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Bummer Patrol, Scene 1

Two men in a big, dilapidated car tool down a main drag in a big city. A black van pulls up alongside, pacing them. Through the side window, we see a door slide open in the side of the van. A man lowers an automatic weapon. The man wears a black blazer and slacks, dark sunglasses and a white polo shirt with a popped collar.

DUDE, the passenger, takes a sip of his coffee. MAN, the driver, glances over, double-takes. He shrieks:

MAN: Shit!

And slams on the gas; they lurch forward. DUDE, the passenger, braces himself, steadying his coffee cup, and shouts:

DUDE: Whoa!

Now they are barreling down the city street, which is mercifully lightly trafficked.

DUDE: What the hell, man!

Man glances at Dude, looks over his shoulder. The van is following, the gunner leaning out the side door. The two guys commence a sort of screaming conversation:

Fever Dream

Three men come down an alley side-by-side; the one in the middle kicks a can and its rattle precedes them, magnified.

I slump on a couch, poking idly at a glowing screen, the wrigglers in my forehead knotting toward migraine.

Fish deep in the ocean, a thousand yards below the faintest glimmer of sunlight, pursue blind lives, eating and fighting and loving and dying beneath the sickly glimmer of the anglerfish’s lure on his thousand teeth. He watches, an awful patriarch, like a white-suited plantation owner watching a cakewalk from his broad porch, sweat glinting on reddening face, choosing his next meal.

There was once a man who told a tremendous lie to a great king, without blushing or blinking or glancing away. In payment for this lie the man was granted a rich duchy and the hand of the princess, and the title of Court Liar. Yesterday he vanished.

Dating Profiles

SBF seeks lonely, horny guy to never call back.

Wooden Maria

I am a Maria made of sticks.

I woke in a pile of rubbish long ago, in the back of an alley that smelled strong of fish and urine, before I knew those were bad smells. I lay in the fish heads and old food for a long time, turning my head, seeing with my painted eyes and smelling with my painted nose. It was dark but I saw the alley, hurting my head with sensation.

I twitched my stick arm and flexed my twig-fingers. I swayed to my feet in the dark, my legs making quiet clack clack sounds. I walked and felt like I was falling, clack clack clack, soft staccato feet against the concrete — I learned that word from Anza, staccato, and I know it means clack clack clack, so I use it.

Then I felt very tired, and I leaned against the wall, and I was leaning like that with my face against the cool brick when I heard Mira, mira, ¿Qué es? It was just sounds in my painted ears, the same as the crinkle of food wrappers and the clack clack clack.

Little rolling bodies surrounded me, and the children pulled at my arms and pushed at my legs, ¿Qué es? No sé. I gave a little cry as I slipped against the wall, my new legs sliding out from under me, and the children bundled me away, like floating on waves, waves of soft syllables: Mira, mira, mira. No sé que.

Court Jester

Gladsome gladsome tidings bring
Shameless caperer, to the king
Till the day he spares the messenger
Of bad news we’ll not tell a thing.

But but the truth I cannot tell
The royal navy’s shot to hell
The horse has fled the country
And the foot has pled a headache —
they’ve likely scrammed as well.

Shall I concoct some happy news?
Say a seer saw a comet
Or my horoscope was wrong?
Or a portentous orphan
has been found upon the lawn?

Yes yes, spin it, that’s your job
Massage the truth into that slob
Or something like it, something fun
Something that won’t have you gumming
up the barrel of a gun.

No! Say not! The final straw!
I’ve earned, till now, my daily slaw
By hook and crook, by truthy lie
But ne’er before by treason foul
Rome dies but I won’t wield the trowel.

Very well! Kill him, chop chop chop
Then have the janitor in with a mop
Promote his assistant, tell his wife
He’s off to Majorca, with some bimbo, for life.

Topeka

I see a man, walking, or at least a pair of feet, moving moving moving across the ground. It’s dry gravel, a dirt road. The wheat — yeah, it’s wheat — on either side stretches on before and behind as far as he can see. Behind him the road mirages, wavery snakes creeping across the high places.

He’s a young man with a boyish face, dark hair, cut short and irregular, in the style. He wears a red checked shirt, open over a faded buff T-shirt, with a shield inscribed with a slogan: North Auckland Regional Fair, 1998. He’s in jeans, and his hands are stuffed into his pockets.

He sits on the side of the road, when he finds a thrown tire to sit on. He squints in the sun and looks up the road. He’s not really waiting for anything in particular, but when something comes along he’ll take it. He cranes his neck and leans back, staring at the sky. A bird circles. Too far away to see if it’s a hawk or a vulture.

Up the road, floating in and out of view through the heat haze comes a red Cadillac, convertible top down. Our boy stands, watching the car slow, stop, in the middle of the road. The driver, a black man about ten years older than our boy, looks at him over his sunglasses. The driver’s a big man, running to fat. He’s preempted a receding hairline with a full shave.

“Whatchyou doin way out here?” he says. “Tryin to burn to death?”

The boy’s hair is blowing in a rising wind. “I’m goin to Topeka.”

Did you know that New Zealand has a Ninety Mile Beach?

It is a lot of beach.

The Jaguar and the Paradigm

I saw the jaguar there above me, wreathed in flame and dripping gore
It shone there dimly, glowed there dimly, and grimly in its set of teeth I read my future like the score —

Jaguar twenty, myself none, all the daring deeds undone, and when in my fear I chatter
Rude sounds, not words, and little more
Creep past my teeth, incisors blunt, and molars pale and paltry th’ feline’s canines before.

“Get from me, beast!” I cried, expecting
at each moment to feel th’rending
of the shining fangwork in the muscles of my core.

I’m standing in the brilliant sun on the edge of a school field in Dargaville, watching men in handsome cream sweater-vests and leg armor stride around on the grass. A “relaxed game of cricket,” we’re told this is. The teams have just reclaimed the field after a brief luncheon. “Some matches last a week,” our host tells us. Despite the sun a stiff wind is blowing; I’m almost grateful for my head-to-toe leather motorcycle suit. Almost.

“Bit cold eh?” says David, our current benefactor, whose generosity has extended from a hitched ride for brother James and James’s squeeze Amber to an offer to stay the night at his and his wife’s dairy farm, which I, as well as Jamber, have graciously accepted.

A flurry of activity breaks out on the field, as one white-clad player does what appears to be an interrupted cartwheel of a pitch downfield. “The fast bowlers can bowl I think a hundred forty K,” says David. He’s a warm, easy-natured man with a quick laugh and skin weathered by a lifetime ambling across green hills in the wind.

“And they catch the ball barehanded?” asks Amber.

“Yep!” The two runners on the batting team have finished jogging up and down the pitch, and the bowler resets himself for another throw.

We wonder about the mechanics of the game. “Do you tag them out with the ball?” Amber wants to know. No, we learn — after handling one of the apple-sized, billiard-hard red balls I’m apt to thank God for that. Cricket injuries in such a game might be as common as rugby wounds, and possibly more serious.

I know that the rules of cricket are almost ludicrously complex. “There’s thirteen ways to get out,” a nearby spectator tells me happily. Bowled out, caught out, something called ‘leg before wicket’… “Swearing at the umpire,” says David.

“Yeah, swearing at the umpire.”

There are a compendium of complexities, but in essence there’re fielders, a bowler and a batsman, who stands in front of a little tower made of sticks. The bowler pinwheels like a dervish and hurls the ball at the batsman, who attempts to shield the tower and his body with a large flat paddle. The fielders scramble after the ball.

In the game we’re watching, the batsman finally connects, plugging the ball hard into the distant bushes. Both teams rush after it, tromping through the rough and pulling branches aside.

“Oop! I think that’s our only ball,” says David. Time to go.

More on the kumara: It is a sort of yammy thing, livid purple. Its flesh tastes like somebody, for some reason, decided to fill a potato skin with caramel cake.

On Purpose

This is a song from Avenue Q. It’s called “Purpose.” I don’t really like it that much. I don’t think it has much in the way of “oomph,” or, as the residents of New Zealand put it, “grunt.” Not like “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” or “The Internet is for Porn” — which are fast becoming standards featured in every grade-school roundup.

And yet it merits a reprise. Presumably because it’s the message of the show — “I don’t have a purpose! I’m young and overeducated. I am a product of the richest economy in the history of humanity. In one day I ingest enough to feed my ancestors for a week, and I’m unsatisfied.” — I don’t recall exactly, but all of that may not be explicitly stated — “Anyway,” the message proceeds, “I learned a bunch of lessons about life, I guess, and decided to make a show about this state of being. Thereby passing the buck to you, millions of fellow young Products Of Our Times.”

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Several Speeches

“We threw im down an empty well greg and me did, just me and greg there in the morning, sitting. Sitting watchin eddy go down the hole, like. I still got his comic books.”

Guess Which Parts I Made Up

Ian is walking along the highway, feet crunching on the gravel verge. Behind him, receding in the distance, is his car, hood popped, inanimate.

An engine rumbles up behind him and a great gold land-shark swerves onto the shoulder in front of Ian, then lurches into reverse, nearly running him over. The door pops open.

Kid: What are you doing! Get in get in get in!

Ian: Thanks. My car just —

Kid: Are you crazy? That’s way illegal! They’ll throw you in jail!

Ian: My car / broke down.

Kid: You can’t walk on the road in California!

A police car whizzes by.

Kid: Did you see that? You see that? I hadn’t stopped you’d be in jail right now.

Ian: Zero tolerance?

I want to get the band back together.

Or rather, I want to say that when I turn up outside your house, in the snow. I want to knock on your door and you open it, and I say it, just like that, I want to get the band back together, kind of abrupt but totally earnest, and then Cut.

I want my life to be a Wes Anderson movie, I guess. I don’t even really know what to cut to. I just know that if the camera follows me in, to your warm kitchen where whoever you live with is cutting carrots for stew, and I sit at the table and you ply me with tea and ask how I’m doing, it will be a letdown. And you can’t cut straight to sequinned bodysuits in Madison Square Garden; that’s cheap. Not a training montage either, because I don’t want to start a band on covers of “Eye of the Tiger.”

Actually I kind of do, but this strains the allegory.

I guess it just has to be a note, a little fulcrum around which the whole story turns. Ah, you think. At last, something interesting has happened.

bitterbuffalo:

So I recently bought the book Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below by Stephen Bayley…I have yet to sit down and read it properly and after reading the reviews that’s actually the last thing I want to do. Part of me wants to keep the book for the sake of the images, but another part of me wants to be rid of it as soon as possible. But if I return the book it’s Amazon that will be paying me back right? Bayley will still have my money and that’s what really annoys me.
Is it worth returning the book on principle or does that make no difference? Is it wrong to enjoy something’s aesthetics if the person behind that is a pig?

http://bitterbuffalo.tumblr.com/ <=This fine lady posted that ^ at a date I couldn’t quite determine. And it brought up one of my favorite questions: How much should the character of an artist have to do with the appeal of the art?
I understand not wanting to support someone whose opinions/perspective/complacent privilege you find repugnant, but isn’t it possible to appreciate an aesthetic as itself? To let the book or the pictures in the book or one line from the book speak on its own? It doesn’t feel right to me to discount someone’s whole artistic output because the person himself is, not to mince words, a shitbag.
A lot of artists are shitbags.
It’s even worse when you start getting historical; most people from History are shitbags too, or at least are saturated with now-repellent assumptions of the inferiority of women/the racial other/the lower-class/the whatever. Add a conceited primadonna’s ego to the heinous social norms of yesteryear and you’ve created someone whom you might certainly be excused from wanting to brunch with.
But I don’t see that it invalidates their art. I feel like art has a sort of transcendent quality. I kind of have to feel this way, because otherwise I’d have to Wikipedia every artist whose wall painting I saw and make sure they weren’t a secret bigot or a puppy strangler or a vocal, nauseating anti-Semite. I’m not saying that that information is unrelated to the artwork! It well might render an otherwise well-executed but forgettable pastoral scene deliciously piquant. Or it might turn the painting into a hellish resonating chamber, bombarding me with mental images and negative connotations that I can’t tolerate.
How does good art by bad people make you feel?

So I recently bought the book Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below by Stephen Bayley…I have yet to sit down and read it properly and after reading the reviews that’s actually the last thing I want to do. Part of me wants to keep the book for the sake of the images, but another part of me wants to be rid of it as soon as possible. But if I return the book it’s Amazon that will be paying me back right? Bayley will still have my money and that’s what really annoys me.

Is it worth returning the book on principle or does that make no difference? Is it wrong to enjoy something’s aesthetics if the person behind that is a pig?

http://bitterbuffalo.tumblr.com/ <=This fine lady posted that ^ at a date I couldn’t quite determine. And it brought up one of my favorite questions: How much should the character of an artist have to do with the appeal of the art?

I understand not wanting to support someone whose opinions/perspective/complacent privilege you find repugnant, but isn’t it possible to appreciate an aesthetic as itself? To let the book or the pictures in the book or one line from the book speak on its own? It doesn’t feel right to me to discount someone’s whole artistic output because the person himself is, not to mince words, a shitbag.

A lot of artists are shitbags.

It’s even worse when you start getting historical; most people from History are shitbags too, or at least are saturated with now-repellent assumptions of the inferiority of women/the racial other/the lower-class/the whatever. Add a conceited primadonna’s ego to the heinous social norms of yesteryear and you’ve created someone whom you might certainly be excused from wanting to brunch with.

But I don’t see that it invalidates their art. I feel like art has a sort of transcendent quality. I kind of have to feel this way, because otherwise I’d have to Wikipedia every artist whose wall painting I saw and make sure they weren’t a secret bigot or a puppy strangler or a vocal, nauseating anti-Semite. I’m not saying that that information is unrelated to the artwork! It well might render an otherwise well-executed but forgettable pastoral scene deliciously piquant. Or it might turn the painting into a hellish resonating chamber, bombarding me with mental images and negative connotations that I can’t tolerate.

How does good art by bad people make you feel?

(Source: finchleerat)

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