« WHAT IS THIS HUMANS THING? | Main | "STRANGER" BY SARAH SHAPIRO »

October 18, 2005
I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS BUT IT FEELS LIKE THE ANSWER.
I went to the KCRW studios to do a radio interview with Elvis Mitchell for "The Treatment."
In the hallway there was a poster that said:
WE HAVE NOT LEARNED ANYTHING,
WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING,
WE DON’T HAVE ANYTHING,
WE DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING,
WE DON’T SELL ANYTHING,
WE DON’T HELP,
WE DON’T BETRAY,
AND WE WILL NOT FORGET.


I didn't have my camera, and I was in a hurry to get to the studio, so I quickly took a picture of it with my phone/camera. In the bottom right corner there was a little credit, which is too small to read on my phone/camera shot. I remember the credit as saying "from a Czech poster", and I'm thinking it must be from the 1968 protests. My girlfriend saw this on my computer and was startled because she grew up with the same poster in her house - but she remembers it as being somehow Native American. And now it has quite a different meaning, which makes a lot of sense, and I'm wondering if I hallucinated the whole Czech thing. As of now, neither of us can confirm our version. So it's just sitting there in my mind like an old sign at the edge of a forest. No one knows who put it there, you keep on walking, but now every tree seems ominous - and you wonder, am I with them? Or am I their problem?

Posted at October 18, 2005 07:09 AM