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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Tomorrow night I am talking on a panel about self-publishing (details here). In an effort to figure out what I think about self-publishing these days, I've been looking back over some old work. I used to disseminate simple, black and white, three-fold flyers as art projects. I decided to post the text and images below from one of my favourites, first made in 1996.
It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
– David Bowie, "Five Years"
The end of the world was thoroughly predictable and yet it surprised everyone. It was hot. The sun hung low in the sky, a huge dark ball of flame. There were massive earthquakes and people fell into great rifts that opened suddenly in the ground, slipping down into the flaming bowels of the planet. There was mass hysteria, sobbing, screaming and looting. The highways were clogged with cars. Loved ones clung to each other with wild fear in their eyes. Teenagers tried desperately to get home to their families. TV news announcers stayed, sobbing, at their posts until the electricity went dead, like captains going down with the ship. Mothers clutched children to their breasts and fathers stood by, paralysed with love, frustration, fear and rage. All this was expected.
What surprised everyone was that it only happened once. Adults were amazed to find that, along with everything else, they felt relieved. This was finally it. It was like the release you feel when your home-team, a non-functioning group of pathetic, disillusioned millionaire pro-athletes from other cities, gets eliminated from the playoffs and you don’t have to muster the energy to cheer for them any more. They just had to get through these next few hours and all those years of anxiety would finally be over.
Another surprise was that it wasn’t really all that bad. Each individual death was no more excruciating than being shot in the head during a liquor store hold-up, dying in a house fire, or being crushed under the wheels of a truck, all familiar events that had been happening to people for ever.
People looked about them blankly. They saw that it was the end of the world. There was fire, there was brimstone, four horsemen came clattering around the corner and whizzed by in a dramatic flurry of blowing capes and manes. It looked just like they’d imagined it would, and yet most people felt distracted from the the significance of the event. This wasn’t a story book disaster or a made-for-TV movie. Everyone had a million other pressing, specific details clamouring for their attention.
Another surprise was that no one survived. When it was all over, and the dust had finally settled, there was no lone soul left staggering through the rubble. No one woke from a terrible nightmare to find that it was all true – no one got to be the last one left alive on a ravaged planet. The place was truly deserted. The cockroach race continued, just like everyone thought they would, but they were insects who never had a concept of humanity to start with.
It was done now, and no one had really even seen it happen.
