Frolic with Mutual
Hieroglyphics
Pigmented
frost saturated the sides of Mr. Lurie’s art project. As he and a crowd of assistants and
sycophants stood about, debating what to do to correct the situation, the
gallery’s curator, Mr. Moore, emerged from his office onto the catwalk
overlooking the gallery floor.
“Come take
a look at this,” he called to me, his forearms on the railing.
“He calls
it the Sardine Stethoscope,” Moore informed me. I carried my mug of fancy green tea out of
the office and joined Moore
at the railing.
“I’m a
hypocrite,” I told Moore . “As we all are, naturally. I resent such indulgent tripe even as I am
guilty of doing the same type stuff.”
“Surely you
can’t compare your work with this.” Mr.
Moore bounced his forehead towards the installation, which was a large,
fabric-covered box.
“If you
don’t like it, then why do you have it in your gallery?”
“First of
all, it’s not my gallery; I’m just the curator. Second, I like Lurie; he’s a good guy,
even if his art is crap. Third, he’s a
famous name. If a Mr. Lurie wants to
spend his time between albums doing this sort of thing,” again Moore used his forehead as an unobtrusive
index finger, “Then his work acquires value, even if it’s only the value of
notoriety.”
I felt that
my tea was cool enough to drink. I had
never tried Patriot’s Umbrella. It was
supposed to be good; at least, according to an article in Samsasamsara magazine that
someone had told me about.
“How is
it?” Mr. Moore asked, smiling at my face of disgust.
“It has
tremendous snob appeal,” I replied, so tempted to dump the rest of my mug onto
the Sardine Stethoscope that I had to
cast my mind into a reverie to stop myself.
Ten years
earlier I was working at the Post Office, hoping that the facility I worked at
wouldn’t be shut down and my job transferred to a larger one in Atlanta , necessitating a
one-way commute of two hours. There
were those that I worked with who didn’t care if we were all shipped off the Atlanta : they either lived
in rental properties and could easily move closer to work or they didn’t have a
multi-faceted art career demanding a couple hours’ attention every day as I
did. I was a painter, a writer, a
cartoonist, and a musician. I felt that
everything depended on the maintenance of the routine I had established. Without my art, the many things that I did,
my life would be empty. I might as well
start going to church or take up drinking again.
Ten years
earlier the sunburst medallion given to me by the Fromme Emperor shrank to the
size of a soybean under the glare of the roadside halogens and, like a soybean,
passed easily and readily into my abdominal cavity, a place where organs slowly
settled into the sediment like a solar system in aspic. Sludge metal and its symbols of stasis…
After the
death of my semi-divine alter ego Toadsgoboad I was at a loss for some
time. I didn’t know how to go about
doing the things I had done under that name.
It was only after I realized that I was still Toadsgoboad despite reverting
to my birth name that I felt free to move forward. Of course, all the trappings of the
Toadsgoboad myth were gone, but the wider expanse of all existence was now
available. If I could but make use of
this source, my work would be the richer for it.
Ten years
earlier—I was listening to Swans and trying to penetrate its mysteries, trying
to familiarize myself with the material and master its burden. There were so many albums to work my way
through—and not just by Swans, but by dozens of other artists like Sonic Youth
and the Boredoms and Pere Ubu and Sixteen with the circle around the numeral.
Who knew
that I would revert to the telling of old-fashioned stories?
