Monday, July 25, 2005... What can you really say about the state of the world right now? I feel fortunate that my landlord forgot to pay the cable television bill sometime while I was in North America, and when I got home earlier in the month, there was no ridiculous CNN, no BBC World with Darshini David reading the economics report, no horrid CNBC. My electric keyboard now lives in front of the television set, and the last thing I glimpsed (in a café) was London being awarded the 2012 Olympics, which bothered me because I knew it meant trouble. But I did not expect to see it surface the next day. So I'm living my life these days unplugged from the high-pressure infusion of news that I came to Paris last fall committed to indulging, and as a result, I'm putting out less world-news type stuff here (you can still read it at our free Political Waves Yahoo group). After years of no television, including through the whole 9-11 era, I decided it was time to see what (on account of the presidential erection) was going on at the news channels and pretty much watched them all the time through the autumn, winter and spring. It feels good to be out of that particular loop. We live in the age of the suicide bombing. Was there ever one before? It's rare to see something happen for the first time in the world, but we may be witnessing one in this particular instance. No gesture could be more confusing about the true value of life. We also live in a time when, as usual, fear is being marshaled to gain increasing control over our hearts and minds; but now it's fear of people who don't care about life. They are the scariest ones, right, because the thing we supposedly all value so much they don't value at all. And the fact that so much fear is pouring in from outside our individual consciousness does not help us get our own lives together, heal our ills, make small, bold decisions and define happiness our way. As far as I can see, the two could not be further from one another. When one's perspective is dominated by fear, concern, negativity and guilt (I do think we feel guilty for not doing more), it's difficult to make intuitive choices, to devote one's life to feeling better, or to keep any perspective at all. Yes, it does happen, but the overall atmosphere around us gets cloudier ad the fear stirs up the dust. For some, love totally loses its meaning in the midst of this, and anger and resentment take over. I am not blaming individual unhappiness on politics. But I would say that we're living in manufactured chaos, and that's a big obstacle to happiness. So, too, is the sense of uncertainty. What exactly is going to happen? Is it worth moving forward every day? How is it possible to find love in a death-obsessed world? Yesterday, some friends and I made a little project of doing a nude photo session down in the Catacombs of Paris. The Catacombs are really an ossuary; a place where bones are stored. Set within the 300 kilometers of caves, tunnels and mines are 6 to 7 million sets of human remains. Part of that is open to the public and, early yesterday, I went down with a model and three assistants to work with the space. We were first in line, and once we got in, we basically ran down the 130 steps to the bottom, bolted across the kilometer of tunnel leading to the ossuary, set up the equipment and worked like we were cracking a bank vault. In the backs of our minds was the setting of the world: the long and increasing series of suicide bombings in Iraq, Egypt, and London; security crackdowns everywhere. The Catacombs is a direct confrontation with death. It is a vast underground storage warehouse for human skeletons. It is our common destination, metaphorically or literally. Ange, my model, threw herself open for the experience, and more than made up for the many technical disasters that come from photographing in a dark environment with little bits of harsh incandescent light where we had to move very quickly to stay ahead of the tourists and out of the awareness of the guards (who probably would have appreciated running into us, come to think of it). An ex boyfriend Nick was with her, in from London (it was his first day in Paris), as was a friend of mine from Paris named Christophe, and another from Holland named Adin, who worked a second camera and documented the project from bit of distance. We made an amazing team. Here's one result of our work. I'm not sure this is appropriate for a Planet Waves cover, but I wanted to share it with you in the form of a cover test. Let's leave this as our commentary on the state of the world right now. I'll provide it on the black background and the white one we're experimenting with. If you'd like to comment,you may drop me a note at francis@planetwaves.net. I'll pass along notes to Ange as well. http://www.planetwaves.net/home_test_black.html http://www.planetwaves.net/home_test_white.html Easy does it this week. You need to get used to the new direction Mercury is moving. As a brief PS, I have a pretty intense week of writing this week, so you might not be hearing much from me, and those to whom I owe emails, thanks for your patience -- it's not personal. Typically I do most of my astrology writing on Wednesday and Thursday, but this week I'm going to marathon straight through. Yours and truly, e PPS, cheers to the young couple fucking in my building on the third floor at all hours, echoing their (prolonged) screams and grunts throughout the little air passageway with the intense acoustics that all the apartments share, windows open, in the summer. They are certainly waking up the neighborhood, and they seem to love it.