anti-nazi spy and art historian

Stroganoff with broccoli and boca, straberry shortcake, a couple of ice pops later.

Fragmented. I’m part of a team or organization that is working to undermine the growing neo-nazi movement in the area. I’ve been sent to watch and listen, I’ll be stationed at the IV there on Central, but posing as a customer, not an employee. Some sort of epic struggle to get across town, activity centered around the Washington/Menaul area, moving through alleyways & dodging around, etc. etc. It’s dangerous and violent, but I don’t really remember how.

Actually in Nob Hill, I know that I need to better disguise myself-- I’m wearing my IV workshirt, for fuck’s sake. Where can I get something different that’s also CHEAP? There’s another pizza joint up the road, NY style, mainly stand-up, pick-up, and delivery. They’re having a grand opening or anniversary or something, and the palce is littered with boxes of very low-quality, cheaply silkscreened t-shirts. I find a box marked L that I like the design of and pull one out. All of the designs are red/black/white, most involve text and a constructivist poster-esque graphic, many with faces. Mine has a tight view of a woman’s eyes, looking sideways. [Very spy-like, in a cartoonish way.] I try to strike up a conversation with the kid behind the counter [in reality an IV-Heights worker], but he isn’t very interested. I talk about how expensive the shirts are for workers at IV, whereas these are going for only $3.00, he’s giving me a “yeah, yeah, shit’s tough all over-- NEXT!” sort of response. Very little solidarity from my fellow pizza kid.

I “disguise” myself. But instead of on stakeout, I end up with my art class, in a cramped bar sort of place, and our instructor is the bartender. He runs the class from behind the bar while he works. We’re looking at artworks salon-hung on a wall. They’re all white, red, and pink, very modern, highly graphic-oriented paintings running to the cartoonish, some with resin over the top. They’re neo-nazi pop art propaganda. The images are largely sihouettes of hip people (esp women in short dresses) dancing, with reverberating auras around them. but from these vague environments will step, say, a neo-nazi character, seemiing to harrangue the viewer. Very comic book inspired. [I have seen these images before in the dream, but I can’t recall when or where, I think back the the beginning when I’m across town, but...] Several of the more finished images have a background of spiralliing red & white stripes, and tend to be 1.5 foot squares and have the resgn overcoats.

The large painting in the center has these.spiralling stripes, but is just a painted loose canvas tacked to the wall. There are also little portraits or vignettes in a circle, towards the edge of the canvas. The instructor encourages us to count the stripes/vignettes, but I’m way ahead of him. I have a china marker out & I’m physically writing on the canvas. We come up with 33, which seems to mean something to the instructor, he points out that 33 is the same number as such and such in neo-nazi mytho-coding. [It made complete sense at the time, I wish I could remember the actual thing he said.] He wonders what we make of the spiral designs, too. I say to a fellow student that I recently read that when a person goes through “psycho-somatic withdrawal from drugs and/or alcohol” [I really meant simply “withdrawl,” but adding ther P-S term was correct in the dream.], many people experience the strong compulsion to draw spirals. I think of Spiral Jacobs from _Perdido Street Station_, and this somehow makes sense. The instructor asks me to repeat my poiint to him/the whole class. I do, and he challenges me, do I mean MOST people in withdrawal, or just SOME? I’m not certain, but I fudge it and say it is an extremely common effect, and that the artist (a mystery person we’re trying to identify) is probably going though detox and this explains not only the artworks, but also the person’s political choices, overreacting to become so proper and straight that they have chosen naziism to express themselves. But he dismisses my ideas as farfetched and unsupported. I’m aggravated.