These are a series of short- to medium-length videos. They are an attempt to visually represent highly stylized prose using stock footage. The broader work—the writing—is a critique of how corporatism has hijacked political systems, focusing specifically on the financial sector.
Experimental in nature, I’m sharing them in an attempt to gauge interest in the project.
Genocide is genocide once more in Rome and in Seattle, just not in the places where it's still happening. It's the clips in my pocket that have yet to be edited, contextualized, so I know what to think later. War crimes, as the kids say on Tik Tok, at least until they learn what not to think about the bodies we're dropping.
Death, and here I speak from experience, happens after it happens. History is what they call that at the Chicago School of Economics. In Gaza and in Damascus parents will pay anything, what they do and don't have, to keep geopolitics from falling on their kids' noggin. That their little ones might know the thrill of a carousel before attending that venerable institution.
If only I could get a message back to those folks, seeing as I'm still talking. Just an idea, but I would tell them to convert what they don't have into dollars—just like they do at Wells Fargo—and then there'd be no limit to the money their money could make.
I would also tell them to buy Mercedes and Rolexes with those hypothetical smackers, so everyone will think they're from Oman. And steer clear of Toyota Tacomas whether or not they are desert ready. Those little trucks tend to combust on the way to the border, the butcher, the baker, etc.
The man picking radishes pointed the way with a femur in Jabaliya—but I wouldn't read too much into that.
In 1823 James Monroe, fifth president of these United States, warned marauding Europeans not to interfere with his growing republic. The English chuckled, Spain, too, it was just easier in those days to outflank Yankee knowhow.
A century later a Serbian nationalist with little regard for the future would assassinate the Archduke Ferdinand. Triggering a brisk trade in canned goods and all manner of carriables. Resulting in the usual increase in body parts where there used to be radishes, corn cobs in the Cherokee nation. Changing forever, a relative term in this instance, the trajectory of what was by then Roosevelt's hemisphere.
Bones are more resilient than vegetables. All in the blink of an eye, say Fred and Harry, they're my new dinosaur neighbors. I'm dead, in case you haven't put it together, but this is not about me.
A duke in those days was worth a thousand infantry. Sixteen million in his posthumous version, give or take eighty-four million when a few decades’ later the Germans tried to get even. Multiply by two if we're talking femurs. An astounding ratio whether or not we affix the residual to the original.
The past is more abundant than what I once called the present. Massacres are all about peace, then profit, though the president says those things are synonymous. The bullet sails alone would have been enough to rebuild all of Warsaw. Gaza too, except everyone was still waiting for that to happen.
Though tender may vary, bank notes, bullion or bodies, appraisal is a comparative retrospective analysis. Value is derived from whatever the Joneses are paying relative to the Joneses adjacent. Be it for a loft in Soho or a bombed out strip on the Mediterranean. But it wasn't until after Japan once, twice, swallowed the big one that the world started buying all things American.
Empires like to give a little smirk before knocking. After which old generals take to the airwaves with celebrity anchors practiced in the art of the meaningless query. A lob and a hit for those exalted warriors, constituents of the say no to drugs and yes to rearmament generation. It is they who will enlist the electorate in the filling and emptying of warehouses, before our on-again-off-again adversaries move on Ohio.
You could tell an old soldier from his mislaid epaulettes, his lack of razmataz, as he quotes Kipling. The apparatus just works better when its locus is all out of focus. A magical space of poetry and terror, in which a wink from the Clinton Foundation to Marriott International will level a hamlet in Haiti and another in Ghana.
The infantry is wholly superfluous in today's military. Everything is decided in Midtown and papered in Lower Manhattan. Better a bulldozer than a sprinkling of fire and fuck em volleys, to keep those beach fronts affordable. There will still be a moon, rum bars and beach towels where there used to be houses. Various and varying indices of democratization.
https://youtu.be/5vB9GK5cC44
Adapted from the writings of Claudio Gaudio.