Hey everyone, we’re back. Lightweight, comfortable. Fine robes. Air unfouled. Ready to absorb. OMG!
So… I ring up a number sent earlier on WeChat; the call goes dead. Then a few clicks – I do the 2-factor thing. The dial tone again. A recording buffers: ‘designed around the health and happiness of people…’ I was left feeling concussed – not by the call, but from repeatedly banging my skull with my phone. Then, after what seemed like a lunchtime, I finally got to hear the teaser for what’s already being PR’d as the most humid new release since Caves of Angry Shockhead.
Word-of-mouth, Hard Ca$h is an elegant read; as instantly invigorating as it is compassionate. A clear, easy-to-follow narrative, each smouldering line of the book’s Press Release presents the faintest of movements – ever nearing some sparkling exercise of exemplary desire – before quickly scuttling back to re-occupy the very same spot where it began. Back on the bottom rung; the only way is up. Spinning Hard Ca$h is a continual quest to unearth the fabled physically abhorrent matter buried deep inside the black box. What makes it so intriguing is what makes it such a difficult read: nobody has yet managed to open the fuggy book.
On my phone, an implied author spends most of our call time revising flashy coincidences found in hoarded dictionaries (maybe ‘hoarded’ is a bit unfair – there are four, just four dictionaries and they are identical) while ironing out the creases in – literally – thousands of one dollar bills. Then she gets back to the normal business of naming every hair on both of her arms. (No spoilers, but the names bare a striking resemblance to the aforementioned coincidences.) This explication is pursued more as a corpus than as a taxonomy, and – hell – that’s what I got, in excruciating detail. The deepfake detail is scalable; I found it most is fascinating on 10:1 but you can go higher if that’s your bag. Gyeah, well, I actually had it at 22:1; didn’t notice TBH – at least not until I got cut off!
The majority of PR relating to Hard Ca$h remains locked away from the reader’s view (member’s only) while some pages of the press release are already out of print. It’s PAYG, so the more cash you splash, the more you comprehend. Three month lease-hold member’s editions of the ur-release are restricted to 56 copies, each is bioencrypted in the DNA of a dead celebrity of your choice*, and probably come with their own unique denouements.
The latest rumours are that Hard Ca$h promises to crystallise its own absorption atmosphere; Willard’s proprietorial carbon-neutral dry peanut-based crystallisation process I hear. I couldn’t check ‘under the page’ – it’s hermetically sealed and jailbreaking…., well, you know what happens if you go there. I imagine that I’d find this ‘atmosorb’ indulgence to be only partially successful; maybe I’ll just never really understand how it sees itself, or perhaps I will be asking all the wrong questions?
*from a preselection of 6 dead B-listers.
For General Distribution: Hard Ca$h is released on all platforms next year reviewed by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants La Confrérie de Neoflagellants [(c)krs] #été MMXXI Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license MMXX
