Molly Metropolis found Monson through Chtcheglov, during Molly’s first frantic inhalation of Situationist texts, when she read some of Chtcheglov’s letters in which he indicated he kept a diary while he was committed. Determined to track it down, Molly contacted Chtcheglov’s daughter, Lynnette. She agreed to sell Molly her father’s diary, and Molly received a bounty in return: Chtcheglov’s copies of both Monson biographies had been attached to his diary by rubber bands.
Inspired by the mystery of Monson’s life, Molly Metropolis asked Berliner to sign the screen prints he made for her as either Antoine or Antoinette Monson. She also seems to have established a legal identity for Antoinette Monson. As I was researching Molly’s connection to the historical mystery figure, I found Monson in Chicago, on a deed. An Antoinette Monson owned an office building, which was damaged in some kind of fire in early 2010—though when Taer began searching for Berliner, the building had not yet burned.
Marie-Hélène Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick, “As a Situationist, walking somewhere doesn’t count if you have a destination in mind.” I wonder how Kraus would’ve weighed in on Taer and Nix’s walking through Chicago; they had a destination in mind but they didn’t know where the destination was. Most likely, Kraus would’ve approved. Their progress was slow; the conditions were terrible. Chicago has a reputation for rough winters because of the wind, which both lowers the temperature and blows the snow and freezing rain into the faces of pedestrians. Sometimes the wind is so strong that the rain falls horizontally. According to Taer’s notes, she and Nix suffered through at least one day of horizontal rain. Once, to avoid getting hit by hailstones the size of quarters, they had to huddle for twenty minutes in a narrow doorway that smelled like urine. One evening it was warm enough that it rained instead of snowed, but overnight the rain froze to black ice on the sidewalks, which was hard to see and easy to slip on. The temperature made their jeans feel like sheets of ice against their legs. Taer loved to complain about the cold.
They had problems with Berliner’s map, too. They realized quickly that it probably wasn’t drawn to scale. Even with Davis’s notes, they weren’t sure which streets the maps depicted. Berliner had drawn the street that Davis had labeled North Clybourn Avenue vertically, but on a regular street map aligned to a compass, North Clybourn ran diagonally from northeast to southwest. Most of the streets that crossed North Clybourn adhered to a strict north-south, east-west grid system, so when the streets hit North Clybourn, they formed a row of triangles. Berliner’s map depicted one of those triangles, a very strange one where two of the streets didn’t actually meet. Taer and Nix interpreted this as Berliner having walked through most of the triangle except half a block on one street. It was either that, they assumed, or he simply drew the triangle sloppily. They tried to figure out which triangle of streets Berliner had drawn on his map. They hiked the same streets over and over again, talking about music, people in college they had slept with who had then avoided them in the dining hall, and their first big breakups. Sometimes they walked silently because they had to wrap scarves around their mouths and noses to block out the snow and wind. They slipped on ice and fell.
As February progressed, Taer became more frustrated as their search proved futile. She also gained some weight, as she always did in winter, which made her cheeks and breasts look rounder, but also upset her. Nix slept on the couch more often; they had lethargic, sometimes orgasmless, sex. Nix avoided walking around with Taer, and Taer let her recede. Taer went out alone, moving aimlessly through the snow, barely even looking at the buildings. She walked every single triangle of streets off North Clybourn but couldn’t distinguish the building that would crack open and spill out secrets from all the other offices and apartments and storefronts. She sometimes left the triangles, refusing to turn at a stoplight when she felt like continuing on straight ahead. She was stuck.
In the months before her disappearance, Molly Metropolis spent most of her time with her creative team, her General Council. The General Council included her choreographer, her personal trainer, her stylists, her dancers, and her manger/creative director Momo Waxler, among others. She was inspired by Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory and tried to include that kind of collective art-making in her own life. Molly published a list of the original members of the General Council, with their nicknames, in the liner notes of Cause Célèbrety when it was released on September 16, 2008. It reads as follows, with my notes in parentheses and italics:
Metro. (Molly Metropolis)
T.T. (Tasha Taylor — Molly’s personal assistant before Nix)
Momo. (Momo Waxler — Creative Director)
Peaches. (Anna “Peaches” Fontaine — Dancer)
Ali. (Ruann Alison West — Dancer)
R. “Prince.” (Ronnie Princeton — engineer of Molly’s various contraptions)
J.F.P. (Joe Frank Parker — Choreographer)
Nance. (Nancy DeWitt — Costume Designer)
(When the UK edition of Cause Célèbrety was released in November, the list had expanded to include Belle Brandice, Ronnie “Tech” F. [The Tech Guy, Tour Manager 2008–2009], R. “Gina” N. [Regina Nix], and David Walker: The Librarian.)
The members of the General Council helped create the subway-map body paint design that decorated her in the “New Vogue Riche” music video, her now-iconic metallic bodysuit from her 2009 MTV Video Music Awards performance, and the LED “mini city” from the “Apocalypse Dance” video.
In an interview with NeonLimelight.com, Molly described the formation of her General Counciclass="underline" “I brought together a costume designer and a choreographer and a makeup artist and instead of making just a team or just a family, we made a team and a family that lives in a city together” [italics mine].
For Molly Metropolis, songwriting wasn’t a simple process of writing lyrics and selecting beats, it was creating a large-scale work of art. While she tweaked her hooks, she sketched costume ideas for the song’s music video, discussed choreography ideas with Parker, and designed cover art for the single. She treated writing a song like making a movie and as such, she needed a full crew.
Molly Metro traveled almost constantly during 2008, even when she wasn’t touring; she lived in Chicago, but spent half of her time in Los Angeles for music industry — related business. Her friends and the members of the General Council thought Molly visited Chicago to see her dancer friends Ali and Peaches, who had once been members of a very early version the General Council, but whose contracts Molly had terminated in early 2008. Instead, Molly spent her time assembling The Ghost Network with Nicolas Berliner.