Laser Fruitcakes Ignore the Omnibus
The beard
descending from Astercore’s left eye was a latticework of resin-reinforced
seaweed and twigs, containing platforms at regular intervals that provided
shelter for many of the onion rings now held in common by the Children of
Venable. Tarzan, with infallible
judgment, had built a small observatory on the uppermost of these platforms.
“Any lower
down and our vision would be obstructed,” he explained to an awestruck pair of
documentary filmmakers from several bodies away. Their newspaper, The Harbison Obsolete Medium, tasted bad unless you’d been raised
to appreciate such an exclusive focus on the tongue’s bitterness
receptors. Tarzan’s picture on the front
page would be seen as a naked ploy to win sympathy for the conservatives, but
current editorial thinking was that identification with the roots of popular
culture was worth the risk.
Arthur
Lamont, the journalist wearing glasses, was not wedded to his employer’s devotion
to antiquity. He had no qualms about
using a digital recorder to document the jungle lord’s comments. However, as Tarzan seemed to find the
technology frightening on a race memory level, Arthur was forced to scribble
down an approximation of what he heard.
The other
journalist, the one with the beard and hair parted in the middle, was Thurber
Turmek, officially the photographer on the assignment, but, as, again, Tarzan
did not understand and therefore feared the simplicity and miniaturization of
the camera Turmek proposed to use, he was left to wander around the
instrument-crowded platform, wondering if he could jump off the side and
survive unscathed, like on some cartoon.
Meanwhile
(and isn’t it always meanwhile with one person in one place and somebody
else in another?) Sunday Medson stood in the doorway of the bathroom of her
suite at the Whittington hotel and smiled at all of this novel luxury. She was more stoned than she had been in some
days, but that does not fully account for the intense pleasure she took in
looking at this boxful of furniture and décor.
No, what made it so deeply pleasurable, like the circular mental
satisfaction of an individual truism, was that this was all hers for free.
The Blad
Foundation, so went Sunday Medson’s cannabis-altered ruminations, chose the
wrong person when they chose me. I don’t
give a rat’s ass about their “mission” to present the historical legacy of the
days of the old religion. She frowned. That was something that could bring her
down. All that wasted time and
effort. Years ago. Years before her time. Damn, she felt she needed another hit off her
bong. But she needed to ration her
stash.
When Arthur
Lamont interviewed himself, his imaginary interviewer was a nondescript
journalist vaguely of the Kurt Loder type (during Loder’s MTV days), but
younger, and genuinely curious. He
usually sat next to Arthur in the car while Arthur drove and posed questions which
Arthur answered out loud. Had Sunday
Medson known this about the seemingly straight-arrow Arthur Lamont, she would
have been surprised. She might even have
offered him a joint, but his recent identification with the Blad Foundation and
espousal of its “beliefs” had made her wary.
Salvatore
Remmick, the imaginary interlocutor of Arthur Lamont, asked Lamont about his relationship
with Sunday.
“I knew her
in the old days, back…” he paused, indicated with his thumb the road already
traveled, “In the old place.” He
swallowed and thought hard. There was
always the possibility that Salvatore Remmick would interject something,
something perhaps presciently leading, but Arthur knew he would wait.
“We were
colleagues. We’re colleagues now. But,” he paused. “I don’t know if we’re closer now, despite
there being a definite, employment-mandated wall between us, than we were back
then or not.”
“So, she’s
just a co-worker,” Remmick tried it out.
Arthur
cocked his head to one side.
“Well, if
you’re asking does she, or does she not, figure as a… figure in my
self-conceived mythology, well then, I guess she would have to, wouldn’t she?”
Arthur admitted.
Remmick
asked, “What role or characterization does she fulfill? Or say, play, what role does she play?” He was a funny sort of person, now that you
had a chance to examine him. He didn’t
look like a fully fleshed-out human being, but rather like a comic
drawing. Maybe by Charles Saxon or a
funhouse version of Charles Schulz.
Arthur turned his attention back to the road.
Fingerless Gantry
En Route
Arthur had
borrowed the team’s car for the day. His
imaginary interviewer, whose name was that of an actual rock journalist that
Lamont had seen on some documentary, probably the Pixies, was, like his
namesake, a slightly overweight (at least by rock standards) man in his late
twenties or very early thirties who had enjoyed some modest success in his
hometown playing bass in a band called Slothful Cabarello and genuinely did not
care which gender of human he had sex with.
All of this, of course, was an unopened book to Arthur, for whom Salvatore
Remmick was really nothing more than a flickering image, coming into
corporeality beside him in the car, or floating in the aquarium of his mind,
across a poorly laminated table in a rock star’s hotel room.
“Keep your
eyes on the road, please,” Remmick advised Arthur with uncharacteristic
caution.
The
atmospheric subtleties of the quieter aspects of Caspar Brötzmann’s music. Can you imagine any icier art to accompany it
than the depictions of corporate success in 1980’s illustration? Even art depicting its contemporary
antithesis: the concrete and glass utopia of East Germany .
“You wish
you had been a rock star?” Remmick interrupted Arthur’s thoughts.
“I am
a rock star,” Arthur countered. “Or else
you couldn’t be interviewing me.”
“Yes, your
band, the Driblets, it’s mostly composed of persons such as yourself, your age
group, your income bracket, your level of actual experience in the music
business, isn’t that true?”
“You know,”
Arthur shook his finger, cooking up a retort of Krebs Cycle-like
complexity. “I don’t know if you’ve ever
heard of Nadar, he—“
“Yes, I
know who Nadar was. Late 1800’s,
photographer.”
“Good, I
won’t have to explain that. Well, do you
know what his Pantheon was?”
“For the
sake of moving things along, yes, I do.”
“Excellent. You are most helpful. Anyway, imagine all of those people in the Pantheon, almost all of them
writers. Think of all the journalism
created by those men. Most of that
newsprint, most of those words, still exist, they’ve been archived somewhere. You can go and find it and read it. And you know what?” Arthur demanded.
“99%
doesn’t amount to a hill of shit,” Remmick returned flatly.
“Oh, you’ve
heard this theory before?” Arthur looked taken aback, even as he deliberately
ran over a bag filled with someone’s Burger King remains.
