ow we dance gaily upon the threshold of the avant-garde, grasping each moment so tightly that we cut our fingers on the jagged edges. As we tango into the next century, swinging the rhythm of the white noise big band...

Will you dance the tarantella? Will you tattoo a tarantula with a stilettoed two-step twist?

The millenium will happen, and you won't notice. Your computer will malfunction, your bank account will disappear, aliens will steal your brain and replace it with styrofoam packing noodles. But you, you'll be too caught up in the neanderthal retro-look, you'll still be heeding doom prophecies of Nostradamus and partying like it's 1999, going to that fabulous new Monet show, papering your walls with faded Van Goghs, babbling about Area 51, Studio 54, and rereading that Douglas Coupland book for the 55th time.

but I say unto thee, k-band is your salvation. k-band is your revelation. k-band is apocalyptic epoxy.

We have invented a new science, a playful physics, where energy is channeled into explosive technology, where the truest art is fraud, where literature, where music, where culture are relegated resident alien status. Yes, homotopy theory IS applicable to everyday post-millenial life! The best science is new science, and new science is the best science. Use your forceps, scanning tunneling microscopes, and tokamoks to expose the soft underbellies of gummy bears. All avant garde art of the twentieth century has been called fraud by the sideline philistines who denied its relevance to the time. Fraud Art welcomes the label, accepts it and bestows it upon itself. What better medium to embrace the necessary hatred and fear of reality than that which is fraudulently real, and really fraudulent? All labels lose their gummy backing in front of the grinning face of Fraud Art. K-band is a Three-Cornered Room in the house of Wisdom. The corners are: A Mission, A Warning, and A Truth. Below is one interpretation of the vertices of this triangular cubbyhole. Are these truly the corners? What shape are the windows? The House of wisdom is not easily found, though it is on the Interstate.

A Mission: to encourage the ravings of delusional paranoids A Warning: look inside for small children and animals before operating A Truth: most dimensions are useless Our Satisfaction is Guaranteed.

The Ritalin-riddled, Prozac-cuddled hyper-hyphenated post-modernist is fucking wishy-washy. Any religion that doesn't prevent you from doing something you like is no religion at all. If God wanted us to have a good time, he would have made us all Unitarians. Science is not a sociological phenomenon, though lab coats are. Therefore, we demand absolutism in most things. A life without opinion is a Disney ride.

We demand a longer week, shorter days.

K-band will straddle the time-space continuum like a Bourbon Street whore straddles her john, swallowing all other dimensions in a single gulp. All time is now. Everywhere is here. Therefore, we demand an end to the "retro" trends that have plagued this decade. Turn off the Cherry Poppin' Daddies and throw in some Duke Ellington. Take off that tie-dye t-shirt and wash yourself. Profess your love of that Brady Bunch episode one more time and you'll discover that you're drowning in the sordid whirlpool of Freedom Rock nostalgia. k-band is eternal fashion, and fashion is fleeting.

The gospel is that which can be known.

The twentieth-century triad of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll have not been replaced by electronica. The physical viscerality of skin, sweat, and sound is all that matters. Sexual pleasure is a freedom all should enjoy. There can be no masturbatory excesses. There is no bad sex, only bad timing. Thus, we demand a better exchange rate for herpes. Drugs are good. We do not preach that drugs must be used wisely; they cannot be. To unlock your mind and body with the drug-key is truly unwise. The fool inside must be allowed to run free.

We demand abolition of all futile rights.

All politics are time-wasting, thus spake k-band. That having been shouted 'til our lungs run raw, we must recognize that current political structures are as rotten as month-old cassava melons, and all laws their putrid seeds. Thus, all rise and say, Odelay the bourgeois! We demand, from the pointy rooftops of Middle America, Communism without the government. Angst shall be the only ballot question. We intend to right the wrongs perpetrated by the plutarchs on the American public. What about Europe, you ask? What about Europe, indeed. k-band says this: each continent is America, if the map is drawn poorly. All criminals should be locked up, with you. That would be punishment enough. With our precognitive powers, can the world be saved? All signs point to yes. Outlook unclear. The goal of every one of the underpaid redactive telepaths of k-band is to make sense of the collective anger, and if all goes well, package it for the überhip. We have just begun to perfect that which is unrealized. We are making the world safer for nonsense, more dangerous for you.

To be against this manifesto is to be for k-band.

-oolah z, j.j. thurgood, April 1, 1999 © k-band, 1999