Space Cruise Loses its Highway

Oh the good old days!
All you windy-eyed ever friends in weather fair or foul at all you Great waiting Lakes!

Semar Pegulingan Lingo Puppies (Song, Gong, and Ping-a-long; or Poetry and Participation)

In downtown Manhattan all imported traditions are ancient ones. Claude Levi-Strauss saw an Indian in a feather headdress taking notes with a Parker pen in the New York Public Library in 1941. Here, the new thing is the same as its archetype. It has to be big and meaningful and empty like a taxicab rolling up to you with its light on and no people in it or else we might mistake it for something fleeting. The jazz bar must represent JAZZ ITSELF, as at the Zinc Bar on West 3rd Street I am told to look at and remember where Billie Holiday sat. So let's pretend that something can escape its already being an imitation of itself and think back to the spontaneous emergence of its grandfather. New York insists that it is possible to be something. But the folk poets on street corners tempt us with their tales of heroes--"we are just like them!" the poets say. We like adventures too! But it is no good to imitate. Heroic heroism has left the room! Ban the poets and bring in the Lingo Puppies! It's not that we let our dogs lick our tongues on the subway because they're the only people who will ever love us unconditionally--we let them because we know they'll never love us back, and love is such a pleasant thing to feel. Nothing deflates the capacious heart like the possibility of fulfillment.

At the gamelan performance I watched a dopey-looking hound trot by the orchestra of bangers and boppers seated before their gilded instruments. Is there anything more ancient than this? I am a Judeo-Middle-Western-Saxon-class sunday with sprinkles and I cann't think of a better opponent than a Kebyar Legong dancer, or a trotting Lingo Puppy. I live by my sword! I am going to be something! I've met my match in this collective cacophany with no heroic melodies or songs of myself! What is this idiophonic ideopathic thunderclap that sets my loins a'quiver so that my heart breaks out in hives?

In New York everything has so much purpose that purpose exceeds its own limits. Each space can meet the needs of each of its potential functions, even those functions that have no needs and only potential. Gong orchestras bristle with potential energy, the kind that poses a threat but never one of fulfillment. Like the dog. There is room here for us all to fulfill our potentials!

Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

In hopes of ousting all netherworld answerless oblivion a team of five adventuresses sink into the chthonic aperture of a maternal geode, carabiners and slick tongues clicking with resolve—a misguided death quest. We follow our team past damp paintings of amateur skill-level, paintings of beasts whose names even babies can pronounce, babies whose scent moistens the pink perinea of said cavern, cavern whence we and all five adventuresses arose and are henceforth headed. The heroic ladies shrunken to babies return—as in a final return—home—as in the fleshy fiber, post or pre biologic abode—and encounter simultaneously untimely demises and timely sapiens’s insipience. We push through to the red-rimmed earth eye and its look conjures memories of the first, longest and foulest sleep.

Sol Goes Home

"Did you see it?"
"Yes."
"Isn't it beautiful?"
"Oh yes."
"I told you."
"How could I know? How could I ever imagine?"

We all experience nature as does the grieving Thorn, who is too young in Soylent Green's post-apocalyptic universe to know it from memory--"how could I ever imagine?"--but nonetheless knows that it is beautiful. It is beautiful precisely because it appears to him and us through the eyes of the dying father, the last image of power--the power of all of human history and knowledge-- reduced to a shrunken, whimpering child, smiling stupidly at the sight of a grazing faun. Thorn necessarily could not have imagined it until this very moment, looking through the window into a locked temple where nature is already staged as the failure of power, a return to the womb--to a time before knowledge and memory, and it can only appear as beautiful as it is falling away: the colors grow dim in the dying eyes of the father and then the screen goes black.

Do we leave nature or does nature leave us? Either way, it can only be encountered as it ceases to be, when we weep at the grandeur of the setting sun before the lights go on and the credits roll.

Lacy daydreams have taken the place of my sleeping dreams

On Aplomb by Sarah Banach

D.H. Lawrence's heavy, wet prose is intimate with its topic to the extent that it eludes Memory. She hides from Him. Topic unfolds in the feminine time of reading. Time is pregnant and reflection slips away into lacy daydreams--

'She had to dance in exultation beyond him. Because he was in the house, she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man. On a Saturday afternoon, when she had a fire in her bedroom, again she took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting. He was in the house, so her pride was fiercer. She would dance his nullification, she would dance to her unseen Lords. She was exalted over him, before the Lord.
He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying, uplifted to the Lord. Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting before the Lord, and knew no man.'

We were all once swathed in a warmth that is now the mere faint breath on our cheek of the imminent and final return that we can only imagine in dreams. The mother is to all of us tears in large eyes, mountains of flesh, hair, forefinger and thumb, the grazing touch that somehow also holds.

Performance Thanatology: The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen

I have recently been ushered into the underground world—where lurk the less popular of the popular entertainments—of improvised comedy. It is generally unfunny, though an absurd exchange orchestrated by an actor hip to the general unfunniness of what has already been established as funny—i.e. those formulas that make the improvised joke possible at all—will happen from time to time, and this by way of a very specific kind of event, a poetic event. Thus, I propose, it is our poet/performers that bear the responsibility of relieving all the poor fumbling virgins, the helmeted handicapped, the cops momentarily forgetting not to act gay etc. etc. of their tireless attempts to make us happy.

Comedy is rarely funny. Movies are never funny. When Ali G speaks in a language that we recognize (and that only for its comic foreignness) baffling his guest—Newt Gingrich or Buzz Aldrin or whoever demonstrates enough fogeyish confidence to expect to be respected—it is fucking funny because of the infinite room that the perfectly staged situation leaves for misunderstanding. Comedy is in the postponement of agreement or resolution, and resignation to the impossibility of final understanding always elicits the wordless expressive act—the scratching of the chin, the straightening of the shirttails, the exasperated departure, the laugh—in both the victim and the spectator.

Performance Thanatology’s The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen (which had its final show last Saturday at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s) offers its audience ENTERTAINMENT; that is, a self-consciously entertaining gesture toward the collective vague memory of the promise of pure entertainment made by the vaudeville show, which few of us can say we know much about while most of us can recognize the errant signifiers it has left in its wake; for instance: the “come one come all” banter of the fast-talking emcee, the crescendo of the live soundtrack signaling applause, the spotlight, the magic trick, the sad clown face. Thanatology’s show offers us these traces of a specific though barely recognizable, receding cultural phenomenon and opposes them to the technology of new entertainment—e.g. video, recorded sound, and television. We have, then, the perfect comic duo—that device which derives humor from the uneven exchange between two partners.

Comedy happens at the convergence or divergence of different signifying systems and in Thanatology’s scheme those systems unfold infinitely toward the far reaches of the linguistic beyond and find there us, the audience, The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen. Reminiscent of both the variety show and our reminiscence of the variety show, this performance includes its audience of post-modern-minded art enthusiasts in such a fashion that we don’t quite know whether to laugh or to cry: the nostalgia is so colored with self-conscious theatrics, the comedy so contingent upon its tragic other—e.g. Ric and Lucas’ loony merrymaking against the recorded soundtrack of 8 year-old Sarah’s dogged piano performance of “Wild Horses” and her simultaneous deadpan announcement into the mic “the song is long gone”—that emotion appears as an amorphous ether reacting dementedly to the desperate incomprehensibility of the world and the impossibility of its representation/remembrance. It is David Lynch’s starry-eyed diva singing “In Heaven Everything is Fine,” oblivious to the enactment of her own ugliness, her hideous incongruity with the stage and its shadowy theatrical outside.

The show is at once comical and terrifying, its farce always threatening to tumble over into the terrain of existential despair. We are given magic tricks without magic, jokes without punch lines, tales without resolution, and other events of mounting tension and consistently denied denouement. And, suffering from the repeated disappointment of bad comedy, I applaud Thanatology’s recognition of the fact that funniness can only occur once Thalia realizes that she is hopelessly driven to meet Melpomene in what is doomed to be an endless game of phone tag. Poor muses. Mel’s phone is blowing up with drunk dials from Thal: “wish you were here, girl! I came out for some air—it’s so loud—and now all of a sudden everything’s spinning and I’m sooooo wasted” and Thal’s voicemail’s all “I know we never get to hang out but you know I’m so busy and I just was looking at pics from our trip to the Keys and it made me miss you sooooo much.”

A Gormandist Manifesto

Consumerism, as we know—though it produces heaps upon heaps of twisted metal, battery acid, banana peels, bones, and fecal matter—only gets its eager mandibles on the paltry goodies that it deems attractive. We proudly confess our affinity for rusty old novelty items with their orange and blue motifs and misspelled slogans for defunct enterprises, but we dirty our hands at the junk shop only with that same delicious orange powder that sticks to our fingers after a bag of Cheetos and a Bartles & James Blue Hawaiian. And we all know that despite the delightful melange of happy colors that beam forth from the supermarket aisles, there really ain’t much to choose from.

I therefore inaugurate with this statement New Gormandism. Our ninety percent submerged iceberg brains can handle only so much culinary aptitude in that measly bit of floating grey matter, thus we finish our peas in anticipation of the pudding. The peas are often soggy, bland and kind of mushy but they’re not that bad. The pudding is good—sweet and creamy around our tongues like underwater embryonic memories. New Gormandism proposes that we supress the feeble and ill-founded preferences of our fungiform papillae and in the spirit of Gargamelle, who, when great with Gargantua, ate immense quantities of godebillios—the fat tripes of fat oxen—take into our gullets everything that our gullets will take.

As Gormandists we are the new foragers, yet this time we forget our contest with those sluggish Cro-Magnons; indeed we play hacky-sack with them and other non-competitive sports, invite them to tea. We shall raise our glasses of milk thistle extract and Murray’s Pomade in a toast to consumption: “here’s to the body: full o’ shit with nuthin’ to do about it!” We eat indiscriminately and thus begin to walk a little bit closer to the ground. We fill ourselves with coal dust and flower petals just to see what happens and then forget about it. We stand among the old, glass Coke bottles and perfume atomizers, our purpose simply to contain, waiting to be picked up by the oblivious junk collector hungry for Cheetos only to float from his fingers like a bunch of inflated pig stomachs at hog-killing time. What we put in our mouths will never suit us, nor should it, for we are mere vessels, our aim to make true among the urban waste factories spitting out all the good stuff that everything has its place.

Our bodies will merge with gasoline rainbows and discarded Christmas trees because we are what we eat. Should Gormandists remain faithful to the tenets of their practice, they will achieve unlimited transubstantiative powers. They shall remember the time when they gazed at a bag of Cheetos, longing for both the awesome speed of that biotope feline and Chester’s dandy indifference, now wielding all of those powers and more. We shall all become Chesters and vacuum-sealed bags that crinkle like the thunder that crashes over the Serengeti.