That Obscure Colossus

No matter how obscurely one lived, the legend lives on, shining brightly, sometimes even blinding the eyes of archive enthusiasts who are reconstructing the past from the ashy imprints on old photographs and texts of all sorts. From the sources even more obscure than the lives about which they testify, speaks a shadow of that shady underground king. Rumor has it that his mother’s antecedents came from Appenine Peninsula, whilst his father’s lineage was a peculiar crossbreed of Welsh females and Chinese males. Strange, but, according to the sources available, true is the fact that no female Chinese nor Welsh male was known to spoil this intricate genetic pattern.

His name was Bizzare. He grew up in a tropical country far away from the place of birth. His childhood was carefree. His thoughts were uninhibited. His games knew no frontiers. He later reminisced it as follows: “It felt like bloody heaven to be alive and a child.” Few believed such a confession. Many were prone to interpret it as a nostalgia for the loss of innocence. But he knew they knew close to nothing about nostalgia. Let alone loss. Upon successful completion of high school, that coincided with his parents’  diplomatic term, he returned to his native Iceland. There he came to realize that the beauty of the Arctic was not only  inaccessible to the majority who boasted about having an impressive aesthetic background, but also undecodable to many of those who happened to be fishing in those domestic seas colder than a demon’s heart.

He was a teenager whose bodily thermodynamics allowed him to even swim in that soulless  aquaemeriVM. He learnt how to appreciate the exchange of energy between the body and the world. He decided he was going to take it as the axiom upon which to base a manifesto of the new mind. Early experiences of diving into the freezing depths of the frozenhearted universe colored his gates of perception with such vividness that later, when he found himself at the threshold of adulthood, he decided that no natural stimuli available could beat that underwater psychedelia. That’s how he became a devout admirer of science.

Mid height and minute, yet strong muscular system that secured good posture didn’t leave his body long after most of his acquaintances   left this world, more often than not under the circumstances shadier than the inside of a monster’s eyelid. He found himself increasingly believing in the power of laboratory—lonesome diver into the kaleidoscopic ocean of the art of micro slides. There he found a universe greater than any canvass decorated with the ultimate, signature imaginative faculty.


By that time he already nailed for himself the status of the unbeatable countercultural poet-cum-ideologue. His darkish complexion highlighted by a fierce pair of eyes emanated an air of easy-going heaviness. That was the mind writing itself into a program for new living within suspicious boundaries, all the while relentlessly anticipating their contestation.


During his wild adolescent years, he was the leader of the gang of the kids from suburbia who only knew run-down outskirts of the metropolis covered with an irreparably grey veil exhausted from the contaminated lungs of the urban giant. The slums these kids were forced to call homes were more reminiscent of the psyche of a person suffering from a severe, decades-long depression than of a monument to an architect’s expertise. Dawns were murky there. Noons dim-lit. Evenings darker than the tomb of a serial killer. There was no midnight.


Only aimless wandering along the faceless concrete surfaces. No site to occupy imagination. No sun to rupture the cement curtain above. No smile to break the spell of cyclic lives. Only perpetual lightless noon. On the way to and from school. That was not one. And a gang of idle-paced kids whose steps bridge the vapid space between the doorstep of the dormitory called home and the vurtual school. Endless journey through the city of indistinguishable days and nights.


Only the subtonic layers of the lingering buzz feature different registers. Those impalpable areas speak in different keys. Or, more precisely, can speak in different keys, should the thoughts be capable of creating the signature tone. Typically, that’s unlikely. All the buzz was just that. And, yet there was a frequency striking the air differently.


His name is Bizzare--king of original duplicity. And he knew it. If he hadn’t, he would have never offered to the world the Unforgettable Ten Musts:

1.      The idea of safety MUST be equated with the frequency of visits of club goers to the  hottest dance hubs in the city;

2.      Job MUST be understood as anything an individual does in order to support the development of small and medium businesses;

3.      The concept of job,  thus, includes the not-for-profit sector, thereby subverting traditional perception of employment;

4.      Equality MUST be understood in incremental class terms;

5.      Military-entertainment complex MUST be read in a freudian key;

6.      Peace MUST be tightly woven with, but at the same time diametrically disproportionate to, inflation;

7.      Tradition MUST be either smashed at a stroke or preserved within a fortress-like bubble;

8.      Art MUST be either totally free or there will be none;

9.      Citizenship MUST be a matter the bloodline, unquestionably founded in legislature;

10.  The degrees of humanity MUST be implemented in the health program  defined in architectural terms.