What follows is something approaching a confession.
“Someone should sit these boys down and ask them what it is they want, you know?” Drawled Massimo Tutt, flipping through the chronologically ordered copies of i-D I had balanced on top of the vintage Nintendo consoles I’d acquired for my next art show. I had been thumb-breezing through a load of swerved tweets condemning the new iPhone as a proper Linus, so I’d missed everything he had rapped up until that moment (I should point out that at this stage, early on Thursday morning, I had been awake for precisely 165 hours). I looked up with that very niche feeling of rage you get when someone tries to wordbash your ears while you’re thumbing off tweets but he was wearing that well Casio old Kraftwerk T-shirt that he stole off CHVRCHES press yat at some dry lunch MTV gig or other they had both been at (or not, but possibly) so my rag unsinnied itself rapido and I asked him to repeat repeat repeat.
“ISIS…or ISL…whatever…” He said, “…I bet nobody has asked what they want yet.” He said with a trademark Tutt Shrug, a move he perfected whilst at Central Saint Martin’s. “I mean, they must want something, right? Everyone wants something, don’t they?” He continued, and I could literally hear his curious, addled brain grinding through this grim thought process something had triggered (possibly the feature in the most recent edition of i-D where they made a rake of well digital looking terrorists pose for a photo shoot beside a piles of rifles, or maybe it was the M.I.A. video for Bad Girls that we had watched 84 times in a row at two am the previous day)). I refused to go any further down this avenue of chat without a cup of tea and a horrorshow biff (to counteract the steroids we’d been hoofing all night whilst obsessively listing the defining moments of post-Chernobyl Ukrainian dance music), so we moved our operation into the kitchen, yeah?
After smoking one off, and then another, and ramming back a yardarm of Assam tea, I asked him what it was he had been trying to project into my head earlier. Neither of us could remember so we decided to make a list of our favourite French B-movies featuring bicycles for the next three hours (a definitive list was settled on, and at some point I might even put it up on here). Sometime in the middle of the afternoon Massimo clicked his fingers and grabbed the sleeve of my 1986 Fila polo shirt like a man about to migrate the herd.
“ISL…or IS…or ISIS, whatever…someone should sit those boys down and ask them what they want, you know?” He mumbled, already doubting the letter blocks tumbling out of his hapless mouth. “I mean, they want something, right? Everyone wants something, you know?”
At here’s the thing. Although I had absolutely no menu what he was gabbing about, but it occurred to me that the people that want something aren’t the ones you have to worry about, it’s the people that don’t want anything that we really have to worry about. When I say worry, I mean think, and when I say think I mean just ignore me, because I’d been awake for 172 hours.
This confession has been meaningless.
