I Feel Better Than James Brown

Beauty Sleeps and The Assimilation of The Abhorrent in Perfect Plastic Even

I was attending Mardi Gras with Fidel Castro

Buxom cross-dressers threw fake gold coins at out feel

as we discussed the state of the revolution

Suddenly CIA men in bikinis tried to stab us with fountain pens

Fidel blew mustard gas through his cigar

and immobilized the lot of them

Nineteen tequilas later we had a deal

Havana goes back to the mob and Fidel and I

open a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken shops

Ain't life sweet.(1)

Ain't It Just, or Mardi Gras without Fidel

It's 1984 and I'm on ray bed watching TV in a Japanese business hotel, and I'm telling you I feel good. The TV programme I'm watching is so incomprehensible that it's sublime. The canned laughter indicates that it's a comedy. It seems to be about a group of adolescent boys guessing the colour of girls' panties and looking longingly at washing lines. I get out my movie camera to film it but run out of film, damn. Anyway, this is better than watching the porno channel - that was seriously disappointing. I'd been told that the actors had dots instead of genitalia as the depiction of the pubic area is banned in Japan . This sounded like fun: I'd imagined the actors taking their pants down to reveal John Baldessari-type coloured dots. It would get better still when the actors stuck their coloured dots together - like a demonstration of Albers' colour theory, but horny. Was it like that? No it was not. But with TV programmes this good to watch who cares. As I said, I feel good! Actually I shouldn't, after all this is not a good hotel, and being an artist is all about hotels. The bigger the artist you are, the bigger the hotel they put you in; this is not a big hotel. I know it's a mistake, but I'm staying. I like it here. Take the ceiling for instance. This hotel has a ceiling from heaven; modern and suspended, small and perfect, it has plastic fittings which penetrate its false skin to provide my light and clean my air, and there's a cute fire alarm with a red light to tell me the ceiling cares about me. I love modern Japan . After all I'm not here for the temples, the Zen or any of that stuff, I'm here for the plastic. In fact, its a bit more complicated than that: I'm here to try and find something. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I know the issue is one of beauty - a story of love and of death. I also know what its made of: its made of plastic. Not that this helps much. Plastic, as its name implies, is the ultimate malleable material; the dream of metamorphosis made real, made ubiquitous, and hence commonplace. Plastic can take the form of anything at all, even itself. The thing about plastic is that it is perfect. Its historical predecessor in a mimetic role was wax, but wax has always retained the taint of death. Plastic however is clean, which is one of the reasons it's perfect.