Prologue

by El Mortigi Tempo

Prologue

Post punk millionaires. The thought of them gives me a frightful chill, almost like surfing the internet and realizing that this supposed dream of connecting everyone in the world is actually very dehumanizing. The age of the mobile phone. Get in touch with anyone, anywhere in the world- a wife, a girlfriend, a child, or even a whore (quite appalling if you ask me)- they are only a few buttons away. I once had this crazy idea of trying to fight prostitution, child prostitution to be more specific, but over the years I have lost faith in humanity. Unfortunately, it is still a man’s world (many apologies to the feminist movement), and he will have sex with any woman within a 1mile radius of him. It is quite sad, but prostitution does not entail just a man’s sexual gratification. The dictionary definition of the term prostitution is “the act, practice or profession of offering the body for sexual relations for money”. Now this is the definition that many of us are familiar with, but there is a second definition which states that prostitution is the “degradation of some science, talent, etc. for money”. We live in an age where prostitution is at its finest. Prostitution is found everywhere: the shopping complexes, the playgrounds, the arenas and theatres, in office buildings, at colleges and other supposed higher learning institutions. But one would argue that their playgrounds and shopping complexes are clean, that they cannot find women wearing high-heeled leopard skin shoes with shiny silver short skirts that reveal their genitals. What people do not realize is that we are the prostitutes who are found in the shopping complexes, playgrounds, etc. I am a whore. You are a whore. We are all whores. Now the reader may be wondering if we are whores, then whom are we providing our services to? Post-punk millionaires. Punk was the last greatest movement of mankind. It was the last zeitgeist that made our lives worth living, and it challenged the mundane, everyday life that the corporate world was throwing at people. But like all great movements that challenged higher powers, punk died, and while there were small attempts to start new movements, there were no significant movements that swept us and promised us that everything was going to be okay. The inability of a strong zeitgeist to fill our hearts with hope paved the way for the post-punk millionaires to rape us of our cultures, religions, and our identities. From the rainforest devastation in Central America to the Canary Wharf in London, the rape of humanity by post-punk millionaires is evident. Ah, Canary Wharf Tower. It is an interesting story that I get terribly depressed when I think about it; thus I do not think I can narrate that story to you without shedding lots of painful tears. But I do not live in paranoia or fear. And whenever I get scared about the state of our society, I close my eyes think about all the what-ifs, and suddenly the Canary Wharf Tower sticks out of my head like a bruise that refuses to heal. We are killing time by not living and dying for something. Post-punk millionaires have made people complacent of life by providing them with cars, houses with pretty little gardens, and jobs. We are killing time, and we refuse to look at ourselves in the mirror for fear of not recognizing the reflection. We have become humanoids to this large, machinery called post-punk millionaires and we are negating our right to be human.

Part One

Black and White

In a recent visit to London I met a young man at a cafe drinking a soda and listening to a CD. I cannot recall his name, so let’s call him Perry. Now, don’t ask me about his surname for two reasons: I cannot recall his surname, and secondly it would be terribly insulting for his lineage and family if I were forced to makeup a surname for him. He always wore a long, black, woolen coat, white polyester shirt, black tie, black polyester slacks, and a daily polished pair of black Doc Martens. I had once jokingly asked him if he had ever worn anything colorful or exciting like leopard skin shoes with red soles, or shiny maroon parachute trousers. But to my despair, he said that he had only worn black and white clothing his whole life. My, what fun is there in life wearing black and white? And oddly enough, he always carried a black (no surprise here) leather briefcase. What was in it was anybody’s guess, but I felt that Perry could not be a member of the business class.

A week after we had met, Perry had gone to Sheffield to meet with an old flat-mate, named Z. Perry and Z had gone to university together a few years earlier, and Z, who was German, studied chemistry. During their university days, the two lived in a two bedroom flat near the Underground station of Bethnal Green. As the trains swiftly passed by the flat, the beer stained, jumble sale furniture shook, and the framed photographs on the walls that were taken by Z’s girlfriend, L, rumbled violently. Z and L had known each other (I believe that they were also sleeping with each other) since they were 15, and when Z moved out of his parents house and into the Bethnal Green flat with Perry, he had convinced L to move into the flat too.

L studied at an art college, and she had aspired to be a photographer since she was 8, when her mother died. She had come home from school on a Wednesday afternoon and was hoping to tell her mother that the cutest boy in her class had kissed her. But she found family members crying in the living room. She didn’t understand what was going on because she didn’t understand death. That is the beauty of children because they live for today, and not for tomorrow. I can assume that L didn’t understand the notion of death when her mother died because she was a child, but I question if adults really understand what death is? The Hindu’s believe that out of destruction comes creation, and out of creation comes destruction. And if that is the case, then is there anything permanent? What is real, and what is unreal? People think that reality is being able to perceive the environment using their five senses. But what if it were the senses and the environment that was unreal? What if everything that we thought of as being real was unreal? I would imagine that this conflict is what causes people to go mad: they have a hard time conveying this notion to the society, hence they are locked up as some freak and dismissed as being asinine. But if everything around us were unreal, then we are the mental patients, asinine and stupid.

L had been very close to her mother, and when her mother died, a sort of numbness arose in L’s body. She had borrowed her father’s Canon A1 camera to take black and white photographs of her mother’s funeral procession; hence her mother’s death caused the birth of her photography career. When L was 11, her grandmother bought her a camera, which eventually became the only instrument with which she could see the world. A boyfriend in high school taught her how to develop black and white film, and she only worked in those two colors. The camera is an amazing instrument because it allows a moment in time to be seen by everyone without losing a detail, and black and white photographs has a certain cold, yet humanistic feeling to it. Black and white represented a cleansing of the soul for L, and in a way, since her mother’s death, she had felt like she had been reborn to help other cleanse their souls.

During the summer, L would go to New York to visit her cousin, and she would take black and white photographs of men urinating in the subways to children playing with the water from fire hydrants in the sweltering heat of the summer. A few months ago I visited an art gallery in Tokyo with L’s work, and I was impressed with the progress in technicality and creativity of photography that L had made since her amateur days. There was always a mystical, enigmatic aura surrounding L. She was a monotonous speaker, and she never cried in public, which made people believe that her mother’s death had stripped her of her emotions and ability to feel. But oftentimes what people believe about someone is never true, and this was the case with L. She was the most attractive girl in her high school, and every boy wanted to date her. She was also he envy of every girl and oftentimes found herself being ostracized from school festivities. In a way, L was the Stephen Dedalus of her school: the observing artist who felt separate from the other kids and who expressed the world in different colors than others, which in L’s case was black and white. Every boy at school attempted or dreamed about having sex with L, but they failed because intelligent girls like L knew what all boys want, and they are able to toy around with the boys’ heads.

She had a great mind, and she searched for an equally compatible mind until she met Z. Unlike L, Z came from a financial poor family, and he had been working at his father’s grocery store after school since he was 12. His father had played him Bowie and ABBA records as an infant, and Z began developing an ear for music. When he was 5, Z won a keyboard from a coloring competition at Wendy’s. Z stole music sheets from a local music store and would teach himself how to play the keyboard and by the time he met L, Z was able to play Beethoven’s concertos to the Beatles “Hey Jude”. L was awe struck by Z, but he paid no attention to her early advances. But after persisting him for weeks, Z accepted a date with L to Hyde Park. Going to a park would not be the first place one would take their first date to, but dear reader, you must try to put yourself in L and Z’s place: two incredibly, beautiful people with troubling, yet tranquil minds. A date at the movies or at a restaurant would have been very trivial. The both of them needed spiritual food to be fed to them, and Hyde Park provided a place for the both of them to exchange ideas and to light each other’s fire. I don’t know what they spoke about on their date in Hyde Park, but I seriously doubt that it was about the school rumor that the headmaster had been having sex with teenage prostitutes. Hyde Park opens at dawn and closes at dusk, but L and Z managed to stay in the park until midnight. It was a cold October night, and the moon shone brightly upon the two lovers. Their spiritual soul searching had culminated with passionate lovemaking under the white, shiny moon in the black, cold night.