"Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service."

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China Tracy, the avatar ego of Cao Fei, one of the coolest contemporary artists around, has made i.Mirror: a haunting, highly poetic documentary in Second Life.

Brilliant and beautiful, i.Mirror is available as a trilogy on YouTube, with each third thriving on a particular focus. It runs for a total of 30 minutes.

Part 1 is the most metaphysical and the most meta-political, with the signage of capitalism and icons of communism recurring throughout the landscapes of the sprawling linden lab metaverse.

Emotions and longing and void and myth make it unravel like an oneiric odyssey devoid of destination.

Part 2 documents a chance encounter and the ensuing discussions.

Love, loneliness, life, libido, liberty, lines of text.

Behind the male avatar:

"a man in his 60s (as Cao's movie reveals), a member of the American far left in the 60s (which the movie doesn't mention.) He it was who Cao met in person on her trip to Northern California, bringing together two of the unlikelier people to form a friendship, but for the metaverse: an elderly Marxist living in the capitalist US, and a young woman from formerly Communist, now hyper-capitalist China."

Part 3 presents a superb series of portraits. The pixels captured brimming with life, both poetical and political, like something Tina Modotti would have done with a Mac.

Sweeping differences, stunning similarities, the vast fauna of a small section of
online humanity makes for an empathic show.

Then dancing and the moon. And all the music too.

The official Marilyn Manson absinthe, 0,7l - 66,6% vol. (of course!)

"George Bush was a bona fide New York intellectual: a dabbler in esoteric religions... a journalist and an academic who was deeply conversant with the traditions of the Middle East."

"Humanity has gone through some very strange, strange periods and I think that we're going through a very strange one now."

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