Of course, so many wanted fame, that the competition for attention and mentions was a kind of existential pestilence. Feverish brains simmered, plots to advance up the chain thickened like a roux. As facile decadence triumphed, the means of production - if it still had lucid meaning as a concept - just idled and idled. Growth was a dusty antique, and the stomachs of culture, emptied for so long, grew bloated in the season of famine.

July was a sultry mess, and the anonymous antonyms of both genders put in their sluttish time until the clock struck five pm on Friday. The money printers worked round the clock to keep the polar ice caps on par with the tempestuous calculations buried in the footnotes of UN white papers.

Anyone who remembered how to paint could try New York, but the best and the brightest - not lacking in conviction - holed up elsewhere. With enough turpentine and turbulent forms, they could find assurance and brace themselves by knowing that the only measure of worth was how what appeared on the canvas three decades from now illumined what paths were taken and could have been taken. Frank O’Hara’s ghost haunted the Badlands and Margaret Kilgallen appeared every Tuesday at a seance in Key West. A lot of stable binaries spontaneously combusted.