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Editorial

NEO-BOHEMIAN EX POST FACTO NON-MANIFESTO 

We, the undersigned, having lived a neo-bohemian life in Paris for the last four years declare after the fact: 

We are a generation that makes the lost ones look like a bunch of kindergarten kids having an afternoon tea party with their big-wheels and GI Joes, and just a bit of cheap lying sex.  How do you expect us to create meaningful art and love when every intellectual, historical and emotional foundation of our childhoods has been blown away?  Take a look at the facts; we ran around in our adolescence: 

1.  Singing, 'Free Nelsen Mandela' ('Say, Robbo, who is this Mandela guy?', 'Shut up, have another beer and keep on singing').  Now he's the fucking President of South Africa. 

2.  Thinking that the world would inevitably go up in nuclear smoke at some time in the next decade due to a nasty mistake with the launching systems of the Yanks, or the Soviets, or of both.  Now there just aren't any Soviets anymore.  They've all gone into exporting potatoes to the Chinese. 

3.  Scratch the Berlin Wall too, guys, the Cold War turned into what it had always been, an economic one. 

4.  Being told European Wars are a thing of the immoral past.  Ha, fucking miserable, ha ha.  What can stop our total relativist cynicism in front of such brutal self-serving realpolitik?  Oh, and don't think that higher education is going to provide some sort of moral pole to cling to in the face of this baseness.  The true commercial nature of academia and its honours is clear. 

5.  Believing meaning was being revolutionary; youth against society.  Bullshit.  We are the most neo-fascist reactionary swiss-cheese generation since the 30s.  We all want to get married and have a fucking Volvo in the suburbs.  Look at our pop music, look at films and T.V., our governments, and our "enlightened movements" working righteously towards an Orwellian 21st century. 

We are the damned, we are the free.  We have no direction, no agenda, no food but the greasy chickens that we prepare in our cockroach-ridden nests.  We are the anguished with no future and no thoughts, no pleasure free of guilt.  But this is our joy and burning silver.  This is our beauty.  For we are the supermen and women, if ever there have been.  We are crazy and we are crazed and we will live our lives like gorgonzola. 

John Benson, Robert Braid, Jennifer Moorehead, Rafer Nelsen, Juliette St Jacques - Paris, May 1994