A Report on the West Coast •••••••• Seminar "Environmental Emnity and Citizen Ambivalence"

Sponsored by •••••••• San Francisco, April 17-20, 1997

by Valerian Intaro

The following text was copied word-for-word from an advertisement which I found in an •••••••• in-flight magazine somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles:

  <<The Newest Safe-T-Man: Your superior body guard

Designed as a visual deterrent, Safe-T-Man is a life-size, simulated male that appears to be 180 lbs. and 6' tall, to give others the impression that you have the protection of a male guardian with you at home alone or driving in your car. This unique security device looks incredibly real, with a positionable latex head and hands, air-brushed facial highlights, and salt and pepper hair. Made of the highest quality, inflatable PVC vinyl, he weighs just 7 lbs. and can be dressed according to your personal style and preference. When not keeping vigil over your well-being, he can be deflated, stored, inconspicuously in the optional tote-bag. Comes with a repair patch.

 Safe-T-Man $99.95-
 Zippered-Nylon Carrying Tote $24.95
 Easy Dual-Action Inflator Pump $9.95>>

<<LAX>>

If you want blood, red carpet stretches for miles at LAX - it is punctuated at regular intervals by black vinyl and steel chairs covered by strange, unruly, odoriferous clients: humans. The humans squish and suffocate the chairs, without thought for the chairs. Today I am one of those humans, except I have thought for the chairs and their plight. A Chinese-American girl with skeletal knees, alligator skin shoes and a green suit glides past. A Korean voice is broadcast over the loudspeaker. A batch of Australians wearing the mother country's map on the back of their sports jackets walk by. Australians who are fat men; Australians who are married to fat men. A buttered roll and a full bottle of iced-tea rolls across the red carpet. They are cleaned up promptly, in much the same way as one would imagine a murder to be cleaned up at LAX.

A person unlucky to have been born with the head which they were born with. The cleaning trolley speeding past me at terminal velocity makes exactly the same noise as an aircraft taking off. Another security announcement: "Please keep your luggage with you at all times. Unclaimed luggage will be destroyed." It would be very interesting to watch airport staff destroying luggage. A member of the security corps walks by. She is wearing a number of plastic tags on her uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie. A very young, black teenage couple (boy and girl) pass by with the speed of an advertisement, blowing pink bubblegum and wearing very tight clothes, holding hands. A tremendously ugly person follows them. Kills the high. I clench my nostrils hard because someone is going down on a McDonalds object within three feet of my face. To make matters worse, a procession of overweight people dressed as sluts in "Hard-Rock Café" sweatshirts are almost as near...a conscientious needle-dick-type in a grey suit struts through my field of vision...a Malibu stereotype. In several hours, I will be checking into a Downtown San Francisco hotel with a 124 other •••••••• scholars for a three-day weekend devoted to an investigation of "Environmental Preservation and XXXX Citizen Emnity" - in other words, a PR exercise for the agency. I have six dollars for the whole weekend and nothing in the bank. It's lucky that they're paying for everything.

This schizm is going to be a nightmare - "Bye-bye now," somebody says. The McDonalds consumer glances at me from the corner of his eye and belches just loudly enough to be heard, which is of course twice as obscene as any deafening burp.

My body becomes a text-book example of the physiognomy of disgust. I shiver and ripple in my seat like a crab. The funny thing is that I do not remember what that person looked like at all - just that there was a hamburger being masticated, being blended with saliva, near my body. The ground beef is becoming un-ground again. The bun is turning into a sort of glue. The lettuce is swallowed whole...I push into the queue and take my place on the aeroplane. I have a window seat, but it has some kind of disgusting "film" all over it. The humanoid on my right is a "businessman" who is oh so delicately typing into an IBM color laptop with some overly-washed and hairy fingers; his red wrists emerge from under starched white cuffs. I can sense the presence of other •••••••• scholars on this aeroplane. They are speaking in European accents about "schools" and "programs." The scholars' voices are a lot louder than the other passengers. Just listen to them...One, in fact, is enthusing about a new form of "creative writing" which falls somewhere between "fiction" and "theory." This is the last straw. I deliberately leave my seatbelt unbuckled, hoping that there is a plane crash. Tampering with the lavatory smoke detector is prohibited by law. "It's a very masochistic discipline," continues the •••••••• scholar who - by now it's obvious - hails from CalArts.

The IBM-wanker next to me has put his laptop away and is staring at a "Management Novel." What next? In a couple of hours from now, how many blond, clean people wearing dry-cleaned suits will be smiling at me and shaking my hand? I will be given one of those conference name-tags. I will have to sit in seminar rooms all day (for a change). One of the students in front of me is talking about Norman Klein's Universal Citywalk seminar. This is it. I take discussions about "theory classes" in public spaces as a personal insult. Finally the aeroplane is cleared for take-off. Reflecting upon the intense good will in the atmosphere, I now realise how much I lied in order to obtain my interplantery visa - all those sentences in my application about alien exchange and the fostering of galactic understanding. There are going to be group photographs. There will be scheduled meetings with "community leaders." The "theory" which I will require this weekend will be to smile, say "yes," and think about other things. The plane has gone up and now it goes down again. I get off it. To my surprise the •••••••• scholars - approximately eight of them - have formed a group and are walking towards the shuttle bay. I hide. They catch up with me again. They are standing right in front of me with sunglasses and cameras but they don't know who I am. It's nice to be in San Francisco. Interplanetary Goodwill. Mutual Understanding.

I recall the conference's motto: "You must attend all sessions"; and on top of that, my own: "I must gain access to medicine as soon as possible." I cannot afford the shuttle and take the $1- bus into Downtown San Francisco, walking the remaining distance to my hotel repeating those interdictions over and over again. I vainly try the ATM only to discover that somebody has deposited $40- in my account. Joy. The bored must first discover what is despicable and move out from there. In my case it is the conspiracy of what is supposed to be interesting. Alexis Bag's English shopkeeper, one of the stars of Strategically Titled (Fall 1995) is absolutely paid in bitch-dollars to hate herself. She knows what she dislikes and because of this simple fact she's self-satisfied. She takes pleasure in pretending that she is controlled by her profession; it allows her the opportunity to become a monster.

I suppose Alexis Bag loves to hate herself, too; she loves to pretend that she is other people. I will take a leaf from her book: I have decided that as far as my participation in conference is concerned, I am an academic Safe-T-Man: I appear to be Valerian Intaro, a New Zealand "••••••••er" with salt and pepper hair and glasses weighing in at 180 lbs. and standing 6' tall, making notes during the seminars, chatting curiously with fellow participants, but in fact I am an inflatable copy of Alexis Bag: "This unique trollop device looks incredibly real with a positionable head, hands and air-brushed highlights. He constantly lapses into paranoid streams of thought about his blood count, skin cancer, hepatitis, and finances."

<<The conference>>

I am a tote-bag for my personality. I walk up to the desk in the lobby of the Canterbury Hotel, pick up my conference pack, sign in, put on my name tag ("Valerian INTARO, Mars/New Zealand"), meet with Mrs so-and-so, shake hands with a few "••••••••ers," do another spin around the lobby, go to my room, collapse on my bed, face-down. By 6.30pm I am sitting in the hotel dining room - The Garden Room - with 125 bitches. The "Garden Room" is a bright pink carpeted sauna which Joan Collins might covet; fresh and deliciously tepid lettuce salads with blue cheese dressing on top miraculously appear through holes in the wall. We are allowed one glass of wine ("Red or white, Sir?"), but cannot choose between entrées. Spaghetti with half-cooked tomatoes, mushrooms and garlic. This is it, then. In the Garden Room there are lots of circular tables which seat eight. And from across tablecloths whose uncanny stiffness reeked of catering companies, the scholars voices did cross: "Hello, My name is Julia Clark (Palaeontology/Evolutionary Biology, Yale University); "Hello, My name is Olaf Glisper (Architecture, UCLA)"; "Hello, My name is Sylvia Ferrari (Museology, University of Washington); "Hello, My name is Valerian Intaro (Theory and Criticism, Art Center College of Design)." "So, what's your speciality....?" Very soon after dinner and after the keynote speaker Dr. Thomas Grax had his way, explaining that he "represents trees and natural environments like some lawyers represent clients," I notice the scholar's faces. They turn their gazes away from him as he stands on the podium of the vermilion lounge and begin to pick their noses and put their hands in their pockets. One Danish woman stares blankly at our table for the whole evening. Alejandra Kallamoo (Experimental Animation/Integrated Media, University of Austin, Texas), and Christina Bankowsky (Broadcast Journalism, USC), spark up a very loud conversation which attracts the attention of the IPOL staff who frown at them. Safe-T-Man, however, retains his composure. He watches people's eyes glaze over. The lecture ended abruptly, at least I think it did. Several •••••••• people take to the microphone and ask Dr. Grass questions about his presentation. I cannot remember anything that Dr. Groff said (I think it was something about insane conservation). The evening session is now over. I read an article in the SF Weekly about a rock musician who was arrested by the police. I quickly walk off to the area mentioned in the article.

The next morning at 7.15am I wake up, puke up, chewing gum, and turn up at the Garden Room for a buffet breakfast.

The same people are there as the night before. Onto my squeaky-clean plate, I pile a certain amount of bright-yellow egg mixture and a rubbery bagel. Everything ends up in the hotel plumbing system within twenty minutes. By 9.00am we are all sitting upright in the Commandant's Room of The Marines' Memorial Hall, Scandal Street, listening to a paper entitled "The Conundrum of Endangered Species Protection in a Working Landscape." I hardly slept at all the night before - too busy smoking cigarettes on the roof of the hotel and thinking my own stupid thoughts. The gulf between my thoughts and the theme of the conference was, as expected, uncrossable. But what the hell - I dressed up in clean clothes and carried my backpack and my notebook with me all the time. My attention is captured momentarily when the second speaker says the words "Habitat Stress." My head is dropping down periodically. I am busy on a series of Jason Yates-style drawings which amuse me. The presentation is finished; those of us who are asleep woke up, and we all rise to our feet doing our best to give the impression that we have been hanging onto every word. It's lunchtime already. The poached salmon and fried green beans is aesthetically vulgar.

"Enough garbage to cover a whole football field ten feet deep arrives here every day," our entertaining host Heather Locklear informs us. "And then we recycle it." We were at a very large tip. I am feeling on top of the world. I look around with amazement: great piles of green, brown, and clear glass; meter-high stacks of plastic bottles; thousands of tons of newspapers which are being pulped; tidy monoliths which were once tin cans; an abominable "pit" where thousands of litres of San Francisco's toxic waste is broken down. This is a great field-trip. I steal a fashionable-looking pair of purple protective glasses on the way out.

Evening: Three ••••••••ers and I are taken for dinner at the home of a Jewish dermatologist and his wife who live in the Marina district of San Francisco. After drinks, our hosts politely inquire as to our credentials and fields of study, making sure to ask us which foreign languages we are fluent in because they are probably fluent in them too. They recite a prayer in Hebrew before dinner. After dinner the dermatologist brings out his electric guitar, and his wife takes us on a tour of their three-storied waterfront house; she points out the pictures painted by her husband's brother "a well-known Californian painter," not to metion the bird studies painted by her husband. She introduces us to the family cockatoo and a small cage full of marsupials which belong to the children who are off attending college.

The following day was a pretty good one, for food. The group are now on the concrete steps of the Presidio. Daphna Misiamach (Plant and Microbial Biology, UC Berekeley), who I dined with the previous evening, tells me that I am looking "much better" today, and that I had looked like "a zombie" by the end of the yesterday. The lunch comes in polystyrene boxes which make excruciating squeaking noises when one tries to break into them. The lunch is packed as neatly as a Marine's aurmoury. It smells nice, like an aeroplane. There are probably twenty things in the lunchbox, well, perhaps eight. Greaseproof paper lovingly conceals a generous-looking chicken sandwhich, taking care not to suffocate it as cling-film does. I open it carefully and a multi-levelled beauty reveals itself. From inside the kit I also pull out a sachet of mayonnaise, a very large napkin, a bottle of mineral water, and an apple. I will take the cookie back to LA and eat it there. At this point "the group" are shuffled off into a nearby hall for another presentation. The very charming Brian Ramsey, Superintendent, Golden Gate National Desesration Area (GGNRA) who sweats profusely into the "action gussets" of his Park Ranger's uniform, is an old hand at charming the crowd. I am sitting next to Daphna MXXXX and would like to preserve her judgement of me as "healthy." It's exhausting. I gawk at details such as bricks and window panes, carpet seams, door-frames, Daphna Michaeli's bony legs, the columns holding up the ceiling, the dark stains of perspiration as they become less prominent on Brian O'Neill's torso as he relaxed into his lecture. The maps of the Presidio which Brian XXXXX's comic forearm knocks to the ground on purpose in order to regain the audience's attention are sun-bleached and dented at the edges. The patriotic director of the San Francisco branch of the PPLOPPX, who is looking very pleased with himself, runs his fingers through his orange beard. Brian Munter, time's up!

We all go for a cruise on the San Francisco harbour and take a good jack at Al-catraz.

The Farewell Dinner at Castag's, Fisherman's Wharf. Some •••••••• students are drinking a lot and talking loudly and enthusiastically about "breasts" - their relative proportions in Europe and America. Dapnha Micheltorena, Alabaster Ferrari and I roll our eyes; we then re-roll them. It seems to make little difference. We are all presented with par-boiled designer meals which are deposited on our tables as if they are engines being dropped out of car-bodies. The very large San Franciscan-Italians who have obviously been working at Castag's for more then thirty years look more like mechanics than chefs. This catered-for food - I feel exploitative looking at the stuff. It is the kind of meal which looks nice for a split second but which collapses into a sludge upon impact with the fork. For how many hours, exactly, has this spinach been warm? - these are my most pressing concerns. "What kind of fish is this?" I politely inquire with all of my •••••••• eagerness. "I'll have to go and ask the chef," macho-lady curtly replies, thinking to herself "Ha, Ha --- what chef!" The mammary-gland-discourse continues through dinner. The dead fish roll their eyes.

<<The boring part>>

<<The •••••••• Program aims to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.>>

   - Salvator J. Woman ••••••••

All the ingredients were there: compulsory activities, timetables, endless lectures, early rises, polite people, catered-for dinners, scenic tours, etceteras, etceteras. Yes, this thing was pretty boring. But as far as boredom is concerned, the conference offered me a perfect opportunity. I was sad to leave. The next morning I got back on the airport bus, and back on the plane. All the same •••••••• scholars were there, on the same flight as me. We are all friends now - I have their e-mail addresses. There is no end to this stupid story.