Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Though his contractor assured him it wasn’t necessary, Mal flew overseas to settle the dispute over the marble; he told Shays not to expect him back anytime soon. His plan of action is simply to read, manage his estate, live in leisurely obscurity as an expatriate country gentleman. His sense of things is that if he disappears, people will forget him, and when that happens, it’s only a matter of time before they start asking for him again.

* MESSAGE *

THESE ARE REAL PEOPLE

NOT ACTORS

ABOUT TO FIND OUT IF THEY’RE HAVING A BABY

HUMANITY IS THE STONE

Entertainment is itself an ideology.

My goal is to destroy all my possessions. I have been making an inventory of everything I own, and it comes to 7,006 items, from televisions to reading material to records to old love letters to my Saab 900. These are the things I have accumulated in the 37 years of my life. Some of them are hard to part with, like my father’s sheepskin coat, which he gave to me many years ago. But I have made a conceptual decision as an artist to shred and granulate everything.

“You always have to consider that,” he said. “But you can’t exploit reality.”

*

A REPORTER CAME to see them in their cell. They tried not to get excited: they were under no illusions anymore about the intelligence or the political sophistication of most reporters. Still, it was an event. Part of the reason for going to jail was to serve as an example; in order to spread the word of that example, you needed help. And the guy was from the AP.

They were back in jail because the judge had tossed them in there for disrupting the trial again. No negotiations this time. Jack Gradison had lost it during one of the prosecutor’s objections, calling him a liar, shouting out statistics about wealth concentrated in the hands of a diminishing few. To Jack an argument was a fight, and he was not going to allow himself to be pilloried without responding just because they happened to be inside a government building. The judge had found Liebau in contempt too, even though he had said nothing, but Liebau had no problem with that. If you were a revolutionary then you should simply consider jail one of your addresses.

It was supposed to clarify the mind. A jail cell was existence stripped to its essentials, and so there were no distractions, nothing to cloud your thinking. Antonio Gramsci, one of Liebau’s heroes, had done his best thinking in jail, had written the invaluable Prison Notebooks there. Still, Liebau had to admit that this notion of existence stripped to its essentials wasn’t totally borne out by his own experience. Jail was, more surprisingly than anything else, an unbelievably noisy place. For hours at a stretch he found it hard to think at all.

The series of buzzers commenced, far away at first and then gradually louder, and by the time the last door was opened Gradison and Liebau, in spite of themselves, were standing expectantly behind the table. The guard watched them with a focus that looked like sleepiness, like an alligator’s.

The reporter’s name was Suarez. A good sign; minorities often were more receptive to the whole notion of concealed power. He asked them a few basic questions about their background, their court case, questions which, Liebau could see, Jack was a little miffed an AP reporter wouldn’t already know the answers to.

“So,” Suarez asked. “Let’s start then with your first meeting with John Wheelwright.”

The first meeting he was talking about was the first day of their first jury selection, many months ago now. Liebau smiled tightly and said that while their lawyer had subsequently told them that Wheelwright had been in the gallery that day, they hadn’t met him then. In fact, they had refused to meet him.

Suarez apologized and wrote hastily on his little notepad. But then, for some reason, the questions about this Wheelwright, this bagman, this insignificant lieutenant to the cultural fascist Osbourne, just went on and on. What did you say to him when he saw you. What did he say to you. How did he look. How did he act. Did he mention anything about … well, about anything. How did he strike you?

“He struck me as a worm,” Gradison said. “Listen, what the hell sort of interview is this?”

Then it all came out, how this insufferable gofer, who smiled at them all the time and offered them the moon if they would just agree to shut up, had flown back to his plantation and watched one of his underlings set fire to himself in the name of advertising. This guy was wound a lot tighter, apparently, than they had thought. Not that they had really spared a thought for him at all at the time, or even now.

“And apparently,” Suarez said excitedly, “there was a woman.”

Liebau was stunned and dispirited. This was what they had been steeling themselves for? They had gone to jail to await rebirth as minor players in some monumentally irrelevant soap opera about people they didn’t even know? It wouldn’t have surprised him a bit to learn that Osbourne had contrived this entire thing, to trump the growing public interest in Culture Trust and obscure the motives of these two men who couldn’t be bought, to keep them from getting famous for their dissent by making them famous for something else.

Contrived or not, that’s pretty much what happened. Search engines were becoming society’s short-term memory, and thus the names of the two cultural guerrillas were now bound forever to the name of the flunky who supervised the maniac who thought his own gruesome death would make a nifty Banana Republic ad. The galleries were full now for every day of their trial. Their judge seemed enraged by all the attention. She refused to grant any more mistrials; the defendants wouldn’t shut up, though, satirizing their captors, provoking their anger, refusing to legitimize the proceedings by sitting quietly through them. Her solution in the end was to put them back in their cell with a TV connected to a closed-circuit hookup. They sat on their bunks and watched their own trial on television, cursing at it, hurling unheard insults at all the participants, as if they were watching a beauty pageant or a football game.

They were found guilty and fined $500 each. When they refused to pay, the judge waived the fine and commuted their sentences to time served.

They were free, and undefeated; but it wasn’t the same without Osbourne on the scene. Their creative edge was lost. The thing they were fighting against seemed too diffuse now. There were ten thousand people doing something like what Osbourne had been doing, only not as provocatively, nor as well.

Six months later, broke, with nowhere else to go, Liebau convinced Gradison that their best option was to go back to the University of Eastern Washington and ask to be reinstated, at least as adjuncts. To their surprise, the petition was granted. Gradison taught English, Liebau anthropology, and Liebau had to admit to himself that he generally felt calmer — Kimiko, his wife, pointed out that his health had improved as well — as a result of this retreat into the world of artifacts, into the realm of dead culture. Still, a retreat was what it was. Like many college campuses these days, theirs sometimes seemed to him like a kind of retirement community for bitter or self-aggrandizing old radicals.

Gradison, though, had more trouble coping with his withdrawal from guerrilla life. The two men saw less of each other for a while. Then one night Jack drove out to Liebau’s remote A-frame, which, when they were younger and stronger, he had helped his old friend build, and announced — pacing up and down in front of the picture window, while Kimiko banged things around disapprovingly behind the door to the kitchen — that he had decided to turn himself in for a certain activity he had been a part of in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1971.