The Cherry Picker

Wu Ming (extended name: Wu Ming Foundation) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna.

In their pre-Wu Ming days, the group wrote the novel Q (first edition 1999).

Unlike the open name “Luther Blissett”, “Wu Ming” stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries.

Their books are seen as part of a body of literary works (the “nebula”, as it is frequently called in Italy) described as the New Italian Epic, a phrase that was proposed by Wu Ming themselves.^[1]

Alan Smithee (also Allen Smithee) is an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project, coined in 1968. Until its use was formally discontinued in 2000,^[1] it was the sole pseudonym used by members of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) when a director dissatisfied with the final product proved to the satisfaction of a guild panel that he or she had not been able to exercise creative control over a film. The director was also required by guild rules not to discuss the circumstances leading to the move or even to acknowledge being the actual director.^[2]

Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an “open reputation” informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe and South America since 1994.

On the Usenet, the first reference to the Luther Blissett Project appeared on 7 November 1994. It was a trumped-up report on alleged uses of the multiple name all over the world, and—albeit written in a somewhat clumsy English—it was posted by a “Luther Blissett” from the University of Missouri-Columbia^[1]

For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980s English football player of Afro-Caribbean origins^[2]

In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the “Luther Blissett” identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon. Blissett was also active in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany^[3]

December 1999 marked the end of the LBP’s Five Year Plan. All the “veterans” committed a symbolicSeppuku^[4]