All The Way To The Bank(sy)!! Some reflections - Stuart Wise

Image above: Original collective, autonomous, subversive 1968 Notting Hill graffiti on Silchester Road before a kleptocratic, business-oriented recuperation by you know whom...............

"Today we have little choice but to become socially inept on a massive scale and on every level of acceptable communication putting an end to all the subtle collaboration especially the artistic / performance nexus. More than ever we need lines of clear demarcation what Debord tentatively hinted at in a letter to Yves Le Manach (23rd December 1972) regarding combating a more total, insidious "decadent" recuperation, that fanfare of devious corporatism that is clearly evident in movements like neo-psychogeography. "But why must modern society recuperate anew so many revolutionary questions? Is it from gaiety of heart? It was certainly easier to recuperate us in the 1950s. As a result of recuperation, is not the ruling order becoming more and more sick?"

Years later and what has this sickness entailed?"
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(The above marked the end of a discussion about a collective pamphlet we were involved in from 1986 entitled France Goes off the Rails and a critique of a notable railway workers strike which was also uploaded to the Revolt Against Plenty web. It can only now be accessed via The Wayback Machine. This critique was also a general theoretical prelude to All The Way to the Banksy).

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The outcome of Debord's sickness query has become a universe of fictive capital to the nth degree which has become inseparable from fictive creativity whereby permanent performance becomes the lynch pin of an increasingly inauthentic, hence unworkable and increasingly unbearable, everyday life. It as though the negative has been taken away from us, even extinguished or, so enmeshed with its affirmative opposite that it's become impossible to disentangle. Confusion really has created its own masterpiece; the masterpiece of an increasing abyss. Hence Banksy.

With Banksy we have: An art that is anti-art seemingly beyond the realisation and negation of art / An anti-capitalist ultra-capitalism / The non-corporate corporate as his often telling street graphics morph into corporate praxis / a corporate subversion / Anarchy with a PR rep straight from Hollywood / An ultra-commodified anonymity / The clandestine guerrilla of subversive millionairing / Disappearance and invisibility as great career moves / Anonymous guerrilla action becoming a personality cult, an innovative publicity gimmick, etc, etc.,..... Enormous contradictions which are seemingly endless. Now without the promise sparked by an overpowering and recent profound subversive moment in the immediate past (as May '68 was in France along with the rest of the remarkable subversive moments elsewhere throughout the world around the same time) it is now necessary to invent the apparition of one along with the ghostly secondary reappearance of its own fictive aftermath. With 1968 the moment of true, radically clear-headed and profound anti-art was remarkably short-lived petering out by the turn of the 1970s. In no time a cynical compromise was obscenely set-up which helped keep the old world intact as seemingly daring innovation quite quickly acquired low key back-up from washed-up curators – almost fatally wounded by 1968 - and their well-off sponsors. Everything then changed in order to remain the same.... Unfortunately today we don't have any stunning, inspiring examples of authentic anti-art vandalism pointing to a new world. Instead, in its place, there's right wing, fascistic, (even anti-Semitic) bullshit scrawled on gigantic, banal, trophy neo-sculptures and the like, comments that aren't going anywhere, mere expressions of growing barbarism.

Banksy has a kind of Magritte-like talent and many of his pieces are very witty indeed causing startled passers-by to think more generally about how bad and lost things really are. For that simple fact alone he is way ahead of the vast majority of street neo-artists into mere banal decoration advertising little more than their own signature. There too the real conflict begins as Banksy sells vacuity back to the rich cynical shit-heads who administer (though hardly control) this dire state of affairs. No wonder he is hated by the rank 'n' file tags and pieces crew most of whom are honest though lost individuals who often never get out of trouble no matter how old they inevitably become, (see our account elsewhere on the Revolt Against Plenty web, Bradford's Eco-Peterloo. The Life and Death of Bill Posters). Regarding the latter guy, it has to be said the early wall writings of Fisto are way beyond anything Banksy has been capable of, conjuring up some of the brief but real subversive spirit of the late 1960s, après the event.

Without much further ado let's simply place here a few pointed facts about this super-hyped figurehead, this epitome of the hip neo-liberal persona whereby 'active creativity' is one of the most potent sales pitches...

Holly Cushing, Banksy's manager since 2007 used to work for Hollywood actor, Sean Penn. Financial records show she set up the limited company called Dismaland with Simon Durban who is thought to be Banksy's accountant. Sean Penn opposed the 2004-7 Iraq war and the war on terror. He was on friendship terms with Chavez and Raoul Castro. He stood with Chavez when the latter supported President Assad against the uprising of 2011-12; an 'uprising' that is now so confused after the surreptitious intervention of the world's super powers, that it's become just another horrendous calamity. Penn also served time for assaulting a photographer and allegedly tied his then wife Madonna to a chair and then beat her.

(Our Comment: "One crazy mixed-up engage "swimming pool red" type actor. Typical pro sub-Bolshevik without a relevant critique of contemporary capitalism never mind an edgy critique of superstardom in general").

Banksy prints are released by Picturesonwalls, or POW, which is a London based (E1 not Bond St – where else?) gallery who represent Banksy. The gallery's logo is skull and crossbones, one of the crossed bones; decorators (not artists) paint brushes.

(Our Comment: "Decorators' brushes indeed! HAH! Banksy could never have worked in the rough and tumble of building sites for years – never mind decades – on end. He would have found too much authentic truth and beauty there; one that is full of laughter and game playing; one that really subverts the grotesque artistic ego which is especially horrendous today in the epoch when art was declared dead decades ago".)

Grey Fox is a PR company used by Banksy along with Pest Control which provides certificates of authentication. According to Jack Kresler of Christie's, London "Pest Control is the sole governing authority; it's the mouthpiece of the artist". It is said of Pest Control "they seem to have an active policy of discouraging dealers buying and selling". Forget about buying a work legitimately from the artiste - on the website of Pest Control there currently is "something / nothing available".

Today Christie's / Sotheby's Phillip de Pury sell only signed prints. Banksy is estimated by Forbes to be worth $20million. In New York's The Village Voice he stated, "commercial success is a mark of failure for the graffiti artist."

(Our Comment:(Our Comment: "$20 million ...and the rest! Who are you Kidding! However, in fairness to Banksy there's still more of a human being in his soul than there is among the those truly fabulously rich, recent Internet moguls who have nothing but contempt for the Californian poor: one such CEO describing them as "grotesque...degenerate, trash." Internet Company CEO's rather younger than Banksy often in the mid 20s to the mid 30s at the oldest, who are into billionairing despising the paltry millionaring which Banksy represents. People like Travis Kalanick of Uber, Joe Gebbia & Brian Chesky of Air bnb, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Keven Systrom of Instagram along with uber-pirates like 'rebel' Kim.dotcom...and the list goes on and on!!!!!")

Banksy has a seemingly casual attitude to copyright encouraging the reproduction of his work for your own personal amusement, so it's with "regret" that he finds himself having to say whether pieces are real or false. A framed print appeared on Banksy's website the day after his 2007 exhibition at Sotheby's when his work soared well above the auctioneer's estimates. The caption on the print, which shows auction goers bidding up prices, reads, "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit".

(Our Comment: "In the immortal words of that wonderful sarcastic tart, Mandy Rice Davies, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he." Banksy is very aware of the great creative hole at the heart of everything today and working in and through an ever increasingly desperate nihilism, sells the emptiness back to the "1%" in real style. Even intuitively aware of the "theological capers of the commodity" (Marx) Banksy becomes a fascinating, phantom God of Emptiness fronted by the sheer worship of money").

Banksy set up a pop-up stall in New York's Central Park selling 100% authentic original signed Bansky canvasses for $60 apiece. 2 buyers bought three works whose real value was estimated to be $200,000. The pop up stall was meant to be a comment on capitalism, authenticity and the art market. Banksy signs a water tank overlooking the Pacific, the caption reading "THIS LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ELEPHANT." The tank became an instant tourist attraction, a media design firm instantly buying it from the city of Los Angeles with plans to remove it and sell it. A homeless person was living in it and when Banksy found out, he gave the homeless man money to buy an apartment and refused to authenticate the work. It crashed in value ending up in a scrap yard.

(Our Comment: "All very clever, smart stuff making out he's anti-money and generous to the poor when basically Banksy is a ruthless, inauthentic manipulator. In reality Banksy had to look at his projected image first and foremost and in order to keep his 'subversive' prestige intact he couldn't do anything but buy a gaff for this homeless guy. Evidently when he wants rid of somebody - i.e. if they criticise him - Banksy pays them off handsomely. When people get rid of us occasionally for ordinary, though usually accomplished building work, etc., they invariably rip us off refusing to pay up a damned penny. So which is the more real experience?")

Regarding copyright, there is now on-going hostility between Banksy and the French neo-artiste, Blek Le Rat who way back was influenced by the ubiquitous screen prints from the uprising of May 1968 particularly the well known simplified stencils of CRS riot police. Banksy has a similar obsession with police as most graffiti neo-artists understandably do. His Kissing Coppers daubed on the walls of a Brighton pub sold for $575,000 in 2014.

(Our Comment: "This really is a maimed expression of "the poetry made by all and not by one" falling back into the old copyright scene beloved of a culture scene on steroids. Down at the bottom where we are located we freely take from each other in and out of collective effort and individually unequivocally glad to see an idea you once had bearing fruit elsewhere. This is not a rip-off as money making doesn't come into it. What galls us is seeing time and again our ideas constantly ripped-off, used and abused in the media – mainly via journalistic scum – who don't ever have the decency to mention the source, though would do so if the source was part of the official hierarchy culled from some frikin' fink who invariably props up the system in one way or another. Banksy, of course knows who we are and therefore his real Elephant in the Room minus the William Morris wallpaper").

Banksy filed for trade mark protection with UK's Intellectual Property Office.

(Our Comment:(Our Comment: "It looks as though Banksy did this to stop his brand being used to market cleaning products: i.e. "Banksy cleaning fluids, get rid of stains and graffiti the easy way" etc, etc. Recently a good internet reply on Banksy read: "He's a guy who says that until the inevitable collapse of capitalism we should all go shopping. He'll be advertising County Life butter next alongside Johnny Rotten". However that would reveal his identity. Or maybe not; in fact an even more obscure though tantalizing anonymity could be the cleverest of sales pitches. Doubtless Banksy wouldn't be as dumb as to feel sorry for the Royal Family as a rotting Rotten now does. But you never know as Banksy is now shaking in absentia hands with absolute finks like Damien Hurst who acted out his part in Dismaland. Even The Financial Times rather smartly said of Banksy, "The stencils provide the marketing; the gallery walls the cash flow, a virtuous cycle of profit and publicity". Too right - this really is how he keeps his 'virtue' and street cred").

In June 2015 Banksy's Silent Majority spayed onto the side of a mobile home during the 1998 Glastonbury festival sold for £ 445,000. The rest of the caption reads, "It's better not to rely too much on silent majorities - for silence is a fragile thing - one loud noise and it's gone"

(Our Comment: "Like so much of Banksy's 'serious' statements wat-da-fuk does this mean? Empty nonsense. Banksy's trajectory has been to gradually mould genuine subversion into a hip form of avant-garde neo-liberalism, part of that "terrifying subtle" syndrome previously mentioned in regard to the dismal reality of corporate totalitarianism. His comments sound so deep and yet are no more than a return and reinstatement of gallery product, a having your cake and eating it post modernist vacuity so typical of the hip neo-liberal individual. In late August 2015, Banksy said of Dismaland, "It doesn't so much ask the question, 'What is the point of art now?' as ask, 'What is the point in asking, "What is the point in art now?" Again: wat-da fuk does this mean?) If Banksy really wanted to create a stink even at this late stage in his meteoric career – one that would rock-on down through the years – he could turn on his big money aesthetes by simply getting a gang together to trash one of their rich condominiums – and issuing a lucid statement alongside an example of coherent vandalism and anti-art subversion.....But he won't do that, will he???")

Banksy's Folkestone piece was vandalised in August 2015. Entitled "Art Buff', it showed a middle-age woman wearing headphones, hands clasped behind her back, gazing in worshipful awe at an empty plinth. It was hardly knowing vandalism, the attacker painting an erect penis on the plinth, Folkestone Council anti-graffiti squad rapidly moving in to clean the "obscene" addition off the hallowed spot in the grounds of a local park. Art Buff's estimated value is reckoned to be £300.000 and had created a surge in tourist numbers visiting Folkestone's Triennial Festival. It can be reckoned a try out for what would happen on a much bigger scale in Weston-Super-Mare. Tracy Emin is attempting to pull off a similar stunt in Margate.

(Our Comment:(Our Comment: "What the guy who vandalised Art Buff should have done is put a crude cut-out figure on the plinth with Banksy stencilled over the figure. Now that would be a really cutting edge and a real contribution which could help revive the essential revolutionary critique of art. As for Tracy Emin: Well, she won't get anywhere as like all the rest of the dumb fuk, contemptible YBA's of the mid to late 1990s they simply didn't have a clue as regards a developing subversive critique of the totality. Most were Blairite New Labour in persuasion, though Emin quickly returned to the Kentish Tory fold. Present day hip neo liberalism, on the nervous edge of disintegration needs attributes and responses far more advanced. A figure like Banksy is just the ticket able in his Dismaland A3 brochure to include strains of South West England anarchism (which is indeed better than most contemporary anarchisms) plus ASLEF oriented rail workers' strikes that significantly don't involve an essential critique of unions which was so prevalent in France Goes Off The Rails").

Basically Banksy represents the ultra recuperation of people like us, indeed even to the very core of our beings who of necessity engage in a praxis which encompasses an often hour-by-hour clandestinity, endlessly engaging in disappearing 'tricks' simply to keep the heat off our backs of an everyday life where almost by rote, you are ever looking over shoulders for the filth, security guards and the like, ever repeating to yourself Brecht's dictum, "No, no, never, never answer the door." As for ourselves we carry on belonging to something like William Blake's and Samuel Palmer's Society of the Ancients. Ah, and then the BIG difference: Banksy turns creative moments into art and cultural specialism's acceptable to a virulently moribund status quo, utilising essential disappearance tactics as a PR stunt, who in a flash becomes a commodified Houdini or more potently, a commodified Jack Shepherd who vanishes from the arms of the military on the way to Tyburn Tree... and all to the wonderment of a captive, passive audience.....

The changing tenour of the times worked behind our backs. Not only couldn't we exist through any professional career or role, ineluctably along with others, we more and more distanced ourselves from all counter, oppositional milieus, anarchist, ultra-leftist, situationist, etc., if only because we were unable to fit in with the increasingly rarefied, hot-house temperatures such groups thrive on, remote from that essential: a turbulent but real everyday life in and among all those who increasingly just to say exist, clinging-on at the sharp end as we endlessly keep disappearing into the disintegrating masses. And, needless to say, light years away also from academic theorists no matter how interesting some of their ideas might be who immediately tend to shame us by pulling rank castigating inadequate use of the English language, etc. Moreover, the type of creeps WHO NEVER GET THEIR HANDS DIRTY, most needing a good haymaker to the jaw to bring them back within the realm of acceptable behaviour. Permanent night and day occupancy of that by now very unfashionable coal face - as it were – always but always makes all the difference in the world.....)

And so to Dismaland

That buffoon of an art critic Jonathan Jones (Now that's a guy who really does hates us) today looks askance at employee strikes in 'venerable' institutions like the National Gallery (and incidentally no different to another buffoon name of Anthony Gormley who also doesn't support such strikes) said in The Guardian, 22nd of August 2015 - obviously needing to brush-up his tarnished image - opportunistically goes a bit situationist in "all that is false about Banksy" launching an attack on Dismaland in Weston- super-Mare, saying: "It claims to be 'making you think' and above all to be defying the consumer society, the leisure society, the commodification of the spectacle, Disneyland packages dreams, Dismaland is a blast of reality." This is ironical seeing Banksy's ideas were sufficiently grounded in King Mob (without Banksy ever having the decency to mention such an excrescence) having purposefully lived for many a year during the 1970s next to the huge Same Thing Day after Day, etc., graffiti on the Hammersmith & City tube line as well as more recently probably having taken note of the original English SI, Charlie Radcliffe inspired, Disneyland piss-take poster seeing it was finally posted on the RAP web only a year or so ago having been lost in a Newcastle –upon-Tyne attic for many a decade.... For sure we do realise that Banksy has been playing with the theme of Disneyland for many a year having, among other things, clandestinely placed a life-sized replica of a Guantanamo detainee in Florida's Disneyland which took 90 minutes for security to remove. But did Banksy know of another transcendental collective precedent and one that wasn't about bigging up a star in the making? Again in some pamphlet of ours (quite forget which) we recounted the great invasion of the Florida site by a bunch of yippies around 1970 who imaginatively vandalised and re-arranged many an exhibit including the exquisite re-shooting of a then cranked-up, mechanised Abe Lincoln. Attacked and beaten up by security guards most of the insurgents did however manage to make an anonymous escape, so we'll never know anything more about such a creative high as, for sure, it was brilliant. And seeing we mention Newcastle, on the one hand, isn't Dismaland merely a surreal variant of sculptural post modernist attempted city regeneration not that different to Gormley's stuffy and obnoxious Angel of the North meaning oodles of money will pour into the decaying seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare for a short period of time? And then: Nothing!

On the other hand, isn't Dismaland little more than the extension of a Fluxus art event or Happening in say the mid-1960s waning in comparison with the direct, clued-in, provocative intervention that can start a prairie fire; detonating a chain reaction throughout an awakening population that means real active rebellion is simmering even if not yet coming to the boil? Isn't Dismaland just an alternative passive tourist attraction that doesn't set the processes of real liberation in motion? All Dismaland is doing is bigging-up the flagging careers and sales expectations of somewhat outré neo-artistic specialists; a further boost if you like to repeat after repeat of neo-punk phenomena. Moreover most of these neo-artists assembled here don't even make their own rubbish as that onerous task is farmed out to skilled crafts people no doubt sufficiently deferential to the neo-liberal, neo-cultural reality. As for other 'cultural' fields, not for nothing has Banksy selected the anti-Putin, Pussy Riot that came out of the worldwide protests of 2011. Of course these gals were / are brave and their account of the 'new' Gulag is fascinating and harrowing but typically they have been taken up by western celeb' culture which, like all cutting edge critique from Russia since the late 1960s the protagonists somehow cannot see through. As for home-grown territory, well, of course, it had to be Sleaford Mods, who in the performance shop window are so anti PC that, "fuck" "shit" "cunt" spills over in every other lyric? And while we are into the obligatory swearing, it would seem similar fucking cunts going by the name of Rawfolds (named after the desperately heroic Luddite attack on Rawfolds Mill near Bradford around 1817) perhaps weren't invited and West Hartlepool's Kill the Poets, it seems have gone soft on the stage. (Is it necessary here to mention Apollinaire's initial, anti-cultural Assassinate the Poets epigrammatic call to arms in what was once an anti-art North East?)

The banal realisation of so much of what was once the uncorrupted negative at the heart of capitalism, things like power to the people, education for all, free medical care, etc., and which later was to include Lautreamont's great dictum: "the poetry made by all and not by one" were sullied from the get-go through certain lamentable lapses and badly thought through arguments. In Lautreamont's case it was the deployment of that damned word POETRY which superficially can mean everybody becomes an artist as understood in all its present day banality minus the essential transcendence of art. Perhaps it can be said great subversives were also scared of themselves policing their deepest insights through lack of clear explanations, lapses that late capitalism could ruthlessly accommodate decades later, lacking as these 'seers' often did, a razor sharp cutting edge that could counter all future dissimulation. (To take one example, hadn't Andre Breton decades ago condemned Isodore Ducasse for hiding behind the "execrable" aristocratic name of the Comte de Lautreamont even though it was probably Ducasse's play on the image of the amazing Lord Byron?) Equally it could be said, how on earth could Rimbaud delete these following lines from his final version of A Season in Hell? "Now I can't stand mystical beliefs and stylistic strangeness. Now I can say art is folly. Our great poets just as easily: art is folly. Hail beauty." !!!!!!!!! remembering that final breath-taking phase, "Hail beauty."

In between there's the missing link: In 1986 - the time of France Goes Off The Rails - the Internet in any real mass sense did not exist so little could we realise that nearly three decades later billions of individuals would create their own artistic / performance-oriented persona despite meaning sweet fuk all, least of all as expression of genuinely individual-cum-mass creative, active impulses.

Firstly however, we must acknowledge and honour those truly courageous, creative geeks; those socially engaged hackers etc., many of whom have ended up in jail having remained true to the original utopian promise inherent in the early years of the Internet. There's also many a stirring blog out there and surely we are all grateful for that. Moreover, it could be said we're hypocritical here as we've also created webs to get our unacceptable ideas across, though we've had little choice in the matter, seeing that the once reasonably common alternative bookshop that stocked our pamphlets has, with hyper-gentrification of bricks and mortar, disappeared eons ago. Many too are the individuals who've promised to publish our tracts in dead tree format, most also disappearing in a puff of smoke (and mirrors) usually after a bout of hi-jacking.
The evolution of the Internet has been clever and ominous at one and the same time. Given a quick start on the back of great utopian hopes of liberation, like freedom from money and the constraints of political economy in general, a fledgling internet never amounted to anything like a critique of political economy in the sense Marx or Bakunin would have grasped it. It did though embrace a subversive, freewheeling life style emanating from American late 1960s counter culture. Fifty years later and that counter culture in California's Silicon Valley has been turned inside out pointing not towards the abolition of wage labour, money, value, the state and commodity production but to its exact opposite: an ever expanding plutocratic nightmare even worse than the robber-baron phase of mid to late 19th century America as we head towards a new feudalism of digital billionairing and analogue beggars. A place where the Internet magically floats outside of time, space and history – an unplace – far removed from a suffering but vibrant, somewhat egalitarian everyday life which still just to say, exists among those at the sharp end. Their ideal is an aesthetic psychogeography of trophy architecture on fabulously false, off-shore islands, floating 'utopias' with a nod towards Charles Fourier, never forgetting that Los Angeles was founded in the mid 19th century on the shell of a Fourierist commune; Nowadays and Straight Outta Compton these are Zanadu's of cyberspace cast adrift on silent seas forlorn, only to be then filled-up with money-mad geeks cut-off from churlish street shit.

Yes, these Internet innovators were finally able to market revolt; nay make it their lynchpin; the un-club, the anti-establishment establishment, disruption as the motor of billionairing where Cool has also morphed into its opposite becoming the orthodoxy of networking........ Inevitably the aforementioned un-places had to be horrifically re-invented meaning late 1960s counter cultural festivals like Burning Man in the Nevada's Black Rock Desert have become low profile but hyper-capitalised events served-up by celebrity chefs with everybody of 'importance' billeted in air-conditioned yurts. Elsewhere in San Francisco, Twitter's new downtown plush but casual looking office has a dining area sickenely named The Commons replete with gourmet cuisine. Truly what the old French Situationists acutely divined, "We are on the same path as our enemies" is even truer, heading towards a destination – pace a slogan of the May '68 uprising - where "Everything is Permitted" or, rather, it's cool to smash up everything, and rip off everybody but where money, status and the new informal, casual uber-elites of "disintermediation" – whatever that means - are worshipped.

As for France Goes Off The Rails, perhaps the most incisive graffiti of December 1986 - in retrospect pointing so brilliantly and ominously to a darkening future - is simply "ISOLATED......KILLED OFF" and the real anthem for future doomed youth vis-à-vis having no future. An unravelling where instead of autonomy, the automaton is taking over via the loneliness of an ultra-commodification so intense that societal autism is plumbing new depths of depersonalisation disorder characterised by privatised narcissism masquerading as isolated 'perfection', making, in comparison, The Lonely Crowd of 1950s radical American sociology appear as warmish conviviality. Thus we remain "alone together" via an Internet where "the more we connect and communicate the lonelier we become." (Keen)

And yet such praxis is cleverly disguised by a re-wiring of business behaviour appearing to give everything away for free via an innovative "personal revolution", reimagining oneself as aesthetic substance when it's all about filthy lucre, where the personal is the economic, where narcissism and generalised autism merge; a selfie-centered delusion. In an age lousy with celebrities, everybody can be deluded into thinking they are an artistic genius just at the moment of utter artistic bankruptcy. All is promo; a gift economy where profits are only for awe-inspiring Internet plutocrats; where the poetry made by all masks and becomes the grim fact that contrary to appearances, everyone is clouded in obscurity as every laughable 'creative' is shaken down and devastated. It means that a vast proletarianisation and dispossession is underway endlessly trashing the millions of re-imagined artists, writers, photographers, sculptors, dancers, singers, musicians and what have you all lined-up to be symbolically offed, offed and offed again......... One day hopefully all these schmucks will awaken to the giant con they've been subjected to and unfortunately believed in. And then maybe – just maybe – we can have a real ball the like of which no contemporary reimagining could possibly match. Roll on Utopia. "Hail beauty"........

Stuart Wise, again with a wee bit of help from twin-bro, Dave (2015)