THE MIRACLE FILTER

Audio Recordings (Tapes 6 - 11)

February – April 1994

The FLAT recordings until now had all been straightforward unaltered audio-cassettes documenting social interactions at the gallery. There was little, if no manipulation of either the tape (physically) or the content being recorded, until the recording of the Miracle Filter series.

Horsbrugh using the 'Miracle Filter' recordings as source material for his writing, 1994. In the background can be seen the "Miracle Filter" (the tape deck) itself.

Horsburgh:    [Peter Styversant] founded New York in 1653. King-size, rich choice tobaccos, and the miracle filter, make Peter Styvesant the international passport to smoking pleasure.[1]

“Miracle Filter”, was a phrase taken from a box of Peter Styvesant cigarettes which described the quality of their filters. The choosing of this phrase was in a sense, a word play on the notion of the ‘filter’. The tape-deck used for our recordings was then referred to as the ‘miracle filter’, in that it ‘filtered’ out all our ‘jargon’.
On the evening of this first recording, Barry, Horsburgh, and I were sitting around at the FLAT. I mentioned a game that a friend, Kearn Bamber and I used to play. We would take a text and read it in a tone or voice that was divorced from the content of the text. For example – one would adopt an angry voice while describing the mechanics of a car engine. In this way the signifying voice would be out of phase with the signifying text. The secret to the game was to try and sound as serious as possible; to make one’s words seem believable.
With what, for me, had been a rather arbitrary reference to the game; Horsburgh hurriedly got the tape‑recorder and a pile of books. We passed out the books randomly and began to read arbitrarily in a ‘conversational tone’. As Horsburgh had trained to be an actor, he slipped into the mode with greatest ease, sounding authentic yet irrational. But all three of us participated, and as each individual spoke, our readings began to develop into ‘conversations’. Amoung us, an audio exquisite corpse materialized.

Horsburgh:    Thomas! Every passenger of oriental traditional medicine
Barry:              was a failure. And because of German counter attacks
Horsburgh:    I discovered ash.
Barry:              If only an operation may be explained by the mistakes made in planning the cases
Allen:               or by use of Matisse cut-outs.

Barry:              What do we know? The reasons they left
Horsburgh:    the three kinds of bladder
Allen:               was to continue working as a ticket examiner
Horsburgh:    toward the discharge of toxins
Allen:               on trains.[2]

Barry 1994.

 

Five tapes were recorded with this process, and during the course of making these audio-tapes we included such improvisations as the insertion of Afrikaans and mock arguments. Significant was the fact that we used old books as sources for our ‘scripts’.
In writings for the Situationist International publication, French writer, Guy Debord, the leader of the Situationist movement, described the revival of ‘bad books’ to produce a new kind of ‘literature’. He distinguished this practice from that of the Surrealists ‘automatic writing’ and spoke to the idea of ‘unintentional participation’ of those authors whose words were appropriated.

The first visible consequences of a widespread use of détournement, apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the revival of a multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive (unintentional) participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly extensive transformation of sentences or plastic works that happen to be in fashion: and above all an ease of production far surpassing in quantity, variety and quality the automatic writing that has bored us so much.[3]

At that time, Horsburgh had introduced the group to the writings of Debord, and we regarded our game at that time as an act of détournement. Defined by Guy Debord in his writings for the Internationale Situationniste #3, détournement was:

…the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each détourned autonomous element - which may go so far as to lose its original sense completely - and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

…practical because it is so easy to use.[4]

And declared that:

the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese Walls of understanding.[1]

In our interpretation of the process, détournement maintained a strong linkage to the Burroughs ‘cut-up’. And indeed, in Methods of Détournement, Debord and Wolman described how the bringing together of independent expressions could be used to create a new form:

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used. It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one, one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish presentation of ‘citations’.[2]

It is worth noting that the use of the ‘appropriated’ text did not originate with the notion of détournement. Such operations could be seen in the strategies of re-contextualization in the ‘production’ of the ‘ready-mades’, and Lautréamont, in the late nineteenth century, had coined the slogan:

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it.[3]

Considered to be a precursor by the Surrealists, the Count of Lautréamont or Isidore Ducasse died in 1870 at the age of 24. He was acknowledged by Debord for creating work “whose appearance [was] far ahead of its time”[4] and he provided the classic definition for the surrealist project by describing the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.”[5]

EXCERPTS from THE MIRACLE FILTER February – April, 1994

The first four tapes are constructed by Horsburgh (H), Barry (B) and myself (A).

MIRACLE FILTER 2

Recording (Tape 6)

H:     Thomas, every passenger of oriental traditional medicine
B:      was a failure. And because of German counter attacks
H:     I discovered an ash.
B:      If only an operation may be explained by the mistakes made in planning the cases
A:     or by use of Matisse cut-outs.

H:     Stalin […] with his top officers
B:      causing the Soviet head-quarters to give up using […] which I suppose is similar
H:     to the illness that the Southern Chinese consume themselves with in the […] parts of his body.
B:      The inadequate numbers of the heavy support of weapons, notably tanks and artillery were used for exploiting success
H:     and led to the advent of Buddism in China.
B:      Also, an unfortunate consequence of the operation.
H:     Like lightened salvation!
B:      Exactly!

H:     In essence the teachings are about man and his dependency on
B:      the Soviet Defensive in the South […]
H:     which is nothing other than the voice of nature
tied down to the German army group
H:     and they had the last word for the reverses at the front. Stalin had dealt mercilessly with his top offices.
B:      The Soviet forces disrupted this plan and […] set free their
H:     twenty-two thousand aircraft and up to twenty thousand tanks
A:     to work on the docks for a year to save money.
H:     The missing word is there engraved in stone and fused in glass.
B:      The unsuccessful actions
H:     of the figures of self
B:      was another reason
H:     why the autonomic nervous system under the direction of the triple […] diffuse organ…

B:      What do we know? The reasons they left
H:     the three kinds of bladder
A:     was to continue working as a ticket examiner
H:     toward the discharge of toxins
A:     on trains.

B:      The man who blows [dealt] can actually
H:     call it back to the sweat glands
A:     reflected in garish pastel images
B:      and an auxiliary blow
H:     to subdue the pain.

B:     And there was nothing with which to replace them
H:     when faced with a particularly painful localised pressure point all life on planet earth breaks down.
B:     The defenders began to feel the shortage of glass,
H:     air and food
A:     and gravel-chips. And gravel-chips were leading to the work of road gangs imbedded in the resin block
B:     growing pressure
H:     in the human metabolism
A:     witnessed many times before took on a new meaning.
H:     This helpful advice still remains
A:     making sculpture rather than functional objects.

H:     But only he[…] in the trunk
B:     had taken globalisation
H:     bug-eyed.
A:     All of this
B:     wealth of military equipment […] not only based on the size of the production in the mountains
H:     but on tracing this scar of the ears
A:     creates a supernatural aura that demands a religious silence
B:     to meet the needs of
A:     post-medieval
H:     sexual sensitivity.

B:     In those great times the fur in the front and the rear was revealed
H:     to the internal government’s massage.
B:     The rear did more than supply the front
H:     and pressed the eyeballs together toward the inside.
B:     It inspired the front with lofty ideas
H:     and all of these were meant to receive the widest publicity […]

H:     Lack of urine flow
A:     Shirtless in the reaction
H:     Considerable vulnerability
A:     to the defined attitude of
H:     swelling bellies.

B:     Electricity
H:     caused ceaseless laughter,
B:     mass production,
H:     continuous anger,
A:     a pair of old Lebanese,
H:     perpetual frowns on the mouths of swords

H:     Bad breath belonging to the absence of feeling and hands
B:     or 100 railway stations

A:     Scoring projectors, psychodelic
H:     army force
B:      to win the war with a lightening stroke
A:     or smoking a big cigar.

B:      While these forces were strong enough to attack
H:     Buddhism in Europe.

B:      Preserve the secret of
H:     the seat of spiritual faculties
B:      in the new offensive.
H:     This was the heart of insufficient circulation
B:      as these quotations show.

H:     All the diseases of the eye
A:     have given up some press-club issues.

B:      However Stalin, instead of a whole series of local offenses,
A:     was excruciatingly ambivalent about both his fame and his physical attractiveness.
B:      These were the main aims which governed his decisions.
A:     He had girl’s pounding on his bedroom door all night
B:      in the first days of the offensive. OK.
A:     He did rather encourage this behavior to a certain extent.

H:     Anglo-phones
B:      experience all sorts of killings.
A:     Superfluous!
H:     What is the function of this organ?
A:     To move back to Cambridge!

B:      Hy het verwys na die sware leenskap van 1878 op die ramp uitgesak het en toegeskryf aan die groot skeepse […]
H:     all serve chronic indigestion
B:      van die Republiek is nooit om die Volke geskiet nie
H:     and alone it ensures the chemical transformation of food and its absorption.

H:     Thomas, you are full of shit! When a shipwrecked man is found clinging barely alive to flodsam, any tender loving care or pampering is sure to terminate him.
B:      By […] het Moshesh
H:     Ingelepe!? The initial trial is thus followed by […] where all upper hands are put to the test!
B:      Een keer het die Basuto opperhoof […] wat hy het gese. Besef jy Venter dat jy op hierdie oomblik in volle en […] kan maar beslus omgestaan op sy borsel en dood en […] gese: Hier staan ek, Moshesh
H:     in Hawaii
B:      Neem jou assegai en steek hom deur hierdie hart van my […] Die barbar het die wit man se houding bewonder en sy […] afgesien
H:     for the repopulation of enzymes.
B:      Well exactly! So what’s the point here?

B:      From whatever angle we look at these comment they manage to presume
H:     the highest category.
A:     But,
B:      it’s a Miracle Filter.

 

MIRACLE FILTER 3
Recording (Tape 7)

B:      I wouldn’t be surprised if I died like a boxer.

A:     I have friends!
B:      Five or six new ones show up every week.
H:     What is striking about this story?

A:     Excuse me, I was probably the first English hit. OK!
H:     You are the most advanced stage of the liver, Siemon. You are diseased!
A:     I was simply affected by Brown’s colleagues.
B:      Unless you are initiated.

A:     Satanist!
H:     Satanist? The complicated symbolism of expression is remarkably similar to nakedness. Look! Ok, listen. To be naked is to be oneself.
B:      That’s a personal thing.
H:     No, to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not be recognizable.
B:      It’s a personal thing.
H:     It’s a naked body!
B:      I like to go with four people at once.
H:     You also like to go with a painting that has been sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France.
B:      Who I know can handle the element of danger.
H:     Thomas, compare the expressions of these two women. Copare the expressions of these women.
B:      I’m always hoping that I am making things look better. I never set out to destroy anything.
H:     The absurdity of your male flattery reached its peak… Well the absurdity of this male flattery reached its peak in the public acedemic art of the nineteenth century. Many state of business discussed in paintings like this.
B:      Ja, but they don’t meet the stereotype of a drop-out.
H:     Because when one of them felt he had been unwitted he looked up in consolation. No thanks!

 

MIRACLE FILTER 4

Recording (Tape 8)

 

H:     I have a question. Is the wall often presented as a myth?
B:      No, it’s a type of mental disorder marked by delusion.
H:     OK, granted that, does graffiti art try again and again to break through the wall; and open its plaster to give you a panoramic view?
B:      No, it’s a natural method of sexual intercourse between males.
H:     No Thomas, the phenomenon of the wall exercises a fascination for the art, while as a source of inspiration.

A:     I cannot deny, it was my finger.
H:     The finger of the past no longer exists as it once did.
A:     It’s gone?
H:     The allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl. Your finger is behind bullet-proof perspex, Siemon!

A:     Bursting with sexual energy… but plagued by bad skin!

 

MIRACLE FILTER - “LOVE & MONEY”
Recording (Tape 9)

H:     Plots of ground in dying Christianity. Colours of my enemies.
B:     I am starting to loose you. Can I just respond?
H:     OK, go ahead.
B:     The spirit of pathological condition and inability to avoid using certain drugs.
H:     Sweet zealous contemplation.
A:     I agree. Shall we now partake in actions that we have so wholeheartedly waited for?
H:     Its like making a diebag.
B:     That’s right.

H:     Dreams are the conventions of chance
B:     a type of galvanometor.
A:     We have been soiled by unknown substances and activities.

A:     I propose a toast…
H:     To swallows in old brides-maid’s clothes…
A:     No…no…no… We will never match the perfection of the mass-produced.
H:     We will only be the webs and pins in the splits of the eye.

 

THE REAL MIRACLE FILTER

Recording (Tape 10)

This is the fifth tape in Miracle Filter series. Although called the “Real Miracle Filter” it does not feature any read text as performed in the earlier tapes (6 to 9), rather it consists of general social interaction Samkelo Matoti, Aliza Levi and Tamlyn Martin join Barry, Horsburgh and Allen in conversation at the FLAT. With Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” as a backdrop, a gentle mood is littered with discussions about “Paris-Texas”, Waco-Texas, the “raisin-bun theory” and other topics. The section below is quite interesting only because the Miracle Filter tape that followed this one is called “Heaven” (Tape 11).

H:     There was this guy in New York, in 1920, who called himself God. He was this black preacher living in Harlem. He called himself God and his headquarters “Heaven”.
M:    I think its true.
B:     Imagine if he really was God.
H:     He was an absolute ruthless […] monger and he had this 8-block commune which he called “heaven”
M:    […] monger! What did he do, man?
H:     He would extort everyone in the neighborhood and say: “Hay God’s getting itchy.”
M:    Crazy!
H:     Ja, I think he was a little off. After dinner every night they would have wild orgies in “Heaven”. All of the angels would get stripped down first and that was when everyone would get drunk and would have sex.
M:    So they reckoned they were in Heaven?
H:     Ja and people would send in letters addressing them to God, Harlem, NY. And they would get to him.
B:     And what happened?
H:     I think he might have killed someone.
M:    I think it is quite an interesting story that… But what do you think about people with influence like that?
H:     A lot of those things are built around personality. The cult of personality… About cultivating an ego which sustains itself.

Here Barry, Levi, Matoti, Martin and Horsburgh discuss going through keyholes in time. This is also the last track on the first FLAT CD compilation.

B:     …what each song means though because the whole tradition is really being lost. As much as the recording is actually capturing the tradition, it actually signifies the…
H:     disintegration.
B:     Ja, the disintegration.
M:    Fuck. Did you hear stories about black magic?
H:     Tell us about some.
L:     Ja, tell us some stories.
M:    You know things about witchcraft? It is very strange that people can […].
TM:What kind of things are you thinking of?
M:    Well like… actual realities that people can go through holes. Keyholes.
H:     Ja, I’ve heard of that.
M:    You know, like vanish…vanish in front of the eyes of the people.
L:     So do you believe them?
M:    Ja… and I think I’ve seen a ghost. It’s strange.
H:     Ja I have to, when did you see a ghost?
M:    A few years ago. It was at night. We were sitting at my dad’s place. And there was this huge mountain. There was this light. I know that… because I didn’t confront the whole situation…
L:     […] go into that walk.
M:    What I’ve heard from people in very distant places. Apparently these guys were ready for circumcision… This dude told me it was like this sun like shoes that dragged him on the ground. It was really like it was going after him…
L:     There is such a fine line between what people call hallucination… and reality.
M:    I don’t think so Aliza…

At this point Barry puts on the “Kenya and Tanzanian Witchcraft & Ritual Music” CD and begins to read from the CD cover. Horsburgh, reading from a cigarette box, joins in and another “Miracle Filter” commences. Sections of this recording also appear on FLAT CD 1. Regular conversation continues after a few minutes, however some texts are read randomly throughout the entire interaction.

B:     The illnesses are expelled from the bodies in a dramatic finale heard here
H:     and founded New York in 1653. King-size, rich choice tobaccos, and the miracle filter, make Peter Styvesant the international passport to smoking pleasure.

B:     The initiation of a Taita girl into the tribe includes a secret ritual at night, during which the girl expects to be eaten alive by an animal in front of the elders; she has been led to believe that her remains will be reassembled at dawn by sacred crows who come down from the Taita hills. In the morning, the uninitiated are shown the girl's “remains”, which are simply bones that the elders have thrown out during the night after feasting. Thus is the mystery of the ceremony kept alive through generations. The "animal" is very realistic: as “secret” songs are sung, an elder, dressed up in skins and chained to a man, crawls along the ground and approaches the terrified girl. An instrument, which is supposed to sound like the hungry animal thirsting after the flesh of the initiate, is played by another elder hidden behind a blanket in the gloom of the hut. The elder rubs his fingers up and down a stick resting upon a pot which has a skin drawn tightly across it: the vibrations that result produce a sinister tone. The Mwari rite has now almost entirely died out.
H:     Thomas, where is that from?

B:     In a way the true function is still there. But that doesn’t mean that its not working - that the function isn’t happening. Because even if it were happening, you wouldn’t know. You can take a rugby ball if you don’t know what it is supposed to do. You don’t know what you supposed to do with it and you can use it for the wrong reasons.
M:    Thomas, do you know when you are going to get married?
B:     No, never.
M:    Don’t you ever think about that?
B:     No, I don’t really think about marriage.
M:    Do you know when you are going to get what you want - what you have chosen as your destiny?
B:     Probably after death.
M:    Because you seem like this whole certain creature.
B:     Do you know what “umkundwabenta” means?
M:    What?
B:     Umkundwabena. It’s “dog-face”, “dog hair”. What is that? What is your perception of it?
M:    Othlogo genjani…
B:     What is you perception? What does it mean to you? It means “the bare-footed one”. It’s the spirit of the city. It’s the spirit of the city.
M:    You can call it like in many ways.
B:     You can call it anything. I know that but what does it mean to you? It’s the one with the ragged clothes.
M:    Ragged clothes?
B:     Ja.
M:    Hay, have you seen that dude.
B:     name… I’ve given him a name… He’s the man who lives in himself.
M:    Have you seen that dude? Have you spoken to him?
B:     Ja, he keeps a dead cat around. Its so that the lizards don’t crawl into his body when he is sleeping.
M:    He eats raw eggs.
B:     He lives in himself. He doesn’t need the city. He doesn’t need anything. All he needs is himself.
M:    It’s strange. The other day I met him and he can’t feel any pain you know. He’s got like this ring stuck onto his finger. And the rest of his finger is swollen. It seems sore, painful. But he’s stuck into that.
B:     Because it doesn’t matter.
M:    But to me, to my eyes…
B:     Because you are on the one side of reality and he is on the other side of reality. You can’t understand his reality and he can’t understand your reality because you are too removed, you are too far away.
M:    But still…
B:     When he gets hungry and you get hungry, he doesn’t eat food.
M:    […] He thinks of himself as these bells above, from the bible…
B:     He lives in himself.
M:    No, I’m talking in terms of how he goes about…
B:     He’s our shadow.
M:    Our shadow. To me he’s like you.
B:     Yes. But the fact is that you still recognize him apart from everyone else.
M:    To me, he is like that dude I saw in Hillbrow. Like something that is not supposed to exist within my circles.
B:     Because he lives in himself. He is his own entity. He needn’t exist for us. But he also doesn’t need us to exist. He’s removed.

This section appears on FLAT CD 1

H:     I had to get rid of that idea that haunted me all the time. Why didn’t I kill bed-bur the very day that we had doubts about that ugly game he was playing. Starting from that point I argued with myself: why do you have the right to kill? My conclusion was that end justified means. My end was to make a successful break. Stretched out between the bow and the mast and I slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept.
B:      Isn’t anything more important?
H:     I slept and slept and slept towards the sea under my fingers. I slept and slept and slept and slept on the surface where the river met. And I slept in the middle and it was strong and I slept like a big bruise.
B:      Shoot low with the matches. Pushing them idly into powerful patterns with their long fingers and watched a beautiful mouth pushed up…
H:     And I slept and slept and slept and slept and slept into a stiff quart of rum and a sky sail in a jib. And I slept into the bows in the name of God. And I slept and slept and slept and slept and slept.
B:      Not savagely?
H:     No, the flood tide lasted six hours.

 

THE MIRACLE FILTER – HEAVEN
Recording (Tape 11)

This is the sixth tape in the Miracle Filter series. This cassette consists of mainly ad-libbed free speech and indeed is the most confident and focused of all the tapes. But then again it does mark a shift in the process and therefor it can also be seen as a transitional recording. Here, Horsburgh takes on the persona of God and conversations between Eve, Gabriel and Michael Landon take place. Extracts found on FLAT CD 1.

A:     God, is that you?
H:     Er… yea, who’s this? Who is it?
A:     Its me, Eve.
H:     Eve? Oh, what are you doing?
A:     Oh, I’m just hanging around.
H:     I think the telephone is ringing. Just go check.
A:     Me, we don’t have a phone.
H:     Of course we do. Gabriel installed one last week. Would you please just go and check.
A:     No, no, no, we don’t have a phone, I’m sorry.
H:     OK, just ten seconds. OK here I am. Its me in the person, can’t you tell? Oh shit! I’m sorry I am assuming the form of a tree.
A:     I just wanted to find out if Adam and I were married, officially? Do you know?
H:     Eve… are you aware of the burden of holy matrimony?
A:     No.
H:     Do you have the slightest idea of what it means to devote your life, your entire life, in economic, social and religious bond.
B:     [Enters, after finding out what happened to the FLAT’s telephone.] He installed it in the wrong apartment. It’s next door.
A:     Adam, please help me. I am talking to God and he won’t tell me if we are married or not.
H:     What do you mean he installed it in the wrong compartment? What do you mean by that? You are telling me… the telephone… he installed it… What are you telling me? What is this?
B:     He installed it in Linith’s apartment.
H:     You mean he installed it in the wrong apartment? What the fuck is Gabriel doing? Would some one please tell me what the fuck Gabriel is doing? Peter…Peter…

B:     Is this reverse-charges?
H:     That’s a good question. Is this reverse-charges?
A:     This is a radio!
B:     Don’t ask me you should know these things, omnipotent one.
H:     Look, I attend to seven hundred million galaxies a day. Not only that I have to contend with the fact that scientific evidence is accruing against me. Have you heard about the fact that the big-bang theory had been discredited? That was the last outpost of every religious bastard on the planet.

H:     Look Eve, go… go…
B:     To Hell…
H:     Gabriel, it’s not necessary at this point, would you please… do you mind? Look Eve, go down to Adam, and tell him you want to feed him something. OK, seduction is an art which you must learn.
B:     He’s already had the apple.
H:     He’s already had the apple?
B:     He swallowed the whole thing. In one bite.
H:     Why the fuck didn’t anyone tell me? Here I was attending to the destruction of large portions of earth with floods and plagues and boils and things and no one tells me that he has eaten the apple! This is central. This is absolutely central to everything that is going to happen for the next four billions years on earth.
A:     Well we were hungry.

H:     Michael! Where’s Michael? Have you seen Michael?
A:     Michael Landon?
H:     No! Michael the Angel of Death.
A:     Oh well, Michael Landon is right here.
H:     Where is the Angel of Death?
B:     He’s digging graves.
H:     He’s digging graves. Well could you get him on the telephone. Could you locate him by means of radio-active-triangulation? Do we have triangulation devices in heaven?
H:     [Over a speaking device] Michael! Come down to heaven, for a couple of minutes. Come here.
B:     How did you get past the gates?
H:     Is that you Michael? Michael come closer, I can’t see you, the light is obscuring your features.
A:     Hi, I am Michael Landon. I am auditioning for a play here.
H:     Wait a minute, weren’t you in that thing about the angel… Heaven… Heaven Doesn’t Want me or Heaven & Hell, or something. What was it called?
B:     I think you should send him back.
A:     No I was in Little House on the Prairy.
H:     Are you really Michael Landon?
A:     Yes.
H:     Wow, its really great to meet you. I mean you’re famous. My stature is falling. I mean what I think I need to do is brush up my image.
B:     No kidding, you are spending your prime time talking to Michael Landon.
H:     Of course, I’m talking to Michael Landon. The man knows how to sell himself. The man has got contacts in the world of show business. Which I feel as though I require in order to reclaim my position as a superior being on this planet.

A:     Hi, I’m Michael Landon’s wife.
H:     Are you Mich…Oh I am very glad to meet you. Do you feed him anything special? Do you give him vitamins or anything?
A:     On special evenings I can speak with a forked tounge.
H:     Jesus, this is Michael Landon’s wife.

H:     What do you think? We need this Jesus character. What is he going to do? He need’s to do something. He needs a gimmick. Love! You know I like that, its fresh, its original, it hasn’t really been used yet. There was Plato, there was Socrates. Moses didn’t really talk about love.
B:     Make him a revolutionary.
H:     Yea, a revolutionary who preachers about love. It’s got a damn nice ring to it, hasn’t it? We should write poetry, Gabriel, you and me. I think we should just sit down and write some poetry, one day. We can be poets! Gabriel, you’ve done what!?
B:     I’ve done a few cut-ups.
H:     What are cut-ups, Gabriel? I'm, I'm thinking about, like about Shakespeare. You know? Like bad verse. And you're talking about cut-ups? God, you're in anti-art already, Gabriel? Fuck, Gabriel should be running this show!
B:     Is that what you suggest?
H:     Gabriel, you don’t have the voice for it. That is what it boils down to… is the voice. Look I am telling you. Look at Plato. Look at Socrates. They all talked about the primacy of speech, you know. Self present speech. That’s what we are about. We are about talking. We are about people talking. You know, people getting in touch. We want a better standed of living for the entire planet, OK. And you could not pass that off with your piddley little voice.

B:     You know what will regain your popularity?
H:     What’s that Gabriel?
B:     I think you need a sex change.
H:     A sex change. Hermaphrodism. Do you mean hermaphrodism? Personally, first of all, we need to get rid of this illusory Luciferian. And then we can talk about the possibility of me exchanging genders at random because that interests me. I mean doing it once a week interests me, you know. I mean keeping people on their toes, so they don’t know whether they are addressing he or she, or whether they are going to be hit by lightening, because they are doing something… I mean that… that to me is power. You know. Not telling people the rules, and waiting till they fuck up cause they didn’t know them and then hitting them with the lightening bolt. I mean that, that’s true power. You know! [Tape starts breaking up. Tape wobbles.]