Aleksander Hardashnakov

Redbird Idea

September 1 - November 12, 2017

Red Bird Idea
Everyone before us minus, the rest adding up quickly.
Someone said to me, “I don't like it here, New York City, all these bodies, and bodies gone. Too
many souls beneath our feet. All the lives lived, too much energy.” In some way I found it stupid
but I’d had a similar thought at some point too. Not about New York, not about Manhattan, not
about East Broadway and Market St.
Getting a blowjob in a cemetery, sitting on a gravestone. Her kneeling atop a corpse, straddling
death while I forgot mine... until I came.
A dependency on lip balm, in jail there wasn't any. She traded parts of her meals for it, the
ribbed plastic container with the peel off top. She hoarded enough to apply multiple times
throughout the day, keeping her lips moist.
Frog, I love you! Even though we’re dead. Even after death, when you and I are product...
forgotten, extracted, mined, burned off, pillaged and recycled potential. Souls. Love still.
While we are here, human beings, minds burning. A red bird idea. Becoming fire, becoming ash.
Coming. I’m drained. My father said to me, “you’ll end up digging graves.” Walking on the dead.
-Aleksander Hardashnakov

A visit to the Crystal Palace, 1851
Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours,
and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful
place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one
thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find
there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in
full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the
glass covered and velvet spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith
and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth
hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this
mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have
arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvelous power of effect. The
multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst
the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there, not one loud noise was to be heard,
not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea
heard from the distance.
-Charlotte Bronte

“In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757
collective years on the site, every single day. Jonathan Taplin points out that this is ‘almost
fifteen million years of free labour per year’. That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion
users.”
You Are the Product
-John Lanchester,
London Review of Books

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