THE ONE ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER ON THE BEACH
Have you seen these pink Peruvian river dolphins?
Before Amazon made everything local for everyone, the Peruvians local to the Amazon used to believe that these majestic looking pink mammals would don top hats at night and go around impregnating local women in their sleep. Like, they fully believed that, or at least wanted to believe in it enough to accept it over the alternatives. For centuries this was a convenient explanation for bastard children.
We don't have to look that far to laugh or shudder at ridiculous sets of ideas. There are communities of educated people amongst us who genuinely believe that immunizations are bad for you & that the world is flat. I even heard some idiot suggest that we ought to treat scientific evidence with respect before he went on to say that ideas of identity-politics are easily misunderstood and misused as weapons of division. Can you believe him?! What a prick! We all know that asking questions about the theological institutions that we, the left have established makes you a close minded bigot..
It did get me thinking though. I mean, I’d never say this publicly - I understand that in 2019 the party line is that fact and opinion are equals, and that intention trump's effect, but I had this crazy thought.. If you’re wrapping yourself in the flag, and operating under the banner of equality, but you don't concern yourself with the effects of the ideas you preach you are self serving: You ought to be considered as dangerous as any other political purist. Anyway, 8 Pacific land-masses have been swallowed in the last decade due to rising sea level. And the rate at which the sea is rising continues to rise.
I mean you know that anyway right, everyone who’s reading this does. To be completely honest I don't really care... Like if you asked me I’d say I’m very upset, really upset about it but… I have this friend H, a photographer, a brilliant image maker. We were on holiday last year and she spent most of her time trying to collect all the plastic from the sea - shoveling it in her swimsuit as she swam. I had this reaction to her doing it that it was awfully naive, and like.. Jesus christ already - we’re on holiday... You’re just one person, it's literally an entire ocean, besides its fucking gross..
But ever since then, this image keeps appearing in my head. It’s of a sublime storybook beach in Puglia, Southern Italy. Clear blue sky, blue-er sea, pale sand, and glorious days of uninterrupted sunshine. In the middle of the frame there's an attractive, successful young 'creative' - blue tick, big clients, three hundred-thousand followers successful. Our eye is positioned close to the sand, so we’re looking up at her. Her blond hair's wet and the cool, salty sea water leaves the proud nipples on her perky breasts hard as it drips down the red designer swimsuit that clings to her athletic figure. The water catches the light as it drips over gently the tanned, soft skinned goose-pimpled thighs, down her impossibly long thin legs before making its way into the baking sand beneath her elegant feet. It’s a tilmley, titillating, fetishistic image of youth and vitality. It’s funky, sexy, cool.. oh My.. It’s everything the client dreamt of! Before you’ve had time to consider it you want to be on a beach, worry free, breathing in the scent of suntan lotion, remembering how much you like Solero’s and remembering why you haven't ordered a Piña-Colada since the last time you got over excited at the beach-hut bar.
I’m sure you’ve seen countless iterations of this image - aspirational woman in red. It's a picture that’s as generic as it is tantalising. Except this time there's detritus bulging out of the women's swimsuit. Lumps of plastic everywhere, sharp spikes trying to push through the expensive woven material. The woman’s reaching inside her costume, pulling out shredded plastic by the fistfull before dispensing it into her bag. As this scene played back in my reverie, I can't help but picture the plastic multiplying quicker than she can pull it out, multiplying at such a rate that it starts cutting through her skin, burrowing through her flesh. Growing it’s way into her organs and piercing everything this image is meant to stand for.
Red
White
Blue cloudless skies.
Sun glare and promises of tranquility.
Ephemeral beauty and epic backdrops.
It’s a pictorial paradise trespassed upon by parasitic by-product.
It’s not placid, or rousing, or forgettable anymore.
It’s terrifying, in a monstrous sci-fi way.
Like an infographic of a malignancy.
Or a portrait of Dorian Grey.
H, I was the one who was naive. Even if you only remove an insignificant fraction of plastic from the now heavily accessorised sea water off southern Italy, this is, at the very least, something. But as a symbolic gesture, this image, massively out performs any individual efforts and after all symbols have to be a step towards belief.
WILE E. AND THE MAHARISHI
It would have been a Wednesday night as I’d been doing Green Parrot that afternoon. Mum knew how much I hated it, and so she would always rent a video on Wednesdays, a sympothetic treat. Every English lesson, while the class were writing and sharing their stories, I copied a poem about a Green Parrot. I was to do this until I could copy it with every word spelt correctly.
I don't know how well you remember primary school? Ten year olds have few abilities as well developed as sniffing out other peoples failures. Those who fly closest to failure themselves have the strongest noses and so my Monday mornings and Wednesday were scored by a soundtrack of thick kids mocking me for being thick as I failed on repete. And though I never felt it was fair we're all, in some way at least, bound to the consensus of our time.
I don't hate him anymore, Mr Francis. I’m fortunate enough now to understand that he was trying his best to help. Trying to do the best by the well established ‘wisdoms’ in his institution, and given his abilities I can't really expect him to have known any better. But I wouldent appologies either, if you repeatedly undermine someone, force them into a situation in which they are publicly ridiculed, it’s only a matter of time until you get a reaction. And if the person you’re humiliating is unable to understand, let alone articulate their frustrations, well - you’d be stupid to expect any outcome other than violence..
For now it’s a Wednesday evening in 1999 - before what’s been referred to ever since as the Incident, and after another afternoon of unsuccessfully copying Green Parrot. My little sister Dilly and I are in the living room watching Roadrunner - laughing. I’m wearing the blue Utd away shirt, my uniform, number 11 like my one time hero, I'm laying belly down on the burnt orange carpet in the living room of my parents' house. My ribs just strong enough to support my bony frame without too much discomfort.
On screen Wile-E has laid out some bird seed inside a chalked circle on a bridge that connected two cliffs. Inside the circle the Roadrunner is pecking away, apparently oblivious to hunter who is hiding underneath the bridge and sawing around the chalked circle from the underside. I'm waiting for a slapstick complication to beset our relentlessly ambitious, perennially punished punchbag-punchline Wile-E. But everything is going suspiciously to plan. The road runner remains rekaxed, taking the bait, as coyote’s saw workes all the way around the circl. This was it.. Wile-E’s big moment. He turns to look at Dilly and I - slightly shocked - before a huge satisfied grin flooded over his face. I let out an excited laugh, as I do so the floor feels heavy in my ribs. But the Roadrunner and the small cut out circle of bridge dont move. It and The Roadrunner stayed put as backdrop, bridge, both cliffs and Wile-E started began sliding down the screen, and plumet into the abyss beneath.
I didn't know what this meant at the time, I'm still not sure, but I knew then what i know now. It's cool.
In a reality in which any product imaginable will be - courtesy of do it all mail order corporation Acme prime - delivered almost instantly after the order is placed you would figure that Wile-E could just order himself a meal. But he never does, and so I guess what Wile-E is trying to teach us is that fulfillment isn't that simple.
My friend B suggested that Wile-E would be well advised to focus his energy on making a quantum leap. That there is an infinite set of realities, and that if Whil-E could grapple with this and untangle himself from himself he could be liberated from his assumptions and shift his energy to another more peacefull thread of reality.
Robert belives Wile-E would benefit from taking a more buddhist path - he could come to understand that neither the Roadrunner, nor himself, really exist. That identity and the beliefs one holds are only liberating until they become a cage, a barrier. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Fulfillment is not a destination, the jorney is serenity, peace is in acceptance... I’m not in any position to advise, but, I'm not sure that Wile-E and the Maharishi would be such a riveting double act, and.. well, what is peace to meaning?
ONE MISSISSIPPI
“Let’s say, hypothetically McKinsey [& company] comes out with a report saying 30% of jobs [in the USA] are subject to automation by 2030[...]. Beam comes out with the same report that thinks it’s 20-25% of jobs. Calls it ‘The Great Transformation’. Says it's going to be four times faster and more vicious than the industrial revolution, which itself caused mass riots, and unrest. The President of MIT comes out and says the Job of MIT now is to help prepare society for the transition. All of those things actually happened, all of those things are real, it's just our media is out to lunch tracking down our idiot president's tweet of the day. It’s insane [...] The reason Trump is our president today is because we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in the swing states. Why isn't that the main topic of conversation.” - Andrew Yang
The Future - that techorentated destination that's occupied film and literature since the computer was invented is now upon us. Albeit far-less novel, and painfully more efficient than the box office required. Over the next decade, as The Future beds-in, machines will increasingly provided an economically superior alternative to labour. We're heading towards a period in which we have a working class and a useless class: In which the poor have less opportunities to author their prosperity and the wealthy shrink in numbers and become increasingly advantaged as they do so.
The end-game of Automation - Ultra-intelligent machines - are a discovery expected within our lifetimes. I.J. Good, chief statistician in Turing's Enigma-Code-breaking team is credited as the first to define and outline the manifestations of such a discovery.
‘Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.’
When discussing Ultra-intelligent machines or Strong AI, we are discussing machines that are self learning - Machines that have the ability to think for themselves. Machines that are conscious.
The dream of tec-pioneers is suggestable Strong AI. This would provide its masters with unprecedented power. Significant advantage over everyone, not only those in their existing markets but in any market or in any field they wish to turn their god like machine’s attention to.
Sugestable strong AI could provide huge advances in healthcare and environmental issues, as well as help consider moral and philosophical questions. It could no doubt help solve the impending unemployment epidemic. It would also offer overwhelming legal advantages, think impunity. Trading superiority, think controls and manipulation of markets and the influencers of those markets. Military superiority. Cyber superiority, think access and manipulation at will. Biowarfare.. the list goes on. What we’re discussing is control of the civilised world as we know and understand it. And this is just for starters.
We’re at the beginning of global arms race - led by the most powerful companies and governments in the world to be the first to create such a machine because - god forbid your competitor or enemy works out the secret to unlimited power before you do. It is urgency, not caution that ostensibly promises reward.
One Mississippi
There is a chance that all will go well, that the right people will be the first to create Strong AI and they will use it for good. That - major existential crisis asid - humanity, all life on earth, and the earth itself will be better off. We will come back to whether or not these goals are mutually achievable later on, if we have time. If it does unfold this way you’d be advised to keep the champagne on ice and suspend your life long holiday for a moment longer. As Good suggests there is a possibility, or perhaps it’s a certainty, that super intelligence will not answer to us. Personally I find it hard enough take orders from anyone I deem less capable than myself. There is no scenario in which I will conceive of taking orders from a kitten. Although shortly after AI’s conception taking orders from the bacteria that live in the belly of the worms dangling from the kittens asshole might provide a better analogy. The idea of super intelligence cooperating with my desires, or those of any being limited to the bandwidth of the human brain seems similarly absurd.
One Mississippi
The heartbeat after the computers intelligence reaches the level of ours it will be intellectually superior to us. Providing its connected to a powerful computer - it will be capable of carrying out thousands of years of innovation at a highly accelerated rate. It is within this first second that we could lose control of the world we have created. As Bill Gates advises, we only have one attempt to get it right.
FLAPPING THE TOWEL
After a few beers George shares that he is having trouble in the bedroom.. He can’t get his girlfriend, the love of his life to….... he can’t bring her to orgasm. And he’s worried that it will affect their relationship.
“Perhaps” says the best friend “perhaps your sweetheart is getting overheated, and can't relax. Maybe you should flap a towel, *laughter* to fan her and keep her cool and she’ll be able to enjoy herself more.’
Terrified of losing his sweetheart George will try anything. But he’s unable to fan whilst making love and so convinces his best friend to help.
George and the love of his life are having sex in their bed whilst the best friend stands to the side fanning the couple with a towel. After several minutes, unsure if it’s working George shouts to his friend, flap harder. With this, his best friend starts flapping with more vigour. Worried it’s not working George is getting frustrated. “Flap harder” he snaps again and the best friend starts flapping with all his might. A minute goes by and it’s George’s sweetheart this time “harder” she screams. This is the final straw George gets up and snatches the towel out of his best friend’s hand.
As he does so George’s sweetheart pulls the best friend down on top of her and George starts flapping the towel *start flapping hands as if flapping towel* as hard as he can whilst.. Well he starts going as hard as he can too.
After barely two minutes George’s sweetheart starts moaning in ecstasy. The lights start flickering as the whole neighbourhood experiences a momentary power surge. Every dog in the neighbourhood is at a window howling. Lightning bolts start clicking through the sky as George’s sweetheart’s eyes roll back and she screams as her body uncontrollably contorts in pleasure. George stop’s flapping and as he does so he realises
George stops flappin the towel and is silent for a minute, besides his heavy breathing. He looks his best friend in the eye, he raises his hand up and as he brings it down and clicks his fingers he shouts, NOW THATS HOW YOU FLAP A TOWEL!..
THE FUTURES BRIGHT
Robert you remember when we used to work in advertising... I didn't recognise it at the time but I found it really difficult how crazy ambitious taglines had to be. Hyperbole you know, I mean, I didn't believe what I was writing.
I’m always especially intrigued by any ad that promises a better future, because they take such balls to pen, or an insane detachment depending on which way you look at it and they can't help but be successful. You can't argue with an ad like that. You remember those Orange ads. They were great, and they had that brilliant tagline.
I guess when that company came out they were competing against stuffy communications agencies whose logos were designed by people using fax machines. And this oddly named company with a warm, calming colour and a minimal logo came along and felt cool, personable, you know in a 90’s way.
But what made them so sure that the future was bright or Orange even. That doesn't really make sense if you think about it. Or if it does its terrifying. Do you think that Orange’s director followed that river of ideas all the way to its mouth and saw that the future really is Orange. Or do you reckon that the board believed in their company and its mission so much that it would change the course of that river running through us, the course of future histories?
What do they mean anyway? I’m pretty sure they weren't pushing a protestant agenda. So do they mean everything will literally be orange? Like we’re all inside a massive glass of Irn-Bru?
It would be Jackson’s wet dream right. I can see him, naked, lavishly breast-stroking around, like that Nivana baby in a sea of nerve calming hangover cure. He’d be a glorious president of this future. But it’s way too sticky for me, and besides we’d all drown ….so that can't be what they mean.
Is it that the whole future will be owned by Orange?
Little orange logos on everything.
Every TV channel belongs to orange. Every day Orange Monday, Orange Tuesday.
Your jeans, shoes, tissues, your makeup too.
Your face is orange
Your cat’s collar has a little orange logo hanging down. It’s cute because it matches the pendent you, your partner and all your friends wear too.
Proudly Orange.
Orange music playing at your christening, orange bunting at your wedding party
An Orange flag laid atop your grandads coffin.
Orange logos printed on the mugs in Piccadilly tourist tat stores.
A Ginger spice girl with ah an orange logo printed on the front of her minidress.
Orange logos on tanks, and on M15’s,
On the collars of the shirts of border control staff.
The leader of the free world - Orange
Every bit of plastic, floating in the sea...
Remove the competition.
Wave goodbye to the purples and those lavender cunts
Drown difference, vanish variance, no culture to even dream of getting in trouble for appropriating.
Orange everything.
It’s great.
Great orange
But I don't look good in orange, it washes me out. And besides this is the longest spell of peace in Europe. What do they even mean let's take back control, I double checked and I never had control in the first place. It’s always been in the hands of those people hungry to rule. Rule.. It sounds so glamorous we’ve got the wording all wrong. It ought to sound like a duty. A moral and philosophical headfuck. But it doesn't and so it ends up as a game of who can be who. And in the game of who can be who it's just one foul move before it takes other foul moves to keep up, and everyone ends up flapping the towel.
The future's bright.
What do they even mean the future. How crazy to materialise possibility that. I guess they were ahead of the curve, everyone's at it nowadays; it’s the new way until it’s not, and it’s a bulls market till too many get cold feet. But Orange has gone bust. So Orange isn’t even in the future they foretold. We’re here, all of us, and Kevin Bacon’s here. Telling us, in a quick and apparently charming patter about the cool, new, even more abstractly named telecommunications company EE.
And no one really kept tabs on what happened, or if this new company will survive any longer but the logo in the top corners changed, and the price of contracts is going up.
And the data tells us that people feel increasingly isolated.
Cut off.
Alone.
But still the promise sounds strong. Promises that exist in the future never need to be cashed.
The promise still sounds strong.
No matter how much it's been undermined.
The promise still sounds strong.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
*Inhale exhale
in- out
In - out*
The future's Bright, The futures Orange,
The future's Bright, The futures Orange,
The future's Bright, The futures Orange
LAMBORGHINI
I’d nipped out of the studio after 8 hrs of sanding to get some dinner. It’s half price at Itsu from six, which is alright… I mean it’s good news, but once I leave the Royal Academy I’m never eating Sushi again.
Parked on Burlington Place was a bright orange Lamborghini. Having spent hundreds of hours sitting over a 30 cm sculpture, getting rid of any sign of touch, a bright orange Lamborghini is a wild thing to look at. All the complex processes and manipulation of materials, every solved problem and moment of genius is stacked up in this nanometre perfect vehicle. The invention of the wheel, the combustion engine, the ambition of the lunatic who thought that they could heat sand and create glass. Metal mining, electric circuits, robot production lines and airborne paints. Alcantara trims, pitch perfect sound systems... The domestication of light! The drive to persistently change what the contemporary, what the future could offer. The ability to cooperate, coordinate, develop and pass on.
We live in an age in which design is getting softer, more palatable to the tastes of the pinterest connoisseur. Benchmark, Benchmark, never unpleasing. Down with the maverick, what can the past teach us? Let us consult the marketing team, and see what the forecasters think. These are the rules of our day. Products, architecture, cars they’re all having their edges softened; their eccentricities muted. Welcome to the century of corporate aesthetics, we hope you have a comfortable stay. The age of facilitating the upset. Worship she who’s offended. He who cries most indulgently wins! But this car - this bright orange Lambogini - doesn't give a fuck. In a world that's getting rounder It’s all angles and sharp lines. The number plate has to be bent down the middle just so it can be attached to the thing. It's unforgiving and thas really som..RUUUUU-MMMMMMM!!!. It beeps and the indicators flash as the engine starts up and this thing, without anyone sitting inside, transitions from object and into the present.
A bald podgy 50 year old guy’s walking towards me. He’s wearing navy chinos, too tight, a white lunch stained shirt, and obnoxiously branded Louis Vuitton loafers, the molded plastic ones that were fashionable a few years ago. I always liked how mad the solid plastic shoes were although I'm sure the board of directors at Sholl’s ‘athlete foot solutions’ liked them even more. The guy clocks me looking at his car, and without him changing his expression I see a smug look wash over his face, a top-of-the-food-chain alfa-consumer no money issues smugness… I guess why not, for two hundred and seventy thousand pounds pedestrian awe really ought to come as standard. His arms are swinging by his side with each step as if he was walking down hill, or he were the town bell crier perhaps. But it’s 2019 and we get our news from satellites these days. Instead it's a key that's in his hand, a key that can start his Lamborghini. COOL!
Two boys about 17 or 18 are crossing the street. Off White T’s, Supreme caps, unblemished setups - Palace decs. They’re documenting the experience, or rather themselves living the experience - front-facing-phone-camera. “Who gets their Lambo in orange, what a cunt!” Say’s one of the archetypes of socially approved conservatism veiled as alt-culture (this is not a particular slight on any of those brands, I happen to be fond of Palace, but - how can one exist and escape the hyperactive global image matrix?) His friend laughs - an overzealous teenage scoff. Having captured themselfs crossing the road they're now standing on our side of the street, still staring into the camera before it’s turned to show their followers the car. The both of them are, I presume, unaware that the vehicle's owner is only a few meters away.
The Town Bell Crier, swinging his arms slightly less vigorously, looks over at the two specimens as he steps of the pavement and walks around to the driver’s side of his car.“Oh yeah” he says calmly and with a rye smile “what colour is your Lamborghini then needle dick?” He ducks into the vehicle, closes the door and jets off. After a brief moment of shock Needle-Dick retorted limply to the rear of the beautiful vehicle and the sound of the roaring engine “Fuck off dickhead”. Needle-Dick's friend and I laugh, although not together. Needle-Dick’s friend is still looking into his phone. The laughter is wiped off his face in favour of a more serious pout, looking at hi audience he says a little too loudly, in an accent that attempts to hide it’s cultivation in well-educated company, “Hey James pull your trousers up. That short fat guys just murked you bruv”. He then brings his free hand up to his face which simultaneously covers his mouth and acts as a pointer. He twists his phone to follow the direction of his pointing finger and film Needle Dick looking shocked.
There’s poetry to The-Town-Bell-Cryer ridiculing this ostensibly cooler, younger, more classically good looking guy, before descending his mistreated and unglamorous body into the immaculate, muscular, super-powered chase and accelerating off. The Lamborghini, the body and physical power this civilisation has afforded him, albeit through substituting the wellbeing of his literal body for it. I’m not making a judgment, part of me thanks God people like The-Town-Bell-Crier exist. That they permit these amazing feats of engineering and imagination to exist. But another part of me can't help but be astonished about the codes by which we live.
FLASH
I saw a homeless man with matted brown hair and a green coat standing on Old Bond Street. He was staring into the window of the Stella Mccartney store examining the Christmas display in the window. As I walked towards him he turned and caught me staring. Embarrassed, I felt compelled to say something. “Looks good huh?” not having examined the window before I offered my opinion. “Nahh shite. Should be higher” he said pointing in the window at the neckline of a dress “and that” he said looping his finger to drawing an imaginary circle around a pleated detail on the front of a blue silk dress with his finger “Too wide. Too much space. Lazy” I looked up at the dress' and for my money he was spot on. When I turned back to him his trousers, like his coat, were open. His penis was resting over his hand as if he were a salesman, presenting a tassel curtain tie as an enticing extra. Without responding I was on my way.
STORMIE WEBSTER
17th Jan 2019. Having wondered what the most liked image on instagram is, and what it would say about us, I turned to google for the answer. This time a week ago, the most liked post was a picture posted by Kylie Jenner, who like much of her family owes her super stardom to half-sister Kim Kardashian, and a fortuitously ‘leaked’ sex tape. A ‘mishap’ turn triumph for Kim, Kris her mother/ agent, and the rest of the Kardashian / Jenner clan. An accident that had propelled Kim’s former boss, mentor and now fellow TV reality star and tycoon Paris Hilton into international super stardom before her.
Twenty year old Kylie Jenner thanks predominantly to her cosmetics brand Kylie Cosmetics, is now the most financially successful member of the family empire. According to Forbes she’s is on course to become the “world's youngest self-made billionaire”. A record she looks set to strip this year from Instagram and Facebook owner, tech guru and data-pawning lizard-man Mark Zuckerberg. Kylie Jenner’s post which has received over 18 million likes features her thumb being gripped by a tiny hand. A hand barely twice the side of this fantastic business woman's nail. The hand of Kylie’s first born and air, Stormie Webster.
On the subject of rich lists I have often thought that tax, that annoying but mandatory resource drain, has, regardless of its iterations, kept a lousy PR team. What would happen if Forbs, instead of publishing lists celebrating how much capital an individual or company can amass, published lists celebrating how much tax an individual or company had contributed?
What if each year your tax slips came through the door with a list of the top contributors from a given year, with a breakdown of companies in your area who contributed the most, best newcomer, most improved etc. Or if there was a breakdown of where your tax had, or might have, gone. Which roads you had fixed, lessons you had helped helped facilitate, illnesses you had helped cured (god bless the NHS). My feeling is that this would have a significant impact on society, even our individual psyche and would change that resource drain into something to be proud of.
Today the most liked picture on instagram, with 52 million likes is that of an un cracked egg.
MY DOGS PENIS TASTES BITTER, DO YOU THINK I SHOULD CALL A VET?
They're in this cashmere beige Porsche 930 turbo, it’s from the 70’s or 80’s, some time when the shapes were ambitious and eccentric, before they muted every curve and line to bland bulge of non offensive, comfortable mediocrity. In an effort to make their designs more palatable for the leagues of sandwich fondlers all equipped with their very own voting handset. Porches have got none of that idiosyncratic swagger anymore…
The camel’s the horse designed by committee..
And I guess the camel does a job, but
They knew how to use plastic back then.
Back then I guess they were still excited about what it could be, how it could be defined.
The plastic on that 930 Turbo it’s fucking amazing. Its warm - but it’s not soft, or apologetic. It’s austere but it has a soul. It’s plastic, and it’s specific, it's a luxury material. It’s beautiful.
Embodied within this relic of what the future might have looked like, our protagonists are driving and talking about colleagues who had recently passed. The Driver says something about what a shame it is that all those jokes, all that hard work and that amazing material is just gone with them.
Looking both amused and unamused at the same time, as he tends to. the passenger replys
“It was never about the bits. That material and your material is purely a vehicle for you to express yourself. So we can feel, enjoy your presence... When you first see a comic up on stage you don't remember everything they say, you remember their energy. You remember their presence, they're alive and vivid, they help you remember that you're alive too.”
D: “Your saying the material’s not important?”
P: “Their material and your material is nothing more than a vehicle for you to express yourself spiritually. So you can communicate in a spiritual way.”...
D: “*breaths in as if about to say something*”