Columbus, trendy discharges, bells: NYE 2012, Mexico City

The warm night’s layers become unstuck and start combining in unusual configurations as we start our journey and the city is eerie, more silent than ever before, abandoned except for the dispersed flow of people moving hesitantly up and down Calle Madeiro as if unconvinced about direction, murmuring under the low orange lights that carve deep contrasts on the deeply bent facades.

We squeeze somehow between these layers, observing, chatting passionately as we walk towards the Angel. Where are they? Maybe everyone is already there? A segment of Madeiro is erased by darkness adding to the eschatological feel and we cannot help joking about the Mayan calendar phantasmagoria. There is a thin trail of people pointing in the same direction, compressed by the strange silence of the city, mesmerized survivors in a post-apocalyptic plataresque Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet.. We get closer, it’s a part of the Diletantes boulevard we feel we have never seen before, Las Vegas style we imagine, the by now dignified-looking symbols of the colonial bourgeoisie dwarfed by the brash ugliness of the neo-colonial megaliths and it’s funny because our chat has been about the transformative potential of indigenous resistance and bourgeois State terrorism and the way North American multiculturalism plasters over fundamental conflicts and makes this terrorism seem like benevolent education by the Father and the irony is completed (as Vince Noir astutely comments in “Journey to the Centre of Punk”) as we stumble upon Plazuela Colon, the man that gave his name to genocide standing erect in the centre of the casino-looking buildings, pointing firmly towards progress, unapologetic about his legacy and his kinky tights.

And we realize it’s a ‘fuck you’ by the upper bourgeoisie to the rest of the nation, “Fuck you and your discussion of indigenous rights and self-determination, fuck you and your talk about other symbolic orders within the nation, fuck you and your de-colonial or anti-colonial movements, we are here to stay, this is our nation, ruled by our rationality, our army and our flows of desire and cash. This is the nation of the sons of Columbus, of the conquerors, of those bearing proudly the signs of European modernity, of progress, of Louis Vuitton. The man in tights is our hero, the genocide he stands for is our model of governing and we shall make sure this place remains under this rule. The primitives that do not self-reform will feel the edge of our enormous swords!” We laugh, but a bit intimidated and we start hearing the music, there is obviously a gig at Angel, it sounds like that brand of Euro-new wave that didn’t came out of punk and never quite morphed into post-punk and now looks like a pop teenager growing old while preserving its childish features, a slightly horrific sight. As we walk more and more people join, a lot of American and European youth among them, they have brought with them their trendy woolly beanies and carefully distressed skinnies and boots and their ‘quirkiness’ in their oversized luggage and we imagine how they will brag back home. And the identikit local trendies confirm their nauseatingly insecure smugness, it’s Plazuela Colon made teen pop culture and we really feel repelled, we start walking back fast, towards the Zocalo were people will be eating lurid blue cotton candy and selling and buying grapes and pop corn and sparklers in untrendy coats and ludicrously unnecessary polar hats and mittens, moving away from the discharge of trendies and feeling better and better as we do, like K. as he is carried out of the spinalizing labyrinth of bureaucracy.

At midnight four or five people start bouncing up and down in the alcoves of the bell towers, barely visible in the sprouting mass of the cathedral, pouring a heavy, intricate but surprisingly bouncy cauldron of sounds over our heads for what seems like a long time and then the compression of silence again and an Anglo behind us shouts: “DON”T STOP NOW!!” as if someone left his hand job unfinished, we find it funny and then the people start moving around a bit aimlessly again, like huge toddlers and we walk ourselves towards the hotel, a deeply satisfying anti-climax making us grin as we go to bed at 00.47 am.

Ms. Primrose Pill displays Origasmi!

After many months of convulsions The Diagonikals' first album is out on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/origasmi/id569330605

Primrose Pill appears in a strangely compelling short video, manipulating the masses into purchasing the toxic product. If her cannibalistic/cabbalistic/anti-capitalistic tactic proves successful black sarcasm will seep out and provoke generalized sepsis of the social order.

Here's the original blurb describing this terrifying experiment (we advise those easy to hypnotize to stop reading and watching here):

"Using hitherto secret subliminal techniques pioneered by dadaism and Eastern Block cartoons this video features Ms.Primrose Pill (The Diagonikals) pushing her band's album in a twirl of images - including retro refrigerators, electric butt plugs, Betty Page, toilet bowls, objet a and a special appearance by the infamous 'bourgeois sack' - that will leave your brain twitching. Watching this video will be planting into your mind the irresistible urge to purchase the first Diagonikals album ( 'Origasmi' now available on iTunes!!!). The mesmerizing soundtrack is "Bourgeois Sack" by The Diagonikals (on iTunes!!)."
 

The Diagonikals stick it to Veliko Tirnovo!

The Diagonikals stick it to Varna!

Twitch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTuUQTqe0w

“Nothing is lowlier than the bourgeois sack, that quivering mollusk that eats at one end and shits at the other!” grins the old avant-gardiste. “It hides its shame behind obstinate toil and can only enjoy cruelty!  It dreams to be a wreck on the strings of meaning, the flaccid vesicle, but still wakes up to find its sheets stained by shameful discharges, ha, ha, ha! And you can see all its thoughts running through that translucent tract, it’s nauseating! There is no higher goal than blocking this sack's accumulations, strangling its over fertile productivity and being useless!” she cries, covered by monochrome sound.

And indeed here is one, holding her delicate pink viscera with one hand and dancing with careful abandon; then the others come out, marshalling their output of ecstasies, traumas and commodities in cadence with the rusty typewriter. The relentless flow of letters marks the flesh, soothing as a lullaby, gagging for a moment the mourning mouths in the pit of the belly. But the amnesia is never completed, the menacing shapes reappear, wavering at the edge of the retina; so they lock themselves in the safety of cars and move orderly, like moths whose eyes secrete light, each one an armored dot in the tragic swarm.

Then the valves are overrun, the electric barriers are shot and oily, pungent flows come out, the body shrunk and overblown randomly, the vocabulary a desperate algorhythm of repetitions, the mouldy cavities drowning, until the steel rhythm starts again, calming the convulsions into disciplined reverberations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTuUQTqe0w

The Diagonikals stick it to Palermo!

“Palermo, dark window of European fantasies” we would declaim, were we not repulsed by romanticism. On a Saturday night we witnessed the city metamorphosize into a surrealist saturnalia, each plaza a coded gathering point. At 2 a.m. in the crumbling Piazza Garafello we sat down by the medieval fountain, a 2,50 euro bottle of beer in hand and watched thick fumes of grilled meat mix with lurid disco lights and raise towards the top of glamorously ruined old houses, surrounded by the swarm of 200 people in various states of intoxication dancing, chatting, throwing shapes, rolling, smoking, eating, drinking, shouting, playing with the fat street dogs, grinding to the hip-hop and techno beats blasted out by the dj’s, checking out each other, making out, collapsing, laughing, strutting and munching on sweets. Mesmerizing.

The Diagonikals stick it to London!

Every bourgeois infantry-wo/man toils to leave a mark on the indifferent symbolic order. Something: a tag, a portrait, a button, a smudge, a scratch in the dirt that will remember our name; a little dusty urn bearing our label on the interminable shelves of meaning. Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” are one wretched attempt to overcome the fated submission; there are other ways, from having a child (the urn carrying your name, genes and desires) to carving your name on a tree. We, for example, lift our leg, piss on a fence and take a photo of the drying stain. These insignificant events display our narcissistic hunger for recognition. The crumb trail that tries to lead us “home” starts with London coz, by the queen’s anal beard, who doesn’t want to leave a mark on London? We have prowled mostly around Hammersmith, sticking ours on whatever we could.