This only goes to show that that once august body has declared itself an enemy of Insomnauts. Drooling in oblivious dormancy, they act only to empower one who would cordon off territories from them and ultimately us, a blanket obscurantist.

Why would they choose to be so blind?—They are not the judicial, but the legislative twig.

Little miss Buffett (that's Warren, not Jimmy) urged us to unquestioningly submit to the Senate’s anesthesia and a new national status, that of a hiber-nation:

"Yeah, I think Congress is a worry of the American people, particularly what they have seen over the last 12, 18 months. If Congress essentially said we can do this better than Ben Bernanke, I would get very worried."

So, in other words, we should not trust Congress except when they vote to entrust our well-being to someone unelected by us, unaccountable, unauditable.

O sagacious Buffett, O oracular Omahan, Orphean lyre in hand—sing to us your sleepy lays whilst we lay here and watch all non-Insomnauts drift into fiat life, a Lethean lethargy.

O how could we have been so presumptuous, Warren, ever to have deigned to even for a moment consider having skin in the game, eyes on our own interests? Surely no erstwhile democracy shall ever question this Ben Shalom, this bearded shaman wafted in brazier soot in his many mirrored, multi-curtained ziggurat.

Insomnauts, awake!

But, in order not to complacently flag into the slough of despond, we would like to break ranks with the devoutly anti-dogmatic and unaffiliated by nominating U.S. Rep Ron Paul for the Chairmanship of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Dr. Paul would be the ideal candidate to replace the ol' Rip Van Hoodwinkle himself, Ben Shalom Bernake.

Ben, the has-been, the bail-out boy, Prof. Baylor, likes sleeping on the job, likes keeping the whole project cloaked in ops as black as Acheron. O Acharonim obfuscations!

A man for all seasons like a living anachronism, Paul, the Panoptes, armed Argus-eyed with audits—HR 1207 and S 604—will most ably represent his closest constituents: Insomnauts everywhere.

Those inclined to do so will then be paradoxically better able to sleep at night via the in-roads of this vigilant potato.

A medical man, he has already taken the Hippocratic Oath. And speaking of the Ιππο, he knows that that it is only by looking a gift horse in the mouth that one might determine whether or not the horse is Trojan, built in 1913, full of Greeks bearing gifts in Sachs like blind alleys, half-awake.

A giant, lidless, Sauron-like eye watched over today’s launch the of the International Institute of Insomnauts' exploratory commitee.

Our goal: to research the viability of a new manifesto, one from a strictly insomnautical perspective.

On the exploratory panel: Myself, M. Wraith, C. Guedon, J. Law, J. McKay. An emissary from our sister school, the International Necronautical Society (INS) Tom McCarthy was also in attendance, perspicacious as ever, amid a roomful of our most trusted advisors, well-wishers, a few unaffiliated passers-by, and maybe, here and there, a sleeper, a spy. 

As the proceedings proceeded, it soon became clear that everyone who chimed in was always already won-over to our cause, pre-convinced of the eminence of our domain.

Yea, seeing as the insomnautical take on things must always be naturally all-seeing and never-sleeping as from the perspective of a hyper-vigilant Argus Panoptes, it was difficult to extract from the pool of panelists any opposing view whatsoever, counter-angles to this omnimodal consensus conclusion: insomnism must be carried forward at all costs.

We, the usurperfriends, may have been presaged a century ago, we were loath to admit. The event happened to fall on the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto." in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909.

Our eyebeams peered thought these peers, however, saw through their flimsy gauze of century old causes rolling out the red carpet and trumpeting our arrival. Were we to trod down that path untrippingly, unswervingly, unabandoningly, we would have disappointed them, but we did not disappoint. 

 Their fanfare was to us naught but vain cacophony. We are post-futurists, after all.

[click here for our own self-induced theme music]

We began the night by nonchalantly throwing a century-old copy of Le Figaro into a wastepaper basket, just as Marinetti suggested we should, and then, just to spite him, we dumpster dove and resurrected him, disobediently scrutinizing the oft-neglected role of the avant-garde in centuries past. This was done only to orient ourselves. No phony orientalism was left unexposed.

Then, brothers Law, Wraith, and McKay and sister Guedon offered several scintillating rebukes of all consciousness-terrorizing sleeper cells:

The widening chasm beneath our trembling feet now eschews overarching narratives, delves deep into one’s own experience where things are all called into question. And if in the tender precariousness of insomnia our firmest grounds and our finest distinctions become untenable or irrelevant where all the sensorium gets kaliedoscoped, the insomniac will have ample time to write new contingency plans for important things, a trans-valuation...

We ended by laying into the hordes of faux-academic obscurantist jargonizers. This provoked a question from McCarthy as to how we should proceed in quotidian life, as academics and pseudo-academics ourselves, to counteract such a tendency. I pointed towards several of Steven Connor’s list of renounced narcotics from the lazy postmodern apothecary.

It was good question, a tough question. At this point I wished F. Gooding could have been in attendance to assist, as he and I had been discussing just this sort of thing.

After the Q and A we all headed over to the pub for further discussions on this and affiliated topics, and we stayed out late, sucking in the atmosphere of this grand nite, and burning up that oxygen in blue flames behind out all-seeing lidless enemy eyes.

INSOMNAUTS, AWAKE!

The event was supposed to be modeled off a US presidential press conference, so I adapted my usual INS role as Chief of Hemlock Research into the friendly but vaguely threatening equivalent of a Secret Service agent.

True to the message delivered, the messengers were not who they claimed to be, were not the authors of the inauthentic creed they espoused. Tom and Simon (Critchley) had hired some Shakespearean actors to stand-in for them and do the honors, and many of the press were totally taken-in by the charade. Bwa ha ha.

When the Q & A started, I was nervous for the actors, thinking they would have to reveal themselves as such, unable to defend convincingly their inauthentic theses from the audience's scrutiny. But my fear for the poor impostor thespians was unfounded, as Tom and Simon had pre-scripted responses for several presumed lines of questioning. In fact, the first canned answer matched the audience member's question so well that I thought the question, too, was scripted, a plant. But of course you can usually guess what kind of questions you're going to get at these things. Or can you? Tom told me afterwards in the pub that the audience's questions were totally unscripted.  So event unfolded with great serendipity. 

Tom and Simon. Or are they?I think the event succeeded not just because it was entertaining, but also because its theories meshed with its delivery on formal levels; it thus had a certain glow to it as art: complete and confident and convincing and therefore, ironically perhaps, un-phony (for therefore, gasp, authentic?). Such a mesh armors art in manifesto mode like a good chain mail of self-referential loops. Mary Ann Caws preface to her "Century of Isms" manifesto compilation notes how this "occasional coincidence of form and function-- like Stéphane Mallarmé's [...] "Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard" in its defeat of the linear-- demonstrates or makes a manifestation "

Theoretically, both in highbrow and lowbrow registers, the declaration answered a Heideggerian authenticity, or some view of one. Yet much in Tom's declaration seemed fitting for the world of the living rather than the dead. His points should be aptly answered by the International Insomnonautical Institute's upcoming manifesto's enantiodromia section. Stay tuned for it.

As if in scenes from a nineteen-teens sped-up projector film, like some Keystone Cops flick, I found myself running and weaving through dense crowds of billionaire banksters and industrialist tycoons in an urban streetscape. I thus found myself in medias res, in the midst of fleeing the scene of a bank heist. Complicated were the routes of my escape through twisted pipes and pneumatic subways tunnels, elevator shafts, escalators. Somehow the escalator installed me, in instalments (I sectioned off like an insect, with thorax, abdomen, etc) in a period piece getaway car, which was decomposing by the moment. I thought of driving into a ditch as a last ditch effort to avoid complete disintegration. But at the moment of embankment with the bank bags bulging and with bullion aplenty, I awoke, penniless, in my swank Hampstead flat. Lars, my fellow insomnaut, was calling on my mobile, informing me he was on his way to help lug our props to The Serpentine.

freddie makes his manifesto; fannie irons out her woes.When he arrives we call a black cab and load it up with all the Sound Moneyfesto props—wicker baskets, a coat stand, and ironing board and iron, large boxes on which pompous rococo gilt dollar and pound signs were majestically emblazoned, maypole ribbons, a tenor recorder, laptop with a silly power-point, a gong, a guitar—and drove through the morning’s gold-lit streets, down along the west side of Regents Park, and around Hyde Park to The Serpentine’s front doorstep.

Already the Manifesto Marathon was underway, and I kept my eye on the proceedings, though I was more than a little anxious to rehearse as much as possible with the entire cast. Mia took us to a large though cluttered room that we had booked for our rehearsal until about 4 pm, at which point the space would be required by someone by the name of Ono.

Nervous chaos. People coming and going. Actors (Lars, Shenna, Frederick) and musicians (Milo, Katie, Sarah) all came up to the rehearsal chamber in dribs and drabs and worked themselves and their parts into the dramatic Sound Moneyfesto tapestry, thread by thread, until it began to finally take shape. I don’t know whether this is from just being a natural procrastinator, or whether it is some kind of arts practice modus, or maybe a bit of both, but the last-minute-ness of the whole affair gave the whole affair a rough-edged, though honest and energized vibe.

There’s nothing worse than watching a play that has been rendered stale by being rehearsed into the ground, until the performers are “comfortable” with their parts.

Even this last-minute attempt at rehearsal was cut short and frantically moved into another room by the stressed-out though kindly accommodating Serpentine staff. We rehearsed a few more times in an admin office, huddling next to staff trying to use faxes and whatnot.

Tiring of this, and feeling like we were imposing, we decided to take a break, which allowed us all some time to stroll around and watch some of the other manifesto makers. I watched Tom McCarthy’s necronautical manifesto with a bit of pride of affiliation. Was it some childish feeling of loyalty, then, (or was it my recent insomnia?) that made me yawn under the influence of Gilbert and George? Art, I know, is no place for petty rivalries—so maybe they just deserved it!

I started setting up some of our props behind the stage just as Yoko Ono was back there getting ready to go on. I thought of what a cliché it would be if I should give her a mean look, in response to her (likely overstated or sensationalized) role in the Beatles break-up. Ha ha. That would have been silly. Instead I just smiled at her as I handed her tech a mic stand.

As Yoko Ono took the stage, we insomnauts met one last time for one final go-through, once again amid the Serpentine admins who were still trying to run an office. We ran the whole thing straight through for the first time without stopping. Lars got to go through his banking bail out routine which, we determined, was hilarious.

Just as Ms. Ono was ending her semaphore appeal for love, we moved the rest of the props and the musical instruments into place backstage. From there we could tell that the manifesto that was supposed to go on next was having some technical trouble, so one of the tech directors came up and asked us if we could go on straightaway, which we did. We began. Everything hit the stage within a few moments: The power point, cello, violin, props, words in the right order. And then the performers themselves—The Insomnautical Theatre for the Ridiculous.

And with that, our new guise, The Sound Moneyfesto was under way. Frannie at her laundary; Freddie making his masterwork manifesto, announcing:

A manifesto should have entertainment
value and food for thought for hungry throngs,
be revolutionary... yet fitting.

A manifesto should assure investments
of our precious short attention spans stay sound,
by seeking funding from the town council.

It should be a peerless document,
on gold foil on velum, be well advertised,
with carousel orchestras of epic machinery,

conveyor belts, gears, cranes
to divvy out research-grant enlightenment
on railroad ties with ties to industry,

a model on which to build
a model society.
                           But how... in this Disaster.
The town council's spectacular collapse.

Funds dried up from over-speculation.
Too like these two lips. Speculative:

Every word I say. 

The first scene was flawless, but my ‘Mission from Mars’ song got marred by my megalomaniaphone, which shorted out once or twice, just as I was singing about Greenspan and his so-called wife. Fannie and Freddie were their well intentioned but sadly inept selves. Llarsy-loo was brill as bail out man, Prof. Baylor.

The final scene went really well and I was told by Milo afterwards that the song ‘The Charge of the Bald Crediteers’ sounded smooth, like a studio recording, with a well-balanced mix.

The maypole dance at the very end, coinciding with ‘The Charge of the Bald Crediteers’, seemed to have its intended surreal effect. Applause. Afterwards I was on cloud nine and a half and hardly remember helping to dismantle things. Almost left my precious recorder, but went back for it, and hugged it. It is that precious to me.

A lovely after-party at swank upscale night club in Covent Garden. I was even able to get my cast in the doors, as well as some friends of mine whom I grabbed out of the audience. Free drinxxx. Always nice. We schmoosed and caroused. We got to chatting with Agnès Varda, who compared our performance to Eugene Ionesco…or some kind of high school rendition thereof. Really? Oh cruel. A hit. A palpable hit.