Paris Syndrome: Sunday June 23, 1940 6am

Recipe for misguided aesthetics casserole:

• take a handful of failed, sheltered artists and let them have a go at rewiring human nature
• give them lots of money, acclaim, power…. cameras
• go ahead and give a few of them mustaches
• host some art exhibits and pomp
• put the failed artists in charge of the doctors, lawyers and indian chiefs
• explain away ultra violence with arguments like “strength, the future, confidence, dry and secure”
• don’t question anything you can’t see
• be sure to keep things pure and annihilate competitive purists
• simmer until you see smokestacks poking through the body politick

Architecture of Doom is a documentary exploring the third reich as an art movement. A new frame for society is conjured up from a Wagnerian playbook. All undertakings- from catabolism to anabolism- are justified in the light of a select few’s artistic delusions of grandeur. Power shows its teeth, but also its shortcomings…

Paris syndrome (a form of Stendhal Syndrome similar to Jerusalem Syndrome) is a pyscho-pathological disorder manifesting with a wide variety of clinical symptoms. Nowadays its often throngs of Japanese tourists who are most affected. The excitement of the visit rolled in with an idealized version in one’s head, coupled to the exhaustion of jet-lag travel- your heart beats faster, giddiness sets in, hyperventillation, then come the hallucinations.

On June 23, 1940 Adolf Hitler takes an early morning guided tour through the empty streets of Paris. The dictator is in awe and he’s giddy. Yet one thought lingers in the back of his mind, Should Paris be leveled? After all Berlin must be the most beautiful of metropolises (metropoli?).

public service announcement #304: genetic variation is the spice of life; there’s really no such thing as a stable line.