SHOEBAG JOHNSON AND THE GOLDEN TICKETS

our whispers wake no clocks.



we lack the courage of our addictions.



home taping is killing music!



there goes the afternoon.

let down and hanging around...

_


living in a glass house :

"once again, we are hungry for a lynching.
that's a strange mistake to make.
you should turn the other cheek."

    - radiohead.

_


the hangman at home :

"What does a hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a
Plate of ham and eggs, do they ask
Him if it was a good day's work
And everything went well or do they
Stay off some topics and kill about
The weather, baseball, politics
And the comic strips in the papers
And the movies? Do they look at his
Hands when he reaches for the coffee
Or the ham and eggs? If the little
Ones say, Daddy, play horse, here's
A rope--does he answer like a joke:
I seen enough rope for today?
Or does his face light up like a
Bonfire of joy and does he say:
It's a good and dandy world we live
In. And if a white face moon looks
In through a window where a baby girl
Sleeps and the moon-gleams mix with
Baby ears and baby hair--the hangman--
How does he act then? It must be easy
For him. Anything is easy for a hangman,
I guess."

    - carl sandburg.

_


the hanging man :

"By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid :
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did."

    - sylvia plath.

litcrit wanderlust

here are some snippets from novels...

"Why so sad, my friend? What could be bothering you? You're young and strong, without any family to tie you down. ... No one thinks less of you because you were not born in these parts; in fact, everyone respects your conduct and your talents... You can read and write and figure... You have spirit; you have a good, logical head on your shoulders. And, on top of all that, you are the best-looking young man in town. Only twenty-four years old! I don't understand why you keep to yourself so much... You act as if you were better than everyone else, like we're not worthy of your company!" - George Sand, The Black City, 1860.

...

"... but much to his surprise he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill and - hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot - examined the nature and purport of the feeling.

It was wanderlust, pure and simple; but it pounced on him as a seizure, intensifying into a burst of passion, even a hallucination. His desire could virtually see, his ability to fantasize, unlulled since his hours of working, conjured up all the wonders and terrors, all the variety of the earth, which he strove to envision. He saw, saw a landscape, and monstrous, a primordial jungle of islands, morasses, and alluvial inletsl saw hariy palm shafts near and far striving upward out of rank and rampant ferns, realms of fat, swollen plants with fantastic blossoms; saw eccentrically misshapen trees plunging their roots through the air and into the ground, into stagnant waters reflecting green shadows; saw bowl-sized, milky white flowers drifting on surfaces and outlandish species of birds, with hunched shoulders and deformed beaks, standing in shallow liquids and inertly ogling sideways; saw the sparkling eyes of a couching tiger between the knotty canes of the bamboo thicket - and he felt his heart pounding with horror and enigmatic longing. Then the vision faded; and shaking his head, Aschenbach resumed his promenade along the fences of the gravestone yards." - Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, 1912.

...

 "There hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had notcied the abscence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she'd happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whisphering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he'd slipped the locked on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he'd have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando El Manto Terrestre," [see below] were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on supersition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?" - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1965.

gaydar

295.

Brief habits.— I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses; my nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all: from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that this will give me lasting satisfaction now—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am envied for having found and recognized it:—and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt or hatred. And one day its time is up: the good things part from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me—but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it, and as if we had reason to be grateful to each other and thus we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and lifestyles.— Enduring habits I hate, and I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and that the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits: for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect,—because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.— Most intolerable, to be sure, really terrible, would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation:—that would be my exile and my Siberia.

296.

A firm reputation.— A firm reputation used to be extremely useful; and wherever society is still dominated by the herd instinct it is still most expedient for every one to pretend that his character and occupation are unchangeable,—even if at bottom they are not. "One can depend on him, he remains the same":—in all extremities of society this is the sort of praise that means the most. Society is pleased to feel that the virtue of this person, the ambition of that one, and the thoughtfulness and passion of the third provide it with a dependable instrument that is always at hand,—it honors this instrumental nature, this way of remaining faithful to oneself, this unchangeability of views, aspirations, and even faults and lavishes its highest honors upon it. Such esteem, which flourishes and has flourished everywhere alongside the morality of mores, breeds "character" and brings all change, all re-learning, all self-transformation into ill repute. However great the advantages of this way of thinking may be elsewhere, for the search after knowledge no general judgment could be more harmful, for precisely the good will of those who seek knowledge to declare themselves at any time dauntlessly against their previous opinions and to mistrust everything that wishes to become firm in us,—is thus condemned and brought into ill repute. Being at odds with "a firm reputation," the attitude of those who seek knowledge is considered dishonorable while the petrification of opinions is accorded a monopoly on honor:—under the spell of such notions we have to live to this day! How hard it is to live when one feels the opposition of many millennia all around! It is probable that the search after knowledge was afflicted for many millennia with a bad conscience, and that the history of the greatest spirits must have contained a good deal of self-contempt and secret misery.

297.

The ability to contradict.— Everyone knows nowadays that the ability to accept criticism and contradiction is a sign of high culture. Some people actually realize that higher human beings desire and provoke contradiction in order to receive some hint about their own injustices of which they are as yet unaware. But that the ability to contradict, the attainment of a good conscience when one feels hostile to what is acccustomed, traditional, and hallowed,—that is still more excellent and constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture, the step of steps of the liberated spirit: who knows that?

299.

What one should learn from artists.— How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?—and I rather think that in themselves they never are! Here we could learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture; but even more from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all—or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed—or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives—or looking at them through tinted glasses or in the light of the sunset—or giving them a surface and skin that is not really transparent: all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

304.

By doing we forego.— At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: "Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!"—I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to so something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it! Whoever lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off: without hatred or aversion he sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree; or he may not even notice that it takes its leave, for his eye is riveted to its goal, and forward, not sideward, backward, downward. "What we do should determine what we forego"—that is how I like it, that is my placitum [principle]. But I do not wish to strive with open eyes for my own impoverishment, I do not like negative virtues,—virtues whose very essence it is to negate and deny oneself something.

307.

In favor of criticism.— Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error: you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—, as are all your present "truths," being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event,—it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm, something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet! —This is said in favor of criticism.

_____

nietzsche. the gay science. 1882.

lonely hunters

'And how many of us are there in this country? Maybe ten thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Maybe a lot more. I been to a lot of places but I never met but a few of us. But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watched the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun - the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it.'
_

carson mccullers. the heart is a lonely hunter. 1940. page 128.

captain crunch

too much too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or
tears

haters
lovers

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.

an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.

I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be.

but sometimes I think about
it.

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody

more haters than lovers.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.

there must be a way.

surely there must be a way that we have not yet
thought of.

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.

it will not say
"no."

___

buk. love is a dog from hell. 1977.

a working class hero is someting to be

is destroying symbols of imperial power okay even when it causes the deaths of innocent civilians?

_

Randal: So they build another Death Star, right?

Dante: Yeah.

Randal: Now the first one they built was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it.

Dante: Luke blew it up. Give credit where it's due.

Randal:And the second one was still being built when they blew it up.

Dante: Compliments of Lando Calrissian.

Randal: Something just never sat right with me the second time they destroyed it. I could never put my finger on it-something just wasn't right.

Dante: And you figured it out?

Randal: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries- the only people onboard were Imperials.

Dante: Basically.

Randal: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished.

Dante: And the second time around...?

Randal: The second time around, it wasn't even finished yet. They were still under construction.

Dante: So?

Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.

Dante: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.

Randal: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.

Dante: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?

Randal: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. (notices Dante's confusion) All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.

(The Blue-Collar Man (Thomas Burke) joins them.)

Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?

Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.

Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.

Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.

Randal: Like when?

Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.

Dante: Whose house was it?

Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.

Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?

Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.

Dante: Based on personal politics.

Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.

Randal: No way!

Blue-Collar Man: (paying for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.


-- Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994).

orchestra without a conductor

"It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value" (22).

_


three botanical models: roots, radicles, and rhizomes.

a root primarily anchors a tree in the ground, and comprises well developed, centralized networks for transporting fluids (vascular). a radicle is an embryonic root, emerging from the seed, rapping up the potential of new trees in its bundle (fascicular). a rhizome is a horizontal underground stem that produces mutliple nodes (from which leaves can grow) and buds (from which new rhizomes grow). so the root-tree model is classical, dialectical, imitative of nature - the one becomes two (binary and biunivocal). the radicle-fascicular model is modern, cyclical, yet still imitative of nature, even if it's choatic or orbital - the multiple returns to a unity (as in joyce and nietzsche). the rhizome-weed model is postmodern, nonexclusive, and beyond the nature/man or real/artificial dualities - the multiple is made and shoots off in a thousand plateaus.

_


cross-reference: hardt & negri's three-part distinction between military, guerrilla, and distributed forces.

multitude, pages 56-7 : "The traditional military structure can be described as a hub, or star, network in which all lines of communication and command radiate from a central point along fixed lines [see kesey footnote]. The guerrilla structure suggests a polycentric network, with numerous, relatively autonomous centered clusters, like solar systems, in which each hub commands its peripheral nodes and communicates with other hubs. The final model in the series is the distributed, or full-matrix, network in which there is no center and all nodes can communicate directly with all others. If the traditional army is like a single armed body, with organic and centralized relations among its units, and the guerilla army is like a pack of wolves, with relatively autonomous clusters that can act independently or in coordination, then the distributed network might be imagined like a swarm of ants or bees - a seemingly amorphous multiplicity that can strike at a single point from all sides or disperse in the environment so as to become almost invisible. It is very difficult to hunt down a swarm"... or "you can never get rid of ants" (9).

_


cross-reference: computer science

d&g define arborescent systems as "hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central autonmata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths" (16). they then cite the work of pierre rosenstiehl and jean petitot, which criticizes 'command trees' as an organizational model in information science. even though r&p were writing in 1974, their ideas correspond with the internet as it has developed - internet as rhizome (see page 299 of h&n's empire, or pages 83, 91-3, 217, 338-40 of multitude).

_


six principles for rhizome-making:

1 & 2. connection and heterogenity.

any point can plug into any other, and is constantly decentering onto new registers. "a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles" (7).

3. multitiplicity.

there's no unified center that overcodes. points become lines with a diversity of short-term directions, which "expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are" (8).

4. asignifying rupture.

recognize there's micofascisms waiting to crystallize. imitation is death - the pink panther isn't a chameleon, but paints the world its color. "Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimersions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency" (11).

5 & 6. cartography and decalcomania (or transferring pictures onto glass).

don't submit to the ready-made and reproducible; don't propagate redundancies. "What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. ... The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by any individual, group, or social formation [or any thread on cross-x.com]. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways" (12).

{there's a good summary in the big paragraph on page 21.}

_


equation: rhizomatics = schizoanalysis = pragmatics = micropolitics = pop

_


rule-of-thumb: make use of everything that comes within range.

an author, speaker, writer, performer, creator, artist, revolutionary, debater, person, whatever, can refrain from identifying themselves and still remain unconsciously trapped in their own identity; or one can make an egoless collective under one's own signature. "For example, it is relatively easy to stop saying "I," but that does not mean that you have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can keep on saying "I," just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which personal pronouns function only as fictions" (138). collective assemblages of enunciation run deeper than 'politically correct' terminology - e.g.: one can refrain from saying 'nigger' and still propagate white supremacist attitudes; or one can make use of 'nigger' in an anti-racist way (as many blacks do). don't interpret or express; experience and experiment. analyze things in their functional contexts, and rob restrictive models of their dominance by over-populating them with the disjunctions they intend to eliminate. a schizo-bricolage (AO 7), lodging themself on a strata and tinkering with whatever lines of flight become available...

_

ken kesey - one flew over the cuckoo's nest : centered wires of power: the nurse "wields a sure power that extends in all directions on hair-like wires too small for anybody's eye but mine; I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants. ... What she dreams of there in the center of those wires is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness, like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients who aren't Outside, obedience under her beam, are wheelchair Chronics with catheter tubes run direct from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor."


robert wright - nonzero : As the zoologist Matt Ridley has put it, "What is the organism? There is no such thing." Each so-called organism, he notes, "is a collective." And not a wholly harmonious collective - at least, not by definition.

If the line between organism and society isn't the distinction between complete and incomplete unity of purpose, then what is the line? That's the problem: lacking a clear boundary, biologists are free to differ. In 1911 the great entomologist William Morton Wheeler published a paper called "The ant colony as an organism" - a title that he stressed, was not meant as mere analogy; an ant colony, in his view, was a type of organism, a "superorganism". This view gained much favor for a time and then fell out of fashion, but lately it has made something of a comeback. One reason may be the growing awareness of conflict within organisms - the growing sense that all organism are in some sense societies. ---- p 304-5.

david sloan wilson. altruism and organism: disentangling the themes of multilevel selection theory. the american naturalist. 150:122-34.

____

what is an organism? and what is individual consciousness? ... look for rhizomes.

prophetic

Minister of Information, Helpmann = Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld
_____

In one window is a bank of TV sets - on the great majority of the screens is the face of MR. HELPMANN - the Deputy Minister of Information. He is being interviewed. No-one bothers to listen to HELPMANN.

INTERVIEWER : "Deputy minister, what do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?"

HELPMANN : "Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, instead of standing on the touch line heckling -"

INTERVIEWER : "In fact, killing people -"

HELPMANN : "- In fact, killing people - they'd get a lot more out of life."

INTERVIEWER : "Mr. HELPMANN, what would you say to those critics who maintain that the Ministry Of Information has become too large and unwieldy ...?"

HELPMANN : "David ... in a free society information is the name of the game. You can't win the game if you're a man short."

INTERVIEWER : "And the cost of it all, Deputy Minister? Seven percent of the gross national produc..."

HELPMANN : "I understand this concern on behalf of the tax-payers. People want value for money and a cost-effective service. That is why we always insist on the principle of Information Retrieval Charges. These terrorists are not pulling their weight, and it's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval Procedures usedin their interrogation."

INTERVIEWER : "Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?"

HELPMANN : "Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game."

INTERVIEWER : "But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year..."
HELPMANN : "Beginner's luck."

-- Terry Gilliam's Brazil. 1985.

_____