Free JM03 - Red Cat by Peter Spiegelman Page B

did no more for me this time than it had before. I made a peanut butter sandwich and went back to the MetroMatchPoint site and searched again for any postings from Wren. And came up just as empty. And then I thought about the names of the other characters in her plays, and about how many other aliases Holly might have used. I searched MetroMatchPoint for Robin, Lark, Helen, Cassandra, and Medea. There were no Medeas but plenty of the rest, though not one that sounded remotely like Wren. So back I went to Google.

    It wasn’t quite dumb luck, but neither could I claim it was rigorous procedure or faultless logic either. It was a more oblique strategy that involved typing the names of Holly’s characters into Google and seeing what popped out. It took much sifting of chaff, but eventually I brought forth a kernel of wheat: Cassandra Z.

    The connection was through Cassandra Zero, the doomed young daughter in Liars Club, and Orlando Krug, the man who’d owned the now defunct gallery in Woodstock where Holly had held her forgettable video show two years ago— the same Orlando Krug who now owned Krug Visual in the West Village, and who represented the work of a video artist by the name of Cassandra Z. Persistence and synchronicity— the detective’s best friends.

    Cassandra Z had a low profile on Krug’s website: an entry on the list of artists that he repped, a one-line biography—“Cassandra Z lives in New York”— and a note, the only one of its kind on Krug’s site, that Cassandra’s videos were not publicly exhibited. “Viewing by appointment only, to qualified collectors.” Which perhaps explained why I’d been unable to find any reviews of her work. I wondered what qualifications Krug had in mind.

    The handful of other references to Cassandra were in an art blog called Candy Foam, and in— of all places— Digital Gumbo: The On-line Journal of Emerging Video Arts. They were fairly recent, within the past eighteen months, and they started a ticking worry in me.

    The first mention on Candy Foam was in the midst of a muddled, sophomoric thread on art and pornography, and whether these were mutually exclusive classifications. Someone calling himself BeatTilStiff offered up Cassandra’s work as an example of both, and triggered a long digression in which Candy and Beat— apparently the only parties to the debate familiar with her stuff— one-upped each other with bits of in-crowd arcana about the videos, all without actually describing what was in them. Candy and Beat were at it again a few months later in an exchange about the import of Cassandra’s work.

    Candy wrote: “It’s her insight into sexual power politics, and her obsession with liminal moments and tectonic shifts— with those instances when control is abruptly transferred, when the dominant becomes the submissive, when denial becomes surrender, and language breaks down— when the whip changes hands, so to speak. And don’t get me started on the deconstructionist aspects…”

    To which Beat replied: “Two words, Candy—‘forest’ and ‘trees.’ And as always, you miss the one while plowing into the other. You got the sex right, and the power, but the actual point escapes you entirely: Cassie’s doing noir porn, fucktard! It’s about hunger and voyeurism and inevitable doom and, above all else, PAYBACK. Check out her lighting! Look at her #5 and then at anything by Musuraca or Seitz. Go watch Out of the Past for shit sake! And BTW— you’re reading too much William Gibson again.”

    To which Candy replied: “ESAD.”

    The reference in Digital Gumbo was more straightforward. It was in a month-old issue, in a gossipy column called “Secondary Market,” and the columnist noted that two of Cassandra Z’s works—#3 and #8— were rumored to have changed hands recently, at six figures each. Whatever she was doing, people were paying good money for it.

    * * *

    I ran on Sunday morning, in a gritty wind I thought would sand the