Welcome to The Ruins of the Lee Vidor Shakespeare-X Website Project!
See A Beautiful Ruin Lying Overgrown In The Internet Jungle!
Beginning at this page you can see the Lee Vidor Shakespeare-X Website Project as it was originally conceived.
Even though it is now abandoned.
It ran for 6 months until I moved on to new work.
The project was running from December 2010 until July 2011.
You can begin your journey here at the former Home page.
Or you can go to the Site Guide and see what was, (and still is really), here in total.
None of the interactive aspects are operating any longer though, now that the Shakespeare-X Message has been announced to the world.
One of the intentions of this web site was to make the Shakespeare-X Message a quest for magic for the whole world to enjoy. A game that was not a game. A game with an outcome that would shake the world.
Lee Vidor was here waiting for you for more than six whole months, ready to talk in person with anyone who showed up.
But she found the world was not imaginatively up to the game.
It is a world which has forgotten magic and wonder. It has lost the belief in it.
And so she flew off to do other things..
To make other magic.
The Intention Of The Lee Vidor Website Project
The intention of the Lee Vidor Website Project was to bring magic into the world.
People would be led to speak aloud the crazy sentence; 'A cartoon angel has received a secret message from William Shakespeare..'
And that sentence would be a true sentence.
And impossible magic would have been brought into the world.
Because something completely impossible would have happened.
In the good way.
Which would have been a nice change for the world.
And very good for the well being of people too. We need miracles in our lives. Even small ones.
This is one of the important jobs of artists. To bring wonder to the world.
What Happened With The Lee Vidor Shakespeare-X Website Project?
Here's how it all came about. And what happened to it in the end.
In the course of writing the 20th Century Bohemians and Angels novel cycle, Lee Vidor uncovered an incredible message to the world from William Shakespeare. A message which had gone unrecognized for 400 years and was a clear statement of identity from the true author of the works of Shakespeare.
A message which told a fantastic story of what happened to Christopher Marlowe. How he falsified his own murder and escaped abroad to write all the magnificent plays of Shakespeare. How he created this imposture so brilliantly that it took us 400 years to discover that he did it.
The Shakespeare-X Message proved irrefutably and incontrovertibly that the literary works of William Shakespeare were not written by the actor William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. It proved it mathematically.
This is a completely impossible thing. An unthinkable thing. A thing of magic and wonder.
A thing of great beauty.
This was something which would shake the world forever.
This was something more valuable than the Mona Lisa.
This was something to make Lee Vidor famous for all time.
Like being Shakespeare's favorite girlfriend..
But what to do with the wonderful message!?
It carried a great responsibility. A message from William Shakespeare. The greatest artist in the history of mankind, speaking to the world. Telling his story of wounding and injustice.
It needed something remarkable to present it. Something to honor such a giant of the imagination.
It needed a cartoon angel with glorious wings.
And there was Lee Vidor.
Ready and willing to carry the jewel of the Information Age out to the world.
Deeply honored to present the real story of Shakespeare to the world.
And so Lee Vidor made a web site, 1500 pages in size, full of magic and provocation and seductive tease.
With the Shakespeare-X Message as the jewel set in the center of it all.
And she made a web site with a serious intention; To seduce substantial corporate funding for an arts foundation which would carry the name of Shakespeare-X, and support the starving artists of the world who desperately needed support.
And she put herself on the web site, ready to create magic and miracle live in person for those coming here in search of those things.
After all, she already had the miracle of an actual message from William Shakespeare..
She had miracle credentials!
Better than anyone's!
And this was something genuinely important and of interest to the world. The real identity and true history of Shakespeare.
And so Lee Vidor created a gigantic interactive web site, with Shakespeare-X and a lovely cartoon angel at the center of it.
And Lee Vidor wrote very careful and creative press announcements regarding the incredible Shakespeare-X Message.
And Lee Vidor sent these press announcements out to all the most important news organizations in the world.
Telling them about the discovery of the Shakespeare-X Message and inviting them to visit this web site to learn about it.
She offered some of these important newspapers a world exclusive on the story.
She offered their news and arts desks by far the greatest cultural news story of the last 400 years..
Not one of the newspapers or media organizations visited the web site.
Not one of them replied to Lee Vidor to ask her about anything.
And so Lee Vidor carefully rewrote the news release and sent it out again. To the ten most important news organizations in the world. On two continents.
I really shouldn't name names because these are distinguished news organizations, so let me just give you some discreet clues:
Their names started with the letters, 'New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, CNN, Guardian, AP, UPI, Reuters, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR.. '
You can perhaps guess some of them from these clues.
But lots of important things were happening in the world. It seems a teenage singing boy had got a haircut. So there was no room left in the news for a message to the world from William Shakespeare.
What bad luck!
So I just read all those haircutting news stories instead.
While I was sitting here patiently waiting for you to show up.
That singing boy may have had a second haircut by now, I hear his hair grows back when it's cut. Although we'd surely have heard about it if he did..
So I rewrote the news releases again. Very very carefully. I filled them with magic and wit and intellectual authority.
And I sent them out again to all the same world news organizations.
And then I did it again.
And then I did it again again.
Every month I did it.
For 6 months.
I sent out 50 news releases.
Not a single journalist visited this web site nor asked me anything about the Shakespeare-X Message.
I put News Conferences announcing everything on Youtube and Vimeo. They're still there.
I put it on Twitter twice a day. Once in prime time for USA, and once in prime time for Europe.
I twittered that a wonderful message to the world had arrived from William Shakespeare.
I got 3 followers from that.
I told all the biggest news organizations on Twitter, which between them had 50 million followers.
I asked them to retweet it.
None did.
I messaged to Oprah on Twitter and then I told President Obama too. Oprah first of course.
I wrote a friendly letter to the Prime Minister of UK. Warning him of a storm coming..
But I never sent it, because who wants to risk a reply from a man who is vandalizing the arts?
I told the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. But they were busy with their Shakespeare.
So..
By now I was getting an average of 2 visitors a day to this website.
Both of them uninterested in secret messages to the world from William Shakespeare. They were here because they heard there was a photo of Hitler's skull with a bullet hole in it here.
And after spending 6 months of telling the world a message had arrived from Shakespeare - to total silence..
And waiting here for you to show up here to talk to me..
No press or media person had ever asked me anything. None ever had visited this site. Not even one.
There was no world sensation because William Shakespeare had suddenly come alive and spoken to the world. And therefore no possibility of corporate sponsorship for the Shakespeare-X Foundation for starving artists.
I owned the most valuable and unique thing in the world. The Shakespeare-X Message.
And now I was a starving artist too.
While owing something which is worth about 5 times as much as the Mona Lisa.
But it is made only of information and its material value is immediately gone when it is disclosed..
So I couldn't give it to anyone without ruining its value.
And no-one in the world would believe that anyone could possess such an incredible thing..
And so I was simultaneously very rich and very poor. I was a starving billionaire.
Which is hilarious to anyone with a sense of irony. Which is me.
Now..
I also have my own work to do. Which is very demanding work.
And this website and press work was distracting me from my own work, which is the creation of the longest thematically unified novel ever written in the English language. It's called 20th Century Bohemians and Angels. It's about the Modernist Renaissance. It's really very good. You can read about it on this web site.
I only undertook the Website Project out of respect for Shakespeare-X.
And for the love of miracles too of course..
Shakespeare-X deserves it all but still, I have a lot of other things to create. Not only a shrine to him.
I had been serving Shakespeare-X unpaid for more than 2 years. On top of my own literary work.
Getting a secret message from William Shakespeare can really disrupt your life it turns out.
Although going around saying to yourself, 'I got a message from William Shakespeare..' can make up for quite a lot of inconvenience.
As long as you never say it out loud.
Meanwhile..
Time passed, and nobody came to the site, and the press and media were always busy reporting on haircuts and the underwear of Hollywood starlets which was showing, or not showing enough, or something. Oh, and a little boy pretended to accidentally go up in a weather balloon too, which was world news headlines for a month.
And none of the world's news organizations have people who read press releases or even their own news tips, or anyone who uses Twitter for reading, or gets Youtube, or Facebook, or uses the web for anything except trumpeting their own important haircut stories.
The story of The Shakespeare-X Message was simply too incredible. I could not make anyone believe it. Or even investigate it. Even after making a 1500 page web site full of magic with which to convince them.
He was only William Shakespeare who had faked his own murder and disappeared. He had no underpants or piano playing cats to show for himself. So no media coverage for him.
If only he had thought to get a weird haircut instead of writing those plays!
And still the press and media never even knew yet that Lee Vidor is a cartoon angel..
Imagine what they might have thought then!
Cartoon Angel Gets Secret Message From William Shakespeare!
Has Wings And Owns Underpants!
Their heads would have exploded probably.
And that is why this website is an abandoned ruin and I am no longer here.
There was too much magic here for the world to even believe that it could possibly exist.
And now that the Shakespeare-X Message has been announced the press and media are all over me. Asking me how a cartoon angel can suddenly get a message from William Shakespeare that stuns and shocks the world..
They are right on top of things..
Why Did This Happen?
We constantly hear that the web is a communication medium and it is spectacularly viral and we are all in contact with one another via it.
Yet the Lee Vidor Website Art Project has proved the opposite.
It has proved that the web is a medium for talking but not for listening.
We are all talking on the web. But we are talking to ourselves.
No-one is listening.
You can tell the entire world that a cartoon angel has received a message from William Shakespeare, and it can be true, and still no-one will hear you.
This seems somehow important as our world drifts towards a better democracy of communication.
The reason that the Shakespeare-X / Lee Vidor Website Project was abandoned is that it offered too much magic.
People simply could not believe it.
That a cartoon angel had received a secret message from William Shakespeare and was going to give away $150 million to people who needed and deserved it.
And you could go and talk to her live about it all on her website.
That's simply impossible in such a dull cynical world.
What Will Happen With The Project Now??
It took me a year to build the project.
I ran it for 6 months.
The project was running from December 2010 until July 2011.
I was here every day waiting for people to come. To talk to them live. But they did not come.
Now the Shakespeare-X Message is in the world where it belongs.
And I have moved on to other things.
I'm moving towards completing the writing of 20th Century Bohemians and Angels.
Which is precisely as described on this website and is another wonderful thing of magic.
You should definitely read it.
Since you missed the astonishing Shakespeare-X Message.
And there really isn't so much magic in the world that you can afford to waste it..
As for the Lee Vidor Website Project..
It will be here as a beautiful ruin in the internet jungle, which people can visit and admire. And mourn its loss.
