PRETENTION "...so anyway, there's that assumption. That there is such a thing as the 'real' people, and the 'pretenders'. And the other assumption is that there's something wrong with pretending. My whole thing about culture-as simulator, as a way of experiencing deliberately fake situations - if you want real situations, fucking go to Cambodia, or Somalia! If you really don't want to be in the simulator. The whole point for me is to create situations where you can pretend - like children do all the time (...) Robert Wyatt said to me once, 'It's funny, you know, in some respects we're always in the condition of children - there are always things which we don't understand, that we have to pretend about, about which we're naive.' Of course, they're different things. We know how to flush the toilet - but we might not know how the structure of our various waterboards works. The point about continuous childhood co-existing with adulthood is that it suggests the idea of allowing oneself lots of machinery, to keep pretending with, to keep simulating."

Brian Eno, in The Wire, June 1996