watered-down version of the attractions that got them noticed in the first place.
But is it enough for Josef Jaeger? He seems the least satisfied of anyone.
“It’s nothing new,” he explains while slumped over the table, heedless of the cigarette that’s about to burn too close to his fingers. “People treat it like it is, but that’s only because they have no sense of the past. And when they treat us like we’re coming up with something new, all that does is make me feel like a fraud. All these elements, they come from somewhere else. Look at some of the earliest industrial acts, from the mid-seventies on, and you’ll find them. Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einsturzende Neubauten … they were the real innovators. They were the pioneers. The only advantage I have over them is being born later, so that I’m working in an age when I’ve got a marketing machine behind me that turns whatever I do into an automatic commodity.”
I suggest that he’s seeking a sort of legitimacy for himself, an area that is uniquely his. Something that — dare I voice such an empty cliche? — no one has ever done before?
He brightens faintly and finally does something with that cigarette. Only now he’s waving his hands around and I fear he’ll set one of his dreadlocks burning, like a fuse. “Who doesn’t harbor the desire to push the envelope? Everybody in this world who’s really forged ahead with something nobody’s ever seen, you could probably fit them all into one house. What makes it so difficult anymore is the hyperaccelerated evolutionary speed that affects everything. Now everything advances in increments, day by day, or week by week. You hardly ever see that huge leap anymore that leaves everybody’s jaw dragging the ground, and they’re screaming, ‘Shit, where’d
Since I can take for granted that he’s ruling out such leaps as a cure for AIDS, or voice-activated steering for emission-free autos, I have to wonder what leap he feels qualified to make.
“Oh, I never claimed to be qualified for anything. But … are we fantasizing here?”
Sure. Why not.
He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling. “What we’ve always been most interested in, in nearly all its permutations, is human potential. Just because we focus artistically on the most heinous potentials that have been realized doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to build some sort of linkage that would be positive, constructive.”
A linkage?
“Creating something in the spirit of a hybrid realization between technology and the primal humanity that’s our essence. Humans have to come to comfortable terms with technology, because right now it’s allowed to be the enemy, but a benign one. Machines can outlast us at every turn, and we’re killing ourselves trying to keep up. Everybody’s sleep-deprived and we’re paying for it in reduced efficiency and horrible decisions. Disasters like the Challenger explosion, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, and more train wrecks and plane crashes than I could name … you know what they all have in common? Somebody, somewhere, without any sleep, trying to maintain a machine’s pace rather than human biorhythms.
“It’s a war of attrition, and all I’m saying is there’s a middle ground somewhere that nobody’s really occupying. What I’d like to do is harness the Cartesian philosophical construct of ‘the ghost in the machine’ and give it a new meaning in the struggle between meat and metal.”
Any ideas?, I ask him.
He doesn’t answer. He just sits still and lifts his hand and watches me watch the cigarette burn toward his finger. It’s an excruciating moment when I realize he’s not going to snuff it out, not even when the skin reddens and blisters.
“I used to not be able to do that,” he says. “It proves I can change.”
*
My name is Jasmine and I’m an addict … one who wants never to change. When Josef arrived at my door, weary from his flight from Switzerland, I let my addiction take control once more. I never realized the full depth of the pain of our separations until the moment we were reunited and I realized what was so incomplete about myself.
Beneath a week’s beard and the dark blond serpentine locks of his hair, Josef’s face was beatific, enraptured.
“It works,” he said.
“Tell me this was worth it.” I clutched him by the arms. “I have to know.”
He dragged me to the bed, and as we kissed with the fever of a month of our lives lost, we stripped away each other’s clothing. We stretched out upon the wide hotel bed, pale and naked, our hair like whips as we consumed one another.
I drew back up to my knees and ran my hands along the thin, suffering rack of his body. Still red and fresh- looking, the scars were symmetrical, up and down each limb, and in twin rows along his torso and back. They weren’t much larger than the welts writ upon one another by Africans practicing scarification as a rite of passage. I put my mouth on one. It tasted hot and raw, and I imagined that against my tongue I could feel it pulse.
“You look beautiful,” I whispered, hoarse and weak.
There’s something puny about an unadorned body. Such a body is, without clothes, more naked still. It’s why we needed our piercings, our tattoos … to lay claim to the last thing we owned that the world could never take from us or tax.
“Get your practice amp,” said Josef.
I lugged it over from the corner where it sat with one of my smaller synths that I would bring into hotel rooms. I yanked the patch cord from the synth’s output and handed the plug to Josef.
When he was ready, I turned it on.
Our arousal was, I think, born out of a delicious fear more than anything. Like the first time we made love after Josef had gotten his ampallang piercing, a steel post through the head of his cock. Or after the time I’d gotten a ring through my clitoral hood. This was no different. We had no idea what to expect, we only knew it would be momentous.
I caressed him, lovingly, gently, and from the practice amp rolled soft waves of sound. Thunder from a kiss upon his thigh, earthquake from a grip upon his arm. I straddled his outstretched leg and dragged my cunt along it from ankle to hip, and the air itself swelled with sound … each distinct but overlapping, an evolving glissando of a world’s end.
Josef’s hands on me, urging me on, I stretched out atop him as I might my own grave. It was like swimming across his flesh as it buoyed me. There could never be too many points of contact, for each had its own voice, and when I impaled myself upon him and we strained with flailing limbs and wet mouths, I heard the throats of an infernal choir drowning out my own cries, and all I could think of was what if we were onstage, with fifty thousand watts of power at the other end of our union.
*
From
For a lot of disgruntled urban and suburban youth, industrial music picked up where punk left off, after it burned itself out or softened into New Wave. The appeal was basically the same: atonal noise, pounding rhythms, inhuman energy, frequently indecipherable lyrics expounding a bleak world view, often sung in a garishly distorted voice.
But a funny thing happened to the industrial revolution: it got mainstreamed. Which is the way of all deviant pursuits, and that it’s happened should surprise no one who’s ever tuned in to MTV and seen Johnny Rotten acting as guest VJ. Sounds and rhythms that smack of industrialism have shown up on recent releases by such unlikely converts as U2 and Suzanne Vega, and even Nine Inch Nails copped a Grammy, albeit under the Heavy Metal category.
