As baP incentivized, vertigo ruled. Up and down were now fashionable political vectors for progressives, fas-cists, and neoliberals alike. Left and right, markers of the timeworn horizontal political spectrum were displaced by this 90° tilt. Poli-ethical Pov’s were measured in per-centages rather than ideological positions. The Roller Coaster model was precarity carnivalized, racing through obvious hegemonic peaks and dips, elations and depres-sions. Distinctions between owners and the owned crys-tallized in the dizzying parabolic arcs.
The Bettys saw this gradient disruption as a temporary glitch. Post-millennial activists, fed up with 2D political spectra, horizontal and vertical, would surely seek a mul-tidimensional schema, a non-Euclidean launching pad, a posthuman soup of dis/oriented value logics. They would invent, must invent, a nouveau milieu, unimpeded by spa-tial and temporal border formations. Irb touted it as a high-intensity, “speed-inapplicable” cosmopolitics.
Carpe-diem types, The Bettys decided to directly enter the fray. Envisaging a performative aesthetico-politico ecology they inaugurated a cap “P” party. This, they pro-claimed, was the only way towards. They smelled their moment, primed to be the tenacious avant-garde of an
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advent. Brown Betty, normally shy of public speaking, was elected spokesperson replacing the fallen Red and the often incoherent White. Brown B’s modest yet thor-oughly impassioned rhetoric was clarion clear.
They called their political party the bad Party, imagining wildly intelligent bad baP rallies. They were convinced, most of them, that they were on to something. Brown B explained to the serious media that the acronym for bad – Betty Advent Demos – was not as comedic as it appeared.
She announced in public appearances – “bad Party is down with an undercommons ethos.” Few understood the import of those words. Those that did were on board.
bad Party needed a symbol. The prismatic rainbow was already taken. Appropriation of cultural and religious icons for political means had proved horrifi c in the past so they knew to tread carefully. They studied the yin-yang fi gure for its beautiful rendering of Chi’s unifi ed plurality. They studied the effi cacy of Che’s now entirely aff ect-free T-shirt image, emptied of all signifi cance by its ubiquitous presence. If they were seeking a Chi/Che commodity-fetish item to stir engagement it would re-quire a self-eff acing cachet.
BAD Partying
The design meetings were hilarious as predominantly silly ideas were discussed and tossed out. As these meet-ings grew raucous and uncomfortably weird, the graphic designer Bettys, and there were several, retreated to a corner to undertake the no-loGo challenge.
After weeks of disruptive prototyping and bickering, a graphic emerged. The design team felt it encompassed the mute generality of a corporate symbol while affirm-ing a saffirm-ingular impulse. A Betty quality, captured in the cracks between force and form. There were objections.
Infrared complained about the inference to binocular vi-sion. They suggested that many species had non-ocular and multi-ocular views of the world so the proposed symbol was reductively anthropocentric. Their argu-ment was overruled as ahead of its time. uvb objected on similar grounds adding that it was overall too cut-sey, dismissing the seriousness of The Bettys’ proposi-tion. She was advised by Yellow and Violet to nourish her sense of humor. Betty Bob took a pass finding the entire project misguided.
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The Bettys would flaunt a black and white banner with twin circular centers. “Eyeholes” Yellow B called them.
A riff on a theme. Their symbol resembled a Goethe il-lustration or a pair of trippy Chanel spectacles, uniting all the colors of the visible and invisible spectrum in one bizarrely unsettling frame. This would be the Bettys’ call to arms and legs and wings, their freak flag. A (w)hole and a cut. Their cleaving, haunted wink at a justice to come.
23
Tendencies
The Bettys were busy producing “How to baP” manuals for bad Party rallies. Indebted to Fluxus scores, they as-sembled redemptive tasks on notecards, copping a few from Ono and Brecht. Occupied with the concept of do-ing it from the middle they splayed in all directions.
Bob, as often the case, was riding another vector. When young he, like many hippies and lefties of his gen, read the Suzuki’s, D.T and Shunryu. John Cage famously helped make D.T.’s translations popular among artists.
Shunryu was too severe for Bob’s tempestuous lifestyle but he was struck by the very first sentence in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:
Beginner’s mind – “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibili-ties, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Some small thoughts stick with one a lifetime and this was another one of those ideas Bob could never shake.
Perhaps because it tapped a tendency so affectively. Per-haps it was a validation of amateurism he required to continue continuing. It’s not that he sucked at closure per se though admittedly, he did. He wasn’t even sure if he could distinguish a being in the middle from a begin-ning. Ontogenetic force is not exactly straightforward.
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He was careful not to let this simple statement redress his many unfortunate leaps into unknown territory. His near drownings in tsunami turbulence. His stupid ques-tions. His stammering answers. But it gave him some sol-ace over the years when he met this thought with good meditative posture and breathing. He was down with beginner’s mind even as it zigzagged its way to a detour.
He remembered sharing the studio with Cyan Betty on a rainy Saturday some time ago. He recalled their obtuse chitchat. An argument over grammatical articles. Over
“as” and “thes.” How to think of Red’s singular adventure as “a life?” Cb stated with muted conviction: “So Deleuze is the culprit behind le milieu, the becoming of the mid-dle that’s been so influential. He’s the guy proposing, at his mortal end mind you, the Zed shape of the French nose, the zigzag of the fly’s flight path, the ZZZ of Zen as a way to think/feel.” “Yeah?” Bob responded dully. “But he fell, or jumped, didn’t he? Straight down.” “Uh, yeah, right” Cb answered, adding, “But surely he immanently transcended.”
Footnote