Authors: Gilbert Sorrentino
NEPER
A legerdemain icon, carefully handcrafted in the ancient and sadly anachronistic “tile mills” of Tynemouth-Bourne-Stetson on Palseyshire, broods, as it were, monochromatically, above the grime-streaked window that looks out on the rain-darkened street below. The difficult configurations of the disconcerting “construction” remind some visitors, paradoxically, of the hand-colored wood engraving of the assassination of Abraham (“Abe”) B. Lincoln at Ford’s Famous Theater and Emporium (such a realization is invariably chilling, and has made more than one person quite literally sick); still, the “moral intrusiveness,” as Michelle Caccatanto has trenchantly put it in one of her dazzling occasional essays on popular culture—which is, as she has noted, “so much
more
than popular culture”—of “La Folie au Monde,” the title by which the work is commonly known, has convinced an equal number of viewers to see in it a classic Dutch street fair with traveling stage and performers—the latter joyously akimbo in the whirl of a traditional Dutch Sunday in Neper. Such, then, is the power of the ancient Tynemouth craftsmen and the products of their time-tested thunking, gathering, carding, wooling, ratcheting, and blooring, made, as they have always been made, in the mist-shrouded valleys of the lower-central-midlands of the verdant Cotswolds and their crystalline lakes, aromatic fens, and glowing heaps of tossed midden, not to mention the acres of dead-grey gorse that say “home!” “La Folie,” as it is familiarly known to its many devotees, can be, as Ms. Caccatanto has noted, “many things to many persons,” yet it always gently insists on its “grave, brooding humanity” and its “true message” of steadfastness and “courage.” A few commentators have suggested that Ms. Caccatanto’s deeply respectful essay quietly suggests her hidden sense of herself, in the presence of so immortal an icon as “La Folie,” as a deluded purveyor of empty blather, the very picture of the impotent and self-deluded cultural critic; but they, as one of her defenders smilingly remarks, “don’t make half her salary.” The sunlight, by the by, brings the obscurest recesses of the object to sudden, startling
life.
OCEAN OF STORMS
A number of large television sets—seven, to be precise—show, continuously, the same film, variously titled
The Past, Rock Island Rock,
or
Celebrity Toodle-oo
. Each is played, if that’s the word, at a different speed, if that’s the word, so that the imagery, as well as the narrative, such as it is, in each film is identical, the differing speeds at which this imagery and narrative are deployed, if that’s the word, enforcing the sense or idea that the viewer, the ideal viewer, is being presented with seven different films. This is posolutely correct, a construction facilitator notes, using a whimsical coinage, if that’s the word, said to be invented by Joe Penner or Ed Wynn on the old vaudeville circuit. They, and others, often played the Palace, nicely named, since playing the Palace was thought of as making it big, getting the big break, making the big time, hitting it big, and grabbing the brass ring. Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler, and Jeanette MacDonald all hit the big time and got the big break in cinematic representations of vaudeville days, those glorious days that will come no more. Whatever, by God,
happened
to the
melted snows?
One of the most famous of the cinematic versions of vaudeville stars’ lives and times was played, if that’s the word, quite improbably, by Esther Williams, or so they say. Miss Williams, on loan from one of her ocean-liner-Palm Beach-Sun Valley-Rio movies, the latter group nicely augmented by such reliable plodders as Xavier Cugat, José Iturbi, Ethel Smith, and Danny Kaye—not to mention Virginia Mayo, Jane Powell, and Kathryn Grayson and her technicolor bust—was uncommonly fetching, if not flagrantly erotic, in black tights and rhinestone tiara. Her rendition of “Waiting at the Church,” in a game albeit pathetic Cockney accent was universally greeted by awed silence. The title of this film, which told, not too courageously, the story of Grace DesMoines, was
Rock Island Waltz.
As intelligence concerning these facts permeates the viewing room, the television sets, one at a time, display, on their glistening blue ponds of screens, snow, and nothing but snow, which is understood by all to be unreal, i.e., it is not
snow
in any way, shape, or form. It is but a manifestation of interference, if that’s the word, and its grey, black, and white, nervously mobile horizontal lines remind the viewer of the lost snows of something or other. Say, vaudeville.
PETAVIUS
The New Cincinnati Opera House in New Petavius, Bingo County, presents the citizens of Viejo Laredo, Gulf City of Southern Texas, in a series of tasteful romantic tableaux, staged in a replica of the Grand Ballroom of the Walnut Street Theatre, the last true bastion of Philadelphia’s stinking rich. The cast will be ably assisted by the clientele of San Francisco’s newly chic Bagel Atelier, each person of which will represent a “humor” or “sight” or “odor,” as these are traditionally portrayed on the stages of the fabled Komische Oper in Wien, the Old Bouwerie in New York, and the Oakland Melodeon, previously the Royal Chinese Theater in San Francisco, which wonderful old house slid into the bay during last winter’s refreshing rains. The staged reading of “Burning of the Brooklyn Theatre at the Washington Street Entrance,” justly admired for its celebration of general priapism among the British aristocracy, will be the coda to the Opera House’s first “act”; it will be followed, after a brief intermission for refreshments—among which will be, of course, Ohio’s inimitable chocolate-mushroom casserole bites and autumn straw-juice—by an offering of improvisational sketches based on themes drawn from “Scenes from Bismarck, North Dakota,” and “Exhalations of the Evening Sky above the Wall where Marcellus Expired,” two compelling scenarios of love, lust, and desire, passion and the wheat harvest: primeval and undeniable forces that “urge us,” as Captain William Westie wrote so pungently, “to get one’s still-warm ashes hauled but good.”
[Photographs, bibelots, postcards, blotters, bricks, posters, mugs, lanterns, pens, pencils, letter openers, baseball caps, tents, sweatshirts, and genuine mahogany veneer wall plaques with gold-leaf trim that bear the likenesses of Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Barbra Streisand, Rimbaud, Einstein, and Leonard Bernstein chatting with Woody Allen will be on sale in the lobby and in selected fine-foods markets throughout Cincinnati, and in midwestern states to be named.]
PLATO
“The enormity of the old tableau’s collapse cannot prepare us for that which will happen sometime next month.” So reads the entire text. The nicely designed placard informs us of other “things to come” as well, including the imminent arrival of Carter the Great, the World’s Weird Wonderful Wizard. The visitors, who may purchase logo ties and sweatshirts, as well as souvenir cups and other items that would seem to be nameless, are
part
of the missing tableau. Words not only make statements, but when tossed about on the page, make more, much more, than mere statements. Observe these words and their potential for scattering. One is tempted to inquire, and be done with it at last, “performance art?” But we will never, it appears, be done with
that.
There is one word in the corner of the placard, just blinking on, with the sense of total aliveness that it may soon have! (Scissors are available at the logo desk.)These words make a statement, of that there can be little doubt; oh, not the usual stale conceptualizations, but the usual stale reconceptualizations, or “the ticket.” Two of them, as a matter of fact, are at the far edge of another placard, over
there.
Dislodged from the shackles of the diachronic, if “dislodged” is the word, or, for that matter,
a
word, the letters may be readjusted to suggest, as they are currently being readjusted to suggest, up there near the ceiling, or what we have agreed to call the “ceiling,” as the glittering new millennium lurches into being:
1937: GERMANY’S FESTIVAL YEAR
. It’s just a little too close, however, to the air duct, to be wholly satisfactory. And yet, and yet: the plain, functional duct seems, quite marvelously, to
be.
POSIDONIUS
Maximus Valerius Posidonius, all of whose writings have been lost, yet whose theories of solar vital forces and rock-removal as a methodology for the prediction of the movements of large bodies of infantry, prefigured the contemporary strategies concerning the deployment of conscripted troops as assistants of various types in the preparation and serving of food, i.e., hot meals, and the maintenance of dining areas within the larger system of the order of battle, is thought to have conceived the notion of cosmic sympathy, and the employment of certain elements of post-Attic Stoicism, to hoist petards and launch Greek fire, shine Phoenician brass, and find the direction whence come and whither go sunbeams during extended thunderstorms, so as to better answer the questions of often surly travelers, stuffed, even bloated, with pita bread and roast lamb—at that time (ca. 94 BC) the only food available in the vast wastes of a particularly arid Syria (known, at that time, as “the Congo”)—is also thought to have taught his students the secrets of grinding eggshells for use as the basic component of a particularly fine spackle, corn flakes, ink, and heroin, secrets improbably locked into number theory and its attentions to the special properties of the integers, e.g.: unique factorization, primes, equations with integer coefficients, (biophantine equations), and congruences; and although earlier thinkers (Galen, Dombrowski, Galento, Fitts-Couggh, Gavilan) laid the groundwork for such discoveries with their invention of algebra, Posidonius’s work has about it a certain furtive elegance, an elegance much apparent in the exhibition of his astonishing solar-storm drypoints. The exhibition has, unfortunately, unexpectedly and abruptly closed, and its contents subsequently lost or destroyed.
PTOLEMAEUS
The histrionic and lyric firmament—brilliantly spangled with tinsel stars—hangs above the rose-tinted photo-collage of scenes from the Cincinnati Opera Festival’s celebrated production of John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera.
A letter from Jacques Offenbach, attesting to his fondness for Gay’s masterpiece, is quite beautifully yet simply framed in gentian eucalyptus, a wood known for its lustrous qualities and astonishing durability. Jenny Lind sang the wood’s praises in a lost aria from
I Puritani,
an unjustly neglected operetta by Anna Bolena, performed, for the first and only time, for Henry Ford, Ed Rafferty, and Grover Cleveland Alexander. Scenes from
La Gioconda,
digitally altered to include portrayals of Brünnhilde in unnatural congress with her stallion, Fritz, temper the dazzling (to some almost painfully so) light from the glowing firmament. Although some Christian Fundamentalist visitors are distressed, even appalled, by the activities of the Wagnerian heroine and her beloved charger, others—happily, the great majority—know that art’s function is to disturb, to question, to disgust, to bore, to nauseate, to make what General Tod Burlingame, Air Force, Retired, called “the big green.” The classic American diner booth, ca. 1949, that asserts its vinyl presence within a shallow alcove at a sudden turning of the wall, is flooded with a penetratingly vulgar orange light, and invites a bittersweet nostalgia in its contrast with the shifting of the erotic tableaux of the
La Gioconda
display. The whole diner “thing” permits one to recall a purer, more innocent era: of Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, Monte Cassino, Tarawa, Dresden, Hiroshima, and, of course, Auschwitz—“the good old days,” as they are wistfully called. The refreshments—cheeseburgers, French fries, bow ties, Mae Wests, and weak coffee—that crowd the formica-topped table of the diner booth are marvelously crafted of high-impact plastic, and look quite real. At precisely eighteen minutes past the hour, every hour, the pop hit made famous by Andy Warhol and his “gang,” “Bobino Josephine,” in the Boston Pops-Carly Simon version, is piped into the room, an aural complement to the “spectacle” of late-night variety show outtakes. Media critics, as well as their highbrow art-critic cousins, characterize the whole presentation as a profound example of “people’s art.”
PURBACH
New Departures, New Arrivals, Old Masters
The quick wit and twisted imagery of Johnstone Sanderson’s “Nancy” poempix; the unexpurgated love letters, chock full of uninhibited and shimmery filth, of Sanderson William; William MacLise’s generous doses—several in number—of delirious “steel prose”; MacLise Brown’s August ice-cream gouaches, disgustingly compelling; fucking “discourse” and fucking “tropes” and the like, by Brown Forster; the Clitoris Commando Series by the newly notorious, self-styled “Cunt Mama,” Forster John; John Charles’s frothy bubbles (or froth
and
bubbles) of burgeoning narrative; embedded tautology atop disinterred ontology created
in vacuo
by Charles Angela, the veteran assemblagist; the sheer vivacity, exuberance, and extravagance of Angela Collins’s “Sheer” portfolio; Collins Anna’s moving photographs of homeless street poets honing their craft; exciting stools of the famous, collected and bronzed by Anna Wilkie of the Atelier de Zotz group; adored meaning, conceived and represented by Wilkie Wendell; Wendell & Warren’s Colorado photos of young people thirsty for art and fun; reconstructions in miniature of charming, friendly, and badly stocked neighborhood bookstores, by Lemon Burdette; Burdette Jones’s glitzy, edgy objects full of elusive racial overtones; a razzberry from el Bronx by Dawn Wasserman’s Gun Hill Road Gang of Gay Girls; Brooklyn boogie, boogie woogie, and woogie wonderland, created by Wasserman Harrison Associates; Harrison Blacke’s little church upon the corner; a cluster of symbolic pens by Blacke White; breathtaking plot-divagation charts, in twenty colors, by White Thorne; distant piles of strangely aloof “stuff” by Thorne Warhol; Warhol Pure’s compelling and really good first book of Berriganesque poetry; the haunting streets of haunting Paris as recreated in West New York, by P.A.P. (Perfect American Products, Inc.).