thenightlibrary

Even as Tess with the teased-up do from Staten Island transforms into Tess from the Upper East Side -- parading in a borrowed mink -- she's still got mountains of shoulder pads. No matter where a woman comes from and whatever rules she's playing by, whether she made them up or someone else did, she still cuts a figure like an art deco goddess on the mast of a ship, sailing into the New Jerusalem. All Hail!

On the other end of the body, Katharine ("Kiki's") "bony ass" in a cast, skiing that is *fabelhaft. *The wind of the Ferry whips around Tess's skinny lips after she no longer sprays it up tight, the camera circles around Lady Liberty's crown and lands on the Twin Towers. How is it that Kiki is living in a town house and Jack has to carry a girl up three flights of steps? Why isn't there an elevator? To get to the top floor, you either have to be carried up slung over an executive's shoulder in speckled tights, and/or you have to read the trashy parts of the paper, and for that you gotta have Gumption. Night school. The girls at the monitor. The nails. The green eyeshadow, green like the type on the monitor, but less jewelry, less clinking when you shake hands.

There's a lot of sea air between there and there, the servant who masquerades as the master. What is the architecture of a cubicle compared to a window-office, tequila to chardonnay? A folder with a rubber band transmutes into a leather briefcase tucked in tissue paper, a little bit of kebab-sauce on your mouth, some garters and a ruffled sky-blue tux, vacuuming naked before the boss comes home and finds out. Pack your peanut-butter-and-jelly for the first day, it's entry level at thirty, there's a beat I hear in here, tick-tock, tick-tock....!

The city as circuit board, hardware to wetware ... and you can call Venezuela for free from a payphone, just need to record that sound it makes when you deposit $5 onto a mini-cassette recorder and play it back when they ask you to deposit.

The Plague, aka Eugene the computer security guy for an oil company, has created the Da Vinci virus to overturn a bunch of computerized tankers, but it's all a ruse to cover up a worm collecting millions from the company, and he's putting it on the hackers. It's mostly undetectable to the sheeple but the hackers can see what's really going on, they are screensaver peeled eyeballs bouncing around in zipping corridors of code, green numbers and purple lightning bolts, they're rollerblading through Grand Central, making off-color jokes, swapping door-stopper books full of UNIX code and selling pirated tapes at their haunt, Cyberdelia. Zero Cool cum Crash Override, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer ... the names mix memory with desire.

I noticed the Plague had a little snake brooch, and Razor and Blade, the TV stars of "Hack the Planet," had Mona Lisa upholstery. Everyone wears miniscule sunglasses at night and have neon-colored beepers. The story is sort of mush but I thoroughly enjoyed 105 minutes with the Prodigy on plastic-bag covered headphones blading through the Matrix ... worth it just for the time travel to a nineties even the nineties could not have imagined for itself.