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01 21 03

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TAZ

By Andrei Codrescu

Terra incognitos are not easy to come by in the days of satellite mapping, but the Sufi-Beat philosopher Hakim Bey observed many blank spots on the map and named them TAZ, Temporary Autonomous Zones. The reason they haven't been noticed by geographers is because TAZ move, they never stay in one place for very long, and they can't be measured with common scientific instruments or methods. The only way to spot a TAZ is to use an artist to locate it. Artists are bloodhounds of TAZ: they sniff out cheap rent, congenial watering spots and fellow tazzerites. Hakim Bey used 100 artists over a period of 20 years to spot upward of 30,000 TAZ in areas ranging from the Carpathians to the Mississippi Delta over a thousand-year span. Armed with nothing more than Sufi ecstasy and a desire to create among their own kind, the TAZ-finders doused their way straight to the next TAZ, even if it was in motion.

TAZ are nomadic because they are successful. They can only stay in place as long as they fly below radar. TAZ take root in poor areas of cities or the unincorporated countryside where space is plentiful and there are mixed cultures. Tazzerites thrive in racially and culturally diverse environments from which they draw the strength to grow and be noticed, which is what eventually draws scouts, geographers and zoning. These are followed by land development, rising real-estate prices, city planning, preservation societies, law enforcement and art simulacra. The lifespan of TAZ used to be decades long until the last quarter of the 20th century when TAZ destruction accelerated, making TAZ short-lived and prone to extinction, but also smaller, faster and harder to spot.

Tazzerites draw their territorial lines through song and dance like the native Australians. In a fully functional TAZ all structures are nomadic, mainly crashpads and tents. Tazzerites use local concepts of time and space that they activate with found materials, speak a variety of hipster lingoes, and use advanced technology to communicate. The "objects" they make are temporal and ephemeral, but they transcend time and space to link both vertically through history and horizontally through geography with all TAZ past and present. They are connected to each other across the globe and often merge when one of them is destroyed.

We live in a TAZ called Narcississippi, which is somewhere between Louisiana and Mississippi. Tazzerites go to Louisiana to party and to Mississippi to repent. Narcississippi is already being dismantled by powerful image-making conglomerates and aggressive zoning. We are not disclosing here the exact location of the TAZ where this is being written, but a clue to its position is the time of its most visible activities. Tazzerites man the night shift.