafael and I arm in arm, up at the very front, sharing smiles with Jason, the leaders of a surreal parade that trailed four blocks long, thick enough to block traffic, the tune still soared with every step, as if the song kept our feet from touching the ground, as if the song was what kept us enchanted, a spell that he made but that we created, until we finally reached a smooth stone beach where a yacht was anchored, lit only with candles, fifty feet from shore.

He motioned us all to stop, then, and began to dance quietly where the shore sloped into the waves, gesturing to us with the great red balloons, a poem in motion, throwing our attention to the dazzling, full moon, then whimsically shifting from joyful pose to joyful pose, his heart bursting for us as he was painted with the flashes of a hundred cameras, like a strange, moving art fresco at the side of the sea. Eventually he paused at the top of some rocks, every inch the grand jester, both the king and the fool, suffused so thoroughly with glittering exultation that his face was a miracle, and finally began to say goodbye, certain, I suppose, that everyone had arrived.

He continued the act without saying a word, tying his treasured trademark hat to the balloons and, with a series of Chaplin-esque gestures, releasing them bumping into the sky. He lay on the rocks, watching them go, the red of the balloons weirdly lit by the moon, the saddest, most happy, fiercest gentle creature that ever lived, all the while as we, his crowd, kept singing, until they were nearly out of sight. Some people cried. (He might have too. It's hard to say, even though I was close, one of the very front line.) Next he began to strip, unbuttoning his shirt, peeling off his pants, unhooking his shoes from his feet, then he waved to us, we the hundreds, crammed onto the beach, spilling out, farther back, still singing, some stuck all the way back on the street, and we waved back, felicity incarnate, and many shouted, "goodbye!" and "until next time!". He looked at everyone, posing as he did so again for our cameras, as if it had all been rehearsed, the camera flashes picking him out for our eyes, then turned, satisfied, and bravely waded into the cold, black sea, the blackest thing, the coldest, and swam for the boat.

And that was that. Except that it wasn't. Telling you what happened doesn't explain what it felt like, how extraordinary it was, how perfect and clever. I could tell you how we cheered when he reached the yacht, how the crew that eventually emerged was dressed all in theater blacks or what it was like the police arrived to break us up or why my shoes got soaked or even more about the astoundingly good concert, but these are details and, in a way, unimportant. We were transported, as truly if we slipped sideways through space in that theater and briefly inhabited another world only a few molecules away, but happier in every respect. That was the magic. We were there as audience, but we were part of it and essential, all of our voices required, all of our eyes and hearts and minds.

Air Empathy
by Jeffrey McDaniel

On the red-eye from Seattle, a two year-old
in the seat behind me screeches

his little guts out. Instead of dreaming
of stuffing a wad of duct tape

into his mouth, I envy him, how he lets
his pain hang out. I wish I too could drill

a pipeline into the fields of ache, tap
a howl. How long would I need to sob

before the lady beside me dropped
her fashion rag, dipped a palm

into the puddle of me? How many
squeals before another passenger

joined in? Soon the stewardess hunched
over the drink cart, the pilot gushing

into the controls, the entire plane, an arrow
of grief, quivering through the sky.



I love things I cannot control. Our weekend in New York was like a bullet fired from a gun, all velocity and shredding hours, with a sun hard as butter and heat like a prayer. We landed at six in the morning, then stayed up until the same, wandering through fictional landscapes and following Banquo and Rebecca, Macbeth and his wife naked in the bath, through an unbelievable space, caught up in the show like we were enchanted, the actors all hunters luring us through the forest, (fifth floor, outside the sanitarium), all the better to cut out our hearts. Add us to the taxidermy collection. Add my skin to the leather in the foyer, to that of the birds I pressed to my cheek in the jail! Feathers in the wall of the padded room. Alchemickal symbols carved into the bottom of every drawer. So much murder! What were some of those places for? So much like a butterfly caught on my silent, silent tongue. Perfection in every direction, dusting my knuckles on it, cutting myself open on the show. Raving in the disco, fire in the eyes of our hands. The crazed beauty of every single moment. I regret that I only have one life to give to Sleep No More. I regret that I didn't find any human teeth in the candy. Or the children's bedroom, drenched through the one-way mirror with blood. Instead I saw him kill the king twice, a cruel orgasmic smother, pillows and fists, blood on his hands, the water splashing on the hem of my dress. Instead a witch took my hand, pulled me into a bedroom alone, and locked everyone else out. She seduced me, we danced, she pulled me into a closet, then out the false back, the closest I've ever felt to fantasy, coats everywhere, her fingers in my mouth, then through a metal door, a loud slam, she lay down on the cold silver table, it was a morgue.

Later, after the show, we didn't go home, but we didn't go to our Brooklyn Burning Man party either. Instead we found ourselves drenched in the fierce, stammering lights of Times Square, waiting for Anthony, dancing to music only we could hear, sharing our earphones with strangers, a tiny flashmob party of two. It was on, it was late, everything was beautiful. I wore my mask over my shoulder, a bleached porcelain epaulette, the bones and angles of where we'd been on view to the world, our strange masque, a visible mark of haunting, physical and solid and near. Eventually he arrived and we conquered the city a stride at a time until the night bruised under our feet, our conversation running like rabbits. Finally we paused at a 24 hour diner, one I remembered passing by the night it felt like my best friend died, and let the time crash in over our heads like the tide. The sun was up when we rolled into bed, too tired to pull up the sheets.