Introduction

We started with a simple question: What happened? 1980, 1981! We started to research. To travel. To ask questions. We called this our dérive because we had read the French philosophers. But we lost this attitude after a while.

This is about what you see along the way, said the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas to us on his porch in North Dakota. Our theater friend René Pollesch had told us something similar: This is not about what you are looking for but what you are finding.

With Pollesch we talked about theater, John Cage, chance, coincidence and the traps of understanding. Then we went to Hamburg and Zurich and showed what we had found so far: bits of film, Slavoj Zizek, Ronald Reagan, images, strange haircuts. We called it a Psychofashionshow: Maximum association. Otherwise emptiness and boredom, which is fine too.

Then we travelled to New York, to Long Island, to be precise, we stared at chairs and masks and vases which Bob Wilson had collected in his sort of psycho-spiritual school retreat, the chairs and masks and vases stared back and we chose this time: Maximum narration and coherence.

The assassination attempt on the pope as a passion play. A little like Oberammergau. Which was fine too. The next story, which we found without looking for it, was the story of Dorothy Stratten. Playmate 1980, lover of Peter Bogdanovich, first strapped by her estranged husband, the smalltown pimp Paul Snider, on a self-built fuck machine and then killed. Blasted away her face, in August 1980.

Those are the stories along the way. This is also how our books work, eleven altogether, one book each month of 2010. Interviews with the likes of Robert Longo, Paul Schrader, Giorgio Moroder, Abulhassan Bani-Sadr, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Don DeLillo, Bob Last. Dates, Facts, Conspiracies. And images that talk.

To make these books and while making these books, we travel. Last we were in Johannesburg where we did not know, what we were looking for, but found white war photographers, black hipsters, Spoken Word Poets and the It-Couple of postcolonial philosophy. You become a different man when you travel, says Christopher Bollas. Or was it our new friend from Johannesburg, doctor Ram Garg?

Now Berlin. Who would have thought. What happened?