Showing posts with label 1994. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1994. Show all posts

Thursday 29 February 2024

River






Esquire, March 1994 v121 n3 p108(10)

River, with love and anger

By Tad Friend

River Phoenix's death has made his friends and family question their knowledge of the actor and has given the public insight into his drug-affected lifestyle. Phoenix's drug usage was spasmodic. Some of his friends are angry over his death, yet others feel he is a martyr.


HEART PHOENIX sat on the edge of the stage and beckoned everyone near. The 50 People in Paramount Studios' screening room gathered around like disciples. A short, tan woman with graying hair, Heart has a saintly way of soothing fears. The mourners needed her now; her son River's memorial service had been wrenching. During their tributes, Christine Lahti, River's mother in Running on Empty, and Iris Burton, River's agent and "second mother," had broken down.

They and others had recalled Phoenix's mercurial abandon, his peculiar combination of heart-stopping innocence and ageless wisdom, his "vegan," or ultravegetarian, beliefs, and, always, the eggshell beauty of his acting. Seeking consolation, they had groped to trace in Phoenix's life a narrative arc, a theme, even a moral.

But River Phoenix had a stubborn case of the vagabond disease that afflicts celebrities: He affected others deeply yet narrowly before moving on. Iris Burton was not the only one present who had privately wondered, in the three weeks since Phoenix's death, whether she had really known him, whether he hadn't been acting a part around her.

Heart spoke, holding Rob Reiner's hand for support. Her hopes for her son had always been on a wholly different plane than most stage mothers'. "We believed we could use the mass media to help change the world," as Heart puts it now, "and that River would be our missionary." She tried to explain that calling to the mourners, saying that she'd sensed from the beginning, as her labor extended to three and a half days, that River didn't want to be in the world. She told how she had awoken two days after his death, understanding for the first time why dawn is called "mourning," and suddenly had a vision of how God had tried to convince River to be born one more time. River told God, "I'd rather stay up here with you." So they bargained, Heart said, smiling. God was persuasive, and River offered to go for five years, and then ten, and finally agreed to visit earth, but only for twenty-three years.

A beatific silence filled the room, vibrating like a sustained bass note. "I was shocked by how many strong, grown-up people River had gotten to in such a deep, emotionally way," says director Alan Moyle. "We were all united," says actor and publicist Mickey Cottrell. "The room seemed almost hallucinatorily beautiful."

Heart then invited others to speak. After a few further testimonials, director John Boorman suddenly blurted out from the corner of the stage: "Is there anybody here who can tell us why River took all those drugs?"

The question quivered in the air. River's young sisters, Liberty and Summer, ran out, and Heart looked astonished.

And then Samantha Mathis, Phoenix's girlfriend and the co-star of his last completed movie, The Thing Called Love, spoke from the front row for the first time. "River was a sensitive," she said with great tenderness, using the word as a noun. "He had so much compassion for everyone and everything that he had a weight on his heart." She paused and added that Phoenix "was obsessive. When he wanted to eat artichokes he would eat ten at a time. He did everything to that degree."

Mathis's was a brave statement, as she had been heartsick with Phoenix for breaking his vows to stay drug-free. But her gloss on Phoenix's life--that he was a Byronic hero, felled by outsize pain and hunger-joined a long line of unifying theories. For instance, that "this innocent little bird got his wings clipped in the most evil city in the world" (Iris Burton); that he was a moody, hard-partying hypocrite who got what he deserved (the National Enquirer, et al.); that an artist had taken the risks of Method acting too far (Peter Bogdanovich).

Each theory is alluring because it provides an answer to the riddle of human motivation, but finally unsatisfying because it seems not quite the answer. "John Boorman's question was a good one," Heart Phoenix says now. "It's what everyone was thinking. Why, when you're living this dream. when you can have any car, any house, any girl, you're so famous--why? Why?' The only understanding I can come to is that River knew the earth was dying and that he was ready to give his passing as a sign."

But River Phoenix's story is not just a passion play; it is also a drama of fierce internal conflict. It was Phoenix's loneliness and anguish, after all, that so felicitously backlit the sadness in the characters he played. And it was that bewitching confusion that later led him to drugs.

"He's already being made into a martyr," says Phoenix's first and longtime love, actress Martha Plimpton. "He's become a metaphor for a fallen angel, a messiah. He wasn't. He was just a boy, a very good-hearted boy who was very fucked-up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions. I don't want to be comforted by his death. I think it's right that I'm angry about it, angry at the people who helped him stay sick, and angry at River."

"Why," asks his mother, Heart, "when you can have any car, any house, any girl, you're so famous--why? Why?"

THE MAIN THING in film acting is something going on in the face," said Gus Van Sant, "and with the really good ones, it's pain." Van Sant was in the basement of his sprawling Tudor house in Portland, Oregon, staring at his darkroom wall. On it hung five photos of River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant's film about Mike Waters (Phoenix) and Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), two street hustlers who travel to Idaho and Italy looking for Mike's mother. We've both just heard the coroner's report on Phoenix's bloodstream : cocaine and morphine (metabolized heroin), each in toxic doses, as well as traces of marijuana and Valium. "You don't read it as pain"--Van Sant drew on a Camel and moved closer, scrutinizing River's half-averted face--"but when you really look, it's pain."

Phoenix was never photographed grinning and very rarely smiling: He mistrusted cameras. And yet it was the camera that fixed Phoenix's image as a disillusioned innocent. Milton Nascimento, the Brazilian singer, once flipped on the TV in his New York hotel room and was transfixed by the last half of The Mosquito Coast, in which Phoenix weeps over his maniacal dying father. Nascimento wrote the ballad "River Phoenix (Letter to a Young Actor)" to celebrate that moment.

During Idaho's filming in the fall of 1990, nine cast and crew members, including Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, slept on scattered futons in Van Sant's house. It was a college dorm, a tribe, a family. Van Sant showed me his garage, where a bona fide garage band of Phoenix and Reeves and other Idaho actors, as well as Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bass player, often jammed late at night.

They played the sweet, off-kilter lyrics Phoenix had written for himself and for his band, Aleka's Attic--"Run to the rescue with love/and peace will follow" or "Hey, lo, where did your halo go?" They played the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, balancing ashtrays on Van Sant's black BMW and drinking wine, smoking marijuana. Sometimes they ended up in tears with Phoenix as he talked about the vanishing rain forests.

Back up the passageway was a gray-carpeted landing where Phoenix played guitar after everyone else had turned in. He liked the alcove's particular echo and played there ecstatically, until his fingertips bled. Music was his true love, what he intended for himself after he'd quit acting.

Phoenix's musical knowledge was encyclopedic, but he had never seen a James Dean film, much less one with Orson Welles. When director Peter Bogdanovich called him about The Thing Called Love, he discovered that Phoenix hadn't heard of him or his movies. Says Van Sant: "River was interested in movies only as they applied to his own character-drawing."

Of his roles, the character Phoenix drew in Idaho resembled him most: "kind of isolated, a nerd, a misfit," as Phoenix's friend Bobby Bukowski puts it. Mike Waters, as written by Van Sant, is a narcoleptic street hustler who sleeps with men to get by. Phoenix completely reimagined a campfire scene with Keanu Reeves so that it becomes the movie's fulcrum: Mike haltingly admits his feelings for Scott and says, "I really want to kiss you, man." "The character I wrote was blase and noncommittal," Van Sant says. "River made him gay and committal; he redeemed him with emotions."

Phoenix, who loved to catalyze and connect, found the low-affect Van Sant a challenge. "River was always doing things like saying, `I just love you,' and lunging to hug me," says Van Sant. "I'd freeze, maybe because my father used to grab my knee in a certain way. River didn't like that, so he'd hug me again, and I'd freeze again, and he'd yell at me."

Hugging Phoenix could be complex. "When he was being aloof I'd impulsively try to trap him in an emotional gesture by hugging him, and he'd flip out of my arms," says Alan Moyle, the script doctor for The Thing Called Love. "Ten minutes later he'd sneak up and hug me from behind. He wanted it to be his spontaneity, and more creative--he'd sidewind you, but you would consider yourself hugged."

Phoenix was into the mechanics of "spiking," or shooting up heroin.

AFTER TALKING with Van Sant, I went with Mike Parker to Portland's Vaseline Alley outside the City, a seedy gay nightclub where boys as young as twelve troll for forty-dollar "dates" from cruising johns. Parker, twenty-three, a friend of Van Sant's who is a former runaway, was Phoenix's main source for :he character of Mike Waters: The two of them often came down here at night to watch pickups.

"River would do what I had told him was a date-grabber," Parker said diffidently, "looking as young and innocent as possible, giving bursts of uncontrollable laughter, doing this"--he scuffed his feet boyishly. "All the marketing tricks."

Parker' s quick, shy eye movements, his graceful hand gestures emerging from head-down repose, were exactly Phoenix's in Idaho. Parker said he felt Phoenix extracting" those moves," but River was really interested in the brotherhood of the kids out here, how we were looking for acceptance and some man to be close to, looking for family. "

Phoenix was also curious about what Parker called "the glamour of men wanting to touch our bodies." While filming his previous movie, Dogfight, Phoenix had received oral sex from another male actor, saying he needed to do it because h, was going to play a gay hustler." He had other brief involvements with men over the years, and it was no big deal to, friends who knew. Phoenix simply didn't censor his afflictions. "If he loved somebody, male or female," says one oF Phoenix's longtime girlfriends, Suzanne Solgot, "he felt he should check it out."

"River dropped clues about his sexuality, but I never really followed them up," says Van Sant, who is gay. Phoenix asked ceaseless questions about Van Sant's relationship with his boyfriend: "What, exactly, do you do in bed? which side do you sleep on? Do you ever tell him to shut up? if you're angry at him, do you still buy him an expensive birthday present?" Van Sant says, "I would laugh because these questions were so personal, and he'd say, What? What?'"

In late 1992, a gay filmmaker (not Van Sant) staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles heard a knock at midnight and discovered Phoenix outside, drunk and wanting to talk about his struggles with bisexuality. The filmmaker reassured him that it would all work out. Phoenix's friends say that this moment may have been acted, dramatized--he seemed at times to try on complicated emotions, applying the Method to his life. Phoenix realized that these virtual-reality scenes left a confusing trail, and confessed in an interview that by his having "lied and changed stories and contradicted myself ... you could read five different articles and say, This guy is schizophrenic.'"

A self-described chameleon, Phoenix almost recklessly "invited the demons of the role into himself," as Bobby Bukowski puts it. Bukowski was the cinematographer on Dogfight, in which Phoenix played a marine. "After Dogfight I remember thinking he was being a real jarhead asshole--it took a month for him to become sweet again," Bukowski says, "and the street-urchin character in Idaho stayed with him and played into the whole drug thing."

Mike Waters's outlaw glamour left its residue. Idaho marked the real beginning of the struggle in Phoenix's life between his "drug friends" and his "goon," or sober, friends; between his urge to party and his urge to withdraw; between his urge to help the addicted and his urge to help himself

The struggle seemed almost to enact itself on his face. "His eyes made him the focus of energy in every scene, the centrifugal force so strong you didn't even try to duel him for control," says Dermot Mulroney, who later co-starred with Phoenix in Silent Tongue and The Thing Called Love. "The off-center eye [Phoenix's lazy right eye] read as madness, and the other read pure sanity. In a close-up, from one side he was the guy next door, and from the other he was absolutely insane."

Phoenix had long been intrigued by the drug culture in Jacksonville Beach, near his home in Micanopy, Florida. On New Year's Day 1990, he watched a rough cut of Van Sant's previous movie, Drugstore Cowboy, and was fascinated by the mechanics of "spiking," or shooting up. He tried pharmaceutical morphine and heroin soon after, and that fall in Portland smoked heroin several times.

"River started with heroin out of malaise, and because it's a delicious drug, but then the reason changed," says Phoenix's friend Matt Ebert, a former addict and hustler who advised him on his Idaho role. "Heroin makes you reflective, you look inside--and then you face the consequences of looking into the chasm."

"He was always pushing how far he could go," says Van Sant. "He'd go Can I say I feel like jerking off?'"

ONCE WHEN WE WERE fifteen, River and I went out for a fancy dinner in Manhattan," says Martha Plimpton, "and I ordered soft-shell crabs. He left the restaurant and walked around on Park Avenue, crying. I went out and he said,~I love you so much, why?...' He had such pain that I was eating an animal, that he hadn't impressed on me what was right." Her voice slows, becomes ragged. "I loved him for that, for his dramatic desire that we share every belief, that I be with him all the way."

Phoenix's friends often ended up being vegan like him. "He'd say about meat, That's not good for you, man, that'll kill you,'" says Peter Bogdanovich. "And he'd be smoking a cigarette, and he'd look at it and say, ~I know, man, I know.'" Phoenix scorched through people's barriers very fast: He had a gift for making everyone feel like his closest friend. He was a celebrant, "the kind of guy," says his friend Wade Evans, "that if you walked outside and it was snowing, you knew that the first thing on his mind was making a snowball."

He was both reflectively and spontaneously generous, serving himself last at dinners; asking that his Silent Tongue co-star, Sheila Tousey, be given his trailer because she spent so much more time in makeup; jumping to his feet when Kevin Kline beat him for best supporting actor at the 1989 Academy Awards. "I had to stop River from running to hug Kevin," his mother says. "It never crossed his mind that he hadn't won."

His public responses were often that unexpected. "He told me he didn't have a sense of humor until he was mine," says Gus Van Sant, "and that he never really got its logic, the surprise of the unexpected. You know: An elephant and a hippo, go into a bar, something is introduced, punch line. And he'd be like, ~Yeah, so what happened then?'"

Phoenix was the champ of hanging out. Many of his friends were much older, and he would spend days or even weeks with them, writing poetry, drinking wine, making videos, wrestling, playing frisbee (with considerably more enthusiasm than skill), cooking veggies (ditto), scarfing Japanese and Indian food. He couldn't sit still to be bored. "If the news was on when he came over to my house, he'd make a face at the TV and then leave," says Josh Greenbaum, the drummer in Aleka's Attic. Phoenix was always on the phone, making funny little jig movements with his hands and face, singing "Hey, Jude" when he was feeling heady. Jude was his middle name; the Beatles song had arrived in the world, like River, in 1970.

When he was uncomfortable, Phoenix's feverish energy could seem like arrogance. He'd write a song, decide "it's brilliant, brilliant," and refuse to change a word. "He was always pushing how far he could go," says Van Sant, in a comment echoed by others. "He'd go, Can I say I feel like jerking off? Why can't I say that? Why? Why can't I say that?' If you said, ~Not so loud!' he'd think that was a funny reaction, like you were paranoid. He'd get into shouting matches with people, where they were both screaming `You fucking moron!' but he'd end up liking them. He liked people who didn't let him get away with things."

He told some skinheads, "Go ahead, kick my ass, just explain why you're doing it." They were dumbfounded.

Phoenix skepticism of social conventions came from a childhood whose outline has become a singular fable of innocence. The outline: He was born in a log cabin in Madras, Oregon, to John and Arlyn (who later renamed herself Heart), itinerant fruit pickers who named him after the river of life in Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha. The family joined the Children of God sect, then moved to Venezuela as missionaries in 1975. River and his younger sister, Rain, sang spirituals on the street to raise money, while the family slept in a rat-infested hut on the beach.

They left the church and took a freighter back to Florida in 1977. Inspired by Joaquin, age three, who'd seen men kill fish against the hull during the voyage home, River and Rain, ages seven and five, convinced the rest of the family to adopt the vegan, Garden of Eden ideal of not using animals, even down to not using milk and honey. In 1980 the family drove their Volkswagen bus to Los Angeles, depending on River in particular, but also Rain and Joaquin, known as Leaf, to make it big in entertainment.

The children sang on street comers and amazed casting directors, greeting them with kisses and an airy "Hi, we love you." They had no tarnish of greed or ambition; they shimmered in the sun. When Phoenix first saw a western upon returning from Venezuela, he was convinced that "companies paid people's families money to kill them. I just believed it."

At age eleven, Phoenix was on the TV show Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; at sixteen, he was acclaimed as both an actor and a teen hunk for his role in Stand by Me. In 1987 the Phoenixes returned to Gainesville, and River bought the family a spread in nearby Micanopy, in 1989, as well as a ranch in Costa Rica.

In many respects Phoenix's was a magical childhood--no television, no formal schooling after fifth grade, and unstinting encouragement to care for others and to share his feelings. Consider how Phoenix lost his virginity: At age fifteen, on location for Stand by Me in Oregon, Phoenix was enamored of an eighteen-year-old family friend. They came to Heart and John and asked, "Can we have your good wishes?" River's parents, far from objecting, decorated a tent for the couple. "It was a beautiful experience," says Heart.

Phoenix's tutor, Dirk Drake, recalls some white-power skinheads taunting Phoenix at a party in 1988. "He smiled with an unbelievable innocence," Drake says, "and said, 'If you really want to kick my ass, go ahead, just explain to me why you're doing it.' The skinheads were dumbfounded. One guy stayed to say, `Ah, you wouldn't be worth it.' And River said, We're all worth it, man, we're all worth millions of planets and stars and galaxies and universes.'"

Phoenix was always creating families as he traveled, making new "brothers" and "sisters" and, particularly, "father," like Harrison Ford on The Mosquito Coast. Kevan Michaels, who was "dad to buddy son" with the sixteen-year-old Phoenix on the set of A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon remembers calling him a few years later on New Year's Day. "I can't understand why we're talking right now," Phoenix said, almost resentfully. "When you make a film you're a family, but when the film is over so is the family."

The outburst may have been provoked by some of Phoenix's own family difficulties. For his upbringing also contained a deep contradiction: He found himself part Atlas, shouldering the pain of the world, and part Antaeus, receiving strength only from contact with the unpolluted earth.

Says Martha Plimpton, who stayed with the Phoenixes after she and River met while filming The Mosquito Coast in Belize: "I love River's family; they brought him up to believe he was a pure soul who had a message to deliver to the world.

"But in moving around all the time, changing schools, keeping to themselves, and distrusting America," Plimpton continues, "they created this utopian bubble so that River was never socialized--he was never prepared for dealing with crowds and with Hollywood, for the world in which he'd have to deliver that message. And furthermore, when you're fifteen, to have to think of yourself as a prophet is unfair."

"Our kids were so comfortable with everyone, so mature," Heart Phoenix responds. "But as River grew," she admits, "he did become more and more uncomfortable being the poster boy for all good things. He often said he wished he couId just be anonymous. But he never was. When he wasn't a movie star, he was a missionary. There's a beauty in that--the man with the cause, the leader--but there's also a deep, loneliness."

The family had had prophet problems before: They'd actually left the Children of God because its leader, David Brant Berg, began encouraging the women in his flock to seduce potential converts--a tactic known as "flirty fishing"--and proudly referred to them as hookers for Jesus. Berg also advocated incest and sex with toddlers, and mailed circulars with graphic pictures of molestation. The Phoenixes felt betrayed, and River rarely talked about the sect. "They're disgusting," he would say angrily. "They're ruining people's lives."

River also had problems with his father, John Phoenix, a bearded, poetic man who hated cities. Phoenix hugely admired John, wrote songs with him, and before his death was planning to direct a movie about John's abuse-punctuated boyhood, called By Way of Fontana, with Joaquin playing John But John had problems with alcohol. Indeed, drinking ran in John's family.

"River would drink with his dad, so they could relate," says Suzanne Solgot. "But he worried the disease was in his bloodline." Says Martha Plimpton: "We had five million talks about his compulsive personality and his guilt and fear over not being able to save his father.

"His parents saw him as their savior," Plimpton says, and treated him as the father." Eventually, because the family was so generous about sheltering lost souls, up to a dozen people lived near or on the Micanopy property, in a motor home, two travel trailers, and in Phoenix's apartment above his recording studio; River supported them all.

Known to River's self-sufficient friends as "the Klingons" or "the tofu mafia," they worked as gardeners, security guards, secretaries, or simply grocery-unloaders. Many of them were gentle spirits whom Phoenix loved being around. "But in River's mind he was their father," Bobby Bukowski says. "And he had some anger about that."

"River and his father were always having breakthrough conversations where River would tell his father his feelings about alcohol, about their roles," Plimpton says. "But the next day nothing would change. River would then say to me, ~Well, it's not that serious, it's not that bad.'"

Plimpton had begun hearing the same refrain from Phoenix about himself "He really liked getting drunk and high," she says. "But he didn't have a gauge for when to stop. When we split up, a lot of it was that I had learned that screaming, fighting, and begging wasn't going to change him, that he had to change himself, and that he didn't want to yet."

He knew almost everyone his age in the business had smoked, snorted, or shot up--drugs are the mainstream.

PHOENIX TRIED to keep things lighter with his next girlfriend, Suzanne Solgot. When he met her, at a party, he shyly introduced himself as "Rio," and when another woman there said she was sure he was River Phoenix he denied it: "I'm not that guy, I'm nothing like him." "He was very private and mysterious," Solgot says. "We never talked much about our past or who we were, though I was always curious."

When they broke up last january, after three and a half years, it was for a familiar reason. "He didn't want me nagging him." Solgot says, "pointing out the contradiction between his public stands and what he was doing to his body."

Phoenix responded that his body was "a horse." But tormented by his public responsibility, he'd worry aloud, "What would those twelve-year-old girls with a picture of me over their bed think if they knew?" He didn't even want his fans to know he smoked and warned interviewers on that point.) Then he'd get angry that he was "under the microscope" and couldn't just cut loose like a normal young man.

All along he was a shepherd to friends who were really cutting loose. He knew that almost everyone his age in the business had smoked, snorted, or shot up. That drugs, long a sign of rebellion against the mainstream, now arc the mainstream. And that whereas it used to take years for people to kill their pain for good with alcohol, now they can do it instantly and without really trying.

"He had called me twice in the last couple of years to ask me to intervene with friends," says Bob Timmins, a drug counselor for Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. "And he had made it passionately clear that he was committed with his time and money to making sure these people didn't die. In one case he drove [a prominent musician] to a clinic in Arizona."

In June of '91, Phoenix was horrified to hear that a famous young actor he'd worked with had shot so much heroin that his arm had abscessed, halting his film for three days. Phoenix confronted his friend and got him to admit "that it was true, that it had freaked him out, and that he hadn't done any smack since."

Still, by 1991 the evidence that Phoenix had his own problem was there to read. "You'd have to be really dumb or naive not to know he was high when he was," says Bobby Bukowski. "He was so clearly high he was like an alien."

In December 1991, Dirk Drake, who tutored all the Phoenix children, had a screaming match with Phoenix at Flea's house in Los Angeles. Flea was away and River was sharing space with several of Flea's friends, who would become known as River's drug friends. One of them, in a drug-induced jealous rage, had chased Phoenix around the house with a butcher knife.

"I told him I was furious about the glamour those friends attached to skag [heroin]," Drake recalls. "Don't worry," Phoenix said, "I have the fear of God." Drake sarcastically him to become a Baptist preacher. "No, no," Phoenix said--he'd meant his unique sense of religious election. "I want to live to see what the higher power's purpose is for me."

None of the people Phoenix tried to help offered help in return; turn; indeed in an excruciating irony, the Persian Brown heroin that helped kill Phoenix was provided by a friend he'd gotten into rehab. There arc several reasons Phoenix wasn't flagged down: His drug use came in spurts, and he was often clean; even close friends saw him infrequently and had difficulty assessing the problem, particularly as he bounced back well the next day; he had a beguiling trick of preemptively telling friends "a really stupid rumor" about his exploits and assuring them "what those assholes are saying" wasn't true; and he had a magisterial authority that convinced even knowledgeable addicts that he was in control. "He fooled a lot of people and he fooled himself," says Suzanne Solgot. "He was a great actor."

"He'd often be high when he called," says Martha Plimpton. "His language would become totally incoherent."

AS HE GREW AWAY from his family in the last three years of his life, Phoenix's missionary goals began to change. He never swerved from veganism, nonviolence, and universal love, and he still gave to Earth Save, Earth Trust, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace, and Farm Animals Institute, among others. But he'd started his own private projects: He was going to build a school in Costa Rica, and was larkishly happy working on a (still-secret) nationwide education project for middle and high schoolers,

"River realized that his family's ideas had been a little simplistic," says one close friend. "The idea that when he bought up rain forest in Costa Rica he was preventing Third World people from making a living there left him confused and unhappy."

Some of Phoenix's core precepts began to undergo a little reexamination. A director recalls, "He'd say to me, How about we do this movie where my brother and I and this gooner here'--some strange and interesting person River had taken under his wing for a few days--~travel across the country killing people--no, no, first we fuck them, and then we murder them.' He was kidding, but he was also wondering how to get people's attention and blow their minds."

Making movies had become more of a chore, and it's noteworthy that aside from james Wright, his seductively moody country singer in The Thing Called Love, Phoenix's last films don't amount to much. The brute capitalism of the business depressed him: While filming Sneakers in 1991, a movie he advised friends not to see, he grumpily told a friend, "I want to make $1 million on my next picture, $2 million on the one after that, and $3 million on the one after that." (He did, in fact, earn $1.5 million for The Thing.)

"He was very disappointed that his music never hit," says Dirk Drake. "In the late '80s he had always felt it was just a matter of days before the world would be healing itself with his beautiful music, before he was touching everyone the way the Beatles did."

Phoenix's sweet, breathless phone voice began to drag. "His language had become at times totally incoherent," says Martha Plimpton, "He'd often be high when he called, and I'd listen for twenty minutes to his jumbled, made-up words, his own logic, and not know what the fuck he was talking about. He'd say, You're just not listening carefully enough.'"

Phoenix's drug use wasn't ruining his acting, but one producer who weighed working with him in 1992 decided he was "largely unreliable." And there were two days filming The Thing in Nashville that fall when, director Peter Bogdanovich says, "the feeling was that he'd taken something. I wasn't sure he could drive the truck [as required for the scene]."

Phoenix was insulted and told Bogdanovich, "This is bullshit. I had half a beer and a cold pill." Some of the rumors about Phoenix's behavior on that set are attributable to his lazy eye: When he flutter-blinked to center his iris, he looked under the influence. That said, he sometimes was.

Flea, who was himself in recovery (and who was not a drug friend), spoke to Phoenix that Christmas, and so did Bobby Bukowski. After Phoenix came over one morning, still blasted on heroin and cocaine, Bukowski waited until Phoenix had taken a nap and eaten one of the garlic-and-raw-veggies-and-serial-glasses-of-water meals he used to cleanse his system and then gently confronted him.

"I'd rather you just point a gun at your head and pull the trigger," Bukowski said. "I want to see you become an old man, so we can be old friends together."

Phoenix wept and wept. "That's the end of the drugs," he promised. "I don't want to go down to the place that's so dark it'll annihilate me."

For several months afterward Phoenix would sometimes all Bukowski for support when he felt the urge to get high. But in January Heart noticed that he'd become distant: almost surly. Phoenix had striven mightily to keep his drug use from her, and he largely succeeded. But this time she realized "a substance might be involved" and asked River. He denied it.

Heart and John repeatedly urged River to take a long vacation in Costa Rica, but he continued to shun the demands; of solitude. Yet he was troubled by intimations of mortality. Early last year he had a recurrent daydream that spirits were coming for him, and he feared the fateful numerology of turning twenty-three on the twenty-third of August. When a friend saw him in a heroin stupor that spring and said, "River, you're going to kill yourself," Phoenix just looked at him, the friend says, "like ~Yeah, so?'"

Last fall Phoenix filmed Dark Blood in an area in Utah reputed to be a magnet for alien visitations, which fascinated him (his latest karmic catchphrase was "Thanks be to UFO Godmother"). He told friends he'd been levitated over his bed, and he would sometimes lie on his patio and shout to the heavens, "Take me, I'm ready! What else is out there?"

But Phoenix was clean and focused in Utah, as he had been that summer. He was in love with Samantha Mathis, whom he'd puppyishly pursued during The Thing Called Love, telling, friends "his head was going to pop off if he didn't get to hold her hand." And he had finally started sifting through his anger, spelunking into his own fault lines. His friends agree that he was strong enough to reemerge; that he was not ineluctably lost, like Jim Morrison or John Belushi. But for the accident of October 31, Phoenix would probably have made it through.

But back in Los Angeles for three days in late October, depressed by the pain of his role as a lonely desert dweller in Dark Blood and by continual on-set fighting, he began with drugs again. He'd always hated Los Angeles. Previously he'd been a public, celebratory user; now he used privately at the Hotel Nikko. Rain and Joaquin had flown out to Los Angeles that final day because Joaquin had an audition for the role of River's brother in Safe Passage. River was excited about the chance to play, at last, a normal young man, who heals his father's blindness. But Rain and Joaquin also sensed that River felt very alone.

ln his last two movies Phoenix had darkened his hair to look older, and it's poignant that River, fed up with his pretty, face, went unrecognized by Johnny Depp that night at Depp's club, the Viper Room. Phoenix looked thin and strung-out in black jeans and Converse sneakers; he looked, finally, anonymous. It was a terrible death, of course--the stricken 911 call from Joaquin; River's eight-minute seizure, his head jerking and his knuckles banging the sidewalk--and yet it was a mistake of youth. He seemed such an old soul it was easy to forget he was only twenty-three.

In Utah, Phoenix would lie on his patio and shout to the heavens, "Take me, I'm ready! What else is out there?"

A FEW NIGHTS after Phoenix died, his family and several close friends like Bukowski and Solgot sat around the table in Micanopy, drinking Gentleman Jack whiskey, John's favorite brand, and remembering River. They got in an uproar of laughter, and a tumbler that came with the whiskey abruptly shattered. Later, when Solgot was at the sink, three more of the tumblers broke simultaneously in the dish rack. "River's a joker," she says.

In two separate memorial services, both held outside on still days, when everyone joined hands to think of Phoenix, the wind suddenly whipped up. He has often been in his friends' dreams, assuring them he is fine, though he seems quiet and sometimes melancholy. "I am still connected to his energy," Heart Phoenix says. "When the wind blows I see River, when the sun shines I see River, when I look in someone's eyes and make a connection I see River. To have death transformed into another way to look at life is his huge gift."

But for others the question of how to remember lingers. In London, Dermot Mulroney ran in to one of River's drug friends, a screenwriter, and slammed him against a wall. "This is how I feel about River's death," Mulroney said. "How do you feel?" The friend said he was clean--now.

Certain scenes of Phoenix's movies are freshly piercing: when Phoenix stops clowning and admits in Little Nikita that "whenever people tell me to be myself I don't know what to do ... I don't know what myself is"; when he gleefully snorts cocaine in Idaho when Keanu Reeves reflects on their three years hustling and says, "What I'm getting at, Mike, is that we're still alive." And in the just-released Silent Tongue, the sequence when the spirit of Phoenix's dead Kiowa Indian wife goads him to commit suicide. In rehearsal, director Sam Shepard roped Phoenix and Sheila Tousey with twine to cement the inescapability of their joint doom, and they play the scene hauntingly; when Phoenix maneuvers the mouth of the rifle under his chin, it's almost impossible to watch. But our wince would not be what Phoenix desired as his legacy.

Nor would he have wanted the other extreme. When 250 people gathered for the family's memorial service under a huge live oak tree at the base of the Phoenix property, the tenor of many of the remarks from the Klingons was, as Suzanne Solgot puts it, "River's in heaven, blah blah blah, it was his time, blah blah blah." "You would have thought he was ninety and had died in his sleep," says Martha Plimpton. "The people who were saying this felt tremendous guilt that they had contributed to his death."

After hearing yet another speaker say, "River needed to go, and he's free now," Bradley Gregg, who'd played Phoenix's elder brother in Stand by Me and who became like an actual brother to him, leaped to his feet and shouted, "River didn't have to die to be free!" Not everyone heard, so he shouted again, "River didn't have to die to be free!" Gregg's wife, Dawn, added a clarion, "Wake up, wake up!" her tears soaking the baby she held in her arms.


Tuesday 10 January 2023

Thursday 18 February 2021

X




“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even Being Right feels Wrong. 

What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that Rain is Poison and Sex is Death? 

If Making Love might be Fatal and if a Cool Spring Breeze on any Summer Afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much •left• except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. 

Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.” 

― Hunter S. Thompson, 

A Generation of Swine : 
Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s 
(Gonzo Papers Vol 2)






Life is a Mystery
Everyone must stand alone


I hear you call My Name

And it feels like Home















“The K Foundation, as Drummond and Cauty called themselves when they stopped being The KLF, burnt their money in August 1994. 

The period of the early-to-mid 1990s is frequently overlooked in our cultural histories, yet it was far more potent and strange than it is usually given credit for. 

In order to understand why it is significant that Cauty and Drummond’s bonfire took place in this period, it is necessary to recognise what was so odd about those years. 

Our mental landscape was very different a century or so earlier. Victoria England had been, on the surface at least, a bastion of certainty. 

The Victorians had three immoveable beacons by which they could orientate themselves and their society: the pillars of Church, Empire and Crown. This, of course, was not to last. 

Charles Darwin had developed a scientific model that was ingenious and ground-breaking, but which had implications. Perhaps wisely, he kept it hidden away in a drawer for twenty years. But in 1859 he published. 

Mainstream scientists and philosophers in the nineteenth century believed that they understood how things were organised, and where the human race belonged, in the natural order of things. But Darwin’s work, in combination with breakthroughs made in the field of geology regarding the age of the planet, caused one of the unshakable pillars of Victorian certainty to crack. The teachings of the Church about the origins of life on this planet had been shown to be wrong

This was a severe failing for an organisation which exists to proclaim an infallible understanding of Truth. The great Churches of the world didn’t react to the new understanding well. In 1870, eleven years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the Vatican formalised the doctrine of papal infallibility


This dogma asserted that the action of the Holy Spirit can remove even the possibility of error from the Pope. The Pope was right, in other words, because he was the Pope, who was right. 

This was clearly a form of circular logic, another of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels, and once that had been recognised the Darwinists found themselves outside the Church’s logic. They could no longer submerge themselves inside the Church and unquestioningly accept what it had to say. 

Calls for the need to have ‘faith’ could no longer be met with reverent acceptance. Indeed, they were increasingly met with knowing smirks. Nietzsche was one who was brave enough to articulate publicly this change in the world. 

God is dead,’ he wrote in 1882, ‘and we have killed him’. This change in understanding may have been unsettling, but it was just a warm-up for the goodies that the twentieth century had in store. New ideas came thick and fast from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Freud, Picasso and Joyce

Every breakthrough seemed to be pulling in the same direction, that of undermining certainty. Things were no longer anywhere near as simple as they had been. Our most fundamental bedrocks – time, space, matter, the rational mind – were discovered to be nothing like as dependable as they appeared. 

We were steaming ahead into uncharted territory. The First World War erupted, and shattered any notion that there was glory in Empire. As the value of Church and Crown eroded in contemporary thought, the public’s need for an unarguable authority gave momentum to politicians, who quickly offered up The State as a candidate. 


They differed in the details, or course –the fascists thought the population should serve the state while the communists thought that the state was the servant of the people –but the methods used to enforce the centralisation of power were essentially the same. 

These ideas played themselves out to their horrendous conclusions during the Second World War. The notion that The State should be The Central Authority in our lives has never seemed credible since. 

As the decades rolled on the search for an unarguable touchstone to replace Church, Crown or Empire in our lives took on ever more urgency. 

For populations still traumatised by the conflict of the 1940s, enforcing social conformity in the 1950s made a lot of sense, yet this was stifling for the generation coming of age after the war. 

In the 1960s they sought liberation, but the philosophies that made so much sense on a personal level did not scale up well to the level of society. 

In the 1970s the attention shifted to the self, but the hedonistic self-indulgence grew to such unbearable levels that punk was needed to tear it down. 

In the 1980s they believed that money and the pursuit of material possessions was the answer. Wealth was pursued, but it did not have the power to satisfy us properly, and that, too, was soon discarded as a candidate for our unassailable personal omphalos. So what next? 

By the time we reached 1990 all options had been tried and found wanting. We could return to The Church, The State, politics, material greed, personal liberation or hedonism if we wished, but we could no longer see them without being aware of their faults. They were damaged goods, still significant but no longer permanent and secure. 

But what other options did we have? Did we have any? 

It appeared not. We were out of ideas. And so there was heard a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in. 

This awful period was brief, and we can date it quite precisely.

It arrived in mainstream culture in 1991, fully formed and simultaneously emanating from many different art forms. 

Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X was published in March that year, and the generation it described suddenly found themselves with a name. 

Another label arrived in July, when Richard Linklater’s no-budget indie movie Slacker reached cinemas. 

The American comedian Bill Hicks’ career started taking off in the UK, and the generation found their philosopher. 

Then, in September, their anthem arrived. Nirvana released the single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and the story of alternative music was changed forever. 

Slackers were not well dressed, because there was no reason to dress smartly. Their uniform was old jeans, Converse trainers and warm, practical lumberjack shirts. They were not career-minded, for there was no reason to pursue the corporate dream. 

They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options rather than just innate laziness. 

They were often well-educated and creative, and were usually portrayed as being talkative and self-obsessed. 

If they had a mission, of sorts, it was to work out how to move forward from where they were. 

With the Berlin Wall down and Thatcher and Reagan out of office, there was a clear sense that the old order had finished. 

Modern historians also draw a line at this point. The historian Eric Hobsbawm coined the phrase ‘the short twentieth century’ to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. 

This is a useful time frame for a historian because it works as a complete narrative. 

Francis Fukuyama’s hugely influential 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man also recognised that a change of great historical significance had occurred. 

Fukuyama argued that an era of great political upheaval had ended and that Western liberal democracy was the final stage of human government. 

He was essentially unable to imagine what could possibly happen next. 

For that was the question that needed to be answered: ‘What next?’. 

Looking to the past didn’t help; it didn’t have any answers and it was all out of ideas. 

The past shrugged as if to say, ‘Good luck. You’re on your own.’ 

At first, Generation X was linked to a sense of relief and a feeling that they had recognised the blind spots of the past and were now facing up to things with a refreshing honesty. 




But as 1991 rolled into 1992 and 1993, this honesty became less invigorating and increasingly unbearable. 

It started to become apparent that they were not going to find a focus for their narrative, or a way to repair the damage to their mental landscape. 

The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface. 




The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the burning of the million pounds and the year Bill Hicks died. 

This was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres that had characterised the twentieth century came to an end. That era was over. 

By this point there was a desperate need for a way out. 
Any way out. 

The changes that signified the arrival of the next era began towards the end of 1994. 

In Britain, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had taken control of the Labour Party and had launched New Labour. 

John Major wrote in his memoirs that his victory in the 1992 general election ‘killed socialism in Britain’. 

Margaret Thatcher was of a similar opinion, as was, it seems, Tony Blair, whose first act upon gaining the leadership of the Labour Party was to remove the socialist ‘Clause IV’ from the party’s constitution. 

After Blair, politics would no longer be led by ideology, but by opinion polls. 

This was the ‘Third Way’, a political discourse dominated by spin, where it was not what you did that was important, but how that played out in the press

In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty paved the way for the modern European Union and, ultimately, the euro. 

In the United States, George W. Bush entered political life in 1994 as Governor of Texas. Netscape released the first version of their Navigator software that year, the first popular web browser, and Microsoft followed with a high-profile launch of their Windows 95 operating system the following year. 

The modern digital era began. 

The world of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook was coming into being. 

The old order was being ripped up. 

The new era was being born, and it was the Age of Networks. 

As the blogger Neuroskeptic notes, during the period from 1945 to 1990 new cults, religions and sects were springing up all over the place. 

This period gave us the likes of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, the Moonies, Jesus Freaks, the Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, the Kabbalah Centre, the Nation of Islam, the New Age, Neopaganism and Wicca. 

Why, he asks, did that outpouring of new religious groups dry up so abruptly and decisively, with hardly any popularly known groups forming after the Waco siege of 1993? 

The question points to a deep change in our culture, and once again marks the early years of the 1990s as the end of an era. 

It was not just new musical genres, it seems, that stopped appearing at that point in time. We can date the end of that era, what Hobsbawm called the ‘Age of Extremes’ to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the information era to the first popular web browser in 1994

What, then, should we make of those years in between? 

They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state. They were a period when the old rules were gone, but before the new order was formed. They were a period, in other words, when normal certainties did not apply, when anything was possible and the strange was commonplace. 

As John C. Calhoun, the seventh Vice-President of the United States once wrote, ‘The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.’ 

Being innate storytellers, we neglect this brief, confusing period and prefer instead the clearer narratives that surround it. 

If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’ll find that each successive one has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the internet during this period. 

The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines. 

The age of John Major and George Bush Sr, it seems, does not attract our attention. 

Our cultural narrative skips from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman late eighties to the Britpop and The Spice Girls mid-nineties quite happily. 

Even the Adrian Mole diaries skip these years. 

This boundary period is a cultural blind spot; we choose not to look at it. 

But there is much that can be learnt from such a time, and great art can be found there. 

In The KLF’s field of music, for example, this brief period brought albums such as Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream’s ScreamadelicaSUPERMAN :, Automatic For The People by REM, Peggy Suicide by Julian Cope, U2’ s Achtung Baby and OasisDefinitely Maybe – all records that are considered the career best, or thereabouts, for those musicians. 

Considering the long careers of many of those bands, the fact that their highest achievements all fall within that narrow period does suggest that there was something in the water at that time, so to speak. 

In the moments that followed the withdrawal of one wave of history you could see, if you chose to look, a brief glimpse of the undercurrents at work in the late twentieth century. 

It did not last long, for the next grand wave arrived and drowned out these subtle workings with energy and noise. And that next wave was noisy. The escape route from the nihilism of the early 1990s was, in the end, mindless optimism. 

Things could only get better. 

Adopting this belief entailed not worrying about the details. And it was fun! 

This, then, became the 1990s that we choose to remember, a time of Cool Britannia, the Millennium Dome and the dotcom bubble. Ego-fuelling cocaine became the drug of choice, BritPop and The Spice Girls were on hand to entertain us, and the modern digital world created itself anew. 

Times were exciting again. 

We could not help but be swept along with that tide, and we found that it supported us to the extent that we no longer felt the need to worry about our foundations. 

How does the death of that era compare to its birth? 

Hobsbawm pinpointed the beginning of that era, the ‘short twentieth century’ of 1914–91, as the beginning of the First World War. This was when the age of empires collapsed upon itself and the political realities of the twentieth century began. 

It coincides roughly with what the American author and lecturer Susan Cain calls a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality

This era’s birth couldn’t have been more different from its death in the 1990s when, having exhausted itself, it quietly laid down and died. 

The period of the First World War was a brutal, violent explosion, when the collapse of the Victorian system engulfed the whole world in sheer bloody horror. Everything –from our social structures to our relationship with technology and the nature of the human condition –was shredded before the unstoppable firestorm. Nothing survived. 

A time of mud, gas and unimagined mechanised slaughter, it is no exaggeration to call this exactly what it was: the darkest point in human history. True, the death toll was higher in the Second World War, but that war had been psychologically understandable in the context of the time. 

No one was in any way prepared for the actuality of The Great War, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable. This was the period that spawned the Cabaret Voltaire. 


As we have seen, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did and an inability to explain or come to terms with their actions. This makes a strange sort of sense when we view this period as the liminal gap between eras. 

There was no narrative context at that point to explain their actions, because the old story had ended and the new one had not begun. 

If Cauty and Drummond had burnt their money earlier in the twentieth century, it would have been seen as a Surrealist act, or perhaps a Situationist one. If they had done it ten years later it would have been understood in terms of the global anti-capitalist movement. 

Doing it in the period between eras made in incomprehensible, for there was no surrounding context that could make sense of what they had done. 

Nothing is really explainable in liminal periods, as anyone who has attempted to understand the First World War using the Victorian world view will have discovered. 

How can you explain an act, except as part of an ongoing narrative? 

The movement that the Cabaret Voltaire created is known as ‘Dada’ –a meaningless, idiotic word which showed their contempt for art itself. Art, as they saw it, was the product of the society that gave birth to it. It was the finest aspect of that society, its highest expression, and by the nature of its transcendent qualities it could glorify and even justify that society. What, though, if that society was rotten to the core? What if you lived in a world so misguided, flawed and terrible that it could create the unthinkable slaughter of the Somme? 

Any art it produced would have to be treated with contempt. 

Any beautiful expression that could in some way redeem the society that formed it would be unacceptable. 

It had to go, all of it

The sensual Art Nouveau style that had so defined the preceding decades collapsed almost overnight. Dada was anti-art. It was negation, a creation that saw itself as destruction. 

Its very nature makes it seem impossible to define or pin down, but its echoes can be heard throughout the twentieth century in movements such as Situationism, Discordianism and punk. 

The word itself oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and no meaning, between being an established movement of many years’ standing to being a spent force the moment the Cabaret Voltaire closed. 

It cloaks itself in gnomic pronouncements that make it appear more of a disembodied conscious presence than an art style. 

‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there . . .’ the painter and sculpture Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada, has said. 

This is usually about as clear as it gets. 

The more you look at the Dadaists’ attempts to define Dada, the more you are reminded of Daoists attempts to define the concept of the Dao. 

The Dao is the central concept in ancient Chinese thought, usually translated as the ‘way’ or the ‘path’.

It also oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and having no meaning. The Dao De Jing, the Daoist central text, begins by declaring that the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. 

As first lines go, this can throw the reader a little. What it means by this is that the Dao is everything and, because a name or definition is a small part of everything, that name therefore cannot be the thing itself. The all cannot be accurately defined, as any definition is limiting. Dao is, by definition, beyond definition, beyond ‘is’ and ‘is not’.

When Arp said ‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there’, he echoed The Dao De Jing which states that the Dao is all heaven and earth, and that the Dao existed before heaven and earth. In light of these comparisons, the Dadaists’ attempts to describe Dada appear as if they are describing something fundamentally similar to the Dao. 

This may initially appear counter-intuitive, of course, because the Dao is associated with peaceful acceptance whereas Dada is violent negation. But Dada emerged during the First World War. The Dao, at that point, would also have been violent negation. One point that many commentators make about Dada is that, while its intention is to destroy or negate, it is still the product of the very thing that it is fighting against. It is a creation of the society that it rejects, and can only exist alongside that society. In the words of Greil Marcus, ‘Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride.’ 

Marcus also discusses the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, ‘. . . an old man, whose life’s work had been the investigation of “modernity,” he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works –technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on –but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called “Dada.”’ 

A Daoist would be amused by Lefebvre’s observation, for a thing to carry its own opposition is anything but modern. This is one of their most fundamental principles and it is depicted in the best-known Daoist symbol, the Yin-Yang. This icon shows a circle, half white and half black and seemingly rotating as if the black and white elements were continually replacing each other. This constant flow between opposites is, in Daoist thought, the fundamental nature of the world. In the centre of the black there is a white dot, and in the centre of the white there is a black dot. This symbolises that each state carries the seed of its opposite –that the Yin always contains the birth of the Yang that replaces it, and vice versa, just as Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati carried the seed of the Discordians and the music industry gave birth to The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Mathematicians also recognised this truth, once they gained a grasp of the nature of chaos. Whenever they looked inside chaos, they found order, and wherever they looked closely at order they found it to be riddled with chaos. Dada can be thought of as a form of Dark Dao, a path that was as sick and feverish as the era that formed it. Dao is an ungraspable concept that contains both the very nature of the world and also the way the world will unfurl. In this context it is no wonder that Dadaists could not define what they had done, as Dao both contains and is more than any single definition. In this liminal period, in this time between eras as the old ways destroyed themselves and before the new order emerged, there was only this fundamental nature of the world remaining, an unnameable Dao that could only be implied by the meaningless noise ‘dada’. The subsequent shift of eras during the early 1990s was a mirror opposite, a small, quiet death that has almost disappeared from history. It was here that The K Foundation, with their meaningless name, performed the act that they could never explain or get over. How different, then, was the fundamental nature of their act of destruction? How close to the underlying nature of the world were they working? The undercurrents that were so briefly visible in the gap between two eras were still exposed. And because the money was burnt in this liminal space between two waves of history, the meaning of the act was not absorbed or dissipated by either of them. The timing, in other words, was perfect. The subconscious was fully exposed when the deed was done.