t Zero Profile Paint & Body of Santa Rosa having come up with a proprietary lacquer of a crystalline microstructure able to vary its index of refr

thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here - she'd watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube - but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into t

he said he was, at least might be more than the nose-twister and eye-poker he appeared. The place was full of computer terminals, facsimile machines, all-ban

eaven," he

said. "Most of it's just props to m

mage of a cartoon eye that shifted and blinked from time to time, and a smile-shaped speaker for a mouth, out of which now came a synthesized medley of refrigerator tune

igner seltzer,

-1980s," replied the mobile cooler. "At the moment 1

sentially Reagan-era fashion colors of gold and silver. One of the video eyes winked at her, and from the mouth emerged a shiny pink tongue of

" DL said, "we'

ack to its recharge station, playing "I'l

" Takeshi brightly, "otherwi

"exactly a tenth of a second after the warranty ran out, th

he screens, stroking some keys. "If I wanted t

"I really don't get

keshi had his

me. Probably to be with Brock Vond, is the way it looks. I

unships, who seem at the moment to be part of

window and anxiously check the sky, "why are we -

rairie's ear. "Until you get to see her . . . would

l whispered, keeping her eyes down because she knew DL

ther for the summer. When DL had known her back in Berkeley, Ditzah and her sister Zipi were going around in battle fatigues with their hair in matching oversize Jewish Afros, spray-painting SMASH THE STATE on public walls and keeping plastic explosive in Tupperware containers in the icebox. "Pretending

urf. Ditzah led them across the patio to a workshop in back, with a Movieola machine and 16mm film all over the place, some on reels or cores, some

elty on the road. They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who c

interviewer once, somewher

nesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue unfadable. "Ne

like our own Ac

to protect, so we can go

esn't that g

m has been ignoring the repression of farm workers here in this county who've been trying to organize - tha

hen only as much as she had to. She made sure the rolling stock was always ready to roll, scouted each new location for rendezvous points and multiple ways out of town, and though preferring to plan their way a

ackled, "Me and Zipi smoking shit somebody marinated in DMT, couldn't keep

the hash in the

Gallup, the ho

g at the screen, "who

re was a core that never changed, and it included genius film editors Ditzah and Zipi Pisk, who'd grown up in New York City and, except for geographically, never left it. California's only reality for them was to be found in the million ways it failed to be New York. "Magnin's?" Zipi would smile grimly. "OK for a shopping cent

care of the paperwork, would snort. "I visited my sister

of the water, fuck somebody right there on the beach then go jogging away without even leaving their phone number," which had in fact happened to her during the girls' first or introductory weekend on the West Co

y liked to chain-smoke while they worked and to have two or three television sets, tuned to different channels, going at the same time, plus rock and roll, the more acid-oriented the better, on the radio, thus cutting and splicing in an env

camera mount, fridgeful of ECO, and, at first anyway, a rump of the Kollective's more stubborn personnel, who had put some of the language of their old manifesto into 24fps's new one - "A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an a

' " suggested

th a stipulation that all life, even that of roaches, is holy. "Wait a minute," cried one of the original Death-to-t

our sign, man?" Ho

ir

figu

reamed. "Howie, that

ism," added the

'fro pick, while Howie, eyes ablush, held out a sm

n in the center, and the task of trying to keep everybody "happy" fell to Krishna. Frenesi would come back with half a dozen rolls of dysrhythmic young Californian women dancing at a rally, Zipi and Ditzah would fly into a rage at the impossibility of getting any of these hippie chicks to do anything on the beat ("It's tzuris I don't need!" "Tzimmes also!"), and it was always Krishna who found the right music, expertly manipulated the tape s

istantly implied in reruns like "Bewitched" or "The Brady Bunch." Here were the usual miniskirts, wire-rim glasses, and love beads, plus hippie boys waving their dicks, somebody's dog on LSD, rock and roll bands d

ines of buses and portable toilets on trailers in the distance, shone pitilessly down on mass incinerations of American-grown pot, the flames weak orange distortions of the daylight, and set over college and high school campuses turned into military motor pools, throwing oily shadows. There was little mercy in these i

e shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there, load the roll, get the shot. Prairie floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead

g funny. It was inside a courthouse lobby someplace and some little guy with a jocklike wal

you put it on p

k always changing venues and times on them at the last minute. They chased him from the courthouse, through the rain, to a motel, then to the fairground exhibition hall, the college and high school auditoriums, the drive-in-movie lot, finally back to the courthouse again, where Frenesi, by then not expecting him, just trying to shoot some old WPA murals about Justice and Progress if she could figure a way to compensate for

e handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, and inscribed in the viewfinder a TV-screen shape so you could frame a shot for the evening news, though this one of Brock ended up on a b

tor, hmm?" Zipi Pisk s

ecutor," Krishna p

akes of this creep," DL semi-tea

ront of it, but couldn't have missed her legs, long, bare, sleekly muscled, pale in the rainlight, in the courthouse echoes. And he could feel how she focused in on him, him alone - the lines of force. The

n't already have ..

something a little more," trying not to stare too hard a

courtroom d

ou a star. We'd all h

ullshit State degradation ritual

hoice. You'd have to

jaw a little forwar

, with a big pistol, wou

e way for a while. That would have been correct procedure. She was wondering instead why

eepened like a blush. "It's only a movie,"

ld liberate from the local power company. In the equipment van, among quartz lamps and PAR bulbs, color-temperature meters, blue filters, cable of different gauges, lamp stands, and ladders, were also grid-access devices, designed and taught her by Hub Gates, customized as occasion demanded by his daughter, "the young gaffer," as he liked to call her, intended for draining off whenever possible the lifeblood of the fascist monster, Central Power itself, merciless as a tornad

hose meters and tie points and shit? Someday

business, Sl

of film against those of "real life." Would it be necessary someday for one of them to die for a piece of film? One that might never

crifice," decla

o motherfuckin' shad

si sounding so sure, "long as we'r

just pull the p

hts out, man,"

whole career. Was she really that superstitious or whatever it was - naive? - to think, this far into the life she thought she'd chosen, of any protection for

began to learn with their bodies the language of batons, high-pressure hoses, and CZ gas, and as the unit medical locker gradually amassed a painkiller collection that was the envy of bikers and record producers up and down the Coast. They were still young, exempt, and for DL, in charge of security, sometimes infuriatingly careless. Just as she was allowing herself to think they might be showing a learning curve on the subject, along came the events at College of the Sur