"Toi t'as vu un aigle" by Gwyneth Bison (translated by David Pickering and Constantin Alexandrakis)


We catch up with Bonita Trocoli and Gwyneth Bison
as they cross the desert of Sonora, Mexico, fleeing
the United States and drawing up some kind of a
balance of their american trip. The car radio plays
Los Tigres del Norte.

Gwyneth Bison  Didn’t you find, I mean in the Greyhound buses, didn’t you find that the people looked like secret agents?
Bonita Troccoli  Uh… I dunno, they were clearly weirdoes, but…
GB  That guy with the moustache-briefcase, with his shirt buttoned all the way up?
BT  To me they looked more like juvenile delinquents on a outing...
GB  …all Karaoke specialists, pros even, like that guy in Las Vegas who got John Legend just right. It’s as though all Americans went throught the Fame school. 
BT  Yeah, but that chick with the huge breasts and her one-eyed Mexican boyfriend totally butchered I Can’t Live If Living Is Without You…
GB  For me it was Chicago especially, while we were waiting for the bus. I swear it was just like meeting all of my teen heroes: LLCoolJ, The Huxtables, Dwayne Wayne, Muddy Waters, Run DMC, Chester Himes, Prince…
BT  Yeah, but calling everyone "brother"...
GB  …
BT  It was Prince that really triggered it.
GB  Yeah, weird, I guess I’m kind of a groupie.
BT  But he was a look-alike?!? An impersonator!
GB  It was just as thrilling, plus, he impersonated my favorite Prince, the Prince from Purple Rain and there, in Las Vegas, whether you’re talking about an original or copy, you can banish the word authentic from your vocabulary… 
BT  A madhouse…
GB  Don’t get me started.
BT  Yeah…
GB  Yeah.
BT  I think that: because they themselves produce all the TV series: it makes sense that their country looks like the copy of their country.
GB  Speculum means mirror in Latin, but it’s also the root of suspect, specter, espionage, telescope, spectacle and speculation.
BT  Yeah, they’re all nuts…
GB  Like I said: you’d think they were all double or triple secret agents, in a touristy kind of disguise.
BT  No surprise they're saying "For Real" all the time.
GB  Except that’s hip-hop...
BT  Even so. "For real" is a conjuration. Kind of like the realness of voguing, a way of reassuring themselves, proving themselves that their life is "really real", to brush off chimeras, myths, fictions… but doing so while making songs and films… it’s twisted, man...
GB  The one in the bus with his dog rocket and his green construction-worker-sized headphones.
BT  A cross between the boss on The A-Team and the helicopter pilot, whatchamacallit…
GB  "Howling Mad" Murdock.
BT  A world populated by potential stars…
GB  It’s creepy.
BT  Grizzly Man…
GB  The deaf-and-dumb Indian who collects money at the slot machines...
BT  ... The Indian Runner – the surfer with a swastika tattoo...
GB  ... Point Break – all of the oak trees around Thousand Oaks...
BT  ... Daisy Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard – a giant brown cube in the boreal forest… 
GB  ... X-Chromosome – the geneticists who play with a remote control car on Torrey Pines beach...
BT  ... Quantum Leap – a sexual act badly mimed to the latest Katy Perry song...
GB  ... The Fresh Prince – we could continue for hours. The Great Checking of our clichés.
BT  Muzak…
GB  …in the middle of a catastrophe…
BT  …or a painfully boring discussion about psychology…
GB  …while singing in a chorus to raise money for cystic fibrosis…
BT  …or at the end of a love story…
GB  …or at a crime scene…
BT  …or during a gang war…
GB  …or driving a convertible…
BT  …or during a round of poker…
GB  …or having coffee with friends…
BT  …or returning from the Vietnam War…
GB  …or making several erotic phone calls…
BT  …during a car chase…
GB  …or a stroll in the park…
BT  …during a messy divorce…
GB  …or while battling cancer…
BT  …at the shrink’s…
GB  …several Cow-boy's metaphysical wanderings...
BT  … during a tailing seen as an art show...
GB  …or a secret meeting at the racetrack…
BT  …after the police commissioner’s speech…
GB  …or as witness at a marriage…  
BT  …while shaking your booty…
GB  …at a bachelorette party…
BT  This road is fucking awesome.
GB  Yeah.
BT  …
GB  …
GB  Anyway, one thing’s for certain: all the Californians have two professions: their own and nutritionist. 
BT  But Baywatch is a pack of lies. California is all grey in June.
GB  And, according to John Major Jenkins, a specialist of Mayan culture, the Armageddon scheduled for 2012 is in fact a transformation, a change in cycle rather than an apocalypse. 
BT  Yeah, they should snap out of it. US citizens don’t have a monopoly on the end of the world.
GB  How is it possible that, in a country as big as a continent (if we include Canada), you can only find German food: hamburgers from Hamburg and frankfurters from Frankfurt? What the fuck ? How could the worst grub in the world end up… 
BT  Child care, a birth, an elevator break-down, a fire, a suicide attempt, the purchase of an apple, a jazz concert, an overdose, a rape, an assassination, a hostage situation, the college football playoffs…
GB  Huh?
BT  I’m making a list of situations.
GB  The Avenue X subway station X as in Malcolm.
BT  In New York, we emerged from our cave like Peter Parker, the human spider, who lives in a cave in New York. While walking to the subway, we saw firescapes straight out of West Side Story, and a little pizzeria straight out of Do the Right Thing, someone pronounced the word "uptown" as in Uptown Girl by Billy Joel or just Uptown by Prince. Then we descended into the subway and it was like Michael Jackson’s Bad video. There was a group of 13-year-old kids dressed like characters out of Ranxerox in New York and the New York subway map looked like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.
GB  In San Diego, like everyone else, we immediately took up jogging and surfing…
BT  And we got lost for an hour in the Torrey Pines Spaghetti Junction (where we finally yelled out: "Fucking crappy-generic-architecture architect!" and thought: FLUIDITY IS A CONSPIRACY [that’s a certainty]).
GB  You saw an eagle. In California, all of Walt Disney’s animals may potentially be seen and, in Los Angeles, we discovered a Tough-Luck-Pedestrian sidewalk:


Tough-Luck-Pedestrian sidewalk

BT  I think they also invented the Leroy-Merlin aesthetic.
GB  The wife of the Silicon Valley prototypist must have had fake boobs, fake teeth and a fake brain, which she mostly used to make inept and condescending comments in a painfully shrill voice.
BT  Chinga tu madre.
GB  Pinchi California Cabrón.
BT  Most of the time, I televisualize the world and, to a large extent (if I count the numerous hours spent), I have telexperienced the world, and I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that, when the world is telexperienced, it’s mainly the United States, because it is definitely the most photographed, filmed and rebroadcast place on earth.
GB  And?
BT  And nothing. But I felt it needed saying. It’s pretty frightening, this monoculture.
GB  All the Americans who arrive in Paris feel like they’re in Moulin Rouge. I think the clichés go both ways, don’t you?
BT  On line inside a cube of glass, metal, wood, stainless steel and granite, facing a counter where a uniformed woman with a ponytail vociferates: NEXT! each time she stamps a passport. It’s my turn and I find myself standing alone in front of the Authorities. I manage as best I can. Another officer opens another counter and calls our friend the Cartographer, then asks me to join them. This other officer seems almost laid-back compared to the malicious hysteria of the first Ponytail (she has pulled her hair so tight and far back behind her ears that it must have hurt like hell). The man launches into his “why-where-how in the United States?” routine. “Because-on-vacation-in-America,” we answer. We are all taken into another room for fingerprinting. Our laid-back cold ass male officer escorts us there. We walk down a long hallway and reach a big circular room. He abandons us in front of another counter made out of stainless steel, frosted glass, and fake wood. We wait. We wait two or three minutes. We wait and the S&M Ponytail finally arrives. She launches into exactly the same questions with each of us. We answer with yeses and short sentences. Then each of us places our finger on a little glass box that emits a fluorescent green beam. Then, the Ponytail raises her thumb to indicate also-put-your-thumb-on-the-green-fluorescent-beam. The cartographer poses the biggest problem. We are going to New York together, but he plans to continue on across America to San Diego. A suspicious itinerary. The Ponytail grills him. Her demeanor shows self-confidence: legs spread, back straight, her hair painstakingly, obsessively pulled back behind her ears, her face crammed with light acne and covered with whitish foundation, which I’m guessing was water-proof (the witish foundation). And then, it’s all over, she lets us go, becoming less and less unpleasant, she lets us go, she has sized us up and she relaxes now, becoming almost genial. Thanks to her we make it across the border (Stockholmized?) We get back on the bus and everyone glares at us for making them twiddle their thumbs for 25 minutes.


Text published in Le Journal des Laboratoires May-August 2011