Symptoms of a museum, part 1

I choose to appropriate the word. The word 'museum' now just means what I read into it, it just 'means' what I pronounce. So it becomes a specification more than a description arrived at through careful observation and analysis. Pronouncements, specifications, commandments, hard-knocks.

And here goes.

A museum is a catalog of the lost and found registry,

When I say "the" lost and found registry, I mean a specific one Of course there are lots of those out there, if you are Japan, one at every station.

I mean the specific registry that journalists run. Journalists who have some interest in history. Journalists who have learnt a thing or two and fancy themselves with other identifiers. Like: historian, curator, critic, why even a director of a museum collection or something. A registry that a journalist runs is always operating desperate reconnoissance missions. Missions that hope to catch hold of things before they disappear. Catch hold of things before they become ghosts. The journalist (sorry a upper-case J will just be too much) pickles these border-line ghosts and proclaims a museum. But museums are not pickle shops. I mean they are lots of things but they are not pickle-shops. So pickling border-line ghosts is one, and then getting real'n'greasy with them is another. Imagine an all-night orgy with ghosts. Where will your mind be? So these don't just bind a history-text with architectural floss and money. They really play the coroner, the mourning chamber, the autopsy chief, the jazz performer. The cheap massage (and other tricks) offering-guy.

Of course there are museums pretending to be talking about the present. Offering the juiciest carrot of them all, for letting also-rans some show to be running-now. So you know escape-the-rat-race exit route. You land up in bed with a journalist who is going to musify (new word!) you. Seeding a monument to the unmarked, undeclared. Like fox searchlight, taking independent movies and putting them in theatres all over the galaxy. But sometimes I find these to be more like half-way houses. So sometimes these kind of museums don't make the cut. When in doubt, ask yourself, does this museum rock my foundations? If yes, check. If no, no-go.

A museum plays with naked power,

By default and also not. Power is access to the server room. Access not because you are the server administrator but because you are a punk. Faith in piracy, eloquently supporting the case of anyone you feel like supporting. Irrespective of the case fitting the pattern or not. Power is not having the wheel in your hand but still being able to turn the direction of the vehicle. Not begging for the wheel but doing without it.

Foolhardy risk-taking may betray a nonchalance, a callous disregard for mortality. But it displays the urge. To know how hard the kick will hurt, you need to see the kicker, feel-up the thigh bones. Power does not mean having the switchboard in access, power means being the suicide bomber and the paratrooper in the same split-screen psyche.

Power means being in the play and citing all kinds of stupid reasons to not play-along. But staying-put and playing with myself at home. Playing with myself is an act of power. Power is in moments, not in positions, not in jobs, not in names, not in staying power or hit-rate.

Museums are refugee camps for mal-adjusted punks,

Adjustment is a clinically pathogenic tendency. To feel comfortable, work hard at digging-in a hole and then snuggling-in. Thorns on your ass, prickly urges that are craft moments of comfortable torture. Lubricants that don't work. Meditation spells noisily disturbed. Museums have their doors open for the mal-adjusted. The mis-fits. Not in the punk, non-compliant, oddball-genius way. Mal-adjusted are the things that don't turn up in the search result. Everything that didn't fit the pattern-search.

As a refugee-camp for mal-adjusted punks, museums are really running a shuffling container. It is a bid to get unstuck from the cycles. The mal-adjusted is the off-key, you don't risk seeing your members on the magazine cover. It becomes the antidote for dulling the crystal-clear, sharp-as-a-blade propaganda floating around. Stifling aspiration at the roots. What do you aspire to? Peer pressure is an impossibility if there are no peers. Root for the underdog, if you have to root at all.

Museums are stand-up comedy concerts, they fuck with everyone and wear irreverence on their sleeve,

Museums are at the end of the food-chain of whichever field they represent. There is no sales, there is no need for more money, there is more of it where it comes from. So the museum if a middle finger to all the middle-men, all the facilitators, enablers. They behave like kingmakers and whether there is magic or not in their magic-wand, they pull it out all the same. Fucking with everyone and feigning irreverence is one of the privileges reserved for the comedian-in-the-house.

The comedian-in-the-house is whoever has the guts to stand at this moment, whoever has the guts to put their head outside the window and holler, whoever can make you laugh. Slap them, leave the room. Do whatever. The comic is not going to stop. The comedy is going to be relentless, non-stop. And the figures in the front-row are going to get fingered. Freedom of speech was invented for the comedy stage only - fart in any direction, the stink gets home. Sometimes you laugh only because you came to a comedy performance. Hysteria builds up, layer upon layer.

Museums are games, rule-based systems,

You can play a game with a machine, because a machine will always faithfully follow rules. There is room for faltering, for exceptions. Museums, which we are talking about are like machines. There is no room for calling the people-you-met-at-the-party in. No room for being whimsical, writing your agenda for the year on a roll of toilet paper. Museums are machines for playing games. Games, according to popular diagnosis: rules, goals, rewards, voluntary participation. So in a game-world you can trigger things to happen, cause events by your actions. There is no mystery. There is complexity, yes. But all of it has been parameterized. So in my world, a museum almost have no head of their own. They are just pockets of probability, zones of repercussion.

And so, this museum is also a casino. A den for high-stake gambling. Sometimes life can be at stake, but other times more important things. Like the right to be seen as a person, a person with something to say. Within its own world only the rules decide what happens. And the rules here are not codes, not algorithms. But just a mass of unresolved, unparsed text.

Museums are crime-syndicates,

Universes within universes, closed systems, games are nothing but crime-syndicates. What are the defining characteristics of organised crime? You don't know where the money comes from. Fear. No one talks, and if someone talks they are dead or dying fast. Tribal-system, bonds and loyalties based on relationships and not a qualified search. Generosity.

Not all crime means possessing automatic assault rifles. Crime is a black-box, there are often very good reasons why crime is allowed to exist. Criminals often are criminals only because they provide functions which are much in demand, but difficult to approve-of. Selling on the street, prostitution, piracy come to mind first. The charade often exemplifies the phrase, "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."

Sanctuaries for the irrational, opaque and the uncalled-for. Crime is doing the dirty work which can't be a business otherwise. And crime is thank-less. No one sends thank-you notes to this museum. People we meet on the street, don't slap our backs, buy us beers, invite us into holy matrimony with their daughters.

Museums are obsessive,

Obsession lives on the same street as sentimentality. Just way head. Way down the road. Obsession narrows down the potential options for the future. We don't want good things to happen, we want this to happen. This might be the repeated urge to digress, this might be anything. My museum obsesses over chasing desire and the point when it ceases to live, but continues zombie journeys.

Without an obsessive, neurotic urge I see programmes and agendas emerge from anywhere. Research, theory, aspiration, funders, google searches... anything. It is a strategy to avoid redundancy, a strategy to sideline possible glories and afflictions. Why want glory when you have a blazing obsession to nurture? The obsessive never worry. About the story winding up and dealing with a silence. The soundtrack is unending, the story will never wind-up. There will be enough obsession to go around, when it comes to that.

Obsession is the only way to to subvert and destabilize cultural tendencies to loop and crawl. Crawl behind trends and pools of common interest, avoidance-behaviors and innocence. Loop with each available opportunity, "if there is no future on the horizon, there is always the past."

And also unresponsive, unsolicited, self-propagating,

Unsolicited communication. Pushing air into a compressed-air tube can go on and on. There needs to be no stop. After it is full, it will stretch. After it has stretched all it can, it will burst. We don't care. We have plans at hand for a ten thousand year fully-pronged attack on your senses. We will be relentless. We will carry on and on and on. We will be unresponsive to demand, social conventions, our turn to speak.

We propagate ourselves, there is no press release. There is no hope that someone will pick it up and run it. No one is qualified to run a piece on this museum, we ain't answering no questions. A self-propagation urge arose from missionary examples, on working on principles of "in or out" no hangers-on. After a point if we are unresponsive, who gives a fuck? Who else is in the room. I occupy more space than the biggest dinosaur. I answer the contemporary with tirades of obsolete belief systems and philosophy. No one and nothing can withstand that attack.

Museums are schizoid,

I have never known the right manner of eating at the dinner table. Even if I know, it doesn't play out right. I will be fumbling with the fork or the spoon or the chopsticks. And I just smile, charmingly and sweetly. I got no time for explanations. I can't explain very well that early in this train ride, I dumped a part of my brain. It was the part that helped me understand and empathise with people around me. Only the schizoid will survive the storm that's brewing. Only the schizoid will lead humanity into the future. A passionate practice of obsession, being self-centered and not giving a flying fuck for anything else.

Of course there are still family and friends. They just become a part of me, there is a magnanimous sense of self. No separation, no chunking of people in bodies.

So, if this is a list of symptoms. This is a check-list, if there are any checks, you've got a museum in your hands.