SATIN RULES Rockwell Rockwellian It's been three years since I began my project Siege Six. That's an umbrella term, a kind of identity shell corporations for the six novels and accompanying soundtracks that use a quarantined New York City as their backdrop. Welcome to NYC, Population 107, 363: Manhattan has been quarantined and left for dead but there are those who stay, the Squatters who populate the empty canyons of the city. A German Real Estate Company, the Lenape Land Trust, occupies midtown as a highly speculative property and aid the Squatters. "The Decline & Fall of All Y'All", is the first in the series. The novel is the confession of one Conrad Patrick McGowan, former governor of downtown Manhattan. The soundtrack is recorded by my band, Motorsoft, which also exists as a Quarantined entity. They are one of the favorite bands in the Quarantine and scrape and recording with what equipment (and more importantly, what electricity) they can muster. Motorsoft is the second door into the shared world I'm trying to create - lyrics intersect with events in the book, band members make brief cameos. As the project develops I'd like to bust a few more doors opens; perhaps some day there won't be a wall between our world and the world I see in the back of my head and on that note let me assure you rents are a whole deal cheaper in a quarantined New York. One summer night about two years ago I was sitting in my driveway in Brooklyn. That's the driveway that you see on the gates from the album cover. I was feeling down. It was more depressed than I'm use to - a huge weight I couldn't get out from under. The band and book were coming along but I was impatient for tangible results and loathing the idle time of my mid-project purgatory (I've since become somewhat acclimated). And then an idea descended down upon me. Literally, descended and floated gently into my head. Close associates of mine have heard me go on at length about Alien abduction and their influence on the arts, but let's set that aside for the moment. Let's stick to the facts: a notion entered my soul and the weight was lifted off my shoulders. A whisper came into my ears. This is what it said: Flags. I'd wanted to make flags for the band for a long time, but it was always a far away notion, something that would come with time and additional resources. Flag making would happen when we were being pushed into the world with a flurry of support and an army of infrastructure. I'd done mock-ups on Photoshop and even got some cheap flags off EBay like Admiral Perry's "Don't Give Up the Ship" which struck me a particularly relevant after September 11th. But it just sat there unrealized, weighing down on me. Thought of that way, you could say the weight on my shoulders was the idea going unfulfilled - it was kicking and screaming to come to life. Only my mind and my hands were getting in the way. But now the whisper came: Flags. I could do the flags myself. It's that simple and that simple thought sprung me from the cage I was locked in. At first I thought that I either would need to learn to sew or try to contract someone to do it for me on the cheap. If that was the case then I'd have to get them as far to completion as possible to keep the costs down. I could probably make the basic, unadorned flags myself, cut out the letters, position them and hand it over to a seamstress. I went to the fabric store, Long Island Fabrics on Broadway below Canal, was pleasantly surprised at the price of Satin (about $5 a yard) and made my most important discovery: MAGNA-TAC 809, Permanent Adhesive for Fabric. I've bought a hundred bottles of it since. No sewing needed, not outsourcing sought, just me in my garage listening to WNYC and making the flags on my own. I began with the "Lust for Strife" flag - simple black and white - for stage performances and then decided to do a flag for every song title and I was off and running and loving it. When I showed the "Lust for Strife" flag to the band it prompted a round of grins. These grins said told me I was being absurd in the right way; this pomp & circumstance was who I was and this was a milestone in the emergence of my true self. Satin flags was an item they could tease me about and that teasing would feel good and that's about as good a test as any for feeling true to form. It took me about four months make them all. I have my favorites. Some are fragile. For some reason the gold satin is not easy to adhere onto the blue satin. The thickness of the satin is important for how good a cut you can get. Over time I've gotten better at making them. I've embellished on them some since the album cover was shot. A quilt is next for me, each panel a song title for our next album, "Reformations". My flags serve the same purpose that pageantry served back in age of Monarch's - transportable displays of power - fold them up and go - unfold them and bring your patch of beauty and power into the fray. These twelve flags (no flag for the song April 12th due to complicated narrative reasons) have followed me into every concert. They gone to Los Angeles and been trampled in my Times Square storefront show, been flown down the Manhattan Bridge during the filming of our video for "Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Mastered!" Sometimes they've led the way and brought people to us, sometimes I've hid behind them, but they are mine, I made them myself and I love them. They are my battle flags.