The Bijouterie of Winnie and the Shiba Fellas

On social media, at the beginning of the war, the CIA unleased an army of twitter 'campaigners'/bots supporting Ukraine (at the same time preparing cyber tactics for Taiwan for the coming war with China which the US will manufacture after the Ukraine). They created the identities in the first instance by appropriating a subculture from computer gaming where cool teen gamers used cartoon dog-human hybrids as their avatars and called themselves 'fellas'. The second 'anti-China' 'army' similarly adopted an animal persona - this time Winnie the Pooh, because there had previously been a campaign suggesting that Xi Jinping looked like Pooh and had therefore banned Winnie the Pooh from China - untrue of course. If you look at Fella twitter accounts they often don't even hide their location is 'Langley' (the CIA HQ). It initiates pile-ons, cyber bullying and abuse campaigns, as you'd expect frequently racist and misogynist. Yesterday, a North Atlantic Fellas Organisation (NAFO) dog replaced the blue bird logo with their trademark dog-face - it is unclear whether this is an actual hack or a Elon Musk marketing stunt related to a court case; either way, I wrote this poem some months ago in response to the Fellas but the twitter hack seems make this a good time to post it. 

The Bijouterie of Winnie and the Shiba Fellas

And did those in ancient time walk upon mountains?

And was the anonymous pleasant pasture anxious?

And when the oozing flood conspired to the anthropomorph,

And assertive hope was mocked to undermine,

And mills still Satanic, though closed and burned out

      For future residential development

               or locations for cold people to starve.

As bristling musculature stared at screens and, chewing,

As if cry havoc dogs and wagin' doges, callin’ tantrum chagrin for war

As if broadcasting pustular to its proud constituency of residual pornocrats,

Ageing as futureless empires do, sanded in desert storms lost, herniated,

 burger fat believers in a half-century pre-dream state,

as if every night, without fail, the bijouterie of Winnie and adrenal Shiba Fellas struts

that banal masturbatory oath. 

Inauguration of Donald Trump: Sequester the Bile

Sequester the Bile

1

Will this be filmed? Will I ever been seen again?

Déjà vu to pre-empt the desire to say:

this is me and that is them - as emphatic modifiers

If the signature is left as an empty list

A loser’s garden for a nobody,

nobodies, useless eaters as a forgetful functor:

their intropunitive ignorance of a soliton that goes ahead of us

Austere defenders of the right to pay towards the certificate

with or without fear.

2

Now conditionally bijective to now

A catalogue of comparatives and superlatives been here before

those heroes, holders or changes to the governance pathway;

recursive choice mildnesses

the indecisive

bring me the head of stupid

enjoy your day of barely disguised resentment, whispered irritation

catalogue systems of libraries, ideas cosy, mediocrity built after

                bombing,
trees all the same height are the same age

in estates of easily constructed isotropic housing

Apologies (labelled transitions between states)

when to compromise only generates compromise –

the axiom of determinacy

not the axiom of choice

standing despite all possibilities to fall

We are not going out onto that jetty,

it's dangerous and no one will thank us.
In the same way valleys are better than mountains

barbarous dissolution

its budget for the new management

You are pathetic and will get what you deserve

3

Architects of the future:

The tyranny of cardinal geometry, stars and grids with sightlines

our breath will create weather OUR BREATH WILL CREATE WEATHER

truly monumental … far exceeding all expectations for our 1000

years

our arch will be bigger than your arch OUR ARCH WILL BE BIGGER

                                                                           THAN YOUR ARCH

the wall detail of cracks and crevices, beautiful colours, fronds and teeny weeny microphylls

the worst thing that could happen

this absolute future looks bleak for vertebrates

Sequester the Bile

Combined with the Brexit vote disaster, Donald Trump winning the American election makes it clear that we have arrived at an historic moment when the idea of Progress itself is being turned back, when truth no longer matters, when the existence of humanity itself faces the abyss (Fascism, climate change, nuclear war, you know the list). As you know, I am dismissive of the portentous claims of Poetry, but there is a certain attraction to the Romantic image of the heroic poet standing against the apocalyptic storm to bellow ‘fuck off’ to the Darkness (I paraphrase obviously). In that shocking Trump week, I was reading a medical thing that talked about a process called sequestering bile. This seems obviously a metaphor for the requirement of this moment. It occurred to me that if poets were going to mean anything there had to be a global chorus that sequestered the bile of Trump etc on the 20^th January coincident with the Inauguration Ceremony. Poets would raise poetry to the status they historically claim with poems sequestering the bile; #SequestertheBile could trend alongside/surpassed the Inauguration hashtag. Anyway It’s there as an idea.

So in addition to the ‘Place’ collaboration with Jayne Dyer, I began writing ‘Sequester the Bile’ with the intention of publishing it on 20^th Jan.

A little after I started, I was approached by Tom Jenks and Steven Fowler to see if I would do something as part of the Enemies Project, a collaborative performance on 14 January at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester - http://www.theenemiesproject.com/northwest  The obvious collaborator for me on this is Helmut Lemke .

Having only just come out of poetry retirement, I am tempted to joke the Godfather3 line “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” or more recently from John Wick “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond, you may well find something reaches out and drags you back into its depths.” … on this occasion the something was the Enemies Project.

Anyway, the poem-writing has started. At the moment I am investigating two motifs: the Nazi policy of killing ‘Useless Eaters’ and the megalomaniac architectural dreams of the 1000 year Reich, specifically the proposals to build a triumphal arch in Berlin under which the Arc de Triomphe could fit and the Volkshalle Dome which would have been so huge that the breathing of the crowds it could hold would have created weather.  The useless eaters language resonates with the murderous Tory welfare policy which except for the absence of lethal injection is evil in plain view: google death rates from the ‘Fitness to Work’ test and compare with Nazi Aktion 14f13 criteria for murder.

And the grotesque gigantism of Volkshalle starts with a gold elevator.

As I say above I am under no illusion that poetry offers real resistance to the evil we face, but as I recently blogged about Paul Hindmith’s Mathis der Maher, the artist’s responsibility at times like these is to make art that contributes to the resistance. To belt and brace it though, I am actively working in the real world too.

I'm Back!

The publication of my interview about the Text Festival with Derek Beaulieu in Jacket, which was actually concluded just after the Festival, turns out to be coincidental with my ability to return to blogging. It’s been an odd year or more social media-wise. Almost overnight, I went from active and frequent verbosity to near silence, which probably seemed a bit odd to people who follow these writings. Initially there was an element of exhaustion post-festival exacerbated by the urgently depressing/infuriating battle to save cultural services from the sado-monetarist onslaught of the evil which is the coalition government. Paradoxically, the solution to the threat that I came up with precluded even more public comment. To the many participants and followers of the Text Festival, an inclusive open maybe even rambling dialogical event, it may be counterintuitive that my next major cultural project has to be developed in large part through confidential negotiations but that has what has been engaging me for the last 12 months.

Finding the solution to the threat to cultural provision was an interesting challenge. The problem could be defined thus: the arts in the UK had spent the last 20 years justifying their legitimacy by association with other fields - mainly social, education and welfare policy. The arts had developed a body evidence tailored to impacts on government indicators for social cohesion, learning, health & well-being, etc. The problem came when the new fundamentally anti-social government re-defined public policy as simply related to its cost. By this criterion, the arts are buggered – all that social good stuff is meaningless to politicians whose rightful place is in the Museum of Dead Bastards Heads.  The knee-jerk response from the arts sector was to re-double its use of the arguments and evidencing of arts as social value, because this had mitigated the worst extremes of previous cost-cutting assaults – although tellingly not without notable cultural losses. By definition this was a doomed strategy this time round and there developed almost a feeding frenzy of cultural cutting. Going to museums meetings during that period involved seeing lots of haunted resignation. It occurred to me early on that the arts’ response was inadequate – primarily, I suppose, because I was never convinced in the first place that art needed to be justified through its contribution to non-cultural agendas. Readers of my blog will have observed this over the years as I have criticised, for example, art in regeneration where you get bad environmental development because it is driven by the artistically compromised; or my attacks on the nonsense of the Kids in Museums organisation which turns cultural facilities into vacuous crèches; or my smugness over my "intrepid resistance to interpretation", etc. All the solutions on offer in those early days were either administrative or financial – move around or share the deckchairs, shed staff or cut budgets. Once you head down that road, you have lost the argument and might as well shut up shop straightaway.

So I set up to find an artistic solution.

The answer turned out to be unexpectedly simple: We should curate our way out of trouble. The arts should do what Art does. Specifically: to curate exhibitions and projects aimed at international galleries and networks; to move the cultural horizon beyond the constricted UK context to where there were still opportunities for funding and partnerships committed to culture qua culture. It may seem simple now but I lost count of the number of meetings at which someone said: why has no-one thought of this before?

I had imagined that this would be the way forward for Bury, but unexpectedly galleries and museums across the north threw their hats into the ring realising that it offered opportunity to all. Pretty quickly I had lost count of how many had joined the project – it is somewhere around forty now, I think.

I planned to focus on Japan initially, as we had experience working there; but as the British Council got involved we were quickly steered to China as the UK’s top priority: hence my trips to China in October 2011 and April 2012 to negotiate and set up projects. As much of the detail was delicate, diplomatic and intensely demanding, confidentiality became essential to progress the plans: so behind the scenes me and my team (who have been remarkable) have been working on the hardest, most complicated project we’ve ever attempted; meanwhile outwardly, my social media presence was near silence.

However, as the first project of this new vision is close to opening, it’s now time to resurface. I’ll expand on the project in a future blog, but suffice it to say our team has put together an exhibition called “Toward Modernity: 300 years of British Art” - drawn from 19 UK museums and touring to 6 national museums in China. So I’ll be in Changsha (Hunan Provincial Museum pictured) again in September for the opening and then again in Beijing in November. In between I’ll be in Austria and Italy setting up a new partnership in the area of public art and creative industries and in the early new year I’ll be in Japan and maybe South Korea working on more touring exhibitions. (It’s not just me; by the way, members of my team are booked for the European Sculpture Network in Celle, Germany in September and the Glasgow Europe conference in November. As I write the incomparable Kat McClung-Oakes is in Tampere, Finland, setting up our Turner exhibition and Josef Minta has just come back from an EU digital museums conference in Barcelona).

Having ‘worked through’ the transition from the Text Festival to world tours, I thought that my observations in the interview with Derek would now seem out of date but I think it still covers what I thought of the Festival. As I predicted despite my protestations I am now working on a 2014 Text Festival, and as I projected then, the questions that seemed to me unacknowledged challenges for poets will probably surface; although maybe not, as poetry has seemed less and less relevant as the year has passed: my latest poetry book will be lucky if it is read by 50 people; the exhibition I have organised in China will be seen by 4 million. Maybe this was one of the reasons why my book was called “The End of Poetry”. 

 

I have missed blogging: I originally started blogging because I liked moaning about crap books, films and exhibitions. And over the last year there have been many things I could and should have moaned about, but now I’m back! 

Rethinking the Museum

I was speculating the other day about an epigrammatic comparison of the attitude of the current government and the previous one to its subjects (us); and came up with “the last government wanted to control your every thought and action; the new government doesn’t care what you think or do; it wants you to fuck off.” Maybe an over-simplification but it was only for my personal entertainment, one of those idle conceits you think to yourself but don’t say out loud. But it came back to mind when I read the ‘think-piece’ on the new North West Museums Federation website “Rethinking the Museum”.
http://www.nwfed.org.uk/thinkpieces/rethinking-the-museum

At first I was pleased to see that someone had attempted futurological thinking beyond the constrictive cultural damage of the previous government and the cultural catastrophe of the current lot forward to 2030; but as I read the ‘think-piece’ another question inviting epigrammatic speculation came to mind: what would the future look like to organisations conditioned by New Labour managerialism and then splayed under knives of sado-monetarism? It would look like the current essay “Rethinking the Museum”.

The science fiction conventions of looking forward are either utopian or post-apocalyptic. The addition of the concept of ‘Vision’ implicitly supposes the former, a dynamic positive projection from current conditions to a desirable future. The NWFED essay finds a bureaucratically dismal third possibility. “Rethinking” offers a future that assumes an absence of positive change, a future of degradation and decline, an extrapolated acceptance of the consequences of the ideological attack on the foundations of British social and cultural structures. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/margaret-thatcher-coalition-lib-dems The “think-piece” should embarrass the writer(s) because it accepts and carries forward a cultural outrage. This doesn’t surprise me: the paper is branded to MLA (Museums Libraries & Archives Council), Renaissance North West and National Museums Liverpool (NML). I’ve had no dealings with the latter but generally found MLA a mildly irrelevant organisation – its chairman is the turgid ex-poet laureate Andrew Motion; both it and Renaissance NW were creations of New Labour and are philosophically flawed in that conception. Recently I had a meeting with a Renaissance officer, during which she actually told me that “Greater Manchester has a super-supply of galleries and museums and could bear a controlled ‘thinning out’”. This doesn’t fit with David Fleming’s (NML) introductory comment: “new museum leaders emerge. They will be those who were prepared to stand up and be counted when times were really tough, who didn’t take budget cuts lying down.” The NW Fed site contextualises this debate with: “We need leadership now more than we ever have.” Yet “Rethinking” starts with the comment “some of the museums we know and love today will be distant memories”: these ‘visionaries’ are puppies waiting for the psycho to pull their legs off, some of them still have wagging tails.

Each aspect of this ‘vision’ is an extrapolation of Tory rhetoric, essentially saying back to anyone in government who might be listening (they’re not), ‘New Labour created us and conditioned us to think what we are told to think so don’t hurt us because we can deliver whatever you want.’ The upshot of this is a ‘vision’ that attempts to justify practices that no museum professional would say unless they had a gun to his head.

By 2030, apparently “successful museums will have learnt how to save money and make money… Monetisation of the museum will be the key”. No, this is the desperation of Now. Museums “…offering paid for services, a healthy [sic] network of volunteers and… exploiting the philanthropy of those with ‘significant net personal wealth’. These are governmental stipulations not vision: make money, run services with volunteers (ie the unemployed/unpaid), and the pretence/lie that by letting the Rich keep their money, they are disposed to redistribute because they are not really bastards. Significant net personal wealth? Another example: ‘Shared Services’, another of the current mantras: apparently a panacea to save running costs. Renaissance NW seems especially enamoured with this idea. In reality this is a very dangerous slippery slope which will lead to museum closures. The think-piece has already assumed that the culture crime has been committed. So in 2030 there will be collection sharing. This is non-idea – museums already share collections, regularly loaning works to each other. A related dismal thought is the “‘showbiz’ value for visitors and will be as much about the shared brand equity of big name museums”. As Riiko Sakkinen observed over the proposed Guggenheim in Helsinki “Guggenheim is the McDonald's of Art - reliable, easygoing and extremely unsurprising. Ronald McDonald serves us comfort food and Sololon R. Guggenheim shows us comfort art.” As he terms it – shoppingmallization. The paper is full of contradictions inherent in government policy: Museums will “centres of experience rather than consumerism…an alternative to ‘consume at all costs’. How does that square with “they will be past masters at leveraging the value of their brand” and the new ‘key value’ of ‘Monetisation’?

“Rethinking the Museum” is shot through with self interest. As Morpheus observed in the Matrix “Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it”. The North West Federation of Museums will still exist. Laudably museums will have helped people ‘through the worst of’ the onslaught’ (at least this recognises the scale of the disaster we face and it projects into the future). However, the Museum sector will be structured pretty much as the New Labour Renaissance model: National Museums (the showbiz brands), the Core Museums (which is currently equivalent to where the Renaissance staff sit), and local museums. But wait, it’s just been announced that Renaissance is going to be called New Renaissance and will focus on ‘Core Museums’. So against the evidence of history that Museum national and regional structures have a shelf life of about 3-5 years, ‘Rethinking the Museum’ reckons these structures will still be in place for 20 years. In the same spirit of adopting ‘future’ nonsense, local museums will all have been morphed in line with today’s ideology – museums will be charitable trusts, ‘independent’ from local authorities (under this government its possible that local government itself will essentially cease to exist), ‘benefiting from mutuality and enterprise’ – every few weeks I get an email inviting me to training courses so I can prepare for mutuality and enterprise. It’s bollocks now and it would be bollocks in 2030.

The only passage that can be said to actually speculate creatively about the future is the opening “some of the museums we know and love will be distant memories, their collections dispersed, their buildings transformed into…work/live units for micro-creatives [whatever they are], crash pads for funky seniors, urban food hubs or incubation facilities for nanotech start-ups”. Thus bizarrely the only unrestricted futurology makes predictions about the non-museum uses of museums after the wreckage of the sado-monetarist apocalypse.

But the think-piece does provoke thinking – Can we extrapolate from current conditions a future with equal validity but containing some hope, some fight?:

The museum wars finished in 2016 when the radical micro-creative movement destroyed the last remaining museum of capitalism, as much from anger at the mind-numbing obsession with stories as its association with the catastrophic Cameron Regime. The preserved ‘archaeology’ of this ‘museum’, which no longer fulfilled the by then accepted definition of a museum, were adorned with the severed heads on pikes of those who had previously held ‘significant net personal wealth’ (for those worried about the museological implications of preservation of biological material for future generations – the outdoor versions will actually be realistic cases of the originals which will have supplementary status in the Museum of Dead Bastards Heads). Meanwhile the Turbo-Realist Museum Movement will be globally networked Glass Bead Game-style hubs of new idea generation, overlaying holographic virtual realities projected contiguously onto surrounding streets or even whole towns. Rather than users or visitors, museums will have thinkers; the only ‘brand’ that will matter will be the depth of a particular museum’s experimentation. Unlike the expectations of “Rethinking the Museum”, the global problems that society faces and to which museums can contribute solutions will be entirely different and unpredictable from 2011. For instance, the solution to climate change was sorted out within 12 months of the bankruptcy and subsequent collapse of capitalism, coming remarkably and unexpectedly from the socialist New Renaissance of the Arab world (sees Zizek http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt), after that it was simply a matter of project implementation. [As I have recently experienced idea thief, I hereby copyright this vision].

Is this future more fanciful than “Rethinking the Museum? Of course. But it is just as valid in taking forward current trends with the difference that it suggests some prospect that progress is possible, or if you don’t accept this projection as progressive, then let’s just say it’s more imaginative.

Fundamentally the problem with “Rethinking the Museum” is the problem of museums in the UK. I am reminded that the new (toothless) People’s History Museum uses the strap line “Sometimes ideas are worth fighting for” – this is exactly what is missing in British museums (PHM included): for them if ideas are worth fighting for, they are fights that happened in the past. This isn’t a recent problem; it was there in the earnest procession to take idiotic performance indicators seriously. The objection that these were externally imposed doesn’t wash because in my experience it was possible to do the minimum bureaucratic nonsense and therefore not compromise artistic vision. Generally, however, public galleries accepted that the government targets told them something important about how they were doing, but each governmental regime is value-laden and thus slanted to distort radical museological practice. The museums sector is defenceless because it relies on arguments based in Liberalism, on protestations of social value. The current government is not interested in social value; it’s only interested in cost. And Liberalism itself is intestate now that the Liberal Democrats in government have been shown to be without principle. To rethink the Museum, we have to finally ditch its reliance on liberal ideas of the past and focus on facing the ideological challenges of the 21st Century.

A Sustainable Future for the Rollerball Museum

Since May, the cultural workforce in the UK has been nervously anticipating the onslaught of the dark regime that now governs the country. The disaster that this will be for British culture is universally accepted – except maybe by intestate liberals in denial, who for the sake of realism can be ignored as hopefully they will be for a generation - Charlie Brooker commented in the Guardian this week that the liberals represent the acceptable face of abuse but we have to hope that they are treated as unacceptable for many years to come. The only question in most people’s minds is the degree of destruction we face. I think that the most telling comparison I have heard is with the Conservatives' last ideological attack: the destruction of the labour movement and the closure of the once mighty mining industry: culture’s future looks remarkably like the fate that befell the wasteland of pit villages and blighted a generation of workers. My epigrammatic assessment is that this government could destroy one hundred years of British culture in the space of three.

The ‘Arts’ and ‘Museums’ have been producing various briefing documents and lobbying campaigns that set out why the arts are so important and there are various online ‘save the arts’ websites and petitions. The problem with all of these is that they rely on the arguments that the arts have developed over 2 decades of New Labour target-driven non-culture imperatives which have fundamentally undermine chances of survival in the current situation. Basically, the arts argue for the economic/social/educational value they provide but the new government is only interested in costs (and that is charitably to give them an economic justification rather than the more likely ideological truth): in this simple equation, the value of the arts is irrelevant.

The dangers are compounded because of the clever nonsense of ‘Business Transformation’. For decades, cuts in public service have been referred to as ‘efficiency savings’. Everyone knows that this is newspeak bollocks; but the unprecedented speed and scale of this debacle implementation is dressed up with this new language which suggests that services can be saved by radical re-configuration: “Business Transformation” is more than a distortion of the language – it is a plain lie. The propagation of this lie is compounded by the naivety of a sector of museum/arts administrators who were trained in the ethos of neo-Puritan museums as useful – it’s a generational thing. They are quick to accept the cuts as inevitable – because they are conditioned by the methodology of the previous regime to hit the target, even if the target is perversely destructive. So you get nonsense out of them such as “it is better to have one good museum than four mediocre ones”. This is supposed to suggest that the recent times of plenty have resulted in too many museums, some good some mediocre, and therefore the new governmental cull is actually an opportunity! This is plainly bollocks. Maybe it would be better to have four good ones – good museums don’t cost any more to run than mediocre ones.

I am pretty frequently getting email bulletins now with titles like “Fuelling The Necessary Revolution”. Every single word of that title makes me want to slap the writer, who goes on to claim that “The funding cuts announced this week are bringing into sharp focus the need for us to consider different ways of thinking and different ways of doing. Whilst artists have a proud and promiscuous history of collaborating across every imaginable boundary, arts organisations have too often tended to work in isolation or in competition. It has been written especially for public and private funders in order to persuade them to encourage and support more collaborations. This guide includes an explanation of the competencies, qualities and attributes necessary, describes the early stage challenges and offers a framework for assessment. It explains what disciplined collaboration looks like...” The exasperation I feel reading this is nearly debilitating – maybe to reduce my use of expletives in this blog I could just observe that the cuts are so large that most of the thinking is already directed to not doing things rather than doing differently; that for those of us who have been ‘promiscuously’ collaborating with artists for years and crossing every imaginable boundary this is patronising shite; and explanation of competencies, qualities, attributes and frameworks for assessement (just what we need!) is the tiresome bureaucracy of HR-Fordist model imposed on arts management over the last decade which paradoxically has artistically de-skilled arts management while pretending to professionalise it.

The other delusional strategy being offered is that the way to survive is to focus on the young – “we need to illustrate to government and society that our organisations can teach young people about the past so they can construct their futures.” There are two misapprehensions in this: the first relates to my earlier observation – under New Labour, working with young people was a consistent governmental imperative (to the detriment, I would argue, to the quality of the arts themselves): the working with youth card is already in the game and clearly has no value to the rich bastards that now govern the country. The other problem with it relates to the sustainability of the Rollerball Museum, which I come to below. Sustainability is another bit of jargon that has a multiple life in the current situation. Until recently it was used as part of the green agenda, reducing the carbon footprint of museums and galleries, etc. Now it has an additional use, much as ‘transformation’ means ‘dismantle’, sustainability now means survival.

Along with the liberal “don’t hurt us because we are good with the poor and dispossessed” strategy of the arts (liberalism after all is dead in the final act of coalition), the other humiliation some are swallowing is “The Big Society”. This is the Government’s vision for replacing the ‘big state’. I can’t be bothered to parse this nonsense, but suffice it to say, that there are arts administrators arguing that there is an opportunity for the arts to survive by ‘delivering this new agenda’. I am just not convinced that enough of the cultural infrastructure will survive because the sentence includes its own demise “for the arts to survive by delivering this new agenda”. This assumes that the arts are supposed to survive; but this is an ideological dismantling of public life to be rebuilt in a different image much as it was with monetarism in the 80s-90s. It doesn’t need or want the past. One of the founding concepts of museums is that access to the past informs the future - “our organisations can teach young people about the past so they can construct their futures” – to dismantle the infrastructure of British museums and galleries is to overwrite history, to disconnect the past so that a different, forgetful future is forged. The new government’s schedule for destruction is 2014 (so that British society has been irrevocably changed before they can be kicked out in the 2015 election), but this story makes me think of a slightly later date: 2018.

By the year 2018, the Corporate Wars have ended and crime has been eliminated around the globe. To entertain and divert the bored masses, the sport of Rollerball -- a cross between hockey, roller derby, and motocross -- has been invented and become wildly popular. Veteran player Jonathan E. (played by James Caan) of the Houston team has become so big with the fans over his ten-year career that the corporate owners fear his stardom violates the team ideology of Rollerball and may inspire a revolution. Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), an executive with Energy Corp., the team owners, tells Jonathan E. “Corporate society was an inevitable destiny”. Increasingly suspicious, the previously dumb jock Jonathan tries to investigate the history of the game and the corporations by going to visiting the last library-archive in the world, which is Zero, the world's most powerful computer based in Geneva. Jonathan only finds more evidence that the world is all wrong. The head librarian is madder than a hatter and the computer is twisted. Somehow they have lost the entire 13th Century and who knows what else. To paraphrase George Orwell “Who controls the past, controls the future”. And how better to control the past than to lose chunks of it. You never know, maybe they’ll win a second term, in which case they will be in power in 2018 - with the unemployment in the arts that's coming, there'll be plenty of applications for the museum director.