The Heart of No Place
The year is 1999; the place, a city in the Northern Hemisphere. Artist/rock widow Y. surfs the Web looking for shadows of her husband John. At the opening of her exhibition she is introduced to Andrea, a young journalist with wild ideas about art and technology. She surprises Y. by reinterpreting her decades-old conceptual- and performance-art works through the latest trends in global money flow and IT.Through flashbacks, we learn that Y. and John also outraged and shocked the public with statements like Its time to talk about vagina envy at a news conference for nuclear disarmament. These antics on one hand endeared them to fans worldwide, while on the other created enemies especially for Y., who defied the Western notion of a submissive Japanese female by being as outspoken and creative as her husband. Some even blame her for having been planted by her fathers corporation to break up Johns band.Following Johns murder by an unidentified gunman, three men a critic, a musician and a producer are interviewed for TheTV. Their eulogies and emotional confessions that they all loved his guitar are met by a single putdown by an (also unidentified) diva: Yeah, you loved his ass, too.Returning to her studio after scattering her husbands ashes, Y. contemplates a new artwork in which she would hammer a nail into a cross. Her grief is shared by her Assistant, who also lost his partner. Y. confides in him her frustration that what she finds on the Internet about her husband does not resemble the man she knew. The Assistant reminds her that its because his songs tend to get under your skin, and that we have created a virtual heaven for departed souls in our imaginations, and on the Internet. Y. continues to grapple with her questions as to why the end of Cold War seemed to signify a turn in the artistic climate in the West, coinciding with Johns death.As Y. returns from her daily walk, the Assistant informs her that computer firm Monosoft requests the use of John and her music and likeness in its marketing campaign. Y. is unaware that Monosoft has been gobbling up competitors and now plans to expand to the content market via acquisition of music and film outfits.Attending her longtime gallerist-friends opening, Y. is introduced to Daniel Mohn, who turns out to be the visionary founder and CEO of Monosoft. Mohn resumes his effort to win Y. over by stating that the Cold War wasnt won by missiles. It was won by people like you and your late husband. It was the arts of the Free World that kept leaking through, until it became the flood that broke down the Berlin wall.Y.s now-grown son visits. As she prepares a sandwich for the young musician, she has an apocalyptic vision of a thousand suns heating up the sky. That night, she contemplates a heap of spilled sugar and creates a chess board on her glass desk, thinking of wars and their consequences, and of women with all their men gone rebuilding ruined cities, maybe with bricks and stones, or with potatoes.During her walk, Y. encounters a group of joggers wearing headsets and portable music players products created through exchanges of Japanese and American technologies. Upon her return, she announces to the Assistant that she has decided to finally perform her Nailing piece, which she had previously thought would never be realized.
romantic